This, I say, was my original interpretation: that the Hittites had taken over parts of the religion of their predecessors at Karatepe, and had made inscriptions upon Hattian figurines to this effect. But the more I considered the evidence (which is too complex to detail here), the more I was inclined to believe that the figurines helped to explain how Karatepe remained an island of culture long after the fall of the Hittite empire. What force will keep invaders at bay over a long period? Not, in this case, the force of arms; the evidence at Karatepe reveals an artistic, not a military culture. Sheer indifference? Why should they be indifferent? Through Karatepe, Zinjirli and Carchemish lay the road to the south, to Syria and Arabia. No; it seemed to me there was only one force strong enough to hold back an ambitious and warlike nation: superstitious fear. Surely the power of Karatepe and its neighbours was the power of some mighty religion—some religion of magic? Possibly Karatepe was a recognized centre of magical culture, like Delphi. Hence those strange reliefs of bird-headed men, of strange, beetle-like creatures, of winged bulls and lions?
Reich disagreed with me, and his disagreement was based upon his dating of the figurines. He claimed that, in spite of their excellent state of preservation, they were many thousands of years older than the proto-Hattian culture. He later verified this beyond all doubt with the use of his ‘neutron dater’. Well, I was willing to be corrected; I was not entirely happy with my own provisional dating of the figurines. But an immense problem remained. As far as we know, there was no civilization whatever in Asia Minor before 3000 BC Further south, civilization dates back to 5000 BC; but not in Turkey. So who made the figurines, if not the proto-Hattians? Did they come from further south? If so, where?
During the first two months that I spent with him, Reich continued to work on his ‘neutron dater’, and used my figurines as basic testing material. But here absurd difficulties arose. The dater showed itself remarkably accurate with samples of potsherd from Sumer and Babylon, where we had means of cross-checking its results. But they had little success with the figurines. At least, their results were so extra-ordinary as to be obviously inaccurate. The neutron beam was directed at minute fragments of stone dust in the cracks and hollows of the figurines. From the ‘weathering’ and decay of these fragments, the dater should have been able to give us a rough estimate of how long ago the basalt was carved. It failed completely; the needle of the indicator swung to its furthest limit—about 10,000 BC! Reich talked about increasing the range of the indicator, simply out of curiosity, to see what date it would finally arrive at. In fact, he actually doubled its range, by some fairly simple adjustments. The needle still swung to its limit with the same unhesitating speed. It was becoming insane, and Reich began to wonder if he had made some elementary error. Perhaps the dust had not been produced by carving?—in which case, the dater was attempting to give us the age of the basalt itself! At all events, Reich left his assistants the task of constructing a dial that would show anything up to a million years—an immense task that would take most of the summer. And then we made our expedition to Karatepe, to try to investigate the problem at its source.
Yes…the source of the problem. How incredible it now seems as I tell the story! How is it possible to believe in simple ‘coincidence’ in the light of these facts? For my two ‘problems’ were converging: the problem of my friend’s suicide, and the problem of the basalt figurines. When I think back upon that summer, it is impossible to believe in a materialistic historical determinism.
Let me try to place the events in their order. We arrived at Kadirli on April 16th. On the 17th, we established a camp at Karatepe. Admittedly, there was nothing to stop us from commuting between Karatepe and our comfortable hotel at Kadirli. But our workmen had to stay in the nearest village, and we decided that it might be better if we spent most of our time at the site of the excavation. Besides, all the romantic in me revolted at the idea of leaving the second millennium BC and plunging back into the late twentieth century every evening. So we set up our tents on a level space of ground near the top of the mound. From below us came the perpetual roar of the Pyramus river, with its swirling yellow waters. The electronic probe was set up on top of the mound.
I should say a word about this instrument: Reich’s invention, that has since revolutionized the science of archaeology. Fundamentally it is no more than an X-ray, whose principle is similar to that of the mine detector. But a mine detector is only able to detect metal, and an X-ray will only be stopped by some hard, opaque body. Since the earth itself is hard and opaque, the old X-ray principle was of no use in archaeology. Moreover, the things that interest archaeologists—stones, earthenware and the rest—have more or less the same molecular structure as the surrounding earth, so they would hardly show up on an X-ray plate.
Reich’s modification of the electronic laser would penetrate to a depth of three miles, and its principle of ‘neutron feed-back’ meant that it immediately indicated any object of regular shape—a stone slab, for example. The only problem then was to dig down to the object, and this could be done fairly easily with our robot ‘moles’.
It should not be difficult to imagine my state of excitement on the day we set out for Karatepe. Fifteen years of hard digging had failed to reveal any more basalt figurines, or to yield any clue to their source. The sheer volume of earth to be excavated made the problem apparently insoluble. Reich’s invention solved it with a beautiful simplicity.
And yet, for the first three days, the results were disappointing. A probe taken directly below the old diggings revealed nothing. A further half day was occupied in moving the probe to another site a hundred yards away. This time I was certain that something would be revealed—and I was mistaken. Reich and I looked gloomily at the plain below us, then at the enormous bulk of the electronic probe, and wondered how many times it would have to be moved before we made a ‘find’.
On the third evening, we received a visit from our two Turkish colleagues, Fu’ad and Darga. We decided to fly back into Kadirli for a meal at the hotel. Our feelings of irritability—due to our suspicion that they were there to spy on us for the Turkish government—soon vanished, for they were both full of warmth, sympathy and eager questionings. After an excellent meal and some good claret, the day’s disappointments seemed less important. Afterwards, we retired to the visitors’ lounge, which we had to ourselves, and drank Turkish coffee and brandy. It was at this point that Dr. Muhammed Darga revived the topic of suicide. He had come armed with facts and figures this time. I shall not attempt to detail the discussion that followed—it went on until well after midnight—but it certainly seemed to indicate that Darga’s theories about ‘biological decay’ were not as wild as they sounded. How, said Darga, could we account for this tremendous rise in the world suicide rate if we stuck to our view that it was simply a matter of ‘civilization neurosis’? Too much security, lack of real purpose? But there was still plenty of ‘challenge’ in the modern world, and psychology had made tremendous advances in the past fifty years. The crime rate was far below what we might expect from the world’s overcrowding. In the first half of the twentieth century, the crime rate and the suicide rate had risen together. So why had the crime rate dropped while the suicide rate had increased so dramatically? It wasn’t good sense. Suicide and crime had always been connected in the past. In the first half of the twentieth century, the high suicide rate was partly due to crime, since one third of all murderers committed suicide. No, said Darga, this was a matter of some strange law of historical decay that only Spengler had suspected. Individual men are merely the cells in the great body of civilization; and, as with the human body, the rate of decay increases steeply with age…
I had to admit that he had me more than half convinced. At half past midnight, the four of us parted on the best of terms, and our two helicopters separated in the moonlight above Kadirli. We were back at the excavation by one o’clock.
It