This posting will be followed by a similar analysis of Aşağı Göbekli and then by some related postings about ancient sites in Upper Mesopotamia that also fit into the astronomical land survey analysis.
Here is our final line drawing result of the traced Google Earth map of Göbekli Köyü.
The image directly below was our first coloring attempt of the traced map and we were astonished to see hands apparently holding a watering vase, so we retraced the map lines again, trying to get more detail, as can be seen in the final colored version further below.
We retraced and recolored the 1st attempt above to be sure of what we had, and also narrowed the main area shown for purposes of interpretation. Otherwise, it would be too broad to display properly on many personal computers or laptops. Here is the retraced, recolored and narrowed version.
Disputable is whether the vase has a water spout, which looks a bit too modern for our taste, and maybe our original tracing of the water vase without a spout was the more accurate version, which would make more sense in view of the mice of the cat. This question of course can be resolved by examination of the original location.
More pressing is the question of the date for the origin of pottery in this region, as no pottery has thus far been found at Göbekli Tepe, so why would it be pictured at Göbekli Köyü?
George Hill writes persuasively in A History of Cyprus, Volume 1, Cambridge University Press, 2010, about the origins of pottery:
"Gjerstad ... in Antike, IX, 1933, p. 262 ... observes that the nearest parallels to Cypriote Stone Age pottery are to be found in East Anatolia and Syria, and it would seem that the Stone Age culture of North Syria, East Anatolia and Cyprus had a common origin. Schaeffer (Miss. pp. 22-3) notes the resemblance between the Cypriote "aeneolithic" pottery and that found in the lower layers of level IV at Ras Shamra (of the fourth millennium....)""Speaking of Cyprus, we might note here that the figure we identify as "the Shaman" also looks very much like a map of the Peloponnese, the southernmost region of Greece, known since prehistoric times, and now one of the 12 districts (Diamerismata) of Greece. A tie here to Greece or Cyprus would perhaps be a political problem, and that is the reason we stick with "shaman" for now, wherever he might have been from, as a presumed "architect" of the Göbekli Köyü landscape.
A further clue might be offered by the clothing of the woman pouring water on the plant (or tree) at Göbekli Köyü, a plant or tree which appears to have one or two fruits. Could those be apples as an Anatolian forerunner of Eve? And even with a nearby serpent at Hydra. Both of these traced "fruit" circles are somewhat faint on the Google Earth map so they must be viewed as uncertain at the present time unless otherwise verified at the geographic location.
The garment of the watering woman is long dress-type garb, flanged at the top (a cape ?), plus "sunny" broad-brimmed headwear, all of which remind us of ancient clothing in Spain. We read, however, about ancient clothes at A Brief History of World Costume:
"The first evidence of woven linen (flax) cloth dates back to the early 6th millennium BC in Turkey, but Western Europe did not produce any known flaxen cloth until about 3000 BC. Also found in Turkey is evidence of some of the first known fiber-dying. Red-dyed thread from 6000 BC was found at Catal Huyuk."E. J. W. (Elizabeth Wayland) Barber writes in Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with Special Reference to the Aegean:
"The fact that the Aegean people, like the Anatolians, knew how to weave and were doing so is steadily attested, from the Middle Neolithic on, but the scraps are so tiny as to give us virtually no further information."That book has a short synopsis at Amazon as follows:
"This pioneering work revises our notions of the origins and early development of textiles in Europe and the Near East. Using innovative linguistic techniques, along with methods from palaeobiology and other fields, it shows that spinning and pattern weaving began far earlier than has been supposed. "Prehistoric Textiles" made an unsurpassed leap in the social and cultural understanding of textiles in humankind's early history. Cloth making was an industry that consumed more time and effort, and was more culturally significant to prehistoric cultures, than anyone assumed before the book's publication. The textile industry is in fact older than pottery - and perhaps even older than agriculture and stockbreeding. It probably consumed far more hours of labor per year, in temperate climates, than did pottery and food production put together. And this work was done primarily by women."Accordingly, it is entirely within the realm of probability that woven cloth of wool or linen was known in the already technologically advanced era of the three Göbeklis. The developing Göbekli decipherment, by the way, was one reason that we recently posted about the new "woven" 3D-printing Nike Flyknit shoes, which we now wear, as we were then looking into ancient weaving history.
It must be noted that the Ancient Greeks were allegedly the first in ancient Europe who had a wide-brimmed "sun hat", called a petasos, usually worn by people in agricultural pursuits, and often worn by women together with a type of cloak or cape called a peplos, but the date of origin of these is unknown. The female water-pouring map figure, by the way, need not necessarily be said to wear a wide-brimmed "hat" as such, for it could well have been some other kind of circularly furled protective headwear.
The following image shows the stars of the heavens represented by our traced drawing of the Göbekli Köyü Google Earth map, here applied to a star map from Starry Night Pro at http://astronomy.starrynight.com showing stars having a brightness magnitude better than 6 (i.e. less than 6, for the reason that, as explained at the Wikipedia: "the brighter the star, the smaller the magnitude: Bright "first magnitude" stars are "1st-class" stars, while stars barely visible to the naked eye are "sixth magnitude" or "6th-class"."
The match between the stars of Cancer and Göbekli Köyü is a pretty good one, especially if it was 9000 years ago, except for some difficulty matching the fingers of the watering woman's hands, the later "claws" of Cancer, as it were, whose Arabic name Acubens as "claws" applied only to the star alpha Cancri and not to the other stars of Cancer. This drawing shows why, because it originally applied only to hands envisioned at this star of Cancer.
Although we are fully convinced that the ancients were astronomers and that the three Gobeklis all related to stars of Cancer in the prehistoric era, our interpretation here must be regarded to be VERY SPECULATIVE since we have not ourselves been in person at the Göbekli Köyü geographic site and rely solely on the map at Google Earth, without any other site information.
To be sure, a woman in woven clothes and wide-brimmed headware watering a plant in 7400 B.C. with a spouted vase would be a sensation. We urge others to look at an unworked Google Earth map of Göbekli Köyü to see if you come up with similar (or better) line drawing results.
One should also recall that a date of 7400 B.C. may be way too early, and that the figure at Göbekli Köyü could derive from a much later date.
What is especially problematic is that we have no way of knowing whether the things we identify as stars "mirrored" on the ground are modern or ancient constructions on land.
Some of the lined-up objects look like they could be trees and may not represent stars at all, unless planted atop previously existing mounds.
So, caveat emptor, i.e. be careful and regard the ideas here as hypothesis, which may, or may not, be confirmed down the road..
Nevertheless, we thought it better to publish these ideas in spite of the readily apparent issues, which we note here in advance of the critics.
There are critics out there who would silence everyone who does not think as they do and who resent anyone who dares to publish things on the edge of current knowledge. We do not write for them. They always represent a closed-minded minority that in every era fades away eventually.
Thankfully, we live in an era where freedom is appreciated by many. We hope you enjoy our writings and appreciate that there is more to the three Göbekli locations near Sanliurfa than previously imagined.
If right, our ideas will ultimately be useful.
If not, very little is lost by raising these topics for discussion.
