7:43
The basalt flats of the Arabian Peninsula extend tens of thousands of miles across the borders of Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. These bassalt fields are known as Harats, which comes from the Arabic for stony area or lava field. They formed millions of years ago when the Arabian plate began to shift away from the African plate along the Red Sea rift. This gradual movement thinned the Earth's crust and allowed magma to rise from the Earth's mantle to the surface. An archaeologist conducting aerial surveys above the sprawling lava deserts of Jordan spots something strange. He began to notice enormous structures stretching across the Harats. They were relatively uniform in their shape and
clearly man-made. But what stood out the most was their size. The structures are essentially huge rectangles formed of two thick bands connected by much longer, thinner rows of rock. Today we know these structures as mustatil or gates because of their unique shape. Early surveys of the Harats showed that the gates were often clustered in groups of two or three, but the total number remained a bit of a mystery until Google Earth changed everything. With mainstream satellite images available to the public, archaeologists around the world could explore the desert from their own homes. So far, more than a thousand of these gates have been found. We can't be sure, but we believe they were built by nomadic tribes thousands of years ago,
the ancestors of the modern-day Bedawin people. The sheer scale of them shows that they were clearly important. But what were they for? These extraordinary gates aren't the only monumental sculptures on the Arabian Peninsula. South of the Jordanian basalt flats lies the Harat Kaibar, one of Saudi Arabia's largest lava fields. Among the volcanic cones, vast stone shapes known as kites have been sculpted into the landscape. Over 900 of these kites have been spotted in Harat Kaibar alone. These structures are even larger than the gates with some measuring over a quart of a mile long.
Many of these structures date back roughly to the holosene humid period which spanned roughly 9,000 to 5500 BCE. Back then the desert belt of North Africa and Arabia was far greener and more fertile. An ideal hunting ground for people living in the area. And these structures weren't just random formations. They were built with a clear and deliberate purpose. These kites have been referred to as mega traps, and that's exactly what they were. It's believed the ancient nomads used the kites long walls or strings to drive herds of prey toward the head where they would become trapped. Some of the kites were built so that their walls intersected and overlapped so that even if an animal escaped over one wall, it
would find itself face to face with another. Essentially, these kites were a death trap. The traps would have taken weeks or even months to build and would have required a huge amount of manpower. Just like the gates, they demonstrate an advanced Aurelia engineering, which makes us wonder whether they served a similar function. Could the gates farther north have also served as huge hunting traps? When archaeologists on the ground get a closer look at the desert gates, they see just how intricate these structures are, and they discover a hidden feature. Taking a closer look at the musatil, we can get a sense of how much care was taken in their construction.
Each of the gates long bars is made of two parallel lines of specially chosen flat stones placed on their edges facing each other. The space between these larger rocks was then filled in with rubble. At the top of the mustatals, we find the head, a platform filled with rocks that once stood several feet high and formed the thickest band in the structure. At the very center of the heads of most gates lies a hidden chamber. These chambers are relatively small, typically 10 to 30 ft wide. While excavating the walls of one mustadil, a team of archaeologists makes a shocking discovery.
They began to uncover human bone fragments. The bones belong to nine separate individuals, two infants, one child, a teenager, and five adults. So, could these structures be something other than animal traps? Could they actually be elaborateerary monuments? The search for answers leads to another nearby site where ancient roadways in northwest Arabia are flanked by mysterious stone sculptures. These aren't gates or kites, but keyholes. As the name suggests, they're made up of two main components, a circular section at one end placed at the point of an elongated triangle.
Nearly 18,000 of these keyholes have been found over roughly 100,000 square miles of the Arabian desert. Like the gates, the keyholes are often grouped in elaborate formations leading away from a central corridor. It's believed that they may have been used to shepherd animals into specific pastures, but they also serve another more symbolic function. Inside the circular ends of these structures, we find piles of stones called kairens. These aren't decorative. They actually mark tombs. Looking at them from above, you can see that the tombs have been deliberately organized with a central roadway running through them near the widest point of the triangle. Today, we now know these arrangements aserary avenues.
We aren't sure why these avenues were built this way. It's possible that they were a means to claim ownership over land or even a novel way of memorializing the dead. It could be that people wanted to bury their loved ones on frequently traveled routes so that their memory would be kept alive by people passing by. Could the monumental gates in Jordan have served a similar function? Could they also be part of an elaborate graveyard? Excavations of ancient gates in Saudi Arabia unear yet more skeletal remains. But these bones point to a different possibility.
It turns out that many of these moose contain thousands of bone fragments. But the vast majority of these bones aren't actually human. They're animal bones. There's evidence that some of these animals were wild, like gazels, but most appear to have been domesticated. Radiocarbon dating shows us that they're up to 7,000 years old, which makes these stone monuments about 2,000 years older than both Stonehenge or the earliest Egyptian pyramids. Cattle hering would have played a central role in the lives of ancient people living in the region at the time, providing a vital source of food. But why were they buried here? Why go to the trouble of building such an elaborate
burial ground for animals? As work on the mustatil continues, researchers working aside at Yaman's Wadasa subdist within the Sonaha Governant come across another remarkable cattle burial. They found a ring of more than 40 cattle skulls that had been planted nose down in the earth. At the center of the ring, there was one more skull, also buried facing downwards. This deliberate arrangement suggests the skulls represented some kind of ritual or symbolic significance. The cattle remains were found near a stone platform and surrounded by several hearths. The skulls and hearths combined
paint a vivid picture of some kind of ritual feast, one that seemingly involved the sacrifice of domestic animals. The discovery of ritual cattle sacrifice in Yemen leads to a revelation for experts working on Arabia's colossal stone gates. We now believe that these huge stone gates were built to host similar rituals. Based on the layout of these enormous rectangles, we can use our imagination and begin to conjure up what these rituals may have actually looked like.
