Mysterious 8,000 year old stone circles filled with phallic carvings discovered in mountain
Around 100 prehistoric ‘cult sites,’ containing phallic carvings have been found in the Eilat Mountains in the Negev Desert in Israel.
The sites date back around 8,000 years, and archaeologists were stunned to find a variety of stone structures and artifacts.
They include stone circles that measure 1.5 to 2.5 meters across with penis-shaped installations pointing toward them.
‘While a comprehensive stylistic study of the stone objects is still ongoing, a preliminary interpretation suggests two symbolic aspects,’ the team, led by Uzi Avner, a researcher with the Arava-Dead Sea Science Center and the Arava Institute, wrote.
‘One is fertility, represented by the stones with elongated perforation (vulva-shape) and by the very combination of the elongated cell and the circle.’
Death is ‘signified by the burial of stone objects and by setting them upside down,’ the team members wrote in their paper.
In one, a humanlike stone carving was found buried with ‘only the very top visible on the surface.’
