Review of "Karahan Tepe" by Andrew Collins

Karahan Tepe: ​Civilization of the Anunnaki and the Cosmic Origins of the Serpent of Eden
Andrew Collins | Bear & Company | October 2024 | ISBN: 9781591434788 | $26

​I will confess that when I learned Andrew Collins had recently published a new book on Karahan Tepe, an ancient site of enclosures and statues similar to and coeval with those of nearby Göbekli Tepe (collectively, the Taş Tepeler peoples, after the region where the sites are located), I was not particularly excited about reviewing it. Collins’s books are never wild enough to be fun to discuss, but they also fall just enough outside of the scholarly consensus to make it a slog to work through his reams of information, mostly accurate but outstripping the evidence. 

​Karahan Tepe is an interesting site, perhaps best known in the popular press for its massive statue of a masturbating main. It’s old, it’s full of carvings of people and animals, and it contributes to our growing understanding of the ritual lives of people who lived ten thousand years ago. But it is not, however, a clearly defined guide to the spiritual practices and beliefs of post-Ice Age people.
 
Andrew Collins devotes much of Karahan Tepe to describing the site’s various enclosures and carvings in accurate detail and then adding speculative interpretations of them, some plausible and others less so. He suggests that the irregular oval shapes of the various enclosures are three-dimensional models of serpents’ heads, with the statues within (the T-shaped pillars) as the snakes’ teeth. Maybe? To the best of my knowledge there is no clear evidence for an intentional serpent shape, but since we have no idea how the ancient people who built Karahan Tepe imagined the site, there is also no evidence against it.
 
So much of Collins’s analysis is like that—speculation that is not disproved by evidence but nevertheless lacks positive proof. This is especially evident when Collins beats the drum for his pet idea (which I examined—and rejected—in detail many years ago), that Göbekli Tepe is aligned to the constellation Cygnus and therefore represents a passage to the underworld. Again: Maybe? But any placement of any site matches something in the sky, and we have no evidence that people of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic recognized Cygnus as a bird-shaped constellation, let alone ritually associated it with psychopomp birds leading souls to the beyond. That mythology is only attested much later, in historical times, and certainly not everywhere—the Chinese considered it a tortoise. Even in the area where Collins localizes the myth’s origin, there is little agreement. It’s a vulture in Collins’s telling but a swan to the Greeks and a hen to the Arabs.
 
Similarly, Collins proposes that Göbekli Tepe was aligned to the Milky Way and thus the passage of the soul to the underworld, as appears in many Indigenous mythologies of the Americas. I don’t think it’s possible, even if there were a Milky Way alignment, to derive an ideology from an alignment in the absence of any direct evidence. Similarly, even if we accept his assertion that the builders of Anatolian sites descended from Denisovan admixed people who migrated from Central Asia 20,000 or more years prior—so what? The length of time is simply so vast that any assertion of alleged intellectual continuity becomes ridiculous. The space between them and Göbekli Tepe is twice the distance between Göbekli Tepe and us.
 
But these claims are all from Collins’s previous books. A lot of Karahan Tepe rehashes his earlier books.
 
When he does get to some new material, it’s mostly just an extension of his previous imaginings about Göbekli Tepe, applied to Karahan Tepe. He sees one enclosure as a close match to an ellipse drawn in the Pythagorean musical ratio of 32:27, the minor third, though there is of course no evidence of musical notation or theory at such an early date. He spins the ratio into a whole chapter imagining musical performances in Karahan Tepe with details impossible to derive from evidence.
 
Another chunk of the book, in the second of the book’s eight parts, is devoted to alleged stellar alignments, particularly to Cygnus, which rest on an assertion of uncanny geometrical accuracy from builders who made highly irregular, imperfect buildings. Even the most precisely built buildings’ alignments have a degree of subjectivity without clear evidence of intention, since much rests on where the viewer is supposed to stand and look, and when. Anyway, this is all from his previous books, too, and vastly overstates what we can reasonably conclude about 12,000-year-old beliefs from the practices of more recent peoples, some as recent as 1200 CE. Suffice it to say that “almost certainly” are not words that should repeatedly appear in speculation about how thirteenth-century beliefs in North America relate to Neolithic Anatolian ideology.
 
