TIME EUROPE
DECEMBER 6, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 23
Ever Nearer the Past
Turkey is an open-air museum, home to the richest diversity of ancient cultures yet discovered on the planet. Seeking to understand how ordinary people lived since the earliest days of the Stone Age, today's "blue-collar archaeologists" are reaching back to touch the faces of antiquity--and filling in some blanks in the picture of human existence
By MARYANN BIRD Gazientep
The rocky, rutted path seems to lead nowhere as it ascends a sun-bleached hill in the moonscape of southeastern Turkey. Ahead, to the north, the Taurus Mountains loom in the distant haze. Behind, the village of Ogrencik ekes out what life it can from this exhausted land on the fringes of the Fertile Crescent, 1,300 km southeast of Istanbul. Suddenly, a single mulberry tree appears atop the next hill, and before it an array of colorful tents--the field camp of a German-Turkish archaeological team. Beyond the tents, in the parched and dusty middle of nowhere, 40 km from the Syrian border, lies Gobekli Tepe, one of the world's most illuminating and rare discoveries from the late Stone Age.
An ancient place of worship--a cult site carbon-dated to the second half of the 9th millennium B.C.--Gobekli Tepe is as good a point as any to begin a diverse archaeological tour of Turkey, a country astonishingly rich with the remains of scores of civilizations and empires stretching from caveman days to the early 20th century. Put simply, Gobekli Tepe--older than the renowned Anatolian city of Catalhoyuk--is where some of our hunter-gatherer ancestors (who were just starting to settle down and organize into societies) first created sophisticated art for ritual purposes.
"This place is as important as the discovery of 14,000 B.C. cave art in France," says Harald Hauptmann, the team leader and director of the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul. Gobekli Tepe reflects what the experts say is a turning point from the Epipaleolithic to the Early Neolithic era in upper Mesopotamia--that is, the time when early man was just beginning to control nature, before the advent of food production, until the first domestication of plants and animals. "In this site and the one at Nevali Cori, 45 km northeast of here," says Hauptmann, "we have found an art we never knew before--not on cave walls but in public buildings, with sculpture and painted haut-reliefs [sculpted stone panels]. What we have ascertained is that art is not something someone just invented one day, like the wheel or fire. It has always been an active part of the human psyche, since the very beginning."
In each archaeological digging season, hundreds if not thousands of new and often startling discoveries are made by Turkish and international teams at scores of excavations, providing insights into the earliest days of humanity. "Anatolian Turkey is perhaps the most richly diverse archaeological site anywhere. It reaches from Paleolithic [early Stone Age] to Ottoman," says Oscar White Muscarella, a senior conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who has been assisting a Turkish team excavating a 9th to 7th century B.C. site once inhabited by Urartians--Bronze Age people who lived near Lake Van, close to the Iranian frontier.
Archaeology today, on the cusp of the 21st century, is not a treasure hunt. It is a painstaking search for cultural context. Sometimes, too, it is a race against time as aspects of modern life--the growing demand for energy and food by an expanding population, and the avarice of private art collectors willing to break the law--put new pressures on old sites. Uncovering clues to how ordinary people lived and how societies developed--what Marie-Henriette Gates, an American professor of archaeology and Bronze Age specialist at Bilkent University in Ankara calls "blue-collar archaeology"--now takes precedence over "golden bowls." The experts' focus has evolved from treasure hunting to people hunting, from the bowls themselves to what was eaten from them, and why. Their findings are prompting revision of the idea that Anatolia was simply a corridor for migrant peoples, rather than a font of civilization in its own right, populated by locals knowledgeable about the wheel, communication, art, agriculture, metallurgy and much more. The bounty is rich in Turkey, and any summary of the Anatolian cornucopia of truly significant discoveries barely scratches the surface. In recent years, for example, the soil has yielded the following:
At Gobekli Tepe, 15 km northeast of the city of Sanliurfa, stand four megalithic limestone pillars, 7 m tall and weighing perhaps 50 tons each. Two of them bear the image of a snarling lion defending what Hauptmann believes to be a cult sanctuary or shrine. Erected without the aid of domesticated animals 6,000 years before giant structures were built in Pharaonic Egypt, the pillars suggest that early Neolithic workers knew how to use poles, boards and pulleys to handle huge stones. Hauptmann's site also features a unique floor relief of a squatting woman--perhaps giving birth--reliefs of a variety of animals, and a field of flint chips, indicating the site also hosted a fairly sophisticated tool- and weapon-producing operation.
A rich collection of small limestone sculptures and clay figures was found at Nevali Cori, as well as life-size limestone figures, providing for the first time an idea of how people in the area worshiped 8,000 years before the birth of Christ. The larger work is animistic, some of it featuring humans and animals in carvings resembling totem poles. The masterpiece of the site is a sculpture of a female head grasped in the talons of a bird. Another, male, head is shaved, with a snake positioned at the back like a braid.
