For almost a century it was believed that the ‘works of the old men’ of Arabia were actually a predominantly Levantine phenomenon. That the vast expanse of Saudi Arabia was devoid of the archaeological remains known as desert kites. And yet, thanks to advances in satellite imagery, the Kingdom’s varied landscape has begun to slowly reveal an extensive network of these monumental dry stone structures.
Viewed from low Earth orbit, the desert kites of Saudi Arabia are being revealed in ever-increasing numbers. From AlUla and Khaybar in the west to the Nafud Desert in the north, they are often kilometres long and intricately designed. Who built them? Nobody knows. The structures remain but very little evidence of the people who constructed them does. There are no permanent settlements, no weapons, and only two known inscriptions. Although a much clearer understanding of desert kites and their usage is being painstakingly pieced together, further excavation and dating is required for even the most basic information about the societies that created them to be ascertained.
Only visible from the air due to the vastness of their design and the lowness of their walls, it wasn’t until the 1920s that pilots of Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF) began to document their existence. On February 2, 1926, the British pilot Percy Eric Maitland took a series of images of the rugged, basaltic landscape of the Harrat al-Sham as he flew along a stretch of the airmail route between Cairo and Baghdad. This was ’lava country‘, he noted in the archaeological journal Antiquity in 1927. One of the photographs revealed a striking structure with a large head and what appeared to be a number of tentacle-like appendages. Similar structures peppered the vast, black desert of the Harrat al-Sham, and although the height of the dry stone walls was difficult to ascertain from the air, Maitland believed them to be no more than two or three feet high. The Bedouin, he said, referred to these structures as the ‘works of the old men’.
Two years later another RAF pilot, Lionel Wilmot Brabazon Rees, wrote of his experiences over the Transjordan Desert. He noted that the style of structure first mentioned by Maitland reminded him “of a small boy’s kite—a more or less hexagonal head with the string and tail springing out from it”. Also writing in Antiquity—this time in 1929—once again a series of photographs were reproduced, including one that clearly showed a kite on a basalt spur south of Qasr al-Azraq in eastern Jordan. Rees was the first to describe these previously unknown archaeological remains as ‘kites’.
Although Rees wrote that he had not seen any trace of a kite wall west of the Hejaz railway or “south of the approximate latitude of Amman”, the assumption was that the kites of the northern Harrat al-Sham might continue south into the Arabian Peninsula. This would not be proven until the arrival of high resolution satellite imagery in the early years of the 21st century and the exponential increase in the study of kites, both of which would reveal that the chains of kites recorded in Syria and Jordan did indeed continue into the same lava field in the north of Saudi Arabia.
What had these structures been used for? Nobody really knew. The initial belief of pilots such as Rees was that kites were constructed for defensive purposes, with their cells acting as strong points. Over time, however, and with the study of kites accelerating, it became clear that they were in fact wild game drives or hunting traps. In its classic form, the gradually narrowing tails of a kite acted as guide walls that funnelled game into an enclosure. That enclosure was usually located over the crest of a hill and any animals moving beyond the funnel‘s throat would suddenly find themselves inside the structure‘s head, which, up until that point, had remained out of sight.
Although there is almost no evidence of what happened to the animals after they were trapped, they were probably directed towards cells on the perimeter of the enclosure
that acted as trapping pits. It is not known how the hunt was carried out or whether the animals were driven or guided into the enclosure. It is also unknown whether hunting was seasonal or continued throughout the year.
What is certain is that significant regions of Saudi Arabia are covered with kites. Recent research has primarily focused on the west of the country, in large part due to the work of the Royal Commission of AlUla and The University of Western Australia‘s Aerial Archeology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia project. That project has helped to reveal a rich archaeological landscape with dense concentrations of not only kites, but mustatils (prehistoric stone structures believed to have been used for rituals) and various forms of burial site.
