Another item in our Stone Age astronomy paper was the Vulture Stone (Pillar 43) of Gӧbekli Tepe. There have been numerous other reports on our prehistoric zodiac (effectively, a recording system), a few more below:
There has, to date, been no critique and rebuttal of our paper.
What the Vulture Stone may or may not depict has become the subject of several debates some of which reflect my own interpretation of Scorpius. I admit a degree of preconception when I first encountered its puzzling detail since I had long associated 10,000 BCE with the “age” of Scorpius. This came from an article by Chelsey Baity titled Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy So Far (1973). In her essay, she illustrates the vernal and solstice positions against zodiacal constellations from 10,000 BCE to 2000 AD. Scorpius (and Ophiuchus above it) marked the summer solstice c.10,000 BCE, a time-zero on her chart. With this in mind, I was naturally eager to see the giant scorpion as not only Scorpius, but Scorpius marking the summer solstice c.9,600 BCE in respect to the (likely) sun-disk poised above the vulture’s wing. Based on its small claws and chequered appearance, this species might be the Anatolian Yellow Scorpion, Mesobuthus gibbosus, a venomous type with a painful yet non-lethal sting, depending on the victim.
I was not originally encouraged to see any other known constellations in the group of figures. The scorpion is usually a denizen of the underworld whereas vultures are creatures of the sky and align more with solar imagery. However, in 2013/15 Burley/Hancock began promoting the vulture as Sagittarius, encasing the figures in a Maya-like scheme, and there have been suggestions of Cygnus since. Sagittarius is an indistinct constellation and Cygnus is very large and quite distant from Scorpius. Aquila would be a better candidate for several reasons, but all of these possibilities reinforce the Scorpius identity which is key. In 2017 Sweatman/Tsikritsis proposed the relief was a datestamp recording the onset of the Younger Dryas, using precession of the equinoxes. Also, that the three “bags”, which are probably not bags but “charnel houses” of a kind, mark the corresponding solstice and equinoxes which complete their date.
The relief otherwise conveys an unreal aspect, as if it was a dream, afterlife scenario or alternate reality. Like the Lascaux Shaft scene, there is a mystic death regardless how its cause is read. In the Gilgamesh epic and elsewhere, discovering more about the cosmos can happen through dream. On their journey to the Cedar Forest, Gilgamesh and Enkidu stop every three days to perform a ritual to induce prophetic dreams. A detail of the underworld was revealed to Enkidu in a dream and he discovered that the dead wear bird-like costumes, as Sandars translates:
An awful being, the sombre faced man-bird … His was a vampire face, his foot was a lion’s foot, his hand was an eagle’s talon. He fell on me and his claws were in my hair, he held me fast and I smothered. Then he transformed me so that my arms became wings covered with feathers (1960: 92)
It remains to be seen if monumental enclosures possibly cognate in age to Enclosure D, or earlier, yield different combinations of the same characters on Pillar 43. But it’s clear this was a significant part in a narrative important to the Gӧbekli Tepe people, a concluding or decisive chapter in a myth cycle rather than a realistic depiction of excarnation. The environmental circumstances in which myths are conceived can backdrop their picture and even be an important part of the knowledge they store. If these correlate with the radiocarbon dating of a site, to say the Vulture Stone yields a datestamp, at least when the solstice occupied Scorpius, is quite reasonable.
It is interesting that in Tablet IX of the Gilgamesh Epic Gilgamesh goes to the end of the world where the sun sets and rises. At this place, the subterranean path of the sun is blocked by a gate guarded by scorpion-men, one of whom attacks the wandering hero (George, 2003). The scorpion also leads to a connective scheme that will be dealt with somewhere else.
The twin phenomena at the site, and related others, is very deep and was likely behind the site’s construction. This doesn’t need elaboration at an architectural level in respect to pillars, but rather in terms of identities – the circles are gatherings of people. Twins, and ideas about them, were prevalent across the ancient world. There also remains a large archaeological gene pool of pairing in the Neolithic Near East. In ancient Greece and in the early historic period of the Near East, twin figures were the founders of cults, settlements and ancestral lineage. Often, one of the two was not begotten by the mother’s mortal consort but by a god or spirit. Across the Americas, hero twins recreate and civilize the world following a disaster, usually described as a flood or fire.
