For almost a century, aerial photographers have been documenting mysterious, millennia-old structures built from low walls of stone in the rocky lava fields, known as Harriet, in Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. This desert region, blistered with volcanic mounds, is almost devoid of life. However, seen from above, the barren floor is covered with massive, interlocking geoglyphs which take the kind of abstract arrow shapes called “kites” and demanding rectangles known as “gates.”
University of Western Australia archaeologist David Kennedy became interested in the structures after discovering how easy they were to track using Google Earth. He had seen some of the kites while doing fieldwork in Jordan and realized that the structures continued into Saudi Arabia. “We would have loved to fly across into Saudi Arabia to take images. However, you never get the permission,” he advised The New York Times. “And then along comes Google Earth.” Now Kennedy has a paper about the rectangular gate constructions in a forthcoming issue of Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy.
Neurologist Abdullah Al-Saeed, a part of The Desert Team, told the Times that it was not until 2008 that he looked at the websites using Google Earth and grasped the importance of what they had discovered. He and his colleagues maintain a detailed photographic record of their kites and gates on their website. They have found that the majority of the geoglyphs are made from relatively low rock walls, occasionally punctuated with round “rooms” whose walls are higher. 1 hypothesis about the kites is that hunters herded animals into them for effortless slaughter, but the Desert Team notes that the walls would have been too low to fence the animals in.
Kennedy considers the geoglyphs were built by nomads, possibly the ancestors of Bedouins who reside in the region today. They could be up to 9,000 years old, but additional research is necessary to determine specific dates. What’s clear is that they had been constructed over centuries at a time when volcanoes were active in the area; a few of those walls are covered in lava from eruptions when they were built. Most of the gates are made from walls which are approximately 150 to 500 feet long, and the longest stretch nearly 1,700 feet.
In this paper, Kennedy writes:
“The lava fields are often rich in archaeological remains, implying a moister past and more abundant vegetation, and recent fieldwork identifying larger settlement sites supports this notion…As in the much better-explored lava field of Jordan, there are many thousands of stone-built structures which are collectively known to Bedouin as the ‘works of the old men.”
In specific ways, the gates and kites resemble the geoglyphs of the Nazca area in Peru, often referred to as the Nazca lines. In the air, they look like big abstract designs and creatures. Nobody is sure who made them, or why.
Neither the Desert Team nor Kennedy and his coworkers have some idea what the harratgeoglyphs mean. Kennedy does not believe they were used as burial mounds or for searching. They do not look like structures that individuals could live in. It is possible they were purely symbolic, used in rituals whose significance has been lost to time.
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