Full Description
How could multiple ancient cultures, spanning both years and geography, have strikingly similar creation myths and cosmologies? Why do the Dogon of Africa and the civilizations of ancient Egypt, India, Tibet, and China share sacred words and symbols? Revealing the existence of a long-forgotten primal culture and the world's first center of higher learning, Laird Scranton shows how the sophisticated complex at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey is the definitive point of origin from which all the great civilizations of the past inherited their cosmology, esoteric teachings, and civilizing skills, such as agriculture, metallurgy, and stone masonry, fully developed.
Scranton explains how the carved images on Gobekli Tepe's stone pillars were the precursors to the sacred symbols of the Dogon, Egyptians, Tibetans, and Chinese as well as the matriarchal Sakti cult of ancient Iran and India. Scranton reveals how Gobekli Tepe's enigmatic "H" carvings and animal symbolism, symbolic of stages of creation, was presented as a kind of prototype of written language accessible to the hunter-gathers who inhabited the region. He shows how the myths and deities of many ancient cultures are connected linguistically, extending even to the name of Gobekli Tepe and the Egyptian concept of Zep Tepi, the mythical age of the "First Time."
Identifying Gobekli Tepe not only as the first university but also as the first temple, perhaps built as a civilizing exercise, Scranton definitively places this enigmatic archaeological site at the point of origin of civilization, religion, and ancient science.
Contents
Foreword by Isaac Scranton
Introduction
1 The Ancient Cosmological/Civilizing Plan
2 Symbolic Constructs of the Cosmology
3 Constructs of the Language of Cosmology
4 Gobekli Tepe and Zep Tepi
5 Archaic Temple Names
6 Turkish and Archaic Word Forms
7 The Sakti Cult in Orissa
8 Sakti References in Ancient Egypt
9 Ascension
10 The Concept of Untying
11 The Heliacal Rise of Sirius
12 Ancestors, Dual Arms, and the Concept of the Embrace
13 Defining a Temple
14 The Bridge of Sirah
15 The Cosmological Role of Ganesha
16 Elephantine, the Nile Inundation,and the God Hapy
17 Tamil Word Forms
18 A Rationale for the Civilizing Plan
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
