Abstract
ANCIENT ROCK - SCULPTURES IN THE LIBYAN DESERT.'-A journey of considerable geographical interest across the southern Libyan Desert from Bara to Bir Natrun in Dongola Province is described by Mr. D. Newbold in Sudan Notes and Records, vol. 7. At an early stage of the journey, the author witnessed the departure of the Kababish on their great seasonal migration, when the tribe moves some 20,000 camels and 150,000 sheep and goats to the “gizzu” or grass country for six months. Evidence of early occupation of the country crossed was abundant, including cairns, pottery, some of which was afterwards identified as Meroitic, a small brick pyramid at Abu Sofian, and a find of five glauconite implements of neolithic type. Rock sculptures were first found at Zobat el Hammad, where drawings roughly incised on boulders showed tailed and phallic men, elephants, giraffes, ostriches, oryx, cattle, and several other animals which could not be identified. At Um Tasawin on the return journey, the cliffs, even in the most inaccessible positions, were found to be engraved with innumerable figures of cattle, giraffes, elephants, oryx, and other indeterminate animals. There were also a number of human figures, some tailed, some armed with bows, a few phallic and one steatopygous. At Abu Sofian, two groups of pictures, obviously of the same-date and “school,” were within a day's march of one another. Here the drawings were incised on round boulders, and were very numerous. Camels are shown literally in hundreds of drawings; giraffes and ostriches still appear; but the cattle'dwindle in numbers, while the elephant is not represented and the bowmen give place to men armed with spears and carrying shields. The absence of the camel at Tasawin and el Hammad suggests that the drawings there cannot be later than the first century B.C. They may be the work of the Southern Libyan Tamahu, the ruling caste in Ethiopia in the Meroitic period, and might be dated any time from 300 to 750 B.C. or even earlier. The Abu Sofian groups are obviously later, as shown by the presence of the camel, but must equally be the work of Libyan artists, and are probably between 1500 and 2000 years old. The archaeological evidence as a whole supports the theory of continued migration into the northern Sudan of desert peoples of the west and northwest from the earliest times, and the introduction thence of a Hamitic element into the riverain populations, which is still strongly marked.
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Research Items. Nature 115, 315–317 (1925). https://doi.org/10.1038/115315a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/115315a0