4,500-year-old avenues lined with ancient tombs discovered in Saudi Arabia

A vast 4,500-year-old network of ‘funerary avenues’ lined with well-preserved Bronze Age tombs has been uncovered in Saudi Arabia. In a new paper, researchers detail the arrangement of around 18,000 tombs, spanning thousands of miles in the Saudi Arabian counties of Al-‘Ula and Khaybar.

They consist of small piles of stone arranged in elaborate shapes, marking the spot where either single individuals or small groups were buried, experts say.

The burials are described as ‘pendant’ tombs because they resemble circular pieces of jewellery attached to a chain, or ‘tail’.

Pendant tombs are already known to have yielded human remains dating to as early as the mid-third millennium BC, during the Bronze Age. 

In total, the experts have observed around 18,000 tombs along ‘funerary avenues’ – long-distance ‘corridors’ linking oases and pastures lined by burials – only 80 of which have been sampled or excavated. 

It’s thought that the tombs may have been built as memorials (‘cenotaphs’) or for other, as yet unclear symbolic or ritual purposes. 

Dr Matthew Dalton, from the University of Western Australia’s School of Humanities, is the lead author of the findings. He and his team used satellite imagery, helicopter-based aerial photography, ground survey and excavation to locate and analyse the funerary avenues.

‘The people who live in these areas have known about them for thousands of years,’ Dr Dalton told CNN. 

‘But I think it wasn’t really known until we got satellite imagery that just how widespread they are.’

Desert regions of the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant are known to be criss-crossed by innumerable pathways, flanked by stone monuments, the vast majority of which are ancient tombs. Thousands of miles of these paths and monument features, collectively known as ‘funerary avenues’, can be traced across the landscape, especially around and between major perennial water sources. 

Funerary avenues were the major highway networks of their day, according to Dr Dalton. Their existence today shows that the populations living in the Arabian Peninsula 4,500 years ago were more socially and economically connected to one another than previously thought.  

Researchers found that the highest concentrations of funerary monuments on these avenues were located near permanent water sources. 

The direction of the avenues indicated that populations used them to travel between major oases, including those of Khaybar, Al-‘Ula and Tayma.

Lesser avenues fade into the landscapes surrounding oases, suggesting the routes were also used to move herds of domestic animals into nearby pastures during periods of rain.

‘These oases, especially Khaybar, exhibit some of the densest concentrations of funerary monuments known worldwide,’ Dr Dalton said.

‘The sheer number of Bronze Age tombs built around them suggests that populations had already begun to settle more permanently in these favourable locations at this time.’  

READ ALSO: THOUSANDS OF HUMAN AND ANIMAL BONES HOARDED BY HYENAS IN LAVA TUBE SYSTEM, SAUDI ARABIA

Continued excavation and analysis of human remains within these monuments will be essential going forward, according to the researchers.

‘Primary inhumations, where identifiable and suitably preserved, may reveal the demographics of those for whom avenue monuments were originally constructed, allowing better reconstructions of these societies and their funerary practices,’ they say. 

The findings have been published in the journal The Holocene. 

Archaeologists in Saudi Arabia excavate ‘forgotten kingdoms’

Amid the arid desert and mountains of Al Ula in northwest Saudi Arabia, archaeologists are working to excavate the remnants of the ancient and long-forgotten kingdoms of Dadan and Lihyan.

Al Ula, a flagship tourist destination since it opened in 2019, is known chiefly for the majestic tombs of Madain Saleh, a 2,000-year-old city carved into rocks by the Nabateans, the pre-Islamic Arab people who also built Petra in neighbouring Jordan.

A team of French and Saudi archaeologists is now focused on excavating five nearby sites related to the Dadanite and Lihyanite civilisations, important regional powers that flourished 2,000 years ago.

“It’s a project that really tries to unlock the mysteries of (these) civilisations,” said Abdulrahman Al-Sohaibani, who is co-directing the Dadan archaeological mission.

Dadan is mentioned in the Old Testament and the Lihyanite kingdom was one of the largest of its time, stretching from Medina in the south to Aqaba in the north in modern-day Jordan, according to the Royal Commission for the project.

Spanning roughly 900 years until 100 CE, the kingdoms controlled vital trade routes but very little is known about them. The team is hoping to learn more about their worship rituals, social life and economy.

Previous excavations had been limited to the main sanctuary area, said Jerome Rohmer, a researcher with the French National Center for Scientific Research.

