ROCK ART AND THE CULT OF STONES

Har Karkom's plateau and surrounding valleys include an immense assemblage of rock art: about one thousand engraved rocks display over 40,000 rock engravings. This vast collection of art has been the primary motivation to explore and research this area. Several rock art sites on the mountain appear to have been used for events that prescribed the arranging of stone circles, the erection of standing stones and the lighting of large fires. It appears that surfaces cleared of stone rubble were piled with wood or other fuels and set ablaze; even after the passage of millennia conspicuous traces remain of the fires that were produced, such as fire chips on hundred of flints in these areas. The size of the burnt area is sometimes more than twenty meters in diameter. In some cases such fires remind one of the traditional funerary pyres of India, but no fragments of bones have been found. It is still not clear with what occasions or performances these conflagrations were involved. In several cases such areas of pyres are connected with rock art concentrations, which offer further clues but no certain answers to the role of the fires.

From our current information, the rock art in the Islamic period, and probably also during Roman-Byzantine times, was often non-religious in its creation and subject matter, allowing all sorts of descriptive and anecdotal figures to be represented. In the Bronze Age, on the other hand, most of the rock art was a matter of cult, and the depictions related mainly to worship. The connection between the fires and rock art is not easily explained; one can readily imagine, however, the effect fires of such proportions and such distant visibility might have.