History in the RemakingA temple complex in Turkey that predates even the Pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution
"These ruins are so ancient that they predate pottery, domesticated animals, even agriculture in the region"
By Patrick Symmes
"These ruins are so ancient that they predate pottery, domesticated animals, even agriculture in the region"
By Patrick Symmes
http://search. newsweek. com/search? byline=patrick% 20symmes
NEWSWEEK, Feb 19, 2010
http://www.newsweek .com/id/233844
They call it potbelly hill, after the soft, round contour of this final lookout in southeastern Turkey. To the north are forested mountains. East of the hill lies the biblical plain of Harran, and to the south is the Syrian border, visible 20 miles away, pointing toward the ancient lands of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the region that gave rise to human civilization. And under our feet, according to archeologist Klaus Schmidt, are the stones that mark the spot—the exact spot—where humans began that ascent.
Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built.
The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture — the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember — the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.
Göbekli Tepe—the name in Turkish for "potbelly hill"—lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey. After a dozen years of patient work, Schmidt has uncovered what he thinks is definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a "Rome of the Ice Age," as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community. Across the hill, he has found carved and polished circles of stone, with terrazzo flooring and double benches. All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars that evoke the monoliths of Easter Island.
Though not as large as Stonehenge—the biggest circle is 30 yards across, the tallest pillars 17 feet high—the ruins are astonishing in number. Last year Schmidt found his third and fourth examples of the temples. Ground-penetrating radar indicates that another 15 to 20 such monumental ruins lie under the surface. Schmidt's German-Turkish team has also uncovered some 50 of the huge pillars, including two found in his most recent dig season that are not just the biggest, but, according to carbon dating, the oldest monumental artworks in the world.
The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is "unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date," according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford's archeology program. Enthusing over the "huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art" at Göbekli, Hodder—who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites—says: "Many people think that it changes everything…It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong."
Schmidt's thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.
This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a "Neolithic revolution" 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion. As far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thinkers have argued that the social compact of cities came first, and only then the "high" religions with their great temples, a paradigm still taught in American high schools.
Religion now appears so early in civilized life —earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct— that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it,less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that "the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture," and Göbekli may prove his case.
The builders of Göbekli Tepe could not write or leave other explanations of their work. Schmidt speculates that nomadic bands from hundreds of miles in every direction were already gathering here for rituals, feasting, and initiation rites before the first stones were cut. The religious purpose of the site is implicit in its size and location. "You don't move 10-ton stones for no reason," Schmidt observes. "Temples like to be on high sites," he adds, waving an arm over the stony, round hilltop. "Sanctuaries like to be away from the mundane world."
Unlike most discoveries from the ancient world, Göbekli Tepe was found intact, the stones upright, the order and artistry of the work plain even to the un-trained eye. Most startling is the elaborate carving found on about half of the 50 pillars Schmidt has unearthed. There are a few abstract symbols, but the site is almost covered in graceful, naturalistic sculptures and bas-reliefs of the animals that were central to the imagination of hunter-gatherers. Wild boar and cattle are depicted, along with totems of power and intelligence, like lions, foxes, and leopards.
Many of the biggest pillars are carved with arms, including shoulders, elbows, and jointed fingers. The T shapes appear to be towering humanoids but have no faces, hinting at the worship of ancestors or humanlike deities. "In the Bible it talks about how God created man in his image," says Johns Hopkins archeologist Glenn Schwartz. Göbekli Tepe "is the first time you can see humans with that idea, that they resemble gods."
The temples thus offer unexpected proof that mankind emerged from the 140,000-year reign of hunter-gatherers with a ready-made vocabulary of spiritual imagery, and capable of huge logistical, economic, and political efforts. A Catholic born in Franconia, Germany, Schmidt wanders the site in a white turban, pointing out the evidence of that transition. "The people here invented agriculture. They were the inventors of cultivated plants, of domestic architecture," he says.
Göbekli sits at the Fertile Crescent's northernmost tip, a productive borderland on the shoulder of forests and within sight of plains. The hill was ideally situated for ancient hunters. Wild gazelles still migrate past twice a year as they did 11 millennia ago, and birds fly overhead in long skeins.
