This information confirms reasons for the building of underground refugia throughout Anatolia and by extension, surely throughout Europe as well. That they were forced to reside there for 150 years is shocking. What is not explained is how folks were fed.
However, we also know that we are dealing with modernism in terms of their technology. We have lighting panels mentioned and we must presume a food production infrastructure which was compact. All this would have been extracted upon the abandonment of the refuge.
Longer life spans are also implied as well.
This report conforms with that of Noah and the Kolbrin bible as well. Thus we have an organized society aware of the pending impact who goes underground in order to survive. The tunnel work is not rough either and surely done using heat devices. We would be hard put to do as well...
When the Zoroastrian texts speak of a
‘fierce, foul frost’ and of ‘a fatal winter,’ is it possible that they
are describing conditions during the Younger Dryas? The texts attribute
the shocking change of climate to a supernatural agency – Angra Mainyu,
the demon of darkness, destruction, wickedness, and chaos who stands in
opposition to and seeks to undermine and undo all the works of Ahura
Mazda, the God of Light. Zoroastrianism is a profoundly dualistic
religion in which human beings and the choices we make for good or evil
are seen as the objects of an eternal competition, or contest, between
the opposed forces of darkness and light. And in this contest the
darkness sometimes wins. Thus the Vendidad reminds us that although
Airyana Vaejo was ‘the first of the good lands and countries’ created by
Ahura Mazda, it could not resist the evil one:
Thereupon came Angra Mainyu, who is all death, and he counter-created by his witchcraft the serpent in the river, and winter, a work of the demons… [Now] there are ten winter months there, two summer months, and these are cold for the waters, cold for the earth, cold for the trees. Winter falls there, with the worst of its plagues.[xv]
In other translations the phrase ‘the
serpent in the river, and winter’ is given as ‘a great serpent and
Winter’ and, alternatively, as ‘a mighty serpent and snow.’[xvi]
Again… you get the idea. The metaphor
that is being repeatedly driven home here is that of the mighty serpent
who springs from the sky down to the earth, who penetrates the earth,
and who brings a prolonged winter upon the world so severe that it is
‘dark’ (‘most turbid, opaque’ according to some translations[xvii])
at midday, and even the fleeting summer months are too cold for human
life. Once again, the whole scenario seems very accurately to describe
the terrible conditions that would have afflicted the world after the
Younger Dryas comet spread its trail of destruction across 50 million
square kilometers, brought on ‘a vehement destroying frost’ and threw
such quantities of dust into the upper atmosphere, together with smoke
from the continent-wide wildfires sparked off by airbursts and
superheated ejecta, that a turbid, opaque darkness would indeed have
filled the skies, reflecting back the sun’s rays and perpetuating
something very like a nuclear winter for centuries.
The Zoroastrian texts leave us in no
doubt that these conditions posed a deadly threat to the future survival
of civilization. It was for this reason that Ahura Mazda came to Yima
with his warning and his instruction to build an underground shelter
where some remnant of humanity could take refuge, keeping safe the seeds
of all animals and plants, until the thousand-year winter had passed
and spring returned to the world. Moreover the account reveals very
little that seems ‘mythical,’ or that obviously derives from flights
religious fancy. Rather the whole thing has about it an atmosphere of
hard-headed practical planning that adds a chilling note of veracity.
For example the admonition that
deformed, impotent, lunatic, and leprous people should be kept out of
the Vara sounds a lot like eugenics, a distasteful policy to be sure,
but one that might be implemented if the survival of the human race was
at stake and there was limited space available in the refuge. For the
same reasons it is not surprising that only the seeds of ‘the greatest,
best and finest’ kinds of trees, fruits, and vegetables, those that are
‘fullest of food and sweetest of odour,’ are to be brought to the Vara.
Why waste space on anything but the best?
Also, although it is certain that a
number of carefully selected people were to be admitted to the Vara,
perhaps as caretakers and managers of the project, and as future
breeding stock, the emphasis throughout is on seeds – which in the case
of human beings would be sperm from the males and eggs from the females.
