‘But you said that last season.’
‘And the season before,’ said a second man, standing nearby with a plate of green olives and white sheep’s cheese.
‘I know.’ Franz shrugged, happily. ‘I know!’
The director of the dig was sitting on the biggest leather chair in his sitting room. Behind him, the antique windows were open to the Sanliurfa streets. Rob could hear the evening town life beyond. A man was shouting at his kids in the house across the way. A television blared in the café down the road: probably showing Turkish football, judging by the cheers and jeers of the customers. Maybe Galatasaray versus the local team, Dyarbakir. Turks versus Kurds. Like the rivalry of Real Madrid and Barcelona, but way more venomous.
Derya provided them with more baklava straight from the patisserie’s silver cardboard box. Rob wondered if he might expire through over-eating. Franz was gesticulating at his juniors. ‘But if it isn’t a funerary shrine or complex then. what is it? Ja? There is no settlement, no signs of domestication, nothing. It has to be a temple, we all agree on that. But a temple to what, if not ancestors? Surely it honours the dead huntsmen? No?’
The other two experts shrugged.
Franz added, ‘And what are the niches, if not for bones?’
‘I agree with Franz,’ said Christine, coming over. ’I think the corpses of the hunters were brought there and excarnated…’
Rob burped very politely. ‘Sorry. Excarnated?’
Franz explained, ‘It means picked clean. The Zoroastrians still do it. And some think Zoroastrianism came from here.’
‘Practically all religions came from around here,’ said Christine. ‘Excarnation is a funeral process whereby you take the body to a special place then leave it to be eaten by wild animals, or vultures and raptors. As Franz says, you can still see this in Zoroastrian faiths, in India. They call them sky burials-the corpses are left to the sky gods. In fact, a lot of the early Mesopotamian religions worshipped gods, shaped like these buzzards and eagles. Like the Assyrian demon we saw in the museum.’
‘It’s very hygienic. As a form of burial. Excarnation.’ The interruption came from Ivan, the youngest expert, the paleobotanist.
Franz nodded, briskly, and said: ‘Anyway-who knows-maybe the bones were moved, afterwards. Or maybe they got shifted when Gobekli was buried itself. That could explain the lack of skeletons on site.’
Rob was confused. ‘What do you mean? “Gobekli was buried itself”?’
Franz put his empty plate down on the polished parquet floor. When he looked up he wore the satisfied smile of someone about to reveal a delicious piece of gossip. ‘This, my friend, is the biggest mystery of all! And they did not mention it in the article you read!’
Christine laughed. ‘You got your exclusive, Rob!’
‘In or around 8000 BC…’ Franz paused for effect, ‘the whole of Gobekli Tepe was buried. Entombed. Completely covered in earth.’
‘But…how do you know?’
‘The hillocks are artificial. The soil is not a random accretion. The whole temple complex was deliberately concealed with tons of earth and mud in around 8000 BC. It was hidden.’
‘Wow. That’s wild.’
‘What makes it even more amazing is how much labour this must have taken. And therefore how pointless it was.’
‘Because…?’
‘Think of the effort to put it all up in the first place! Erecting the stone circles of Gobekli, and covering them with carvings, friezes and sculptures, must have been a process that took decades, maybe even centuries. And this at a time when life expectancy was twenty years.’ Franz wiped his mouth with a napkin. ‘We imagine the hunter-gatherers must have lived in the area in tents, leather tents, as they constructed the site. Living off the local game for sustenance. Generation after generation. And all of it without pottery or agriculture, or any tools but flints…’
Christine stepped a little nearer. ‘I think maybe I’ve already bored Rob with this?’
Rob raised a hand. ‘No, really, it’s not boring. Really!’ He meant it: his article was expanding by the day. ‘Go on Franz, please?’
‘Jawohl. Well then you see we have the mystery, the deep deep mystery. If it took these barely human people hundreds of years to construct a temple, a shrine to the dead, a funerary complex, why the hell did they then go and hide it under tons of earth two thousand years later? Moving all that soil must have been almost as daunting as building Gobekli in the first place. Is it not so?’
‘Yes. So why did they do it?’
Franz slapped both his hands on the tops of his thighs. ‘That is it! We do not know! Nobody knows. We only confirmed it this month, so we haven’t had a chance to think.’ He grinned. ‘Fantastic, ja?’
Derya offered Rob another a bottle of Efes beer. He took it and thanked her. He was having fun. He’d never expected archaeology to be fun, he hadn’t expected it to be puzzling either. He thought about the mystery of the buried temple. Then he watched Christine as she talked with her colleagues across the living room and felt a tiny and ludicrous pang of jealousy, which he immediately quashed.
He was here to write a story-not fall pathetically and fruitlessly in love. And the story was proving much more exciting than he’d hoped. The oldest temple in the world. Discovered next to the oldest city in the world. Built by men before the wheeclass="underline" built by Stone Age cavemen with the curious gift of great artistry…
And then the great Neolithic cathedral, this Kurdish Carnac, this Turkish Stonehenge-Rob was imagining his piece now, writing the paragraphs in his head-then the whole damn temple was deliberately interred beneath tons of ancient dust, concealed for all time, like the most terrible secret. And no one knows why.
He looked up. He’d been in a journalistic reverie for maybe ten minutes. Carried away with his job. He liked his job. He was a lucky man.
The little supper party was coming to a head. Someone got out an old guitar and everyone sang a few songs. Then the raki flowed for a final round of nightcaps, and then it flowed again, and Rob knew he was getting too drunk. Before he disgraced himself and fell asleep on the wooden floor he decided he should head home-so he went to the window to inhale some fresh air and prepare himself to make his excuses.
Out there, the streets were much less noisy. Sanliurfa was a city that stayed up late, because it slept all the hot afternoon-but it was nearly 2 a.m. Even Sanliurfa was asleep. The only real sound came from directly below. Three men were standing in the street, just under Franz Breitner’s elegant windows. They were singing a strange lowpitched song, almost like a chant. Quite peculiarly, they had a little trestle table erected in front of them: a table arrayed with three guttering candles.
For maybe half a minute Rob watched the men and the candle flames. Then he turned and saw Christine standing in the far corner of Franz’s living room, talking to Derya. Rob beckoned her over.
Christine leaned out of the window, looked at the chanting men and said nothing.
‘It’s sweet isn’t it?’ Rob said quietly. ‘Some kind of hymn or a religious thing?’
But when he turned to look at her he could see that her face was pale, and very tense.
She looked horrified.
9
Rob made his farewells and Christine accompanied him.
Outside, the three chanting men had blown out the candles, packed up the trestle table, and were now starting to walk down the street. One of them looked back at Christine. His expression was inscrutable.
Or maybe, Rob thought, it was just the lack of streetlight making it hard to see what the man was thinking. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked in its own lonely ritual. The moon was high above the nearest minaret. Rob could smell raw sewage.
Threading her arm through his, Christine guided them down the dark little road and out onto a broader, slightly better-lit street. Rob was waiting for her to explain but they continued in silence. Beyond the furthest apartment blocks Rob could just glimpse the desert. Dark and endless, and ancient and dead.