Here's something that will mess with your head. In the mid-1990s, German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt started digging into a hilltop in southeastern Turkey — and found something that shouldn't exist. Göbekli Tepe: a stone temple built around 9600 BC, seven thousand years before the Egyptian pyramids. Schmidt noticed where it sits. Right in the Fertile Crescent, the exact region where the Bible's Genesis places the Garden of Eden — near where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers begin.
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Gods & Monsters·1/3·1′
The place
Göbekli Tepe
The Garden of Eden Hypothesis
Was Göbekli Tepe the original Paradise?
~9600-8000 BCGöbekli Tepe
Moral of the Story
“The Eden myth may preserve a memory of humanity's transformation from hunter-gatherers to farmers — a "fall" from paradise into the world of agricultural toil.”
Characters
K
Klaus SchmidtT
The builders of Göbekli TepeA
Adam and Eve (mythological)Source
Klaus Schmidt's writings and interviews, Biblical Book of Genesis, scholarly analyses by David Lewis-Williams and others