Göbekli Tepe, the serpents of the rain, and the oldest egg hunt on earth

The ridge of Göbekli Tepe has no spring and no river. Eleven and a half thousand years ago, the people who raised its great rings of T-shaped pillars drank only what they could catch. They cut cisterns into the limestone to hold the winter rain, and they lived on the wild grain that the rain raised on the slopes below. It was a hill that lived on rain, and everything they did there was shaped by the year of the water.

That year had three characters: the rain, the serpent, and a star that was hidden for half of it.

The year of the water

On that ridge the rains come in winter. From late autumn the storms roll in off the Taurus. Through the cold months they fill the cisterns, sometimes as sleet, and by spring the slopes below the hill are green with wild wheat and barley. In early summer the grain turns gold, and the people of the hill came down with their sickles to carry it up. Excavators have found thousands of grinding stones on the hill: this is the bread of the rain, gathered in the weeks the water had made. Then the long dry comes. The grass burns brown, the cisterns sink, and the land seems to die until the storms return.

A people whose life hung on that turning would have watched the sky for it, as every farming people since has done. And the sky over the ridge kept the same year.

The egg hidden through the rains

In the oldest cosmology, the brightest star in the sky, Sirius, is the cosmic egg, the egg that hatched the world’s first pair of serpents. In the centuries the hill was in use, that star rode so low over the southern hills that the sun’s glare swallowed it for months at a time:

• At the turn of the year, just as the winter rains set in, it sank into the evening twilight and was gone.
• Through the whole season of the rains, while the storms filled the cisterns and the grain stood up on the slopes, the egg was hidden.
• In the weeks after midwinter, in the heart of the rains, the Seven came back to the dawn. That is the little cluster of the Pleiades, which this series reads as the egg’s nest. On the hill’s greatest pillar a row of seven birds is carved at its feet. The nest returned with the rain.
• At the height of summer, within about a week of the solstice, just as the grain had been gathered and the cisterns began to sink, the egg came back. One morning before dawn it stood low in the south-south-east for a few minutes, out of the sun.

The rains fell while the egg was hidden. The egg was found when the rains were over and the harvest was in.

The serpents come up

Between the hiding and the finding, something else came out of the ground.

The serpent is the creature the people of Göbekli carved more than any other: about a quarter of every animal in the first rings, often in crowds, dozens at once, pouring down the pillars toward the floor. Snakes are not social animals, but there are two moments in the year when they are seen together in numbers, and on that ridge both follow the rain:

• In spring, from April into June, they come out of the dens where they spent the cold season, in crowds, at the same place every year, as if the earth were giving back what it had taken.
• In summer, the young hatch. The snake carved most often on the hill is the Levantine viper, which still lives on those slopes, and it is one of the few vipers that lays eggs. Its clutch hatches all at once, a crowd of young snakes coming out of the ground together.

So the hill’s year had a shape:

1. The egg is hidden.
2. The rains fall.
3. The serpents come up out of the earth.
4. The grain ripens.
5. The egg is found again in the summer dawn.
6. The clutch opens.

In the old teaching the egg hatches the serpents. On the ridge, the serpents came out of the ground in the very season the hidden egg was coming back.

The rite of rain

A people who lived by that turning kept a rite for it, and this series reconstructs it. The serpent was not killed. It was thanked, as the one that goes into the earth and comes back as the water does, and it received only white offerings, milk and honey poured on the stone. Its shed skin was lifted on the tree. Water was poured on hot stone so that the rain would answer, and bread was broken in the ring.

The ground keeps traces of that pouring. At Karahan Tepe, Göbekli’s neighbour on the same limestone, the builders cut a channel through the rock where the great ring meets a room below, so that whatever was poured in the ring would run down into the room underneath, where serpent heads are carved emerging from the walls. On a hill with no water, someone made a way for water to run from the ring into the serpent’s room under the ground. And on Göbekli itself, among tens of thousands of animal bones from the feasts, no excavation report describes a single snake killed or offered.

The pairing is not the hill’s alone. All over the world, peoples who never met joined the serpent to the rain and honoured it with milk instead of blood:

• In India, on the day of Nag Panchami in the monsoon, people pour milk for the cobras and let them go.
• Among the Hopi of Arizona, in the late summer rain ceremony, the Snake dancers gathered snakes, honoured them, and set them free to carry the prayers for rain down into the earth.
• In the uplands of Anatolia, thousands of years after Göbekli, the Hittites kept a spring festival where the serpent and the rain were still bound together. By then the serpent had become the enemy, killed by the storm god, and the old thanksgiving had turned to combat. The season, the serpent and the rain were all still there.

The egg hunt

There is a custom kept in houses all over the world every spring that no one has ever fully explained. An egg is hidden, children hunt for it, and it is found.

• The egg is painted, and in the oldest Christian lands, from Greece to Russia, it is dyed red.
• The feast is fixed by the sky, not by the calendar: the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.
• It celebrates one who went down into the earth and came back on the third day.
• In northern Europe a hare hides the egg, and no one knows why a hare.

The sky over the ridge may say why. Just west of Sirius, at almost the same height on the sky, crouches the small constellation of the Hare. Every night, at every latitude, the Hare goes under the horizon shortly before the egg and comes up shortly before it. The Hare leads the egg into hiding, and out again.

On the ridge, the egg was hidden through the season of the rains, while the serpents slept in the ground and the grain grew, and it was found in the summer dawn, after the serpents had come out. The custom keeps that outline, though it has drifted to spring and lost its star. An egg is hidden in the season of the rains and the new grass, the egg is sought, and it is brought back into the light as the one who went under the earth comes back. Children playing the game don’t know what they are keeping. They keep the happy ending, which was always the point.

What goes under comes back

Set the pieces side by side and they are one teaching, told by the hill’s whole year:

• the rain goes into the ground and comes back as grain;
• the serpent goes into the ground and comes back in crowds;
• the egg goes into the sun and comes back at dawn, hatching serpents;
• and at the end, after fifteen hundred years, the people of the hill buried their rings whole, upright and unbroken, under earth and the bones of their feasts, as the seed is buried and the egg is hidden, so that the hill would come back.

In our own century it has.