Rob demurred; Kiribali insisted.
Rob sat down on a rocky bench. He took out his notebook and strained to read his notes in the moonlight. Then he closed the book, and stared across the undulating plains. Kiribali sat beside him, and listened to Rob’s account.
‘The Biblical accounts of the Fallen Angels, the passages in the Book of Enoch, the secret imparted in Genesis 6: I believe these are a folk memory of interbreeding between hominid species, the first men…’
‘I see.’ Kiribali smiled.
‘And this, I believe, is how the folk memory arose. Sometime around 10,000 BC a species of man migrated from the north to Kurdish Turkey. These invading hominids were physically large. They may ultimately have evolved from Gigantopethicus, the largest hominid ever known. Certainly, judging by cultural influences nearby, these larger hominids came from central east Asia.’
Kiribali nodded. Rob went on, ‘Whatever their origin, let’s call these invading hominids the Northern men. Compared to Homo sapiens, the Northern men were more advanced, and certainly more aggressive. They had mastered pottery, and building, carving and sculpting, maybe even writing; whereas Homo sapiens were still living in caves.’
The detective remained silent, thinking. Rob elaborated. ‘Why were the Northern men smarter and more ruthless? The solution is in their origin: they came from the north. Scientists have long speculated that fiercer climates produce a sharper, more strategic intelligence. In an Ice Age you need to plan ahead, merely to survive. You also need to compete more brutally for what resources there are. By contrast, warmer and kinder climates maybe produce a higher social intelligence, and more friendly co-operation…
‘But the Northmen had a problem; hence their migration. We can speculate that they were dying out, like the Neanderthals before them. It seems, indeed, that the Northmen suffered a genetic flaw which predisposed them to intense and evil violence. Perhaps the harshness of their environment instilled in them a fear, of a vengeful God. A deity who hungered for blood, for the propitiation of human sacrifice.
‘Whatever the reason: the Northern men were killing themselves, sacrificing their own kind. A dying civilization, like the Aztecs. In desperation they sought a kinder locale and climate: the Edenic climate of the fertile crescent. They migrated south and west. Once there they began to breed with the humbler peoples of the Kurdish plains; and as they intermingled with the hunter-gatherers, the humble cavemen, they taught them the arts of building, carving, religion, society: hence the startling advance in culture represented by Gobekli Tepe. In fact, I suspect Gobekli was a temple built by the supermen to inspire awe in the huntergatherers.’
A goat bleated, somewhere in the gloom.
‘For a while, Gobekli Tepe must have seemed to the little hunter-gatherers like paradise. A Garden of Eden, a place where the gods walked amongst men. But things began to change. Food resources may have run low. As a result the Northern giants put the little hunters to work: to reap the wild grasses of the Kurdish plain, to toil as farmers. The mysterious move to agriculture had begun. The Neolithic revolution. And we humans were the helots. The slaves. The toilers in the field.’
‘You mean this was the Fall of Man,’ Kiribali said. ‘The expulsion from Eden?’
‘Perhaps. To deepen the mystery, we also have strange hints of changes in sexual behaviour around this time. Maybe the Northern men liked to rape the small cavewomen, rape them with pigs like the statue in your museum, maybe they taught the women to “kiss the phallus” as the Book of Enoch has it. The women certainly became aware of their sexuality-like Eve, found naked in Eden-as they copulated with the newcomers. And as the two hominids interbred, the unhappy genes of violence and sacrifice were passed on, albeit in a diluted form. The genes were inherited by the children born of these unions.’
A lorry hooted in the far distance as it took the main road south to Damascus.
‘So yes, it was the Fall of Man. The community of Gobekli and the surrounding plains was now thoroughly brutalized, traumatized and hypersexualized. This was no Eden any more. Moreover, the farming itself was coarsening the landscape. Making life harder. And the reaction of the Northern men to these ominous signs? It was to take up the old traits again: they began to sacrifice, to appease the cruel gods of nature, or the demons in their minds. And they needed to appease these gods with human blood. To fill jars with living babies.‘ Rob glanced at the empty deserts to the east.
Kiribali leaned forward. ‘And then?’
‘Now we reach recorded history. Around 8000BC the suffering, sacrifice and violence must have become too much. The local huntergatherers turned on the Northern invaders. They fought back. There was a huge battle. In desperation, the ordinary cavemen slaughtered the last of the invading Northmen, whom they greatly outnumbered. And then they buried all those bodies in a valley, close to the graves of the sacrificed children. Creating one great death-pit-not far from here, from Gobekli. The Valley of Killing.’
‘And then they buried the temple!’
Rob nodded. ‘And then Gobekli Tepe was interred, laboriously, to hide the shame of this cross-breeding, and to entomb the evil seed. The hunter-gatherers deliberately buried the great temple to eradicate the memory: the memory of the horrors, of the Fall from Eden, of their encounter with evil.
‘But the burial didn’t work. It was too late. The violent and sacrificial genes of the Northern men had entered the DNA of Homo sapiens. The Gobekli gene was now part of the human inheritance. And it was spreading. Using the Bible and other sources we can actually trace the gene, trace the exiles from Gobekli wandering south, to Sumer, Canaan and Israel; because as they went they spread the genes of sacrifice and violence. Hence the early evidence for sacrifice in these lands. The lands of Canaan, Israel and Sumer.’
‘The lands of Abraham,’ said Kiribali.
‘Yes. The prophet Abraham, born near Sanliurfa, must have been partly descended from the Gobekli Northmen: he was intelligent, a leader, charismatic. And he was also obsessed with sacrifice. In the Bible he was prepared to slay his own son, in obedience to some wrathful god. Abraham was also, of course, the founder of the three great religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The Abrahamic faiths. And Abraham founded these faiths on the folk memory he shared with those around him.
‘All these great monotheistic religions spring from the trauma of what happened at Gobekli Tepe. All religions are based on a fear of great angels and a wrathful god: a subconscious and mass recollection of what happened in the Kurdish desert: when powerful and violent beings came amongst us. Significantly, all these religions are still based on the principal of human sacrifice: in Judaism there is the mock fleshly sacrifice of circumcision, in Islam we have the sacrifice of jihad-’
‘Or maybe the butchered captives of al-Qaeda?’
‘Maybe. And in Christianity we have the repetitive sacrifice of Christ, the firstborn of God, forever dying on the cross. So all these religions are a stress syndrome, a kind of nightmare, in which we constantly relive the trauma of the northern incursions, the time when we humans were cast out of Eden, and forced to give up our life of leisure. Forced to farm. Forced to kiss the phallus. Forced to kill our own children to please the wrathful gods.’
‘But, Robert…How do the Yezidi fit in?’
‘They are vitally important. Because there are only two sources of knowledge as to what really happened at Gobekli. The first are the Kurdish cultists, the Yarsens, Alevis and the Yezidi. These tribes like to believe they are directly descended from the purebred Gobekli cavemen. They are the Sons of the Jar. The sons of Adam. The rest of humanity, they say, comes from Eve, from the second jar of quarterbreeds and halfbreeds: the jar full of scorpions and snakes.’