So when we read that the Vara is to be constructed in three
subterranean levels, each smaller than the one above, each with its own
system of criss-crossing ‘streets,’ it is legitimate to wonder whether
some kind of storage system, perhaps with ranks of shelves arranged in
cross-crossing aisles, might not really be what is meant here:
In the largest part of the place thou shalt make nine streets, six in the middle part, three in the smallest. To the streets of the largest part thou shalt bring a thousand seeds of men and women; to the streets of the middle part, six hundred; to the streets of the smallest part, three hundred.[xviii]
If it seems fanciful to imagine that we
might, in an almost high-tech sense, be looking at the specifications of
a seed bank here, then how are we to assess other ‘technological’
aspects of the Vara – for example its lighting system? As well as making
a door to the place, and sealing it up with the golden ring already
given to him by Ahura Mazda, Yima is also to fashion ‘a window,
self-shining within.’[xix]
When Yima asks for clarification as to the nature of this
‘self-shining’ window Ahura Mazda tells him cryptically ‘there are
uncreated lights and created lights.’ The former are the stars, the moon
and the sun, which will not be seen from within the confines of the
Vara during the long winter, but the latter are ‘artificial lights’
which ‘shine from below.’[xx]
Yima did as he was instructed and completed the Vara which, thereafter, ‘glowed with its own light.’[xxi] That accomplished, he then:
made waters flow in a bed a mile long; there here he settled birds, by the evergreen banks that bear never-failing food. There he established dwelling places, consisting of a house with a balcony, a courtyard and a gallery…[xxii]
There, too, we are reminded, in accord with the commands of the god,
he brought the seeds of men and women… There he brought the seeds of every kind of tree [and]… every kind of fruit… All those seeds he brought, two of every kind, to be kept inexhaustible there, so long as those men shall stay in the Vara…[xxiii]
Finally, we learn that:
every fortieth year, to every couple two are born, a male and a female. And thus it is for every sort of cattle. And the men in the Vara, which Yima made, live the happiest life.[xxiv]
Interestingly the translator explains,
in a footnote drawn from various ancient learned commentaries on the
text, that the human inhabitants of the Vara ‘live there for 150 years;
some say they never die.’[xxv]
Moreover, and particularly intriguing, the births of offspring to every
couple do not result from sexual union but ‘from the seeds deposited in
the Vara.’[xxvi]
Other hints of a mysterious lost
technology connected to Yima include a miraculous cup in which he could
see everything that was happening anywhere in the world and a jewelled
glass throne (sometimes described as ‘a glass chariot’) that was capable
of flight.[xxvii]
Flood & Rain
As well as a climate catastrophe in the
form of an overnight reversion to peak Ice Age cold, we also know that
the Younger Dryas involved extensive global flooding, as a large
fraction of the North American ice cap – directly impacted by at least
four of the comet fragments – melted and poured into the world ocean. It
is therefore noteworthy that the Zoroastrian texts speak not only of
the ‘vehement, destroying frost’ of a global winter but also of a
subsequent flood accompanied by heavy precipitation, in which ‘every
single drop of rain became as big as a bowl and the water stood the
height of a man over the whole of this earth.’[xxviii]
On the other side of the world and much closer to the North American epicentre of the cataclysm, the Popol Vuh,
an original document of the ancient Quiche Maya of Guatemala, based on
pre-conquest sources, also speaks of a flood and associates it with
‘much hail, black rain and mist, and indescribable cold.’[xxix]
It says, in a remarkable echo of the Zoroastrian tradition, that this
was a period when ‘it was cloudy and twilight all over the world… The
faces of the sun and the moon were covered.’[xxx]
Other Maya sources confirm that these strange and terrible phenomena
were experienced by mankind ‘in the time of the ancients. The earth
darkened… It happened that the sun was still bright and clear. Then, at
midday, it got dark…’[xxxi] Sunlight was not seen again ‘until the twenty-sixth year after the flood.’[xxxii]
Returning to the Middle East, the world
famous account of the Hebrew patriarch Noah and the great Ark in which
he rides out the flood, commands attention. It is obvious that there are
many parallels with the story of Yima and his Vara. The Vara, after
all, is a means of surviving a terrible and devastating winter which
will destroy every living creature by enchaining the earth in a freezing
trap of ice and snow. The Ark, likewise, is a means of surviving a
terrible and devastating flood which will destroy every living creature
by drowning the world in water. In both cases a deity – Ahura Mazda in
the case of the Zoroastrian tradition, the God Yahweh in the case of the
Hebrew tradition – intervenes to give advance warning to a good and
pure man to prepare for the coming cataclysm. In each case the essence
of the project is to preserve the seeds, or the breeding pairs, of all
life:
And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the Ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.
Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive.[xxxiii]
Easily missed, but noteworthy, is the
fact that Noah’s Ark, like Yima’s Vara, is to have a ‘window,’ is to be
closed with a ‘door,’ and is to consist of three levels:
A window shalt thou make to the Ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.[xxxiv]
Last but not least, there are hints of a
lost lighting technology in Noah’s Ark that parallel the references to
the ‘artificial lights’ in the Vara. In the legends of the Jews we read
that the whole journey of the Ark, ‘during the year of the flood,’ was
conducted in darkness both by day and by night:
‘All the time it lasted, the sun and the moon shed no light…’[xxxv]
However just like ‘self-shining window’ of the Vara:
‘The Ark was illuminated by a precious
stone, the light of which was more brilliant by night than by day, so
enabling Noah to distinguish between day and night.’[xxxvi]
Underground Cities
Noah’s Ark, as is well known, is said to
have ended its journey on the slopes of Mount Ararat, the symbolic
heartland of ancient Armenia but now, as a result of wars in the early
twentieth century, located within the modern state of Turkey. Turkey, in
turn, shares a border with Iran – ancient Persia – from which the
accounts of Yima’s Vara come down to us.
It is therefore intriguing that Turkey’s
Cappadocia region has a very large number of ancient underground
structures hewn out of solid rock and usually, like the Vara, consisting
of multiple levels stacked one above the other. These underground
‘cities,’ as they are known, include the eerie and spectacular site of
Derinkuyu, which I was able to visit in 2013. Lying beneath a modern
town of the same name, eight of its levels are presently open to the
public, although further levels remain closed off below and,
astonishingly, a subterranean tunnel several kilometres in length
connects it to another similar hypogeum at Kaymakli.
Entering Derinkuyu was like crossing
some invisible barrier into an unexpected netherworld. One minute I was
standing in bright sunshine; the next, after I had ducked into the cool,
dank, dimly-lit system of tunnels and galleries (no self-shining
windows now; only low wattage electric light), I felt I had been
transported to a realm carved out by mythical dwarves at the dawn of
time. In places the tunnels are low and narrow so that one must stoop
and walk in single file between walls stained and blackened with ancient
smoke and overgrown here and there with green mold. At regular
intervals, slid back into deep recesses, I passed hulking megalithic
doors, shaped like millstones, 5 to 6 feet (1.5 to 1.8 meters) in
diameter and weighing close to half a ton. These were clearly designed
to be rolled out to block access. Stairways and steep ramps led down
from level to level and, although all the levels were interconnected,
the rolling stone doors could be used to isolate them from one another
when needed.
Photo by Santha Faiia
Photo by Santha Faiia
Photo by Santha Faiia
Photo by Santha Faiia
I noticed a remarkable system of plunging, sheer-sided ventilation shafts connecting the deepest levels with the surface – and doing so to such good effect that the gusts of fresh air were still palpable 80 meters (260 feet) or more beneath the ground. In some places the passageway I was following would debouch into a junction where tunnels branched off in several directions and more stairways led down to even lower levels. And here and there, now to one side of the passageway, now to the other, sometimes accessed by means of holes cut in the wall, sometimes through full-sized doorways, lay small low-ceilinged grottos in which even a few people sitting together would have felt cramped. But sometimes those doors would lead into interconnected networks of chambers and passages and sometimes they would open out suddenly into lofty halls and spacious rooms with barrel-vault ceilings looming high overhead supported on monolithic columns hewn from the living rock.
