Hundreds of Mysterious Stone 'Gates' Found in Saudi Arabia's Desert
Google Earth has unlocked the gates to ancient mysteries around the world.
For years, amateur and professional archaeologists have used the search engine's satellite imagery to discover mysterious earthworks in Kazakhstan, Roman ruins, a forgotten fortress in Afghanistan and more. In the past decade, Google Earth also has helped identify thousands of burial sites and other "works of the old men," as they're called, scattered across Saudi Arabia.
Now, archaeologists have uncovered nearly 400 previously undocumented stone structures they call "gates" in the Arabian desert that they believe may have been built by nomadic tribes thousands of years ago.
"We tend to think of Saudi Arabia as desert, but in practice there's a huge archaeological treasure trove out there and it needs to be identified and mapped," said David Kennedy, an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia and author of a paper set to appear in the November issue of the journal Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy.
"You can't see them very well from the ground level, but once you get up a few hundred feet, or with a satellite even higher, they stand out beautifully."
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @03:25PM (2 children)
Those were navigation marks for aliens. Destroy them all because they'll be back soon.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @03:57PM
Indeed. Stone gates discovered in desert? whatcouldgowrong [wikimedia.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday October 24 2017, @04:00PM
No, they are not. They were the ancient cities that put a bid to host Amazon HQ.
Serves them right. the fools. Amazon found the carnival funnier than the camels and moved closer to Rio.
Sambaaa [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Funny) by Justin Case on Tuesday October 24 2017, @03:39PM (3 children)
Yeah, I told him the stones would never work out. Apologies everyone, it's my fault Gates switched his attention to Windows.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 24 2017, @04:40PM (2 children)
It fits all too well:
- Windows are more easily broken than stone gates
- Windows are less secure than stone gates
- Windows requires constant maintenance and attention, much more than stone gates
Too bad the Linux desktop is patterned after Windows, maybe we should be developing the CLI up to a stone gates interface?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Tuesday October 24 2017, @04:59PM
Windowing interfaces have overpromised and underperformed, yet manage to corner mindshare nonetheless. For most jobs they seem inherently unsuitable. Certainly they're a distraction at best if you're primarily working with text.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday October 24 2017, @09:04PM
I know this sounds silly but have a look at TempleOS. Guy is a loon but built a pretty interesting command line interface that is editor/compiler/command shell. Works in a VM.
http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/ [codersnotes.com]
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @03:49PM (17 children)
This story submission wasn't written by edIII. It's a quote from nytimes.com, that has had a link inserted into it that leads to the article whence the quote came.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tibman on Tuesday October 24 2017, @04:01PM (3 children)
Does your second sentence invalidate your first? If no then can you say the nytimes wrote the entire article that appears to include text quoted from other included hyperlinks?
Most summaries i see are c&p snippets from a linked article with little rewriting. But that editing is still attributed to whoever submitted it. That seems fine to me.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @05:28PM (2 children)
>Does your second sentence invalidate your first?
Let me restate in a way that may be understandable to you. Text was taken from a nytimes.com page, changed only by inserting a link to the source page within the quoted text, and that became the totality of the story submission. The link that was inserted was tacked onto a random word, giving no indication of its significance.
>If no then can you say the nytimes wrote the entire article that appears to include text quoted from other included hyperlinks?
Where, specifically, do you see those unattributed quotes? If the New York Times is plagiarizing in the same way this site is, that's a problem too. They do publish corrections. [nytimes.com] You can contact them about the problem, or I will do so. If you mean to say that I'm holding them to a lower standard than I'm holding this site, I'm not. Quite the opposite.
>Most summaries i see are c&p snippets from a linked article with little rewriting. But that editing is still attributed to whoever submitted it. That seems fine to me.
I've also seen it on other occasions. I don't agree that it's fine. Quotes, especially lengthy ones such as this, should be clearly attributed. Doing otherwise is confusing and appears, or is, dishonest.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @09:04PM (1 child)
Well, it is true that the submission wasn't done the way that *I* would have.
OTOH, anyone who's not using a device that disallows hovering over a hyperlink and seeing what that leads to isn't going to have a major problem.
Search engines would also give a +1 to the pagerank of the page due to the embedded link.
Molehill --> mountain.
...and an editor has already "corrected" the "deficiency".
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 25 2017, @05:37AM
> Molehill --> mountain.
You call it insignificant. Another commenter said this style is "the SN SOP." Check the Hall of Fame [soylentnews.org] page. There are more accepted submissions from Phoenix666 than from any other named submitter, over 2800 of them. He consistently uses this unclear quotation style, and the editors frequently leave it unchanged. I don't think I've overstated the importance of this.
> Search engines would also give a +1 to the pagerank of the page due to the embedded link.
I wasn't claiming that this style denies "link juice" to news outlets. I'm not very knowledgeable about SEO, but I would guess that a more prominent placement of the link might result in greater "link juice."
> ...and an editor has already "corrected" the "deficiency".
