Fourthly, beside the scorpion on Pillar 43 is a serpent and beneath the scorpion are the head and long neck of yet another bird, with a headless anthropomorphic figure positioned to its right. The serpent matches the tail of Sagittarius (as we’ve seen, the vulture appears to be composed from the central part of Sagittarius only—the Teapot—so this leaves the remainder of the constellation available to the ancients for other uses). The best contenders for the bird, and for the peculiar little anthropomorphic figure to its right are parts of the constellations we know today as Pavo and Triangulum Australe. The remainder of Pavo may be involved with further figures present on the pillar to the left of the bird.
As is the case with Sagittarius, elements of the modern constellation of Scorpio have been redeployed in the ancient constellations depicted on Pillar 43. Only the tail of our Scorpio is in the correct location to match the scorpion on Pillar 43 and its head faces to the right, whereas the head of the scorpion on the pillar faces to the left. The scorpion on the pillar is also below the vulture, whereas modern Scorpio is a very large constellation lying parallel and to the right of Sagittarius. I suggest the solution to this problem is that the scorpion on Pillar 43 is conjured from a combination of the tail of the modern constellation of Scorpio (right legs of the Pillar 43 scorpion), an unused part of the “Teapot” asterism of Sagittarius (right claw of the Pillar 43 scorpion) and the constellations that we know as Ara, Telescopium and Corona Australis (respectively the tail, left legs and left claw of the Pillar 43 scorpion). Meanwhile, as noted above, the claws and head of the modern constellation of Scorpio have been co-opted to form the chick with the hooked beak on Pillar 43.
This whole issue of the relationship between the modern constellations of Scorpio and Sagittarius and the scorpion and vulture figures depicted on Pillar 43 takes on a new level of significance when we remember that in some ancient astronomical figures Sagittarius is depicted not only as a centaur—a man-horse—but also as a man-horse hybrid with the tail of a scorpion, and sometimes simply as a man-scorpion hybrid.6 On Babylonian Kudurru stones (often referred to as boundary stones, although it is likely that their function has been misunderstood7) a figure of a man-scorpion drawing a bow frequently appears that “is universally identified with the archer Sagittarius.”8 What further cements the identification of Sagittarius with the vulture on Pillar 43 is that these man-scorpion figures from the Babylonian Kudurru stones are very often depicted with the legs and feet of birds.9 Moreover, in some representations a second scorpion appears beneath the body—i.e. beneath the Teapot asterism—of Sagittarius,10 reminiscent of the position of the scorpion on Pillar 43 (see Figures 50 and 51).
Figure 51: Man-scorpion Sagittarius figures from Bablylonian Kudurru stones (left) are frequently depicted with the legs and feet of birds, further strengthening the identification of the vulture figure on Pillar 43 with Sagittarius. In other Mesopotamian representations (right) we see a second scorpion beneath the body of Sagittarius occupying a similar position to the scorpion on Pillar 43.
When all this is taken together it goes, in my opinion, far beyond anything that can be explained away as mere “coincidence.” The implication is that ideas of how certain constellations should be depicted that were expressed at Göbekli Tepe almost 12,000 years ago, including the notion that there should be a scorpion in this region of the heavens, were passed down, undergoing some changes in the process, but nonetheless surviving in recognizable form for millennia to find related expression in much later Babylonian astronomical iconography. But given the close connections with ancient Mesopotamia, its antediluvian cities, its Seven Sages and its flood survivors washed up in their Ark near Göbekli Tepe, we should perhaps not be too surprised.
Figure 52: Astronomer Giulio Magli notes of Pillar 43 at Göbekli Tepe (right) that the “bags” in the top register are similar to the “houses in the sky” occurring on much later Babylonian pillars (left).