“We would just like have a comprehensive overview of the chronology of the site, the layout of the site, its material culture, its economy,” Rohmer added.

READ ALSO: THOUSANDS OF HUMAN AND ANIMAL BONES HOARDED BY HYENAS IN LAVA TUBE SYSTEM, SAUDI ARABIA

“It’s a comprehensive project where we’re basically trying to answer all of these questions.”

In Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s push to transform Saudi Arabia’s economy and society, Al-Ula has gained prominence. The kingdom is banking on tourism as it tries to open up to the world and diversify its economy away from oil.

Al-Ula’s development is part of a move to preserve pre-Islamic heritage sites in order to attract non-Muslim tourists and strengthen national identity.

Life-sized camel carvings in Northern Arabia date to the Neolithic period

A parade of life-size stone camel carvings in northern Arabia dates back to the Stone Age, new research finds. The 21 camels and horse-like figures were found in 2018 in the province of Al-Jouf in the northwestern Saudi desert. Researchers first believed that the carvings were about 2,000 years old, in part because they look similar to rock reliefs found in the famous stone city of Petra in Jordan. 

New dating efforts reveal that the carvings are much older: They date back 8,000 years. They were probably carved between 6000 B.C. and 5000 B.C. when the region was wetter and cooler.

At the time, the landscape was a grassland punctuated with lakes, where camels, horses and their relatives roamed wild, the researchers said. Humans herded flocks of cattle, sheep and goats — and apparently created great works of art. 

The carvings are chiselled into naturally occurring rocks at the site, and they often seem to meld with the natural grain of the rock. Their creation would have required tools made of a stone called chert, which would have come from at least 9 miles (15 kilometres) away.

Artists who took on the laborious job of carving each animal would have needed some sort of scaffolding and a couple of weeks’ time to complete, according to researchers from the Saudi Ministry of Culture, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, the Centre National de la recherche Scientifique in France and King Saud University.

“Neolithic communities repeatedly returned to the Camel Site, meaning its symbolism and function was maintained over many generations,” said Maria Guagnin, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Science of Human History, who led the new research.

The study was published Wednesday (Sept. 15) in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports.

The carvings are quite eroded, meaning that dating them was difficult. The researchers used multiple lines of evidence to do so, ranging from the tool marks in the rock to the radiocarbon dating of bones found in related rock layers. (Radiocarbon dating uses the radioactive decay of certain carbon molecules to mark time, but it requires organic material for the analysis.) 

The researchers also measured the density of the desert varnish on the rocks using a technique called portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry.

Desert varnish is a mineral coating that forms on desert rocks over time.

Portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry uses a handheld device to beam X-rays at a sample and non-destructively analyze the elements on its surface.

Finally, the team used luminescence dating of fragments that had fallen off the rock wall to determine when those fragments fell.

This method measures the amount of naturally occurring radiation in rocks and can reveal when rock was first exposed to sunlight or intense heat and how long it’s been acquiring radiation from the sun since that time. 

The new Neolithic, or Stone Age, date, puts the carvings in the context of other rock art made by pastoral people in northern Arabia, the researchers said in a statement.

These include large stone monuments called mustatil, which are made of sandstone walls surrounding a courtyard with a stone platform at one end. 

Periodic Prehistoric Rainfall Made Northern Arabia Navigable

Arabia, known today for its desert landscape, served as a “green turnstile” for migrating Stone Age members of the human genus starting around 400,000 years ago, a new study finds.

Monsoon rains periodically turned northern Arabia into a well-watered oasis, creating windows of opportunity for long-ago humans or their relatives to trek through that crossroads region from starting points in northern Africa and southwest Asia.

That’s the implication of a series of five ancient lake beds of varying ages, each accompanied by distinctive stone tools, unearthed at a northern Saudi Arabian site called Khall Amayshan 4, or KAM 4. Sediments from the lake beds, which were linked to periods when the climate was wetter than today, also yielded fossils of hippos, wild cattle and other animals. Like hominids, those creatures must have migrated into the region along rain-fed lakes, wetlands and rivers, an international team reports online September 1 in Nature.

Until now, the oldest stone tools in Arabia dated to at least 300,000 years ago. Previous finds only hinted that Stone Age Homo sapiens or other Homo species temporarily inhabited green, wetter parts of Arabia, a conclusion largely resting on discoveries at two other Saudi sites, each preserving stone tools from a single point in time.