The whole place, in short, is a complex
and cunning labyrinth on an immense scale – a work of astonishing
architectural complexity that would be impressive if it had been built
above ground but that is utterly breathtaking when one considers that it
all had to be mined, chiselled, hammered, cut and gouged out of the
volcanic bedrock. Later, studying a plan, I realised that this vast
hypogeum, looking in cross-section like a gigantic rabbit warren, lay
underfoot wherever one went in the modern town of Derinkyu; streets
beneath streets, rooms beneath rooms, a secret antipodal city of unknown
antiquity and of unknown purpose but certainly the produce of immense
ingenuity, determination, and skill.
And Derinkuyu is just one of two hundred
such subterranean complexes, each containing a minimum of two levels
(with around forty containing three levels or more) that have been
identified in Turkey in the area between Kayseri and Nevsehir.[xxxvii]
Moreover, new discoveries are constantly being made. Derinkuyu itself
was found in 1963 after builders renovating the cellar of a modern home
broke through to an ancient passageway below. And most recently, in
2014, workers preparing the ground for a new housing project at
Nevsehir, an hour’s drive north of Derinkuyu, stumbled upon yet another
unsuspected hypogeum. Archaeologists were called in and it was quickly
realised that this one was bigger than any others so far known. As Hasan
Unver, Mayor of Nevsehir, put it, Derinkuyu and Kaymakli are little
more than ‘kitchens’ when compared to the newly-explored site. ‘It is
not a known underground city,’ added Mehmet Ergun Turan, head of
Turkey’s Housing Development Administration. ‘Tunnel passages of seven
kilometres are being discussed. Naturally, when the discovery was made,
we stopped the construction we were planning to do in the area.’[xxxviii]
Several commentators immediately speculated that the newly discovered site might be ‘5,000 years old,’[xxxix]
but there is no basis for this – or really for any date. All we can say
for sure is that the earliest surviving historical mention of Turkey’s
underground cities is found in the Anabapsis of the Greek historian Xenophon written in the fourth century AD[xl] – so they are older than that.
But the question is, how much older?
There is no objective way to date
structures made entirely of rock. What archaeologists look for,
therefore, are organic materials that can be carbon dated. To be useful,
however, these organic materials must be excavated from locations –
under a megalith that has never been moved, for example, or in the
original mortar in a joint between two stone blocks – that allow
reasonable deductions to be made about the date the associated
structural elements were put in place. In many sites, however, there is
the possibility that the intrusion of later organic materials will give a
falsely young date, and in some – the underground cities of Turkey
being a prime example – no reliable dating can be done. This is because
the sites were used, reused, and indeed repurposed, many times down the
ages by many different peoples, with organic materials being introduced
on every occasion, thus making it impossible to draw any inferences
about the epoch of their original construction.
