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Ancient Stone Structures In Saudi Arabia ('Gates'; Mustatils; Etc.)

blessmycottonsocks

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Petroglyphs discovered in Saudi Arabia depict hunters with a pack of hounds, some of them on leashes. ... Also, the proximity to the enigmatic structures known as "gates" and similarly dated to at least 9,000 years ago, show that Göbekli Tepe wasn't the only flourishing and coordinated culture on the cusp between the palaeolithic and mesolithic eras.

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www....ence/saudi-arabia-gates-google-earth.amp.html

See Also:
Nearly 400 Ancient Monuments Have Been Found in Saudi Arabia Lava Fields
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-new-type-of-ancient-monument-has-been-found-in-saudia-arabia
 
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Here's some more descriptive bits from the New York Times article cited above.
Hundreds of Mysterious Stone ‘Gates’ Found in Saudi Arabia’s Desert
By Nicholas St. Fleur
Oct. 19, 2017

Now, archaeologists have uncovered nearly 400 previously undocumented stone structures they call “gates” in the Arabian desert that they believe may have been built by nomadic tribes thousands of years ago.

“We tend to think of Saudi Arabia as desert, but in practice there’s a huge archaeological treasure trove out there and it needs to be identified and mapped,” said David Kennedy, an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia and author of a paper set to appear in the November issue of the journal Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy.

“You can’t see them very well from the ground level, but once you get up a few hundred feet, or with a satellite even higher, they stand out beautifully.”

Since 1997, Dr. Kennedy has flown planes and helicopters over Saudi Arabia’s neighbor Jordan, photographing the angular and wheel-like structures scattered over its lava field or harrat. Not much is known about the people who built the edifices, but they are thought to have constructed them at least 2,000 years ago and maybe as far back as 9,000 years ago ... They are believed to be the ancestors of the modern-day Bedouin people in the region. ...

“Absolute bafflement.” That’s what Dr. Kennedy said he felt when he first saw the satellite images. Suddenly, he was confronted with structures quite different from anything he had ever seen before. He called them gates because when looked at horizontally, they resemble a simple fence with two thick upright posts on the sides connected by one or more long bars.

“They don’t look like funerary, for disposing of dead bodies. They don’t look like structures where people lived, and they don’t look like animal traps,” he said. “I don’t know what they are.” ...

For nearly a decade, he has painstakingly cataloged nearly 400 gates. ... The longest gate he had identified was more than 1,600 feet long, though most were between 160 and 500 feet long. Sometimes the posts were as thick as 30 feet. ...
FULL STORY: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/science/saudi-arabia-gates-google-earth.html
 
Subsequent field work and analysis revealed these mustatils are among the oldest stone structures known.

AUGUST 25, 2020
Survey of mustatils shows them to be some of the oldest stone structures in the world

... Mustatils are fence-like structures constructed by people thousands of years ago in what is now Saudi Arabia by piling rocks to form low walls—the walls were then formed in the shape of rectangles. In most cases, most of the mustatils that have been identified cannot be made out from the ground—modern study involves airplanes and satellite imagery.

In the years after they were first discovered, mustatils were known as gates, because as seen from an airplane, they resemble the sort of gates used to pen animals. More recently, they have been renamed as mustatil, which means "rectangle" in Arabic. In this new effort, the researchers carried out both a survey of all of the known mustatils (using satellite images) and then conducted site visits. And in one of the site visits, they received permission to collect charcoal residue, which they used to date one of the mustatils to around 5000 BC. ...

In all, the researchers documented 104 mustatils along the southern edges of the Nefud Desert in Saudi Arabia. They acknowledge that there are likely many more to be found in other parts of the country. They noted that the mustatils were located on a variety of terrain—some were even on the sides of volcanoes. They did not find any evidence that might hold clues as to the purpose of the structures, though some have suggested they might be a form of kite: stone enclosures built to trap animals. ...
SOURCE: https://phys.org/news/2020-08-survey-mustatils-oldest-stone-world.html
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract from the 2020 summary article on the survey and research. The full article is accessible at the link below.

