The Place of Temples

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Gobeklitepe, or more properly, Göbekli Tepe, stunned the archaeological world a few years back.  This site in what is now Turkey contained what is apparently a sanctuary—purposefully buried—and advanced architecture for its age.  It was that age that was so shocking.  Gobeklitepe dated from around 11,000 years ago.  Now, in case ancient history’s not your thing—this will be painless—agriculture began, according to the standard chronology, about 10,000 years ago.  This led to surplus production that in turn led to the first cities, indeed, what we recognize as civilization itself.  While Gobeklitepe wasn’t permanently occupied, it was an example of a temple before agriculture, and according to the standard thinking, this should not be.  Consequently not too much has been published on the site because nobody likes a smart aleck, even if said aleck is an archaeological site.

Just within the last weeks, Anadolu Agency announced that an even older site was found in Turkey, near the city of Mardin.  Reports coming out of Boncuklu Tarla suggest that it is a millennium yet again older, dating from 12,000 years ago.  The article doesn’t include many photos, but suggests the site is similar to Gobeklitepe.  If this holds up, a new paradigm for human history will need to unfold.  What drew people together at first was not tilling the soil and reaping a surplus, but religion.  Even in the still standard paradigm, kings could only emerge with the backing of gods, so early cities had impressive temples.  What the evidence now suggests is that the temples came first and ancient people came together at sacred sites before they had a surplus to bring.  You can’t pick a sacrificial animal without having a heard or flock from which to take said victim.

We live in a technological era in which intelligent people are scratching their heads with their smart devices because religion just won’t go away.  I have suggested before that the reason it won’t is that it is deeply engrained in our biology.  We can try to reason the gods away, or abstract them to the point that we can call them laws or principles, but we can’t escape the fact that we’re held down by forces beyond our control.  Ancient people in Turkey, hunter-gatherers in our current paradigm, were gathering together and putting massive energy into building what look like temples before they had a secure and steady source of food.  Before, indeed, they had smart phones or even dial-up.  Millennia later we would rediscover them and wonder about things even as religion would be the deciding factor in elections in the most technically advanced cultures on the planet.

Photo credit Zhengan, via Wikimedia Commons.

After the Carapture

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When my wife showed me the first news article about “Carmageddon” I shrugged my shoulders with a noncommittal “meh.” Now that the nation has somehow managed to survive the two-day closure of a highway in Los Angeles, commentators are wondering what this reveals about our cardolatry. As a nation, the United States worships cars. Last week predictions were made that traffic jams of biblical proportions would disrupt the second largest city in the country and that not even God would be able to sort out the mess. In Norway, in the meantime, a right-wing conservative Christian decided to tip the scales of justice by becoming a mass murderer. Why do we glory in our own destruction?

Human beings only developed what we recognize as religion after the advent of the city. Cities require temples and temples require religious infrastructure. Priests had much to gain in antiquity by proclaiming the wrath of God—the angrier the deity the more offerings that roll in and the wealthier priests become. Religion has evolved over the five-and-a-half-thousand years of civilization, but it has never had a true conversion. It is one among many ways of coping with the stresses of becoming an urban population. We live in cities and we have traffic jams. We live in cities and learn from those far different from us. We live in cities and bomb our enemies in the belief that God finds those far different from us evil. Apparently God approves of the killing of teenagers. Just ask old Ramesses about that one.

Norway is among the most non-violent and secular cultures in the world. Los Angeles is a liberal city among one of the most religious cultures on earth. They experience the wrath of God in different ways, according to the media. Cities gave us religion. When we had had religion long enough, cities began to withdraw from that particular approach to life. When we can’t get our cars where we want, it is the wrath of God. When we can’t get the government to follow our personal religious quibbles, we take the prerogative to introduce the wrath of God. We long for the end of what we have created. No matter how we achieve such destruction, we’ll find religion planted squarely in the middle.

What's coming to your neighborhood?