Aside from providing the earliest known evidence of hominids in Arabia, the new finds demonstrate for the first time that ancient Homo groups travelled there when conditions turned wet, say archaeologist Huw Groucutt of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and colleagues.

As a result, northern Arabia could have served as a key, if intermittent, passageway out of Africa for humans or close evolutionary relatives who reached South Asia by around 385,000 years ago, southern China between 120,000 and 80,000 years ago and the Indonesian island of Sumatra between 73,000 and 63,000 years ago.

The number, completeness and time frames of KAM 4’s ancient lake deposits make this site “one of a kind … that will continue to produce remarkable results,” says archaeologist Donald Henry of the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, who did not participate in the new study.

Across five occupation phases covering hundreds of thousands of years, different Homo species or closely related populations at KAM 4 “were doing broadly the same things,” Groucutt says. Small groups camped by lakes where individuals made stone tools for food preparation, hunting and woodworking.

But each phase, dated mainly by a technique that estimated the amount of time since grains of lake sediment had last been exposed to sunlight, had its own evolutionary character.

For example, the identity of the KAM 4 crowd 400,000 years ago, who left behind large hand axes, is unclear, but the researchers know it couldn’t have been H. sapiens. Our species didn’t originate until roughly 300,000 years ago in Africa. One possibility is that those ancient Arabians represented a now-extinct Homo population from southwest Asia that later migrated into Africa, possibly contributing to H. sapiens evolution, Groucutt speculates.

Similar but slightly smaller, more finely worked hand axes turned up along the shore of a roughly 300,000-year-old KAM 4 lake bed, indicating the second phase of occupation. Groucutt and colleagues doubt that early H. sapiens from Africa scurried over to KAM 4 in time to make those tools. Whichever Homo group did could have come either from northern Africa or southwest Asia, the researchers say.

The third round of KAM 4 occupants, probably H. sapiens, fashioned artefacts excavated at an approximately 200,000-year-old lake bed, Groucutt says. These finds consist of rock chunks shaped so that sharp flakes, also unearthed there, could be pounded off. Humans based in northeastern Africa around that time made similar tools. Some of those people may have reached Arabia before eventually journeying to southwest Asia, Groucutt suggests.

Groucutt’s group excavated comparable tools at a site called Jubbah about 150 kilometres east of KAM 4 that date to around 210,000 years ago.

Those finds are another sign of human migrations into Arabia at a time when the corresponding KAM 4 lakebed shows that wet conditions reigned. Additional stone tools unearthed at Jubbah date to around 75,000 years ago.

Stone implements resembling the Jubbah finds were also excavated at the youngest two KAM 4 sites, one dating to between about 125,000 and 75,000 years ago and the other to roughly 55,000 years ago. The older site likely hosted H. sapiens, possibly a group that left Africa, Groucutt suggests.

The youngest KAM 4 artefacts could represent either H. sapiens or Neandertals, he says. Neandertals reached the Middle East about 70,000 years ago and could have reached a green Arabia by 55,000 years ago. If so, Neandertals may have interbred with H. sapiens in Arabia, a possibility not raised before.

Despite uncertainties about which hominids reached KAM 4 during its green phases, KAM 4 tools generally look more like similarly aged African tools than artefacts previously found in southern Arabia or at eastern Mediterranean sites, says Henry, the University of Tulsa archaeologist.

Migrations out of Africa, he says, now appear more likely to have wended through northern Arabia rather than across the narrow Red Sea crossing to southern Arabia, often regarded as a major dispersal route for ancient humans.

Thousands of human and animal bones hoarded by hyenas in lava tube system, Saudi Arabia

Although hyenas look and hunt like canines, they’re members of the mongoose family and therefore more closely related to a cat. However, just like dogs, hyenas have an affinity for hiding bones — it’s just that they can tend to go a bit overboard.

Case in point, archaeologists were left speechless after they stumbled across a lava tube cavern in northwestern Saudi Arabia that is packed with hundreds of thousands of bones gathered by striped hyenas over the course of 7,000 years.

The ultimate hoarders

The gruesome floor filled with ancient animal bones was found deep in a lava tube system — a network of caverns carved by lava flow. The site, known as Umm Jirsan, was discovered in 2007, but it was only recently that researchers ventured deep into the dark caverns.

Mathew Stewart, a zooarchaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, led a team of researchers who catalogued nearly 2,000 bones and teeth belonging to at least 14 different species, including cattle, horses, camels, rodents, and even humans.

