Tarsus

The head of the statue stared with a constant gaze into the darkness and the endless vista of time. It was a fixed stare created by a craftsman’s hammer and chisel; the genius of bygone days the artisan had captured realism from the hard impenetrable granite material. One could easily imagine the head once alive with thoughts, and fascial emotions now frozen in granite by the artisan. Without a body the appearance of the head with the stoney stare was highlighted as it lay on the bare dark dusty floor. It had been severed violently from its body and forgotten and abandoned, thousands of years ago.

Nonetheless, after an eternity, it was now time for an unbelievable discovery, and a rebirth, and it would change the world forever.

Inch by tiny inch the lid of the chamber was being lifted with great care, the lifting apparatus was handled with careful precision, by all the workers on the archaeological site. The modern city of Mersin was giving up more of its secrets. Secrets from the long-ago ancients, before the Ottomans, Romans, and Byzantines, from the ancient days of the Hittites. When excavators started digging the foundations to build a new hospital, they discovered several meters underground the remains of a building from 5000 years ago – the beginnings of prehistory. When the area provided a great civilization, and the early tropes of trading and the exchange between people of thoughts, ideas and as well as commerce.

Ann Tumbleton watched with awe and excited concentration. She felt like she was a little child again opening her presents on her birthday. Ann was studying for her doctorate in archaeological anthropology and had volunteered for a summer term field trip, a break from her studies at Ankara University. Archaeological anthropology is a branch of anthropology that studies past human cultures and societies through the analysis of material remains, such as artifacts, structures, and landscapes. It involves the excavation and interpretation of these remains to reconstruct the lives of past peoples. This subfield applies archaeological methods to address anthropological questions and understand the origin and development of humankind prior to the invention of writing.

Ann was writing her thesis on the attitudes and customs associated with mortality, and the burial practices of the ancient Anatolian civilization of the Hittites. The accidental discovery by the builders of the remains of the building from the Hittites civilization halted immediately the further construction of the hospital, as by the law of the country, all archaeological ruins were sacred, and no further new construction work could be built directly on top of ancient ruins. The country had sedimentary layers upon layers of civilizations going back more than 7000 years, therefore perseveration was a top priority for both the nation and international community. Obviously, the news of the discovery reached the faculty of the Ankara University for archaeology instantly, and one or two knowledgeable professors were sent immediately to the site. Their expert analysis maintained that the site was constructed over 5000 years was met with studious excitement and glee by many at the University. The government assigned a one-year period to excavate the site and halted any further construction of the hospital.

Slowly and gradually the secrets of the 5000 years ago were exposed from the slow and fastidious digging, every small bucket of soil had to be filtered through a series of tests, allowing nothing to be overlooked. When the digging exposed the strange looking chamber, no one in the educated world of the Hittite civilization had ever witnessed such a strange structure ever before. It raised so much conjecture, and all the experts could not agree. The uncovering of the chamber on the site in archaeological terms was like the discovery of another planet in our solar system. It created unabated excitement amongst the closeknit academic community for archaeology.

Ann felt like a pioneer, an onlooker to a great discovery. She felt privileged to be there in person as a witness. The lifting of the roof of the chamber was a major exercise in engineering; every single motion was measured; it was like taking the lid off a bomb. Immense and painstaking work and effort by numerous people watched, as the roof inched into the tiniest of opening, and the secrets of within were about to be revealed. Inside looked like a tomb, with open steps leading to the floor, and plinth structure situation in the middle of the chamber. Surprisingly, the chamber had collected very little dust or debris. There was very little evidence of any decay whatsoever, which was astonishing. The surrounding walls and the roof had been sealed with precision. On first visual inspection the chamber looked entirely empty.

Before anybody could enter the chamber with its open downward steps precautions were made with sensors, and instruments. To make sure any human activity such as stepping downwards on the steps would not disturb the structure or discover something vulnerable that wasn’t visible to the human eye. The sensors revealed solid structures, without any blemish, or evidence of decay. The structure could have been built in the last year. Since the chamber was build 5000 years ago, it left the technicians bewildered, and in amazement how well the chamber had lasted the rigours of time.

Ann was invited as the lead archaeological anthropologist to take the descend into the chamber with a pair of ladders. She was elected the guinea pig to validate the findings of the instrumentation. Any artifacts or ancient drawings, writings or hieroglyphic symbols were part of Ann’s studies, so the archaeological team considered her the best candidate for the initial visual inspection.

Gingerly descending the ladder into the now open chamber, Ann felt like an intrepid explorer. She imagined how Armstrong felt as he slowly descended the steps on the moon lander to the virgin surface of the moon. Slowly step by step until her final outstretched boot with a sanitized covering, reached the bottom of the chamber. Finally, she planted both feet on the floor of the chamber. Disappointingly, she found no symbols, no writing, no inscriptions on her initial visual inspection. Ann slowly circumvented the chamber, moving carefully around the solid stone plinth in the middle of the chamber.

It wasn’t until she reached the wall with the steps that she saw the object on the floor of the chamber. The object was in the shadow of the steps, and it wasn’t until Ann was right on top of object, that she recognized the object as a severed head from a statue.

Ann could not touch it. The artifact was too precious to touch by that of a human being, it would need to be handled by artificial sanitized equipment, and placed carefully in a vacuum, to avoid any harm by the natural but corrosive elements of the environment. It would eventually be extracted days later from its nearly eternal resting place, and placed with the other artifacts in locked storage, after endless photographs and x-rays were taken of the head.

The photographs were distributed around the world to all the experts of Hittite culture, and it was immediately recognized that this statue head did not come from that period of time. Every status of the Hittite civilization was recognizable with its helmet or cone shaped headgear, and the gods ordained with their crowns of aurora. The head was human like, and life like copy without any headgear. The discovery was not compatible with anything found previously from this ancient civilization, it was like finding a modern-day motorcycle crash helmet, amongst the buried ruins of Petra.

Ann and all the archaeological anthropologists would have been even more alarmed if they had witnessed the scene from inside of the dark locked room containing all the artifacts unearthed from the ancient Tarsus site, the crate that contained the vacuumed packed statue head started to omit a bright yellow glow.