Gobekli Tepe's Pillars

What happened to the builders of Gobekli Tepe?

Genetic correspondence between ancient and modern populations of the Near East and North Africa, from Schuenemann et al., Nature Comms. 2017.


Gobekli Tepe was gradually abandoned between around 9,000 to 8,000 BC, right at the beginning of the Neolithic revolution. Presumably, other, newer cultural centres gained from Gobekli Tepe's loss. But where did its people go?

In earlier posts I highlighted the connections between symbolism at Gobekli Tepe and Ancient Egypt. It appears almost as though the Ancient Egyptians are the most direct descendants of the people who constructed Gobekli Tepe. Is this where they went?

Clearly, we have the similarity in megalithic architecture. And Ancient Egypt is not so far from southern Anatolia. The fertile banks of the Nile would probably have been very inviting compared to the hard hills of southern Turkey.

I have already outlined the correspondence between the animal symbols at Gobekli Tepe and the major deities of Ancient Egypt. And we expect the animal symbols represent constellations. It appears, then, that their deities might have encoded some of the western constellation set. For example, Anubis developed from Lupus, Horus developed from Sagittarius, Thoth developed from Pisces or Ophiuchus, and so on.

And in the previous post I outlined how the proto-writing on the Pillars at Gobekli Tepe might have eventually become the cartouches of Ancient Egypt. They appear to be very similar. In Prehistory Decoded I suggest further connections between the symbols at Gobekli Tepe and the mythology of Ancient Egypt.

But this idea is very hard to prove. There is, after all, the small matter of around 4 to 5 thousand years to account for. In this time, the animal symbols seem to have developed a rich mythology and god-like personalities. But their writing seems to have hardly changed at all. There is very little to separate the proto-writing at Gobekli Tepe with the earliest scripts in predynastic Egypt. Despite this similarity, we are nevertheless missing the intermediate forms over the intervening 4 to 5 thousand years.

In prehistory Decoded I provide a possible solution to this conundrum which involves the myth of Zep Tepi and the Great Sphinx. But is there any more concrete evidence of a direct line of descent?

Logically, there are three possibilities. 1. There is no real connection and the similarities are mostly coincidence. 2. The connections are real and mainly caused by the cultural diffusion of ideas. 3. The connections are direct and caused by the migration of people - they abandoned Gobekli Tepe to go to Egypt.

It's difficult to separate 1, from 2. Without evidence of the intermediate forms, which appear to be missing. But if 3 is correct, we should find evidence in the form of ancient DNA.

Fortunately, exactly the data we need was published in Nature Communications in 2017 by Schuenemann et al.. Their main result is shown above. It shows that DNA of some New Kingdom Egyptian mummies is most similar to Bronze Age people of the Levant, i.e. of western Syria, Lebannon, Palestine, Israel, and Jordan. This makes a lot of sense.

But it also shows if we go back further in time, the strongest genetic connection is with Natufian populations (about 50%) with some admixture with Neolithic Anatolian groups (about 30%) and Iranian groups (about 20%, presumably from the Zagros mountains).

This is perfect. My thesis is that it is Natufian tribes from the North of the Levant and south east Anatolia who constructed Gobekli Tepe. On this evidence, it appears these people really might have abandoned Gobekli Tepe in favour of the fertile Egyptian Nile.

So why is there no record of settlements along the Egyptian Nile before 6,000 BC? And why does their civilisation appear to have taken several steps backwards before recovering later in the predynastic period? A possible solution to this problem is provided in Prehistory Decoded.