Read a Sample of Echoes of History

In October 1994 a German archaeologist walked over a low hill in southeastern Turkey and understood what he was looking at. Others had walked there before him. A survey team from Istanbul and Chicago had recorded the place in 1963 and moved on, taking the tops of the stones for Byzantine grave markers. Klaus Schmidt had been working at Nevalı Çori, and he knew Neolithic limestone when he saw it. Excavation began the following year.

The hill is called Göbekli Tepe. It lies about 15 kilometers (9 miles) northeast of Şanlıurfa, the city the Greeks knew as Edessa. What came out of the ground was not a single stone circle. It was a series of enclosures, round and oval and rectangular, set with T-shaped limestone pillars, some of them 5.5 meters tall, many carved with foxes, boars, snakes, and birds. Some of the pillars have arms, hands, and belts. The enclosures are dated to roughly 9600 to 8200 BCE.

Nobody held their breath. The site had waited eleven thousand years and it went on waiting while the reports were written.

But the dates matter enormously. People who had not yet learned to farm quarried and raised those stones. They did it before pottery, before metal, before writing, before cities. And when they were finished with the enclosures they filled them in, deliberately, with rubble and bone, which is the reason anything survived at all.

I want to be careful here, because this is the first page of the book and the temptation to overclaim starts immediately. Göbekli Tepe did not prove that prehistoric people were secretly sophisticated; archaeologists already knew that complex hunter-gatherer societies existed. What the site delivered was extraordinary evidence from one place and one period, and that evidence forced the existing picture to become richer than it was.

Still, something at Göbekli Tepe is genuinely difficult. These people spent an enormous amount of effort on something that did not feed them. Whatever the enclosures were for, the reason lay outside survival.

Which is where my questions begin.

What if our ancestors were not only surviving? What if some of them were already asking what we ask, where existence came from, whether death is the end, whether something stands behind the world? What if the reaching toward something greater was there from the beginning rather than arriving late, as a by-product of leisure?

Those questions cannot be answered with a trowel. They can be examined.

Civilizations rose and fell across Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Americas. Their languages died, their cities silted over, their gods lost their worshippers. Through all of it one thing did not stop. Human beings kept asking what they were and why anything exists. That question outlived every civilization that asked it.

This book is an investigation into that persistence, and into the oldest evidence we have for it.