Karahan Tepe: Civilization of the Anunnaki and the Cosmic Origins of the Serpent of Eden by Andrew Collins
Karahan Tepe is arguably the most exciting archaeological discovery of the twenty-first century. Consisting of a series of stone enclosures and rock-cut edifices carved out of a hillside in the remote Tektek Mountains of southeastern Turkey, it is changing everything we know about the emergence of civilization in the immediate aftermath of the last ice age.
As the sister site of the more familiar Pre-Pottery Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe discovered in the mid 1990s, Karahan Tepe is now known to have been created as a ritual center as much as 11,500 years ago. Its builders were a highly advanced society that today bears the name Tas Tepeler, meaning “stone hills.” It is a reference to the culture’s heavy use of stone and the fact that its settlements are preserved within artificial “hills” known as tepes.
A defining feature of the Tas Tepeler culture is its use of T-shaped stone pillars, many with anthropomorphic features. They include bent arms ending in hands with long spindly fingers that curl around onto a stone’s front narrow edge. Twin vertical lines representing the hems of hanging garments are seen beneath the T-shaped head while V-shaped emblems of office, referred to as “neckties,” appear around the stone figure’s “neck.”
All this makes it clear that these stones, hundreds of which have been found not just at Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe, but also at several other lesser known Tas Tepeler sites in Turkey’s Sanliurfa region, represent anthropomorphic beings, arguably the divine ancestors of those who created the earliest of these structures. But who exactly were these people? What did they believe in? Where did they come from and why build these extraordinary ritual complexes in the first place?
Gateway to the Stars
Our first real glimpse of Tas Tepeler’s extraordinary achievements came in 1994 with the discovery of Göbekli Tepe. This is a massive ritual complex of stone enclosures located at an elevated position on the southern edge of the Ante-Taurus Mountains, just 14.5 kilometers (9 miles) outside of the ancient city of Sanliurfa. Many of the T-pillars there display beautiful carved reliefs showing a multitude of creatures of the natural world including leopards, vultures, boars, foxes, bovines, and even scorpions and spiders. At the center of all the main enclosures were originally a pair of towering, T-shaped monoliths standing side by side and forming what can only be described as a gateway to the stars.
Chartered engineer Rodney Hale, working with the present author, found that the main enclosures were all aligned to one particular star. This was Deneb in the constellation of Cygnus, the celestial bird, recognisable in the night sky as the Northern Cross.
Deneb was important to the ancients as it marked the point of bifurcation of the Milky Way into two separate streams, due to dust and debris in line with the galactic plane. Known as the Dark Rift, this dark path to the sky was recognized among various ancient cultures as a road or river to a sky world. It is a theme found everywhere from ancient Egypt to the highlands of Guatemala in central America. As many as 30 to 40 Native American tribal confederations all recognised this journey of the soul along the Milky Way, which they saw in terms of what they called the “Path of Souls.”
Figure 1. The head of Pillar 43 showing its three “manbags,” which most likely represent the three worlds situated within the cosmic ocean. Credit: Andrew Collins.
The Enigma of Pillar 43
Confirming that knowledge of this journey of the soul was present among Anatolia’s Tas Tepeler communities was the discovery at Göbekli Tepe of a highly important standing stone known today as Pillar 43. Its central theme is the death journey undertaken by those wishing to enter the afterlife. Centrally placed on the stone’s T-shaped head is a huge vulture symbolising not only the flight of the soul, but also the constellation of Cygnus. From Greece to Anatolia to the Near East, ancient sky lore recognized the stars of Cygnus as a soul bird in the form of a vulture. Indeed, even to this day in Armenia, which once extended into Anatolia to include Göbekli Tepe, the Cygnus stars signify a sky figure known as Angegh, the vulture.
Pillar 43 holds many more clues as to the nature of the cosmos. In a sea of chevrons representing the cosmic ocean are three devices popularly referred to as “manbags.” They symbolise the three realms of existence, the Upper World, Middle World, and Lower World, a universal concept recognized not only among various shamanic based cultures of the Eurasian continent, but also among the beliefs and practices of many Native American tribes.
