No one knows why these circular stone structures, thought to be 2 thousand years old, which continue to confuse archaeologists, are there and for what purpose they were built. Moreover, the Khatt Shebib Wall is only one of the ancient structures found in Jordan.
Sir Alec Kirkbride, a British diplomat in Jordan who first mentioned the existence of the wall known today as “Khatt Shebib” in 1948. While travelling by plane in Kirkbride Jordan, he noticed” a stone wall that runs across the country and serves no visible purpose."
Now, using aerial photographs, researchers studying the remains of the road have discovered that the wall continues for 106 kilometers from the north/northeast direction to the south/southwest direction. In some parts of the wall, the two walls lay side by side.
“If we add the ledges and the parts where the two parallel walls continue together, the total length of the wall can reach 150 km,” says Professor David Kennedy of the University of Western Australia and Rebecca Banks of the University of Oxford, who studied the wall.
Although today the wall is in a state of ruin, “even in its original state, the length of the wall could not be more than 1 meter and the width could not be more than half a meter,” the researchers say. Along the Khatt Shebib wall, archaeologists also found the remains of an estimated 100 so-called Towers. The towers were 2 to 4 meters in diameter. Researchers say some of the towers were built after the wall was built. “Some of them may have been used as shelters, safe places to spend the night, " Kennedy told Live Science. Some may have been used as a place of surveillance or sentencing. Perhaps some of them were places where hunters could hide and wait until the prey animal approached them,” he says. The research raised new questions for archaeologists about when, by whom, and why the wall was built.
The only information on dating so far comes from pottery found in the towers and other settlements around the wall, Kennedy said. Accordingly, the wall was probably built at a time between the Nebatis, who ruled between 312 BC and 106 AD, and the Umayyads, who ruled between 661-750 ad. Although it is possible that one of the kingdoms or empires that ruled Jordan built the wall during this nearly 500-year period, the wall may not have been built by a major state. “It is also possible that local communities saw what their neighbors were doing and were convinced of its benefits and copied this practice, that is, building walls,” Kennedy and Banks write. According to Kennedy and banks, the fact that the wall is low and narrow indicates that it was not built for defensive purposes. The fact that there is more evidence of farming on the west side of the wall than on the East Side suggests that the wall was a boundary between nomadic hunter-gatherers and Agriculturalists, say the researchers. Or it could represent a boundary otherwise. In order to have more information about the wall, more land work needs to be done. Kennedy and Banks “aerial archaeology with aerial photographs cannot help answer questions such as the history and purpose of the wall. For this, land work needs to be done,” he said.
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