The general view of archaeologists is that the underground structures were originally developed in the 7th or 8th
centuries BC by an Indo-European people called the Phrygians who lived
in Cappadocia at the time. The theory is that the Phrygians began the
project by widening and deepening natural caves and tunnels that already
existed in the volcanic rock, making use of the spaces they created for
storage and possibly as places of refuge from attackers. By Roman
times, with the Phrygians long gone, the inhabitants of the area were
Greek-speaking Christians who further developed and expanded the
underground caverns, rededicating some of the rooms as chapels and
leaving inscriptions in Greek, some of which survive to this day. In the
Byzantine era, from the eighth to the twelfth centuries AD, the Eastern
Roman Empire was locked in wars with newly Islamicised Arabs and the
underground cities became places of refuge again – a function they
continued to serve during the Mongol invasions of the fourteenth century
AD. Later still, Greek Christians used the cities to escape persecution
at the hands of Turkish Muslim rulers, and this practise continued into
the twentieth century when the structures finally fell into disuse
after the truce and population exchange between Greece and Turkey in
1923.[xli]
With such a chequered history it is easy
to see why the underground cities cannot be dated using objective
archaeological techniques. Moreover the vast effort that went into their
excavation out of solid rock, and their sophisticated ventilation
systems, speak of powerful long-term motives far beyond the limited and
temporary need for shelter from attackers. With this in mind let us
consider a scenario in which the Phrygians, favoured for no good reason
by archaeologists as the first makers of the cities, were themselves
just one of the many later cultures to make use of them. It is perfectly
possible that this is the case and, if so, then it is also possible
that these extraordinary underground structures might date back to a
time long before the Phrygians – perhaps even as far back as the ‘fatal
winters’ of the Younger Dryas that set in around 12,800 years ago.
There is no proof of this, of course. Nonetheless Turkish historian and archaeologist Omer Demir, author of Cappadocia: Cradle of History, is of the opinion that Derinkuyu does in fact date back to the Palaeolithic.[xlii] His argument is based partly on the notion that it already existed in Phrygian times,[xliii] partly on stylistic differences between the upper (older) levels and the lower (younger) levels,[xliv]
and partly on the fact that marks of the implements used to cut the
rock have worn completely away in the upper levels but are still visible
in the lower levels:
It is necessary for a long period of time to pass for the chisel marks to disappear. This means that there was quite a time difference between the years of construction of the first stories and the last stories.[xlv]
Demir also suggests that the huge
quantities of rock excavated to make the underground city – which are
nowhere in evidence in the vicinity today – were dumped into local
streams and carried off.[xlvi]
In one of these streams, the Sognali, at a distance of 26 kilometers
(16 miles) from Derinkuyu, hand-axes, rock-chips, and other Palaeolithic
artefacts were found.[xlvii]
The evidence is suggestive at best. I
would not want to bet my life or my reputation on it! Nonetheless the
scenario that sees Derinkuyu and the other underground cities
constructed in the Upper Palaeolithic around 12,800 years ago at the
onset of the Younger Dryas has the great merit of no longer leaving us
casting about for a motive commensurate with the huge effort involved.
We are informed of that motive quite explicitly in the story of Yima.
Stated simply the cities are Varas, cut down into the depths of the
earth as places of refuge from the horrors of the Younger Dryas which
were not limited to the ‘vehement destroying frost’ but – as we know
from the cosmic impact spherules and melt-glass found in sediment
samples at nearby Abu Hureyra in Syria – also included the terrifying
existential threat of bombardment from the skies.
REFERENCES
[i] Encyclopaedia Iranica, ‘Zoroaster ii. General Survey’, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/zoroaster-ii-general-survey
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] R.C. Zaehner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism.
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1961, e.g. see page 135: ‘The whole
story of Yima’s golden age, his excavation of the Vara, or underground
retreat, and his re-emergence to re-people the earth (the last episode
occurs only in the Pahlavi books) must belong to a very old stratum of
Iranian folklore wholly untouched by the teachings of Zoroaster.’