Hundreds of thousands of other bones that are yet to be analyzed still lie on the cavernous floor.

Radiocarbon dating of the samples suggests the animal remains range from 439 to 6,839 years ago, which can only mean these lava tubes had been used as dens for at least 6,000 years.

The striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena) is a bit smaller than spotted and brown hyenas. They have a broad head with dark eyes, a thick muzzle, and large, pointed ears, with a mane of long hair growing along the back.

Their most striking feature is the legs: the front legs are much longer than the hind legs. This gives hyenas their distinctive walk, making them seem like they’re always limping uphill.

Hyenas are nocturnal or crepuscular predators that stay out of sight during the day, preferably in a natural cave or a burrow dug into the hillside. Sometimes they may take over the dens of other creatures where they transport bones to be eaten, fed to the young, or cached for later use.

It’s a well-established fact that hyena dens aren’t tidy at all, being normal to find leftover bones scattered across the floor. However, the lava tube horde stunned even the researchers who were most familiar with the hyenas.

Hyenas will eat an entire human body — except for the skull cap

Although they didn’t find hyenas at the site, the researchers are certain this was one of their dens judging from the cuts, bites, and digestion marks left on the bones.

The presence of human skull fragments was also telling of hyena presence since the animals are known to scavenge through burial grounds in search of food. They normally will consume everything except for the top of the skull.

“The size and composition of the bone accumulation, as well as the presence of hyena skeletal remains and coprolites, suggest that the assemblage was primarily accumulated by striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena),” the authors wrote in a study published in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

It’s highly unlikely that the six skullcaps with gnaw marks on them found at the site belong to humans who were killed by a hyena hunting party.

The mammals are mostly scavengers but when they do hunt they prefer to target hares, birds, and antelopes. However, the possibility that some hunter-gatherers were killed by hyena packs cannot be entirely ruled out.

Today, striped hyenas are a threatened species in Saudia Arabia but thousands of years ago they were common across the Arabian Peninsula.

The current investigation at Umm Jirsan was undertaken as part of the Paleo deserts Project, a large-scale research initiative aimed at tracking environmental and climate change in the Arabian Desert region over the past one million years.

Of particular interest is how human and animal migration in the region waxed and waned with the changing climate. This is a challenging goal since the unforgiving desert climate in the region tends to destroy any exposed organic matter.  Luckily, the Umm Jirsan lava tubes create a perfect time capsule that will give scientists material to work with for years to come. 

Saudi Arabia’s Hima cultural site added to UNESCO world heritage list

Hima, in the Gulf state’s southwest, is home to one of the largest rock art complexes in the world.

Najran, Saudi Arabia: 

The sixth site in Saudi Arabia has been added to UNESCO’s world heritage list, the UN organisation announced on Saturday.

Hima, in the Gulf state’s southwest, is home to one of the largest rock art complexes in the world.

“New site inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List: cultural area of Hima, Saudi Arabia. Mabrouk (congratulations)!” UNESCO announced.

Hima features more than 34 separate sites including rock inscriptions and wells along the route of the ancient Arabian caravans.

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Prince Badr bin Abdullah bin Farhan Al Saud, the Saudi culture minister, welcomed the listing, the official SPA news agency reported.

The kingdom has a “rich heritage (of) human civilisations. Efforts have borne fruit in making it known to the world,” it quoted him as saying.

SPA said Hima was a conduit for caravans on the trade and hajj routes to and from the southern parts of Arabia.

“People who passed through the area between pre-and post-historic times have left behind a substantial collection of rock art depicting hunting, wildlife, plants, symbols, and tools used at the time, as well as thousands of inscriptions,” the news agency said.

The site covers 557 square kilometres (215 square miles).

SPA said the wells in the area are more than 3,000 years old and were considered a vital source of fresh water in the vast desert of Najran province.

“They still serve freshwater to this day,” it added.

Other UNESCO sites in Saudi Arabia include rock art in the Hail region and historic Jeddah.

In 2019, Riyadh announced that for the first time it would grant tourist visas for those wishing to visit Saudi Arabia.

Previously, the country was open only to businessmen and Muslim pilgrims visiting the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

Inscription With Image of Babylonian King Found in Saudi Arabia

A 2,550-year-old inscription, written in the name of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, has been discovered carved on basalt stone in northern Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage recently announced. 