Monumental landscapes of the Holocene humid period in Northern Arabia: The mustatil phenomenon
Huw S Groucutt, Paul S Breeze, Maria Guagnin, et al.
The Holocene
Volume: 30 issue: 12, page(s): 1767-1779
First Published August 17, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1177/0959683620950449

Abstract
Between 10 and six thousand years ago the Arabian Peninsula saw the most recent of the ‘Green Arabia’ periods, when increased rainfall transformed this generally arid region. The transition to the Neolithic in Arabia occurred during this period of climatic amelioration. Various forms of stone structures are abundant in northern Arabia, and it has been speculated that some of these dated to the Neolithic, but there has been little research on their character and chronology. Here we report a study of 104 ‘mustatil’ stone structures from the southern margins of the Nefud Desert in northern Arabia. We provide the first chronometric age estimate for this type of structure – a radiocarbon date of ca. 5000 BC – and describe their landscape positions, architecture and associated material culture and faunal remains. The structure we have dated is the oldest large-scale stone structure known from the Arabian Peninsula. The mustatil phenomenon represents a remarkable development of monumental architecture, as hundreds of these structures were built in northwest Arabia. This ‘monumental landscape’ represents one of the earliest large-scale forms of monumental stone structure construction anywhere in the world. Further research is needed to understand the function of these structures, but we hypothesise that they were related to rituals in the context of the adoption of pastoralism and resulting territoriality in the challenging environments of northern Arabia.
SOURCE / FULL REPORT: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0959683620950449
 
The latest hypothesis about these mustatils' purpose suggests they were ritual sites associated with a cattle cult.
Mysterious 7,000-year-old stone structures may be part of prehistoric cattle cult

Sprawling rectangular structures scattered across northwest Arabia and dating back more than 7,000 years may have been part of a prehistoric cattle cult, researchers have found.

More than 1,000 of the mysterious structures, referred to as mustatils (an Arabic word meaning "rectangle"), have been documented in Saudi Arabia. While their appearance varies, they are usually rectangular in shape and often consisting of two platforms connected by two walls. Archaeological work indicates that some of the mustatils had a chamber in the center made of stone walls surrounding an open area with a standing stone in the center. ...

"The mustatils of northwest Arabia represents the first large-scale, monumental ritual landscape anywhere in the world, predating Stonehenge by more than 2,500 years," Melissa Kennedy, assistant director of the Aerial Archaeology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia project (AAKSA), said in a statement.

"These structures can now be interpreted as ritual installations dating back to the late sixth millennium B.C., with recent excavations revealing the earliest evidence for [a] cattle cult in the Arabian Peninsula," a team of researchers wrote in a paper published April 30 in the journal Antiquity. ...

FULL STORY:
https://www.livescience.com/stone-structures-in-arabia-prehistoric-cattle-cult.html

PUBLISHED REPORT:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...stern-arabia/80E2AD8B538C268E7CA5C3C29CB4EC52
 
Newly published research describes a different type or category of ancient stone structures in northwestern Saudi Arabia. These are funerary sites consisting of similarly-shaped stone structures located along travel routes. The researchers refer to them as "funerary avenues."
4,500 year-old avenues lined with ancient tombs discovered in Saudi Arabia

Archaeologists have discovered a 4,500-year-old highway network in Saudi Arabia lined with well-preserved ancient tombs.

Researchers from the University of Western Australia have carried out a wide-ranging investigation over the past year, involving aerial surveys conducted by helicopter, ground survey and excavation and examination of satellite imagery.

In findings published in the Holocene journal in December, they said the "funerary avenues" spanning large distances in the northwestern Arabian counties of Al-'Ula and Khaybar had received little examination until quite recently. ...

"The people who live in these areas have known about them for thousands of years," researcher Matthew Dalton told CNN. "But I think it wasn't really known until until we got satellite imagery that just how widespread they are." ...

Dalton said the funerary avenues, which he had seen from a helicopter, stretched for hundreds, "maybe even thousands of kilometers" and that the same routes were often followed by those traveling along the main roads of today. ...

The tombs themselves are mostly either pendant-shaped or ring burials. Ring tombs involve a cairn surrounded by a wall of up to two meters in height, while pendant tombs have "beautiful tails."

Using radiocarbon dating, the researchers determined that a concentrated group of samples dated back to between 2600 and 2000 BC, although the tombs continued to be reused until around 1,000 years ago. ...

