Mustatils are
monument
A monument is a type of structure that was explicitly created to commemorate a person or event, or which has become relevant to a social group as a part of their remembrance of historic times or cultural heritage, due to its artistic, historical ...
s from
Prehistoric Arabia, made of
sandstone
Sandstone is a Clastic rock#Sedimentary clastic rocks, clastic sedimentary rock composed mainly of grain size, sand-sized (0.0625 to 2 mm) silicate mineral, silicate grains, Cementation (geology), cemented together by another mineral. Sand ...
walls, found in northwestern region of modern-day
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in West Asia. Located in the centre of the Middle East, it covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula and has a land area of about , making it the List of Asian countries ...
.
Location, prevalence, and layout
Named ''mustatil'' (, plural مُسْتَطِيلَات, mustaṭīlāt) for their shape, they have walls surrounding a long central courtyard, with a rubble platform at one end and entrances at the end opposite the platform. Some entrances are closed off with stones.
Over 1,000 mustatils, clustered in groups of 2–19, are spread out across a
ritual landscape covering 200,000 square kilometres. They range from 20 to over 600 metres in length, with walls that are 1.2 metres high. Some of the sandstone blocks used in their construction weigh more than 500 kilograms.
[
]
History of discovery and research
The mustatils first came to the attention of researchers in the 1970s. Excavation of one mustatil funded by the Royal Commission for Al-'Ula
Royal Commission for al-Ula (RCU; ) is a Saudi commission established in July 2017 to preserve and develop the 2,000-year-old archaeological and historical site of al-Ula north-western Saudi Arabia.
Importance of al-Ula
Al-Ula is the home of T ...
revealed a chamber at the center containing fragments of cattle skulls, but no remains from other parts of the animals; they are believed to be evidence of a previously unknown cattle cult.[
Radiocarbon dating of the skulls revealed that the mustatil, and maybe the others, was built between 5300–5000 BCE, during the Holocene Humid Period, a time when the area was a grassland that went through frequent droughts. This would make the mustatils one of the oldest-known large-scale ritual landscapes in the world.]
See also
*Desert kite
Desert kites () are dry stone wall structures found in Southwest Asia (Middle East, but also North Africa, Central Asia and Arabia), which were first discovered from the air during the 1920s. There are over 6,000 known desert kites, with sizes r ...
*Havilah
Havilah () refers to both a land and people in several books of the Bible; one is mentioned in Genesis 2:10–11, while the other is mentioned in the Generations of Noah (Genesis 10:7).
In Genesis 2:10–11, Havilah is associated with the Garden ...
References
{{reflist
External links
Uncovering the ritual past of an ancient stone monument in Saudi Arabia - Phys.org - 15 March 2023A mysterious cult that predates Stonehenge - BBC - Demi Perera 5 July 2022
Types of monuments and memorials
Neolithic Asia