On the plane to Istanbul Rob sipped at his watery gin and tonic in a little see-through plastic cup with a tiny swizzle stick. He read the print-out of Steve’s email, and some other stuff he had found on the Net about the Turkish dig.
The site being unearthed was called Gobekli Tepe. For an hour Rob thought this was pronounced Teep, but then he saw a phonetic spelling on one his printouts: Tepe was pronounced
Tepp-ay.
Gobekli…
Tepp-ay.
Rob said it himself-
‘Gob-eckly Tepp-ay’
and then munched a mini pretzel.
He read on.
The site was apparently just one of a number of very old settlements presently being unearthed in Kurdish Turkey. Nevali Cori, Cayonu, Karahan Tepe. Some of them seemed incredibly ancient. Eight thousand years old or more. But was that
really
so ancient? Rob had no idea. How old was the Sphinx? Stonehenge? The pyramids?
His gin and tonic finished, he sat back and thought about his lack of general knowledge. Why didn’t he know the answer to questions like this? Because, obviously, he didn’t have a university education. Unlike his colleagues who had degrees from Oxford and London and UCLA, or Paris or Munich or Kyoto or Austin or wherever, Rob had nothing but his brain and an ability to speed-read-to digest information quickly. He had fled education at the age of eighteen. Despite his single mother’s cries of despair, he had spurned the offers of several colleges and universities, and instead had gone straight into journalism. But who could blame him for this, really? Rob swallowed another mini-pretzel. He’d had no choice. His mum was on her own, his dad had stayed in America being a mean brutal bastard; Rob had grown up poor in the furthest reaches of dull suburban London. From an early age he’d wanted money and status as soon as they were available. He was never going to be like those rich kids he used to envy when he was a lad, able to take four years off to smoke dope and go to parties and drift into comfortable careers at a leisurely pace. He’d always felt a need to get a move on.
The same desire for swift progression had governed his emotional life. When Sally came along, smiling and bonny and clever, he’d grabbed at the happiness, and the stability, she offered. The birth of their daughter, soon after their precocious marriage, seemed like a signal that what he had
done was a Very Good Thing. Only then had he realised, belatedly, that his kinetic career might be in conflict with settled domestic tranquillity.
The El Al economy seat was as uncomfortable as ever. Rob sat back, and rubbed his eyes. Then he asked the stewardess for another gin and tonic. A pick-me-up, and a help-me-forget.
Reaching in his bag beneath his feet Rob pulled out two books from Tel Aviv’s best bookshop, one on Turkish archaeology, and one on ancient man. He had a three-hour stopover in Istanbul and then another flight to Sanliurfa, way out in the wild east of Anatolia. Half a day to do some speedreading.
By the time they arrived in Istanbul, Rob was quite drunk-and fully apprised of the recent archaeological history of Anatolia. Particularly important, it seemed, was a place called Catalhoyuk. Pronounced
Chattal Hoy-ukk.
Discovered in the 1950s, it was one of the oldest villages in the world ever unearthed-maybe nine thousand years old. The walls of this ancient settlement were covered with pictures of bulls and leopards and buzzards. Lots of buzzards. Very old signs of religion. Very strange images.
Rob looked at the pictures of Catalhoyuk. He flicked through a few more pages. Then they landed at Istanbul airport and Rob carouselled his bags and threaded his way through the crowds of jowly Turkish businessmen, stopping at a little store where he bought an American newspaper
with one of the latest reports from Gobekli Tepe, and then went straight to the gate to wait for his next flight. Sitting there in the departure lounge he read some more about the dig.
The modern history of Gobekli Tepe began, it said, in 1964, when a team of American archaeologists were combing a remote province of south-east Turkey. The archaeologists had found several odd-looking hills blanketed with thousands of broken flints: a sure sign of ancient human activity. Yet the US scientists did no excavating. As the newspaper phrased it:
‘these guys must now feel like the publisher that turned down the first Harry Potter manuscript’.
Ignoring the snoring Turkish lady asleep in the airport seating, right next to him, Rob read on.
Three decades after the Americans’ near miss, a local shepherd had been tending his flock when he had spotted something odd: a number of strangely-shaped stones in the sunlit dust. They were the stones of Gobekli Tepe.
Tepp-ay,
Rob said to himself, remindingly. Tepp-
ay.
He wandered over to a machine, bought a Diet Coke, then wandered back and went on reading.
