Paradise, Lost / Paradise, Found

Copy of a short piece I wrote for another blog of mine. First published 12-06-2011

Happened across an article in the Daily Mail today from back in 2009 that caught my fancy. In short, it describes the find of a bunch of carved ancient stones long buried at Gobekli Tepe in eastern Turkey / Kurdistan. This site predates other ancient sites such as Stonehenge or the Pyramids by several thousands of years, meaning it is the oldest such site that has been uncovered to date.

Not only does this site teach us amazing new things about our (humanity´s) past, we also learn more about the region, the practices and possible lifestyle and beliefs of the people alive at the time, and oh as an afterthought - reshapes what we thought we knew to be true about human development. Isn´t is just awesome when history, religion and science come together!

Some quotes from the article:

Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at least 12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old. That means it was built around 10,000BC. By comparison, Stonehenge was built in 3,000 BC and the pyramids of Giza in 2,500 BC.
Gobekli is thus the oldest such site in the world, by a mind-numbing margin. It is so old that it predates settled human life. It is pre-pottery, pre-writing, pre-everything. Gobekli hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, right back in our hunter-gatherer past.

Taking a leap and going on to talk about how this site might represent the actual location of Biblical Eden,

In the Book of Genesis, it is indicated that Eden is west of Assyria. Sure enough, this is where Gobekli is sited. Likewise, biblical Eden is by four rivers, including the Tigris and Euphrates. And Gobekli lies between both of these.
In ancient Assyrian texts, there is mention of a 'Beth Eden' - a house of Eden. This minor kingdom was 50 miles from Gobekli Tepe. Another book in the Old Testament talks of 'the children of Eden which were in Thelasar', a town in northern Syria, near Gobekli.
The very word 'Eden' comes from the Sumerian for 'plain'; Gobekli lies on the plains of Harran. Thus, when you put it all together, the evidence is persuasive. Gobekli Tepe is, indeed, a 'temple in Eden', built by our leisured and fortunate ancestors - people who had time to cultivate art, architecture and complex ritual, before the traumas of agriculture ruined their lifestyle, and devastated their paradise.

The simple historical value of a site like this is staggering on its own. Add to that it being a possible location for Eden - and if not Eden, then surely one of the closest things "we" of the past few hundred years have found to Eden, and this site has just hit the top ten of my Must See Locations in the World list.
Right along with other such places like Machu Picchu, Stongehenge, the Pyramids, Petra, Borobudur and Uluru, just to name a few.

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