© Huw Groucutt
In the north of the Arabian Peninsula, bordering the Nefud Desert,
archaeologists have recently catalogued vast stone monuments dating back 7,000 years. Shaped like long rectangles, the '
mustatil' structures are a mystery - but new evidence suggests they were possibly used for ritual or social purposes.
Mustatils are amongst the earliest forms of large-scale stone structures, predating the Giza pyramids by thousands of years. Hundreds of these structures have been identified, and archaeologists believe they are somehow related to increasing territoriality as the once-lush region gave way to arid desert.
Discovery of the mustatils was first
documented in 2017, enabled through satellite photography, which revealed the scale and number of these enigmatic structures in the desert lava field of Harrat Khaybar in Saudi Arabia.
Named 'gates' because of their appearance from the air, they were
described as "two short, thick lines of heaped stones, roughly parallel, linked by two or more much longer and thinner walls."
Now, a team of archaeologists led by Huw Groucutt of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany has conducted similar research. Studying satellite images of the southern edge of the Nefud Desert, they identified 104 new mustatils. Then they went out into the field and studied them up close.
Comment: Other recent research paints a pretty grim picture of how the ancient Egyptians treated some of their animals.
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