Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Eden: Gen 2:4-25

Recently excavators working at Göbekli Tepe in Kurdish southeastern Turkey have claimed that this 10,000 BC site was the first evidence for the transition from the hunter-gatherer to the agriculturalist phase of human existence. The site, they say, was a cult site, where hunters congregated to worship. And since too many were present to feed with casual hunting, they began to harvest and eat the wild grasses in the area, thus eventually cultivating the ground, deforesting it in the process, and leading to the abandonment of both the site (it was “buried” by them!) and the exclusively and distinctively hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

All this led them to make the sensational claim that Göbekli Tepe, which is located not far from Sanli-urfa (in the local popular Muslim lore believed to be Abraham’s birthplace, Ur), was a model for the biblical Eden. The story with the "Eden" claim can be read here. An earlier (1999) report, not so sensational and archeologically much more informative, can be read here.

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