Flower people
Visible Only From Above, Mystifying 'Nazca Lines' Discovered in
Mideast, by
Owen Jarus
Source - http://www.livescience.com/16046-nazca-lines-wheels-google-earth.html
They stretch from Syria to Saudi Arabia, can be seen from the air but not the
ground, and are virtually unknown to the public.
Credit: Stafford Smith - The Harrat ash-Sham lava field
stretches from Syria to Saudi Arabia and contains thousands of wheels. Here,
drawings reveal the various shapes these structures can take.
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. They are often found on lava fields and range from 82 feet to 230
feet (25 meters to 70 meters) across.
Credit: David L. Kennedy APAAME_20080925_DLK-0308The area near
the Azraq Oasis in Jordan has hundreds of wheels, large structures made of stone. (Unless otherwise noted, all the
photographs in this album are taken from the air, as one can't make out the
structures from flat ground.)
"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.
Credit: Robert H. Bewley APAAME_20090928_RHB-0120 - These stone
structures have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle with
spokes radiating inside. This wheel in Jordan looks like it has four dots within
its spokes.
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.
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.
Credit: David L. Kennedy. APAAME_20081102_DLK-0061-1In this
photo the helicopter carrying the team descends toward the ground near two
wheels. Even from reduced elevation the wheels are still visible.
"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."
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.
Cairns, or piles of stones, are often found associated with the wheels, sometimes circling
the perimeter and other times in among the spokes. Here, the wheel to the south
has a ring of such cairns around it.
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.
- I guess we should try to see things as they are. Holmes would deduce that
these structures are buildings. Villages, made by the Flower People, here and
there.
Circular houses that men built in the past, with 4 or 5 rooms, often placed one
next to the other. The fact that they do no share straight lines, says that
their purpose
was not an astronomical one, or connected to stars, time and symbolic meanings.
These houses were spontaneus settlements made by the "Flower people" that lived
there.
I hove found more than 5000 of them in two different continents, and believe
that they were really built by the "old men". As hundreds of them can be found clustered
into
groups,
it is clear that these people gathered together in small communities. Their
structures have nothing to do with Nazca lines, which depict animals, insects,
birds, and
show straight lines that never seem to appear in this culture, though we could
consider them geogliphs, in the sense that from an archaeoastronomical point of
view, we are able
to see them clearly from the sky. As no one seems to be interested in digging,
or finding an answer, I suppose that these ruins are certainly much older that
9000 years, and
the topic an off limits one. As they cerainly belong to pre history, the fact
that they are similar to houses in use 200.000 years ago, which we can find near
Egoli in South Africa,
were gold miners used to live, I am starting to think that someone is hiding the
explanation away, in order to protect the gold mines they own forgetting on
purpose the Sumerian
connection they have with Outsiders and their needs.
.