Nabta Playa - pannous/hieros GitHub Wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabta_Playa

New wiki contradicts the following 'old picture':

11,000 - 9300 years ago, settlements at Nabta were composed of small seasonal camps of cattle-herding and ceramic-using people. These early cattle are regarded as domestic (Wendorf and Schild 1994), and it may have been in the Western Desert that the African pattern of cattle herding developed, wherein cattle serve as a "walking larder" and provide milk and blood, rather than meat (except for ceremonial occasions) and are the economic basis for power and prestige. Pottery is very rare in these sites, but distinctive. It is decorated over the entire exterior with complex patterns of impressions applied with a comb in a rocking motion. The source of this pottery has not been identified, but it is among the oldest known in Africa, and older than pottery in Southwest Asia.

combs made from fish bone and which belong to a general pottery tradition strongly associated with the southern parts of the Sahara (e.g. of the Khartoum mesolithic and various contemporary sites in Chad) of that period!

Partial replacement of the very early (proto-)Neoliths:

By the 7th millennium BC, exceedingly large and organized settlements were found in the region, relying on deep wells for sources of water.[2] Huts were constructed in straight rows.[2] Sustenance included fruit, legumes, millets, sorghum and tubers.[2]

A little later imported goats and sheep, apparently from Western Asia,[11] appear. Many large hearths also appear. These prehistoric peoples led livelihoods seemingly at a higher level of organization than their contemporaries who lived closer to the Nile Valley. This pattern is latter reflected in Sumerian connections of the C-Group. The people of Nabta Playa had above-ground and below-ground stone construction.

By the 6th millennium BC, evidence of a prehistoric religion or cult appears, with a number of sacrificed cattle buried in stone-roofed chambers lined with clay. cattle cult indicated in Nabta Playa marks an early evolution of Ancient Egypt's Hathor cult.

By the 5th millennium BC these peoples had fashioned what may be among the world's earliest known archeoastronomical devices (roughly contemporary to the Goseck circle in Germany and the Mnajdra megalithic temple complex in Malta).

NOT an accurate calendar!
"Calendar circle" may be a misnomer as the spaces between the pairs of stones in the gates are a bit too wide, and the distances between the gates are too short for accurate calendar measurements."[7] An inventory of Egyptian archaeoastronomical sites for the UNESCO World Heritage Convention evaluated Nabta Playa as having "hypothetical solar and stellar alignments."

Late Neolithic megalithic structures at Nabta Playa /WendorfSAA98.html

Nabta Playa sculpture:

thirty "complex structures" located in an area about 500 meters long and 200 meters wide, on a high remnant of playa clays and silts about a kilometer south of the large settlement which yielded so many bones of cattle. Each of these structures consists of a group of large, elongated, roughly shaped or unshaped sandstone blocks set upright to frame an oval area about five meters in length and four meters in width, oriented slightly west of north. In the center of this oval there is one, sometimes two, very large flat slabs laid horizontally. Two of these structures have been excavated, a third has been tested, and drill-holes have been dug at two others. All are basically similar, although they differ in some details. All of the excavated and tested structures were built over mushroom-shaped tablerocks, the tops of which were deeply buried (from two to three and a half meters below the surface) in heavy playa clays and silts. These tablerocks are quartzitic lenses in the underlying bedrock which were shaped by erosion of the softer surrounding sediments before the overlying playa sediments were deposited. How the Nabta people managed to find these tablerocks deeply buried below the surface is not clear, but it may have been mere chance and occurred during the excavation of a water well. Except for the structures, however, there is no other archaeological material in this area, which is highly unusual for the Nabta Basin, where archaeological sites of various ages occur almost everywhere.

The excavation of the largest of these complex structures disclosed that before the upright stones were erected, a large pit about six meters in diameter and four meters deep had been dug. The table rock at the base of the pit was shaped by removing the irregular edges, leaving a convex perimeter on three sides. The fourth side, at the north end, was worked by flaking to form a straight edge. The top of the table rock was also smoothed. The pit was then partially refilled with playa clay to a level about a half meter above the top of the table rock, and then an enormous (ca. 2.5 tons), carefully shaped stone was brought in and held in position by several small slabs. The base of the shaped stone was 2.5 meters below the surface. What this "sculpture" represents is not clear; it is shaped on only two sides, and its sculptors used the natural bedding in the rock to achieve a wide, curved surface which they smoothed. In some views the stone vaguely resembles a large animal. After the shaped stone was placed in position, the pit was backfilled completely, and the surface architecture of large upright stones and two large horizontal central stones was erected directly over the tablerock.

The other excavated structure also had been erected over a tablerock, and it too had a large stone over the tablerock, but work on that stone was limited to a few flakes removed from one end. The third complex structure was only tested. It was one of eight that were tightly clustered and interlocked together. The units were smaller, constructed of smaller stones, but had the same configuration with a large horizontal central stone. The test excavations recovered charcoal from a shelf on the edge of the pit under the structure, and this charcoal yielded a calibrated radiocarbon age between 5600 and 5400 years ago (4800 +- 80 years bp; DRI 3358). This is the only date available for these structures, and it is about 1500 years later than we had estimated from the stratigraphic evidence.

Very confusing data! 8000BC? 6000BC? 3000BC?