Genetic mapping shows that the first domestication of wheat was in this immediate area —perhaps at a mountain visible in the distance— a few centuries after Göbekli's founding. Animal husbandry also began near here — the first domesticated pigs came from the surrounding area in about 8000 B.C., and cattle were domesticated in Turkey before 6500 B.C. Pottery followed. Those discoveries then flowed out to places like Çatalhöyük, the oldest-known Neolithic village, which is 300 miles to the west.
The artists of Göbekli Tepe depicted swarms of what Schmidt calls "scary, nasty" creatures: spiders, scorpions, snakes, triple-fanged monsters, and, most common of all, carrion birds. The single largest carving shows a vulture poised over a headless human. Schmidt theorizes that human corpses were exposed here on the hilltop for consumption by birds—what a Tibetan would call a sky burial.
Sifting the tons of dirt removed from the site has produced very few human bones, however, perhaps because they were removed to distant homes for ancestor worship. Absence is the source of Schmidt's great theoretical claim. "There are no traces of daily life," he explains. "No fire pits. No trash heaps. There is no water here." Everything from food to flint had to be imported, so the site "was not a village," Schmidt says. Since the temples predate any known settlement anywhere, Schmidt concludes that man's first house was a house of worship: "First the temple, then the city," he insists.
Some archeologists, like Hodder, the Neolithic specialist, wonder if Schmidt has simply missed evidence of a village or if his dating of the site is too precise. But the real reason the ruins at Göbekli remain almost unknown, not yet incorporated in textbooks, is that the evidence is too strong, not too weak.
"The problem with this discovery," as Schwartz of Johns Hopkins puts it, "is that it is unique."
No other monumental sites from the era have been found. Before Göbekli, humans drew stick figures on cave walls, shaped clay into tiny dolls, and perhaps piled up small stones for shelter or worship. Even after Göbekli, there is little evidence of sophisticated building. Dating of ancient sites is highly contested, but Çatalhöyük is probably about 1,500 years younger than Göbekli, and features no carvings or grand constructions. The walls of Jericho, thought until now to be the oldest monumental construction by man, were probably started more than a thousand years after Göbekli. Huge temples did emerge again — but the next unambiguous example dates from 5,000 years later, in southern Iraq.
The site is such an outlier that an American archeologist who stumbled on it in the 1960s simply walked away, unable to interpret what he saw. On a hunch, Schmidt followed the American's notes to the hilltop 15 years ago, a day he still recalls with a huge grin. He saw carved flint everywhere, and recognized a Neolithic quarry on an adjacent hill, with unfinished slabs of limestone hinting at some monument buried nearby. "In one minute —in one second— it was clear," the bearded, sun-browned archeologist recalls. He too considered walking away, he says, knowing that if he stayed, he would have to spend the rest of his life digging on the hill.
Now 55 and a staff member at the German Archaeological Institute, Schmidt has joined a long line of his countrymen here, reaching back to Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy. He has settled in, marrying a Turkish woman and making a home in a modest "dig house" in the narrow streets of old Urfa. Decades of work lie ahead.
Disputes are normal at the site — the workers, Schmidt laments, are divided into three separate clans who feud constantly. ("Three groups," the archeologist says, exasperated. "Not two. Three!") So far Schmidt has uncovered less than 5 percent of the site, and he plans to leave some temples untouched so that future researchers can examine them with more sophisticated tools.
Whatever mysterious rituals were conducted in the temples, they ended abruptly before 8000 B.C., when the entire site was buried, deliberately and all at once, Schmidt believes.
The temples had been in decline for a thousand years — later circles are less than half the size of the early ones, indicating a lack of resources or motivation among the worshipers. This "clear digression" followed by a sudden burial marks "the end of a very strange culture," Schmidt says.