The researchers think the use of the routes long preceded the tombs, and are still not sure exactly why the tombs were built along the route ...
FULL STORY: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/saudi-arabia-discovery-scli-scn-intl/index.html
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract for the funerary avenues research report. The full report is accessible at the link below.


Dalton M, McMahon J, Kennedy MA, et al.
The Middle Holocene ‘funerary avenues’ of north-west Arabia.
The Holocene. December 2021.
doi:10.1177/09596836211060497

Abstract
The desert regions of the Arabian Peninsula and Levant are criss-crossed by innumerable pathways. Across large areas of north-west Arabia, many of these pathways are flanked by stone monuments, the vast majority of which are ancient tombs. Recent radiometric dating indicates that the most abundant of these monuments, elaborate and morphologically diverse ‘pendant’ structures, were constructed during the mid-to-late third millennium BCE. Thousands of kilometres of these composite path and monument features, ‘funerary avenues’, can be traced across the landscape, especially around and between major perennial water sources. By evidencing routes of human movement during this period, these features provide an emerging source for reconstructing important aspects of ancient mobility and social and economic connectivity. They also provide significant new evidence for human/environment interactions and subsistence strategies during the later Middle Holocene of north-west Arabia, and suggest the parallel existence of mobile pastoralist lifeways and more permanent, oasis-centred settlement. This paper draws upon the results of recent excavations and intensive remote sensing, aerial and ground surveys in Saudi Arabia to present the first detailed examination of these features and the vast cultural landscape that they constitute.

SOURCE / FULL REPORT: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09596836211060497
 
The Nabateans rose to prominence later (the last few centuries BCE). However, both they and whatever earlier culture(s) constructed the stone structures described above illustrate a significant point - there's still relatively little known about the prehistoric / ancient cultures that inhabited the Arabian Peninsula. For centuries scholarly attentions have focused on Egypt (to the west), the Levant (to the north / northwest), and Mesopotamia (to the northeast / east).

I suspect the Arabian Peninsula doesn't represent the blank space in human affairs Western historians, archaeologists, etc., have left it by way of omission.
 
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220704-a-mysterious-cult-that-predates-stonehenge

A mysterious cult that predates Stonehenge

By Demi Perera5th July 2022

Spread over a vast, remote landscape in north-western Saudi Arabia are millennia-old archaeological remains that could change our understanding of prehistory.

The car was gliding smoothly along the immaculately maintained highway in AlUla, a region in north-western Saudi Arabia, when my driver abruptly veered off the road. "I missed the turning," he said. I looked out of the window in confusion as I couldn't see an obvious bend. "Here," he exclaimed, as the car jolted across basalt rocks to join a barely discernible path into the desert.

We drove into a vast, flat landscape. A bright blue sky enclosed us on all sides and a smattering of white clouds hung low. After a few minutes, we stopped by acircle of stacked stones. I climbed out of the car, waiting to meet Jane McMahon, part of a team of archaeologists from the University of Western Australia that has been working in AlUla since 2018. All around me was an arid plain of grey-black rocks lightly dusted in pink-hued sand. There was something otherworldly about it all: the lack of a single tree or a blade of grass; the stillness of the air that was only occasionally interrupted by a bitter gust of wind that chilled you to the bone.

I'd come here because recent discoveries in AlUla are shining a light on a fascinating period of history in Saudi Arabia. Since the nation only opened for international research a few years ago (and to tourists in 2019), many of its ancient sites are being studied for the first time. While historians are familiar with the ruins of the 2,000-year-old cities Hegra and Dadan and their place on the Incense Route (Hegra's tombs and monuments are a Unesco World Heritage Site), they didn't have much knowledge about the civilisation that came before, until now.

What has been discovered is that spread over AlUla's vast, remote landscape are millennia-old archaeological remains that could change our understanding of prehistory. Work by McMahon and her colleagues is shedding light on some of the earliest stone monuments in world history – predating Stonehenge and the earliest pyramid in Giza.

When McMahon arrived, she explained that the circle of rocks next to me was the remains of a house occupied in the Neolithic period (from 6000 to 4500 BCE), and that this area was once scattered with thriving settlements. Until recently, the prevailing wisdom was that this region had little human activity until the Bronze Age after 4000 BCE. But McMahon and her colleagues' work has unearthed a very different story: that Neolithic Saudi Arabia was a dynamic, intensely populated, complex landscape spread over a vast area.

