Scientists Finally Opened This Chamber At Karahan Tepe — And What It Hid Was Chilling

Everybody knows Göbekli Tepe. Thirty five kilometres away sits Karahan Tepe, identified in nineteen ninety seven and then left completely untouched for twenty two years while the world looked the other way. It is not a smaller copy. Göbekli Tepe is mostly animals with the human form implied. Karahan Tepe puts humans front and centre and the results are considerably harder to look at. In this one I go through the chambers. Structure AB, carved downward into living bedrock so that the floor, the walls and the pillars are all one continuous piece of stone, which means no mistakes and no repositioning, the whole plan finished in somebody's head before the first chip came off. Eleven pillars standing in a row, several unambiguously phallic, and a bearded human head sculpted out of the wall watching them with a stone snake extending horizontally from its face toward the pillars. Then a separate chamber with a two point three metre human figure, seated, ribs incised deep enough to count, both hands around its own phallus, fixed permanently to the ground so it could never be moved. A vulture sculpture and an offering plate arranged in front of it. And a small sealed vessel holding three figurines, a fox, a vulture and a boar, each one with its head threaded through its own stone ring before the lid went on. That is not storage. That looks like binding. One percent of the site has been dug.
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