But, again, this is all from his earlier books.
 
The third part finally starts to get into some new material, but it’s buried in a long travelogue that would be interesting if Collins could refrain from running off on various tangents and wildly speculative ideas. Like the Victorian writers on ophiolatry of yore, he sees serpent worship everywhere, which is somewhat true, and all connected to an original serpent cult that inspired the Bible, which is not true. He devotes a great deal of time to explicating an Anatolian folktale about a serpent, and it is of no relevance whatsoever, since there is no way to connect a modern Turkish story to early Neolithic people. While the tale of Shahmaran, a half-woman, half-serpent creature, does exist in eastern Anatolia, scholars believe it originates in Indo-Iranian and Turkic lore—i.e., east of modern Turkey and thus probably not at Karahan Tepe.
 
He's on more solid ground when he points out serpents in ancient mythology of Anatolia and upper Mesopotamia, but, again—so what? Serpents are so exceedingly common across ancient cultures that there is no conclusion to be drawn about any direct connection back 10,000 years prior to our evidence.
 
Naturally, Collins pushes his ideas beyond reason. He suggests that the Anunnaki were inspired by the builders of Karahan Tepe, that the primeval goddess Tiamat is the serpent of Karahan Tepe, and that the mountain realm where the Anunnaki live is a memory of Karahan Tepe. He talks of shamanic journeys and life after death and animal psychopomps—but all of this speculation suffers the same flaw, assuming that we can project with confidence backward from historic times to a period so far distant that we can say almost nothing definitively about its beliefs.
 
I will confess that eventually I got bored wading through chapter after chapter of alleged celestial alignments, zodiacal symbolism, and towering speculation about what Antique and medieval mythology supposedly implies about the beliefs behind said alignments. For example, Collins tries to tie one enclosure’s axis to a Scorpius alignment, basing his argument for meaning on Hamlet’s Mill. He follows that book’s authors in asserting a universal recognition of the scorpion-mother as the guardian of the Milky Way’s gateway to the netherworld. OK, but the constellation is only a scorpion to the Babylonians and the Greeks who borrowed from them; e.g., in Java it’s a swan and in Hawaii a fishhook.
 
We simply cannot prove that the Mesopotamian constellations derive from Ice Age originals, much less that these were universal. (Just to make things more complex, despite the appearance of scorpions supposedly representing Scorpius at Göbekli Tepe, Collins claims the “original” depiction of Scorpius was as a snake, so scorpions and snakes all represent his ur-myth!) Some of the constellations can be traced back to the Bronze Age and may perhaps be older, but there is no evidence to indicate which ones or by how much. Similarly, there is no evidence to support Collins’s claims that the zodiac dates back before the fifth century BCE, when the Babylonians invented it. It is absent from older Mesopotamian records.
 
Almost the entirety of Part 5, which covers Göbekli Tepe’s Pillar 43 (the one with a vulture on it) is derived from Collins’s earlier books (specifically The Cygnus Key and Denisovan Origins), with the same mistakes repeated. He echoes material from Martin Sweatman’s faulty analysis of the pillar, which, of course, originated in Sweatman’s reading of Collins’s books. (This is masked a bit by Collins attributing many of the claims to British engineer Rodney Hale, who coauthored a paper with Collins in 2013 attacking a different interpretation of the pillar.) All of this I’ve covered before, so I see no reason to repeat what I previously said in the linked reviews. It’s a mixture of plausible claims—that vultures and headless bodies relate to “sky burial” excarnation as later occurred at Çatalhöyük—and claims unsupported by anything but speculation, particularly that the carvings are an exact and accurate map of the stars in a particular heart-shaped projection placing the pole at center.
 