Pillar 43 can be considered a mnemonic device for shamans and initiates wishing to reach the sky world. This makes it clear that Anatolia’s Tas Tepeler culture possessed a complex understanding of the cosmos as much as 11,500 years ago.
Since excavations began at Karahan Tepe in 2019 under the directorship of Necmi Karul of the University of Istanbul as many as 20 stone enclosures have been unearthed. Many contain T-pillars along with a large number of strange statues, some displaying shamans transforming into animal form. The structures date between 9400 BCE and around 8000 BCE, after which the site was abandoned.
Three interconnected enclosures have been either partially or wholly cut out of the hillside making them the earliest examples of rock architecture anywhere in the world. One of the chambers known as Structure AB or the Pillars Shrine is very curious indeed. It contains 10 standing pillars carved directly out of the bedrock. On its rock-carved west wall is an extraordinary sight—a giant human head three times the size of anyone living today. It extends from a long vertical neck that is clearly serpentine in nature, showing that the head signifies a spirit with the head of a human being and the body of a snake.
Figure 2. The giant human head on the west wall of Structure AB. Credit: Andrew Collins.
Snakes Everywhere
Serpentine imagery predominates at Karahan Tepe. Immediately behind the Pillars Shrine is a deeply cut, snakelike groove cut into the rock surface that leads to another shrine known as Structure AA or the Pit Shrine. This contains a strange pit around two meters deep over which is a rock-carved bench on which a long snake has been incised.
Curiously, its head matches almost exactly the overhead profile of the structure, suggesting it was designed to represent the head of a snake. It is a similar story with the Pillars Shrine, which has the exact shape of the head of the Anatolian Meadow Viper, a species of snake indigenous to the Tektek Mountains. A large quantity of bones belonging to this the Anatolian Meadow Viper have recently been found in a newly exposed enclosure at Karahan Tepe being called the Kitchen, showing that the snake almost certainly featured in rituals and ceremonies taking place there as much as 11,000 years ago.
Figure 3. Overhead view of Structure AB, above, and, below, the shrine with the head of the Anatolian meadow viper (Vipera anatolica) overlaid. Credit: Andrew Collins.
Solstitial Alignments
Our first clue comes from the discovery that the Pit Shrine was determined to be aligned to the setting sun at the time of the summer solstice 11,000 years ago. Just two hours later, as darkness fell on the local landscape, an observer inside the structure would have seen the Milky Way towering upwards from the same place that the sun had just set. Setting into the horizon would have been the Galactic bulge and stars of Scorpius, which mark the central region of our own Milky Way galaxy. Among many ancient cultures the bulge was seen as the head of a world-encircling serpent, its body formed by the circular course of the Milky Way. Its forked tongue, and by virtue of this its active spirit, was almost certainly represented by the stars of the Scorpius constellation.
Figure 4. The Galactic Bulge as the head of a celestial serpent. Credit: Andrew Collins.
Another major enclosure at Karahan Tepe, Structure AD, also known as the Great Ellipse, was also found to be aligned to the Galactic bulge and nearby stars of Scorpius, although this time six months later at the time of the winter solstice. Was this what the Tas Tepeler inhabitants of Karahan Tepe were interested in: a world-encircling serpent whose head corresponded with the center of the Milky Way galaxy? Could the giant stone head emerging out of the wall of the Pillar’s Shrine have been a representation of the active spirit of this world-encircling serpent?
Figure 5. Karahan Tepe’s Structure AD otherwise known as the Great Ellipse. Credit: Andrew Collins.
Shortly after dawn at the time of the winter solstice in 9000 BCE, the rising sun would cast a slim dagger of light onto the giant stone head. This then gradually moved across its face for around 45 minutes before vanishing from view. Did this quite deliberate light show, first noted by Hugh Newman and JJ Ainsworth on the winter solstice in December 2021, trigger the stone head’s activation? Was it at this time that communications with the cosmic snake truly began?
