Is this too modest in my expectations? Bricks revisited

Creation vs. Evolution : Bricks at Göbekli Tepe or Close? · Is this too modest in my expectations? Bricks revisited · Correction from Yesterday · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Jericho and Babel Contemporary?

[Update : Bad idea at the end, see correction from next day]

And each one said to his neighbour: Come, let us make brick, and bake them with fire. And they had brick instead of stones, and slime instead of mortar.

I was asking the other day, what about bricks for stone and bitumen for mortar in Göbekli Tepe?

Here is a little wikipedian trail, but rammed earth might still be too little for brick to be verified, especially bricks baked with fire.

The Urfa man, also known as the Balıklıgöl statue, is an ancient anthropomorphological statue found in excavations in Balıklıgöl near Urfa, in the geographical area of Upper Mesopotamia, in the southeast of modern Turkey.[1][2] It is dated circa 9000 BC to the period of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, and is considered as "the oldest naturalistic life-sized sculpture of a human".[3] It is considered as contemporaneous with the sites of Göbekli Tepe (Pre-Pottery Neolithic A/B) and Nevalı Çori (Pre-Pottery Neolithic B).[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfa_Man

Ah, Urfa is after all in "Upper Mesopotamia" and therefore in Mesopotamia, a k a Shinar. It is 80 km East of the Euphrates river.

Now, a little further down we see the locations:

The statue was found during construction work, and the exact location of the find has not been properly recorded, but it may be coming from the nearby Pre-Pottery Neolithic A site of Urfa Yeni-Yol.[1] This is not far from other known Pre-Pottery Neolithic A sites around Urfa: Göbekli Tepe (about 10 kilometers), Gürcütepe.[1] It is reported that it was discovered in 1993 on Yeni Yol street in Balıklıgöl, at the same location where a Pre-Pottery Neolithic site was investigated from 1997.[5]

So, I wanted to look up Gürcütepe.

Gürcütepe is a Neolithic site on the southeastern outskirts of Şanlıurfa in Turkey, consisting of four very shallow tells along Sirrin Stream that flows from Şanlıurfa. All four hills are now covered by modern buildings, so they are no longer recognizable. In the late 1990s a German archaeological team under the direction of Klaus Schmidt carried out soundings on all four hills and made extensive excavations on the second hill seen from the east.

Originally it was assumed that the four hills were settled in a specific time sequence, that one of these settlement phases would coincide with the nearby Gobekli Tepe. However, the excavations have indicated that all four hills were settled during the PPNB period; the easternmost hill is from the later PPNC period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCrc%C3%BCtepe

So, when was PPNB (pre-pottery neolithic B)?

Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) is part of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, a Neolithic culture centered in upper Mesopotamia, dating to c. 10,800 – c. 8,500 years ago, that is, 8,800–6,500 BCE.[1] It was typed by Kathleen Kenyon during her archaeological excavations at Jericho in the West Bank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Pottery_Neolithic_B

A bit later than Göbekli Tepe, then, starts about when GT ends.

But if we get back to Gürcütepe and then look at the German text of "same article" (on wiki, each subject has its own article in each language, even if a language has an article starting out as translation from another one, it is subsequently modified by wikipedians on that language) ...

Er besteht aus vier sehr flachen Tells entlang eines Baches, der von Şanlıurfa aus in die Harran-Ebene fließt. Alle vier Hügel sind heute moderner überbaut und nicht mehr zu erkennen. Ende der 1990er Jahre wurden von einem deutschen Archäologenteam unter Leitung von Klaus Schmidt auf allen vier Hügeln Sondagen und auf dem von Osten aus gesehen zweiten Hügel auch flächige Ausgrabungen vorgenommen. Alle vier Hügel waren während des PPNB, nur der östlichste Hügel auch in PPNC besiedelt. Es wurden Stampflehmgebäude mit Raumunterteilung neben größeren Gemeinschaftsbauten gefunden.

And what does Stampflehmgebäude mean?

Rammed earth, also known as taipa[1] in Portuguese, tapial or tapia in Spanish, pisé (de terre) in French, and hangtu (Chinese: 夯土; pinyin: hāngtǔ), is a technique for constructing foundations, floors, and walls using natural raw materials such as earth, chalk, lime, or gravel.[2] It is an ancient method that has been revived recently as a sustainable building material used in a technique of natural building.

Rammed earth is simple to manufacture, non-combustible, thermally massive, strong, and durable. However, structures such as walls can be laborious to construct of rammed earth without machinery, e. g., powered tampers, and they are susceptible to water damage if inadequately protected or maintained.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rammed_earth

Not identic to baked bricks ... but could baked bricks deteriorate over time to look like rammed earth? Or shall one rather say that one needs to look further till one finds what archaeologists would recognise as baked brick?

Does Biblical Hebrew have a phrase for rammed earth? Could fire have been used on top of ramming? I'm, so far, at a loss.

Obviously, rammed earth and baked bricks have some qualities in common and perhaps baked bricks was not a success at first, so they used rammed earth instead eventually - only succeeding later.

Mixing things with the earth could involve bitumen? Not sure.

Oh, one thing more. Urfa near Euphrates is 396.12 km or 246.14 miles nearly due West of Mossul - where Niniveh is. On the Tigris.

And he was a stout hunter before the Lord. Hence came a proverb: Even as Nemrod the stout hunter before the Lord. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babylon, and Arach, and Achad, and Chalanne in the land of Sennaar. Out of that land came forth Assur, and built Ninive, and the streets of the city, and Chale.

37°13′23″N 38°55′21″E = Göbekli Tepe
36°21′34″N 43°09′10″E = Nineveh (as archaeologists have identified it)

That's it for today on this blog./HG