The Sahara Read online

  Although evidence is limited, what emerges is a picture of a people who had available to them a variety of stone tools and who also managed to domesticate a number of animals. The Capsian diet included auroch, an oversized ancestor of cattle, antelope, hares and snails. While it is clear that Capsians enjoyed a meat-heavy diet, it is less certain what greens they ate for balance.

  Capsian culture is noted for the widespread use of ornamentation in tools and containers such as ostrich shells, as well as a fascination with beads and other jewellery made from shells, a fondness they shared with the Aterian industry. But the emotional development of Capsian culture seems to have gone further still, producing many fine early examples of both figurative and abstract rock art. Importantly, Capsian culture also indicates a certain spiritual maturity: their dead were buried, rather than just taken away from where the living fed and slept, and corpses were often painted with red ochre before being interred. Such care clearly suggests a strong faith in some form of afterlife.

  Of all the archaeological sites discovered in the Sahara, it is one of the most recently excavated that has proved to be the most exciting. Uncovered in 2000, Gobero, in Niger, is the site of the oldest and largest ancient graveyard in the entire Sahara. So far archaeologists have uncovered the remains of more than 200 individuals and a multitude of objects, including jewellery and animal bones, buried with them. All told, the finds have provided researchers with unprecedented insights into the life of early Saharan peoples who settled in Gobero more than 10,000 years ago. Even more excitingly, archaeologists have discovered that Gobero was home to at least two distinct cultures, one replacing or following the other. The human remains and the extensive artefacts found at the site have offered tantalizing insights into both cultures, which between them ensured the site was more or less continually inhabited for roughly 5000 years. Located on the side of a now disappeared lake, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of 54 species of animal, including elephant, hippo, giraffe, hartebeest, warthog, lion, python and mud turtles.

  The earliest settlers at Gobero were of the Kiffian culture, and their remains show men and women who were frequently taller than six feet. The Kiffians are notable for their pottery, which tended to be adorned with delicately wavy lines. Based at Gobero until roughly 6000 BCE, it is thought that they abandoned the site during a periodic dry phase, only to be replaced some time thereafter by the Tenerians. Like the Kiffians, the Tenerians left a great deal of pottery behind them, which betrays their preference for designs made with simpler, straight lines. Between both styles, pots and pottery shards alike demonstrate an interest in the decorative arts with a 10,000-year pedigree, one that likely emerged along the Nile valley before travelling as far west as Mali. Of even more interest than the pots themselves, the craftsmanship demonstrates clear and distinct developments in the skill level of the potters, as well as changes in fashion.

  Like the earlier Capsian culture, Kiffians and Tenerians also displayed some sense of spirit in their sensitive treatment of the dead. Burial customs meant that individuals were often laid to rest wearing items of jewellery, including an eleven-year-old girl who was buried with a bracelet on her upper arm that was made from a hippo’s tusk. However, a number of the graves excavated have raised more questions than they have provided answers. The most intriguing of these is that of a woman and two children buried side by side in a communal plot. Positioned in such a way that implies they are engaged in a loving embrace, the bodies are thought to be those of a mother and her children. In addition to the tenderness of their proximity, pollen found in the grave suggests to archaeologists that they were laid to rest on a bed of flowers. Although impossible to prove, since none of the bodies bears any sign of violence, and it is assumed they were buried at the same time, it is likely the trio died as the result of a fatal contagion.

  Investigations at Gobero and elsewhere are far from complete, and the expectation of further revelations into early Saharan cultures runs high among archaeologists and others. What we do know is that around 2300 BCE the last period of the Green Sahara came to an end. As the monsoons from the south stopped, permanent sources of water dried up. Human and animal populations were forced to move away or die. In this post-pluvial era, aridity became the new standard, and the Sahara finally took on the parched quality that we are familiar with today.

  Rock Art

  “...We became aware that the valley contained some remarkable sculptures deserving our particular attention... No barbarian could have graven the lines with such astonishing firmness, and given to all the figures the light, natural shape which they exhibit.”