The New Hilltop Enclosure Revealed
Even further evidence of the interest Karahan Tepe’s Tas Tepeler inhabitants held in the Milky Way came in 2023 with the discovery of a huge new enclosure on the hill’s summit. As much as 11,000 years old and now thought incorporate an area around 33 meters across, it faces towards a local hilltop named Ceylân Tepesi, meaning the “hill ridge of the gazelle.” If a person was inside this enclosure in 9000 BCE they would have seen Deneb, the brightest star in the celestial vulture, rising from this hilltop.
Deneb’s presence would have signalled the presence of Milky Way’s Dark Rift, which at the time of the winter solstice would have been stretched out, low in the sky, from Ceylân Tepesi in the north-northeast all the way through to due east. At that moment, those seated on the three stone thrones cut into the bedrock at the western end of Karahan Tepe’s Great Ellipse would have been able to witness the Galactic bulge and stars of Scorpius rise directly in their line of sight.
The newly exposed enclosure on the top of Karahan Tepe was found to contain some incredible statues. One was of a standing vulture aligned directly towards the constellation of Cygnus, its celestial counterpart. Next to the vulture excavators uncovered a massive male human figure in a seated position. It is around 2.3 metres (7.5 feet) tall and displays striking features including an anatomically correct ribcage, a mullet-like haircut, and realistic facial detail. The man holds his penis with both hands as if emphasizing its importance. Who or what might this statue represent?
The Coming of the Anunnaki
The Sumerians and later Babylonians spoke of gods called the Anunnaki, or the Anunna, a name meaning “people of the sky” or, simply, the “sky people.” Professor Klaus Schmidt the discoverer of Göbekli Tepe wrote that these mythical beings were probably a memory of the prime movers behind the foundation of the Tas Tepeler movement in southeastern Anatolia some 12,000 years ago. Legends speak of them providing humanity with the rudiments of civilization.
Figure 6. The seated statue of a giant human figure found in the new enclosure recently exposed on the summit of Karahan Tepe. Credit: Andrew Collins.
Where the Anunnaki might have come from is another mystery, with all the smart money on them having begun their migrational journey as far east as Siberia and Mongolia as much as 30,000 years ago, this being the view of several leading Turkish archaeologists today.
The presence in Anatolia of this shamanic elite behind the foundation of Tas Tepeler were, it seems, mythologized as the Anunnaki, while its inhabitants’ reverence of the cosmic serpent was vilified by those who came after them. To the Abrahamic faiths this creature became the wicked Serpent that beguiled Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, which according to local legend was located where Sanliurfa exists today. One of the city’s most ancient names was Adamah, meaning the “place of Adam,” with another being El-Ruha, Aramaic for “the soul,” with the soul in question being that of Adam, the First Man. From there Adam and Eve are said to have gone east to settle on the nearby Harran plain where they invent agriculture and grow the first wheat. Was this an abstract memory of Tas Tepeler great achievements in the region including the domestication of cereal crops including wheat?
It is strongly suspected that the beliefs and practices of Tas Tepeler lingered on in the Sanliurfa region for many thousands of years, reemerging in late antiquity among the Ophite Gnostic sects of Anatolia and the Near East. Their instructors, we are told, were the Chaldeans astronomers and astrologers of ancient Harran, the so-called city of the Sabians.
The Ophites believed in Gnosis, a state of oneness with the divine involving a belief in the existence of a demiurge, a creator of the physical world, in the form of a cosmic serpent. What is so incredible is that this is likely the same serpent that thousands of years earlier was venerated by the Tas Tepeler inhabitants of Karahan Tepe during rituals and initiations that took place inside their snake shrines. From the evidence presented in the new book it would appear that the purpose behind these rites was a form of oracular communication involving a serpentine intelligence symbolised by the Galactic bulge and stars of Scorpius, which together marked the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
These are just some of the topics discussed in Karahan Tepe: Civilization of the Anunnaki and the Cosmic Origins of the Serpent of Eden, a new book by Andrew Collins published by Inner Traditions in 2024.
For more information https://books.innertraditions.com/karahan-tepe/
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