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Land- and Skyscapes of Hegra: An Archaeoastronomical Analysis of the Nabataean Necropoleis

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Abstract

The archaeological World Heritage Site of Hegra (Mada´in Salih, Al-Hijr), in Saudi Arabia, is often considered the southern capital of the Nabataean Kingdom. Positioned just northeast of the AlUla Valley (where ancient Dadan is located), the Nabataeans recreated several aspects of their northern capital, Petra. They carved more than 130 tombs into the sandstone outcrops of which nearly a hundred had a monumental character with ornate façades of exceptional beauty and deep sense of enduring. In February 2023, our international, multidisciplinary research team conducted a field campaign in Hegra. Our objective was to measure the orientation of Nabataean tombs and sanctuaries in the area, which could offer new clues to aspects of Nabataean culture and religion that we had studied in earlier works at Petra, and elsewhere in Nabataea. This paper includes the analysis and interpretation of the data on the orientation of 113 tombs, including all monumental ones, the largest coherent set of Nabataean tombs ever analyzed. The results show that the tombs were not randomly orientated but followed a series of patterns, most probably emphasizing the skyscape, within the framework of the Nabataean lunisolar calendar religious festivals, and, on occasions, also the local landscape.

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All the data are pubslihed within the paper so there is no need for additional data availability.

Notes

  1. Tom Paradise (2015) also produced an interesting archaeoastronomical study of several monuments in Petra, from a solar phenomenological perspective. This preliminary work, however, did not perform any test of significance and included little cultural context.

  2. A lunisolar calendar is a time-keeping system that counts lunations as months of 29 or 30 days in a year (often 12 months), but seldom included a 13th intercalary month to preserve the path of the seasons.

  3. These differences between façade and interior could be structural or for any other purpose. To analyze this phenomenology in more depth, a photogrammetric study of the chambers’ interior would be desirable. This could permit the study of illuminating effects within niches and secondary chambers inside the tombs. However, this would require an independent study that extends beyond the scope of the present paper and might be the topic of a future investigation.

  4. The declination is an astronomical magnitude, which is independent of the observer’s position and takes into account the altitude of the horizon, while the azimuth is only useful for a flat marine horizon. It is the optimal magnitude to search for celestial orientations while the azimuth is enough for a topographic alignment. Stellar declinations slowly vary with time due to the precession of the equinoxes. Solar and lunar declinations vary along the year and the lunation, respectively, and only slowly and secularly change their extreme values due to the variability of the ecliptic. The declination () is calculated through the standard spherical trigonometry formula: senδ = cosϕ cosh cosa + senϕ senh, from the standard data in ‘a’ and ‘h’ (see Table 1). The error in declination ($$\Delta \delta $$) is calculated by propagation through the derivative of this formula and the errors in azimuth ($$\Delta $$ a) and angular height ($$\Delta $$ h), where the latitude (ϕ) is taken as constant, as follows:

    $$\Delta \delta \approx \left|\frac{\partial \delta }{\partial h}\right|\Delta h + \left|\frac{\partial \delta }{\partial a}\right|\Delta a$$
    $$\frac{\partial \delta }{\partial h}=\frac{{\text{sin}}\phi {\text{cos}}h-{\text{cos}}\phi {\text{cos}}a{\text{sin}}h}{\sqrt{1-({\text{sin}}{\delta )}^{2}}}$$
    $$\frac{\partial \delta }{\partial a}=\frac{-{\text{cos}}\phi {\text{cos}}h{\text{sin}}a}{\sqrt{1-({\text{sin}}{\delta )}^{2}}}$$

    It is worth noting that the error in declination would be dependent of the declination itself. However, the errors calculated for our data (see Table 1) indicate that the divergences are minimal within the lunisolar range (< 0.1°), and the values of the errors are even smaller at extreme declinations (± (90°ϕ)). Hence, the average error of c. 1.3º considered would be appropriate for declinations within the lunisolar range, and, in any case, an overestimation for extreme values of this magnitude.

  5. Also known as ‘Hoskin diagram’ because Prof. Michael Hoskin from Cambridge University was the first scholar to extensively use them in his research. Now they are a popular way to represent orientation data because they give a lot of information at a glance, including the number of tombs facing a certain sector of the horizon.

  6. Qasr Al Sani’ (IGN102), an isolated monumental tomb dated to 8 AD and dedicated in the month of Nisan, one of the largest on site, was also cardinally orientated (due North within the errors, see Table 1). Built for a fortune teller called Malkayun AlArraf, presumably an astrologer, and his family, the tomb has a peculiar horizon that suggest that it could have been something more than a mere tomb. Hence, it will be adequately discussed in another more specific paper.

  7. It is worth noting that Liritzis et al. (2015) preferred the stars of the Southern Cross as a possible explanation for a certain preference for southern orientations that they found in part of the sample of their remote sensing data.

  8. Megalithic monuments cardinally orientated were also common in prehistoric Arabia (Al-Mushawh 2018).

  9. We also modelled full moon risings within this range of azimuths. Full moon of Nisan does not work, but full moon rising of Tishri could be of use. The month of Tishri was also important in Nabataean calendrics, as shown in Belmonte et al. (2019), and might be indirectly reflected in Tannur Almanac. However, it is never mentioned in the tomb inscriptions at Hegra. Hence, we favored the hypothesis related to Nisan last-crescents.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to express our deepest appreciation to the ‘Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU)’ for the support and assistance, and to His Highness Prince Bader b. Farhan Al Saud, the Governor of the Royal Commission for AlUla, and to Amr Al-Madani the CEO for their leadership and vision. Furthermore, we deeply acknowledge the support, during the organization process of the campaign, to Dr. Abdulrahman A Alsuhaibani, Executive Director of Archaeology, Conservation and Collections, and to Dr. Rebecca Foote, Director of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Research, who kindly advised us on the several steps to be followed also once on the terrain and reviewed the manuscript. Discussions with Mr. José Ignacio Gallego Revilla, UNESCO & Partnerships Expert for RCU, were also appreciated. Challenges and suggestions from two incisive reviewers are acknowledged and helped improving the quality of the paper. The Spanish team was funded by the State Research Agency (AEI) of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICIN), and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under grants with references PID2020115940GB-C21/PID2020115940GB-C22 ’Orientatio ad Sidera V’. Contributions from The internal IAC project P310793 ‘Arqueoastronomía’, and the Inovation Agency of Galicia (GAIN, Xunta de Galicia) through the programme ‘Axudas de apoio ‘a etapa posdoutoral’ were also notable.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain

    Juan Antonio Belmonte

  2. Departamento de Astrofísica, Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain

    Juan Antonio Belmonte

  3. Instituto de Ciencias del Patrimonio, INCIPIT-CSIC, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

    A. César González-García & Andrea Rodríguez-Antón

  4. The Royal Commission for AlUla, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

    Munirah A. AlMushawh

  5. School of Architecture, Universidad Europea de Canarias, Tenerife, Spain

    Maitane Urrutia-Aparicio

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  1. Juan Antonio Belmonte
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Belmonte, J.A., González-García, A.C., AlMushawh, M.A. et al. Land- and Skyscapes of Hegra: An Archaeoastronomical Analysis of the Nabataean Necropoleis. Nexus Netw J 26, 275–305 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00004-024-00774-z

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