A new insight into an enigmatic culture that thrived thousands of years ago has been discovered recently by chance in the occupied Golan Heights. The megalithic structure is composed of huge basalt boulders known as dolmens. They were used as burial tombs some 4,000-4,500 years ago in the Intermediate Bronze Era, and form a small roofed chamber that opens to the east.
According to AFP, the identity and beliefs of those who built the monuments remain largely unknown, but a recent finding of rock art might change that.
"About two years ago, when one of the rangers here in the park walked her daily walk, she looked inside and saw something carved in the walls. The ranger contacted the Antiquities Authority, and when we looked inside we saw this is not just lines carved or some stains on the wall, this is rock art," recalled Uri Berger, an archaeologist with the Antiquities Authority.
The lines form the shapes of six horned animals of varying sizes, three facing east and three facing west, with two of them -- likely a male and female -- directly facing each other.
Another horned animal is carved into the interior of one panel, facing the other six. The zoomorphic depictions, hidden in plain sight since study of the dolmens began 200 years ago, were the first to be discovered in the region and a major development for Berger and his research partner, archaeology professor Gonen Sharon.
Sharon, an archeology professor at the Tel Hai University, had previously made another important discovery in the region, when he was hiking with his children in 2012 on a field in the northern Galilee with some 400 dolmens spread across it.
One of the sites explored by the archeologists was inside an industrial zone near Kiryat Shmona, where three small megalithic structures that survived the zone's development are surrounded by circles of stones. On the relatively rounded capstone of the largest dolmen there, two sets of short parallel lines are carved into each side of the rock, with a longer line carved below, creating the image of closed eyes and a grimacing mouth facing the sky.
"To us they look like a face," said Sharon.
