Science and wisdom came to Sumer from the Armenian Highlands

Modern Armenia… A small state connecting Europe with Asia. Two millennia ago, it was considered the most powerful in the Near East, comparable to the Roman Empire and the Parthian Kingdom.

Scientific research, archaeological excavations, manuscripts, ancient maps, and even the Bible – all testify that Armenia was the cradle of civilization.

In ancient times, the Sumerians and Egyptians believed that science and wisdom came to them from the Armenian Highlands.

The mysteries faced by historians conducting their research in Armenia sometimes prove insurmountable even for the most modern technologies.

For instance, back in the seventies of the last century, archaeologists discovered a bird figurine made from a material previously unknown to scientists in Eastern Armenia. It is more than three thousand years old. This material cannot be cut by any modern tool.

But how could our distant ancestors create and process such amazing materials? The course of history shows that the development of technologies requires a certain amount of time. How far back in time do the origins of these amazing achievements go?

The bird figurine is currently located in the National Museum in the capital of Armenia — Yerevan. Upon closer study, scientists determined that the composition of the material does not exist on Earth in any compound, moreover, it is not a meteorite.

Another surprising fact is related to items found alongside the bird. There were iron horse bits from the same era. However, there is no patina on them, and moreover, they haven’t rusted over more than three millennia. The paradox is that these bits were created a thousand years before the Iron Age.

These artifacts are not on display; they are kept in the reserves. The reason is more than banal: there’s no room. The museum displays a huge number of ancient finds, from weapons to colored glass vases.

The museum also holds the world’s only footwear that is almost six millennia old. However, as scientists still don’t know much, they can only describe the items found in ancient burials.

Even in the twentieth century, many scientists began to suggest that the so-called “historical period” was actually much longer than previously thought.

Based on astronomical, mythological, and other indirect evidence, it was hypothesized that the first civilizations emerged during the Ice Age.

However, official science was slow to agree with these arguments, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the situation changed.

It turned out that archaeologists had indeed made a sensational discovery: the first civilization emerged not in the Nile Valley, but on the Armenian Highlands twelve thousand years ago.

It is here that agriculture, animal husbandry, and textile production originated. And from there, the art of metal processing and construction with architecture gradually descended into the lowland areas. New foci of civilization arose, including the Sumerians and Egyptians.

The term “Armenian Highlands” as a definition of the place where Eastern and Western Armenia are located was first introduced by the German scholar Otto Herman von Abich. However, today historians often avoid ethnic names for reasons of political correctness.

Many amazing discoveries have also been made in Western Armenia – present-day Turkey, where the population of this part of Armenia lived until the 1915 genocide. Here is the famous mountain of Portasar, which means “navel mountain”. This sounds quite symbolic.

Archaeological excavations around this mountain have revolutionarily changed our understanding of the ancient Neolithic not only of the Middle East but also of Eurasia as a whole. Excavations have been underway here for more than twenty years, led by German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt.

It is here that a civilization was born that became the basis for the stratification of subsequent society. Schmidt discovered an entire temple complex at Portasar, assembled from ancient processed megaliths, dating back to a period when, according to our understanding, humans were primitive and only engaged in hunting.

However, it turned out that here, on the Armenian Highlands, twelve millennia ago, temples were built from processed stone, which is twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids.

Agriculture, sedentary lifestyle, and civilization, according to scientists, originated precisely in this place, in the center of which is located Mount Portasar or Göbekli Tepe, as the Turks call it.

To date, the temples of Portasar represent the oldest cult structures in the world, the construction of which, having started in the Mesolithic era, lasted several millennia.

In the oldest layer, dating back to the eleventh millennium BCE, monolithic stones up to three meters in height were found, collected from unprocessed stone into a round structure. Floors made of processed limestone are lined with low benches along the walls.

People living at the time near Portasar were not just good hunters. They had a good organization of social life. There must have been a hierarchy, since there was already a division of labor, and there were some specialists, for example, stone cutters and builders.

Göbekli Tepe on the Armenian Highlands is the most sensational find of the last centuries, more significant than the excavations of Troy or the discovery of Stonehenge.

Today, only four cult structures with a diameter of up to fifty meters have been excavated here. According to geophysicists, there are sixteen similar structures in the depths of Portasar.

Today it can be said with confidence that later agricultural cultures from Göbekli Tepe were used in Mesopotamia, along the Tigris and Euphrates, as well as in a large area including Syria, Turkey, and Northern Iraq.

Two hundred kilometers from the capital of Armenia, at an altitude of more than one thousand seven hundred meters, is the oldest monument – hundreds of vertically standing stones with through holes in the upper parts. Karahunj is much like Stonehenge, but it is significantly older than its British counterpart.

Scientists have found that the outlines of Karahunj exactly resemble the constellation of the Griffin. In ancient Sumer, as in Armenia, this is what the constellation of the Swan was called. But where did people in antiquity have such astronomical knowledge?

Lectures on doubling the history of mankind have been read in European and American universities for more than a year. In the textbooks of Cambridge and Oxford, diagrams and maps show how civilization moves from the Armenian Highlands to the Middle East and Egypt.

But what made our proto-civilization move from its settled place? Researchers believe it was caused by global climate changes, which led to prolonged droughts.

Representatives of the Göbekli Tepe culture in the tenth millennium BC covered all their structures with earth and moved south in search of glacier-free lands in order to survive, develop their agriculture and culture. And they reached Sinai, the Red Sea, the eastern shores of the Persian Gulf, where they ended their journey.

As astonishing as it may seem, this is precisely how the famous American clairvoyant Edgar Cayce described and dated the events of ancient times. As early as the 1930s, long before the discovery of Göbekli Tepe, Cayce claimed that civilization originated in the eleventh millennium BC.

It should be noted that the resettlement from the Armenian Highlands was not at all limited to the Middle East. In the Anglo-Saxon chronicles, compiled in the ninth century and preserved in the British Historical Museum, it is said that the first inhabitants of the island of Britain were the Britons, who came from Armenia.

The culture that came from the Armenian Highlands lived on a vast territory, the final borders of which are still unknown today. Every year new monuments and facts are discovered, territories expand, and perceptions are enriched.

The past has left us with many mysteries. Neither Armenian nor many foreign researchers have been able to unravel the mystery of the material from which the found artifact – the bird figurine – is made.

Today, a large group of Japanese scientists are studying it. Who knows, maybe they will find the answer. But then there will inevitably arise new questions about how this metal or alloy was obtained in ancient times.

Well, such is the process of cognition, endless, like history itself.

Author unknown, translation: Vigen Avetisyan