34

WALKING WITH SERPENTS

So exactly who were the Watchers of the book of Enoch? Their recorded appearance as being extremely tall, like “trees,” with long white hair, pale skin, ruddy complexions, eyes that seem to shine like the sun, and visages with the appearance of vipers, conjures a strange creature indeed, and one that has all the hallmarks of an albino. So were the Watchers albinos? It is a compelling theory, although there is a far easier explanation.

Such distinctive traits might simply be exaggerated descriptions of the Swiderian population, whose suspected presence in eastern Anatolia in the aftermath of the Younger Dryas Boundary impact event might well have catalyzed the creation of Göbekli Tepe and the later accounts of mythical beings such as the Watchers and Anunnaki. As we saw in chapter 20, Swiderian communities certainly included “tall . . . long-headed, [and] thin faced” individuals,1 while among the post-Swiderian groups of Central Russia and the Baltic region were people of increased height with elongated (hyper-dolichocephalic) skulls and narrow faces.2

Additionally, Swiderians would also seem to have carried the distinctive physiognomy of the Brünn population. They too possessed heads that were long and narrow, plus they bore traits that marked them as likely Neanderthal-human hybrids, most obviously prominent brow ridges.3 Similar traits were identified in the Swiderian-linked Kebeliai skull, found in Lithuania in 1948, suggesting that among the Swiderian groups entering eastern Anatolia were strange-looking people indeed.

In fact, the unique physiological features of the Brünn population derived, most probably, from prolonged contact with Neanderthal communities, either in Central Europe or at places like Kostenki and Sungir in Central Russia (the first settlement sites at Kostenki go back at least 40,000 years, arguably even earlier). It is even possible that cross-contact between the different human species began much further away, in the Altai region of Siberia, where anatomically modern humans shared the world with Neanderthals, as well as other types of extinct human types, before their final disappearance sometime around thirty to forty thousand years ago.

All this tells us that when the Swiderians entered eastern Anatolia their striking physical appearance might have contrasted greatly with that of the local Epipaleolithic population. Did this lead, eventually, through consistent storytelling, to gross exaggerations that have made the Watchers into superhuman albinos the size of trees? If so, then we can understand also how the the Swiderians’ elongated heads led to their being represented not only as abstract statues with T-shaped heads at Göbekli Tepe but also as human angels with visages like vipers in myths and legends. Was it a memory that across the millennia became so abstract that eventually they became Awwim, quite literally walking “serpents”?4 It is a staggering possibility. What is more, compelling evidence now suggests that the peoples of the Near East preserved an abstract memory of the existence of a serpent-faced elite for thousands of years after the construction of Göbekli Tepe.

THE MYSTERY OF TELL ARPACHIYAH

Following the Pre-Pottery Neolithic age came the Pottery Neolithic, which in eastern Anatolia and Northern Mesopotamia was represented by the Halaf culture, ca. 6000–5000 BC, and the Ubaid people, ca. 5000–4100 BC, both of whom probably influenced the emergence of the Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations down on the Mesopotamia Plain. At a Halaf and later Ubaid site known as Tell Arpachiyah, situated in the Khabur Valley, just outside the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, Max Mallowan and John Cruikshank Rose of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, in the company of writer Agatha Christie, made an amazing discovery. They uncovered evidence of an advanced village setting with cobbled streets, rectangular buildings, and round buildings with domed ceilings like the tholoi tombs of Mycenaean Greece.5

Mallowan and his team also unearthed a number of burials, many in poor condition. Thirteen skulls, however, were better preserved, and these were examined by anthropologists Theya Molleson and Stuart Campbell.6 Six were found to be artificially deformed, in that they had been deliberately elongated to create an extended cranium. This must have been done when the individuals were still in their infancy using a combination of boards and linen wrappings. These findings had earlier been predicted by Max Mallowan and fellow archaeologist Hilda Linford, who in 1969 wrote:

We appear to be confronted with long heads, and there are certain pro nounced facial and other characteristics which . . . would have made them exceptionally easy to recognize.7

What seemed important about these deformed skulls is that some of their unique features were not artificial but natural. In other words, the deformation had merely accentuated what was already there. It was a realization that led Molleson and Campbell to conclude that “several of the individuals (including some without deformations) were related to each other,”8 in that they formed part of an extended caste, or family group. Moreover, because the site covered the transition phase from Halaf to Ubaid, ca. 5200–4500 BC, and the characteristics were present in remains belonging to both cultures, there was evidence of a direct genetic descent from one culture to the other across an extended period of time.

