Bat, Al-Khutm and Al-Ayn archaeological sites
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The cemetery at Bat holds roughly 400 tombs and is considered the largest and best-preserved Bronze Age cemetery in south-eastern Arabia.
- Excavations in 2017 and 2018 found the Al-Khutm tower buried under several metres of collapsed stone, with its walls still standing about 4 metres high.
- A deep well was discovered in the central corridor of the Al-Khutm tower, which was rebuilt in the following Wadi Suq period at the end of the third millennium BC.
- Of the five towers around Bat, Karen Frifelt's Danish team fully excavated only one, Kasr al-Rojoom, and placed test trenches in two others.
- Since 2007 the Bat Archaeological Project, founded under Gregory Possehl of the University of Pennsylvania, has studied the towers and the settlements around them.
- Grave goods recovered from the tombs include pottery, stone vessels and necklaces of beads made from semi-precious stones.
Why it is worth it
On the rocky ridges above the village of Bat, in the interior of northwestern Oman, dozens of stone tombs shaped like beehives stand against the sky, built some five thousand years ago. Together with the nearby sites of Al-Khutm and Al-Ayn, they form one of the most complete and best-preserved groups of settlements and burial grounds of the third millennium BC anywhere in the world, and in 1988 they became Oman's second UNESCO World Heritage Site, after Bahla Fort.
The core site lies in Wadi Sharsah, part of the modern village of Bat, around a palm grove east of the town of Ibri. Two kinds of burials can be seen. The older group consists of Hafit-period beehive tombs built of dry stone on the tops of the slopes around the village; the second spreads across a river terrace and includes more than a hundred cairn tombs. Bat also has seven monumental stone towers, round structures roughly 20 to 25 metres across, with an outer wall enclosing two rows of compartments on either side of a central well. Their purpose is still debated. The earliest known example is a mud-brick Hafit-period tower buried beneath the stone tower of Matariya, while the latest is probably Kasr al-Rojoom, dated by its pottery to the late Umm an-Nar period, around 2200 to 2000 BC. In this era the region traded locally mined copper and stone with Sumer in Mesopotamia.
Systematic work began in 1972, when a Danish team led by Karen Frifelt excavated here and showed that the area had been inhabited for about four thousand years without interruption. Two kilometres west of Bat, Al-Khutm preserves another round stone tower of the same type. Al-Ayn, about 22 kilometres to the southeast, is the smallest of the three cemeteries and the best preserved: a line of 21 beehive tombs from the Hafit and Umm an-Nar cultures runs along a ridge, with the bare face of Jebel Misht in the Hajar Mountains rising behind them.
Getting there
The sites lie in Al Dhahirah Governorate. The nearest town is Ibri, about 24 km to the west. The nearest airport is Sohar International Airport (OHS), about 124 km away on the coast. Al-Khutm is 2 km west of Bat, and Al-Ayn about 22 km to the southeast.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Archaeological Sites of Bat, Al-Khutm and Al-Ayn are a group of beehive tombs or necropolis from the Hafit period in the 3rd Millennium BC, located near a palm grove in Oman. They were declared World Heritage by UNESCO in 1988, becoming only the second such Omani site after the Bahla Fort was designated world heritage in 1987.
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