  Heinrich Barth, Travels and Disc(J1Jeries in North and Central Africa

  Everyone who has seen rock art in the Sahara has, in his or her own way, echoed the sentiments of surprise and delight uttered by Heinrich Barth upon his discovery of these examples of prehistoric human creativity. The beauty of these works of art is breath-taking, as is the astounding range and quantity of the works still in existence. Across the Sahara there are tens of thousands of examples of the ancient creative urge brought to life. Of all the evidence available to us regarding ancient human habitation in the Sahara, rock art is the most widespread and dramatic. What more striking sign of the one-time presence of people than a painting on the wall of a cave showing a herd of cattle and the thrill of the hunt?

  Even more dramatic than the pictures of cattle and other now domesticated animals are the depictions of bigger beasts, such as elephants, rhinoceroses and crocodiles. In many cases, these have been reproduced on walls and rocky outcrops in something close to scale. To gaze upon the exquisitely detailed, near life-size carving of a giraffe indicates how far conditions in the Sahara have changed over time. The widespread incidence of rock art, including the chosen subject matter, proves that wetter, milder conditions once prevailed in areas that are today uninhabitable, and also that not only was human tenancy in the desert possible but it occurred on a significant scale.

  Rock art is broadly divided into one of two types: petroglyphs (engravings or carvings) or pictographs (paintings). The earliest Saharan rock art is between twelve and fourteen thousand years old, although precise dating, as in so many matters prehistoric, is impossible. Also, the vastness of the Sahara militates against any consensus since there is no reason to suppose that while art was flourishing on one side of the continent, artists on the other side were creating works of the same quality or style at the same time. Nor is there any reason to assume that craftsmen thousands of miles apart would concurrently choose the same subject matter or materials.

  It is far more likely that items which display some similarity came about as a result of population shifts, for example people migrating after a once reliable water source dried up, or being forced to move with the 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 comparably diminutive scale of the few human figures who appear. The total absence of domesticated animals from these rock canvases also indicates an early, non-pastoral epoch, hence its alternative name: the Hunter period.

  After this comes a time known variously as the Archaic, Pre-Pastoralist or Roundhead period. Thought to start between 10,000 and 8000 and ending in about 5000 BCE, it takes its Roundhead name from the work of the great, if flawed, French explorer and ethnographer Henri Lhote. One of the first people to conduct extensive studies of Saharan rock art, he came up with the label in the 1950s after noting the presence of numerous strange-looking human figures with large round heads in the Tassili n’Ajjer in south-eastern Algeria. His initial work in recording the carvings was of some importance but it led to his later theories for which unfortunately he is much better remembered-that Martians had inhabited the prehistoric earth.

  The Ahaggar and Tassili where Lhote explored are rightly renowned for the magnificent collections they house, the greatest storehouse of ancient rock art on earth, both in quantity and quality. Although these stone canvases were first scored and chipped some 8000 years ago, our knowledge of them was extremely limited until Lhote’s work, which is why it is such a pity that he is today largely remembered for his outlandish claims.

  Lhote’s published findings declared that the admittedly striking and strange, round-headed figures were proof that ancient man once had contact with aliens from outer space. He even named one of the largest and most distinct figures Jabberen, and announced that it was a Martian god. Erik von Daniken who, like Lhote, claims to believe in ancient astronauts, wrote about the round-headed figures in his book Chariots of the Gods, citing them as evidence that the earth had been populated by humanoids from outer space. This obviously did nothing for Lhote’s reputation. And neither did his failure to realize that a number of heavily stylized, Egyptian-like paintings he “discovered” were hoaxes perpetrated by members of his own research team.

  Whether artists from the Roundhead period were recording encounters with aliens or simply being creative, the next artistic period is altogether more straightforwardly named. The Cattle period, also known as the Pastoral period, is variously dated as starting between 7500 and 5000 BCE and ending between 4000 and 25 00 BCE and clearly marks the time when Saharans domesticated cattle. If the scale of the herds in these drawings is to be taken literally, it was evidently a time of abundance, when life in the Sahara had never been more comfortable, and when the existence of such food stocks must have contributed to a steep climb in local populations.

