There is nothing less empty than a desert.
Some find in the Sahara miles of fine Cambrian sandstone sediments;
others admire, in the sands where the pyramids are wet, Egyptian jerboas and horned vipers.
The Goby Desert has its dinosaurs, Antarctica its emperor penguins.
And the north-west of Saudi Arabia has an astonishing road network lined with multi-millennial tombs, as underlined in a new study by researchers from the University of Western Australia (UWA).
So many "funeral avenues" that bear witness to ancient mobility traced between the rocky plateaus and the oases of the peninsula.
Read alsoIn Saqqara, an aristocratic New Kingdom necropolis is gradually emerging from the sands
The region explored by Australian scientists is well known to specialists in prehistory and Arabian antiquity.
As early as the 1980s, early work focused on the strange funerary monuments that stretch around the oasis of Khaybar, some 140 kilometers north of Medina.
These structures are presented, seen…
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