As surprising as it may sound, until now on our Planet we find traces of civilizations that we did not know about before. Although most of this lies practically underfoot, there are still plenty of hard-to-reach places on Earth.
Residents of the Ranban district have long known that in the Pir Panjal mountains there are countless amazing sculptures of horses and riders, found in the most unexpected places, but no one knows when they were created. One such site has been turned into a kind of open-air museum, since stone sculptures are located in the vicinity of the village of Gool, and some of these sculptures and slabs were brought here from the surrounding fields. Many of the statues are broken and lie on the ground - they are part of paths or stacked together with stones in fences around houses and fields. They can even be seen in streams where they are used for washing. The local population professing Islam knows nothing about their origin. For most of them, these statues are completely alien and incomprehensible. Those who were at least somehow interested in them,consider them to be navigational markers for the caravans that passed through these places during the Mahabharata.
But this is very far from the truth.
General view of the Gul site (in the Pir-Panjal mountains, Small Himalayas.
The first and absolutely necessary task for the study of these unusual monuments was their accurate fixation and description. The implementation of this part of the research was entrusted to the employees of Trimetari Consulting LLC under the leadership of Mikhail Anikushkin, who carried out work on ground laser scanning of objects. There is no other, equally accurate way of fixing numerous objects. The work was carried out in two clusters, in which numerous stone statues were concentrated. The first cluster is located at an altitude of 1890 m above sea level, the second - 2030 m. The area of each cluster is about one hectare
More than one generation of children grew up next to stone horses and headless horsemen (left). Abandoned and overgrown ancient pools. Some of them still receive water from mountain springs (right).
Laser scanning was performed with a Leica ScanStation P20 scanner; To create a survey geodetic plan and height justification, a Leica GS14 GNSS receiver was used, operating in RTK mode with the transmission of corrections over a radio channel. In addition to laser scanning, aerial photography was carried out using the DJI Phantom 3 UAV and survey photographs of objects using a digital SLR camera.
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The most original part of these monuments destroyed by time and people are images of horses carved from stone with two, three and even four riders. This unusual and unrelated to reality way of "group" movement indicates the mythological nature of what is happening - before us are images of heroes, ancestors, heading to that distant country, which each nation represents in its own way, and in which everyone completes their earthly journey. These are monuments to the fallen soldiers. Both horses and riders are depicted in great detail, with carefully "written" details of horse equipment, clothing, jewelry and weapons. At the same time, we have before us what can be called a stylization or a primitivist manner of depiction - all the proportions of the human body are distorted, as are the proportions of weapons and harnesses. The back of the horses is like an oriental sofacovered with a carpet with fine tassels. Two, three, four people fit freely on it. These similar to each other riders on mighty horses seem to be fabulous fantastic creatures who came from a world unknown to us. In everything there is some redundancy of details, which, who knows, can reflect the real picture. Each horse deserves a separate description, because despite the obvious typological similarity of all the figures we saw and recorded (and there are more than 200 of them only at two locations), indicating a certain canon, each stone statue has its own characteristics. It's amazing that all riders have the same face. To convey the image of a warrior, a character was created who was the embodiment of the entire army. The flatly cut backs of the heads are striking, which, as it seems to us,was intended to reflect the characteristic anthropological feature of the population - annular or frontal-occipital deformity. This type of skull deformation was characteristic of the peoples of Central Asia at the beginning of the 1st century. n. e. In this region, this tradition was adopted by the nomads, known collectively as the Huns, and spread by them to Europe and India. On the coins of the Hephtalite rulers, you can see the same flatly cut nape and a special shape of the skull, which anthropologists explain by artificial deformation (Trofimova T. A. Images of Hephtalite rulers on coins and the custom of artificial skull deformation among the population of Central Asia in antiquity \\ History, archeology and ethnography Central Asia. M. 1968, p. 189).e. In this region, this tradition was adopted by the nomads, known collectively as the Huns, and spread by them to Europe and India. On the coins of the Hephtalite rulers, you can see the same flatly cut nape and a special shape of the skull, which anthropologists explain by artificial deformation (Trofimova T. A. Images of Hephtalite rulers on coins and the custom of artificial skull deformation among the population of Central Asia in antiquity \\ History, archeology and ethnography Central Asia. M. 1968, p. 189).e. In this region, this tradition was adopted by the nomads, known collectively as the Huns, and spread by them to Europe and India. On the coins of the Hephtalite rulers, you can see the same flat-cut backs of the heads and a special shape of the skull, which anthropologists explain by artificial deformation (Trofimova T. A. Central Asia. M. 1968, p. 189). Images of Hephtalite rulers on coins and the custom of artificial skull deformation among the population of Central Asia in antiquity \\ History, archeology and ethnography of Central Asia. M. 1968, p. 189). Images of Hephtalite rulers on coins and the custom of artificial skull deformation among the population of Central Asia in antiquity \\ History, archeology and ethnography of Central Asia. M. 1968, p. 189).
We can see the same type of deformation in the images of the Himalayan horsemen. The most characteristic features of their faces, which bring them closer to the images on the coins, include large, straight, triangular noses and an upward curled mustache, shown in thin parallel lines. The large, round earrings in the ears of each rider are similar to what we see on the coins of some Hephthalite rulers.
Nearly all of the riders at Ghul's site lost their heads long ago (left). Horsemen image from point cloud (right).
Before us is a completely original cultural layer, which, as it seems to us, belongs to one of the "dark" periods in the history of India, associated with the conquest and domination of the Hephthalites (5-7 centuries AD) - a people as mysterious as it is powerful … There are three Hephthalite tribes that have managed to fit into the ecological and social environment of Northern India, which ensured their prosperity. These are Rajaputs, Gujars and Jats (Uspenskaya E. N. Rajaputs. Knights of Medieval India. 2000). The militant Rajaputs are the origin of the equally warlike Dogra - the people who now inhabit Jammu and the neighboring regions of Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and northeastern Pakistan. Probably, in these mountainous regions their ancient burial and cult complexes were "hidden" and forgotten,to which the silent stone army found in the Pir-Panjal mountains also belongs.
Headless Horsemen.
Surprisingly, in the appearance of the modern population of this region of Jammu, one can see undeniable features of similarity with the ancient horsemen. And looking at the faces of the men, women and children of Ranban County, one can imagine what the people might look like in reality, leaving their unsigned portraits in stone.
The people who created these original monuments did not disappear without a trace and the descendants of these tribes and now live in these places, not knowing that those statues that disturb them so much in their small fields are traces of their former glory and the memory of their ancestors.