Tea at Trianon: Decoding Gobekli Tepe

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, May 23, 2020

Decoding Gobekli Tepe

From Skeptoid:

The neat thing about Göbekli Tepe is that if you go there, or even just look at pictures of it, there's something immediately weird about it that stands out, and you don't even have to know anything about archaeology to see it. Most of the site looks just the way you'd expect any ancient ruins to appear: the remains of low stone walls showing the outlines of where structures once stood; excavation trenches where archaeologists have exposed these walls; wooden catwalks allowing people to walk around without disturbing the ruins. But scattered everywhere throughout the site is something you've never seen anywhere else: great white monoliths of limestone, most rising higher than the battered old walls, many in excellent condition. They seem desperately out of place, and far too precisely cut to have been associated with the surrounding rubble. They're roughly the dimensions of giant dominos, but slightly T-shaped, with tall stubby arms at the top. Called the T-pillars by archaeologists, they range from under 2m to over 5m in height, and weigh up to 10 metric tons apiece.

The T-pillars are exquisitely decorated, all in relief — where the image projects outward from the flat surface. Most are depictions of local animals of every variety. A few are even wonderfully rendered three-dimensional sculptures of boars crawling down the side of the T-pillar. The pillars are arranged in circles up to 10 meters in diameter, and inside each circle are the two tallest pillars. Four of these circles have so far been excavated at the site, but the indications are that the site includes at least twenty. This uncertainty is due to what is archaeologically the most surprising thing about Göbekli Tepe, and it's not the pillars: it's that the entire site was deliberately buried with rubble, very soon after completion, and new circles of pillars were built on top of the rubble of previous ones. Thus, when it was first discovered, the site was one giant low mound almost 20 acres in size and some 15m high. Only about 5% of it has been excavated so far.

The site was first discovered and described in 1963, but little serious work was done until 1994 when it was taken over by Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute, who remained the principal investigator until his death in 2014. Schmidt's most historically significant discovery was one of the earliest: the site's age, determined by radiocarbon dating of wood, charcoal, and animal bones to be 11,500 years ago. Göbekli Tepe was built slightly earlier than 9500 BCE, with an error range of a few centuries. This was at least 6,500 years before the first earthworks at Stonehenge. Until this date was established, previous thinking had been that neolithic populations who subsisted on hunting and gathering would not come together to build great monumental works. Yet the construction of Göbekli Tepe clearly required a lot of workers for a long time, which would require a change in our understanding of the development of human cultures. (Read more.)

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