As Karahan Tepe moves forward, the degree to which you find the arguments interesting or plausible depends heavily on how much you accept the preceding ideas. In Part 6, Collins attempts to spin a Neolithic faith of a cosmic serpent embodied in the Milky Way from his previous speculations and the presence of serpents in world mythology. Many animals appear in multiple myths, but most of these never get this kind of attention. Serpents, due to the infamous serpent in Genesis, tend to attract special attention in the West. Bovines, however, which are rather common in myths and legends across the lands where cows are raised, never seem to receive the same attention. Ditto for big cats (lions in Eurasia and Africa, tigers in India, jaguars in the New World, etc.), who, despite their ubiquity, almost never get roped in to fantastical claims about the lost mythology of Atlantis. For that matter, truly ancient constellations that are no longer recognized, such as Argo Navis, play no role in Collins’s thoughts, because they don’t appear in his sky-modeling software.
 
Collins’s argument about the Milky Way as a serpent draws heavily from Indigenous American cosmologies, which have no known connection to Pre-Pottery Neolithic Anatolia, except in the imagination of Collins, who sees both as descendants in opposite directions from a central Asian Denisovan ur-culture. (In a previous book, he identified these putative Denisovan ancestors are a superior, white-skinned race brought low by race-mixing.) He includes a long and irrelevant section on Ohio’s Serpent Mound, speculating that the oval-shaped earthwork near the head of the serpent is a portal to the netherworld in the Milky Way, but he uses nineteenth century sources, which did not include the now mostly obliterated earthwork that appeared on the other side of the oval and enclosed it. Brad Lepper has persuasively argued that the myth symbolized in this set of earthworks was a widespread creation myth where the Great Serpent fertilized First Woman, who then was imbued with the power to create the Earth and everything in it.
 
Similarly, when Collins tries to use Greek examples of serpent-slaying myths to explicate Karahan Tepe, he falls into a trap, since those stories are widely understood to be part of the Indo-European serpent-slaying story (explained by Calvert Watkins years ago in How to Slay a Dragon) and to have originated among the Proto-Indo-Europeans in central Asia. His other example, Marduk slaying Tiamat, is also problematic in that Marduk is a latecomer to mythology (a minor god that Babylonian kings promoted to the head of the pantheon), and many scholars believe Tiamat is also a late creation, sometime after 2000 BCE, a sort of diabolized goddess counterpart to Marduk. Tiamat can’t be traced much farther back than the Akkadian inscription that first mentions her.
 
The section ends with a brief detour to Harran that Collins handles badly. The city’s long history is complex, but the important part is that it was a pagan city venerating the moon god Sin but became known in the Middle Ages as a place of ancient pagan wisdom because it remained pagan (and a refuge for pagans of many faiths) in the face of Christian and Islamic onslaughts. There’s an amusing story about the people of Harran gaining a legal exemption from Islam by identifying as the Sabians of the Qur’an, claiming the Corpus Hermeticum as their holy book, but all of this is medieval legendry that does not, as Collins thinks, prove a continuity of stellar worship going back to the time of nearby Karahan Tepe. The star worship is, by most accounts, a later development, when Babylonian- and Greek-inspired astrology provided the cover of science and reason for the fading pagan faiths Islam gradually squeezed out.
 
Nevertheless, as we enter Part 7, Collins is fully immersed in looking for Karahan Tepe’s influence on Late Antique and early Medieval beliefs: “Is it possible therefore that cosmological beliefs surrounding the Milky Way’s role as the world-encircling serpent managed to survive from the age of Taş Tepeler across the millennia until they were developed more fully by the Chaldeans of Harran, the Zoroastrians of Persia, the Orphic mystery schools of Greece, and, of course, the Ophite Gnostic sects of Anatolia and the Near East?” In short, no. As I previously mentioned in another review, we have difficulty tracing continuities between specific Mycenaean beliefs and practices and those of the Classical Greeks, though we know there were many, and only five hundred years separate them. Only some of the gods share the same names, but not the same relationships. Anyone familiar with Zeus’s wife Diwia and their son Dromios? The Mycenaeans knew them, but not the Greeks. Ten thousand years of “secret” continuity is an inconceivable number.
 
As Collins pushes further into Late Antiquity and Medieval lore, his speculations become even more disconnected from anything related to Karahan Tepe. The justification is the geographic proximity of various Mesopotamian and Levantine sites to eastern Anatolia, but at times Collins stretches the ideas to the point of absurdity, as when he tries to connect the Gnostic sect celled the Petrates, whose beliefs are attested only by Hippolytus, to Karahan Tepe even though the Petrates’ beliefs are very clearly a fusion of Christianity, Hermeticism, and Neoplatonic ideas. Their key figures include Christ, for Christ’s sake.
 
