gobekli tepe - genesis of the gods (35 page)

THE GOBUSTAN WARRIORS

Rock art in the Gobustan (or Kobystan) National Park, located 40 miles (64 kilometers) southwest of the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, shows warriors with bows and arrows slung across their backs (see figure 23.1). Some figures appear to be wearing fringed waistbands and even animal loincloths with the tails hanging between their legs, similar to those seen on the anthropomorphic twin pillars in Göbekli Tepe’s Enclosure D.

Figure 23.1. Rock art from Gobustan, Azerbaijan, close to the west coast of the Caspian Sea, showing warriors wielding bows and arrows. Mesolithic period, ca. eleventh to tenth millennium BC. The boat in the upper register is thought to have been added at a later date.

The lifelike manner in which the warriors are drawn, with smaller figures behind them, gives the impression of arrival—as if they are arriving from somewhere else in the ancient world. This seems emphasized by the fact that in the background of some of the engraved panels are high-prowed boats of a type common to the Neolithic rock art of Egypt’s Eastern Desert and the Bronze Age rock art of Scandinavia. So much do these vessels resemble those of later cultures that prehistorians suggest that, whereas the Gobustan warriors are “early Mesolithic age at the latest,”
⁶
thus ca. 9600–9000 BC, the vessels were added later, most probably during the Bronze Age.

Mary Settegast, the author of
Plato Prehistorian,
argues that the Gobustan rock art shows the arrival of incoming warriors, most likely bow-and-arrow-wielding reindeer hunters from Europe.
⁷
So are we looking at Swiderians seizing control of Zarzian territories? Whoever these warriors represent, their presence would not seem to have been greeted cordially, for some of the engraved panels show open conflict between two separate groups of individuals.

Even if the Gobustan rock art does show Swiderian hunters coming up against their Zarzian counterparts, there is no reason to assume that one decimated the other. Perhaps after some initial skirmishes, the two factions came to some kind of understanding regarding the exploitation of the region’s rich mineral resources, including the all-important obsidian. In doing so, it is possible that the Zarzians amalgamated with the incoming European hunters to become the driving force behind the emergence of the proto-Neolithic world at key settlements like Hallan Çemi in the Eastern Taurus Mountains. As mentioned earlier, Hallan Çemi acted as a workshop and clearinghouse for obsidian coming from Bingöl Mountain and Lake Van, and so its Zarzian vulture shamans might well have had some hand in the rise of early Neolithic cult centers in the
triangle d’or
such as Göbekli Tepe, Çayönü, and Nevalı Çori.

DISTANT COUSINS

If the Zarzians did come originally from the Russian steppes, as James Mellaart suspected, sometime around ca. 19,000 BC, the chances are they were related to the highly advanced Kostenki-Streletskaya culture, which disappears around exactly the same time. So if the Solutreans and their proposed successors, the Swiderians, really were related to the Kostenki-Streletskaya culture (as was proposed by V. Gordon Childe, see chapter 21), then it means that the Zarzians were in fact distant cousins of the Swiderians, a factor that might just have allowed them to find some common ground. Both used bows and arrows, and both might well have domesticated dogs and/or wolves, while the Kostenki-Streletskaya culture is thought to have held a special interest in the fox, one of the primary totemic animals seen at Göbekli Tepe.

For example, a male burial uncovered at Sungir in Russia in 1956 (designated Sungir 1) had a number of perforated arctic fox teeth on his cranium when uncovered, suggesting they were sewn into a cap of some sort. Another burial of a boy aged around thirteen (Sungir 2), interred in a shallow grave head-to-head with an adolescent female (Sungir 3), was found to have around 250 drilled arctic fox teeth around his waist. These probably came from a decorated belt, similar to those seen on the central pillars in Göbekli Tepe’s Enclosure D.

