Long walls have been found in many parts of the world, and some have been very long. The best-known walls are Hadrian’s Wall in the UK and the Great Wall of China.
Less well-known is Khatt Shebib, a wall that crosses the desert in Jordan. The first reports of it beyond Jordan were made by British diplomat Sir Alec Kirkbride in 1948. Flying over Jordan, he noticed a stone wall that went on for miles, but seemed to serve no purpose.
In the 2010s, Aerial Archaeologists in Jordan made a new map of the wall. They recorded its full extent – it runs NNE to SSW for 106km (66 miles). There are sections with a second, parallel wall and some branches off it.
The wall also has the remains of about 100 “towers”: 2m-4m diameter buildings at various locations along the wall. Many of them are later additions, added to the wall.
No one knows more than the basic facts about the wall: no one knows what it was for, who built it and when, are all mysteries. Pottery finds along the wall have come from somewhere between AD100 and AD600, but these dates are not necessarily when the wall was built.
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