How were these giant constructions built in the desert?

Desert kites are giant structures carved out of the Middle Eastern desert some 8,000 years ago. Archaeologists recently discovered two interconnected units in Jordan and Saudi Arabia with inscriptions of these buildings, which may be the oldest known architectural plans.

These structures are mainly low walls built of stone and form an enclosure with ditches on its edge, which can be up to 5 kilometers long. Despite their size, they don’t look like much at ground level, having only been discovered in the 1920s when planes flew over the desert and noticed their massive patterns.

It is believed that they were built as traps for animals that passed through the deserts during migration routes, such as gazelles and antelopes. The animals may have been herded into the barn, where they were trapped and then killed.

The proportions in which these traps were built left researchers interested in how to set them up without seeing them from above. But the monoliths found may have finally answered this question.

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Architectural plans on a monolith

Archaeologists led by Remy Crassard were doing field work in southeastern Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia when they discovered giant stones with mysterious patterns that looked like desert kites. By comparing the drawings to the geometry of some of the kites, the researchers found that they looked like those closest to them, still to scale.

It is unclear whether the monoliths are building projects, maps, or a symbolic commemoration of desert kites. However, if the first hypothesis is confirmed, these constructions could be a milestone in the timeline of human intelligence.

The existence of architectural plans for desert kites suggests that they were not built haphazardly, but rather in a coordinated fashion that required imagination and planning.

Although human constructions have altered landscapes for thousands of years, few plans or maps predate the learned civilizations of Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. The ability to transform a large area into a small two-dimensional surface is a milestone in intelligent behavior. These structures are visible as a whole only from the air, but this requires space to be represented in a way that is not seen at this time.

Researchers in a press release

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