Rock formations in Jordan possibly world’s first calendar

SAN ANTONIO—Thousands of years before the Mayans created their calendar that famously ends in 2012 and 10 centuries before England's Stonehenge was erected, people in the southern Jordan River Valley founded a major city and organized massive rocks into circles.

Some believe Tall el-Hammam, the remains of that fortified city, could be the site of biblical Sodom. David Maltsberger of Baptist University of the Américas and a group of fellow archaeologists wonder if the city's builders also created the world's first calendar and ask what the stone structures had to do with Canaanite religion.

If finding answers involves hours drinking tea with Bedouin sheikhs, repeatedly climbing up and down 1,500-foot slopes below sea level, and applying space-age technology to unlock the secrets of the skies Abraham pondered when he counted the stars and dreamed of his descendants, then that's what Maltsberger will do—and has been doing since 2006.

So far, the team has surveyed more than 400 dolmens—funeral-related structures. These usually consist of several large stone slabs set edgewise in the earth to support a flat stone roof, covered by a mound of earth and accompanied by large standing stones called menhirs. The team also has scrutinized numerous large circles of mega-stones—60 feet by 35 feet—scattered throughout the area.

When analysis showed the menhirs all apparently oriented toward the North Star, Maltsberger asked whether the obvious geographical directional markers also are "directional markers for the soul" and focused his study on the celestial orientation of the dolmens.

He also began to reflect on why all the known stone structures related to calendars are in Europe, but they were built centuries later than and thousands of miles from where megalithic construction began—the Middle East.

A related question was how the monuments and related burial practices were part of Canaanite religion. "Is this ancestor worship—something cultic related to certain family or clan?" he asked.

This question put him at work in the field of archaeoastronomy, the study of what role ancient civilizations assigned celestial phenomena to their cultures. Origins of the calendar are not well known, "but are believed to be related to astronomy and solar observation, to solstices, equinoxes," he said. "Somehow—and that is what we are trying to determine—the solar observation is attached to the lunar calendar."

That begs the question: Are some of the structures surrounding Tall el-Hammam the oldest evidence of a system for recording the passage of time in the Middle East—and possibly the world?

"The early Bronze Age, 3200 to 2200 B.C., was a period of large-scale urban expansion. At the same time and locations, the construction of dolmans and other megalithic structures blossomed," pointed out Maltsberger, associate professor for biblical studies and archaeology at BUA.

"We also know from inscriptions that Israel was using a lunar calendar by 10th century B.C., but no one has found physical evidence of how they devised this calendar. Our evidence from Tall el-Hammam dates around 3000 to 2000 B.C. and may give us insight into how the calendar began."

In January, Maltsberger again joined the excavation staff at Tall el-Hammam as part of an archeological team seeking answers. The project, headed by Steven Collins, dean of the College of Archaeology & Biblical History at Trinity Southwest University in Albuquerque, N.M., is a partnership with the Department of Antiquities of the government of Jordan.

Tall el-Hammam is a Bedouin area, which means an ever-shifting population of migrant herdsmen.

"When we arrived this year, a Bedouin camp was set up right in the middle of where we wanted to work. So, we spent lots of time in the chief's tent drinking tea and getting to know one another," Maltsberger explained.

Thanks in part to the Bedouin sheikh, the team identified more unexcavated dolmens.

Back on the BUA campus in San Antonio, Maltsberger is sifting the data. "This entails careful survey of all the measurements as well as recreating the sky in ancient periods to see where the North Star and major constellations would have been positioned in relation to Tall el Hammam and Mount Nebo," he said.

To correlate the locations of the dolmens to stars and constellations, Maltsberger has to know where the heavenly bodies were at the time of construction, not where they are today.

He is consulting with a research astrophysicist and using software from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A collaborator at the University of Colorado-Denver who is skilled at building 3-D models of the sky using the Geographical Information System also is assisting.

"The more David stays involved with archeology, the better he is at connecting with students, making the lectures come alive when he teaches Old Testament and New Testament classes," said Marconi Monteiro, academic dean at BUA. "His work allows him to present information in a way that makes students feel they are eyewitnesses."