gobekli tepe - genesis of the gods (50 page)

Clearly, it was not Peri or Cin who built Göbekli Tepe, but human beings. However, there is an outside chance that, in their archaic stories about the Peri and Cin, the Kurds may have preserved the memory of incoming peoples of strange appearance who inspired the building of monuments and sacred places. The manner in which the Peri were able to cohabit with mortal kind is also reminiscent of the way the Watchers took mortal wives, who gave birth to giant offspring that resembled their Watcher fathers in appearance, being large bodied with pale and ruddied skin, just like the faylike descendants of the Peri.
²⁹

EGYPTIAN INFLUENCE?

So were the Nephilim and Sons of God of Genesis 6, along with the Watchers of the book of Enoch, really the memory of a Swiderian elite whose original homeland included the Carpathian Mountains of Central Europe? It is a persuasive theory, although we cannot dismiss the possibility that the Hooded Ones were made up of individuals from more than one ethnological background, with some reaching southeast Anatolia from other parts of the ancient world. We have already seen how the post-Zarzian peoples of the Eastern Taurus Mountains and Zagros Mountains might have provided the expertise to help create cult centers such as Hallan Çemi and even Göbekli Tepe, suggesting that the structures themselves were in fact the product of indigenous cultures, under the control of a power elite of Swiderian origin.

Yet other cultures from farther afield might also have been involved in the creation process. For instance, if Nilotic peoples from Egypt, Sudan, and even the Sahara were trading with the Natufian peoples, as seems likely from a number of disparate pieces of evidence now emerging from Epipaleolithic sites in the Levant corridor,
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then it remains distinctly possible that groups or individuals from the Nile Valley might have had a hand in the emergence of Göbekli Tepe.

These are possibilities that cannot be ruled out at this time. Yet what seems more certain is that the Swiderians, who would have reached eastern Anatolia during the Younger Dryas period, carried with them some semblance of the beliefs, practices, and ideologies that had earlier thrived among the Solutrean peoples of southwest and central Europe. They were also, very likely, carriers of magical traditions derived from the Kostenki-Streletskaya culture, whose descendants they would have encountered as they crossed the Russian steppes on their way to the Caucasus Mountains and Armenian Highlands. The Kostenki-Streletskaya peoples’ own successors most probably included the Zarzians, who had followed a very similar route as the Swiderians, southward from the Russian steppes to eastern Anatolia, as much as ten thousand years earlier. All of these influences are interconnected and came to bear, eventually, on the construction of Göbekli Tepe, ca. 9500–8000 BC.

Our journey is almost over. Yet I still needed to make the link between Göbekli Tepe and the presence some two hundred miles (320 kilometers) away of the Garden of Eden. How did one affect the other when they existed in separate millennia, many thousands of years apart? Those living either in biblical times or much later during the formative years of Christianity cannot have known of Göbekli Tepe, even if they
did
recognize Armenia as the genesis point of human civilization. So what linked all these disparate elements together? The answer for me came with the confirmation of a dream.

PART SIX

Completion

35

A QUIET CORNER OF EDEN

T
hursday, March 1, 2012. Finally, after nearly eleven months of searching, I had found the monastery of my dream, the one in which the monks were celebrating life itself through the elevation of a holy relic thought to be a fragment of the Tree of Life. Called Yeghrdut (or Yeghrduti), the monastery was located 13.5 miles (21.5 kilometers) west of the town of Mush, in the foothills of the Eastern Taurus Mountains, overlooking the plain of Mush and the Murad Şu, or Eastern Euphrates.

EDEN-LIKE WOODLAND

Evidence of the existence of this monastery, destroyed during the Armenian Genocide of 1915, had utterly eluded me until now, even though I had consulted ample books on the history of Taron, the ancient Armenian kingdom that embraced the plain of Mush. Yet of all places, it was on Wikipedia that I first found reference to Yeghrdut. It had its own entry, and under the subheading “Legends,” the following lines almost jumped off the page at me:

According to popular belief, the Kingdom of Armenia has an Eden-like woodland named Yeghrdut in the Taron district, west of the Muş Valley. It is believed that old men who come there from Muş valley and spend some time in that corner of unearthly beauty would become twenty years younger.
¹

This “Eden-like” woodland called Yeghrdut, where local men would come to be rejuvenated, sounded very much like the claims attached to the Fountain of Life (Ma’ul Hayat) or Waters of Life (Ab’i Hayat), identified in Kurdish folklore as being in the vicinity of Bingöl Mountain, 35 miles (56 kilometers) north of this area. Was this Armenian account simply an echo of these same legends, or could Yeghrdut relate to the presence in the region of the terrestrial Paradise? Clearly, Eden-
like
did not mean Eden itself, although I had a hunch there was far more going on here.

