New Carvings and Monumental Serpent at Karahan Tepe - Andrew Collins & Hugh Newman Interview 2023

Hello Megalithomaniacs. Today we're speaking with Andrew Collins about some really interesting new research coming out of Karahan Tepe and the sites in the whole Testepele region of southeast Turkey. And many of you know Andrew, he's a well-known author and explorer and researcher. He's published many books including some about Göbekli Tepe and the sites in that region and we've been visiting there with Andrew, myself and JJ since about 2014. It's the first time I went there. Andrew's been going there for much longer than that and over the years it's become this sort of unfolding story especially now that Karahan Tepe has started to be excavated since 2019 by Nesmi Kiril and his team. So we're going to get into a few different things that we've been kind of slowly discovering as more gets excavated. I just want to start by mentioning something that both Andrew and I and JJ were involved with. We were there in May this year on our tour with a group and JJ and I just spotted on the sides of the kind of western edge of structure AD, the main, the great ellipse, the main enclosure there, these on the sides of it, these carvings of animals that none of us had seen before and it was quite odd because me and Andrew, JJ, we've been there many times over the last few years and just not seen them. I made a little video about this, one of the short videos on YouTube and TikTok and stuff and but I find that odd because something that I've been talking with you about Andrew for a while is this the fact that like as the sun moves round at certain times of year you get this kind of angle of the sun will actually kind of bring out more of these very subtle relief carvings and that seems to have been the case with these ones because we've been there, we've photographed it, we've been there multiple different times a year but never in May I don't think since it's been excavated and suddenly these things emerge on the sides of these giant rock cut hypergean style kind of pillars with benches between them carved out of the bedrock on the western side of this enclosure so that was really, I found that really interesting that they haven't been spotted before, haven't been recorded, haven't been mentioned by any of the archaeologists even Ishmael there I don't think was aware of them I was actually pointing them out to one of the security guys there because we kept trying to get photos of this same thing over and over again so just that alone is interesting but there's more I mean there's more discoveries that we're going to be discussing and yeah so I just want to welcome Andrew in here I just wanted to get your opinion on you know the fact that we're still finding things like this at Carrahan Tepe well I mean quite clearly there's so much to be found there and as you said I mean a lot of it is to do with the lighting you know at different times of the year depending on what time of day that you're there you know you're going to be seeing more and more now whether the archaeologists you know were aware of this or not I don't know but what's so interesting is obviously you mentioned it whilst I was on the top of the hill so I went down to try and look for them but I was looking at the wrong side I was looking at the southern side of them and I thought I could see you know carvings on those as well which I thought is the ones you were talking about and I think that they are real the only problem is is that the ones on as you're looking south towards you know the buttresses are so faint that it's really difficult to make out what's there it's only on the other sides as you're looking north the ones that you were pointing out that you can actually really see the animals what's interesting that one of those animals is actually facing towards the bedrock itself it's like upright and facing towards the bedrock which is an interesting stance but it also means that if somebody's sitting there on that bench then and they're looking outwards the animal is looking at them directly it's not like the animals you know attacking them in some way which I find you know an interesting stance really one of the other one of the other things you noticed as well we were kind of because we got because the light was so good that particular day we were there in May we noticed on the front of the kind of buttresses the upright bedrock kind of pillars that these kind of leopard kind of headless leopards really on the base of them and we've spotted another one there there's quite a well-known one there that's been documented before my friend Dakota Wynne he kind of spotted that and filmed that photographed that and it's been you know on Graham Hancock's Ancient Apocalypse as well and he felt it was like a sort of hooded figure without the head was kind of missing but then we found one on the another pillar that we just happened to see because of the angle of the light during the May time we were there and you had this realization that perhaps they're they're actually like almost like leopard pelts which is incredible you know if you think about how the size of what leopards can be so what do you make of that well I think that there is you know no doubt in my mind at all that these are leopard leopard skin pelts being used as loincloths and you've only got to go back to Gobekli Tepe to realize that animal skins were being used in this way because on certainly on pillar 18 in enclosure D you've got the the fox pelt loincloth there I think I think there's one on the one next to it on pillar 31 which is the other central pillar in enclosure D but it's clear that you know these animal skins are being used in that way and as you say you've got them on two of the buttresses which show that those buttresses really are supposed to be anthropomorphic and thus you know rock-cut t-pillars but also as you say