Last but not least, there’s the mystery of the three “bags” or “buckets” in the upper register of Pillar 43, which caught my eye on my first visit to Göbekli Tepe and which are discussed in Chapter One. As astronomer Giulio Magli has noticed, these:
three “bags” are pretty similar to the three “houses in the sky” occurring in the much (very much!) later Babylonian Kudurru traditions.11
What Magli calls the “houses in the sky” (again see accompanying illustrations) are the symbols of Mesopotamian deities, notably Enlil, who sent the Deluge to destroy mankind, and Enki, the god of wisdom who intervened to save us.12 The reader will recall from Chapter Eight that it was Enki who warned the patriarch Zisudra of the coming cataclysm and urged him to build the great Ark that would ultimately bring the flood survivors to the region of Ararat so close to Göbekli Tepe. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that all these shared themes in the iconography of Mesopotamia as late as the first millenium BC, and of Göbekli Tepe as early as the tenth millenium BC, have much older antediluvian origins in a lost civilization that was the progenitor of both—and perhaps of many other cultures around the world—and that took pains, through deliberately engineered myths and wisdom traditions, and through carefully structured teachings passed on from generation to generation by initiated Sages, to ensure that its memory would not be lost forever from the earth.
The Maya
Late into the night, as I work through the whole scenario in my hotel room in ŞanlIurfa, my confidence in Burley’s case continues to grow. Once all the surrounding context is taken into account, the vulture “holding the sun” on its front wing really does look like the figure of an ancient constellation representing the Teapot asterism of the constellation of Sagittarius.
This then raises the next part of the puzzle: when does the vulture/Sagittarius “hold the sun?” Burley makes clear that he believes the moment represented on Pillar 43 still lay far in the future when Göbekli Tepe was built—indeed 11,600 years in the future, i.e. in our own time, the epoch of 2012. And he comes to this conclusion because it is only in our epoch, specifically in the 80-year window from 1960 to 2040, that the sun on December 21, the winter solstice, not only sits over the outstretched front wing of the bird (i.e. over the spout of the “teapot” in the modern conception of this asterism) but also targets the “nuclear bulge” and the dark rift at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. So, arguably, this is a very significant astronomical moment that is symbolized on Pillar 43.
Very significant indeed, as it turns out, because it is also this exact same 80-year window (where the year 2012 falls just a little after the midpoint) that is signaled in the famous—or perhaps it would now be better to say infamous—Mayan calendar. A great deal of nonsense was talked about that calendar, and particularly about the December 21, 2012 date, which many wrongly took to be something absolute and precise, when in reality it was always an “indication date” and nothing more.
In getting to grips with this mystery, it is only the astronomy that counts—and naked-eye astronomy at that. We are not talking about radio telescopes or astrophysics here. With regard to the naked-eye astronomy of the ancient Maya, the real scholars of this subject, among whom there is none more pre-eminent than John Major Jenkins, made valiant efforts—for a long while before 2012—to teach us that what the end date of the Mayan calendar was based on was in fact the once-in-26,000-years conjunction of the winter solstice sun with the center of the galaxy, i.e. with the dark rift and nuclear bulge of the Milky Way. Because of the diameter of the sun and the limitations of naked-eye astronomy this conjunction cannot be pinned down to an exact year but is best considered, as I’ve indicated here, as a window 80-years wide spanning the period 1960–2040.