THE DISCIPLE THADDEUS

That day I searched online and found two webpages on Yeghrdut’s history and legendary background written in Russian-Armenian.
²
What they contained simply stunned me and changed everything I thought I knew about Armenia’s place in the story of the Garden of Eden. Apparently, the fourth-century Armenian churchman Zenob Glak, who wrote a history of Taron, recorded a quite fantastic story regarding the origins of the Yeghrdut monastery. It begins with the well-established account of how in AD 29 Thaddeus, one of the seventy (or seventy-two) disciples of Christ, traveled to the city of Edessa (modern Şanlıurfa) in Northern Mesopotamia at the behest of its king, Abgar, who wished to be cured of a serious skin malady.

According to early Christian legend, the king, having heard of miracles being performed by Jesus, sent out a request for this wonder worker to cure him of his illness. In response, the disciple Thomas dispatched Thaddeus of Edessa, who had earlier traveled from his homeland in Northern Mesopotamia to Judea, where he’d been baptized by John the Baptist in the River Jordan, and then, following the Baptist’s death at the hands of King Herod, had become a follower of Jesus.

So when Jesus was still alive, according to the story, Thaddeus (also known as Addai) arrived in Edessa, his native city, carrying with him a handkerchief that Jesus is alleged to have wiped across his face, leaving behind a facelike impression. It was the power of this holy relic, known as the Image of Edessa, or the Mandylion, that is said to have cured Abgar of his malady.

The account goes on to state that Thaddeus afterward baptized King Abgar, who thus became the first monarch to adopt the Christian faith. As for Thaddeus, he apparently remained in Northern Mesopotamia preaching the word of God, and then in either AD 43 or AD 45 entered the neighboring kingdom of Armenia. Here he came upon a “woodland” called Yeghrdut, where he deposited a number of highly significant holy relics brought out of the Holy Land. Other variations of this tradition have Thaddeus being accompanied on his journey by the apostle Bartholomew.
³

Fast forward to the fourth century, and the writer Zenob Glak now has the celebrated Armenian churchman Gregory the Illuminator being led by God to retrieve the holy relics left behind by Thaddeus three centuries earlier. Thereafter a monastery is founded on the spot in order to house them.
⁴

The relics found by Gregory at Yeghrdut apparently included a small finger of Mary Magdalene, items belonging to Joseph of Arimathea, and bones from the right arm of John the Baptist,
⁵
hence the monastery’s dedication to the saint.
⁶
Gregory also discovered a bottle, or container (Armenian
shish
), in which was preserved a remnant of the perfumed oil (known as the Myron, Muron, or Chrism) that had anointed “prophets and apostles”
⁷
and had been used by Thaddeus to help restore King Abgar’s health and vitality following his miracle cure after coming into contact with the Image of Edessa. For this reason the monastery bore the alternative name of Shishyugho, which means “of the oil bottle,”
⁸
or Shuyugho, “young branch of the (oil) tree.”
⁹

EDEN AND THE TREE OF LIFE

In Christian tradition such relics, if considered “genuine,” would be deemed highly significant. However, for me they paled into insignificance when compared with what else Thaddeus supposedly deposited at Yeghrdut, for according to Armenian tradition he came bearing a fragment of the “Tree of Life” (Armenian
), which after its discovery became a key focus of veneration at the monastery.
¹⁰

More incredibly, I discovered that Yeghrdut was believed to have been located not just in an “Eden-like woodland,” but in “a corner” or “one corner” of “Eden” (Armenian
), which can also mean the “Garden of Eden.” This, the Armenian source states, “was in Taron Province, south of the Mush plain (Armenian
).” It goes on to say that “The place was called Yeghrdut, and here the elderly man would travel to become younger by twenty years.”
¹¹

As soon as I read these words, my stomach churned, and I knew inside that this was the monastery I had glimpsed in dream the previous year. Both the reference to the presence there of a piece of the Tree of Life and the monks’ belief that their monastery stood in some quiet corner of the Garden of Eden seemed to confirm this fact. It was the same place I’d seen, smelt, and experienced, both in sleep and then afterward when recording my thoughts in diary form.