The Sahara Read Online Free PDF

arrival of a new, more powerful tribe. Less permanent journeys, for instance to seasonal grazing grounds or along trade routes, would also no doubt allow the spread of artistic motifs and techniques. The difficulties of dating and categorizing the work is compounded by the relatively small number of specialists who have been able to visit a majority of the rock art sites, such is the scale of the desert and the distance between many of the places where the best collections are to be found.
    There is surprising variety in Saharan parietal or cave wall art, especially if one considers that we remain a long way from successfully interpreting much of the work that is available to us. For every picture that unambiguously shows a human or animal form, any number of suggested interpretations can be forwarded. Theories are affected by, among other things, the size and number of the subjects, the colours and detail involved, the medium employed and their location. In broad terms we can say that those works with unambiguous subject matter very often portray animals, that is, food. The human form is another popular choice of subject, while images depicting acts of warfare or violence between men are as rare as pictures of plant life and smaller animals.
     

    An ancient hunt at Tassili
     
    This choice of subject matter may simply acknowledge the greater effort and risk involved in hunting large animals so that the greater the risk, and the larger the quantity of meat resulting from the hunt, the higher the esteem in which the beast was held. Even today, in zoos, wildlife-parks and on safaris, people still tend to be far more excited and interested in bigger animals, possibly because of their rarity but also perhaps because of some atavistic memory.
    Given how varied scholars’ interpretations of Saharan art have been, there is surprising unanimity when it comes to dating rock art. Even after his first encounter with it on examining the engravings at Wadi Telisaghe in 1850, Heinrich Barth recognized that it was not all the same, either in style or age. One of the first Europeans to see rock art in the Sahara, Barth went on to conduct extensive studies of the rock art of the Air Mountains in Niger and the Fezzan in Libya. A close observer of detail, Barth deduced that the different styles of the engravings meant the art came from different, prehistoric periods, and also that the presence of large animals suggested that the desert had once enjoyed a very different climate. While such observations may seem obvious to us, when Barth first advanced his untested theories they were radical.
    Products of the their time, many nineteenth-century explorers regarded as inconceivable the idea that Africans, by which they meant black Africans, (and non-Christian ones at that) would have been capable of producing such brilliant work. Barth was as guilty of this prejudice as anyone and his conclusions could be completely wrong. Accepting that the works had great merit, Barth remained unconvinced they were created solely from the imagination of local, if long dead, artists. Writing in Sahara and Sudan he concluded that, “No barbarian could have graven the lines with such astonishing firmness, and given to all the figures the light, natural shape which they exhibit.” He concluded that they must have been “executed by someone who had been in intimate relation with the more advanced people on the coast, perhaps with the Carthaginians.”
    Modern scholars, in our marginally more enlightened times, more or less agree on there being five very broad divisions in Saharan rock art. The first of these is the Hunter or Bubalus period, named after the Bubalus antiquus - a long extinct species of giant buffalo which is widely portrayed in art from this era which stretches between 12,000 and 7000 BCE. The carvings from this phase are distinguished by both the large, almost life-size engravings of the Bubalus and other large savannah-dwelling animals, and the