The ‘rediscovery’ of the site reached the ears of the museum curators, in the city of Sanliurfa, fifty kilometres away. The museum authorities contacted the relevant government ministry, who in turn got in touch with the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul. And so in 1994 ‘experienced German archaeologist Franz
Breitner’ was appointed by the Turkish authorities to excavate the site.
Rob scanned the rest of the article. He tilted the paper to have a better look. There was a picture of Breitner in the American newspaper. And underneath the photo was a direct quote from him:
‘I was intrigued. The site already had emotional significance for the villagers. The solitary tree on the highest hill is sacred. I thought we might be onto something’.
Armed with this insight Breitner had taken a closer look.
‘Within the first minute I knew that if I didn’t walk away immediately, I would be here the rest of my life.’
Rob looked at Breitner’s photo. He certainly looked like the cat that had got the double cream. His smile was the smile of a man with a lottery win.
‘Turkish Airlines announce the departure of flight TA628 to Sanliurfa…’
Rob grabbed his passport and boarding card and filed onto the plane. It was half-empty. Obviously not that many people made it out to Sanliurfa. Way out in the savage east of Anatolia. Way out in dangerous, dusty, insurrectionist Kurdistan.
During the flight Rob read through the rest of the documents and books about Gobekli’s archaeological history. The eerie stones unearthed by the shepherd turned out to be the flat oblong tops of megaliths, big ochre stones which were often carved with bizarre and delicate images-mainly
of animals and birds. Buzzards and vultures, and weird insects. Sinuous serpents were another common motif. The stones themselves seemed to represent men, according to experts-the stones had stylized ‘arms’, which angled down the sides.
So far, forty-three stones had been unearthed. They were arranged in circles from five to ten metres across. Around the circles were benches of rock, smallish niches, and walls of mud brick.
Rob considered what he’d learned. All this was reasonably interesting. But it was the age of the site that had really got people truly excited. Gobekli Tepe was staggeringly ancient. According to Breitner, the complex was at least ten thousand, maybe eleven thousand years old. That was to say around 8000-9000
BC
.
Eleven thousand years old? It sounded incredibly ancient. But was it? Rob went back to his history book to compare this age with other places. Stonehenge was built around 2000BC. The Sphinx maybe 3000
BC
. Prior to the discovery and dating of Gobekli Tepe, the ‘most ancient’ megalithic complex had been located in Malta-and that was dated around 3500
BC
.
Gobekli Tepe was, therefore, five thousand years older than any comparable structure. Rob was headed to one of the oldest human constructions ever built. Maybe the oldest.
He felt his Story Antennae twitching. World’s Oldest Building Found in Turkey? Hmmm. Maybe not front page, but quite possibly third page. A
nice big splash. Moreover, despite these reports in the paper, it seemed as if no western journalist had actually made it out to Gobekli. All the articles in western media were second-or third-hand, via Turkish news agencies. Rob would be the first man on the ground.
At last his journey was over. The plane banked and dived and trundled to a halt in Sanliurfa airport. It was a dark clear night. So clear that through the windows of the plane the night actually looked cool. But when the door opened and the plane ladder descended Rob felt a blast of oppressively hot air. As if someone had just opened an enormous oven. This was a hot place. Very hot. They were on the edge of the great Syrian Desert, after all.
The airport was tiny. Rob liked tiny airports. They always had an idiosyncrasy lacking in huge, impersonal modern airports. And Sanliurfa airport was especially idiosyncratic. The bags were brought by hand to the Arrivals Lounge by a fat man with a beard and a stained vest, and Passport Control consisted of one guy half-asleep at a rickety desk.
In the airport car park a warm dusty breeze was knocking the fronds of some straggly palm trees. Several cab drivers eyed him from the taxi rank. Rob looked and chose. ‘Sanliurfa,’ he said to one of the younger guys.
The stubble-jawed man smiled. His denim shirt was torn, but clean. He seemed friendly. Friendlier
than the other taxi guys, who were yawning and spitting. Even better, this young guy seemed to speak English. After a quick chat about the fee and the whereabouts of Rob’s hotel, the driver took Rob’s bags and slung them manfully in the car boot, then climbed in the front and nodded and said, ‘Urfa! Not Sanliurfa. Urfa!’
Rob sat back in the taxi seat. He was very tired now. It had been a long, long journey from Tel Aviv. Tomorrow he would go and see this weird dig. But now he had to sleep. Yet the taxi driver was keen to keep him talking.
