The dry expanses of southeastern Turkey, home to some of humanity’s most ancient sites, have yielded fresh discoveries in the form of a stone phallus and a colored boar.
For researchers, the carved statue of a man holding his phallus with two hands while seated atop a bench adorned with a leopard, is a new clue in the puzzle of our very beginnings.
The 2.3m statue was discovered at the end of September at Karahantepe, in the heart of a complex of about 20 sites that were home to thousands of people during the Stone Age.
Photo: AFP
Karahantepe is part of the network around UNESCO-listed Gobekli Tepe, a place where our prehistoric ancestors gathered to worship more than 7,000 years before Stonehenge or the earliest Egyptian pyramids.
Necmi Karul, who heads Istanbul University’s Department of Prehistoric Archeology, found the toppled statue that was broken into three sections.
“We found several statues of this kind ... but for the first time here we found the phallus,” said the archeologist, who coordinates the work of a project focused on the area’s settlements.
Photo: AFP
The man lay in one of the first rectangular buildings, probably as a pillar supporting the wooden roof — clues to how people used the site.
Karul said that these settlements bear witness to “a new social order born after the Ice Age.”
“The main reason to start a new kind of architecture is to build a new type of society,” he said.
Gobekli Tepe — which some experts believe was never actually inhabited — might be part of a vast sacred landscape that encompasses other nearby hilltop sites that archeologists believe could be even older.
However, the first modest photographs of the statue released by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism led the local press to suspect censorship in the nation that has turned conservative under Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“We are archeologists, censorship doesn’t exist. We had not yet found a phallus,” Karul said, laughing.
Yet there is meaning hidden in the discovery.
“Before leaving a site they [residents] used to crash the pillars and the statues — but before, they broke the nose and the phallus,” he said.
Then the site was filled in, buried under tonnes of sand and earth. Its function remains unknown as do the reasons for the sudden abandonment and destruction of place after apparently hundreds of years of use.
The largest room at the site, surrounded by smaller rooms, seems to have been a kind of gathering place accessed via a narrow passageway, supported by a forest of phallus-shaped pillars topped by a man’s head carved out of the rock.
“Those who entered here knew the symbols ... they knew the meaning. It told them a story, but we don’t know it,” Karul said, adding that no female figures have been found.
Perhaps they were made of wood, he said, hazarding a guess.
No sooner had Karul unearthed the Karahantepe man, when he made another discovery the same week at Gobekli Tepe.
Archeologists found a 1.2m long by 70cm high depiction of a boar, with red eyes and teeth, as well as a black and white body.
The 11,000-year-old wild pig is the first colored sculpture from this period discovered to date, Karul said.
The site was occupied for about 1,500 years before being abandoned. Of the 20 area sites in the Tas Tepe (Stone Hills) project that is coordinated by Karul — which stretches over 120km not far from the border with Syria — only nine are being excavated.
“Work for the next 150 years,” said Karul, adding that the man and the boar would remain where they emerged from the earth, but with the necessary measures to safeguard them.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home