The wild cat from the Golan Heights

A mysterious site, called Rojam al Hari on old Syrian maps, was built in the Golan thousands of years ago. The complex, built like Stonehenge in England from huge stone circles, serves as evidence of a sophisticated and developed culture, in the Sefer region of antiquity

David Ref

Rojam to the mountains. 42 thousand basalt stones that were brought to the place already in the third millennium BC, photo: Dobi Tal and Muni Harmati, "Albatross"

Direct link to this page: https://www.hayadan.org.il/rugam.html

Although they may have chosen a lighted night, under the surface of the earth there was an alta, and when the oil candles fell from their hands they were left in the dark. Finally they managed to make their way out, with gold jewelry, bronze arrowheads, colored beads, ceramic figurines and carved flint stones in their hands. In their flight, some of the jewelry fell on the floor of the burial complex, but they did not bother to look for it in the dark.

The antiquities robbers entered the tomb structure on the Golan Heights in the fourth century AD, to rob objects that had been buried there about 1,600 years earlier. The jewelry they lost in their flight, like their oil candles, remained in place for another 1,600 years.

One summer afternoon in 1990, one of the workers in the excavation team, headed by Yoni Mizrahi, felt cool air emanating from a pile of stones in the center of Rojam al Hari. When he looked down he saw the opening to the burial complex that the team had been looking for all season of excavation.

Rojam El Hari is one of the most mysterious archaeological sites in Israel. For an unknown reason, the site, which in Arabic means "heap of stones of the wild cat", was called that on Syrian military maps, found during the Six Day War. In Hebrew it is called a ghost wheel. It is located in the Golan Heights, not far from Gamla, about 16 kilometers east of the Sea of ​​Galilee, at an altitude of about 500 meters above sea level.

The structure of the site can best be understood from the air. This is a megalithic complex - a huge stone complex - with more than 42 thousand basalt stones that were brought to the place already in the third millennium BC and arranged in circles. The weight of some of the stones
reaches more than five tons.

Approximately in the center of the compound stands a large stone pillar, approximately 20 meters in diameter and approximately five meters high. Although this is the most visible relic, it is doubtless the most interesting. There are circular walls around Gal-Ad. The circumference of the outermost wall is close to half a kilometer and its diameter - more than 150 meters. Within the area it delimits, more walls were built, some elliptical, some circular and some open - which do not form a closed circle. Many more stone walls connect between the circles.

Mizrahi, who wrote his doctoral thesis at Harvard University on Rojam al Hari, was helped in 1990 by two gas and oil drilling experts who came from abroad with radar and sonar equipment. They transported heavy equipment over the Gal-Ed and in the photographs we can see a particularly dark area - where the team dug from that day on, and where the ancient tomb complex is located.

The jewelry, from the end of the second millennium BC, did not belong to the generation that built the tomb complex. Someone used a structure that was already there. But even the builders of the tomb were not the ancients who established the complex itself. In the center of the Rojam el Hari site - which was probably built as early as the third millennium BC as a cult site - a burial complex was added in the second millennium BC, perhaps to indicate the attribution of the person buried as a scion to a glorious culture; A culture that established an impressive ceremonial site that was used by the inhabitants of the region at a time when they had not yet developed a written language.

Rojam El Hari was "revealed" to the world immediately after the Six Day War. It must have always been known to the residents of the area, but academic research on it began in the late sixties. Reading the summary of the archaeological survey from the years 1968-1967 reveals relatively close anthropological processes: "As part of the special survey in the occupied territories, the Golan Heights was also surveyed", wrote Maria Gutman and Adam Drucks in 1969 humbly, many years before the annexation of the Golan Heights and the declarations that "Shinit Gamla will not fall" .

In his doctoral thesis from 1992, Mizrahi explains - perhaps for the benefit of his colleagues in the anthropology department at Harvard - that the Golan has always been a buffer zone between the fertile lands to the west of Jordan and the Syrian deserts to the east. He points out that the Bible shows that even the permanent residents of the Golan were considered outsiders. Episodes of permanent settlement in the area were, according to him, relatively short and unexpectedly interrupted. The Golan has passed from hand to hand throughout history.