Burials at Kostenki itself have also been found to contain unusual amounts of teeth and bones of the arctic fox. This includes the 150 fox teeth found wrapped around the head of a child, aged about six to seven years old, uncovered at a site known as Kostenki 15. Covering the burial was a huge mammoth scapula (shoulder blade), a feature common also among the contemporary, and unquestionably related, Pavlovian culture of Moravia. Today Moravia is part of the Czech Republic, which includes the sites of Brünn (modern Brno) and PÅ™edmost, where evidence of the Brünn-type human population was reported in the nineteenth century.

Among the Pavlovians—their name deriving from Pavlov, a village situated in the Pavlov Hills, around 22 miles (35 kilometers) from the city of Brno—the arctic fox also features heavily among burials. At a site named Dolní VÄ›stonice one child burial contained twenty-seven arctic fox teeth, while a triple burial made up of two men, with a woman in between them, revealed that both males had been wearing headdresses of arctic fox teeth when interred. Within the mass grave uncovered at PÅ™edmost in 1894 (see chapter 20), excavators came across large amounts of wolf and fox remains, which seemed to line the perimeter of the pit. Among the remains were a number of unperforated arctic fox canines as well as various wolf skulls. Most pertinently, a woman, aged around forty, discovered at Dolní VÄ›stonice site 1, and known popularly as “the shamaness,” was found to be holding five unperforated fox incisors in her right hand and various fox bones in her left hand.

Although the use of wolf and arctic fox remains as items of personal adornment among the Eastern Gravettians, ca. thirty-two thousand to twenty-one thousand years ago, might easily be attributed to the large-scale capture of these carnivores for their meat and pelts, the presence in the graves of unperforated fox teeth hints at the importance of this animal on a cosmological level. Arguably the arctic fox, and the wolf also, was seen as an otherworldly creature that needed to be appeased by the newly dead on their journey into the afterlife. Such ideas, if realistic, might easily have been inherited by the descendants of the Eastern Gravettians, including the Swiderians, who came to occupy the same territories during the Younger Dryas period.

Should this quite fantastic scenario prove realistic, then it seems likely that incoming Swiderian groups entered eastern Anatolia and assumed control of the obsidian trade, giving them direct access to settlement sites not just in the Eastern Taurus range and Zagros Mountains, but also in southeast Anatolia, much closer to Göbekli Tepe. Now they were in a position to introduce their own religious ideologies to the local inhabitants, which would seem to have included new ways to counter the baleful actions of the cosmic trickster in its guise as the sky wolf or sky fox.

Because the center of the Armenian obsidian trade was Bingöl Mountain, there is every chance that this is one of the locations the Swiderian hunters settled so that they could exploit their newly acquired sources of exotic materials, including the all-important obsidian find sites. If this is correct, then we should find evidence of their presence in this region, and this, as we see next, is exactly what we do find.

24

WOLF STONE MOUNTAIN

I
n the religion of Zoroastrianism, a native form of which flourished in historical Armenia before the spread of Christianity in the fourth century, the wolf was an animal of Ahriman, the evil principle, who engages in a constant struggle with Ohrmazd (also known as Ahura Mazda), the creator of the universe. The Bundahishn, one of the holy books of the Zoroastrian faith, speaks of how Ahriman planned to create the wolf species as “disembodied, unseen evil spirits.” Yet Ohrmazd got wind of Ahriman’s plan and created the wolf himself, along with the elephant and the lion, which were all made creatures of the evil principle.

Ormuzd showed what he had done to Ahriman, who being pleased, “attached the evil spirits to these forms saying, ‘Ohrmazd did what I was going to do.’”
¹
Elsewhere, Ahriman is cited as the progenitor of the “wolf species,” the leader of whom is the lion,
²
a predator interchangeable with the wolf in the Zoroastrian tradition.