But it was also the birth of a new, settled civilization, humanity having now exchanged the hilltops of hunters for the valleys of farmers and shepherds. New ways of life demand new religious practices, Schmidt suggests, and "when you have new gods, you have to get rid of the old ones."
http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ G%C3%B6bekli_ Tepe
"These structures not only predate pottery, metallurgy, and the invention of writing or the wheel; they were built before the so-called Neolithic Revolution <http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Neolithic_ Revolution> , i.e., the beginning of agriculture <http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Agriculture> and animal husbandry <http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Animal_husbandry> around 9,000 BC. But the construction of Göbekli Tepe implies organisation of an order of complexity not hitherto associated with pre-Neolithic societies. The archaeologists estimate that up to 500 persons were required to extract the 10–20 ton <http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Metric_ton> pillars (in fact, some weigh up to 50 tons) and move them 100 to 500m to the site. ... It is generally believed that an elite class of religious leaders supervised the work and later controlled whatever ceremonies took place here. If so, this would be the oldest known evidence for a priestly caste — much earlier than such social distinctions developed elsewhere in the Near East.
"Schmidt has engaged in some speculation regarding the belief systems of the groups that created Göbekli Tepe, based on comparisons with other shrines and settlements. He assumes shamanic <http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Shamanism> practices and suggests that the T-shaped pillars may represent mythical creatures, perhaps ancestors<http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Ancestors> , whereas he sees a fully articulated belief in gods only developing later in Mesopotamia <http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Mesopotamia> , associated with extensive temples <http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Temple> and palaces <http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Palace> . This corresponds well with an ancient Sumerian<http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Sumer> belief that agriculture, animal husbandry and weaving had been brought to mankind from the sacred mountain Du-Ku<http://en.wikipedia .org/w/index. php?title= Du-Ku&action=edit&redlink=1> , which was inhabited by Annuna <http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Annuna> [ki]-deities, very ancient gods without individual names. Klaus Schmidt identifies this story as an oriental primeval myth that preserves a partial memory of the Neolithic.
"It is also apparent that the animal and other images give no indication of organized violence ..."
http://www.guardian .co.uk/science/ 2008/apr/ 23/archaeology. turkey
Schmidt says that Gobekli Tepe may well be "the last flowering of <an older> world that [the Neolithic] was about to [supplant]." ...
The site is devoid of the fertility symbols found at other neolithic sites, and the T-shaped columns, while clearly semi-human, are sexless.
"I think here we are face to face with the earliest representation of gods," said Schmidt, patting one of the biggest stones. "They have no eyes, no mouths, no faces. But they have arms and they have hands."
"Look at this", says Vecihi Ozkaya, 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."
NEWSWEEK, Feb 19, 2010
http://www.newsweek .com/id/233844
They call it potbelly hill, after the soft, round contour of this final lookout in southeastern Turkey. To the north are forested mountains. East of the hill lies the biblical plain of Harran, and to the south is the Syrian border, visible 20 miles away, pointing toward the ancient lands of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the region that gave rise to human civilization. And under our feet, according to archeologist Klaus Schmidt, are the stones that mark the spot—the exact spot—where humans began that ascent.
Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built.
The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture — the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember — the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.
Göbekli Tepe—the name in Turkish for "potbelly hill"—lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey. After a dozen years of patient work, Schmidt has uncovered what he thinks is definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a "Rome of the Ice Age," as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community. Across the hill, he has found carved and polished circles of stone, with terrazzo flooring and double benches. All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars that evoke the monoliths of Easter Island.
Though not as large as Stonehenge—the biggest circle is 30 yards across, the tallest pillars 17 feet high—the ruins are astonishing in number. Last year Schmidt found his third and fourth examples of the temples. Ground-penetrating radar indicates that another 15 to 20 such monumental ruins lie under the surface. Schmidt's German-Turkish team has also uncovered some 50 of the huge pillars, including two found in his most recent dig season that are not just the biggest, but, according to carbon dating, the oldest monumental artworks in the world.
The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is "unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date," according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford's archeology program. Enthusing over the "huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art" at Göbekli, Hodder—who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites—says: "Many people think that it changes everything…It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong."
Schmidt's thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.
