KURDISTAN: BIRTHPLACE OF CIVILIZATION

"The GAP development project of which these dams are part is destroying a heritage which belongs to the whole of humanity and contravenes the most basic professional standards. Governments and companies involved with these projects are ignoring its serious implications: the destruction of such diverse cultural and religious heritage in a State with a history of severe cultural repression. Turkey's progress on cultural rights for the Kurds and others has been an object of scrutiny in recent years; the EU must consider cultural destruction on this scale in that context."
~ Maggie Ronayne.

Hoşyar Zebarî's in Kuwait calling PKK a "terrorist" organization for his master, war criminal Condoleezza Rice, and her boy, Ali Babacan. I guess Zebarî forgot that the KDP is also a "terrorist" organization. More from the pimps at the US Department of State.

I hope they gave Zebarî a dog biscuit and patted him on the head after his performance.

Check out Hevallo's call for the use of words as weapons, but don't stop there. Take up his challenge and engage in counter-psyops by spreading Kurdish truth. Along that line, there are two new blogs online. The first is Gordon Taylor's new blog, The Pasha and the Gypsy, where he will cross-post his articles from Progressive Historians. The second new blog is X-Kurdistan and it is in Turkish for the moment, as I'm told.

For something a little different . . . The Guardian has an article on an archaeological site in North Kurdistan (Southeast Turkey) that is dated 7,000 years older than Stonehenge and 5,500 years older than the first Mesopotamian cities:

As a child, Klaus Schmidt used to grub around in caves in his native Germany in the hope of finding prehistoric paintings. Thirty years later, a member of the German Archaeological Institute, he found something infinitely more important: a temple complex almost twice as old as anything comparable on the planet.

"This place is a supernova," said Schmidt, standing under a lone tree on a windswept hilltop 35 miles north of Turkey's border with Syria. "Within a minute of first seeing it I knew I had two choices: go away and tell nobody, or spend the rest of my life working here."

Behind him are the first folds of the Anatolian plateau. Ahead, the Mesopotamian plain, like a dust-coloured sea, stretches south hundreds of miles. The stone circles of Gobekli Tepe are just in front, hidden under the brow of the hill.

Compared with Stonehenge, they are humble affairs. None of the circles excavated (four out of an estimated 20) are more than 30 metres across. T-shaped pillars like the rest, two five-metre stones tower at least a metre above their peers. What makes them remarkable are their carved reliefs of boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions, and their age. Dated at around 9,500BC, these stones are 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia, and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge.

Never mind wheels or writing, the people who erected them did not even have pottery or domesticated wheat. They lived in villages. But they were hunters, not farmers.

"Everybody used to think only complex, hierarchical civilisations could build such monumental sites, and that they only came about with the invention of agriculture", said Ian Hodder, a Stanford University professor of anthropology who has directed digs at Catalhoyuk, Turkey's best known neolithic site, since 1993. "Gobekli changes everything. It's elaborate, it's complex and it is pre-agricultural. That alone makes the site one of the most important archaeological finds in a very long time."

Referenced in The Guardian article is the find of an 11,000-year-old mural in Western Kurdistan (Northern Syria) near the Firat River and northeast of Aleppo. Another dig is going on about 120 miles east of Riha (Urfa), again from The Guardian:

Vecihi Ozkaya, the director of a dig at Kortiktepe, 120 miles east of Urfa, doubts the thousands of stone pots he has found since 2001 in hundreds of 11,500-year-old graves quite qualify as [something even more dramatic]. But his excitement fills his austere office at Dicle University in Diyarbakir.

"Look at this", he said, pointing at a photo of an exquisitely carved sculpture showing an animal, half-human, half-lion. "It's a sphinx, thousands of years before Egypt. South-eastern Turkey, northern Syria - this region saw the wedding night of our civilisation."

It would appear that the finds at Djade al-Mughara and Kortiktepe are approximately the same age as the newly discovered temple at Gobekli.

Just imagine, then, what might be found at Hasankeyf if a proper archaeological dig were established there. Now imagine what will be lost at Hasankeyf as the global fascists press on with their plans for the Ilisu Dam . . . and may they be damned for it.