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Benvenuti in queste pagine dedicate a scienza, storia ed arte. Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, Torino

Showing posts with label Syrian desert. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Syrian desert. Show all posts

Saturday, February 1, 2014

stone circle - 2 - Jordan

Stone circles in Jordan.
Syrian desert.


Stone circle and desert kite

Stone circle and desert kite in Jordan

Desert kites - 1


The Syrian Desert is an arid land of south-western Asia, extending from the northern Arabian Peninsula to the eastern Jordan, southern Syria, and western Iraq, largely covered by lava fields. Considered in the past as a barrier between Levant and Mesopotamia, it is now crossed by several routes and pipelines. This desert possesses two volcanic regions. One is the Jabal al-Druze, in the As-Suwayda Governorate. The other field is that of the Harrat Ash Shaam.

When we observe this desert from space, we discover that this harsh environment was probably quite populated in ancient times. We can conclude this fact from some huge stone structures, the "desert kites", that can be easily seen in the images recorded by satellites. These structures were firstly observed by pilots of the Royal Air Force in the 1920s, flying over the desert. These pilots named them "kites", because these lines reminded of kites used by children to play, but in fact they are huge hunting traps.

We usually imagine our ancestors, before they settle down, as people simply hunting and gathering for food, but this is not true. The "desert kites" are the remains of an ancient hunting technique based on stone-walled traps, the construction of which surely involved several people for long times. The desert kites were used to push large herds of animals into some enclosures, or, in the worse case, to fall off from steep cliff edges. The simplest structure of a desert kite has a triangular shape, consisting of two long, low walls built of stones and arranged in a V-shape, like a  funnel, ending as a corral. Hunters pushed the game between the walls, trapping then the animals into the end of the structure. It is usually considered that animals were slaughtered “en masse”.

Typically, a desert kite possesses two, three or more small circular enclosures on the edge of its corral. Some ancient rock art images show these hunting traps, depicting the role of the 'walls' of the kites. Let us note that these walls are low and then not able to stop any game. In fact, the walls are not walls at all: they are the basements, in the rocky harraat, where stick some poles and build a fence with branches. These structures create a visual effect as a barrier for the animals.



"Kite" rock-drawing from Jordan,  G.L. Harding: The Cairn of Hani, Antiquity 28,1954:pp 165-7
(2007-02-22) In 1951, Harding discovered a burial cairn with Safaitic inscriptions. On one of the stones was scratched a hunting scane.The cairn is located in the heart of the 'Kite' area,there is no doubt that the drawing depicts a scane of the gazelles being hunted in such a' Kite'.

References
23 June 2011,  http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.4665 , http://arxiv.org/pdf/1106.4665v1.pdf
February 2009, Khaybar Desert Kites, Vanja Janežic
alsahra.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/khaybar-desert-kites.pdf
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=2146412866

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Ancient solar observatories: Syrian desert

The Syrian desert is covered by ancient stone structures created during Neolithic times, as I discussed in the paper, Stone circles on the harraat of Syrian desert, published at http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.4665
Some of these stone structures are circular, with radial lines of stones. These circles have been also compared with Stonehenge. Therefore, we can ask ourselves, are these solar observatories too, as Stonehenge is.
The answer is probably so, see my paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.2591
I used a software for the solar energy applications to see the direction of sun on sunrise and sunset of solstice. It seems that there is a good agreement. Therefore, the Syrian stone circles are probably the Stonehenges of Middle East.

This is one of the stone structure of Syrian Desert. The image shows directions of sun during the day. “The lines on the drawing show the direction and height (altitude) of the sun throughout the day. Thicker and shorter lines mean the sun is higher in the sky. Longer and thinner lines mean the sun is closer to the horizon”, according to Sollumis.com http://www.sollumis.com/. On the left, the site as it appears in the Google Maps. In the middle, the direction of the sun on the summer solstice, choosing the center of the circle for observation. We see that, at sunrise, the sun is passing near the dot. At the sunset the direction is that of a line. In the image on the right, we see the direction of the sun on winter solstice. At sunrise, the lines is passing between dots. The sunset has the direction of a radius (images have been obtained from original provided by Google Maps and sollumis.com).

Circles and lines!
Alignemnt at the sunrise on the winter solstice


At the site http://www.dp-news.com/en/detail.aspx?articleid=97188
it is told that "He (David Kennedy) explains that they come in a huge variety of forms, some being ‘kites’, structures that funnelled animals, some being seemingly random meandering lines of stone and others being rectangular. None are believed to be aligned with the stars, which has added to the mystery surrounding their purpose." Well, in my opinion it is not so.