Gobekli Tepe's Pillars

The Origin of Writing, Part 2

Left: Pillar 2 at Gobekli Tepe (image courtesy of Alistair Coombs), Middle: an Ancient Egyptian cartouche (image from Wikipedia), Right: stone plaquette found at Gobekli Tepe (image courtesy of Alistair Coombs)

True writing appears almost simultaneously in Ancient Sumeria and Ancient Egypt shortly before 3000 BC. But various forms of proto writing are known from around 6000 BC. Proto writing is a set of symbols used to convey a limited type of information, whereas true writing can convey any meaning - it is essentially speech made visual.

Klauss Schmidt, who discovered Gobekli Tepe, thought its pillars, especially on their narrow faces, exhibited a very early form of proto-writing. He thought their pictures told stories. He also suggested the Uraeus (snake) symbol of Ancient Egypt might have derived from the snake symbols at Gobekli Tepe. I suspect he was right.

The orthodox view of writing popular among archaeologists, proposed by Schmandt-Besserat, is that it developed in Mesopotamia, probably in Uruk, out of symbols used to record trade. But Gobekli Tepe, with its pillars and their symbols, strongly suggests this is only part of the story. As we know, the symbolism at Gobekli Tepe is almost certainly astronomical, with likely mythological aspects, which suggests the story of writing actually began with astronomical notation and religion.

The connections between Gobekli Tepe and Ancient Egypt seem to be especially strong. I've previously blogged about the correlation between animal symbols at Gobekli Tepe and the major Ancient Egyptian Deities. Here I want to point out another potential link - this time involving the development of writing - between Gobekli Tepe and Ancient Egypt.

The image top left is of Pillar 2 at Gobekli Tepe. According to our zodiacal theory, it represents the sequence Capricornus, Aquarius, Pisces, which corresponded to the path of the Taurid meteor stream at the time Gobekli Tepe was occupied. The middle image is of a cartouche - which is how names are written in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Notice how similar this style of true writing is to the proto-writing at Gobekli Tepe, even down to the oval border and supporting horizontal line, which resembles the pillar outline at Gobekli Tepe. On the right is another sequence of symbols, also resembling a prototype of hieroglyphics, found on a stone plaquette at Gobekli Tepe. I suggest it is the first known record of the near-universal 'comet/sky god defeats the cosmic chaos snake' myth. It also resembles an Egyptian cartouche. Indeed, it seems to be a small, portable version of a pillar.

Is it possible that Gobekli Tepe's symbols and pillars are ancestral to Ancient Egypt's hieroglyphs and cartouches? Given all the other correspondences between these cultures, I suspect the link could be quite direct. We can imagine that, having recorded the path of the radiant of the Taurid meteor stream in this way on Pillar 2, that this sequence of symbols representing constellations originally might have eventually come to represent the Taurid meteor stream itself. In other words, perhaps Pillar 2 displays the 'name' of this meteor stream.

Maybe, just maybe, this is how Egyptian hieroglyphics developed. But what evidence is there for this development in Ancient Egypt?

Hieroglyphics seem to appear out of nowhere in the earliest Dynastic records. They have not yet been found in any pre-dynastic remains. Instead, there are objects, such as flasks, knives and ivory tags, with animal symbols very similar to those found at Gobekli Tepe. Taken at face value, this suggests that the symbolic system seen at Gobekli Tepe hardly changed over 5000 years, and then quickly transformed into a full system of writing within a few hundred years in Egypt. This hardly seems credible. We will have to wait and see.