there's another one which is on the side of a t-pillar that's used being used as a bench on the north side of the great ellipse you know which is structure AD at Karahan I mean it's clearly there and that also means that that t-pillar is in secondary use I mean where it was before that time we don't know but this is beginning to tell me that in addition to what we're going to come on to which is the snake imagery there which is incredibly important is that there was some kind of cult associated with the leopard at Karahan and what I've already suggested in in other books is that this leopard cult which of course goes on to be found at places like Chattahoyack in the ceramic neolithic I think is possibly a female cult and the reason I say that is because obviously in much later times in the bronze age and also within mythical tradition you've got the use of leopard pelts being worn by the maniacs the frenzied followers in the cult of Dionysus or Bacchus who would tear people apart if they got in their way and these were females and so I think that there's a strong chance that the the leopard cult at Karahan and obviously probably at Gobekli where you also find a lot of leopard carvings and imagery could be a female cult and I find that that interesting. That's fascinating to me and JJ because we're both you know very focused on this idea of there being like a feminine aspect to it I mean you discovered that the name the original name of Karahan Tepe being Ketchley or Ketchley I'm not sure how you pronounce it the K-E-C the root of that is a feminine root and so even the name the original name of the site I mean people should be aware of this isn't Karahan Tepe which funnily enough means something like dark lord or something like this which is kind of fun it's actually got a feminine aspect myself and JJ have been looking into much of the symbolism there and we keep finding especially JJ all this stuff like the cut marks and different symbology which seems to push the idea that there is a very feminine aspect there so it kind of backs up what we've been looking at as well so I find that fascinating but can you tell us can you just mention a bit about the name of the name of the site in a bit more detail yeah I mean this really came about because the the name of the farm itself is Ketchley and we realized that the original name of Karahan was just Ketchley I mean whether it was even Ketchley Tepe we're not sure but just Ketchley which was known about by the owners of the farm certainly for a hundred years or so and they knew that it was actually a Kurdish name and not a Turkish name in Turkish Ketch the root of Ketchley basically means goat which makes sense because obviously it's a farm and there's goats there however in Kurdish Ketch the most obvious you know translation of the word Ketch means bald as in a bald head like I've got here and that makes sense and that's obviously the way that the family interpreted it but if you ask around and talk to Kurdish people they say that the word Ketch is a female derived term which can mean anything from woman to daughter to queen you know in other words a personage who is female basically and the fact that we're talking about hills that could well have been seen as representations of female anatomy I find that really really interesting and it seems to suggest that the root of Karahan itself is of a female a divine female and that the hill itself was almost seen as a personification of that female form oh that's another funny thing just to go with that my mum when she got remarried her surname became Ketch which I thought was quite quite a bizarre little coincidence but anyway and she's kind of kept that name for the anyway for now so yeah fascinating so we're going to look at a couple of other things you've been looking at we're going to show some imagery here we're going to open up some slides so you can describe what's being found but fundamentally you find we've been discussing this and it seems like something quite important that is strangely obvious but you don't really see it until it's pointed out so let's get this open let's point this out to people because this is a fascinating area of research okay let's get on to what we found basically and it it concerns the pillar shrine which we'll talk about but the main symbolism at Karahan and this has long been noted is quite clearly the snake okay right from the early days in the mid 1990s when Bahatin Chelak who was then with the University of Tehran was exploring the site surveying it you know he discovered serpent imagery and the first ever t-shaped pillar that was you know that was recorded was this one that's on the screen now which you can see this quite weird looking snake on the side of it with a ball shaped head which you know some people when they looked at it they said oh you know looks like a sperm or something like this so I mean that was our first indication really that snakes were important there and I did write about this in an article that I did on Karahan which is available online but then of course obviously with the excavations starting in 2019 they've uncovered a lot of other snake imagery there most obviously connected with structure AB which we like to call the the pillar shrine I mean for instance you've got these 11 pillars actually rising up out of the the base of the structure 10 of which are actually cut out the bedrock itself but the 11th one which is highlighted here was clearly made elsewhere and has been slotted into place and it does seem to have features suggesting that of a creature a reptile and I would say possibly even a striking snake I mean you can actually see this horizontal line roughly where the mouth is which I think is deliberately carved and to me this probably represents some kind of genius loci at the site some kind of spirit presence in the form of a snake very similar to the Nagas in Vedic tradition and