“We haven’t excavated any settlements associated with the construction of the mustatil, so these may hold further clues and information about the practices involved,” Kennedy says. However, Kennedy says that finding nearby ancient settlements could potentially shed light on questions about the mustatils. The mustatils predate the earliest known written language by thousands of years, so it’s unlikely such a document exists. Archaeologists sometimes look to written texts for a direct explanation, but only if they’re available. “We don’t why they were prepared in these different ways, but the fact that they were not all prepared in the same manner is really interesting.”Īt this point, little is known about the details of the rituals that once took place there. “Some of the horns had the bone cores removed, with just the keratin sheath preserved, whilst others had the bone core and the sheath prepared,” she says. Kennedy tells Inverse that one of the new findings that was particularly surprising was the way these remains were prepared as offerings. But no teeth or jaws were unearthed during the excavation. Horns, too, were a commonly buried object. Whoever sacrificed the animals appeared to select only bones from the cranium, or the region of the skull that encases the brain. Since betyls were part of many ancient religious practices, and were believed to connect humans with deities, Kennedy and colleagues interpreted the animal remains as part of a ritual sacrifice. The skull and horns of cattle, sheep, goats, and gazelle were all found at the site, buried around the betyl. But more were hidden within the walls, waiting to be discovered. Some initial discoveries were reported in a 2021 Antiquity paper, where Kennedy and colleagues described a host of animal bones and a sacred stone known as a betyl. Melissa Kennedy, an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia, helped excavate one of the mustatils 55 kilometers (34 miles) east of Al-’Ula. Funding from the Saudi Royal Commission for AIUla, which was established in 2017, has supported large-scale surveys and excavations, including the one reported in the new study. People began to document the mustatils back in the 1970s, but it wasn’t until recent years that scientists first studied them in detail. Some mustatils were constructed in lava fields from basalt, while others were made of desert pavement, clusters of stone that naturally form in arid climates. Kennedy et al., 2023, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0 A narrow entryway in the base typically opened up to a large courtyard, while chambers were constructed at the head of the monument.Ī diagram of the remains of a mustatil, shown from the air. Though musatils range in size from 20 to 600 meters in length, they have the same defining features: two long walls running parallel, with short head and base barriers at opposite ends. It represents just one of several regions on the northern Arabian Peninsula that is home to these unusual monuments. The Saudi Arabian city of Al-’Ula (also stylized AlUla) is surrounded by the remains of mustatils. Animal bones, ritual stones, and human burials reveal that the site was a place for cult sacrifice and pilgrimage - and may have served multiple roles over the centuries. On Wednesday in the journal PLOS One, they describe new findings based on extensive excavations and analysis. One group of researchers from Australia, Saudi Arabia, and Switzerland have been digging into the past of a particular 7000-year-old mustatil to understand how it was used. In the past few years, scientific surveys and excavations have finally started to bring these mysteries to light. The remains of over 1600 are known in Saudi Arabia today - though their purpose in the ancient world remains a mystery.
Mustatils, named after the Arabic word for rectangle, were once extremely common across the landscape. Called a mustatil, it was drastically different than a pyramid, arranged in a 2-dimensional rectangle and characterized by short walls and open courtyards. Several thousand years before the pyramids rose over ancient Egypt, people living on the Arabian Peninsula constructed a different kind of marvel.
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