The fortuitous discovery of lines carved into the rocks of an ancient tomb in what is now the Israeli-occupied Golan can also provide a new vision of an enigmatic culture that flourished thousands of years ago.
In a small clearing, the Yehudiya Nature Reserve, among yellow and shaded weeds through eucalyptus trees, giant rocks and dark basalt slabs form a small covered room that opens to the east.
Megalithic design is one of thousands of so-called dolmens scattered in northern Israel and the region as a whole, from burial tombs erected between 4,000 and 4,500 years during the Intermediate Bronze Age.
Today, on the plateau captured in 1967 in Syria, with Israeli infantry soldiers securing the border just 23 kilometers (1 mile), scientists are looking for the region’s remote past.
The identity and ideology of those who built the monuments on a giant component is unknown. But a new fortuitous discovery of rock art can also reposition that.
About two years ago, “when the park rangers made their daily trek, he looked contemptuously and saw something etched on the walls,” recalls Uri Berger, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority.
The park ranger contacted the IAA and “when we looked inside, we saw that it’s never just carved lines or stains on the wall, it’s rock art,” Berger said.
The lines shape six animals with horns of alternate sizes, 3 facing east and 3 facing west, with two of them, a male and a female, directly facing face.
Another animal with horns is carved into a panel, in front of six.
The zoomorfa representations, hidden from the birth of the study of dolmens two hundred years ago, were the first discoveries in the region and a primary progression for Berger and his fellow student, Gonen Sharon.
– “St shapes” –
Sharon, professor of archaeology at Tel-Hai College in northern Israel, is an ancient discovery.
Just north of the nature reserve, the outdoor Shamir kibbutz, north of Galilee, Sharon was walking with her teenage children in 2012 in a box with about 400 dolmens scattered.
Unbridled to the shadow of the largest monument, Sharon sat down, looked at the roof of the dome’s giant sning and said she had seen “shapes” that looked like herbal formations.
“If someone had done them,” he recalls.
The marks turned out to be chain sculptures resembling tridents.
“It turned out to be the first made in the context of dolmens in the Middle East,” Sharon said.
Shamir’s sculptures, immaculate through generations of researchers, have revitalized the archaeological study region.
One of the revisited sites was located in an ad that deceived near Kiryat Shmona, a city northwest of Shamir, where 3 small megalithic designs that survived the deceptivepal design of more than a decade are surrounded by stone circles.
In the largest, relatively rounded dolmen, in the corner, there are two sets of short parallel lines engraved on either side of the rock, with a longer line carved under the image of closed eyes and a mouth wincing towards the sky.
“The grooves don’t seem to be functional,” said Sharon. “To us they look like a face.”
– “Letter from the past” –
Stone monuments have “replaced the landscape” of northern Israel, Berger said.
But their importance has also made them point to the theft of antiquities, which in giant components have stripped the maximum remains probably to produce clues about their creators.
Small ceramic pieces, spearhead classified ads and metal daggers, pieces of jewelry and classified ads and some bones are decrypted at the sites from time to time, Sharon said. “But it’s not often to find” anything, and those discoveries are very scattered.
“We know very little about the culture of providing them.”
With the discovery of art engraved in stones, “we are able to say anything, this is yet another burden than we have been made known for two hundred years,” Berger said.
The discoveries of rock art, published in a new article through Sharon and Berger’s Asian Archeology magazine, provide for the first time the animal drawings of this ancient culture and provide the broader genre of the region’s visual offering.
Berger said the drawings raise new questions about those created.
“Why those animals? Why in those dolmens and others? What made this one special?
The slow but steady accumulation of artistic discoveries brings researchers “increasingly” closer to subjects in their research, “of the civilization they know,” Berger said.
For Sharon, “it’s like a letter from beyond birth to present what is the world of culture and symbolism beyond the design and erection of very giant stones.”
(This article was published from a firm thread without converting the text. Only the call was changed).
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