On Oct. 17, Live Science published an article describing a highly unusual type of site – called gates in the Harret Khaybar area, that my colleagues and I had systematically catalogued and mapped and were to publish in the scientific literature in November. That sparked immediate and extensive international media coverage, including features in The New York Times, Newsweek and the National Geographic Education Blog. Four days after the article was published on Live Science, I got an invitation from publication from the Royal Commission for Al-Ula, in northwest Saudi Arabia, to visit that town. The Al-Ula oasis is famous for hosting the remains of a succession of early cultures and more recent civilizations, all strewn thickly among its 2 million-plus date palms. As a Roman archaeologist, I had known this oasis for over 40 years as the location of Madain Salih, Al-Hijr — ancient Hegra, a world-class Nabataean site adopted by UNESCO.

Four days after the invitation from the Royal Commission, my colleague Don Boyer, a geologist who now works in archaeology, and I were on our way to Riyadh. Almost immediately, on Oct. 27 to Oct. 29, we began three days of flying in the helicopter of the Royal Commission. In total, we flew for 15 hours and took almost 6,000 photographs of about 200 sites of all kinds — but mainly the stone structures in the two harrat.

Though we didn’t have much notice, Boyer and I spent three days before our visit looking over the sites we had “pinned” and catalogued using Google Earth over several years. We then, relatively easily, planned where we wanted to fly in order to capture several thousand structures in these two lava fields. Our helicopter survey was probably the first systematic aerial reconnaissance for archaeology ever carried out in Saudi Arabia. It was possible only because of the publication of the Live Science feature article describing my research on the gate structures, and the resulting international media coverage, which caught the attention of the Royal Commission.

-Prof. David Kennedy, in this LiveScience article, November 2017

I am just so excited about this, people. Just so excited.

I had heard that there were large stone structures, called “gates,” in Saudi Arabia. I’d even blogged about it before. But I had no idea that there were hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Saudi Arabia must be simply covered in these things.

It gets better. Guesses are that they date back 7,000 years (pre-Flood? Immediately post-Flood?). We know because many of them have been covered by lava flows in the interim. The Bedouins say they are “the works of the old men.”

It gets better. Why was the extent of these structures previously unknown? Must be racism, right? Evil European archaeologists didn’t expect the ancient inhabitants of Saudi Arabia to have built stuff like this?

Why, no. These structures are waaay out in the desert, known only to the locals. Almost impossible to find on foot. They are best surveyed from the air. Well, shortly after the last two World Wars (when small planes first came into general use), the Arab states started to achieve their independence from Britain and France. And they became closed states. They didn’t want anybody flying over their land. So, these amazing structures have been unknown and underappreciated, because those archaeologists who were interested, weren’t allowed to observe them.

So, let’s review. This story simply has everything guaranteed to make Out of Babel squirm with joy. Old, mysterious structures, really old, pre-dating even the amazing Nabatean civilization (the folks who built Petra), HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of them, purpose unknown, not generally known to exist because of remote location and closed country. Not only would this make a great movie, but it is the kind of thing that is continually popping up all over the world. Apparently, there is literally tons of evidence of smart humans building advanced civilizations, in just about every country on earth, yet we moderns have been unaware of this for a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons weren’t our fault (how were we supposed to know?), some were (we were blinded by the evolutionary narrative that says prehistoric people weren’t “advanced”).

When I say “advanced civilizations,” I mean a variety of different things by that. I mean cities with sophisticated water systems like Teohihuacan, observatory/computers like Stonehenge, observatory/cities like Poverty Point, temples using advanced geometry like Gobekli Tepe, pyramids like the ones in Bosnia, giant geoglyphs like the Nazca Lines and Serpent Mound and, apparently, these Saudi Arabian gate things. I also mean stones that appear to have been drilled, or precisely molded like the ones at Puma Punku.

If you have time, please follow the link and look up the LiveScience article. It’s worth reading the whole thing, and includes a video with views of the structures from an airplane.