Out of the Desert

Rock Art of Rajl

The site of Rajl is situated in Jordan’s Eastern Desert, which is sometimes called the Black Desert because of its black volcanic rock. Over the millennia, groups of rocks became attractive to the nomads of the desert. They arranged the stones into circles and mounded groups called cairns and often carved on texts and figures on them. In Jordan, the cairns vary in size. Some have more than a hundred stones while others have only a few. Many have a small number or no manmade marks on them. Several long boulder walls and corral-like structures, which may represent game traps, are in the vicinity. The function of these places is not yet established. They may be desert rallying points, camping sites used during hunting season, herding or burial sites.

One cairn, known as the Cairn of the Mermaids, seems to have been a place for ceremonial gatherings and a location where members of the tribe could leave messages for each other. It is a spectacular rock art site with beautiful images and 79 documented inscribed texts. The largest one has 84 letters. Most of the texts are associated with drawings but some have only text. Tribal marks and seven dots are also depicted. So far the listed names number no less then 112 people, 74 of whom seem to have belonged to one family of the Zhm tribe within 13 generations. A second list assembled from three texts encompasses nine different names from the tribe of ’mn, and a third list from a single carving notes 14 generations. The texts are mostly written in Safaitic but those in Arabic are in Kufic script, thus indicating a late period, perhaps the eighth century.

The peoples who carved on these rocks were the desert nomads of late antiquity. They have received relatively little attention in Jordan, and their rock art is known mostly to only a few scholars.