There is a reason for citing these facts, for in historical Armenia, the region we know today as eastern Turkey (the modern Republic of Armenia lies immediately north of here), there once existed a mountain called Gaylaxaz-ut, which means “abounding in
gaylaxaz,
” or “wolf ’s stone” (from
gayl,
“wolf ”).
³
Usually this refers to flint, the principal material used during the Stone Age to make tools and weapons. Yet
gaylaxaz
can also mean obsidian,
⁴
even though in Armenian tradition this black volcanic glass is known also as
satani elung,
“Satan’s nail,”
⁵
or perhaps “Satan’s claw.”
^*13

SERVANTS OF SATAN

Previously, Gaylaxaz-ut had been called Paxray,
⁶
which in the Armenian language means “hind, deer, stag,”
⁷
with the deer being a creature synonymous in local folk tradition with both Satan and the wolf.
⁸
Aristakes Lastivertc’i, an eleventh-century Armenian cleric and historian, relates an archaic story that speaks of how on this mountain a “village” was established named Xač (pronounced something like “hack”), which means “holy cross.” This was destroyed, he said, by the “servants of the Satan,”
⁹
who afterward returned “to their snake-dwelling lairs,”
¹⁰
located elsewhere on the mountain.

Trying to get to the bottom of this strange story, Armenian linguist Hrach K. Martirosyan wondered whether the mountain Gaylaxaz-ut might be Baghir Dağ,
¹¹
a peak at the end of a mountain chain to the west of Bingöl Mountain. On its eastern side is the ominously named Shaitan Dağ, “Satan’s Mountain,” leading Martirosyan to ask:

Bearing in mind that the mountain of Paxray = Gaylaxaz-ut is said to be dwelled by “servants of the Satan” [in “snake-dwelling lairs”], one may assume that the “devilish fame/nature” of the mountain is conditioned by the abundance of
gaylaxaz
-stones as is seen in the name of the mountain and is also reflected in its earlier name Paxray, if this indeed is identic with
paxray
“hind, deer.”
¹²

In other words, the name Gaylaxaz-ut alludes, most probably, to a mountain where “
gaylaxaz
-stones,” that is, flint or obsidian, is found, and that the “servants of the Satan” are in fact reflections of the mountain’s inhabitants. Although Martirosyan identifies this location with Baghir Dağ,
¹³
there are no notable flint or obsidian sources nearby. More likely is that Gaylaxaz-ut, which quite literally means Wolf Stone Mountain, is Bingöl Mountain, around 45 miles (72 kilometers) east of Shaitan Dağ. This, as we saw in chapter 23, has been the region’s primary source of obsidian since Paleolithic times.

Confirmation that Gaylaxaz-ut is Bingöl Mountain comes from its earlier name of Paxray, recorded also as Paxir, Parxar, and Parxaray.
¹⁴
According to the Roman naturalist and philosopher Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79), the beginning of the Euphrates on Monte Aba (an ancient name for Bingöl Mountain) was called the Pyxirates,
¹⁵
which almost certainly derives from the same root as Paxray, suggesting that Bingöl Mountain really is Gaylaxaz-ut, Wolf Stone Mountain.

That obsidian was known in Armenia as wolf’s stone implies, quite clearly, that the creature was associated in some manner with this black volcanic glass. Might the wolves not have been animals originally, but groups or individuals who identified themselves with the wolf and prized this black volcanic glass? Did the memory of these “wolves” degenerate over time until they became nothing more than the “servants of the Satan,” minions of the Zoroastrian evil principle Ahriman, who lived in “snake-dwelling lairs” on Wolf Stone Mountain?

LAND OF THE PERI

That mythical beings associated both with obsidian and the wolf might once have inhabited the region is affirmed by the fact that one of the rivers that takes its rise on Bingöl Mountain is the Peri Şu, which means “river of the Peri,” with Peri being “one of a large group of beautiful, fairy-like beings of Persian mythology.”
¹⁶
Peri Şu is the river’s name in the local Kurdish language, although to the region’s Armenian population it is the Gail, or Kyle, from
gayl,
meaning “wolf.”
¹⁷
Linking the wolf still further with Bingöl is a narrow gorge through which the fledgling river passes after leaving the mountain, which is called in Turkish Kurt-Duzi, meaning “wolf (
kurt
) plain (
duzi
).”
¹⁸