seemed incredibly ancient. Eight thousand years old or more. But was that really so ancient? Rob had no idea. How old was the Sphinx? Stonehenge? The pyramids?
His gin and tonic finished, he sat back and thought about his lack of general knowledge. Why didn’t he know the answer to questions like this? Because, obviously, he didn’t have a university education. Unlike his colleagues who had degrees from Oxford and London and UCLA, or Paris or Munich or Kyoto or Austin or wherever, Rob had nothing but his brain and an ability to speed-read-to digest information quickly. He had fled education at the age of eighteen. Despite his single mother’s cries of despair, he had spurned the offers of several colleges and universities, and instead had gone straight into journalism. But who could blame him for this, really? Rob swallowed another mini-pretzel. He’d had no choice. His mum was on her own, his dad had stayed in America being a mean brutal bastard; Rob had grown up poor in the furthest reaches of dull suburban London. From an early age he’d wanted money and status as soon as they were available. He was never going to be like those rich kids he used to envy when he was a lad, able to take four years off to smoke dope and go to parties and drift into comfortable careers at a leisurely pace. He’d always felt a need to get a move on.
The same desire for swift progression had governed his emotional life. When Sally came along, smiling and bonny and clever, he’d grabbed at the happiness, and the stability, she offered. The birth of their daughter, soon after their precocious marriage, seemed like a signal that what he had done was a Very Good Thing. Only then had he realised, belatedly, that his kinetic career might be in conflict with settled domestic tranquillity.
The El Al economy seat was as uncomfortable as ever. Rob sat back, and rubbed his eyes. Then he asked the stewardess for another gin and tonic. A pick-me-up, and a help-me-forget.
Reaching in his bag beneath his feet Rob pulled out two books from Tel Aviv’s best bookshop, one on Turkish archaeology, and one on ancient man. He had a three-hour stopover in Istanbul and then another flight to Sanliurfa, way out in the wild east of Anatolia. Half a day to do some speedreading.
By the time they arrived in Istanbul, Rob was quite drunk-and fully apprised of the recent archaeological history of Anatolia. Particularly important, it seemed, was a place called Catalhoyuk. Pronounced Chattal Hoy-ukk. Discovered in the 1950s, it was one of the oldest villages in the world ever unearthed-maybe nine thousand years old. The walls of this ancient settlement were covered with pictures of bulls and leopards and buzzards. Lots of buzzards. Very old signs of religion. Very strange images.
Rob looked at the pictures of Catalhoyuk. He flicked through a few more pages. Then they landed at Istanbul airport and Rob carouselled his bags and threaded his way through the crowds of jowly Turkish businessmen, stopping at a little store where he bought an American newspaper with one of the latest reports from Gobekli Tepe, and then went straight to the gate to wait for his next flight. Sitting there in the departure lounge he read some more about the dig.
The modern history of Gobekli Tepe began, it said, in 1964, when a team of American archaeologists were combing a remote province of south-east Turkey. The archaeologists had found several odd-looking hills blanketed with thousands of broken flints: a sure sign of ancient human activity. Yet the US scientists did no excavating. As the newspaper phrased it: ‘these guys must now feel like the publisher that turned down the first Harry Potter manuscript’.
Ignoring the snoring Turkish lady asleep in the airport seating, right next to him, Rob read on.
Three decades after the Americans’ near miss, a local shepherd had been tending his flock when he had spotted something odd: a number of strangely-shaped stones in the sunlit dust. They were the stones of Gobekli Tepe.
Tepp-ay, Rob said to himself, remindingly. Tepp-ay. He wandered over to a machine, bought a Diet Coke, then wandered back and went on reading.
The ‘rediscovery’ of the site reached the ears of the museum curators, in the city of Sanliurfa, fifty kilometres away. The museum authorities contacted the relevant government ministry, who in turn got in touch with the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul. And so in 1994 ‘experienced German archaeologist Franz