Perhaps they were, or perhaps they weren’t. Some of the great enclosures of Gobekli Tepe are divided by their pillars or columns into 12 parts, though there is no evidence that these ancient builders were thinking in terms of a zodiac. There were many much earlier cultures, however, who used this division of the sky into 12 segments.Īndrew Collins states that, by at least 2400 B.C.E., and probably long before, the Indus Valley civilization had divided the celestial horizon into 12 parts, and they were using an instrument made of shell to mark off 360 degrees on the horizon. Collins notes that sun dials, and later clocks, were designed to reflect the movement of the sun, and to go clockwise.Ī century or so ago, it used to be thought that the Greeks invented the zodiac, dividing the sky and the seasons into 12 segments. In Islam, on the other hand, during the hajj, pilgrims circumambulate the Kaaba in a counterclockwise direction. In Hindu and Buddhist temples today, circumambulation is always clockwise. Andrew Collins makes the point that these seemed to be designed for circumambulation – as devotees would have walked clockwise around the great circle, they would have been able to view all the carved animals whereas, if they walked counterclockwise, they would have seen no carvings. On some of the stone circles, imaginative depictions of animals are carved on the right sides of each of the great pillars – only on the right side, with no carvings on the left. Obviously, no one today can know for sure what the builders of Gobekli Tepe intended or what they were thinking. They are believed to be the oldest megalithic structures in the world. In his remarkable book, Gobekli Tepe, Genesis of the Gods, Andrew Collins paints a portrayal of the possible cosmic significance of these great mysterious circles of stone pillars, in southeastern Turkey, whose origins go back nearly 12,000 years into the past, to the time of the ending of the last great Ice Age.

Gobekli Tepe by Andrew Collins