SNAKELIKE HEADS

Molleson and Campbell went on to state that this type of deliberate cranial deformation within a specific group of people “has considerable potential for elitism.”9 In conclusion, they wrote that head accentuation among the Halaf and later Ubaid peoples was done to “demarcate a particular elite group, either social or functional,” who were of “close genetic relationship” and as such were part of a hereditary group that was “closely inbred.”10

Furthermore, Molleson and Campbell speculated that the “shapes of the head may have had some meaning,”11 adding, incredibly, that these individuals were perhaps recalled in the fired clay figurines found in various Ubaid cemeteries, which have snakelike heads (see plate 32).12 In addition to this, they wrote that a number of small ceramic heads with elongated cranial features and strange coffee-bean eyes dating from the Halaf period were also most likely representations of this elite group (see figure 34.1).13

Figure 34.1. Heads of serpent-like statues from ancient Mesopotamia in the British Museum. Their extended heads and coffee-bean eyes indicate that they are abstract representations of the long-headed elite known to have existed among the Ubaid and Halaf cultures, ca. 6000–4100 BC.

CULT OF THE SNAKE

So who exactly were these long-headed individuals, who would seem to have been members of a genetically related group seen as snake-headed in appearance? The greatest clue comes not from the ancient world, but from Central America. Among the Maya of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, a hereditary line of priests called the chane, or “serpents,” would deliberately deform the heads of their infants to give them what was known as a polcan—an elongated serpent-like head. Doing this made the child eligible for a hereditary priesthood known as the People of the Serpent, who perpetuated the cult of the rattlesnake.14 They honored Itzamna, or Zamna, a form of Ahau Can, the “Lordly Serpent,” a great wisdom bringer and legendary founder of the chane priesthood.

Had something similar been occurring at Tell Arpachiyah in northern Iraq—a hereditary group, arguably an elite caste, that deliberately elongated the heads of their children so that when they came of age they were demarked as special among the communities in which they moved? Was this done to honor or celebrate a divine ancestor, or a specific group of ancestors, believed to have possessed very similar serpentine features? Did they represent these divine ancestors as snake-headed figurines of the type found in Ubaid graves?

More pertinently, were these human serpents the Watchers of the book of Enoch, who were believed to have had long, serpentlike faces—visages like vipers, as the Testament of Amram so aptly puts it? Was their memory confused with the envisaged Fall in the terrestrial Paradise, through the serpent’s temptation of Adam and Eve? Remember, the book of Enoch tells us that the Watcher named Gâdreêl was the serpent that “led astray Eve.”15

ELITE RITUAL CENTER

No further information is available concerning the genetic background of the skulls found at Tell Arpachiyah, which is now thought to have been an “elite ritual center.”16 Yet it is worth considering whether the elite family group or caste that deformed the heads of their children among the Halaf and later Ubaid peoples might not have been descendants of Swiderian groups who entered eastern Anatolia from the north some four thousand to five thousand years before the foundation of Tell Arpachiyah around 5200 BC.

Intriguingly, overwhelming evidence indicates that the Halaf culture controlled the Lake Van and Bingöl obsidian trade,17 distributing the black volcanic glass throughout the Near East from a series of centers in eastern Turkey, northern Syria, and northern Iraq, including Tell Arpachiyah.18 In other words, the elite group here might have seen itself as the direct successors of the walking serpents that had controlled the obsidian trade in the distant past. Perhaps the Halaf even saw themselves as their lineal descendants, the reason they chose to accentuate their cranial features to make their children look more serpentlike in appearance. If this is true, then clearly by this time the European hunters’ connections with totems such as the wolf and reindeer had long since been superseded by those of the serpent and vulture, two of the most familiar creatures associated with the beliefs and practices of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic world (it is interesting to note that in Aztec mythology, the serpent is linked directly with obsidian, and obsidian knives in particular).