As an artifact of precession, the winter solstice sun was moving slowly and steadily toward its conjunction with the center of the galaxy for thousands of years before 2012—and in his books, going back at least as far as Maya Cosmogenesis, which he published in 1998, John Major Jenkins made this eminently clear. Diagrams that he offered to his rea
ders showed the journey of the winter solstice sun from 3000 BC, when it was 70 degrees away from the dark-rift crossing point in Sagittarius, through the time of Christ when it had halved the distance that remained for it to travel, to the epoch of 2012 (that 80-year window between 1960 and 2040) when it most closely conjuncts the dark rift, and onward to AD 5000 when it will have moved 70 degrees past the dark rift.13
More than this, Jenkins meticulously documented why the conjunction of the winter solstice sun with the dark rift in the central bulge of the Milky Way was important in Mayan cosmology—because this was the region of the heavens that the Maya thought of as “the place of creation” with the central bulge viewed as “the womb or birthplace of the sky”:
The Maya understood this dense, bright bulge as a Cosmic Center and Creation Place, a conclusion based solely on naked-eye observation that is, in fact, very true: the center of our saucer-shaped galaxy lies within this bright and wide part of the Milky Way … that hyperdense region out of which the Milky Way and everything in it, including us, has poured.14
It is not my purpose here to go in depth into the whole enigma of the Mayan calendar, not least since I wrote about this subject at some length in Fingerprints of the Gods.15 However, my understanding since the publication of Fingerprints in 1995 has moved on, and it is important to be clear that in signaling the decades around 2012 as the end of a great cycle, the Maya were not speaking of the end of the world, as such, but rather of the end of an age—“a time of great transformation and world rebirth”16—that would be followed by the beginning of a new great cycle or world age. This, in the Mayan scheme of things, is the turbulent and dangerous time of transition we live in today. It is therefore strange, and indeed somewhat eerie, to find the solar and astronomical coordinates of the exact same 80-year window between 1960 and 2040 prophesied by the Maya to mark a turning point in human history, carved in high relief on a 12,000-year-old pillar in Göbekli Tepe in far-off Turkey.
Eliminating the impossible
I want to be sure that I could be right to read some kind of prediction or prophecy for our age, some sort of notification, some sort of message sent specifically to us, in the reliefs on Pillar 43. Before even beginning to consider what that message might speak of, the first step is to confirm that Paul Burley’s discovery is a solid one.
I’m already persuaded by his identification of Sagittarius with the vulture and of the disc held up by its wing with the sun. The general context of the surrounding constellations is also an excellent fit. Could it be, however, that the reliefs on the pillar do indeed depict the sun’s conjunction with Sagittarius and the center of the Milky Way, but at some time other than the winter solstice in the years between 1960 and 2040?
Of course, the winter solstice alignment recurs once every 26,000 years, so in 24,000 BC the sun would have been seen in Sagittarius, targeting the center of the galaxy exactly as it does today, and this rare alignment will happen again 26,000 years from now, i.e. in AD 28,000. It’s not impossible that any hypothetical message could be to do with these remote dates.
It’s intriguing, however, that there’s another “message,” from a completely different culture—the ancient Maya—that uses the same system of coordinates and that is indeed focused, very exactly, on the years between 1960 and 2040.
Meanwhile at Göbekli Tepe there are also the other three key moments of the year to consider—the summer solstice and the two equinoxes. Was there any alignment through Sagittarius with the center of the galaxy at any of these three other “stations of the sun” in the epoch of 9600 BC when Göbekli Tepe was built?
I know from my work on Ancient Egypt that the sun was in Leo on the spring equinox in 10,800 BC. Now a few moments on the computer confirm that this remained the case 1,200 years later; in 9600 BC the equinox sun was still in Leo and was thus at a point on its ecliptic path that was very far from any alignment with the center of the galaxy. I feel quite safe, therefore, in ruling out the spring equinox, at least in that epoch.
Figure 53: Spring equinox sunrise at Göbekli Tepe, 9600 BC
The same is also true for the autumn equinox in 9600 BC. Because the sun was then in the constellation of Aquarius, and again very far from alignment with the center of the galaxy, I rule it out too.
Figure 54: Autumn equinox sunrise at Göbekli Tepe, 9600 BC
Moreover, after reminding myself of the orientation of all the enclosures at Göbekli Tepe, it becomes clear that the equinoxes can be ruled out in all periods. This is the case because all of the four major enclosures, A, B, C and D—remember Pillar 43 is in Enclosure D—have a very definite northwest to southeast orientation.17 None of them come anywhere near to due east where the equinox sun rises, or due west where the equinox sun sets. If the builders of Göbekli Tepe had wished to direct our attention to either of the equinoxes in a piece of symbolic art like Pillar 43, their very first step would have been to provide an obvious clue by aligning the site east to west. Since they did not do so, it is safe to assume that events at the equinoxes were not what they had in mind.
This leaves us with the solstices. The sun rises south of east and sets south of west on the winter solstice. On the summer solstice it rises north of east and sets north of west. In theory, therefore, sunrise alignments (south of east) on the winter solstice and sunset alignments (north of west) on the summer solstice can be considered as relevant to the northwest to southeast orientation of Göbekli Tepe.