Elsewhere, Oppenheimer (1998) explores the multifaceted twin-theme of Kulabob and Manup across the Pacific Islands to the drowned continental Sunda shelf of Southeast Asia and links these tales with the fratricidal, warring brother motif of the Mediterranean found in the Osiris-Set, Cain and Abel legends. At Pohnpei in the Pacific the (paranormal) building of megalithic Nan Madol was credited to the brother magicians Olishipa and Olosohpa one of whom died. The Romulus and Remus duo implicit in the founding of Rome is a very popular story. Curiously, a linguistic genealogy links remus and roma with an earlier twin matrix known from the PIE cosmogony of *Yemo (‘twin’), a primordial human ancestor sacrificed (split in two) which the Scandinavian ice giant Ymir, the Avestan king Yima and the Vedic death god Yama relate. The *Yemo genealogy itself may have originated from a prehistoric ritual sacrifice of one of a pair. More on that later…
The antagonistic twin theme ran wide in Celtic Europe. Lincoln (1991) relates how the Old Irish reflex of *Yemo, Donn, which became a Christian epithet for evil or Satan, came through Emain or Emon (‘the twin’). Whether or not linguistically, or ritually, related to the *Yemo tree, a brother pair comes out in ancient European epics of magic, war and cattle rustling. The Old Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge (‘The Cattle Raid of Cooley’) is a good example, where the warrior Cuchulain fights against his (foster) brother Ferdiad. From the same genre, parallel relationships exist between the Welsh divinities Bran (Brennius) and Beli (Belinus), and the latter’s sons Nynniaw and his brother Peibaw. Again, with Gwyn and Gwyrthur of the Mabinogion. It appears again in the Irish legend of Diarmuid whose contesting brother was transformed into a boar. With many pairs, one of the brothers takes the form of an enchanted animal or has those qualities.
Jan Potocki may have had the above in mind by naming one of the two strange Moorish sisters Emina, both of whom appear to be the ghosts of two executed criminals and a cabala-lensed Gemini, in The Manuscript Found in Saragossa.
In African Bantu societies primordial twins mediate between abnormal births (e.g. dwarfs, cripples and albinos) and more regular humanity (Bonnefoy, 1993). Their arrival is met with ambivalence; they are sacred yet monsters and of uncertain omen. Depending on the society in which they were born, they were venerated or killed. A belief held by the Dogon people of West Africa is that of ancestor twins known as the Nommo. These human ancestors are fish in line with womb symbolism and bear out a complex biological tradition connected with the placental formation of humans. Rice (1997) sees similar traditions in ancient Egypt in dualisms of multiple kinds and the sacredness of royal placenta.
The twins or brothers can personify celestial luminaries, the Castor and Pollux Gemini pair being the most well-known example. The Greek twin horse gods known as the Dioscuri (‘sky guardians’) share a wide genealogy with sky twins from Vedic India to Scandinavia. Possible Roman adaptations of them are the Dadaphores (‘torchbearers’) Cautes and Cautopates of Mithraic iconography which don’t otherwise have a known mythology. These brother gods represent stars, celestial hemispheres, opposing seasons, and possibly even atmospheric optics such as refracted zodiacal light (giving the impression of dual sky pillars) and comets. It has not been unknown for earthly monarchs to model themselves on these cosmic pairings as Tiberius did with himself and his brother Drusus (Champlin, 2011).
With other twosomes a twin or brother relationship can be implied without a blood-bond specified. Gilgamesh and his wild comrade Enkidu exemplify this combination and conform to the mortal vs immortal theme in lots of other twin mythologies (e.g. one dies while the other goes on a quest for immortality). Dalley (2008) suggests the animal-grappling hero in league with his bull-like colleague (in the form of Shakkan or animal-master prototypes of) may reach back to extreme levels of Mesopotamian antiquity. Other basic motifs which the Gilgamesh collection used might derive from hunter-gatherer folk sources of Upper Mesopotamia. Hunting itself involves a journey, potentially to unexpected places – even through the stars! In fact, for reasons to be discussed elsewhere, the Gilgamesh and Enkidu adventure lends some perspectives to what is going on with Göbekli Tepe iconography and how it relates to the central T-shapes. In that some brothers civilise the world and restore balance between heaven and earth following a disaster, given this pair’s closeness to the Younger Dryas one could imagine their daunting task.
The peripheral pillars, which are humanoid too, would serve the role of “knowledge keepers” of the myth that concerns the central pair. This continued through the later enclosures, and at other memorial-cum (esoteric) meeting sites, where variations were put to earlier themes, mutability of characters, and access becoming more open.