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A sign under the statue identified him as Ismayil Bay Qutqasinli (1806-1869). He is honored as a founder of realistic prose but he is also known as an Azerbaijani general in the Tsarist Russian army.
The shops in the one-story buildings that lined up the street sold basic provisions of a simple life.
Gabala did not look that different from other towns we saw outside of Baku. Its half-paved main street was shared by cows and cars, almost in equal numbers.
Canyons to the west of the road we were driving on. The Mountain Jews’ settlement here is called Lahij, “probably after the territory of Lahijan, Iran, from which they might have come.”
Today much of the land around Gobustan is desert or semi desert, much devoid of life. The vast administrative district in which Gobustan is located that extends north some 1,400 square miles has a population density of only 27 persons per mile. The dusty forgotten past lives in the closest contemporary hamlet, with the same name, Gobustan, which looks more like a ghost town.
We also saw some rock inscriptions in Latin left by the Romans in the first Century A.D., only two kilometers from the pre-historic petroglyphs, at the foot of the Boyuk Dash Mountain. As it read, it was done for Julius Maximus, a centurion of the 12th Legion, probably on a reconnaissance mission during the reign of Emperor Domitian (AD 51-96).
We saw the petroglyph of another type of boat in Gobustan, above the picture of a buffalo, our guide said, that boat carving was done much later by the Arabs who occupied this area in the 7th Century. In fact there was ample evidence of their presence at that time in other carvings of Arabic inscriptions and pictures of horses, chariots, and warriors holding lances.
According to her, in 1981 archeologists from Azerbaijan showed the petroglyphs of this boat at an international conference on ancient civilizations. Heyerdahl then compared it with the picture of another boat from Norway and found that “it was very difficult to say which one was from Gobustan and which from Norway. So he came to Gobustan in 1982 and studied its boat petroglyph and concluded that “the Norwegians came from Gobustan.”
Did any of those pre-historic people survive? A Norwegian ethnologist, Thor Heyerdahl, has argued that they became the forefathers of his country’s Scandic people. This theory owes it origin to the petroglyph of a spindly flat bottom reed boat we could see in Gobustan.
We had come to a small round area dug in the ground which the guide said was for making a fire. “Around 2,000 B.C. the climate changed, and it became cold. People used this to make a fire with coal for heat. It also served them for cooking. They barbequed, boiled water, made soup and also something that was very similar to our yogurt, almost made the same way: milk mixed with something from the stomach of sheep which turns the milk into yogurt or cultured cheese.”
There were some petroglyphs I could not recognize as familiar objects. We had to rely on the guide’s explanations and stretch our own imagination to understand what they were. She called a figure the picture of “a pregnant woman.”
This could have been the evidence for the existence of a mathematical system. “We have a theory that maybe they had 10 numbers because of the 10 fingers and 10 organs. See here two lines point to two eyes, four to four eyes here, and six to the eyes of three people.”
Another figure, she said, was “a lion, from 8,000 B.C.” There was still another animal figure which looked like a donkey. The guide said that was now extinct here but it had been used in cross breeding to produce the Karabakh horse, which is today the national animal of Azerbaijan.
Our guide dated one to between 5000 and 6000 B.C., but she said there were some from 8000 B.C. She showed us the petroglyphs of what she said was an ancient seal from the Caspian Sea which was 4 meters long, “its natural size.”
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