In search of prehistoric Saharan art.
The Petroglyph`s Code
Rock drawings found in the south Saharan oasis of Dakhleh, dating
back some 7,500-6,000 years, portray female figures, giraffes being
led by rope, and other scenes. The secrets they hold about the lives
and beliefs of the oasis's Neolithic inhabitants are now being uncovered
by an international team of researchers
The term 'rock art' chiefly conjures up images of paintings from
southern France and Spain, of Palaeolithic masterpieces in dark caves
first discovered by torchlight in the late 19th century. Yet the notion
of leaving behind a kind of message inscribed on rock has appeared
in many cultures and on all the continents.
Archaeology as a science spent a long time neglecting this particular
source of information about the past. The developed research methodology
had no place for such hard-to-classify images, whose understanding
simultaneously required knowledge from the fields of archaeology,
ethnology, and art history. The intellectual ferment at the end of
the 20th century proved to be favourable to rock art: researchers
slowly came to realize that this unique phenomenon offered a window
on the past which no one had yet peered through.
Rock art research still often heads down blind alleys. Even though
these images represent nearly directly conferred from the past, it
is as if the two "devices" at either end of this "high-speed link"
spanning the centuries are running completely different operating
systems: the minds of prehistoric artists vs. our minds as their 21st-century
audience. Finding some common ground is not easy, although Polish
researchers have been striving to do so since 1985, in the Dakhleh
Oasis in southern Egypt.
Islands of the Blessed
That is how the Egyptian oases were dubbed by Herodotus in the 5th
century BC - and aptly so, seeing as they are located in the world's
least hospitable region to mankind, the Western Desert that forms
part of the Sahara. These five islets, as enclaves of water, vegetation,
and life, must have represented a true blessing for those travellers
that managed to reach them. The Dakhleh Oasis (meaning "inner oasis"
in Arabic) is located in southern Egypt, some 600 km from Cairo as
the bird flies. The oasis does not look much like the Hollywood image
of a pool of azure water surrounded by palms, being in fact a 100
km long conglomeration of small villages and towns with a population
of nearly 80,000. This ethnically diverse population, where nearly
every village has its own separate dialect, excellently illustrates
the oasis's complex and stormy history. Human communities have inhabited
the oasis for some 200,000 years without interruption, and so it is
not surprising that it is sometimes called "eternal."
The Dakhleh Oasis Project (DOP), an international, interdisciplinary
mission led by Dr. Anthony Mills, has been operating in the area since
1977. In Egypt, where archaeological concessions are granted to study
areas counted in square meters, it was phenomenal when permission
was granted to study the oasis as a whole. This made it possible to
pursue the project's main idea: to study the functioning of the oasis
as a kind of separate organism, as a microcosm existing in remote
enough isolation to make it possible to identify the factors and stimuli
affecting it and to trace the mechanisms of change and methods of
adaptation. While it is mainly under Canadian auspices, the project
also includes specialists from Australia, the UK, the US, the Netherlands,
Austria, Germany, and Poland. There are geologists, botanists, linguists,
architects, physical and cultural anthropologists, historians, and
of course archaeologists.
The first years of research, involving reconnaissance work around
the oasis, already turned up numerous rock engravings known as "petroglyphs."
This led Prof. Lech Krzyżaniak from the Poznan Archaeological Museum,
a specialist in Saharan rock art, to be invited to join the project
in 1985.
Even though the Saharan region seemed to be maximally exploited archeologically,
it was a surprising fact that rock art in the region had previously
been studied by few individuals. The first was the Egyptian traveller
and adventure-seeker Hussanein Bey, a representative of the Egyptian
diplomatic corps who made an epic journey across the Western Desert
by camel in 1923, traversing 3,400 km to reach Darfur in Sudan. Along
the way he encountered many sites with rock art, which he described
in his book The Lost Oasis. Next was the Hungarian count Ladislaus
de Almasy, accused of spying for the German Reich, who made discoveries
in the region of Gilf Kebir in 1933, including a famous valley with
paintings showing "swimmers in a prehistoric lake," as it was then
interpreted. Methodical research of rock art in the region was only
begun by Hans Winkler, the German art historian, ethnographer, and
philologist, who in 1939 published his two-volume The Rock Drawings
of Southern Upper Egypt, which has already become a classic. The petroglyphs
he described included several examples from the eastern Dakhleh Oasis
region.
Another 40 years would then have to transpire before this work was
taken further, when the Petroglyph Unit was then set up under the
DOP. The unit now functions as a joint project of the Poznan Archaeological
Museum and the Polish Academy of Sciences in Poznan, coordinated by
Warsaw University's Polish Centre for Mediterranean Archaeology in
Cairo.
A Sahara vibrant with life
The desert has many faces, and around the Dakhleh Oasis it is in
large part rocky, forming a kind of labyrinth of sandstone rock outcroppings.
It is on these rocks that the ancient petroglyphs were carved. Mankind
has been shaping the surrounding landscape since the dawn of time,
and in this case people turned it into a kind of outdoor picture gallery.
Great research efforts, involving methodical reconnaissance work plus
hundreds of photos, tracings, and sketches, have been made in the
hope of finding some key to interpreting and under standing the prehistoric
world portrayed here. Slowly, with the help of knowledge obtained
from other DOP specialists, the world of the past encoded in the petroglyphs
is beginning to reveal its secrets.
