The nineteenth-century German explorer Heinrich Barth was one of the first Europeans to observe and record the remarkable images engraved on rocks in the central Sahara.1 In 1937, the anthropologist Leo Frobenius published a book, Ekade Ektab, demonstrating that Barth’s discoveries were far from the only examples, and that many other images have adorned the rocks of this region since prehistoric times.2 Other researchers were also hard at work, and a series of important discoveries were made throughout the central Sahara in the following decades. Further engravings, located in the southwestern Fezzan region of Libya were reported by Paolo Graziosi.3 In the Hoggar Mountains of southern Algeria, François de Chasseloup-Laubat, among others, reported images of human figures.4 Paul Huard studied engravings and paintings discovered in northern Chad.5 Paintings in the Acacus Mountains of western Libya were painstakingly analyzed and documented by Fabrizio Mori.6 Over the border in southeastern Algeria, Charles Brenans, Henri Lhote, Yolande Tschudi, and Jebrine Machar ag Mohamed began assembling an inventory of paintings from the Tassili n’Ajjer plateau.7
When Lhote presented his team’s findings as part of a major exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris during 1957 and 1958, artists and scientists alike were enthusiastic.8 Among specialists, there was little doubt that the iconography constituted an unparalleled ethnological record of African prehistory. Ancient peoples, it seemed, had inscribed direct testimony of their material culture, mythology, and way of life on the sunburnt rocks of the central Sahara. Usually limited to reconstructing the distant past from vestiges in bone or stone, historians now had at their disposal depictions of people hunting for large animals, migrating with their herds, assembling tents from animal skins, checking the straightness of arrowheads, styling their long hair into a bun over the forehead, and indulging in countless other activities that leave no other trace in the archaeological record.
Grand Narratives
In the 1970s, Huard began working with the Egyptologist Jean Leclant to consolidate the documentation of Saharan rock art. The pair theorized that a prehistoric hunting culture had emerged in the vast expanses between the Nile Valley and the Atlantic around 6,000 BCE during the Holocene climatic optimum (8,500–3,500 BCE). These populations flourished for millennia, hunting antelopes, buffalo, giraffes, elephants, hippopotami, and large felines, before acquiring domesticated cattle and sheep.9 This culture gradually expanded to encompass the whole of northern Africa, then retreated southward and toward the Nile to escape the deteriorating conditions that eventually led to the current aridity of the region. This thesis was later refined by Huard’s wife, Léone Allard-Huard, who was able to draw on new discoveries made during the final decade of the twentieth century.10
At the turn of the millennia, Huard and Leclant’s ideas might have seemed the ideal basis for a definitive ordering of the thousands of images inventoried since Barth’s initial discoveries. The authors may have quibbled about matters of chronology and dating, but specialists agreed that the rock art itself attested to a succession of wide-ranging cultures inhabiting the region. The first of these groups was thought to be the Bubalus people (ca. 10,000–8,000 BCE), whose artists created many images of Pelorovis antiquus, an extinct species of buffalo, and their successors, the Round Head artists (ca. 6,500–4,000 BCE). The latter are named for the distinctive, featureless, globular heads depicted atop their anthropomorphs.11 Following these groups were the so-called Bovidians (ca. 4,000–1,500 BCE), a population of shepherds who left behind portrayals of their beloved herds. In the art from the succeeding Caballine period (ca. 1,500 BC–0), horses appear for the first time, and are shown harnessed to chariots. Finally, in the Cameline period (0–), scenes involving camels and their drivers emerged as recurring motifs. This iconography embodies the story of Saharan civilization.
During the 1990s, some scholars estimated that the oldest of these images originated at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, around 10,000 years ago,12 while others argued for a much earlier beginning in the middle of the Pleistocene, 20,000 or more years ago.13 These estimates were poorly argued and frustratingly approximate. Dating issues, along with irreconcilable disagreements among specialists arising from competing interpretations of the art’s anthropological and mythological meanings, caused historians gradually to lose interest in the issue. As beautiful as the images are, the notion that they can inform us about the movements of the ancient central Saharan populations is largely illusory. Indeed, the chronological position of a piece of rock art is virtually impossible to pin down with any degree of certainty. Reconstructing a reliable history of human settlement in the African subcontinent seems, at best, a remote possibility.
In the late 1980s, the work of Huard and Leclant was subjected to a fresh critical appraisal. Their ideas did not emerge unscathed. Alfred Muzzolini was able to demonstrate that there was no consistent archeological basis for the large-scale hunting culture imagined by the pair.14 He also argued that the Bubaline was more a style than a period, and one that could still have been in use when the Bovidian shepherds populated the subcontinent.15 The Bovidian period, Muzzolini suggested, was composed of several stylistic and cultural nuclei, whose delineation would allow for a more credible and fine-tuned approach to establishing the chronology of pastoral images.16 This systematic reassessment led to the development of a new chronology, which posited that central Saharan rock art emerged around 5,000 BCE.17 After some initial resistance, the scientific community has largely accepted Muzzolini’s view.