I noticed that. I'm grateful for the response by that editor and for the submitter's acknowledgment that he made a mistake. I wanted to respond to tibman anyway, especially because someone deemed his remarks "insightful."
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday October 24 2017, @04:07PM (3 children)
Uhhhh - your point? It's pretty obvious that the submission is a block quote. The source of the block quote is given. I didn't notice that any of the eds, whether it be edI or ed XVI, claimed any credit above and beyond having read and submitted the article to Soylent. So, you point? You just don't like edIII? Are all the rest of the eds alright, or is it all of them that you wish to denigrate?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @04:51PM (1 child)
It's just misleading "edIII writes:" and then something edill didnẗ write. Perhaps not everybody is familiar with the SN SOP.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 24 2017, @04:53PM
see comment below for the real problem
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @08:35AM
It's been altered since I commented. When I made my comment, the nytimes.com article was linked from the word "gates" as it is in the original submission.
>The source of the block quote is given.
It was given as "edIII writes:" as though he had written it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday October 24 2017, @04:52PM (6 children)
I don't know why submitters put in links into the blockquote that weren't there originally. I have moved it outside of the blockquote
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday October 24 2017, @05:05PM (3 children)
Just my mistake I think. Normally it would be outside the blockquote. Sorry about that, but that's why I appreciate the eds around here :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 24 2017, @05:17PM (2 children)
I don't think you are the main offender, and it ought to be caught beforehand by editors but it isn't really discussed. Could even be considered OCD on my part.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 25 2017, @12:11AM (1 child)
I am the main offender.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday October 25 2017, @12:35AM
I was trying to be polite!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 24 2017, @06:53PM (1 child)
I do that because Slashdot did that. Often they used the hyperlink as a device to draw the eye to a particular phrase or sentence in the excerpt to highlight the topic or emphasize something else.
Also, copy & paste is the fastest way to construct a submission and the best way to keep the story pipeline full. If people who don't submit stories but complain about matters like these insist submitters re-process what the story has already composed, then submissions will instantly dry up because that takes too long, and nobody will thank you for the effort if your submission has any typos or you get something wrong.
Some in the community seem to think SN is a newspaper like the NY Times or a news agency like the BBC, and is bound by the journalistic and editorial conventions of those parties. It's not. So they should not grouse that SN does not meet those expectations, because they will be perpetually disappointed.
If the people who dislike how stories hit the front page now dislike it so much, then perhaps they should volunteer some of their time on the back-end to make the story source a separate field in the submission form and in the DB such that it no longer says, "[submitter] writes:" but instead "From the [BBC]:"
In other words, let them put their money where their mouth is.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 25 2017, @03:32AM
There's ample opportunity to do that in the headline, or by writing a remark of one's own.
While there's nothing wrong with emulating good practices from Slashdot, you seem to be telling us that Slashdot stopped doing that. If they stopped, maybe they realized it's not a good practice. If you admire them and want to emulate them, let the fact that they stopped be a reason for you to stop.
It is indeed, and when copying and pasting several paragraphs of others' work, we ought to clearly indicate whose work it is. And when we quote something but make changes to it beyond correcting minor typos, we ought to clearly indicate what those changes are.
That's a false assumption, because I do submit stories. So I know how much effort it takes to clearly identify the article. I always make it clear, and I don't find it a hardship at all.
When you tack a link to the source article onto arbitrary words within a quote, you are altering it.
Are you accustomed to getting praise for your submissions? Mine have received very little, and I see few comments praising anyone's.
I wish that it would attain the standard to which high school students are held. You're the most prolific submitter (at least, going by the stories that have been accepted) and I am indeed constantly disappointed by your misleading quoting style.
Because you can't be bothered to type "From the BBC" or "I saw this on the New York Times website", "source", "src" or the like? Then please, just put in a bare link, or use one of the bots to submit it, either of which takes less effort that what you've been doing. You could attribute your quotations clearly without any additional effort on your part.
The way you're doing these submissions requires more effort from the editors, should they wish to change it to a normal style of quoting. If the editors don't bother to do so, your style causes needless confusion to the readers. I'm not the first to point this out to you. I find it annoying, akin to the commenters who always post in monospace or who bring up Nazism or Donald Trump in unrelated discussions. Annoyed readers have asked them to stop, but they persist. I'm pleased by the responses of edIII and takyon.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 24 2017, @06:58PM (1 child)
FFS so volunteer your time on the back-end to capture the story source separately in the submission form, store it in the DB, and spit it out on the home page as, "From [story source]:" instead of "[submitter] writes:"
If you care that much about it, put your money where your mouth is. If you don't pony up, then stick a cork in it. Slashdot and SN have been doing it this way for 20 years. Go back there and whine and whine and whine about how CmdrTaco and Hemos and Cowboy Neal suck and didn't follow journalistic conventions.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 25 2017, @04:57AM
No, because not every story follows, or should follow, that format. Some submissions are actually written by the submitter. Others link to multiple articles. If you seriously can't be bothered to type "From [story source]:" as you just did, maybe the story isn't worth submitting at all. But as I said, you needn't even type that. You can just provide a bare URL, and it will automatically be linked.
