JASSASIYA PETROGLYPHS

On certain days, the Petit Futé investigator plays Indiana Jones to give you plans for visits off the beaten path. It's an adventure! Because you are told that it cannot be found or even that it does not exist, that no book or research work on Qatar details its access, well, we go there. Don't be discouraged! From the KM42 beach (or French beach), count 15 minutes by car following the best track, preferably in 4x4, along the coast towards the south. Leave the mangrove on your left, the millionaire's villa at a good distance too, and you will soon come across a lonely tarmac that always pulls in the direction of Ras Laffan. On either side of the track (GPS coordinates: N25°57'10-E51°24'27), fences border this skinny Jebel Jassassieh and the main outcrop looms on the right. A rather bad track goes around it, which allowed us to snoop around the pebbles left outside the fenced perimeter and thus to give you the Gps location of a long-necked animal (GPS coordinates N25°56'43-E51°24'14), engraved on the northern face of a stone a few dozen meters from the fence.

Since the Danisharchaeological mission of 1961, very little work has been done or in any case published, as if the mystery surrounding certain motifs and the cultural questions thus raised were a problem. Some 900 glyphs have been identified on nearly 600 sites: open hands, rowing boats with anchors, some of which have the profile of models from the Portuguese period (16th century), scorpions, rosettes, alignments of cup-sized holes, stellar structures. No serious dating can be given, which is a pity.

The most intriguing questions are raised by these 333 alignments composed of shallow holes aligned by 7 or 9 on two parallel axes, and by these 71 rosettes also made up of curious cups. Combinatorial games have been suggested, like the African awale, but what to think of some alignments dug sometimes on an inclined plane or so close to each other that it is impossible to install the players. And do we need to carve the same game into the rock 300 times for the villagers to have fun? What can we say about the rosette cups, which are also too numerous to be just for fun? Some people think that these "stone cups" could have been used to store and classify pearls; others evoke a sort of tide calculation system. Mystery!

South of Jassasiya, now absorbed by the suburbs of the industrial Laffan, Al Huwailah is an important and forgotten historical site, probably the main city of Qatar before Zubarah and Doha took over. In 1977, the French Archaeological Mission came to explore: "Al Huwailah is a city with a fort, buried under the sand. We know from theEncyclopedia of Islam that the Al Musallam of the Banu Khalid tribe were settled there in 1766. The fort is an almost square building of about 32 m on each side. All the walls are made of limestone rubble and white coral stones, bound with a sand-rich lime mortar. Among the material collected, common ceramics, glazed ceramics, fragments of porcelain with blue decoration on a white background, and a small panel of sculpted stucco.