As we’ve seen, a winter solstice alignment involving the sun, Sagittarius, and the center of the galaxy can be ruled out for 9600 BC, since that alignment only occurs in our own epoch, or in 24,000 BC or in AD 28,000. On the winter solstice in 9600 BC the sun was in Taurus and very far from alignment with the center of the galaxy. A summer solstice sunrise alignment north of east can also be ruled out, not only in 9600 BC but in all epochs, given the site’s distinct southeast to northwest orientation.
Figure 55: Winter solstice sunrise at Göbekli Tepe, 9600 BC
Figure 56: Summer solstice sunrise at Göbekli Tepe, 9600 BC
By a process of deduction, therefore, we are left with only one possible alignment that might work in 9600 BC and this is to the summer solstice sunset, north of west, which presents no conflict to the general southeast to northwest orientation of Göbekli Tepe. Moreover, computer simulations show that on the summer solstice in the epoch of 9600 BC the sun was in the constellation of Scorpio and while it did not align with the center of the galaxy (having moved past the dark rift and the nuclear bulge), it was still reasonably close to that target. As the reader will recall, Sagittarius and Scorpio straddle the dark rift and the nuclear bulge but it is in Sagittarius, not Scorpio, that the exact alignment with the center of the galaxy occurs. Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to accept the summer solstice sunset, north of west, in the epoch of 9600 BC as a candidate for the scene depicted on Pillar 43. A relatively minor error of draftsmanship by the sculptor who carved the figures would, in theory, be enough to explain the discrepancy.
There is, however, a difficulty which Andrew Collins, his colleague Rodney Hale, and the mathematicians Alessandro de Lorenzis and Vincenzo Orofino all seem to have missed in their focus on possible alignments toward the northwest, specifically to the setting of the star Deneb in the constellation of Cygnus, reviewed in the last chapter. Deneb did indeed set north of west in the epoch of 9600 BC in alignment with the orientation of Enclosure D but this alignment, though accurate enough, was purely theoretical and could never in fact have been observed from Enclosure D, for the simple reason that Enclosure D is built into the side of the steep ridge of the Tepe that rises to the north of the main group of enclosures. No observation of the setting of Deneb would have been possible from Enclosure D and for the same reason no observation of the summer solstice sunset would have been possible. The sun would have dropped out of sight behind the ridge for approximately twenty minutes before it actually set and in order to observe its setting, it would have been necessary to leave E
nclosure D and climb the ridge.
For this reason, therefore, combined with the fact that the sun in Scorpio, while close, does not target the center of the galaxy, a summer solstice sunset alignment must also be ruled out.
“When you have eliminated the impossible,” Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes famously pronounced, then “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” By a process of elimination we have seen that Göbekli Tepe cannot be inviting us to consider the equinoxes, and nor can it be inviting us to consider the summer solstice, even at the favorable moment of sunset. This leaves us only with the winter solstice with the sun in Sagittarius targeting the center of the Milky Way galaxy, the definitive astronomical signature of the years between 1960 and 2040 in our own epoch—a signature that recurs only at 26,000-year intervals. However improbable it may seem, therefore, we are obliged to consider the possibility that in 9600 BC the builders of Göbekli Tepe were already so advanced in their knowledge of the recondite phenomenon of precession that they were able to calculate its effects for thousands of years backward and forward in time in order to produce an accurate symbolic picture of the Sagittarius/winter solstice conjunction.
If this speculation is correct then it is appropriate to remind ourselves that two comparable scientific achievements of prehistoric antiquity have also survived the ages and come down to us in the same degree of completeness.
One is the Mayan calendar that envisaged a great cycle in the life of the world coming to an end in exactly the same 80-year period between 1960 and 2040. Moreover, it used exactly the same yardstick—the progress of the winter solstice sun toward alignment with the center of our galaxy—to predict when the fateful conjunction would occur and to define the cusp between the end of the old age and the beginning of the new.