Nobody pulled your chain. I remarked on edIII's story submission. You jumped in, in a bizarrely strident manner. I and others have brought this up with you before. I ceased doing so because you're obstinate. That doesn't make you right.
They're long gone. You are not. Slashdot doesn't do that any more, and if it did, that wouldn't make it acceptable. And your strident remarks begin to lead me to believe that you like to irritate your readers. I and other submitters have no trouble indicating who we're quoting. There's no good reason to do otherwise, as evidenced by your comments in this thread. What about me, what about Slashdot? What I do, and what Slashdot does or used to do, is irrelevant. What you do may be pertinent. If you your unclear quoting style starts to be adopted by other submitters, it's pertinent. There are good reasons not to quote that way:
Your reasons for doing it seem to be:
Your reasons are weak. Why defend the indefensible?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Spook brat on Tuesday October 24 2017, @03:51PM
When they run into the ruins of the Nameless City [hplovecraft.com] they'll need to be careful; a previous expedition found the ruins inhabited by intelligent reptilians who depict human sacrifice in their artwork.
Travel the galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms... And kill them [schlockmercenary.com]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 24 2017, @03:52PM (3 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by Arik on Tuesday October 24 2017, @04:42PM (1 child)
There's a lot of space there, I've browsed through it on landsat many times, curious as to which spots you're talking about.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 24 2017, @07:04PM
I vaguely recall what he's referring to. It might have been this one [ancient-origins.net].
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday October 25 2017, @06:25AM
There's all kinds of ruins out in the Arabian and North African deserts -- most look like remnants of villages, with associated walled gardens and sheep pens. And I suspect that's what these "gates" were, in an era when there was more water -- walled to keep sheep in or out, depending on the season.
As to odd ruins out in the Russian backbeyond... I'd bet there are still a lot of buried ruins we haven't found, either too well hidden by time or too built-over by later cities. I think we're probably missing a whole layer of ancient civilization, if not more, in our usual histories -- especially in the swath from eastern Europe to south-central Russia.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Funny) by donkeyhotay on Tuesday October 24 2017, @05:26PM (4 children)
They're very long and narrow. They're from the time when the climate was different around there and the land was wetter and more fertile. The ancients grew spaghetti in these long plots. They are spaghetti fields. Mystery solved.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @06:37PM (3 children)
Cut the pastafaian bullshit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @09:11PM (2 children)
Photographic evidence: Spaghetti Harvest [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 25 2017, @05:45AM (1 child)
Second result: [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 25 2017, @08:10AM
Yup. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law#firstHeading [wikipedia.org]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday October 24 2017, @07:00PM (2 children)
Gates and Kites. What they look like if viewed from above? Talk about your modern tools getting in the way.
They look like ball fields, some kick-ball sort of game. Or maybe foot races. Or gather round and stab the pig before the feast, who knows.
The field of play delineated more by the act of stone clearing resulting in an out of bounds delineation.
It explains both the long thin fields, as well as the Kites (which look more like animal traps, but are also probably play fields for s slightly different game.
You have to be willing to accept frivolous purposes and play pursuits in primitive people, instead of assuming everything was a dwelling or religious facility. After a harvest people had time to play, and meet to trade animals and find wives were not one's sisters, etc.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 24 2017, @07:11PM (1 child)
It could be anything. The Arabian Peninsula is a desolate waste now, but 11,000 years ago it was much wetter and greener. There was an article about it last year. I think it was this one [insidescience.org].
They found rock art that depicted animals that inhabit savanna, which indicates that's what existed there, then. The stone structures, whatever their function, lend more evidence to that conclusion of a gentler climate.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday October 25 2017, @06:30AM
To me they look like sorting pens for sheep, which probably doubled as protected crop space when the sheep were turned out in the spring.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Funny) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday October 24 2017, @08:51PM
The Goa'uld are just waiting to come through the gates once you lift the cartouche off. Do you want us to be invaded? Just leave them gates alone! [wikipedia.org] Trust in my handle and Zig!
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday October 24 2017, @08:58PM (2 children)
D. Kennedy says...
I sense a "but" coming...
Umm.
Wait... ooooh
So now it's just waterless, desolate, and "mostly" uninteresting, and therefore not a desert?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @09:15PM (1 child)
Tundra is desert, but the water isn't -liquid-.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @09:57PM
it sounds like words need more than one definition, or that perhaps we shouldn't apply them all by definition!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 25 2017, @01:15AM
Stone gates from abandoned Minecraft homesteads. No one even remembers what version we're in, or when the line between player and mob became blurry.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Wednesday October 25 2017, @12:13PM
I would have put quotes around "Mysterious" before gates. If they not *actual* gates , how are they "mysterious"?
More importantly, maybe only "mysterious" to the researchers?
Yeah, things only seen from the air...perhaps the ancients had hot air balloons?