in Buddhic tradition as well which are guardians of sacred places and also a buried treasure and I think that that's what we've got there but the most obvious you know feature of course is the head that emerges out of the side of the shrine and yeah this is on a long serpent-like neck which is recognized by it's talked about by Graham Hancock and it has horizontal lines across it or parallel lines which clearly represent the underside of the neck of a snake but the head itself which is about twice the size of the human head maybe even larger than that is clearly human but it seems to me like it's some kind of snake genius I mean there's a representation here that you can see from an 18th century Ottoman manuscript and it was taken from a much earlier I think Persian text from the 13th century which shows what you might describe as a snake genius so what is the function of this what is actually going on here well other snake imagery which can be mentioned immediately is that next to the pillar shrine you have this other shrine which is structure AA which I call the pit shrine we have this incredibly long snake along the bench where people would sit again cut out the bedrock and I mean this is this is huge this snake I mean it goes on for several feet I mean it could even be eight nine feet in length and it seems to be incised as opposed to carved like the normal reliefs but what's interesting is that these two structures which you can see here seem to be joined and when I say joined I mean as far as the path that you take to get from one to the other by this long curved groom and Nesmi Carol himself talks about this in terms of a serpentine form in nature now it's been suggested by the archaeologists that it's used to run water you know possibly to pour libations offering so that it would flow from from one place to the other now that may be the case although having studied it at close quarters I would say right in the center it actually goes up slightly which you know would be bad masonry if that was the case you know the fact that you know it does rise in the center but anyway it could easily be have been used for that that's not my concern but what's interesting was that we were talking about this at the Megalithomania tour of Turkey in May amongst the group I mean basically what happened was that you know Hugh, myself, JJ had been giving various lectures and we went to Gobekli and Karahan on one of the days and we just threw it open to the audience themselves we just said to everybody you know what's your views on these sites that we've seen I mean you know you your eyes can have seen things that we have missed I mean and we haven't got all the answers and we openly accept that so what did you see and one of the ladies when I was showing this maybe called Chell Hamilton she actually said when she was looking at she said do you think that the Pillar Shrine and this carved groove could be a sperm the representation of a sperm you know a human sperm and I thought about this for a moment and realized that this was impossible because how would the ancients have been aware of what the human sperm looked like I mean clearly they didn't have microscopes so I mentioned this but as I was saying this I thought well wait a minute what if the Pillar Shrine actually is a head but not the head of a sperm but the head of a snake and the more I thought about this the more I thought actually this may well be you know real so I thought about it and one thing that we know about this region of Turkey which is the very remote Tektek mountains is that a common snake found there is the Anatolian meadow viper I mean this is a very poisonous snake here and it is definitely found and I mean when Hugh and I were investigating the northern hill on the same farm which faces out towards Karahan Tepe and which we today know as Keteli Tepe we were told to watch out for snakes up there that they were poisonous and although we didn't encounter any you know straight off we were actually shown this pit with a whole load of stones in it and you know there was snake skin in it you know just to prove the point that snakes really are you know there or thereabouts and one of the species probably is the Anatolian meadow viper so you know this is the head of it here and I just thought well what I wonder what will happen if I put the head of this particular species of snake on the pillar shrine assuming that the snake would have been there in the past well you know here's a nice overhead plan of the pillar shrine and this is what happens if you put the head over it it's almost a perfect fit and I mean when I saw this I just thought this is extraordinary and I mean why has nobody ever noticed this before that the actual pillar shrine itself may well be that you know the head I mean a three-dimensional head of a snake and of course at first I was thinking that the carved groove coming away from it was a sort of symbolic neck and body of that snake you know even Esby Carroll says that it's serpentine in nature but as I was doing this and I was doing it at the house of my good friend Debbie Cartwright and her husband Ivan and Graham Phillips was there as well he was helping us out and as they were doing this I said oh my god I said wait a minute what is the neck isn't actually the groove itself but it's actually the bedrock immediately above it and the the groove is merely highlighting the presence of the neck so and so I looked at it carefully I thought oh my god yes that's it in other words the actual bedrock has been shaped to form the neck of it and the groove is merely there to highlight its presence and when I mention this to you know to Debbie, Ivan and Graham I said well I thought that's what you were talking about anyway when you said the neck they'd seen it and realized it before I'd even noticed it myself so this is what I think the neck is that's the neck it's not the groove it