This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a "Neolithic revolution" 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion. As far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thinkers have argued that the social compact of cities came first, and only then the "high" religions with their great temples, a paradigm still taught in American high schools.
Religion now appears so early in civilized life —earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct— that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it,less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that "the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture," and Göbekli may prove his case.
The builders of Göbekli Tepe could not write or leave other explanations of their work. Schmidt speculates that nomadic bands from hundreds of miles in every direction were already gathering here for rituals, feasting, and initiation rites before the first stones were cut. The religious purpose of the site is implicit in its size and location. "You don't move 10-ton stones for no reason," Schmidt observes. "Temples like to be on high sites," he adds, waving an arm over the stony, round hilltop. "Sanctuaries like to be away from the mundane world."
Unlike most discoveries from the ancient world, Göbekli Tepe was found intact, the stones upright, the order and artistry of the work plain even to the un-trained eye. Most startling is the elaborate carving found on about half of the 50 pillars Schmidt has unearthed. There are a few abstract symbols, but the site is almost covered in graceful, naturalistic sculptures and bas-reliefs of the animals that were central to the imagination of hunter-gatherers. Wild boar and cattle are depicted, along with totems of power and intelligence, like lions, foxes, and leopards.
Many of the biggest pillars are carved with arms, including shoulders, elbows, and jointed fingers. The T shapes appear to be towering humanoids but have no faces, hinting at the worship of ancestors or humanlike deities. "In the Bible it talks about how God created man in his image," says Johns Hopkins archeologist Glenn Schwartz. Göbekli Tepe "is the first time you can see humans with that idea, that they resemble gods."
The temples thus offer unexpected proof that mankind emerged from the 140,000-year reign of hunter-gatherers with a ready-made vocabulary of spiritual imagery, and capable of huge logistical, economic, and political efforts. A Catholic born in Franconia, Germany, Schmidt wanders the site in a white turban, pointing out the evidence of that transition. "The people here invented agriculture. They were the inventors of cultivated plants, of domestic architecture," he says.
Göbekli sits at the Fertile Crescent's northernmost tip, a productive borderland on the shoulder of forests and within sight of plains. The hill was ideally situated for ancient hunters. Wild gazelles still migrate past twice a year as they did 11 millennia ago, and birds fly overhead in long skeins.
Genetic mapping shows that the first domestication of wheat was in this immediate area —perhaps at a mountain visible in the distance— a few centuries after Göbekli's founding. Animal husbandry also began near here — the first domesticated pigs came from the surrounding area in about 8000 B.C., and cattle were domesticated in Turkey before 6500 B.C. Pottery followed. Those discoveries then flowed out to places like Çatalhöyük, the oldest-known Neolithic village, which is 300 miles to the west.
The artists of Göbekli Tepe depicted swarms of what Schmidt calls "scary, nasty" creatures: spiders, scorpions, snakes, triple-fanged monsters, and, most common of all, carrion birds. The single largest carving shows a vulture poised over a headless human. Schmidt theorizes that human corpses were exposed here on the hilltop for consumption by birds—what a Tibetan would call a sky burial.
Sifting the tons of dirt removed from the site has produced very few human bones, however, perhaps because they were removed to distant homes for ancestor worship. Absence is the source of Schmidt's great theoretical claim. "There are no traces of daily life," he explains. "No fire pits. No trash heaps. There is no water here." Everything from food to flint had to be imported, so the site "was not a village," Schmidt says. Since the temples predate any known settlement anywhere, Schmidt concludes that man's first house was a house of worship: "First the temple, then the city," he insists.
Some archeologists, like Hodder, the Neolithic specialist, wonder if Schmidt has simply missed evidence of a village or if his dating of the site is too precise. But the real reason the ruins at Göbekli remain almost unknown, not yet incorporated in textbooks, is that the evidence is too strong, not too weak.
"The problem with this discovery," as Schwartz of Johns Hopkins puts it, "is that it is unique."