Truthfully, I found this lengthy section with its globe-spanning efforts to connect mythological serpents the least engaging in the book. Collins collects enormous amounts of detail on serpent lore, derived in many cases from Victorian sources, but he has little to no understanding of the relationship between religious and philosophical traditions across time and space. He is like the Victorian writers of snake-cult treatises, unencumbered by the need to consider whether certain faiths derive from or were influenced by others. Hinduism, stemming from Vedic religion, traces back, for instance to Proto-Indo-European pantheons and myths, so finding stories similar to those of other Indo-European cultures in Vedic lore is no independent confirmation of a Neolithic original. The less said about his effort to explain the patently Indo-European connections by claiming that Anatolians 12,000 years ago were actively trading with India and China, the better.
 
Collins has a section on the belief of the Sabeans of Harran that the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre are the tombs of Hermes and Agathodaemon (first told in Abd Al-Latif al-Baghdadi’s Account of Egypt, after 1200 CE, not that he knows that). He goes into a long spiel about how this story is a survival of ancient serpent lore, but it’s just not. The train of logic runs the other way. The Sabeans of Harran, to comport with Islam, held that Idris was their prophet, following the Islamic belief that Idris was also Hermes Trismegistus (Ibn Juljul, Tabaqat al-atibbaʾ 5-10 [987 CE], 5-10, quoting Abu Ma‘shar’s The Thousands, c. 850 CE), the figure they actually venerated. But Hermes was also Enoch, and Enoch was associated with the Watchers and Nephilim, and thus Hermes-Enoch was said to have built the antediluvian pyramids to preserve knowledge from the Flood, adapting a Jewish legend originally told of brick and stone pillars (Ibn Juljul, Tabaqat al-atibbaʾ 5-10, 5-10 [where Hermes builds “pyramids” in the abstract]; Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist 10 [998 CE, where Hermes is buried in the Great Pyramid]). The historical record amply demonstrates that this complex of associations does not emerge until the tenth century CE, and at any rate grows out of Hermeticism. George Syncellus (Chronicle 41) records that Agathodaemon was the son of Hermes, which is how he got roped into the myth; the association with Seth was secondary, due to Enoch’s mission to the Sons of Seth, the name given to the Watchers when later Antiquity turned them from fallen angels into corrupt humans (Al-Mas'udi, Meadows of Gold, ch. 3). But note that Bar Hebraeus, in Chronography 1, pp. 4-6 (c. 1286 CE), attributes the identification of Agathodaemon with Seth to the “ancient Greeks,” by which he likely meant Byzantine writers, his main Greek source for primeval history being the fifth-century monk Annianus, a huge fan of Watchers and Nephilim. The Sabeans allegedly burned animal sacrifices at the pyramids, and this detail shows that their supposed pilgrimages to the pyramids were modeled on medieval practices associated with the Kaaba in Mecca (see Nashwan ibn Sa‘id al-Himyari’s twelfth-century report), not prehistoric cultic survivals. None of this matters terribly much except that Collins has no awareness of any of the ancient or medieval material or its relationship to textual traditions across time and space and thus can’t see the actual and demonstrable path of influence from known sources to known derivatives and adaptations. We don’t need prehistoric ideology to explain it.
 
To that extent, the remaining chapters in the section, which attempt to discover a Late Antique serpent cult at Edessa, somehow tying Mesopotamian gods to Greek Orphism, are unnecessary and of no direct relevance to Karahan Tepe.
 
When he tries to project this back to Karahan Tepe to imagine a fertility cult of phallic worship tied to the center of our galaxy as a place of cosmic creation, I couldn’t make up the speculation that ensues:

In a traditional binary sense, the act of penile erection in a male was something brought about by the actions and presence of a female, emphasizing the idea that women had the power to initiate the process of fertilization. It was therefore possibly the women of the community, the female shamans, who were responsible for ensuring that the Pillars Shrine remained a potent powerhouse of virile energy to mimic that required to connect with the perceived source of cosmic creation in the direction of the Galactic Bulge.