Around me were more than 30 dwellings and tombs, and that was just a tiny fraction of the remains here. I tried to imagine the landscape as it may have been thousands of years ago: green, lush and teeming with people as they moved noisily round, herding goats and calling out to each other.

"The climate and inert landscape of Saudi Arabia means most of the archaeology is pretty well preserved on the surface from 5,000 to 8,000 years ago. So exactly as you see it is how it was all that time ago," McMahon said, explaining that understanding more about the lives of these early peoples could also shed light on how the large, dense settlements of Hegra and Dedan developed, and how cultural and technological changes in the region, such as irrigation farming, metalworking and written texts, came about over the following millennia.
"The cultural changes that took place following the Neolithic are huge, but we don't know a lot of how those changes happened," she said.
However, even in the hands of such experienced archaeologists, one AlUla discovery has continued to elude explanation. Spread over an area of a staggering 300,000 sq km and built to a fairly consistent type, are 1,600 monumental rectangular stone structures that also date to the Neolithic period. Initially named "gates" due to their appearance from the air, the structures were later renamed "mustatil", which translates to "rectangle" in Arabic.

"It makes the mind race that we have structures as big as five to six football fields, made of thousands of tonnes of stone, that not only cover such as massive geographic region but that also are 7,000 years old," said Dr Hugh Thomas, co-director of Aerial Archaeology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Projects (AAKSAU). He has been working alongside McMahon for the past two years conducting aerial archaeology surveys and targeted excavations to understand the mustatil's purpose.

Mustatil are certainly impressive, and the only real way to get a sense of their size is from the air. When I flew over them in a helicopter, I could see the large stones laid out in straight lines across the sand, about the length of four football fields and a width of at least two.
"In my opinion, mustatil are some of the most unique archaeological structures so far identified in the world," Thomas said. "When we look at other structures dating to the Neolithic that are just as impressive in their construction, I am hard-pressed to think of any that cover such a large geographic region."

While Thomas's team has recorded mustatil of varying sizes and complexity, they've also noted consistent characteristics. They're all constructed in a similar manner, by piling rocks to form low walls that are filled with gravel, and they include a head (the top of the structure), a base, and long walls connecting them. Some have entrances and multiple narrow interior courtyards. The stones used for building have been especially chosen to fit together to support the large structures, displaying a deep understanding of local materials.
These prehistoric monuments were first recorded in the 1960s by a local team carrying out ground surveys, but at that point, no one knew what they were. Remote sensing surveys carried out by Professor David Kennedy (also from the University of Western Australia), in 2017 intensified interest, and initial theories suggested they were used as territorial markers for ancestral grazing grounds. Yet, as more and more were found, all dating to the same period, a different understanding emerged.

Thomas, McMahon and their teams have since unearthed evidence that suggests cultic practice. They've uncovered large numbers of cattle, goat and wild gazelle skulls and horns in small chambers in the heads of the mustatil, but found no indication that these were kept for domestic use. Since no other animal's body parts were found, it led the team to deduce that these were sacrificial. It further suggested that the animals were sacrificed elsewhere. This is important because it is evidence of a highly organised, cultic society, much earlier than was previously thought – predating Islam in the region by 6,000 years.

"Excavation of several mustatil have revealed artefacts suggestive of ritual practices taking place inside the structures," said Thomas. "The people who built them had a shared culture and belief system and this was not a practice that was localised. It spread across a huge swathe of Arabia about the size of Poland."

Thomas added: "Saudi Arabia has had the appearance of being an arid and inhospitable landscape, viewed in isolation from the rest of the world other than a few notable sites, such as Dedan and Hegra. However, archaeological evidence, such as the mustatil, demonstrate that the region had a rich and complex history. To have a structure so widely dispersed across such a massive area suggests a shared belief system, language and culture on a scale that I personally never imagined possible."

Munirah Almushawh, co-director of an archaeological project in Khaybar (another area of AlUla), agrees, noting that not only did this society share a single belief system, but they travelled huge distances to share the knowledge that allowed them to build the structures. Some of the mustatils weigh as much as 12,000 tonnes; more than the Eiffel Tower. Their construction would have required knowledge, skill and organisation over long periods of time.

"The mustatil suggests large social networks, innovative architectural skills and vast exploration in prehistoric Arabia," Almushawh said.

