World's oldest temple may have been built to worship the dog star

Article
16 August 2013 by Anil Ananthaswamy

Magazine issue 2930

 

THE world's oldest temple, Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, may have been built to worship the dog star, Sirius.

 

The 11,000-year-old site consists of a series of at least 20 circular enclosures, although only a few have been uncovered since excavations began in the mid-1990s. Each one is surrounded by a ring of huge, T-shaped stone pillars, some of which are decorated with carvings of fierce animals. Two more megaliths stand parallel to each other at the centre of each ring. (Illustration, below, from article).

 

 

 

Göbekli Tepe put a dent in the idea of the Neolithic revolution, which said that the invention of agriculture spurred humans to build settlements and develop civilisation, art and religion. There is no evidence of agriculture near the temple, hinting that religion came first in this instance.

 

"We have a lot of contemporaneous sites which are settlements of hunter-gatherers. Göbekli Tepe was a sanctuary site for people living in these settlements," says Klaus Schmidt, chief archaeologist for the project at the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in Berlin.

 

But it is still anybody's guess what type of religion the temple served. Giulio Magli, an archaeoastronomer at the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy, looked to the night sky for an answer. After all, the arrangement of the pillars at Stonehenge in the UK suggests it could have been built as an astronomical observatory, maybe even to worship the moon.

 

Magli simulated what the sky would have looked like from Turkey when Göbekli Tepe was built. Over millennia, the positions of the stars change due to Earth wobbling as it spins on its axis. Stars that are near the horizon will rise and set at different points, and they can even disappear completely, only to reappear thousands of years later.

 

Today, Sirius can be seen almost worldwide as the brightest star in the sky – excluding the sun – and the fourth brightest night-sky object after the moon, Venus and Jupiter. Sirius is so noticeable that its rising and setting was used as the basis for the ancient Egyptian calendar, says Magli. At the latitude of Göbekli Tepe, Sirius would have been below the horizon until around 9300 BC, when it would have suddenly popped into view.

 

"I propose that the temple was built to follow the 'birth' of this star," says Magli. "You can imagine that the appearance of a new object in the sky could even have triggered a new religion."

 

Using existing maps of Göbekli Tepe and satellite images of the region, Magli drew an imaginary line running between and parallel to the two megaliths inside each enclosure. Three of the excavated rings seem to be aligned with the points on the horizon where Sirius would have risen in 9100 BC, 8750 BC and 8300 BC, respectively (arxiv.org/abs/1307.8397).

 

The results are preliminary, Magli stresses. More accurate calculations will need a full survey using instruments such as a theodolite, a device for measuring horizontal and vertical angles. Also, the sequence in which the structures were built is unclear, so it is hard to say if rings were built to follow Sirius as it rose at different points along the horizon.

 

Ongoing excavations might rule out any astronomical significance, says Jens Notroff, also at DAI. "We are still discussing whether the monumental enclosures at Göbekli Tepe were open or roofed," he says. "In the latter case, any activity regarding monitoring the sky would, of course, have been rather difficult."

 

This article appeared in print under the headline "Stone Age temple tracked the dog star"

 

 

Coincidence???? See article in the prior post about the discovery of circa 5,000 year old gaming pieces from a tomb in Turkey that include four (?) dog gaming pieces. And now we have some suggestions that the circular structures constructed at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey may have been centered (pun!) around the rising and trajectory of Sirius across the sky, the so-called "dog" star.

Many ancient board games in the Middle East and Fertile Crescent utilized dog and/or canine pieces (such as the Egyptian game Hounds and Jackals, both being canine species). The discovery of the dog (and other) gaming pieces in one tomb in Turkey at Basur Hoyuk I believe pushes back the use of dog-styled gaming pieces to its earliest known date.  I've written quite a bit at this blog about the close association between dogs (canines) and various incarnations of the Great Mother Goddess. Check out some of the connections that I wrote about in these posts (these are just a few of the related posts):

Dog Graves Uncovered in Colonial Virginia
September 5, 2010

Dogs in Myth and Legend
December 27, 2009

Deities of the Canine Kind
February 10, 2009

One of the co-founders of Goddesschess, Georgia Albert a/k/a Isis, wondered way back in 1998 at the long-defunct Art Bell website message board "Is chess the game of the Goddess?" and from there, Goddesschess was born in May 1999. Those posts were all saved at what we call "the Weave" and can be viewed in their entirety - over 1000 of them! - at the Goddesschess website. Certainly much food for thought in those posts from our earliest days -- before any of us embarked on this long road of study and research about ancient history and board games. 

