Rogem Hiri / Gilgal Refaim
I had not heard of this site before today, so I’m guessing a good few of yourselves haven’t either. It deserves more recognition, for it has a lot of interesting features:
- as old as Stonehenge
- concentric circles, just like Atlantis
- immense size
- astronomical alignments
- a bunker in the middle, perhaps
Rogem Hiri (“Mound of the Wild Cat”) is the Arabic name for this site, and Gilgal Refaim* (“Wheel of Refaim”) is the Hebrew name. It is situated in the Golan Heights (Israeli occupied Syria) , 16 kms east of the Sea of Galilee, in the middle of a large plateau (32.908388°N 35.800581°E). Nearby there are also hundreds of dolmens.
It is made from an estimated 42,000 basalt rocks. There is no mystery as to how they built it, but it would’ve been quite an effort. The four concentric rings range from 50m in diameter and 1.5m wide for the innermost, to 150m in diameter and 3.2m wide for the outermost ring.
At the very centre is a tomb, although the burial occurred much more recently (roughly 1400BC) than the construction of the site itself (2500-3000BC). And of course, the tomb has been looted, so it is merely presumed someone was buried there…
At the center of the circles is a cairn, an irregular heap of stones. It is 20-25 m. in diameter and preserved to a height of 6 m. The cairn consists of a central mound of stones surrounded by a lower belt, which gives it the appearance of a stepped, truncated cone. A geophysical survey using Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) revealed the pile of stones to be hollow. A built burial chamber, with a narrow corridor leading to it, was discovered there. The chamber is round, roughly 2 m. in diameter, built of large stone plates arranged on top of each other, but slightly slanting inwards. It was covered by two massive slabs of basalt, each weighing over 5.5 tons, which created a semi-corbelled dome over the burial chamber.
Not too different to the “burial chamber” at the centre of the Great Pyramid!
References:
Wikipedia
Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Haaretz.com
Rogum Hiri (best aerial pics)
*BTW, the Rephaim of the Hebrew name for this site were giants. Perhaps some deeper investigation could discover if this name comes from presuming only giants could have constructed it, or something more factual. I’m constantly looking for evidence of giants/angels/nephilim/mysterious elders constructing survival bunkers in ancient times. This site seems to fit the bill.
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