On each side of the green, gently flowing Euphrates River at Belkis, southwest of Sanliurfa, lie the twin towns of Seleucia and Apamea. Jointly known as Zeugma ("bridge" in Greek), they are believed to be the site of the only river crossing between the eastern Taurus Mountains and ancient Babylonia. "We are trying to understand the link between the two sides," says French archaeologist Catherine Abadie-Reynal of the University of Nantes, who with Rifat Ergec, director of Turkey's Gazientep Museum, leads the Zeugma inquiry. In Apamea, on the right bank--once a prosperous Hellenistic city in northern Mesopotamia and now a dusty, stony spot where little more than pistachio trees grow--excavators found stunning mosaics and surgical tools in rooms of a Roman house that apparently belonged to a doctor. On the more fertile Seleucia side of the river, tile markings indicate that a Roman military unit was garrisoned there.
The sprawling ruins of Aphrodisias lie in the Meander Valley in southwestern Turkey. Considered the jewel of the Greco-Roman ruins in Turkey and dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite, the site possesses all the features by which Rome measured civilization: ornamental aqueducts, public baths, a 30,000-capacity stadium, an open-air theater seating several thousand, two city squares, fountains and hundreds of monumental statues. Rich in agricultural and mineral wealth in its glory days from 700 to 30 B.C., Aphrodisias was one of perhaps 400 Hellenistic cities that flourished in the Roman Empire's eastern province of Asia Minor. It is the best preserved, however, because successive earthquakes covered Aphrodisias in mud. Now, says project leader Bert Smith, a professor of classical archaeology at Oxford University, it is home to "the greatest collection of architectural sculpture left in Turkey."
A 5,000-year-old administrative palace at Arslantepe, near Malatya in eastern Turkey, is complete with religious temples, a royal tomb containing a fortune in copper and silver and weapons--including what is probably the world's first ceremonial sword. With the discovery of two types of pottery--wheel-crafted Mesopotamian wares and hand-fashioned, trans-Caucasian black-polished items--the Italian archaeologist Marcella Frangipane, professor of prehistory at the University of Rome, concludes that the dead ruler was a nomad. "The tomb marks a watershed: this is the first proof of the movement of trans-Caucasian people from the northeast to the west, which finally gave rise to Hittite civilization in central Anatolia," she says. "From the time of the tomb, history changed ... There developed a purely Anatolian culture." Frangipane and her team established the beginnings of a state at Arslantepe in the 4th millennium B.C.. "The discovery of this site changed our ideas of development," she says.
Two larger-than-life white marble statues of Dionysius, made in Aphrodisias in 120 A.D., were found in the vast Greco-Roman city of Sagalassos, 260 km to the east. The terraced city built of huge stone blocks, says Belgian archaeologist Marc Waelkens of Louvain's Catholic University, achieved--with its huge public buildings--"a heroic grandeur to match the immutable vastness of the natural surroundings" of the Pisidian highlands of the western slopes of the Taurus. Isolated at 1,700 m above sea level, Sagalassos was first settled in the 2nd millennium B.C. by Anatolian Pisidians, redoubtable warriors who fought Alexander the Great in 333 B.C. on a flat hill below the city--and lost. "It is a prime example of an Asian population being Hellenized," says Waelkens. "In 25 B.C., Caesar Augustus incorporated Sagalassos as part of Galatia and it was Romanized. He was the first to subdue the tough, Pisidian mountain men." As Greece began to deteriorate in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D., Waelkens adds, Greco-Anatolian cities like Sagalassos, with its pottery exports and agricultural wealth, thrived. "These towns were the Texas and California of the Roman Empire," he says. Indeed, among the ostentatious findings in a 6th century A.D. house are a mosaic-decorated dressing room and a hot tub with marble stairs.
An Anatolian flat seal, made of bone and in the form of a lion, was found at Hacinebi Tepe, east of Sanliurfa. It was discovered in the study of the world's oldest state and colonial system, set up by the Uruks of southern Mesopotamia in about 3700 B.C. Seals were used in business transactions before the development of cuneiform writing. It was the Uruks who invented the wheel and, with their complex cities of 40,000 people, devised in 3100 B.C. the world's first known system of writing.
The world's first and perhaps finest furniture inlay work, dating from 800 B.C., was initially recovered as bits of blackened, twisted wood at the Phrygian tomb at Gordion, southwest of Ankara. (The Phrygians, artisans and geometricians, inhabited a powerful kingdom from 1200 to 695 B.C.--one of their rulers being Midas of the legendary golden touch.) Working in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara every summer for nearly two decades, Elizabeth Simpson of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania did the reconstruction drawings that helped unravel the Iron Age puzzles. Using four rotating, intricate designs, the Phrygian craftsmen inlaid boxwood, yew, juniper and walnut, rendering an abstract representation of the mother goddess Matar (Kybele) in mathematical form.
In the Mediterranean port of Kelenderis, Anatolia's closest link to Cyprus, a large and colorful landscape mosaic of the harbor, showing its waterfront buildings and three caiques under full triangular sail, was uncovered. "Not only is it one of the very few landscape mosaics ever found, but it was found next to the harbor it depicts," says Professor Levent Zoroglu of Turkey's Selcuk University in Konya, who dug up the late Antique-early Byzantine piece--some 1,500 years old--in the garden of an Ottoman inn. MORE>>
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