Gobustan

I was in Baku from Sunday 21 February through Wednesday 24 February and had the opportunity to take some time out to visit Gobustan. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site located about 60km south west of Baku. Less than an hour drive.

The site is on an elevated plateau looking down to the Caspian Sea. There are over 6000 images of bovines, equines, mother figures, hunters, boats, etc. Some measure several meter in length. The animals depicted need a moister climate than today. This suggests that at the time of the drawings the climate was wetter with lush vegetation. The hills with the carvings were probably islands in the Caspian as the Sapian Sea was much higher than it is today. This would also be suggested by the numerous boats that are depicted. The earliest rock carvings on Kichikdash mountain date from 34’000 BC!

One of the better known carvings is the one several meters of the ground of a group of people in two rows. The way of representing people is quite representative for a lot of the carvings of people on Boyukhdash mountain near the visitor center.

One of the more interesting carvings is the one of pregnant women in profile. In addition pictures of tattooed women are widespread across Gobustan. They resemble statues that were found in Gobustan dating to the upper Palaeolithic.

There are plenty of carvings of boats indicating that the sea must have been much closer to the caves and rocks where people were carving as to give them a sufficiently close look. Therefore the Caspian Sea level must have been much higher than what it is today, probably by up to 80 meters.

Some of the caves show layers upon layers of carvings on top of each other. They depict people and animals. They show plenty of bulls in all sizes.

I managed to see only a small sampling of the carvings the site has to offer so I will be back for more.

Azerbaijan | Hans February 27, 2010

4 Comments to “Gobustan”

By Baurzhan, March 1, 2010 @ 5:13 am

Nice! Whenever, I see such things, I always ask myself “what was in it for those people?”, “why did they make those carvings?”, what are motivations behind doing that? Despite, reading about them, I can’t fully internalize deeper meaning of carvings to those people… Might be spending more time in those areas could open up something.
By admin, March 1, 2010 @ 9:48 am

I couldn’t agree more with your comment. It’s intriguing to see the dedication and refinement. May be they didn’t know how to write but they definitly knew how to draw. The result is the same: they left something behind for the generations that were to come.
By Sayora, March 2, 2010 @ 2:02 am

Hans, i guess your camera had more than 3 lenses as carvings are much clearer vs. Maxim’s ones and even vs. real ones.
Sayora
By admin, March 3, 2010 @ 5:31 am

Not really … just better at “photoshopping” the results