Plans etched into stone tablets depict vast hunting traps called desert kites built 9000 years ago, showing a mastery of geometry long before the invention of writing
By Christa Lesté-Lasserre
17 May 2023
Aerial view of a desert kite from Jebel az-Zilliyat, Saudi Arabia
O. Barge, CNRS
Architects drew up highly precise plans of vast stone-walled hunting traps 9000 years ago, representing the oldest known architectural plans to scale in human history.
The plans were etched into massive stone tablets that have been recently discovered close to the elaborate traps, known as desert kites, which span such wide distances that their shapes are only recognisable from the sky. The findings confirm that Neolithic humans had an “underestimated mental mastery” of landscapes and space, well before they became literate, says Rémy Crassard at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
“There’s no doubt that these Homo sapiens had the same degree of intelligence that we do, but this is the first time we actually have concrete proof of their spatial perception – in both these gigantic kites and now also in their very precise corresponding plans,” he says. “It shows to what extent this way of thinking was anchored into their culture.”
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Kites in Saudi Arabia and Jordan feature funnelling lines up to 5 kilometres long and up to 10 pointed branches leading to pits as much as 4 metres deep. Named by aeroplane pilots who first discovered them from the air in the 1920s and thought they looked like toy kites, the structures probably lured gazelles or other wild prey into narrower parts of the structure where they would get cornered or fall, says Wael Abu-Azizeh at the French Institute for the Near East.
A stone at Jibal al-Khashabiyeh, Jordan, engraved with a plan of a desert kite SEBAP & Crassard et al. 2023 PLOS ONE
But despite the complexity of these Stone Age structures, the rare artistic representations of them found so far have been nothing more than rough abstract sketches. Scientists believed that the oldest true architectural plans that were at least intended to be to scale dated to Mesopotamian civilisations 2300 years ago.