Chapter 4

Summary of Ron's Evidence

All searches must begin with a plan and Ron's plan was simple- just locate the area where the Euphrates River intersected with the southern edge of the Taurus Mountains in south central Turkey because he had noticed the enormous plain that was in that location. From there, begin to look for very large "tells" located near the river. His search began as his flight into Diyarbakir started to descend as it came over the mountains. He photographed an extremely large "tell" which was located along the dry riverbed of the Euphrates (it changes it's course over time as do all rivers.)

As we mentioned earlier, Turkey has a staggering number of archaeological sites (about 40,000), most of which remain unexplored. When Ron, Ronny and Bob arrived and got a taxi to drive them throughout the region, everywhere they looked, they saw this perfectly flat plain was filled with "tells", "tells" and more "tells". Around the city of Diyarbakir is a region of farming, sparsely populated and still politically unstable. Ron knew they had to confine their investigations to daylight hours for safety's sake. Like some of our farming states, there were few major roads and lots of fields so they were limited in approaching the sites of interest to some degree.

Taking a road from Diyarbakir which twisted around until it was in the general area Ron wanted to go, he saw a "tell" which was much larger than the others they had seen. It wasn't the one he had seen from the air, but this one he felt was certainly worthy of investigation. Most of the very old traditions about the tower at Babel tell how a portion of it was struck by lightning and fell to the ground. If this was factual, he felt there would be a "tell" which displayed evidence of such. And this "tell" did have two segments- one that appeared to be structured and relatively symmetrical, like a city; it was much taller than the other "tells" in the area; and the other segment was right next to the first, graduating downward in size away from the main section like a pile of blocks that fell outward and were covered in dirt. Climbing this "tell", they found where a small excavation had been (not recently) done which allowed them to see some of the internal structure. Since this was on the uppermost portion of the "tell", it was either the topmost level of many levels built on the same site, or it was a very ancient site which had very, very high structures within it.

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