Nazca Lines From Syria To Saudi Arabia

Margot · Jan 14, 2013

ragin cajun said: ↑

Could we build Stonehenge and the Pyramids today? yes

Could we do it with the tools and technology of the people that built it? probably not.
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I think you underestimate the ancients. Have you ever been to Baalbek?

Oldyoungin · Jun 27, 2013

Most likely has to do with pleasing the Gods , as those who would be the only ones to see them...

hot air balloons.

Margot2 · Oct 31, 2013

Margot said: ↑

Aren't these cool? Any guess what they were used for?

They stretch from Syria to Saudi Arabia, can be seen from the air but not the ground, and are virtually unknown to the public.

They are the Middle East's own version of the Nazca Lines ancient "geolyphs," or drawings, that span deserts in southern Peru and now, thanks to new satellite-mapping technologies, and an aerial photography program in Jordan, researchers are discovering more of them than ever before. They number well into the thousands.

Referred to by archaeologists as "wheels," these stone structures have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle with spokes radiating inside. Researchers believe that they date back to antiquity, at least 2,000 years ago. They are often found on lava fields and range from 82 feet to 230 feet (25 meters to 70 meters) across. [See gallery of wheel structures]

"In Jordan alone we've got stone-built structures that are far more numerous than (the) Nazca Lines, far more extensive in the area that they cover, and far older," said David Kennedy, a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Western Australia.

Kennedy's new research, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, reveals that these wheels form part of a variety of stone landscapes. These include kites (stone structures used for funnelling and killing animals); pendants (lines of stone cairns that run from burials); and walls, mysterious structures that meander across the landscape for up to several hundred feet and have no apparent practical use.

His team's studies are part of a long-term aerial reconnaissance project that is looking at archaeological sites across Jordan. As of now, Kennedy and his colleagues are puzzled as to what the structures may have been used for or what meaning they held. [History's Most Overlooked Mysteries]

Fascinating structures

Kennedy's main area of expertise is in Roman archaeology, but he became fascinated by these structures when, as a student, he read accounts of Royal Air Force pilots flying over them in the 1920s on airmail routes across Jordan. "You can't not be fascinated by these things," Kennedy said.

Indeed, in 1927 RAF Flight Lt. Percy Maitland published an account of the ruins in the journal Antiquity. He reported encountering them over "lava country" and said that they, along with the other stone structures, are known to the Bedouin as the "works of the old men."

Kennedy and his team have been studying the structures using aerial photography and Google Earth, as the wheels are hard to pick up from the ground, Kennedy said.

"Sometimes when you're actually there on the site you can make out something of a pattern but not very easily," he said. "Whereas if you go up just a hundred feet or so it, for me, comes sharply into focus what the shape is."

The designs must have been clearer when they were originally built. "People have probably walked over them, walked past them, for centuries, millennia, without having any clear idea what the shape was."

(The team has created an archive of images of the wheels from various sites in the Middle East.)

What were they used for?

So far, none of the wheels appears to have been excavated, something that makes dating them, and finding out their purpose, more difficult. Archaeologists studying them in the pre-Google Earth era speculated that they could be the remains of houses or cemeteries. Kennedy said that neither of these explanations seems to work out well.

"There seems to be some overarching cultural continuum in this area in which people felt there was a need to build structures that were circular."

Some of the wheels are found in isolation while others are clustered together. At one location, near the Azraq Oasis, hundreds of them can be found clustered into a dozen groups. "Some of these collections around Azraq are really quite remarkable," Kennedy said.

In Saudi Arabia, Kennedy's team has found wheel styles that are quite different: Some are rectangular and are not wheels at all; others are circular but contain two spokes forming a bar often aligned in the same direction that the sun rises and sets in the Middle East.

The ones in Jordan and Syria, on the other hand, have numerous spokes and do not seem to be aligned with any astronomical phenomena. "On looking at large numbers of these, over a number of years, I wasn't struck by any pattern in the way in which the spokes were laid out," Kennedy said.

Cairns are often found associated with the wheels. Sometimes they circle the perimeter of the wheel, other times they are in among the spokes. In Saudi Arabia some of the cairns look, from the air, like they are associated with ancient burials.

Dating the wheels is difficult, since they appear to be prehistoric, but could date to as recently as 2,000 years ago. The researchers have noted that the wheels are often found on top of kites, which date as far back as 9,000 years, but never vice versa. "That suggests that wheels are more recent than the kites," Kennedy said.

Amelia Sparavigna, a physics professor at Politecnico di Torino in Italy, told Live Science in an email that she agrees these structures can be referred to as geoglyphs in the same way as the Nazca Lines are. "If we define a 'geoglyph' as a wide sign on the ground of artificial origin, the stone circles are geoglyphs," Sparavignawrote in her email.

