Giant’s Ring, near Belfast. Neolithic henge with the remains of a chambered tomb in the middle. Breathtaking from the air, in the slanting rays of sun. #aerialphotography #prehistory #archaeology— Chiara Botturi (@botturi_chiara) May 11, 2018
Photo: ©UK Telegraph pic.twitter.com/BW1y5gGkyQ
Rujm al-Hiri (Galgal Refaim) in the Golan Heights
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| Credit: By Assaf Tzaddik, CC BY-SA 3.0. |
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| Credit: Haaretz. |
Rujm al-Hiri's unremarkable appearance from the ground belies its striking form when seen from the air: It consists of four circles — the outermost more than 500 feet across — made up of an estimated 42,000 tons of basalt stone, the remains of massive walls that experts believe once rose as much as high as 30 feet. It is an enormous feat of construction carried out 6000 years ago by a society about which little is known.
It seems likely that Rujm al-Hiri served residents of excavated villages nearby that were part of the same agrarian civilization that existed in the Holy Land in the Chalcolithic period, between 4500 and 3500 B.C. This predates the arrival of the Israelites as described in the Bible by as much as three millennia....
Most scholars have identified Rujm al-Hiri as some kind of ritual center, with some believing it connected to astronomical calculations. Archaeologist Yonathan Mizrahi, one of the first to excavate there, found that to someone standing in the very center of the circles on the morning of the summer solstice in 3000 B.C., "the first gleam of sunrise would appear at the center of the northeast entryway in the outer wall."...
[Mike] Freikman's excavations have yielded almost no material remains of the kind that are common at most archaeological sites, he said. That is significant, however, as it confirms that the site was never lived in and was thus not a defensive position or a residential quarter but most likely a ritual center of some kind — possibly, he said, one indeed linked to a cult of the dead.
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