The strange dark garments or cloaks of feathers worn by the Watchers were most likely the ritual paraphernalia of a shaman, arguably one associated with the vulture. This probably led eventually to claims that these individuals were bird people19 or that they bore wings, something that was added to the description of angels as late as the fourth century AD.

Not only were the book of Enoch’s Watchers seen as walking serpents, but the Anunnaki also were said to have had distinct serpentine qualities. For instance, Christian O’Brien points out that Ninkharsag, the wife of Enlil in the Nippur foundation cylinder, bears the epithet “Serpent Lady,” while Enlil himself is described as the “Splendid Serpent of the shining eyes.”20 Remember, it is the Anunnaki that Klaus Schmidt proposes are perhaps represented by the T-shaped pillars at Göbekli Tepe. So are these anthropomorphic pillars representations of the Watchers as well?

CITY OF ENOCH

It would be wrong to identify the long-headed, hood-wearing anthromorphs represented by the stone pillars at Göbekli Tepe as actual Watchers, or indeed Anunnaki, simply because both derive from quite separate branches of human development that reached their zenith many thousands of years after the world that emerged in the triangle d’or sometime around the end of the Younger Dryas mini ice age, ca. 9600 BC. Having said this, the indirect connections between Göbekli Tepe and these human angels cannot be ignored. For instance, one Syrian chronicler wrote that the city of Şanlıurfa, ancient Edessa, was founded by “Orhay son of Hewya,” the “Serpent,”21 a clear allusion to the Watchers of the book of Enoch. Remember, Göbekli Tepe is just 8 miles (13 kilometers) away from the center of Şanlıurfa, where a Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlement dating to 9000 BC was investigated in 1997 following the discovery in Yeni Yol Street of a life-size human statue with obsidian disks for eyes (see chapter 4).22 This was discovered in the same area of the city where Nimrod is said to have built his fortress and Abraham was born in a cave, the latter being the reason the whole area is considered sacred in Muslim tradition.

Strengthening the link between Enoch and Şanlıurfa still further is the fact that Bar Hebraeus (1226–1286), a historical chronicler and bishop of the Syrian Church, wrote that the prophet Enoch founded the city of Edessa, that is, Urfa or Orfa (even though, in fairness, he attributes the same role to Nimrod elsewhere in his writings).23 This is interesting, as Enoch was said to have been visited in his dream-vision by two Watchers, who took him on a tour of the Seven Heavens, one of which contained the abode of the angels, while in another was the Garden of Righteousness. As we have seen, the geographical setting for the patriarch’s amazing journey would appear to have been the Eastern Taurus Mountains and Armenian Highlands. So was Enoch’s place of departure on this great adventure Şanlıurfa?

THE PERI AND CIN

We should also not forget that the Kurds of eastern Turkey preserve stories and traditions regarding mythical beings that inhabited this region in prehistoric times. They are the Peri—tall, strong, beautiful, “super human beings,” whose fay-looking descendants were still thought to inhabit remote mountain villages as late as the twentieth century. As with the relationship between the Anunnaki and the Igigi, the Peri are said to have worked in concert with other beings of mythical origin called in Kurdish the Cin; that is, the Jinn of Persian folklore; the expression “Cin u Peri” being used to express the dual powers of these mythical creatures.

