About a dozen life-sized stone sculptures and reliefs of camels have been found in a markedly inhospitable site in northern Saudi Arabia. While camel art has existed in the region going back millennia, nothing quite like this has been found before.
The somewhat eroded statues are tentatively dated at around 2,000 years old, give or take a century or more, according to a collaboration between the French National Center for Scientific Research and the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage reported this week in the Cambridge journal of Antiquity.
The archaeologists studying the weather-beaten “Camel Site” in Al Jawf, a province in northwest Saudi Arabia near Jordan, suggest the sculptures are a facet of a broader Arabian tradition that was probably influenced by the Parthians (ancient Iranians) and nomadic Nabateans from preceding centuries.
Why the artists chose to carve dromedaries in stone in such a remote, hostile environment is debatable. Read more.
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