  From 3000 to as recently as 800 BCE, the Horse and Chariot period marks another profound change in the Saharan landscape, with wheeled vehicles making their mark on the landscape, forging paths from the northern coastal region southwards through the Fezzan to the Sahel and beyond.

  The final period is the Camel period, the dates for which, like the preceding periods, are disputed although reckoned to start between 2000 and 400 BCE and stretching to the present day. Like all art, contemporary rock art reflects present-day norms and realities that, in the case of today’s parietal art, includes representations of modern inventions such as aeroplanes and modern weaponry as well as human figures and graffiti in Arabic, Berber and Tamasheq, the language of the Tuareg.

  Iconography and Graffiti

  Establishing a definitive answer to the question of the purpose of rock art is as unlikely as authorities agreeing on its age. One thing is certain; the creation of many of these works of art took a great deal of time and energy, which is suggestive of a relatively highly developed society. In these societies, either time was set aside where everyone was involved in creating art, perhaps after a successful hunt when food was temporarily plentiful, or perhaps there had developed certain individuals in society whose role was making pictures.

  One of the most often proposed functions of parietal art is religious. What constitutes religious feeling is naturally subject to interpretation, and with this in mind there is nothing to suggest that the hunting scenes might not be religious icons, both representing the necessity of securing a food supply and offering thanks for any perceived divine assistance received in the chase. It is equally possible, if impossible to prove, that the hunt was itself a religious event, along the same lines as attending those formalized rituals common to any Sunday, or Friday, or Saturday, service.

  The figure of a large-breasted female on a cave wall is interpreted without controversy as a symbol of fecundity; perhaps a goddess whom the artist’s clan hoped would bless them with healthy children or, for sedentary agriculturists, a good harvest. Similarly, an obviously male figure supplied with an outsized and erect penis might likewise represent a fertility god, or could it just be that it was meant for a spot of fun? There is the hint of a suggestion that certain examples of this megaphallic art may be little more than graffiti, scratches or daubs added later by individuals with a lewd or juvenile sense of humour.

  Although in many cases the works are clearly too elaborate for this suspicion to be justified, one certainly senses levity at work in some of the more sexual images. Dr. Bonnet, working for the Paris Natural History Museum in Algeria in the nineteenth century, noted that a number of the engravings’ hunters “brazenly display monstrous phalluses... in most cases it is easy to recognize, from the form and the colour of the line, that these organs are later additions to the rest of the figure.” In other words, Bonnet saw some of these large erections as litt
le more than early graffiti. There has surely been no time since the emergence of Homo sapiens when those distinctive male and female body parts have not been, so to speak, held up as objects of ribald humour.

  The overtly sexual illustrations so shocked a number of the Europeans who re-discovered this art that many ignored them altogether in their accounts. However, in 1848 the French traveller Jean-Jacques Ampere published an account of his journeys through Egypt and Nubia, which included comments on engravings he had found around Philae. Apart from lions, elephants and ostriches, he noted some distinctly obscene portrayals of humans. Of all the human figures proudly displaying their sex, those engaged in acts of zoophilia have always provoked the sharpest intakes of breath. Even so, bestiality is surprisingly common in the works of these early artists: the shock of the old, perhaps. It also happens that bestiality in Saharan rock art is more common than in other sites around the world of a similar age. Whether this is because most of these works were destroyed elsewhere in the world or whether Saharans had a particularly keen enthusiasm for coupling with animals, it is impossible to say.

  Then there are those images of men copulating with animals far larger than themselves, including giraffes, rhinos and elephants, which certainly raise far more questions than they answer. Whatever the reason for carving these images into a rock face, it was not done lightly. Again, there is nothing to suggest that there is not present here some religious iconography. It is still the case today that hunters in certain tribes will engage in ritual copulation with antelopes they have just killed. Perhaps these images are of great symbolic, rather than literal, importance, votive offerings for human domination over larger and potentially lethal prey. Other forms of bestial activity include engravings of men either urinating or ejaculating into the eyes of rhinos.