A gigantic monument at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee, as well as several mysterious structures, including a gigantic stone wheel and a moon-shaped monument, were recently found in northern Israel. The mysterious structures have left archaeologists around the world bewildered. Who built them and what were they used for?
They may be some of Israel’s most mysterious structures. They are easy to miss from the roadside but can clearly be seen from the skies or beneath the sea.
The prehistoric stone monuments of Gilgal Refaim, Jethro Cairn and the circular structure found in the sea of the Galilee went unnoticed for centuries in the disputed regions of the Golan and the Galilee but still archaeologists don’t know who built them, or why.
Theories have gone wild and include ancient calendars, ceremonial structures, or ‘sky burial’ sites in which dead bodies were placed on top of stone mounds to be picked apart by vultures. Even more eluding is that that are no archeological evidence of a city near them, and some have therefore posited that the structures is in fact a huge monument carrying symbolic significance.
The possible age of the structures is even more enigmatic and many put the estimate anywhere between 3,000 and 12,000 years old, making them older than the pyramid of Giza and Stonehenge in Great Britain.
The only thing we can say with certainty is that they are there and they are huge.
In 2014 Israeli archaeologist reported of a crescent shaped stone monument larger than a football field in northern Israel. At about 150 meters in length and 7 meters in height, the monument, dubbed ‘Jethro Cairn,’ can be seen on satellite images.
Bronze Age pottery excavated at the monument indicates it was built between 3050 and 2650 BCE, but it may be much older.
The monument’s shape, a crescent, may have been chosen to symbolize the ancient Mesopotamian moon god Sin.
The Moon-god Sin or Naama was the special guardian deity of the Chaldeans who lived in the ancient city of Ur. Once a center of worship of the moon-god, the site’s most prominent feature is still a temple tower, or ziggurat, some 61 m long, 46 m wide, and 21 m high.
Only a day’s walk from the monument sits late bronze age city called Bet Yerah, meaning “house of the moon god” in Hebrew. Another 13 kilometers southeast of the monument another enigmatic monument was discovered, this time below the sea level.
About 8 miles (13 kilometres) northwest of the Sea of Galilee, a recently identified crescent-shaped monument was built about 5,000 years ago
Not far from where the monumental crescent was found, another enigmatic structure has eluded archaeologists ever since its discovery was announced in 2013.
The mysterious structure with a diameter greater than the length of a Boeing 747, was discovered by divers about 9 meters underneath the Sea of Galilee in 2003.
The massive structure was built out of basalt rocks, arranged in the shape of a cone. It measures 70 meters at the base of the structure, is 10 meters tall, and weighs an estimated 60,000 tons. It is twice the size of the ancient stone circle at Stonehenge in England.
The archeologists think it was built on dry land and later submerged by the lake but the exact age of the structure has been difficult to pinpoint.
However, one thing the archeologists are certain of is that the monument was likely of great importance to the people who built it. The nearest basalt outcrop was a few hundred meters from the site, and the stones, which were one to two meters in width, would have weighed over 90 kilograms at times. […]