In Search of Meaning
Attempts to discern meaning from the rock art of the central Sahara have often led researchers astray, giving rise to flights of fancy and an array of conjectures without any firm grounding in the archaeological record. Around the time of the Paris exhibition, Lhote made the surprising suggestion that the images were evidence that pharaonic civilization had extended westward during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt (1,539–1,293 BCE). Others suspected that many of the discoveries predated pharaonic art, seeking instead to identify the origins of Egyptian mythology. Some figures were interpreted as a prefiguration of Anubis, while others were thought to depict the deity Bes. The absence of any explanatory framework, and the enigmatic nature of many compositions, invited superficial comparisons and woolly speculation.
During the 1980s and 1990s, numerous researchers sought to explain rock art in terms of so-called entoptic signs, telltale indications that the imagery was the expression of altered states of consciousness. The highly subjective nature of such interpretations generated all manner of speculation, especially in relation to shamanism and ritualistic practices.18 The notion of shamanism embraced by researchers was so loosely defined that its traces could easily be found throughout the rock art. These interpretations were first proposed by David Lewis-Williams as part of his doctoral thesis, in which he sought to elucidate meaning from rock art attributed to the San people of southern Africa.19 These ideas proved remarkably malleable, and they were subsequently applied to Paleolithic art from around the world.20 In the case of the Saharan imagery, many instances of parallel or intersecting lines, or groups of dots have been designated entoptic, despite the obvious caution that the simpler the sign, the more widespread its adoption.21
A New Chronology
The founding of the Association des Amis de l’Art Rupestre Saharien (Association of the Friends of Saharan Rock Art) in 1991 was an important event because it served to revitalize the field.22 The journal of the association, Les Cahiers de l’AARS, publishes work by both professionals and serious amateurs. Yves and Christine Gauthier, among the amateurs, have demonstrated the value of cartographic methods for refining the chronology of rock paintings.23 This approach has also been used to more accurately date circular lithic monuments known as corbeilles (baskets) that are characteristic of the central Messak plateau in southwestern Libya. Some examples feature a stela decorated with engravings in a style associated with the region.24 The stelae date from between 4,550–4,370 and 4,220–3,960 BCE. So, too, the engravings. Prior to this discovery, the so-called Messak style of engraving had long been thought to belong to the much earlier Bubaline period.25
The study of central Saharan rock art has also benefitted from the digital revolution in photography. In addition to facilitating the archiving and preservation of images, specialized software, such as DStretch, has proven invaluable in processing photographs by accentuating features imperceptible to the naked eye.26 When photographs collected from a famous site in Tassili n’Ajjer were processed using DStretch, the original inventory of 51 subjects recorded by Lhote was expanded to 165. In some cases, the software revealed dozens of figures on walls that were previously thought blank.27
Algorithms employed by phylogeneticists have also been adopted by archaeologists.28 Once a sufficiently large collection of related rock art images has been assembled, each example is described using lines of code. Algorithms derived from phylogenetics can then be used to develop hypotheses with respect to the origins and evolution of the images. Where these hypotheses coincide with those developed using other methods, such as cartography, the results are mutually reinforcing.
Phylogenetic methods were first applied to central Saharan rock art as part of a study involving depictions of two major groups of therianthropes, namely figures with the heads of wild dogs, typically found in the Messak Settafet, and figures with the heads of jackals, found in the neighboring region of Tassili n’Ajjer. The evolutionary process that was reconstructed for the two styles using phylogenetic analysis suggested that the Messak images predate those from Tassili n’Ajjer. It seems likely that the artists in both areas may have developed their own mythical beings from a shared cultural heritage, each community adopting the common therianthropic motif, but varying its appearance.29 Phylogenetic analysis allows researchers to examine the work of the engravers and painters of the central Sahara in minute detail without becoming mired in the sort of haphazard and subjective comparisons that characterized earlier work, especially in relation to Egyptian mythology. Although improved, this process can be made still more rigorous by incorporating other methods, such as cartographic analysis, with the goal of producing replicable and refutable results.
From all the documentation currently available, a new chronology has emerged that is still a little imprecise in places, but is nonetheless reliable, and arranges central Saharan rock art in a cohesive and comprehensible sequence.30 The earliest rock art seems to belong to the Round Head period, originating in the Acacus Mountains and Tassili n’Ajjer, and is estimated to have begun ca. 5,500 BCE. The Messak style appears to date from around 4,250 BCE. In the fertile period between the Bougdouma-Oyo arid event (ca. 5,200 BCE) and the post-Neolithic arid event (ca. 2,200 BCE), domestic cattle appear frequently in rock art, notably in the Messak style and the group of styles jointly labeled as pastoral. Better adapted to harsh climates than cows, sheep and goats are depicted with increasing frequency in Iheren paintings dating from around the middle of the fourth millennium BCE.31 Better adapted to harsh climates than cows, sheep and goats appear in paintings dated as late as the first millennium BCE. After the post-Neolithic arid event, the Caballine period began throughout the Sahara. This was followed by the Cameline period, beginning around the fifth century CE, when the camel became a motif in rock art following its arrival in the area. This overall vision is affirmed in the majority of recent research.32
Translated and adapted from the French by the editors.
