Kamyana Mohyla

Kamenna Mohyla (Ukrainian: Кам'яна Могила; Russian: Каменная могила) is an archaeological site in the Molochna River valley, about a mile from the village of Terpenye, Zaporizhia Oblast, Ukraine.

The site encompasses a group of isolated blocks of sandstone, up to twelve meters in height, scattered around an area of some 3,000 square meters. As Tatar legend has it, it resulted from a scuffle of two bogatyrs who took turns throwing rocks at each other. In truth, the site had its origins in a sandbank of the Tethys Ocean. For a long time it was the island in the Molochna River, which has since been silted up and now flows a short distance to the west. It is thought to be the only sandstone outcrop in the Azov-Kuban Depression.

The shape of this sand hill is similar to that of kurgans that dot the Pontic-Caspian steppe. In 1889, the Russian archaeologist Nikolay Veselovsky was called upon to explore the enigmatic site and started excavations the following year. As soon as he concluded that the site was a burial mound, excavations were terminated. There was very little scientific exploration of the site during the first third of the 20th century.

In the 1930s the site was investigated by a team of archaeologists from Melitopol under Valentin Danylenko (1913-82). The young archaeologist claimed to have discovered thirty spots with petroglyph inscriptions which he dated to the 15th-20th millennia BC. That would make them the oldest extant evidence of writing in the world. Danylenko resumed his work on the site after WWII and claimed to have discovered thirteen caves with petroglyphs.

While a few eyebrows were raised at his suggestions, the site was designated an archaeological preserve in 1954. The move was intended to prevent the area from being flooded during construction of a water reservoir. During the following decades, the condition of petroglyphs visibly deteriorated. Danylenko's magnum opus about the site was released posthumously, but it took the publication of Anatoly Kifishin's hefty monograph in 2001 to attract wider attention to Kamenna Mohyla.

In this controversial work, Kifishin compared the petroglyphs of Kamenna Mohyla to those of Catalhoyuk and concluded that both were related to the Sumerian cuneiform script. Shortly before his death, Igor Diakonov lashed out against Kifishin's hypothesis (the two openly feuded since the 1960s). However, the Ukrainian media eagerly seized on Kifishin's notion about "proto-cuneiform texts" of Kamenna Mohyla and vulgarized it into sensationalist headlines about "Ukraine as the urheimat of the Sumerians".

Petroglyphs are found only inside the caves and grottoes of Kamenna Mohyla, many of them still filled up with sand. No adequate protection from the elements has been provided to this day. No traces of ancient human settlement have been discovered in the vicinity, leading many scholars to believe that the hill served as a remote sanctuary. Faint traces of red paint remain on parts of the surface. Scholars have been unable to agree whether the petroglyphs date from Stone Age or New Stone Age. The latter dating is more popular, although the depiction of a mammoth in one of the caves seems to favour the former date.