The tombs of Al-Ayn

Why this is extraordinary

Above Wadi Al-Ayn, a ridge carries a row of round stone tombs that taper like beehives. UNESCO lists them with the settlement and towers of Bat and the tower of Al-Khutm as one of the most complete sets of third-millennium settlements and cemeteries anywhere. The property was inscribed in 1988. Bat lies in Wadi Sharsah, about 24 kilometres east of Ibri. Al-Ayn is about 22 kilometres east-southeast of Bat. An excavation report on the necropolis counts a main row of 19 mostly well-preserved tombs on the ridge, and a further 12 in worse condition nearby and down the slope. An earlier survey had described 21. The pin is the ridge, at 23.216 north, 56.962 east. The mountain in the photograph is Jebel Misht, north of the tombs.

The shape is Hafit, the early Bronze Age of this coast, about 3100 to 2700 BC. A Hafit tomb is a single chamber, built of dry stone in rings that step inward, with a small triangular door and a false vault that once closed the top. Tomb 6, dug in 2010, is 5.75 metres across on the outside and 2.20 metres inside. The only object on the bedrock of the chamber was a copper needle 8.6 centimetres long. In the rubble outside the door was a sherd of Jemdet Nasr pottery, the ware of southern Mesopotamia in that horizon, which is how these tombs are tied to a distant calendar as well as a local one. Tomb 7, dug in 2011, is 3.90 metres across and still 2.77 metres high. Its triangular door faces south, and part of the original blocking was still in the passage. The pottery in its fill is Iron Age, first millennium BC. The tomb was used again thousands of years after it was built. A south door is a fact about one excavated tomb. It is not yet a rule for the row.

The row itself follows the ridge. That is the orientation reading on offer, and it is a ground reading as much as a sky reading. Tombs set along a crest look at the valley and are seen from it. They do not need a sunrise to explain the line. A south door, as at Tomb 7, faces the side of the sky where the sun spends the middle of the day. One door is not a solstice instrument. A solstice sunrise would be a bearing that shifts to its northern or southern extreme and stays, and no shared bearing of that kind is published for these tombs in the sources used here. Jebel Misht to the north is a landmark a builder could hardly miss. Facing it, or turning away from it toward the wadi, is a choice about a mountain, and a mountain is not a star.

The towers are the other unsolved half of the same property. UNESCO counts seven at Bat and one at Al-Khutm, round, about 20 to 25 metres across, with compartments and a central well. The earliest is a mud-brick Hafit structure under the stone tower at Matariya. The latest, Kasr al-Rojoom, falls in the late Umm an-Nar period, about 2200 to 2000 BC, by its pottery. The listing says conclusive evidence of their function is still missing. They may be platforms for houses, or for temples, or for something else, and the superstructure is gone. Cuneiform from Mesopotamia at the end of the third millennium speaks of Magan, the copper land identified with this coast. The texts are a name for a trade. They are not a label on a tower.

What the beehive held is the quiet dispute. Several tombs, once cleared, are poor in bone. Reuse, robbing, and the chemistry of the fill can all remove a body. An empty chamber is not, by itself, a monument that was never a grave. Tomb 6’s needle on the bedrock and Tomb 7’s later pottery are the sort of thin floor a robbed grave leaves. They are also the sort of floor a cenotaph would leave. The architecture is funerary in the listing’s reading. The bodies are the part the stone has not kept.