NASHVILLE, TN
Plan view reconstruction of a Göbekli Tepe enclosure, illustrating the geometric template proposed in this section. Two larger T pillars stand at the geometric center oriented in parallel; a ring of approximately twelve smaller T pillars is set into the carved limestone bench encircling the perimeter. The two-and-twelve organization recurs across the substantially excavated enclosures at Göbekli Tepe, with the perimeter count varying modestly around the canonical figure based on enclosure size and preservation.
Nashville: Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe are recent archaeological finds that are challenging our knowledge of ancient peoples and civilizations. Similar sites are being discovered throughout this region of modern Turkey, which is described in the Urantia Book (published in 1955) as an ancient migration corridor from Mesopotamia into Europe and Asia from both directions around the Caspian Sea.
The builders of these sites were likely a blended people drawing from three ancient races. One of these races was Nodite: “And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.” (Genesis 4:16, KJV)
The Urantia Book records two Nodite groups living in the area. The Western or Syrian Nodites came down to history as the Assyrians. The Northern Nodites were also known as Vanites after their leader, Van, who remained loyal to God in the face of world-wide rebellion. (The rebellion of Lucifer was a real, though very ancient, event according to the Urantia Book.)
“Some of the early associates of Van subsequently settled about the shores of the lake which still bears his name, and their traditions grew up about this locality. Ararat became their sacred mountain, having much the same meaning to later-day Vanites that Sinai had to the Hebrews. Ten thousand years ago the Vanite ancestors of the Assyrians taught that their moral law of seven commandments had been given to Van by the Gods upon Mount Ararat. They firmly believed that Van and his associate Amadon were taken alive from the planet while they were up on the mountain engaged in worship.” (UB 77:4.11)
This is passage provides a possible explanation for the iconography found at Göbekli and Karahan Tepe according to Derek Samaras:
“The architectural template of the Göbekli Tepe enclosures is consistent across the substantially excavated examples. Each enclosure is organized around a pair of large T pillars at the geometric center, oriented in parallel and facing the same direction, and surrounded by a ring of perimeter pillars carved from the bedrock floor or set into the encircling stone bench. The number of perimeter pillars varies modestly by enclosure based on size and preservation, with Enclosure C preserving approximately twelve and Enclosure D preserving approximately eleven (Schmidt 2006; Notroff et al. 2014). The two central pillars are consistently larger than the perimeter pillars, are decorated with the most elaborate relief carving on the site, and carry the anthropomorphic features (arms, hands, belts, loincloths).”
Samaras argues that the two larger, central pillars may represent Van and Amadon, while the outer ring of pillars represents the twelve Melchizedek receivers who had charge of our world in those distant days. In other words, the stones are a representation of an ancient historic event which lived on as legend for thousands of years in that region.
Again, quoting Samaras: “The reading is reinforced by the location. Mount Ararat, the sacred mountain of the Vanite ascension memory, sits approximately three hundred kilometers northeast of the Şanlıurfa cluster. Lake Van, the regional anchor of Vanite settlement, sits approximately two hundred kilometers northeast. The Şanlıurfa enclosures, on this reading, are the southern ceremonial extension of a Vanite cultural geography whose religious focus point is the mountain on which the ascension was believed to have occurred. The two central pillars, oriented in parallel and facing in the consistent direction documented across the excavated enclosures, may be oriented toward Mount Ararat itself. This orientation hypothesis is testable against the published azimuths of the central pillars at each enclosure and is offered here as a research direction rather than an established result.
“The two and twelve template is not unique to the Şanlıurfa cluster. It recurs across Old World mythology and ritual architecture in forms that have been independently catalogued by historians of religion: the two pillars of Solomon’s Temple (Jachin and Boaz) flanked by the twelve oxen supporting the molten sea; the two olive trees of Zechariah 4 standing before the seven branched lampstand whose iconography incorporates twelve loaves of showbread; the twelve apostles of Jesus arranged around the central pair of master and disciple at the Last Supper; the twelve signs of the zodiac arranged around the dual sun and moon. Each of these recurrences is normally treated as an independent symbolic development of the small culture that produced it. The Urantia Book’s account suggests, instead, that all of them are downstream cultural memories of a specific historical institutional arrangement (two ascended figures plus twelve administrators) that was first encoded in stone by the Vanite descendants in southeastern Anatolia in the centuries preceding 9600 BC, and that subsequently traveled outward through the Andite migration corridor into the religious traditions of every culture the Andites reached.
“If this reading is sustained, the Göbekli Tepe enclosures are the oldest preserved iconographic record of the post rebellion administrative structure of Urantia [the name for earth]. They are not merely ceremonial. They are commemorative. Each enclosure stages, in monumental stone, the moment in planetary history when the rebellion ended, the loyal pair was taken up, and the twelve receivers assumed administrative responsibility for the salvage operation that followed. The Vanite descendants, whose oral and institutional memory of these events had been preserved for tens of thousands of years, built the enclosures to keep that memory legible to anyone who came after them. The fact that the iconography is now legible to modern researchers, eleven thousand years after construction and following ninety years of academic excavation, is the most direct vindication of the Vanite intent the historical record has produced.”
This intriguing possibility further substantiates with Urantia Book account of human pre-history. The Urantia Corps for Spiritual Progress supports and applauds all such research.
“If the T pillars in these sites do, in fact, face Mount Ararat, this will provide substantial proof of the Samaras hypothesis,” said UCSP founder, Rebecca Bynum. “We look forward to the results of this inquiry, and in the meantime, applaud Derek Samaras for his painstaking textual and archaeological research, which will certainly help to bring the Urantia Book account of human pre-history to the attention of mainstream researchers.”
