By Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery.com News
 |
| The forefathers of the pyramid builders left telling
details in rock drawings in the desert east of the Nile, according
to British archaeologists. |
The signature
of the forefathers of the pyramid builders was hidden in the desert
east of the Nile, according to British archaeologists who have
discovered 30 new sites filled with drawings carved into rocks.
Unseen by
human eyes for up to 6,000 years, the rock engravings depict cattle,
giraffes, ostriches, hippos, boats, and the men and women who
lived in the area around 4,000 B.C.
"It's
the Sistine Chapel of predynastic Egypt. It's amazing. What this
does is open up a completely new chapter in the study of Egyptian
civilization and its origins," Toby Wilkinson, the Cambridge
archaeologist who made the discovery, said to London's Guardian
newspaper yesterday.
The first
traces of human activity in the Eastern Desert of Upper Egypt
were found by German Egyptologist Hans Winkler in the 1930s, but
the outbreak of Second World War interrupted his research. Only
in the 1970s did scholars begin to investigate the origins of
the Egyptian civilization in the forbidding stretch between the
Nile and the Red Sea.
The area wasn't
always inhospitable. Until 3,500 B.C., when it began to turn into
desert, the landscape would have resembled today east African
savannahs, the climate would have been wetter and the population
larger. And to judge from the rock drawings, a multitude of elephant,
ostrich, ibex and gazelle grazed the area.
It was in
this section of the desert, between two roads, the Wadi Hammamat
and the Wadi Barramiya, that Wilkinson and his team discovered
this month a plethora of rock art sites with spectacular images.
Many drawings offer familiar features of ancient Egyptian religious
symbolisms, such as boats for the voyage through the underworld
or figures with plumes in the hair, like those worn by the later
gods of Egypt.
Who were these
rock artists? Wilkinson believes they belonged to an indigenous
nomadic people, who moved according to season with their cattle.
As the land around began to dry, they had to settle.
"There
is a lovely little scene of seven women dancing, holding hands,"
Wilkinson said. " We are going to have to rethink our idea
of the extent of Egypt, 7,000 or 6,000 years ago. It wasn't just
the Nile valley, it was this vast area on either side which was
able to support life. These people moved out of the savannas into
the Nile valley and settled there, and this is what kickstarted
Egyptian civilization."
Scholars are
thrilled by the discovery. "It all sound very exciting. I
would love to know more on these rock drawings, " says Yosef
Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, an authority
on predynastic Egypt.
|