is actually the bedrock immediately above it and what happens is that this neck curves around the other shrine next to it and eventually peters out towards the northwest so you know that in itself you know could signal and the importance of that direction in connection with the snake we'll come back to that so you know but we're not just thinking with something looking down from above the whole shrine itself is the head of the snake it's three-dimensional and if that's the case what the hell would have been going on here in the past so when the question then becomes why go into a snake's mouth what would you be achieving by doing this and the clue is and I was having a conversation about this with with Debbie you know as all this was coming out and she pointed out she said well the clue is clearly sky burial so I said well explain what you mean she says well obviously the whole concept of sky burials and this image here by the way shows sky burial is actually taking place on the Tibetan plateau in the modern day is that vultures will come down and pick clean the human body human cadaver and what that means is that the birds are consuming the meat of the individual so that the individual you know let's say their soul or their spirit is actually becoming a part of the vulture itself so that when the vultures fly off they are actually taking the spirit or the soul of the individual with them and this seems to be shown in a mural that was discovered in the 1960s by James Mellart at Chattel Hoyak which as we know is is a slightly later ceramic neolithic structure dates from about 7000 about 5500 BC and here on this mural you've got two towers which I think are what they call excarnation towers obviously excarnation means moving out from carnation you know into you know another existence another worldly environment on the right you've got the two vultures that seem to be devouring this matchstick person who doesn't have a head and there's a very good reason for that because if you look at the left tower you can see only a head and two vultures that seem to be you know putting this head under its wing taking it under its protection and that head is a representation of the human soul because heads and skulls in the early neolithic in Anatolia in the near near east were represented by the human head of human skull and I think that that's what's being shown here is that the head represents the spirit or the soul being taken away so you know this is also something we found on the so-called vulture stone pillar 43 at Gobekli Tepe you've got your vulture there on the head of the stone you've got this bull on the wing which it almost seems to be protecting I think that that is a representation of a human skull or human head in other words the spirit of an individual that's being you know literally guided into the sky world and that sky world as I've shown various of the books I think is related to the Milky Way with an entrance in the area of the Cygnus constellation the celestial bird which in this area has always been known as a vulture and even to this day in neighboring Armenia Cygnus is still the celestial vulture called Anjek or however it's pronounced so going back to this idea of entering the mouth of another worldly snake the idea is to be consumed by the snake itself to be eaten by it ritualistically once inside the pillar shrine and in doing so you then communicate with the active spirit the snake is both psychopath which is the Greek term for the spirit of an animal that accompanies the soul into the next world or the other world but you're also communing with that snake and I think that what's happening in the pillar shrine is that communication with the snake would take place and that is symbolized by the giant stone head which is on the end of the serpentine neck and that so in other words that the the head itself is the active spirit of that snake basically but if that's the case then where was this otherworldly snake well obviously as we know you know Hugh and JJ found this incredible alignment for midwinter at Qorhan in connection with the pillar shrine just after dawn on this day in the modern day but also going back to 9000 BC the winter solstice sun penetrates through the porthole window and illuminates the stone head so we know that solstices are very very important to do with this site and one of the reasons why Hugh and JJ were looking specifically for you know solstice alignments at the time of midwinter was because I previously found that the neighboring pitch shrine structure AA seemed to be aligned towards the summer solstice I mean the actual orientation of it is approximately 302 degrees azimuth which is obviously the west northwesterly area and if you look at the skies at the time of the summer solstice which it exactly targets you find that the sun is perfectly aligned so in other words if you were in the the pitch shrine in around 9000 BC you would see directly in line with that shrine the sun setting now that in itself is incredible because it makes it arguably one of the oldest solar alignments in the world but that's just the beginning because not only is the sun which you can see at the moment is in the of Scorpio but just two to two and a half hours later when it gets dark the Milky Way is rising vertically up into the sky and the position that it's rising vertically up from is in the area at the sudden termination of what's known as the dark rift which is this this line that breaks the the mid-plane section of the Milky Way which is caused by dust and debris and where exactly this occurs in 9000 BC at Karahan you have the stars of Ophiuchus you have the stars of Sagittarius on the other side and as I said just below it setting with the sun you've got the stars of Scorpius and the importance about all this area it is the area here that you can see once again the pillar 43 at Gobekli Tepe is that this is the area it's all