Petroglyphs of the Archaeological Landscape of Tanbaly

Sun-headed deities stare out from the rock at Tanbaly Gorge, where some 5,000 petroglyphs crowd a green cleft in the arid Chu-Ili mountains of south-east Kazakhstan. Herding peoples carved here from the later Bronze Age — the mid-2nd millennium BC — almost to modern times, leaving 48 clusters of images alongside their settlements, burial cists and kurgan mounds; the densest panels likely served as open-air altars. UNESCO inscribed the archaeological landscape in 2004.