‘You want beer? I know good place.’
Rob groaned, inwardly. Flat dark fields were racing past. ‘No thanks.’
‘Woman? I know good woman!’
‘Er, no, Not really.’
‘Carpet. You want carpet. I have brother…?’
Rob sighed, and looked at the rear-view mirror. Then he saw the taxi driver staring back at him. The man was smiling. He was joking.
‘Very funny.’
The taxi driver laughed. ‘Fucking carpets!’ Then, without taking his eye off the road, he turned and offered a hand. Rob shook it.
‘My name Radevan,’ the driver said. ‘You?’
‘Robert. Rob Luttrell.’
‘Hello, Mr Robert Luttrell.’
Rob laughed and said hello. They were on the outskirts of town now. Lamplights and tyre shops lined the empty, litter-strewn street. A Conoco gas
station sign glowed red through the sultry gloom. Concrete blocks of flats rose up on both sides. There was a sense of heat everywhere. Yet Rob could see women behind windows in distant kitchens: still in headscarves.
‘You need driver? You here business?’ asked Radevan.
Rob thought about this. Why not? The man was friendly, he had a sense of humour. ‘Sure. I need a driver, and an interpreter. For tomorrow? Maybe more.’
Radevan happily banged the steering wheel with his palm, while he torched a cigarette with the other hand. Neither hand was actually on the steering wheel. Rob thought they were going to careen off the road into a small neon-lit mosque, but then Radevan cuffed the wheel and they were back on track. Between puffs on his pungent cigarette the driver chatted. ‘I can help you. I good translator. Speak Kurdish English Turkish Japanese, German.’
‘You speak German?’
‘Nein.’
Rob laughed again. He was warming to Radevan big-time, not least because he had sped ten miles in ten minutes without crashing, and they were already in the middle of town. There were shuttered kebab stalls and late-night baklava shops everywhere. A man in a suit and a man in an Arabic cloak. Two kids sped past on mopeds. Some young women in jeans with brightly coloured
headscarves were giggling at a joke. Traffic honked around a junction. Rob’s hotel was right in the centre of town.
Radevan was looking at Rob in the mirror. ‘Mr Rob, you Englishman?’
‘Kinda…’ Rob said. He didn’t want to get into a long debate about his precise parentage; not now. He was too tired. ‘Sort of.’
Radevan grinned. ‘I like Englishman!’ He rubbed his forefinger and thumb together as if asking for money. ‘They are rich. Englishman very rich!’
Rob shrugged. ‘Well…some of them.’
Radevan insisted, ‘Dollars and euros! Dollars and pounds!’ Another grin.’ OK, I take you tomorrow. Where you go?’
‘Gobekli Tepe. You know it?’
Silence. Rob tried again. ‘Gobekli Tepe?’
Radevan said nothing, and pulled the car up short. ‘Your hotel,’ the driver said, bluntly. His smile had suddenly gone.
‘Er…you meet me tomorrow?’ said Rob, lapsing into pidgin English. ‘Radevan?’
Radevan nodded. He helped Rob carry his bags to the hotel steps, and then the driver turned back to the taxi. ‘You say…you say you want Gobekli Tepe?’
‘Yes.’
Radevan frowned. ‘Gobekli Tepe bad place. Mr Rob.’
Rob stood at the door to his hotel, feeling as if he was in a film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s
Dracula.
‘Hey. It’s just a dig, Radevan. Can you take me or not?’
Radevan spat on the road. Then he climbed into his taxi and leaned out of the window. ‘Nine o’clock tomorrow.’
The cab disappeared with a lusty wheel-spin into the fusty hubbub of the Sanliurfa streets.
Next morning after a breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, sheep’s milk cheese and three dates, Rob got in the cab. They headed out of town. As they went, Rob asked Radevan why he had such an attitude towards Gobekli.
At first the driver was grumpy. He shrugged and muttered. But as the roads got emptier and the wide irrigated fields took over he opened up like the landscape. ‘It is not good.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Gobekli Tepe could be rich. Could make Kurdish people rich.’
‘But?’
Radevan puffed angrily on his third cigarette. ’Look at this place, this people?’
Rob glanced out of the window. They were heading past a little village of mud houses and open drains, grimy kids playing amongst the litter. The kids waved at the car. Beyond the village was a cotton field where women in lavender-coloured headscarves were bending to the crop in the dust and the dirt, and the searing heat. He looked back at his driver.