The Genesis Secret

22

Rob and Christine were sitting in the tea-house by the Pool of Abraham. The honeyed stones of the Mevlid Halil mosque were glowing in the morning light: their mellow hues reflected placidly in the water of the fishpond.

They had spent the previous evening researching the Eden theory separately: Christine on the laptop in her flat, Rob in a net café: dividing their time to get more data more quickly. And now they had met to discuss it. They had come here for the anonymity: it felt safer to be sitting amongst the crowds. The strolling friends and off-duty soldiers, the kids eating fried mutton balls with one hand as their mothers gazed at the carp. The only jarring note was a police car parked discreetly at the edge of the tea-gardens.

Rob was remembering how he’d arrived at his solution. They had discussed Genesis when they were in Sogmatar and Haran. And Christine had also mentioned the Adam and Eve legend. This combination must, Rob realized, have triggered memories of his father reciting the Bible; so he had seen how the numbers could be read. Chapter x verse y. Digit followed by digit. But now they had to examine this solution, more deeply, and compare notes on the underlying logic.

‘OK.’ He took a gulp of tea. ‘Let’s go through it again. We know that agriculture began here. The first place in the world. In the area immediately surrounding Gobekli. Sometime around 8000 BC, yup?’

‘Yes. And we know roughly when and where farming began…’

‘Because of the archaeological evidence: “domestication is a shock to the system”. I read that in the book in your flat. The skeletons of people change, they grow smaller and less healthy…’

‘Yyyyes,’ Christine agreed, hesitantly. ‘As the human body adapts to a protein-poorer diet, and a more arduous lifestyle there is certainly a change in skeletal size, in the robustness of the physique. I have seen that in many sites.’

‘So. Early domestication is a trial. Likewise, newly-domesticated animals get scrawnier.’

‘Yes.’

‘But…’ Rob leaned forward. ‘When this domestication happened, in 8000 BC, that was also the time when the local landscape began to alter. Around here. Right?’

‘Yes, the trees were chopped down and the soil leached away and the area became very arid. As it is now. Whereas before, it was…paradisiacal.’ She smiled meditatively. ‘I remember Franz talking about Gobekli as it must have been. He said it was once a prachtvolle Schafferegion-a glorious pastoral region. It was a region of forests and meadows, rich with game, and wild grasses. And then the climate changed, as agriculture took over. And then it became a weary place-that had to be worked ever harder.’

Rob took out his notebook and recited, ‘As God says to Adam: “cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life”. Genesis Chapter 3, verse 17. Three seventeen.’

Christine rubbed her temples with her fingertips. She looked tired, which was unusual for her. But then she shook herself, and pressed on. ‘I have heard this theory before: that the story of Eden is a folk-memory, and an allegory.’

‘You mean, like, a metaphor?’

‘According to some, yes. If you look at it one way the Eden story describes our hunter-gatherer past, when we had time to wander through the trees and pick fruit and gather wild grasses…like Adam and Eve, naked in paradise. And then we fell into farming and life got harder. And so we were expelled from Eden.’

Rob looked at two men holding hands, crossing the bridge over the little rivulet; the bridge that led to the teahouse. ‘But why did we really start farming?’

Christine shrugged. ‘No one knows. It is one of the great mysteries. But it certainly started here. In this corner of Anatolia. The very first pigs were domesticated at Cayonu, that’s just seventy miles away. Cattle were domesticated at Catalhoyuk, to the west.’

‘But how does Gobekli fit in precisely?’

‘That’s a difficult one. It’s a miracle that hunters created such a site. Yet it shows that the life before farming was very leisured. These men, those hunters, they had time to learn the arts, to sculpt, to make exquisite carvings. It was a huge leap forward. Yet they didn’t know how to make pots.’ Christine’s silver crucifix glinted in the sunshine as she spoke. ‘It’s bizarre. And of course sexuality developed, too. There are many erotic images in Gobekli. Animals and men with enlarged phalluses. Carvings of women, splayed and naked women…’

‘Maybe they ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge’? said Rob.

Christine smiled politely. ‘Maybe.’

They were quiet for a moment. Christine turned nervously to her left, as a swarthy policeman patrolled with his radio buzzing. Rob wondered why they were both so paranoid. Neither of them had done anything wrong. But Officer Kiribali had been so sinister. And what about the men staring up at the flat. What was that all about? He dismissed his fears. There was still ground to cover. ’Then there’s the geography?’

‘Yes.’ Christine nodded. ‘The topography. That’s also important.’

‘There aren’t four rivers near Gobekli.’

‘No. Just one. But it’s the Euphrates.’

Rob remembered what he had read in the net café. ‘And scholars have always reckoned that Eden, if it lay anywhere, must have been somewhere between the Tigris and the Euphrates. The fertile crescent. The earliest site of civilization. And the Euphrates is actually mentioned in Genesis, as rising in Eden.’

‘It is. And also we have the mountains on the map.’

‘The Taurus.’

‘Source of the Euphrates, East of Eden,’ Christine affirmed. ‘There are strong legends that Eden is sheltered by mountains to the East. Gobekli has the Taurus to the east.’

Christine took out her own notebook: and read out some of her notes. ‘OK, there’s more. In ancient Assyrian texts, there is mention of a Beth Eden, a so-called House of Eden.’

‘Which is?

‘It is or rather it was a small Aramean statelet. Located on the bend of the Euphrates, just south of Charchemish. Which is fifty miles from Sanliurfa.’

Rob nodded, impressed. Christine’s research had been better than his. ‘Did you find anything else?’

