The Greek looking shrine – Salut.

Dry Stone walls – Salut.

Iron Age Dry Stone walls – Salut

Fanjah.

Fanjah – from the main road between Fanjah & Bidbid.

My camp site – Salut No2.

My camp site for the night – as you can see, I have all the comforts: spot the can !

The mound of rocks centre right; an early Iron Age burial tomb, so I had plenty of company for the night 🙂

An incongruous match.

As could be seen from an earlier image – quite a climb getting here: definitely worth the effort.

Friendly tree.

My friendly tree 🙂

Bronze Age site of Salut No2.

Looking towards the opposite hill from the one posted yesterday – two things about this: I made friends with the tree on the left, so more of that later because it was almost the same colour as the background hills.

The other is the tower tomb & alongside, the columned structure which seems oddly out of character !

Bronze Age site of Salut.

Just a quick image from my latest travels – the Archaeological site – Salut.

I have about 80 unprocessed images & 3 rolls of film, it will keep me out of mischief for a while.

Salut.

Off on my travels again – this time in search of the early Bronze Age site of Salut, some 20 kilometres south of Bahla & Jabrin fort.
A place I have known about for several years, but never visited until now; glad I left it so late because there has been extensive archaeological research carried out recently.
The site has been put forward for inclusion on the UNESCO world heritage list of sites with major historical interest.
It has had extensive human settlement in this area since at least the end of the fourth millennium BC to the present day. Observable by the large concentration of archaeological evidence that can still be seen. There are indications of very large settlements from the Bronze Age (c.3000-1300BC) and following Iron Age (c.1300-300 BC) probably through to the Middle Ages, with farming still carried on in 2015.

Another from Nizwa Fort.

Nizwa Fort.

Another flower.

Steps to where ?

Date Storage – Al Hazm Fort.

Nikon D800 at ISO 6400. Tokina 35-70 f2.8 Ais AT-X lens.

A Date storage area on the ground floor of Al Hazm fort.

The raised channels that can be seen in the image above were used for storing Hessian type sacks of dates. They were stacked one on top of the other and as the juice was forced out of the lower sacks, it ran through the channels into a catchment area.
This juice had a number of uses; a very nutritious food, medicinal qualities both internal as medicine & external in the form of salves, can be used as a sweetener like honey and I am sure in the case of Al Hazm Fort, a military use! Boiled and poured through the murder holes above entrances.

From that well-known on-line encyclopædia.

Dates have been a staple food of the Middle East and the Indus Valley for thousands of years. They are believed to have originated around Iraq, and have been cultivated since ancient times from Mesopotamia to prehistoric Egypt, possibly as early as 4000 BCE. The Ancient Egyptians used the fruits to make date wine, and ate them at harvest. There is archaeological evidence of date cultivation in eastern Arabia in 6000 BCE. (Alvarez-Mon 2006).
There is also archaeological evidence of date cultivation in Mehrgarh around 7000 BCE, a Neolithic civilization in what is now western Pakistan. Evidence of cultivation is continually found throughout later civilizations in the Indus Valley, including the Harappan period 2600 to 1900 BCE.
In later times, traders spread dates around South West Asia, northern Africa, and Spain. Dates were introduced into Mexico and California by the Spaniards in 1765, around Mission San Ignacio.
Fossil records show that the date palm has existed for at least 50 million years.