Why did people build the first towns? Seems like an easy question: they found places where economic factors made it possible to produce and store more food, safely raise their children, and carry on the shared, diversified responsibilities of village life. As these rural communities grew, walls were needed to protect small towns from human mauraders and wild beasts, especially in the night. Gods and magical spirits were invoked to guarantee fertility, enhance the harvest, and protect these proto-cities from natural and man-made calamities. The ancients believed the balance between heaven and earth must be maintained by human action to demonstrate fidelity with the divine forces. So, altars of sacrifice blossomed, and religious semi-professionals (shamans) became priests and priestesses. This led to the construction of permanent shrines and temples for this purpose. Next question?
This is a rough outline of what most archaeologists and anthropologists have believed about the sequence of civilization. The movement toward urbanization was driven by economics and security, i.e., the need to share resources for the common good. Humans abandoned hunting and gathering after they learned how to plant and harvest grain. They settled down near a source of water because fields cannot travel with nomads. These small settlements grew into villages and towns, which required common defense and a division of labor. More complex art and pottery flourished as people had time to spare for the finer pursuits. Religious institutions and the structures to house them--shrines and temples--came later in support of the spiritual and ritualistic needs of an established community.
If you have taken a course in the history of civilization you are probably nodding... Yeah, yeah. And your point is?
Warning: Fasten your cultural seatbelts. All of the above is most likely wrong. Not just wrong, but backwards-wrong.
Gobekli Tepe: World's First Temple?
German-born archeologist Klaus Schmidt has discovered a vast and artistically delightful temple complex in southeastern Turkey near the Syrian border which, according to a growing number of scholars, is older than the pyramids. No, that
doesn't say it stongly enough. The complex is seven thousand years older than the Great Pyramid and six thousand years senior to Stonehenge. The ruins are so ancient they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture. Schmidt has discovered over fifty sites buried safely beneath the soil of Turkey, where they were built about 11,500 years ago. What's more amazing is the nature of the ruins. There is no water source, no trash heaps, none of the telltale signs of human habitation. The sites were not lived in; they were ceremonial centers--temples. That means human raised temple buildings first, then they figured out how to service these religious complexes by domesticaing grain, raising herd animals, and constructing groups of family dwellings in the area.
Schmidt's thesis is that people must have been gathering at ceremonial sites for ages before they decided to formalize the place of worship with stone structures. The temple came first. The need to worship drove people to find stable food sources and create permanent settlements. Writing in Newsweek, Patrick Symmes observes:
"Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that 'the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture,' and Göbekli may prove his case." [1]
Lyceum 2012: The Church in/of the Future
It is worth noting, when considering the Lyceum 2012 theme above, that people have been predicting the downfall of organized religion since writing was invented. But the temples at Gobekli Tepe predate writing by thousands of years. There appears to be something hardwired into humanity which requires us to give thanks, to offer gifts to the divine--first fruits of the field and flocks, devotions of our minds and hands, acts of service in support of something immeasurably greater than ourselves. It was not simply the whimpering of frightened people in a thunderstorm when our ancestors cried unto their gods for deliverance; it was faith that a moral order exists in the cosmos, and that something like justice must eventually prevail. Klaus Schmidt is under no illusions that humanity has gotten religion right through time, but he does seem to believe in the evolution of collective consciousness when he asserts that new ways demand new practices. The people who managed the Gobekli Tepe complex decided to bury the site with dirt, which makes it one of the best preserved Neolithic sites. "When you have new gods," Schmidt says, "you have to get rid of the old ones." [2]
It sounds like theological reflection is at least as old as civilization itself...
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[1] http://www.newsweek.com/2010/02/18/history-in-the-remaking.html
[2] Ibid.
