A few weeks ago, Saudi Arabia stole the spotlight with its annual camel beauty pageant, which saw more than twelve camels get disqualified for botox use.
Now, a newly discovered "Camel Site" in the kingdom is taking the world by storm. Life-sized images of camels were found carved into large rocks in an inhospitable area in Al Jawf province, believed to date back 2,000 years.
After being explored by a Franco-Saudi research team over the past two years, the researchers were able to "identify a dozen or so reliefs representing camels," according to The Daily Mail.
The "camelid sculptures [are] unlike any others in the region. They are thought to date back to the first centuries BC or AD," a press release from the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), which participated in the study, read.
The study was conducted by both researchers at CNRS in France and the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage (SCTH).
Research engineer at CNRS, Guillaume Charloux, explained that although "natural erosion has partly destroyed some of the works, as well as any traces of tools, we were able to identify a dozen or so reliefs of varying depths representing camelids and equids," according to Daily Mail.
Scientists suggest the site may have once been a "place of worship, or that the camels were used as boundary markers". However, no additional artifacts were found at the site that could confirm the origins of the rock art, which depict social and religious events.
According to the Bradshaw Foundation, there are 4,000 registered archaeological sites in Saudi Arabia, of which 1,500 are rock art.
The "earliest examples of rock art date from the early Neolithic, around 12,000 BP, and this form of expression endured until the advent of the Islamic period, c. 650 AD".
Rock Art is widespread in the kingdom: The Ha'il region is one example