It was believed that King Solomon made the Cin go to work for him and that they “did what an ordinary human being could not do.”24 Both the Peri and Cin were able to carry heavy objects, build great monuments, and perform other grand feats, and it was put to me by my Kurdish contact, Hakan Dalkus, who was brought up in a small village in the foothills of the Eastern Taurus Mountains, that “maybe Göbekli Tepe was built by them. Or some people then or later believed so. It makes such a place sacred too. While for us Genies, [that is, Cin] mostly stand for bad characters to be feared, Peri is the opposite.”25

In his book The Fairy Mythology (revised edition, 1850), celebrated Irish mythologist and historian Thomas Keightley (1789–1872) states that the Jinn, the Persian name for the Cin, “were created and occupied the earth several thousand years before Adam,”26 whose death is usually said to have occurred five thousand, five years before the time of Christ (see chapter 35). So if the Cin or Jinn are in some cases the memory of a human culture that thrived in the Armenian Highlands in prehistoric times, then it suggests they entered the scene around the same time that Swiderian groups might well have arrived in the same territories during the Younger Dryas mini ice age, ca. 10,900–9600 BC. One of the leaders of the Jinn was Azâzêl,27 a fallen angel, who was also a leader of the rebel Watchers, according to the book of Enoch, showing that traditions regarding the Watchers probably derive from the same origins as those of the Peri and Cin.28

Clearly, it was not Peri or Cin who built Göbekli Tepe, but human beings. However, there is an outside chance that, in their archaic stories about the Peri and Cin, the Kurds may have preserved the memory of incoming peoples of strange appearance who inspired the building of monuments and sacred places. The manner in which the Peri were able to cohabit with mortal kind is also reminiscent of the way the Watchers took mortal wives, who gave birth to giant offspring that resembled their Watcher fathers in appearance, being large bodied with pale and ruddied skin, just like the faylike descendants of the Peri.29

EGYPTIAN INFLUENCE?

So were the Nephilim and Sons of God of Genesis 6, along with the Watchers of the book of Enoch, really the memory of a Swiderian elite whose original homeland included the Carpathian Mountains of Central Europe? It is a persuasive theory, although we cannot dismiss the possibility that the Hooded Ones were made up of individuals from more than one ethnological background, with some reaching southeast Anatolia from other parts of the ancient world. We have already seen how the post-Zarzian peoples of the Eastern Taurus Mountains and Zagros Mountains might have provided the expertise to help create cult centers such as Hallan Çemi and even Göbekli Tepe, suggesting that the structures themselves were in fact the product of indigenous cultures, under the control of a power elite of Swiderian origin.

Yet other cultures from farther afield might also have been involved in the creation process. For instance, if Nilotic peoples from Egypt, Sudan, and even the Sahara were trading with the Natufian peoples, as seems likely from a number of disparate pieces of evidence now emerging from Epipaleolithic sites in the Levant corridor,*20 then it remains distinctly possible that groups or individuals from the Nile Valley might have had a hand in the emergence of Göbekli Tepe.

These are possibilities that cannot be ruled out at this time. Yet what seems more certain is that the Swiderians, who would have reached eastern Anatolia during the Younger Dryas period, carried with them some semblance of the beliefs, practices, and ideologies that had earlier thrived among the Solutrean peoples of southwest and central Europe. They were also, very likely, carriers of magical traditions derived from the Kostenki-Streletskaya culture, whose descendants they would have encountered as they crossed the Russian steppes on their way to the Caucasus Mountains and Armenian Highlands. The Kostenki-Streletskaya peoples’ own successors most probably included the Zarzians, who had followed a very similar route as the Swiderians, southward from the Russian steppes to eastern Anatolia, as much as ten thousand years earlier. All of these influences are interconnected and came to bear, eventually, on the construction of Göbekli Tepe, ca. 9500–8000 BC.

Our journey is almost over. Yet I still needed to make the link between Göbekli Tepe and the presence some two hundred miles (320 kilometers) away of the Garden of Eden. How did one affect the other when they existed in separate millennia, many thousands of years apart? Those living either in biblical times or much later during the formative years of Christianity cannot have known of Göbekli Tepe, even if they did recognize Armenia as the genesis point of human civilization. So what linked all these disparate elements together? The answer for me came with the confirmation of a dream.