‘We know about Adam and Eve in Haran. But Eden isn’t just described in Genesis, it is also mentioned in the Book of Kings.’ She flicked a page in her notebook, and read the citation: ‘“Have the gods of the nations delivered them which my fathers have destroyed, as Gozan, and Haran, and Rezaph, and the children of Eden which were in Thelasar.”’

‘ Haran again?’

‘Yes. Haran.’ She shrugged. ‘And Thelasar is possibly a town called Rusafah in Northern Syria.’

‘How far is that?’

‘Two hundred miles south-west.’

Rob nodded, enthused. ‘Making Gobekli just east. Eastward in Eden. And what about the name? The word Eden itself? It means delight in Hebrew…’

‘But the Sumerian root is in fact “eddin”. A steppe or plateau, or plain.’

‘Like…the Plain of Haran?’

‘Quite so. Like the Plain of Haran. In which we find…’

‘Gobekli Tepe.’ Rob felt the tingle of sweat on his back. It was a very hot morning, even in the cool of the teahouse gardens. ‘OK then, the last thread is the actual Bible connection.’

‘Abraham was meant to have lived here. He is certainly linked to Haran, in the Book of Genesis. Most Muslims believe Urfa is the Ur of the Chaldees. And that is also mentioned in Genesis. This small region has more links to Genesis than anywhere else in the Middle East.’

‘So that’s it.’ Rob smiled, feeling satisfied. ’Taking into account the Biblical links, the history and legends, plus the topography of the region and the evidence of early domestication-and of course the data from the site itself-we have the solution. Right? At least we have Franz’s solution…’ Rob lifted his hands, like a magician about to do a trick: ‘Gobekli Tepe is the Garden of Eden!’

Christine smiled. ‘Metaphorically.’

‘Metaphorically. But still, it is persuasive. This is where the Fall of Man took place. From the freedom of hunting, to the toil of agriculture. And that’s the story recorded in Genesis.’

They were silent for a moment. Then Christine said, ‘Though a better way of putting it is that Gobekli Tepe is…a temple in an Edenic landscape. Rather than the actual Garden of Eden.’

‘Sure.’ Rob grinned. ‘Don’t worry, Christine, I don’t actually think Adam and Eve were wandering around Gobekli eating peaches. But I do think Franz reckoned he had found it. Allegorically.’

He gazed across the glittering pools, feeling a lot happier. Talking it through was helping; and he was also very excited about the journalistic possibilities. Even if it was a bizarre story it was astonishing, and surely very readable. A scientist who thought he was digging up Eden, even metaphorically and allegorically? It could be a double page headline. Easy.

Christine did not seem so happy about the success of their hypothesis. Her eyes misted for a second: a phase of emotion that swiftly passed. ‘Yyessss…Let’s say you are right. You probably are. It certainly explains the numbers. And his mysterious behaviour at the end, digging for things at night. Taking them away. He must have been very excited. He was very jumpy just before…just before it happened.’

Her mood touched Rob; he chided himself. Here he was thinking about his work and yet there was still a murder unsolved.

Christine was frowning. ‘There’s still many questions left.’

‘Why did they kill him?’

‘Exactly.’

Rob wondered aloud. ‘Well, heck. Maybe…maybe some American evangelists found out what he was up to. Digging up Eden, I mean.’

Christine laughed. ‘And they hired a hitman? Right. Those Methodists can be so touchy.’

There was nothing left in her tea glass. She picked it up and put it down, then said, ‘Another problem is this: why did the hunters bury Gobekli? That’s not explained by the Eden theory. It must have taken them decades to inter an entire temple. Why do that?’

Rob looked up at the blue Urfan sky for inspiration. ‘Because it was the site of the Fall? Maybe it symbolized even at that early stage the error of mankind. Falling into farming. The beginning of wage slavery. So they hid it out of shame or anger or resentment or…’

Christine made a rather unimpressed pout.

‘OK.’ Rob smiled. ‘It’s a crap theory. But why did they do it?’

A shrug. ‘C’est un mystère.’

Another silence fell across their little table. A few yards away, through the rose bushes, little children were pointing excitedly at the fish in the pond. Rob looked at one girl: she was about eleven, with bright golden curls of hair. But her mother was shrouded in black veils and robes: a full chador. He felt a sadness: that soon this lovely girl would be concealed like her mother. Shrouded for ever in black.

And then a flash of real guilt crossed his mind. A flash of guilt about his daughter. On the one hand he was revelling in this mystery-and yet, inside, he still wanted to go home. He yearned to go home. To see Lizzie.

Christine was opening Breitner’s notebook, and laying it on the table alongside her own notes. Shadows of sunlight, spangled by the teahouse lime trees, flickered across their little table. ‘One final point. There is something I didn’t tell you before. Remember the last line in his notebook?’ She pointed to a line of handwriting, turning the notebook so that Rob could see.

It was the line about the skull. It said, Cayonu skulls, cf Orra Keller.

‘I didn’t mention it before because it was so confusing. It didn’t seem relevant. But now…Well, take a look. I have an idea…’

He bent to read: but the line remained incomprehensible. ‘But who is Orra Keller?’

‘It’s not a name!’ said Christine. ‘We just presumed it was a name because it’s in capitals. But I think Franz was just mixing languages.’

‘I still don’t get it.’

‘He’s mixing English and German. And…’

Rob looked over Christine’s shoulder suddenly. ’Jesus.’

Christine stiffened. ‘What?’

‘Don’t look now. It’s Officer Kiribali. He’s seen us, and he’s coming over.’