The kites in the north of Saudi Arabia are largely a continuation of those found in the Harrat al-Sham, which stretches from Syria, through Jordan and into the kingdom‘s northern extremity. In the north-west, there is a pronounced concentration of kites in Harrat Khaybar, a volcanic field to the north of Medina, with major clusters in the vicinity of the oases of Khaybar and Al-Hait. Further concentrations exist in AlUla County—primarily on the lava field plateau of Harrat Uwayrid—and Harrat Nawasif, a lava field to the east of Turbah. Kites have also been discovered in Harrat Rahat, Harrat Kishb, Tabuk and in the Nafud Desert, where a systematic remote sensing survey of the eastern Nafud region was carried out by archaeologists from the University of Oxford‘s School of Archaeology.
Exact dating is scarce and scientific analysis of the kites in Saudi Arabia is still relatively new, but the belief is that they are Neolithic in origin and date from the early to middle Holocene Humid Period. During that timeframe (circa 9,000 to 4,000 BCE) wetter climatic conditions prevailed, allowing for an expansion of grasslands and the hunting of game such as gazelle. As hard as it is to imagine now, the climate of the Arabian Peninsula would have been far friendlier 8,000 years ago. Permanent lakes formed in the oases of Tayma and Jubbah—both in the north-west of Saudi Arabia—and short-lived bodies of water existed in the interdune depressions of the Nafud Desert and in the Jebel Oraf basin. Scientific analysis of the oasis of Tayma has suggested that these wetter conditions peaked between 6,800 and 5,900 BCE, and even in the volcanic fields of Harrat ar Rahah-‘Uwayrid the existence of springs and of enhanced vegetation in wadi beds would have provided access to the key commodities of human subsistence.
The people who criss-crossed this landscape would have been primarily nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists who herded cattle, sheep and goats. They would have also hunted animals such as gazelle and ibex using weapons made of flint and other stones. It is they who are believed to have built the first kites.
Variations in kite design were the result of several factors, including topography and the species being hunted. In AlUla, it is believed that simpler kites were built to hunt smaller herds of animals. In Harrat Khaybar, where the topography is far more flat, larger herds would have undoubtedly been present, so much grander ones were constructed.
In some cases, the tails of the kites in AlUla County and Harrat Uwayrid begin to curve as the area between them narrows, usually at a point where the topography starts to change. In the Nafud Desert, the walls can run in an almost straight line for over four kilometres, often across a changing landscape. In its most basic form, the enclosure is circular and would have been used to concentrate and direct prey towards the kite‘s cells. In the Nafud Desert, the kite heads are predominantly star-shaped, with cells located at the tip of each star point. However, not all kites have a head. In Harrat Uwayrid, the most common form is V-shaped and has no enclosure at all, only a small trapping pit at the end of two guide walls.
What the kites tell us about early human life in the Arabian Peninsula is not entirely clear, but they do offer some clues. Firstly, it is certain that there was a sizeable, thriving population during the Neolithic period—a population that, just like contemporary communities in the Levant and Mesopotamia, were building large-scale monumental structures. Khaybar in particular is theorised to have had a significant population, not only because of the large number of kites discovered there, but because of the prevalence of mustatils and pendants (monumental funerary structures). Such a concentration of archaeological remains suggests a meaningful population.
The design and complexity of some kites and their predominantly westerly orientation also tells us that the prehistoric people who built them had a wealth of knowledge about the species they were hunting and their movement across the landscape. There is also evidence of a mustatil being reused to make a kite, and also of a kite being reused to create a mustatil, which perhaps suggests that both could have been created at roughly the same time. This, however, is only conjecture. What we do know is that Saudi Arabia is gradually being revealed as a country with dense archaeological remains. Only when their secrets are finally revealed will the true extent of the Kingdom’s ancient past spring tantalisingly to life.
Iain Akerman is the author of ‘Kites Of The Desert: Archeological Mysteries of Saudi Arabia’, published by Assouline, AED4,050, available now from assouline.com