The Rojam El Hari site was almost never excavated until the late XNUMXs, but the similarity in its shape to the Stonehenge site and dozens of similar complexes in England and France immediately led to a wave of speculation regarding its dating and functions. We argued that Rojam al Hari served as a ceremonial center or a military compound; Some saw it as a grain barn or animal pen, while others thought it was a large burial ground. There were even those who hastened to state that this is the burial place of Og, King of Bashan, mentioned in the Bible.

Dr. Matanya Zohar from the Hebrew University studied the site from the early 1991s and even drew its ground plan, including the location of the thousands of stones in it. The excavations conducted by Mizrahi at the site in the years - 1988-XNUMX as part of the archaeological expedition to Eretz Geshur, led by Prof. Moshe Kochavi and Prof. Farahia Bek from Tel Aviv University - provided new findings and illuminated discoveries already found in the first survey from the XNUMXs.

Two large gates were found in the outer wall of the compound, one in the northeast and the other in the southeast. According to the hypothesis, special ceremonies were held in Rojam al Hari on the longest and shortest day of the year. According to calculations made by Mizrahi and his colleagues, it seems that around the year 3000 BC the first rays of the sun did penetrate on the longest day of the year through the opening in the northeast gate, which measures 20x29 meters, although not at a perfect angle. It seems that the light then also passed through openings in the inner walls, up to the geometric center of the complex. The hypothesis is that it was the worship of the gods Ishtar and Tammuz, the Mesopotamian couple whose love life marked the cycle of fertility in nature - as a blessing to man and animals and the prosperity of crops. In the second millennium B.C., when the tomb complex was built in Rojam al Hari, the passage of light was damaged.

The south-east gate has been a disappointment to Stonehenge fans. The sun did not penetrate it on the shortest day of the year, in December 3000 BC, nor for thousands of years before. The research in Rojam al Hari is indeed defined as an excavation in the "Levant", but it is hard to assume that any of the researchers will consider the possibility that negligent contractors missed the sun's rays by a few degrees. The reign of the Early Bronze Age did not tolerate such construction errors, and it seems that the southern gate was simply not intended to mark a particular day. Maybe he headed towards a historical site that was important to the population of the area.

The ancients could determine the equinox days (in March and September) at the Rojam al Hari site based on the passage of sunlight between two huge rocks, two meters high and five meters wide, that stood at the eastern end of the complex. According to the autumnal equinox and the vernal equinox, the inhabitants could prepare, respectively, for the first rains, followed by the sowing season, and for the hot east winds of summer.

Mizrahi and Prof. Anthony Avni - an astronomer from the United States who studied the Mayan and Inca sites in South America - made careful calculations in Rojam el Hari. They were able to calculate the degree of attribution according to which the entire complex was built - a standard that was accepted in Mesopotamia and Egypt and is based on the dimensions of the human body.

They tried to decipher the meaning of the walls connecting the five central stone circles on the site. These walls have no important architectural significance, and Mizrahi speculates that they make up an architectural array that refers to a celestial array of the stars of the sky at the time of the site's construction. In some of the buildings he sees reference to prominent geographical sites in the Rojam el Hari area - including the Hermon and the Tabor, which were considered sacred already in ancient times.

It seems that the Rojam al Hari site had a religious, mythological and cosmological significance for the residents of the area. It was used by them both for astronomical observations and for planning the agricultural calendar. Rojam al Hari is not a burial complex around which a monumental site was built, but rather a monumental site within which a burial site was built. The latter was established only at the end of the second millennium BC, in its form that has been preserved to this day. During this period there were no permanent settlements in the Golan and the population consisted mainly of nomads and shepherds.

Over the years Rojam El Hari stopped being used as a ceremonial or burial site. So it is possible that we will become a sheep pen or a grain barn, and maybe even a military defense point. The site lost its luster and most of the stones of its walls collapsed.

The occupation of the Golan led to its rediscovery and deciphering of some of its secrets. Some will also not want to refer to the grim evidence provided by the site - evidence of a thriving culture that, although it was hung in the sky and tried to bring order to the world of wild nature, did not survive in the Golan.