​Insert your own penis joke.
 
The final part of the book at last goes completely off the rails. Collins returns to material from his earlier books, namely claims about the supposed Younger Dryas comet strike and assertions that radiation from the galactic center had something to do with it. This time, Collins tries to argue that the supermassive blackhole in the center of the Milky Way is conscious and directing cyclical cataclysms; or, in Collins’s words: “Is God a supermassive black hole?” I won’t even get into his weird efforts to claim the Orphic cults encoded in their mythology references to the plasma jets of the Sagittarius A* supermassive black hole. Much of his argument centers on accepting Robert Graves’s imaginative reconstruction of the so-called Pelasgian Creation Myth as a genuine pre-Greek layer of myth, but Collins has no idea it is Graves’s poetic reconstruction because he cites it to a self-published online book that treats it as indisputably ancient. Similarly, his ignorance of Islamic lore leads him to place too much weight on a modern Turkish folklore story that the Kaaba originally stood in Anatolia, which is transparently a contemporary localization of the medieval Islamic account of the foundation of the Kaaba. (The Turkish tales appears to combine elements of Adam’s founding of the Kaaba, Abraham’s rebuilding of the Kaaba after the Flood destroyed it, and Enoch’s two pillars of wisdom—all identifiable antecedents needing no Karahan Tepe influence.) I recognized the story from the similar tale in the Akhbār al-zamān, but I assume versions appear in other Arabic accounts, none of which Collins knows or can cite.
 
Similarly, when Collins uses a localized myth that Adam and Eve lived in Harran and invented agriculture there, thus tying Karahan Tepe to the agricultural revolution, he has no notion that the story is only a local variant of a widespread story localized in many places. The Akhbār al-zamān, a thousand years older than Collins’s modern sources, places the same events, for example, in Sri Lanka and Jeddah.
 
Collins does make the connection between the two pillars in the Turkish story and Enoch’s pillars of wisdom, but he reaches for Flavius Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews 1.71) uncritically, mistaking early English translations of their location in the land of “Siriad” for “the Syrian Empire,” which he takes to be the Assyrian lands, including Karahan Tepe, whose T-shaped pillars he believes to be their inspiration. (He also confuses the history of translations, but that is another problem too arcane to discuss here.) Josephus’s Greek text is not referring to Syria but to “Seiridia,” transparently the land of the star Sirius, Seirios in Greek, a reference to Egypt, whose calendar revolved around Sirius’s annual rising. We know this to be the case because the Byzantine monk George Syncellus, writing in Chronicle 41, uses the same word to refer to Egypt in his own passage about Hermes, who is Enoch, setting up pillars of wisdom, and he specifically states that the “Seriadic land” is Egypt. Syncellus derived his material from a Christian forgery of Manetho, not directly from Josephus.
 
Again, Collins knows none of this.
 
Similarly, when he cites Cainan finding antediluvian inscriptions from the Watchers after the Flood in Jubilees (8:3) as a memory of Karahan Tepe’s T-pillars, he ignores the obvious connections to longstanding Mesopotamian traditions about antediluvian carvings going back to the colophon of Ashurbanipal in the seventh century BCE and famously recorded by Berossus in his account of reviving wisdom after the Flood. He placed the antediluvian tablets at Sippara.
 
The final chapters make increasingly wild claims taken from Collins’s other books (he helpfully lists all the previous books he copies from)—that Adam and Eve fell when they ate wheat, not fruit, symbolizing the origins of agriculture; that Eve was a serpent hybrid and mother of serpents (i.e. the infamous “Serpent Seed” theology); and that the Taş Tepeler people were Denisovan hybrids whose otherworldly connections made them the Anunnaki and Watchers of later lore.
 
It’s all rather too much, and too obviously an effort to force archaeology to make the Bible literally true. And in the end, that seems to be what Collins wants, to find a reason to believe that his soul will continue on after death by imagining that ancient people 10,000 years ago had special insight into the spiritual world before they “fell” from grace due to the primal sin of civilization. If only we could be wild and free again we, too, might meet the divine and live in power and glory forever and ever. And like a religious catechism, Collins can’t help repeating the same prayer across book after book, forever, without change.