The oldest map in Europe has spent more than a century, buried and forgotten by everyone in the reserves of the National Archeology Museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye; its ancestors from the Middle East have waited nine millennia under the harsh sun of the Arab-Jordanian desert. Archaeologists have discovered, engraved on the stone, what they believe to be the oldest known plans, in this case those of immense structures built for hunting.
What did people represent at that time, before the first city-states emerged from the sands and waters of the Fertile Crescent? “Desert kites”, “desert kites” in English. Thus baptized by their first discoverers – aviators in the 1920s. These structures of singular shape are delimited by low walls which, seen from the sky, look like the trails of a kite. The constructions “open into an enclosed space of around one hectare, where pits several meters deep are dug”, describes Olivier Barge, archaeologist and cartographer at the Archéorient laboratory of the University of Lyon-2.
The Globalkites project, organized by Archéorient, lists to date more than 6000 structures of this kind, from Kazakhstan to Jordan. These constructions allowed a “sophisticated hunting technique”. Animals – gazelles for example – were gathered in this kind of trap before being directed to the pits to be slaughtered. It was near such “desert kites”, located in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, that the laboratory’s team of archaeologists made two “exceptional discoveries” in 2015, in the words of Olivier Barge, co-author of the study devoted to this subject and published this month in the scientific journal PLOS One.
An almost meter-high blond limestone stele in Jordan and a towering block of black sandstone in Arabia both bear the detailed engraved plans of nearby ‘desert kites’, researchers have observed, after close examination of their surface. . These plans are not a simple schematic representation, specifies Wael Abu-Azizeh, archaeologist at the French Institute of the Near East and co-author of the study.
The precision of their layout has stunned archaeologists. Without the help of modern techniques, “we would be unable to reproduce the plane of the ‘kite’ with the precision that is the case here”, indicates Wael Abu-Azizeh. Drawing a plan to scale implies mastery of the proportions of the elements represented, and therefore their precise measurement. A challenge, when it comes to structures whose overall shape cannot be grasped without observing it from the air. “We have no idea how they did it,” agrees Olivier Barge, whose study highlights “the largely underestimated mental mastery of space perception” of the populations of the time.
Until now, the hypothesis was that the art of cartography must have been born much later, in “a culture mastering writing, with a tradition of archives, integrated into exchange networks”, continues the cartographer. . Like that of Mesopotamia, 5000 years ago.
The discoveries of Jordan and Saudi Arabia reshuffle the deal on the subject. The mega-structures are built in a complex topography, excluding the idea of an initial plan which would then be restored on the ground. This plan made it possible to “transmit information, and share it with several people, for the organization of the hunt”, explains Wael Abu-Azizeh, for whom this is the “most probable” hypothesis.
Added to this is a cultural dimension. The map would then be a symbol of the mastery of space and of a particular hunting technique, through skilfully constructed traps using the particularities of the terrain.
