Gbekli Tepe: The Dawn of Civilization

[wnylib]

20. Absence of sacrifice is not an indicator of

absence of ritual. Rituals can take many forms. Feasting itself is often a ritual. Some religious holidays are designated by the term "feast" or "festival" and are celebrated by feasting, without sacrifices.

Regarding the possibility of burnt offerings, not all sacrifices were burned. There was an ancient custom of ritually sacrificing a bull and bathing in its blood, long before the bull cult in Zoroastrianism and before it was picked up by Romans from Persia. Also a similar cult of sacrificing wild boars. (I have often thought that was the basis of pork becoming a forbidden food in Judaism, because of its religious meaning among Gentiles.)

There should have been some fires burning, to illuminate the stones and to cook the meat that was eaten. Could they have been used for burning a sacrifice? We don't know, but by the time of this site, fires for cooking, heating, and illumination had been common for several millennia, back to 900,000 years ago among our Homo erectus ancestors. Since there are many animal bones and depictions, they were eating meat at this site.

I don't think we can rule out religion as a purpose for men gathering at this site for feasts any more than we can definitively say that it was for religious ceremony.

But we do know that many other locations in the world had sites that were ceremonial religious gathering points prior to the development of those locations into cities and civilizations.