Arabian Stonehenge?

Palgrave's Itinerary

An unusual account by a 19^th-century explorer of the Arabian Peninsula describes a massive megalithic stone circle with horizontal lintel stones – much like England's Stonehenge but located in Central Arabia, on the edge of the Tuwaiq (or Toweyk) Escarpment.

Legend says this megalithic circle was built by a giant magician named Darim.

The discoverer in question was William Gifford Palgrave. The account of his travels in the southern part of Qasim appears in his Personal Narrative of a Year’s Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia (1862-63), published in London in 1865.

Palgrave also mentions two other similar stone circles, one nearby and the other on the edge of the Hejaz. While there are many low stone circles in Arabia, this is the first known reference to grand, European-style megalithic structures with lintels.

William G. Palgrave

Palgrave was an Arabic scholar and Jesuit priest, who explored the “terra incognita” of the Arabian heartland with the support of the Jesuit order and French Emperor Napoleon III. 

He posed as a Muslim during his travels, to avoid hostile reactions from locals in more isolated destinations. (In 1865, after his book was published, he renounced the Catholic Church, joined the British Foreign Office and eventually married.)

Here is Palgrave’s account of his discovery of the Arabian Stonehenge:

We halted for a moment on the verge of the [Toweyk] uplands to enjoy the magnificent prospect before us. Below lay the wide plain; at a few miles’ distance we saw the thick palm groves of ‘Eyoon, and what little of its towns and citadel the dense foliage permitted to the eye. Far off to our right, that is, to the west, a large dark patch marked the village and plantations which girdle the town of Rass; other villages and hamlets too were thickly scattered over the landscape. All along the ridge where we stood, and visible at various distances down the level, rose the tall, circular watchtowers of Kaseem. But immediately below us stood a more remarkable monument, one that fixed the attention and wonder even of our Arab companions themselves.
 For hardly had we descended the narrow path where it winds from ledge to ledge down to the bottom, when we saw before us several huge stones, like enormous boulders, placed endways perpendicularly on the soil, while some of them yet upheld similar masses laid transversely over their summit. They were arranged in a curve, once forming part, it would appear, of a large circle, and many other like fragments lay rolled on the ground at a moderate distance; the number of those still upright was, to speak by memory, eight or nine. Two, at about ten or twelve feet apart one from the other, and resembling huge gate-posts, yet bore their horizontal lintel, a long block laid across them; a few were deprived of their upper traverse, the rest supported each its head-piece in defiance of time and of the more destructive efforts of man. So nicely balanced did one of these cross-bars appear, that in hope it might prove a rocking-stone, I guided my camel right under it, and then stretching up my riding-stick at arm’s-length could just manage to touch and push it, but it did not stir. Meanwhile the respective heights of camel, rider, and stick taken together would place the stone in question a full fifteen feet from the ground. These blocks seem, by their quality, to have been hewn from the neighbouring limestone cliff, and roughly shaped, but present no further trace of art, no groove or cavity of sacrificial import, much less anything intended for figure or ornament. The people of the country attribute their erection to Dārim, and by his own hands, too, seeing that he was a giant; perhaps also, for some magical ceremony, since he was a magician. Pointing towards Rass, our companions affirmed that a second and similar stone circle, also of gigantic dimensions, existed there; and, lastly, they mentioned a third towards the southwest, that is, on the confines of Hejaz.
 That the object of these strange constructions was in some measure religious, seems to me hardly doubtful; and if the learned conjectures that would discover a planetary symbolism in Stonehenge and Carnac have any real foundation, this Arabian monument, erected in a land where the heavenly bodies are known to have been once venerated by the inhabitants, may make a like claim; in fact, there is little difference between the stone-wonder of Kaseem and that of Wiltshire, except that the one is in Arabia, the other, the more perfect, in England.

No subsequent explorer ever reported seeing the Arabian Stonehenge, leading other explorers to question Palgrave’s veracity.

F.V. Winnett and W.L. Reed, in their Ancient Records from North Arabia (1970), have this comment:

Palgrave (Narrative, p. 251) reported the presence of a sort of Stonehenge at al-‘Uyun in the province of Qasim but Philby (The Heart of Arabia, vol. 2 [London , 1922], pp. 140-1) claims this to be a figment of Palgrave’s imagination. According to Dr. Vidal, the people of the area have no recollection of any such monument, In any case, the monument described by Palgrave was different in character from that seen by us [near Qarah].

The “Dr. Vidal” referred to in that passage was archaeologist/anthropologist F.S. “Rick” Vidal of Aramco’s Arabian Research Division in the 1950s.

There may indeed be a stone structure similar to Palgrave's description near the town of Nabhaniyah, west of Ar-Ras, in Qasim. According to Najdi sources familiar with that area, there is a megalithic stone site close to Nabhaniyah that is used by locals as a family picnic ground. This claim has not yet been confirmed.

The notion that Palgrave may indeed have seen a dramatic megalithic structure in Central Arabia was supported by a 1998 article in Science magazine. In that piece, archaeologists excavating a megalithic site in Yemen proposed the existence of a widespread Bronze Age megalithic culture throughout the Red Sea region:

For decades, classical archaeologists focused much of their attention on the Mediterranean Sea, where Egyptian stelae, Minoan friezes, and Turkish shipwrecks reveal the rise and fall of empires and the skein of sea trade among them. Now, new excavations are offering the first, tantalizing glimpse of an ancient civilization that flourished 4000 years ago near another major Old World waterway: the Red Sea. Work by researchers from several different countries on the Red Sea's arid southeastern coast points to a complex culture whose people enacted costly rituals, possessed metal tools, and raised daunting megaliths at about the same time as Stonehenge appeared in Great Britain.
 In research currently in press in the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, Edward Keall, head of the Department of Near Eastern and Asian Civilization at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, presents preliminary evidence for a previously unstudied Bronze Age culture in coastal Yemen. His team members found the ruins of a circular prehistoric religious site, or henge, built of granite pillars weighing 20 tons. Buried at the foot of a fallen megalith, they discovered a cache of copper-alloy tools dated to between 2400 and 1900 B.C. And nearby, they unearthed fragments of children's skeletons from what appeared to be ceremonial burials. All this suggests a well-organized people living in an arid coastal plain once thought to have been almost empty at this time. "People had assumed that there was nothing there during the Bronze Age," says Keall.
 Other experts say the finding should draw attention to the dozen or so similar stone pillar sites scattered across western Arabia. "These sites have been sort of looked at, but not very thoroughly," says Christopher Edens, a research associate in the Near Eastern section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. "Now, someone has actually investigated these things and found this cache of bronzes, which is phenomenal for this area. I was floored." Moreover, the new excavation, which has yielded the first date for these mysterious megaliths, raises the possibility that an ancient and unsuspected trade network operated along this stretch of Red Sea coast....
 Title: Yemen's stonehenge suggests Bronze Age Red Sea culture.
Author(s): Pringle, Heather
Source: Science; 03/06/98, Vol. 279 Issue 5356, p1452, 2p, 1 map, 2c

Meanwhile, the search for Palgrave’s "Arabian Stonehenge" continues….