Massive stone structures in Saudi Arabia may be some of oldest monuments in the world
By Owen Jarus - Live Science Contributor an hour ago
They number in the hundreds and can be larger than an NFL football field.
Mustatils have been found in a wide variety of environments in Saudi Arabia including six examples
seen here on the slope of a volcano.
(Image: © Gary Rollefson)
They number in the hundreds, can be larger than an NFL football field and are found across Saudi Arabia, including on the slope of a volcano. Sprawling stone structures reported in 2017 now appear to be some of the oldest monuments in the world, dating back some 7,000 years, archaeologists now report.
A new study of the mysterious stone structures — once called "gates" but now referred to as "mustatils," the Arabic word for "rectangle" —suggests they were used for rituals; and radiocarbon dating of charcoal found within one of the structures indicates people built it around 5000 B.C., a team of researchers report in an article recently published in the journal The Holocene.
Related: See photos of the mysterious stone structures in Saudi Arabia
"The mustatil phenomenon represents a remarkable development of monumental architecture, as hundreds of these structures were built in northwest Arabia," the researchers wrote in their paper. "This 'monumental landscape' represents one of the earliest large-scale forms of monumental stone structure construction anywhere in the world."
Ritual use
The structures are made from low stone walls that form what often looks like a field gate from above (hence their former name). They range in size with some measuring less than 49 feet (15 m) long and the largest measuring about 2,021 feet (616 m) long.
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The White Volcanoes of Harrat Khaybar
KAUSHIK PATOWARY OCT 25, 2019
Of the millions of pilgrims that visit the holy city of Medina, in Saudi Arabia, every year to pray in the Prophet’s Mosque, few people are aware that the city is build upon the basalt flows of a past volcano, with the now dormant volcano lying very close to the city. This volcanic field, known as Harrat Khaybar, contains some of the rarest examples of white volcanoes, so called because of their light colored rocks caused by the presence of a kind of alkali and silica-rich light blue-gray igneous rock called comendite.
An aerial view of the Jebel Bayda, a white volcano made by silica-rich lava (comendite) in Harrat Khaybar. Photo credit: Luigi Vigliotti
This uncommon type of lava was first discovered in Queensland Australia in the Glass House mountains, although it has also turned up in Sardinia, Corsica, Ascension Island, Ethiopia, Somalia and few other areas of East Africa.
The Harrat Khaybar volcano is one of Arabia's largest volcanic fields and covers more than 14,000 square km. The volcanic field was formed by eruptions along a 100-kilometer, north-south vent system over the past 5 million years. The most recent recorded eruption took place between 600–700 AD.
Harrat Khaybar contains a wide range of volcanic rock types and spectacular landforms, as represented in the photograph below. The image was taken by the Expedition 16 crew aboard the International Space Station in March 2008.
The symmetric structures are tuff cones, formed by eruption of lava in the presence of water. The combination produces wet, sticky pyroclastic deposits that can build a steep cone structure, particularly if the deposits consolidate quickly. The presence of these tuff cones indicate that the local climate was much wetter during some periods of volcanic activity. Today, this region is as dry as bone with little to no yearly precipitation leading to an almost total lack of vegetation.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/10/white-volcanoes-of-harrat-khaybar.html
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Professor David Kennedy of the University of Oxford just discovered hundreds of mysterious structures near ancient lava domes in Saudi Arabia. Using Google Earth, Kennedy found approximately 400 stone walls that are believed to be more than 9,000 years old. Because the structures appear similar to others found in the Middle East, they have been dubbed “gates”
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Older article:
Aerial Images May Unlock Enigma of Ancient Stone Structures in Saudi Arabia
By David Kennedy November 12, 2017
Aerial photographs and ground inspection of the keyhole pendants in Saudi Arabia reveal more details of the enigmatic structures.
(Image: © Courtesy APAAME, APAAME_20171027_DLK-0891)
Hundreds of thousands of stone structures that date back thousands of years and dot the deserts and plains of the Middle East and North Africa are, in many cases, so large that only a bird's-eye view can reveal their intricate archaeological secrets: gorgeous and mysterious geometric shapes resembling a range of objects, from field gates, to kites, to pendants, to wheels.
These are the "Works of the Old Men," according to the Bedouin when first questioned in the 1920s. And although ancient peoples evidently had their reasons for constructing these stone structures, their purpose has remained relatively opaque to archaeologists today.
I have been studying these Works for two decades, and their inaccessibility has made these sites' purposes even more elusive. That's where satellite imagery (used by Google Earth) and aerial reconnaissance, which involves much lower-flying aircraft) come in.
In the past few weeks, a huge opportunity opened up in this field after Live Science published an article about my research, sparking a deluge of international media coverage. Ultimately, I was invited to visit the country that has been least open to any form of aerial surveys, or even to archival aerial images: Saudi Arabia. Last month, they lifted this veil of sorts and allowed me to fly over the country's vast array of archaeological sites for the first time. [See Spectacular Images of the Stone Structures of Saudi Arabia]
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