JASSASIYA PETROGLYPHS

On certain days, Le Petit Futé goes all Indiana Jones and gives you plans for visits off the beaten track. It's an adventure! Because we tell you we can't find it, well, we're going. Don't be discouraged! From beach KM42 (or Plage des Français), allow 15 minutes by car, following a new asphalt road along the coast to the south. Leaving the mangroves to your left, you'll soon come across a lonely tarmac that keeps pulling in the direction of Ras Laffan. A road (GPS coordinates: N25°57'10-E51°24'27) leads to the rock engravings of Jebel Jassassieh, whose main rocky outcrop can be seen on the right. Two parking lots have been set up on either side of the various engravings. You'll have to explore the stones on foot and poke around to discover, for example, the engraving of a long-necked animal, a game of mancala or traditional boats. Twelve petroglyphs are referenced by a handy map on new explanatory panels on the site. While there's not actually much to see, the site does have a historical symbolism, as there are few traces of the past in the Qatari desert.

Since the Danisharchaeological mission of 1961, very little work has been done, or at least published, as if the mystery surrounding certain motifs and the cultural questions thus raised were a problem. Some 900 glyphs have been identified in almost 600 locations: open hands, rowing boats with anchors, some of which have the profile of models from the Portuguese period (^16th c.), scorpions, rosettes, alignments of cup-sized holes and stellar structures. It's a pity that no serious dating can be put forward.

The most intriguing questions are raised by these 333 alignments made up of shallow holes aligned by 7 or 9 on two parallel axes, and by these 71 rosettes also made up of curious cups. It has been suggested that these are combinatorial games, of the African awale type, but what are we to make of certain alignments sometimes dug on an inclined plane or so close together that it's impossible to accommodate the players? And do we need to carve the same game into the rock 300 times for the villagers to enjoy themselves? What can we say about the rosette cups, too numerous to be just for fun? Some think these "stone cups" could have been used to store and classify pearls; others evoke a sort of tide-calculation system. A mystery!

To the south of Jassasiya, now absorbed by the suburbs of industrial Laffan, Al Huwailah is an important and forgotten historical site, undoubtedly Qatar's principal city 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 theEncyclopédie de l'Islam that the Al Musallam of the Banu Khalid tribe settled here in 1766. The fort is an almost square building, approximately 32 m square. All the walls are of limestone rubble and white coral stone, bonded with a sand-rich lime mortar. Among the material found are common ceramics, glazed ceramics, fragments of porcelain with blue decoration on a white background and a small sculpted stucco panel.