[vi]
J. Darmetester and H.L. Mills, Trans, F. Maz Muller, Ed, The Zend
Avesta, Reprint edition by Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, New
Delhi, 1990, Part I, p. 5
[vii] Ibid, p. 11
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Ibid, p. 13
[x] Ibid
[xi] Reported by Frank Brown and John Fleagle in Nature,
17 February, 2005. And see Scientific American, 17 Feb 2005,
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fossil-reanalysis-pushes/
[xii]
A golden age in which ‘fields would bear plenty of grass for cattle:
now with floods that stream, with snows that melt, it will seem a happy
land in the world…’ J. Darmetester and H.L. Mills, Trans, F. Maz Muller,
Ed, The Zend Avesta, op.cit., p.16 See also the following passage from
the Yasna, cited in R.C. Zaehner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism,
op.cit., pp. 92-93: ‘Kingly Yima, of goodly pastures, the most glorious
of all men born on earth, like the sun to behold among men, for during
his reign he made beasts and men imperishable, he brought it about that
the waters and plants never dried up, and that there should be an
inexhaustible stock of food to eat. In the reign of Yima the valiant
there was neither heat nor cold, neither old age, nor death, nor
disease…’ ‘Yima’s golden reign, in which all men were immortal and
enjoyed perpetual youth, lasted a full thusand years.’
[xiii] J. Darmetester and H.L. Mills, Trans, F. Maz Muller, Ed, The Zend Avesta, op.cit., pp 15-18
[xiv] E.W. West Trans, F. Max Muller, Ed., Pahlavi Texts, Part I, Reprint Edition, Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, New Delhi, 1990, p. 17
[xv] J. Darmetester and H.L. Mills, Trans, F. Maz Muller, Ed, The Zend Avesta, op.cit., p. 5
[xvi] Cited in Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, The Arctic Home in the Vedas, Reprint edition by Arktos Media, 2011, p. 254
[xvii] E.W. West Trans, F. Max Muller, Ed., Pahlavi Texts, op.cit., p. 17, note 5
[xviii] J. Darmetester and H.L. Mills, Trans, F. Maz Muller, Ed, The Zend Avesta, op.cit., p. 18
[xix] Ibid
[xx]
Ibid, p. 20. See also the US (1898) edition of Darmetester’s
translation of the Vendidad, reprinted 1995, edited by Joseph H.
Peterson, page 14, Note, 87
[xxi] R.C. Zaehner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism, op.cit., p.135
[xxii] J. Darmetester and H.L. Mills, Trans, F. Maz Muller, Ed, The Zend Avesta, op.cit., p. 20
[xxiii] Ibid
[xxiv] Ibid
[xxv] Ibid, note 5[xxvi] Ibid, note 4
[xxvii] Encyclopaedia Iranica, op.cit. ‘Jamshid i’ (http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/jamsid-i) and ‘Jamshid ii’ (http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/jamsid-ii)
[xxviii] E.W. West Trans, F. Max Muller, Ed., Pahlavi Texts, op.cit., p. 26
[xxix] Delia Goetz, Sylvanus G. Morley, Adrian Reconis, Trans., Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991, p. 178.
[xxx] Ibid, p. 93
[xxxi] John Bierhorst, The Mythology of Mexico and Central America, Quill/William Morrow, New York, 1990, p. 41
[xxxii] J. Eric Thompson, Maya History and Religion, University of Oklahoma Press, 1990, p. 333
[xxxiii] Genesis 6: 19-20
[xxxiv] Genesis 6: 16
[xxxv] Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 1988, Vol I, p. 162
[xxxvi] Ibid
[xxxvii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derinkuyu_%28underground_city%29
[xxxviii] Hurriyet Daily News, 28 December 2014 (http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/massive-ancient-underground-city-discovered-in-turkeys-nevsehir-.aspx?PageID=238&NID=76196&NewsCatID=375), The Independent, 31 December 2014 (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/vast-5000-yearold-underground-city-discovered-in-turkeys-cappadocia-region-9951911.html).
[xxxix] E.g. see report in The Independent 31 December 2014, op.cit.
[xl] Turkey, Lonely Planet, 2013, p. 478
[xli] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derinkuyu_%28underground_city%29
[xlii] Omer Demir, Cappadocia: Cradle of History, 9th Revised Edition, p. 61
[xliii] For example in Proto-Hittite times up to 2,000 years earlier. See Omer Demir, op.cit., p. 70
[xliv] Ibid, p. 60
[xlv] Ibid, p. 60
[xlvi] Ibid, p. 59
[xlvii] Ibid, p. 61
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