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Chapter One
Star Stones
It took a war a fierce and bloody war to bring to light, just decades ago, one of the most enigmatic ancient sites in the Near East. If not the most enigmatic, it certainly is the most puzzling, and for sure one rooted in great antiquity. It is a structure that has no parallel among the remains of the great civilizations that had flourished in the Near East in past millennia at least so far as has been uncovered. Its closest parallels are thousands of miles away, across the seas and on other continents; and what it mostly brings to mind is Stonehenge in faraway Britain.
There, on a windswept plain in England about eighty miles southwest of London, circles of imposing megaliths form the most important prehistoric monument in the whole of Britain. There, a semicircle of huge upright stones that have been connected at their tops by lintel stones encompasses within it a semicircle of smaller stone uprights, and is surrounded in turn by two circles of other megaliths. The multitudes that visit the site find that only some of the megaliths still remain standing, while others have collapsed to the ground or are somehow gone from the site. But scholars and researchers have been able to figure out the configuration of the circles-within-circles, which highlights the still-standing megaliths), and observe the holes indicating where two other circles-of stones or perhaps wooden pegs had once existed, in earlier phases of Stonehenge.
The horseshoe semicircles, and a fallen large megalith nicknamed the Slaughter Stone, indicate beyond doubtthat the structure was oriented on a northeast-southwest axis. They point to a line of sight that passes between two stone uprights through a long earthworks Avenue, straight to the so-called Heel Stone. All the studies conclude that the alignments served astronomical purposes; they were first oriented circa 2900 B.C. (give or take a century or so) to sunrise on the summer solstice day; and then realigned circa 2000 B.C. and again circa 1550 B.C. toward sunrise on summer solstice day in those times.
One of the shortest yet most fierce and ferocious recent wars in the Middle East was the Six Day War of 1967, when the hemmed-in and besieged Israeli army defeated the armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and captured the Sinai peninsula, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Golan Heights.
In the years that followed Israeli archaeologists conducted extensive archaeological surveys and excavations in all those areas, bringing to light settlements from early Neolithic times through biblical times to Greek, Roman, and Byzantine periods. Yet nowhere was the surprise greater than on the sparsely inhabited and mostly empty plateau called the Golan Heights. Not only was it discovered that it had been an actively inhabited and cultivated area in the earliest times of human habitation; not only were remains of settlements found from the several millennia preceding the Common Era.
Virtually in the middle of nowhere, on a windswept plain (that had been used by the Israeli army for artillery practice), piles of stones arranged in circles turned out when viewed from the air to be a Near Eastern "Stonehenge".
The unique structure consists of several concentric stone circles, three of them fully circular and two forming only semicircles or "horseshoes." The outer circle is almost a third of a mile in circumference, and the other circles get smaller as they get nearer the structure's center. The walls of the three main stone circles rise to eight feet or more, and their width exceeds ten feet. They are constructed of field stones, ranging in size from small to megalithic ones that weigh five tons and even more. In several places the circular concentric walls are connected to each other by radial walls, narrower than but about the same height as the circular walls. In the precise center of the complex structure there rises a huge yet well-defined pile of stones, measuring some sixtyfive feet across.
Apart from its unique shape, this is by far one of the largest single stone structures in western Asia, so large in fact that it can be seen from space by Earth-orbiting spacecraft.
Engineers who have studied the site estimated that, even in its present condition, it contains more than 125,000 cubic feet of stones weighing an aggregate of close to 45,000 tons. They estimated that it would have taken one hundred workmen at least six years to create this monument collect the basalt stones, transport them to the site, place them according to a preconceived architectural plan, and raise the walls (undoubtedly taller than the now-visible remains) to form the cohesive complex structure.
All of which raises the questions, by whom was this structure built, when, and for what?
The easiest question to answer is the last one, for the structure itself seems to indicate its purpose at least its original purpose. The outermost circle clearly showed that it contained two breaks or openings, one located in the northeast and the other in the southeast locations that indicate an orientation toward the summer and winter solstices.
Working to clear away fallen rocks and ascertain the original layout, Israeli archaeologists exposed in the northeastern opening a massive square structure with two extended "wings" that protected and hid narrower breaks in the two next concentric walls behind it; the building thus served as a monumental gate providing (and guarding) an entrance into the heart of the stone complex. It was in the walls of this entryway that the largest basalt boulders, weighing as much as five and a half tons each, were found. The southeastern break in the outer ring also provided access to the inner parts of the structure, but there the entranceway did not possess the monumental building; but piles of fallen stones starting in this entranceway and leading outward from it suggest the outlines of a stone-flanked avenue extending in the southeastern direction an avenue that might have outlined an astronomical line of sight.