Despite these exciting discoveries, knowledge of mustatil is still in its infancy, with just five of the 1,600 excavated so far. What is certain is that AlUla will only continue to reveal its mysteries. As the region reopens for tourism post-pandemic, plans are in place to construct a massive, open-air museum where visitors can self-navigate around various archaeological sites or be taken through by a guide. Travellers will be able to learn about the Neolithic period, see the ancient ruins of homes and mustatil and imagine for themselves how this seemingly highly organised society lived and moved through the landscape.

McMahon and Thomas are as excited for AlUla's future as much as for its past. "The significance of what we've discovered is rewriting the history of the Neolithic in north-west Arabia," said McMahon. "Our work has so far uncovered only what has always existed: the complexity of the Neolithic period in this region, which had previously been considered either uninhabitable or merely unimportant in this time."
 
No, this doesnt sound like the start of some horror movie at all....

https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3...ip-of-unknown-gods-at-ancient-desert-monument

-------------------------------------
Mustatils, huge stone monuments concentrated in northern Saudi Arabia, were the site of rituals and early pilgrimages according to new research.
.....
Mustatils are rectangular, low-walled, stone structures that range from 20 to 600 m in length. The researchers identified 7000 year-old fragments of animal skulls and horns, primarily from domestic cattle, found close to a large upright stone that is part of a 140 meter-long mustatil located 55 miles east of the city of AlUla. The authors argue the close proximity likely indicates the area is a site of animal offerings.

“We believe these remains are offerings to an unknown deity or deities represented by the central stone,” lead author Melissa Kennedy of the University of Western Australia wrote in an email to Motherboard. “We speculate that the mustatil were built as a form of community bonding, with multiple groups coming together to construct them. We also suggest that there may be an association with water, as most mustatil point towards areas that hold water. As such, there may be a link with ancient climate and environmental change as Arabia gradually became increasingly arid, like it is today.”
 
More mustatil finds.

Researchers have discovered human bones and animal remains dating to around 7,000 years ago in Arabian stone structures known as mustatils.

Photographs of animal horns from a variety of animals, including cattle and caprines, or animals in the goat family, discovered at at the mustatil archaeological site.

The team found animal horns from a variety of animals, including cattle and caprines, or animals in the goat family, at the site. (Image credit: Wael Abu-Azizeh et al. 2022/RCU)


Archaeologists excavating an ancient stone monument in Saudi Arabia have unearthed thousands of animal bones, as well as human remains belonging to at least nine individuals.

The discoveries suggest that people gathered at stone structures to perform rituals and activities in Saudi Arabia about 7,000 years ago. These rituals appear to have included depositing animal horns and skulls.

More than 1,000 prehistoric rectangular stone structures called mustatils ("rectangles" in Arabic) have been documented in Saudi Arabia, yet exactly when and why they were built have remained a mystery. In 2018, the Royal Commission for AlUla, a region in northwest Saudi Arabia, launched a project to document and study mustatils and other archaeological remains in the region.

The recently excavated mustatil measures 131 by 39 feet (40 by 12 meters); the stone walls are up to 6.6 feet (2 m) thick, but the original height of the walls, which have since eroded, is unclear.

At the center of a courtyard within the mustatil, there is a structure that may have functioned as a shrine, with two hearths where ceremonies may have taken place, the archaeologists wrote in a paper published in August in a supplement to the journal Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies.

A dry, arid landscape of the mustatil.


The landscape of the mustatil; at the time the mustatil was built, the area was likely wetter than it is today. (Image credit: Wael Abu-Azizeh et al. 2022/RCU)

Within the mustatil, archaeologists also found more than 3,000 fragments of animal remains that together weigh about 55 pounds (25 kilograms). These animal remains include hundreds of horns and heads of animals, including cattle and caprines such as goats. Other prehistoric sites in the Middle East also contain a multitude of cattle heads and horns, including a site in Yemen where a ring of cattle skulls was displayed, lead study author Wael Abu-Azizeh, a junior professor of archaeology at Lumière University Lyon 2, told Live Science. The animal bones were deposited between 5300 B.C. and 5000 B.C., the archaeologists wrote. ...

https://www.livescience.com/archaeo...-found-in-enigmatic-stone-structure-in-arabia
 
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