The Sahara was not always a desert. The region's climate has varied
over the millennia, oscillating like a sinusoid. The last ice age
came to an end some 10,000 years ago, at the start of the Holocene
epoch, lasting to this very day. Rains then returned to the Sahara,
with the Dakhleh Oasis seeing both summer monsoon rains from the equatorial
region and winter rains from the Mediterranean. The landscape we have
to picture in our mind's eye is something akin to present-day northern
African savannas. Seasonal rivers, reservoirs, and wetlands emerged,
with the grassy areas being plied by gazelles, antelopes, ostriches,
and predators of various sorts. As vegetation and animals returned,
so too did people. At first during the wettest periods, they moved
freely about the entire Sahara - still as nomads and hunter-gatherers,
who only periodically made longer stays at the oasis, perhaps during
the dry season. Such stays must have offered opportunities for intertribal
meetings, exchanging goods, wife-seeking, cult rituals, or simply
mutual merriment. Their wanderings sometimes took them far afield,
as is evidenced by rock art showing elephants and giraffes, which
lived farther to the south.
It seems that the stimulus to begin food production, to enter a new
stage of development, came from periodic climactic deteriorations
that forced people to stay nearby water reservoirs, to begin agricultural
cultivation and animal husbandry. They most likely led a semi-settled
lifestyle, wandering with their herds during the wet season around
the Libyan Plateau stretching all around, to return to the oasis valley
during the dry season. The oasis's Neolithic inhabitants, called the
Beshendi culture by archaeologists (some 7,500-6,000 years ago) left
behind stone tools, stone querns and grinders, piles of ostrich eggshells,
and stone architectural structures. But most intriguingly, on rocky
faces nowadays lashed by the desert winds, they left behind their
own visualizations of the world. These were the earliest producers
of rock art in the region.
The world portrayed
We can imagine that what they chose to immortalize in stone was what
was most important in their lives. The pictures show us various animals
they must have seen around them, some of which they hunted. The images
are performed using various techniques, ranging from engraving and
pecking (pounding dents) to various sorts of abrasions on the rock
surface. Just as the animals could once be found gathered at the same
water hole, now they appear together on the same sandstone panel.
Mighty elephants, with stressed tusks and a characteristic profile,
appear alongside delicate and graceful gazelles, executed so precisely
that a skilled eye can discern different species. There are processions
of ruffled ostriches, moufflons, herds of longhorn cattle, and above
all giraffes - they are everywhere, in all possible poses, situations,
configurations, and techniques. Sometimes they are beautifully decorated,
with attention to detail and truly artistic taste; sometimes they
are merely simplified, schematic outlines. Some extraordinary pictures
show giraffes being led by people with ropes. Did people try to domesticate
them? There can be no doubt that these animals must have held some
sort of special significance for the oasis community. But what sort
of significance? For now, that remains in the domain of questions.
Ladies of the oasis
The greatest secret of the oasis, however, lies in the female figures
that are unique within the entire Sahara region. Their stylized outlines
are interpreted variously - as being pregnant, or as having a steatopygic
or "pear-shaped" body. Common traits they share are a very weakly
formed upper body, a merely outlined head, a spindly torso and vestigial
arms, plus a heavily accented lower body whose ample dimensions are
covered by skirts, frequently richly and inventively decorated. There
are some very refined images, showing tattoos and body paintings,
hairstyles, bracelets and necklaces, and artistic ornamental attire.
Who were these mysterious women of the oasis? What might their significance
have been? They are at times shown dancing, at times wearing face
masks. Sometimes there are compositions where animals, chiefly giraffes,
are being led toward the women. There is a striking disproportion
in size between the animals and those leading them on the one hand,
and the female figures on the other - the latter being much larger!
It has been hypothesized that these are images of real figures, embodying
some sort of female deities.
Petroglyphs showing female
figures are very frequently found in particularly prominent locations,
such as on specially selected flat panels perched on hilltops. They
are veritable altars turned toward the skies. Is it possible that
they were related to rain as a source of water (which after all signifies
life in societies that produce their own food)? Sometimes female figures
are engraved inside rock depressions used as stationary querns. A
quern means food, the basis of subsistence. The female element signifies
fertility, fecundity, abundance. Both the potential pregnancy of the
female figures and their possible steatopygia naturally suggest reproductive
power. Steatopygia was, after all, a very desirable trait in most
primitive societies, suggesting fertility. Were the giraffes being
led before the "goddesses" to be sacrificed to them? Or were they
meant to receive some blessing there, as being particularly important
to the oasis community? If the female figures engraved in the Dakhleh
Oasis really do portray female fertility-related deities, what rituals
might have been performed for them? These and many other questions
must remain unanswered for now. We hope that they will not remain
so forever.
Further Reading:
Bey H.A.M . (2006). The Lost Oases. Cairo, New York: The American
University in Cairo Press.
Krzyżaniak L., Kroeper K . (1993). The Dakhleh Oasis Project:
Interim Report on the Second (1990) and Third (1992) Seasons
of the Recording of Petroglyphs. The Journal of the Society
for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities, Vol. 20:1990, 77-88.
Winkler H.A. (1939). Rock Drawings of Southern Upper Egypt,
vol. II. Egypt Exploration Society. Oxford University Press: London.
Text from:
Kuciewicz E., Jaroni E., Kobusiewicz M. , In search of prehistoric
Saharan art. The Petroglyph`s Code, Academia 1 (9), 2007, 4-8.
