Today the area is semi-arid, but looking out over the Harran plain where Karahantepe, or Karanhan Hill, is located it is not difficult to imagine the hunting scenes Karul describes, with woodland areas of wild oak, pistachio and walnut trees spreading out into the horizon and large wild goats and gazelles being corralled into one of the 28 traps found in the excavation and killed by early human hunters.
"Even older evidence of collection of wild barley seeds in the Levant has also been found in what is today Israel, and Karul readily points out that these processes were taking place in different stages throughout the Fertile Crescent area. At the top of the Fertile Crescent, where Gobeklitepe and Karahantepe are part of a series of the over 12 Neolithic Taş Tepeler, or Stone Hills, under planned excavation, the meeting of two climate zones created new climatic conditions which allowed wild plants to propagate quicker, and so the numbers of animals increased and people no longer had to search for food far away, he said.
“People became sedentary not because of a lack of food sources but because of (an abundance) of sources,” he said. “There were animals up in the mountains of course, and also in the plain. It was a paradise.”"
"Dwellings were also uncovered near the special buildings, and some with miniatures of the “T” shaped pillars, leading Karul to believe that rituals similar to the ones which took place in the communal buildings may have taken place in people’s homes as well.
Carbon-14 dating has placed the special buildings and the dwellings as contemporary structures, he said and their relative location to one another indicates that they were built with consideration of each other.
In addition, 27 large cisterns have been found at Karahantepe, some with the potential capacity of holding 100 tons of water. Some of these were still being used by people in the village at the foot of the mound until 10 years ago."
"Though similar, Karul said the buildings in Gobeklitepe and Karahantepe, which cover about 10 hectares (100 acres), are of different styles and may contain clues about the beginning of religion. Both contain graves inside the special buildings. At both Gobeklitepe and Karahantepe, some of the carvings are complex three-dimensional sculptures including a man carrying a leopard from Gobeklitepe. In Karahantepe benches have been carved into the bedrock on one side of the special building, which has benches all the way around. As in all the special buildings two of the monumental pillars, some of which reached 20 meters in height, were placed facing each other in the middle, and other pillars formed concentric circles around them. The largest of the special buildings measures 23 meters in diameter and it is calculated to have been able to hold some 400 people.
This may have been the beginning of fashioning the hunter-gatherers into a cohesive community, he said.
" “I don’t think the big buildings were temples,” said Karul. “If you call them a temple you are underestimating their function. If you go into a temple you go to pray. But in this place, people came together. That does not always mean they came to pray. If you say it was only ritual then you get stuck in that mindset. I think they were multi-functional buildings.”
I personally think he shows his own biases here, and a lack of a grounding in, for example, Medieval European history. Christian churches at the time were full of people conducting business, gossiping, etc. They were not the solemn places they are now, and we know that from contemporaneous accounts.
I do think the communal buildings fulfilled more than one purpose in the lives of these people; honoring the spirts of the animals upon which they depended, celebrating the bonds of community, paying tribute to their own dead.
To me, this makes them seem so very modern and in the tradition of religious worship. In the Catholic mass the following phrases can be found:
Presentation of gifts:
Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation,
for through you goodness we have received the bread we offer you;
fruit of the earth and work of human hands,
Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation,
for through your goodness we have received the wine we offer you:
fruit of the vine and work of human hands,
[FONT="]Give us this day our daily bread
Remembrance of the dead:
Remember, oh Lord, your servants ___ and ___who have gone before us with the sign of faith, and rest in the sleep of peace. To these, O Lord, and to all who rest in Christ, we beseech You to grant of your goodness, a place of comfort, light and peace.
At numerous times the names of the "saints and martyrs" are invoked, in a way, the illustrious ancestors.
It's clear to me, anyway, how Christianity flows from its roots in the Near East.[/FONT]
