Mystifying Monuments

A mysterious group of ancient monuments first discovered in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, known as mustatials, predate the first Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge by over 2,000 years, making them the world’s oldest ritual landscape, archaeologists now say.

Scattered across 77,000 square miles of desert in northwest Arabia, the mustatils (the name comes from the Arabic word for “rectangle”) were built between 8,500 and 4,800 years ago, during the period known as the Middle Holocene, according to a report published last week in the journal Antiquity.

Through satellite imagery, helicopter and ground surveys, and excavations, the study identified more than 1,000 mustatils, typically built in clusters. That’s more than double the number previously thought to exist.  

The project, led by a team from the University of Western Australia, is being funded by the Royal Commission for AlUla, which is hoping to drive tourism to the nearby site of AlUla.

Experts had previously raised numerous theories as to the structures’ purpose, including as animal enclosures, burial sites, or territory markers. But the new study shows that the mustatils‘s walls would have been too low to prevent animals from escaping.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...