The Sirius Lore

From Al-Alhram 26 June - 2 July 2008 Issue No. 903 To the earliest Egyptians, Sirius/Sothis was the home of departed souls. Assem Deif* shows how the triad Osiris-Isis-Nephthys affected other cultures The place is the Isis-Hathor Temple of Denderah, where the priests hasten along the columned aisle to witness an important event. The principal temple is dedicated to Hathor, whereas a small adjacent one is dedicated to Isis in which a statue of the goddess is located at the end of the aisle. It is a little before 5am on 22 July, 700 BC, the summer solstice; the priests wait to watch Sirius rise and its rays penetrate the temple to fall on Isis's gem. As they arrive the sun is still below the horizon, and they gaze impatiently for the apparent heliacal rising of the Dog Star. For the priests already knew that the appearance of Sepdet lasts only for a brief moment before Ra brightens the sky. When the star begins to flicker low on the horizon it marks the beginning of a New Year in Ancient Egypt. The festivities will soon begin. The Egyptians referred to the heliacal rising and its associated festival as prt spdt, "the going forth of Sepdet". The star hid for 70 days, and now it has returned from the duat (underworld) to bring welfare to the land and to allow its people to bury their dead. The 70 days of the star's invisibility is due to the dominance of sunlight in this period. When it starts its heliacal rise from the east it is ahead of the sun by about 11 degrees, moving across the celestial sphere to set in the west. On subsequent nights, it distances itself from the sun by appearing earlier and spending longer in the night sky until it eventually becomes out of phase with the sun, rising just when the sun is setting over the western horizon. It again approaches the sun on successive nights until it disappears totally from view, obscured by the sun's brilliance for 70 days before reappearing again for a few minutes just before sunrise -- the heliacally rising. Not only does the star herald the flooding of the Nile, but the shade of the blue-white star is also important. If the star appears bright and clear, the Egyptians expect an abundant harvest. If it is dull and reddish, a poor harvest results. In the second century AD the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy described the star as being red, and the less red it was the better the harvest. The Arabs too revered the star ,which they called "Al-Shi'ra Al-Yamaniyyah", referring to Yemen, south of Mecca; for it was this star which guided them in this direction. Many nations paid homage to its goddess, Isis. Her fame spread to all corners of the Roman Empire, and the last recorded festival of Isis took place in Rome in 394 AD. There was even a temple of Isis on the River Thames in London. To the Egyptians she was the caring mother and the symbol of fertility. She also owned magical powers; as she restored her husband to life after he was murdered by his brother Set. Some scholars believe the River Nile took its name, Siris, from Sirius. Not only was it the foundation of the Egyptian religious system, but its celestial movement determined the Egyptian calendar. Another bright star is Canopus (Arabic Suhayl), the second brightest star in the sky after Sirius and similarly located in the southern hemisphere. It is used nowadays to guide spaceships. Both stars disappear for an almost equal amount of time and rise heliacally at the summer solstice. Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky, 20 times brighter than our Sun and twice as massive. It is called the Dog Star because of its prominence in the constellation of Canis Major . Since it is the star of Isis, it was supposedly married to Orion, or her brother Osiris. The Arabs, however, made Sirius the sister as well as the wife of Canopus, "Alpha Carina" rather than Orion. Scholars say "Sah" in the Pyramid Texts, with whom the soul of the king was to be united, resembles the name Suhayl. They also say that Sirius, as a star, was married to another star and not to a constellation. Rest of article.