Turkey: Cradle of Civilisation(s)

The sculptures are exquisite.  Graceful birds and pouncing animals reminiscent of ancient Egypt are carved onto Stonehenge-sized stone monoliths.

But this artwork dates from 6,000 years before the pyramids – or Stonehenge.

Welcome to Göbekli Tepe, a Neolithic site about 15 km from Şanlıurfa in south-eastern Turkey.

I’ve blogged before about the astonishing history and archaeology of Turkey, including Homage to Cappadocia and Astonishing Anatolia and Gaziantep.  Everywhere you go, fresh – yet ancient – wonders surround you.

You may think I’m exaggerating.  Well, I recently had the privilege to take a few days off.  In four days I visited caravanserais and the Great Mosque in the fortress-city of Diyarbakır, whose ancient walls were restored (sic) by the Romans in 349; the fortress and ruined bridge of Hasankeyf on the Tigris, dating from 1,800BC but sacked by the Mongols in 1260; the Mor Gabriel Monastery, founded in 397; mosques, madrasahs and museums in Mesapotamian Mardin, which dates back to around 4,000BC; the ancient ruins of Harran, founded around 3,000BC; Göbekli Tepe, which weighs in at around 10,000BC; Nemrut Dağı, a child at 62BC but surely one of the world’s most spectacular ancient sites; and many others places including Gaziantep again and its wonderful Roman mosaics.  All this was accompanied by terrific Turkish regional food.

Anyone who follows me on twitter – if not, please do on @leighturnerFCO – will have seen my tweets from my travels at the time.

These archaeological remains highlight the fact that the territory of what is today Turkey has been inhabited over the millennia by an incomparable range of civilisations and peoples.  Some historians designate Mesopotamia – the lands between the Tigris and the Euphrates, which encompass a big chunk of modern-day Turkey – as the cradle of civilisation.  While many of the wonder of today’s Turkey, including here in Istanbul, were built by people who would today identify themselves as Turks, others stretch back far into pre-Ottoman history.

Indeed, it is striking that you can read half-way through some history books about Turkey without reaching the year zero of the modern age.

All this poses fascinating questions of identity.  Turkey, like the United Kingdom, has seen many different peoples take control of the territory over the years.  It is tempting sometimes to see a clean break between a historic civilisation – such as the people who built Göbekli Tepe or Stonehenge – and the people who live there today.  In the case of the United Kingdom, it is common to argue that Britons are very mixed-up, consisting of Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, many varieties of Viking, Normans and others – even before more recent arrivals (eg Huguenots in the 17thC) and the modern immigration of the last hundred years.

For a flavour of debates about what it means to be British or English, check out this the Wikipedia page on “English people”, which includes some interesting stuff about the “national origin myth” of the English.

Which makes the case of the remains known as “Cheddar Man” – Britain’s oldest complete human skeleton – interesting.

Found in a cave in the west of England in 1903, Cheddar Man is estimated to have died around 10,000 years ago at a time when what is now England was connected to what is now France by dry land.  He was in no way “British” or “English” as we now know it.

Yet when in 1996, the skeleton of “Cheddar Man” sent for DNA testing “to the astonishment of the scientists,” as The Times reported “, a close match was found between Cheddar Man and Mr Adrian Targett”, a history teacher at a nearby school, and two other people in the village.

The experiment proved that a man living in late 20^th century Britain was a direct descendant, through the maternal line, of a person living in the same locality in Neolithic times.

What this tells us about Turkey, if anything, is above my pay grade.  But Turkey undoubtedly has a history of migrations and individual and mass movement of people over the ages at least as tempestuous as the UK.

So perhaps Turks can take pride in the extraordinary richness of the archaeological treasures that cram this beautiful country not only on the grounds that these treasures are located within the borders of modern-day Turkey, but because some Turks are themselves descended from the people who built those ancient wonders.

Meanwhile my tip to anyone who has not done so yet, whether Turkish or otherwise, would be to visit the sites of Southern and Eastern Anatolia as soon as possible.  So far, many of them are comparatively little-known compared with the splendours of Ephesus, Istanbul and Edirne.  When the world discovers the rest of Turkey, this country is going to become the hottest tourist property in the world.