No other monumental sites from the era have been found. Before Göbekli, humans drew stick figures on cave walls, shaped clay into tiny dolls, and perhaps piled up small stones for shelter or worship. Even after Göbekli, there is little evidence of sophisticated building. Dating of ancient sites is highly contested, but Çatalhöyük is probably about 1,500 years younger than Göbekli, and features no carvings or grand constructions. The walls of Jericho, thought until now to be the oldest monumental construction by man, were probably started more than a thousand years after Göbekli. Huge temples did emerge again — but the next unambiguous example dates from 5,000 years later, in southern Iraq.
The site is such an outlier that an American archeologist who stumbled on it in the 1960s simply walked away, unable to interpret what he saw. On a hunch, Schmidt followed the American's notes to the hilltop 15 years ago, a day he still recalls with a huge grin. He saw carved flint everywhere, and recognized a Neolithic quarry on an adjacent hill, with unfinished slabs of limestone hinting at some monument buried nearby. "In one minute —in one second— it was clear," the bearded, sun-browned archeologist recalls. He too considered walking away, he says, knowing that if he stayed, he would have to spend the rest of his life digging on the hill.
Now 55 and a staff member at the German Archaeological Institute, Schmidt has joined a long line of his countrymen here, reaching back to Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy. He has settled in, marrying a Turkish woman and making a home in a modest "dig house" in the narrow streets of old Urfa. Decades of work lie ahead.
Disputes are normal at the site — the workers, Schmidt laments, are divided into three separate clans who feud constantly. ("Three groups," the archeologist says, exasperated. "Not two. Three!") So far Schmidt has uncovered less than 5 percent of the site, and he plans to leave some temples untouched so that future researchers can examine them with more sophisticated tools.
Whatever mysterious rituals were conducted in the temples, they ended abruptly before 8000 B.C., when the entire site was buried, deliberately and all at once, Schmidt believes.
The temples had been in decline for a thousand years — later circles are less than half the size of the early ones, indicating a lack of resources or motivation among the worshipers. This "clear digression" followed by a sudden burial marks "the end of a very strange culture," Schmidt says.
But it was also the birth of a new, settled civilization, humanity having now exchanged the hilltops of hunters for the valleys of farmers and shepherds. New ways of life demand new religious practices, Schmidt suggests, and "when you have new gods, you have to get rid of the old ones."
http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ G%C3%B6bekli_ Tepe
"These structures not only predate pottery, metallurgy, and the invention of writing or the wheel; they were built before the so-called Neolithic Revolution <http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Neolithic_ Revolution> , i.e., the beginning of agriculture <http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Agriculture> and animal husbandry <http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Animal_husbandry> around 9,000 BC. But the construction of Göbekli Tepe implies organisation of an order of complexity not hitherto associated with pre-Neolithic societies. The archaeologists estimate that up to 500 persons were required to extract the 10–20 ton <http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Metric_ton> pillars (in fact, some weigh up to 50 tons) and move them 100 to 500m to the site. ... It is generally believed that an elite class of religious leaders supervised the work and later controlled whatever ceremonies took place here. If so, this would be the oldest known evidence for a priestly caste — much earlier than such social distinctions developed elsewhere in the Near East.
"Schmidt has engaged in some speculation regarding the belief systems of the groups that created Göbekli Tepe, based on comparisons with other shrines and settlements. He assumes shamanic <http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Shamanism> practices and suggests that the T-shaped pillars may represent mythical creatures, perhaps ancestors<http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Ancestors> , whereas he sees a fully articulated belief in gods only developing later in Mesopotamia <http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Mesopotamia> , associated with extensive temples <http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Temple> and palaces <http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Palace> . This corresponds well with an ancient Sumerian<http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Sumer> belief that agriculture, animal husbandry and weaving had been brought to mankind from the sacred mountain Du-Ku<http://en.wikipedia .org/w/index. php?title= Du-Ku&action=edit&redlink=1> , which was inhabited by Annuna <http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Annuna> [ki]-deities, very ancient gods without individual names. Klaus Schmidt identifies this story as an oriental primeval myth that preserves a partial memory of the Neolithic.