the area around Scorpius and as we know that Scorpius is actually represented on the vulture stone by the scorpion that you can see and when you blow that up you can see that next to it is this serpent and also just below that a fox and all of these are clearly in the vicinity of the Scorpius constellation and what we know is that this very shrine from which this alignment takes place is that you've got this long snake on the left and directly in front of it and facing the same direction you have this fox so the very two symbols associated with this area of the sky where the shrine seems to be pointing towards are both there the fox and the snake so you know we're obviously dealing with some kind of celestial snake in that area of the sky so what is it well after much thought my conclusions were that we're dealing with the Milky Way itself the Milky Way is seen as a world encircling serpent in many different ancient cultures from Scandinavia to Vedic traditions in India to Mesoamerica Mesopotamia and North America tradition all of which see the Milky Way as this huge celestial serpent of the sky and if that's the case then where is its head well the head almost certainly is the galactic bulge and this is right by all of the constellations we just talked about there Ophiuchus Sagittarius and Scorpius at the southern termination of the dark rift and this was seen anciently as a point of communication with the Milky Way in other words soul spirits that wish to enter onto the Milky Way would make a leap of faith towards this very point in the sky so is it possible that this was the idea of what was happening in the pillar shrine communication with this cosmic entity in the form of a serpent the head of the Milky Way serpent bear in mind that they saw the head as symbolic of the you know the spirit of the soul of an individual you know and of course that would be the same with the with a snake as well if it was in this cosmic form now obviously in front of us we actually see the Milky Way we see the dark rift which you can see on the left hand side here you see the stars of Scorpius and this whole area here which is marked by galactic center is where the head almost certainly would have been and this is interesting because if we come now back to Karahan another alignment which i think was incredibly important there relates to the great ellipse itself because we've already talked about midwinter uh well and midsummer and obviously midwinter but just a few hours before the sun would have risen at Karahan if you'd have been sitting on those thrones between the buttresses in the great ellipse you would have seen horizontally rise right in front of you the Milky Way in particular the area around the galactic bulge and the stars of Scorpius right in front of you going between east and just south of east which is precisely the orientation of the great ellipse and to me I find this beyond coincidence particularly as we know that the exact same orientation which is around 10 degrees south of what the um that the great head inside the pillar shrine is and as you will show me the last time we were there we were looking at this head and you you can actually see it outside of the of the pillar shrine itself you can go a distance of 50 60 feet and you can still see it looking towards the horizon and you know I think that it's looking towards its celestial counterpart in other words the active spirit of the Milky Way serpent this is obviously all part of a ritualistic process now the other now before we go on to the the the next part any thoughts there to yourself well yeah I think this is absolutely fascinating I think it's fantastic research to be honest with you the way it all kind of just locks together you know this from the winter solstice the summer solstice with the star movements the Milky Way it's really quite interesting and we've got we've got more but we're going to research this when we go there in September because we think even though it's 10 degrees off east we think there could be something very important with the equinox as well but also with Venus as well but again we're still researching this so we can't really talk too much about it yet but we found we're finding the Venus connection with the winter solstice and possibly with the equinox as well but more on that later but yeah I think what what is being found there so far is is absolutely brilliant and yeah I'm delighted it's all coming out and this really began just by you taking a look back in September October 2021 at overhead plans when the first photographs came out of the site which I think I sent you the kind of link to it and you did the research and suddenly everything's been unfolding ever since so it's been a kind of revelatory year or two thank you Andrew if you've got anything you'd like to add please do and we'll say farewell to everybody yeah I mean I think the only thing you can add is that you know we're discovering new stuff all the time and it's only going to continue you know the more what archaeologists do at the different sites and the more trips that we make I mean you know we're just finding stuff in villages and it's stuff which some of the archaeologists are not even aware of so you know there's like two things going on here what the archaeologists are officially doing and what we're doing which is you know pure exploration and adventure and the fruits of that are in the books that we write the articles that the great videos so just watch this space you know we'll reveal what we can as soon as we can I mean we're not going to be holding this back you know for books that won't come out for two or three years we'll tell you as we find stuff. Megalithomaniacs thanks for watching once again please subscribe please also subscribe to Andrew's channel check that out and yeah we hope to see you out exploring these sites in the near future take care everybody thanks for watching