The function of the wheels may also have been similar to the enigmatic drawings in the Nazca desert. [Science as Art: A Gallery]

"If we consider, more generally, the stone circles as worship places of ancestors, or places for rituals connected with astronomical events or with seasons, they could have the same function of [the] geoglyphs of South America, the Nazca Lines for instance. The design is different, but the function could be the same," she wrote in her email.

Kennedy said that for now the meaning of the wheels remains a mystery. "The question is, what was the purpose?"

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011...ca-lines-discovered-in-mideast/#ixzz1Yj0vxd9m
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Maybe they were early Bedouin villages.......... built on the model of a Bedouin camp.. which was laid out in a circle with the animals inside the circle at night.

Margot2 · Oct 31, 2013

The Pseudoarchaeology Research Archive (PARA) is an online repository for scholarship relating to topics in pseudoarchaeology (including various cult, fantastic, and fringe archaeologies, as well as related topics in cultural and physical anthropology).

Adopting a healthy skepticism towards pseudoarchaeological theories and thinking, we contend that an attitude of critical analysis and empirical rigor is a vital part of the scholarly enterprise.

http://pseudoarchaeology.org/

puffin · Oct 31, 2013

ragin cajun said: ↑

I am jerking your chain, kuddy. I would like to understand these markings too. I would like to know how they laid them out without any guidelines. I would also like to know how the pyramids were built. We would have a difficult time building something like that with today's technology.
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Give me an endless labor force and as long as it takes and a lot of sand and I'll build you a pyramid.
You lay the first layer of limestone blocks down, and the next then you get all your slaves to move enough sand up to the second course so they can lay the third course and forth then you get your slaves to move enough sand up to the last course so they can lay the next course/s. When you reach the top you have great long gentle sand slopes/ramps, call them what you wish, covering the pyramids. The slopes could have been a mile long or more. who cares. The entire pyramid is covered in sand at this point with only the top/s visible. Plop on the last stone and you're done. "OK boys. Now get to work removing all the sand you used to make the slopes/ramps you rolled the limestone blocks up on. It may take a year or two but hey I'm not going anywhere and neither are you".
I figured out this elemental method for how the pyramids where built when I was ten.
If you want to prove the method round up someone with a mini Bobcat (you can refer to it as "the slaves"), a dozen school kids you want to spend the day playing in a sand dune and a couple of pickup trucks full of old bricks.
It always amazes me to hear people claim how "impossible" the pyramids were to build.

OhZone · Oct 31, 2013

How about this one in Canada?
http://www.thefaramfoundation.com/medhatglyphs.htm

Margot2 · Oct 31, 2013

OhZone said: ↑

How about this one in Canada?
http://www.thefaramfoundation.com/medhatglyphs.htm
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Its a beautiful website.. even though I am not convinced of the "radials".

waltky · Apr 8, 2018

Looks like a UFO landing strip...

Massive Ancient Drawings Found in Peruvian Desert
April 5, 2018 - Armed with satellites and drones, archaeologists discover new Nasca lines and dozens of other enigmatic geoglyphs carved into the earth.

Etched into the high desert of southern Peru more than a millennium ago, the enigmatic Nasca lines continue to capture our imagination. More than a thousand of these geoglyphs (literally, 'ground drawings') sprawl across the sandy soil of Nasca province, the remains of little-understood ritual practices that may have been connected to life-giving rain.

Now, Peruvian archaeologists armed with drones have discovered more than 50 new examples of these mysterious desert monuments in adjacent Palpa province, traced onto the earth's surface in lines almost too fine to see with the human eye. In addition, archaeologists surveyed locally known geoglyphs with drones for the first time—mapping them in never-before-seen detail.

Many of the newly discovered Nasca lines are too faint to be seen by the human eye, yet visible when captured in low altitude by a drone camera.

Some of the newfound lines belong to the Nasca culture, which held sway in the area from 200 to 700 A.D. However, archaeologists suspect that the earlier Paracas and Topará cultures carved many of the newfound images between 500 B.C. and 200 A.D.

Unlike the iconic Nasca lines—most of which are only visible from overhead—the older Paracas glyphs were laid down on hillsides, making them visible to villages below. The two cultures also pursued different artistic subjects: Nasca lines most often consist of lines or polygons, but many of the newfound Paracas figures depict humans. “Most of these figures are warriors,” says Peruvian archaeologist Luis Jaime Castillo Butters, the new glyphs' co-discoverer. “These ones could be spotted from a certain distance, so people had seen them, but over time, they were completely erased.”

A View From the Sky and Space
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