An engraving at the top of the inscription shows King Nabonidus holding a scepter alongside four other images that include a snake, a flower and a depiction of the moon, the commission said in a statement, noting that these symbols likely have a religious meaning. 

These engravings are followed beneath by about 26 lines of cuneiform text that experts with the commission are currently deciphering. This is the longest cuneiform inscription ever found in Saudi Arabia, the commission said in the statement. 

The inscription was found in Al Hait in the Hail Region of northern Saudi Arabia. Known as Fadak in ancient times, Al Hait holds numerous ancient sites, including the remains of fortresses, rock art and water installations, the commission said. “[It] has great historical significance from the first millennium [B.C.] until the early Islamic era.” 

King Nabonidus

It remains to be seen what new information this inscription will provide on King Nabonidus (reign 555–539 B.C.).

The Babylonian Empire stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea, and at the start of Nabonidus’ reign, he conquered part of what is now Saudi Arabia and ultimately chose to live at Tayma, a city in what is now Saudi Arabia, until around 543 B.C. 

Why Nabonidus chose to live in what is now Saudi Arabia for an extended period of time is a matter of debate among historians, with some experts saying that conflicts between Nabonidus and Babylon’s priests and officials are a likely reason.

At the end of Nabonidus’ reign, the Babylonian Empire came under attack by the Persian Empire, which was led by King Cyrus the Great;

Babylon itself was captured by the Persians in 539 B.C. and the Babylonian empire collapsed. The fate of Nabonidus after the collapse is unclear. 

These mysterious stone structures in Saudi Arabia are older than the pyramids

Hundreds of stone monuments scattered across northwestern Saudi Arabia may represent the oldest known ritual site on Earth. Researchers studying mustatils, courtyards made from sandstone blocks, date them to about 7,000 years ago, making them millennia older than Stonehenge or the Pyramids at Giza. 

Surveying the region by helicopter, the team found over 1,000 mustatils, more than twice the previous estimates. 

The theory is that the structures were used during the ritual by members of a cattle cult, who sacrificed cows, goats and sheep to their unknown god.  

The mustatils, named after the Arabic word for rectangle, received little attention when they were first discovered in the 1970s.

More recently, archaeologists at the University of Western Australia in Perth explored the mysterious structures, flying by helicopter over 77,000 square miles of AlUla and Khaybar.

They found more than 1,000 mustatils– over twice as many as previously thought existed. The structures range in length from 65 feet to nearly 2,000 feet, with some sandstone boulders used to make them weigh half a ton.

Typically, a mustatil had long walls around a central courtyard, with an entry at one end and rubble platform, or ‘head,’ at the other.

They may also include an orthostat, or upright stone, in a central chamber. Some entranceways were blocked up with rubble, suggesting the structures were decommissioned at some point.

Mustatils were typically clustered in groups of between 2 and 20 and, given their monumental size, large groups of people would have had to work together to build them.

Earlier studies speculated the structures were used as pens for livestock, but the walls of the mustatils were too low to enclose animals. In a report published this week in the journal Antiquity, researchers say they believe the strange courtyards were used for religious rites.

‘It’s not designed to keep anything in, but to demarcate the space that is clearly an area that needs to be isolated,’ lead author Hugh Thomas told New Scientist.

Fragments of cow, sheep, goats and gazelle horns and skulls found at one mustatil suggest the society that built them used animal sacrifices in their rituals.

The recent excavations reveal ‘the earliest evidence for a cattle cult in the Arabian Peninsula,’ the team’s report reads. ‘As such, mustatils are amongst the earliest stone monuments in Arabia and globally one of the oldest monumental building traditions yet identified.’

There may have been a procession involved with the ritual, as the mustatils’ narrow entranceways ‘indicate that the structures were accessed in single file,’ the team wrote.

By radiocarbon dating the skulls, Thomas and his colleagues dated the mustatil to between 5300 and 5000 BC, predating Stonehenge by more than 2,500 years and making them ‘the first large-scale, monumental ritual landscape anywhere in the world,’ according to co-author Melissa Kennedy, assistant director of the Aerial Archaeology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia project (AAKSA). 

Rock art in the era from the same time period showed ‘scenes of both cattle herding and hunting,’ the team wrote, lending credence to the cattle-cult theory.

Kennedy told Art Newspaper the structures’ widespread distribution, size and uniformity ‘suggests a common religious belief may have been held over a huge part of northwest Arabia during the Late Neolithic, a feature that is so far unparalleled anywhere in the world.’