The Great Wall is just part of a larger series of fortifications in eastern Central Asia. One of the others is the less studied Medieval Wall System (MWS). The gobi wall here is a few hundred kilometers of one of the individual walls within the MWS, which as the name suggests is within the gobi desert in the modern country of Mongolia.
And just to preclude the usual follow-up, these walls probably weren't major defensive fortifications intended to keep out armies of nomadic raiders. Their primary function was closer to airport customs, visible outposts that reinforce the boundaries and laws of the state.
> The Medieval (10th to 13th century CE) Wall System (MWS) stretches approximately 4000 km across extensive regions in northern China and Mongolia, as well as shorter sections in Russia (Figure 1). It represents one of the most extensive yet enigmatic architectural features in East Asia. In recent years The Wall Project, funded by the European Research Council, as well as other projects, has extensively studied and published on different sections of this wall line. Such research demonstrated that this extensive system of earthen walls was built by different empires from c. the 10th to the 13th centuries CE [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Among the different sections of the MWS, the wall section located in the southern Mongolia’s Gobi Desert is the least explored and still poorly understood. This study focuses on a 321 km-long segment of this wall line, located in Ömnögovi province of Mongolia, that we refer to as the Gobi Wall (Figure 2).
I don't know, looks like hunting walls to me. When chased, animals naturally follow such walls, however insignificant they are (sometimes they follow even a line drawn on the grass), and get onto predictable trajectory leading them into ambush.
I'm curious how you came to that conclusion. Nothing about these walls resembles desert kites that I can see, except that they both use natural materials in an arid climate.
As a child growing up in Central Asia, I saw people piling up stones, sticks, and other debris along the ancient lines people used to control herds and wild animals.
The ones built for hunting often had a narrow, funnel-like end, while those meant for managing herds could take on almost any shape.
One of the photos in that article looks exactly like the walls I remember from my childhood.
And just to preclude the usual follow-up, these walls probably weren't major defensive fortifications intended to keep out armies of nomadic raiders. Their primary function was closer to airport customs, visible outposts that reinforce the boundaries and laws of the state.