Niles M. Reddick: Gobekli Tepe

Gobekli Tepe

Niles M. Reddick

When a herder discovered the tip of a pillar protruding from the tell, his intuition told him it was important, and village officials contacted an archaeologist. Like kids with shovels in a sandbox, the university team moved dirt from the tell and found more pillars in circles with carvings of animals not indigenous to the deserts of Turkey like geese, armadillos, and gazelles. Speculation was the animals came from the ark at nearby Ararat after the flood. Later, the circular ruins seemed to align with one star, a star where NASA noted activity. Perhaps the ancient nomads had attempted contact with their ancestors, or perhaps this was a religious place when the desert was fertile and alive.

All I knew is that I got a basic stipend for this internship, a discount from inflated tuition and fees, and a tent in which to live, where I ate mush with a side of desert sand. If sand grew, I’d be a mound myself because it was everywhere – caked in my nostrils, on my eyelashes, around my lips. In the distance, I heard gunfire and bombs explode near the Syrian border where they fight for sand and controlin the name of a God, and I was conditioned to sleep by the loud lullaby. In fact, when the war zone was quiet, supplies were low, or troops were on the run, I tossed and turned. One graduate assistant – an Indiana Jones type with stylish readers, a safari hat, and a knife on his belt – signaled me.

“Hey, there, can you bring a trowel and brush? There now, work around this and then brush it.” I followed his lead, and we pulled a three-inch figurine from the dirt. “By God,” he said. “It’s the first time this little fellow has seen sun and sky in over ten thousand years. You think it was a child’s toy, some idol worshipped, or a good luck talisman?” “I don’t know,” I said, and quite frankly, I didn’t care. It wasn’t finders, keepers. The whole kit and caboodle was like a horoscope to me. It could have been this or that, it could have meant this or that, but reality is what we make it, and the graduate assistant would create his own. Yes, it was fascinating and would land him in a journal no one would read, or he could slip it in his pocket and sell it on the black market to pay his tuition and fees, or he could get a feather in his safari hat for donating it to the Turkish museum and have a story to tell his undergraduates for the next thirty years until retirement and then recount it to his nursing home buddies. All I knew for certain was we weren’t six feet into this circle of pillars, we had been here an entire semester, I looked and felt like an unwrapped mummy, and I craved a real shower, some clean clothes, a good filet, and some European wine.