"It is also apparent that the animal and other images give no indication of organized violence ..."
http://www.guardian .co.uk/science/ 2008/apr/ 23/archaeology. turkey
Schmidt says that Gobekli Tepe may well be "the last flowering of <an older> world that [the Neolithic] was about to [supplant]." ...
The site is devoid of the fertility symbols found at other neolithic sites, and the T-shaped columns, while clearly semi-human, are sexless.
"I think here we are face to face with the earliest representation of gods," said Schmidt, patting one of the biggest stones. "They have no eyes, no mouths, no faces. But they have arms and they have hands."
"Look at this", says Vecihi Ozkaya, 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."
“A living entity, by constitution, has the propensity to be attached to something. We see that if someone has no object of attachment, if he has no children, he transfers his attachment to cats and dogs. This indicates that the propensity for attachment cannot be stopped; rather, it must be utilized for the best purpose.” (Shrila Prabhupada, Teachings of Lord Kapila, Ch 10)
Even though these daily pastimes occurred around five thousand years ago on this planet, they take place eternally in the universe. Just as the sun is always rising somewhere on the earth, the glorious lila of the Supreme Personality of Godhead - 
Depending on the work performed in a previous life, elevation to a higher species and more fortunate conditions can be secured for the upcoming life. Nothing can be considered a more beneficial situation than being in the direct presence of God, who is always with a form. It is not surprising to hear from others the advice that God should be remembered and worshiped, but the details on how that transfer of control over emotion and mental satisfaction should occur is not readily forthcoming. Being in the company of God and caring about His welfare at all times of the day is an ideal way to make good on the professions of faith and claims of religiosity. Mother Devaki and her husband Vasudeva, who is also known as Anakadundubhi, immediately developed an affection for their young child, their savior who even showed His grand Vishnu form to them while still in the prison. 
Being transferred to Vrindavana, Krishna lived under the care of His foster parents Nanda Maharaja and Mother Yashoda during His childhood. Life in Vrindavana was just splendid; every day brought new delights. Krishna was loved by everyone, including His other cowherd friends, both boys and girls. Vrindavana was a farm community, so the residents lived the simple life. Tend to the cows in the morning, take care of the household chores during the day, and all the while sing along to the songs composed by the pure 
Attachment is found in each one of us. Those who are somewhat spiritually inclined but not fortunate enough to take to bhakti-yoga, or 
The fact is that attachment will always be there, even in the state of renunciation. In Arjuna’s case, his desire for renouncing the battlefield was rooted in his attachment to the bodily welfare of those fighting for the opposing army. The first instruction taught to aspiring transcendentalists of the Vedic school is that we are not our bodies. The spirit soul is what counts, and the body can be thought of as a temporary covering, a set of clothes that eventually gets worn out. The inherent attachment is found within the soul, who like a magnetic particle is naturally attracted to the Supreme Spirit, which is an expansion of God that resides within the heart next to the individual soul. But when attachment is directed towards worldly objects, those things relating to the outer covering of the soul, the resulting enjoyment through association is short-lived. When all the juice is sucked out of the paltry enjoyment, the desire for the removal of misery, or tyaga, surfaces once again.
Better than taking to renunciation as a way of avoiding the bitter pill of anger, heartache, defeat, loss and overall sadness is finding a tangible object for attachment. The solution is actually quite clear. When one object finds another that it is most strongly attached to magnetically, it is very difficult to break the bond. In these instances the objects are so attached to one another that it is virtually impossible to separate the two entities. The Supreme Lord Krishna can be thought of as the largest object that is magnetically charged. As individual souls, we are all meant to be attached to Him in some way or another. The service mentality therefore can be purified only when it is directed at Krishna, who can accept any amount of affection from any amount of people simultaneously. What’s so wonderful about this attachment is that it automatically makes us love our fellow man, cats, dogs, and all forms of life even more. Attachment to Krishna, when maintained through steady practice in bhakti, brings about the vision of the paramahamsa, or the topmost transcendentalist who is likened to a supreme swan, who is capable of seeing everything and everyone as being part of Krishna. If Krishna is all-attractive, then naturally anyone who is associated with Him will also be brilliant.
