JamesWhitehead
Piffle Prospector
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2001
- Messages
- 14,223
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,930105,00.html
Rock art clue to nomad ancestors of Egyptian pyramid builders
Stone age cattle herders left religious imagery which was to re-emerge in Valley of Kings
Tim Radford, science editor
Saturday April 5, 2003
The Guardian
Rock art etched on cliff walls in the eastern Sahara more than 6,000 years ago could spell out the answer to one of archaeology's great puzzles - where the ancient Egyptians came from.
The answer? They were there all the time.
The pyramid builders made their first entry in the archaeological record 5,000 years ago. This appearance was so abrupt that it has provoked fantasies of alien landings, mysterious civilisations or an invading master race. But in Genesis of the Pharaohs, published on Monday by Thames and Hudson, the Cambridge Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson presents a different picture.
The people who carved the great temples of Memphis and the elaborate tombs of the Valley of the Kings were once stone-age nomadic cattle herders who every summer, when the Nile flooded, took their herds to the fresh grass of the uplands.
They left a painstaking record of religious imagery, much of it to reappear 2,500 years later in the Valley of the Kings.
The origins of the Nile civilisation have been a hot topic for many decades. "They don't seem to have an ancestry, they don't seem to have any period of development, they just seem almost to appear overnight," said Dr Wilkinson.
"This has left people pondering, and of course it has been fertile ground for the unorthodox who suggest it was all planted by aliens, or visitors from Atlantis."
He and colleagues followed research by a German scholar, Hans Winkler, who before his death in the second world war published one preliminary report on rock art in what is now desert between the Red Sea and the Nile.
"It was never clear from his work whether what he found was all there was, or whether there was much, much more. The answer is there is a huge amount more, the place is littered with Egyptian rock art.
"There are some sites where the tableaux covered by the art are enormous - high cliff faces - and one has to imagine that these are the temples of prehistoric Egypt, these are sacred places to which people came back on a regular basis."
Dr Wilkinson's survey pinpointed hundreds of sites at which, 1,000 years before the founding of ancient Egypt, cattle herders had left intricate carvings of hippos and crocodiles, cattle, and above all, boats carrying godlike figures.
Each had been painstakingly "pecked" into the rock by an artist with a stone stylus. There are no written records. There is almost no other evidence of the people who fashioned the stories in the rock.
But the carvings tell of seasonal nomads who would have left the river valley with the annual flooding, and taken their herds to what had once been grassland savannah.
"I think one of the most striking things is the shape of the boat, with an upright prow and an incurved, sickle-shaped stern, very distinctive in the rock art.
"It is found throughout Egyptian history, and particularly in the Valley of the Kings, where it is quite specifically a divine boat, a boat associated with the king's voyage in the afterlife. I feel strongly that this particular shape of boat, already, in 4000BC, is associated with the spiritual dimension."
Some motifs in the desert stone explain other Egyptian puzzles. "On the coffin of Tutankhamun, there is the king, holding across his chest symbols of kingship which people have never thought about - and these are symbols of animal husbandry. Why does the king wear a bull's tail, why does he carry a crook?"
Rock art clue to nomad ancestors of Egyptian pyramid builders
Stone age cattle herders left religious imagery which was to re-emerge in Valley of Kings
Tim Radford, science editor
Saturday April 5, 2003
The Guardian
Rock art etched on cliff walls in the eastern Sahara more than 6,000 years ago could spell out the answer to one of archaeology's great puzzles - where the ancient Egyptians came from.
The answer? They were there all the time.
The pyramid builders made their first entry in the archaeological record 5,000 years ago. This appearance was so abrupt that it has provoked fantasies of alien landings, mysterious civilisations or an invading master race. But in Genesis of the Pharaohs, published on Monday by Thames and Hudson, the Cambridge Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson presents a different picture.
The people who carved the great temples of Memphis and the elaborate tombs of the Valley of the Kings were once stone-age nomadic cattle herders who every summer, when the Nile flooded, took their herds to the fresh grass of the uplands.
They left a painstaking record of religious imagery, much of it to reappear 2,500 years later in the Valley of the Kings.
The origins of the Nile civilisation have been a hot topic for many decades. "They don't seem to have an ancestry, they don't seem to have any period of development, they just seem almost to appear overnight," said Dr Wilkinson.
"This has left people pondering, and of course it has been fertile ground for the unorthodox who suggest it was all planted by aliens, or visitors from Atlantis."
He and colleagues followed research by a German scholar, Hans Winkler, who before his death in the second world war published one preliminary report on rock art in what is now desert between the Red Sea and the Nile.
"It was never clear from his work whether what he found was all there was, or whether there was much, much more. The answer is there is a huge amount more, the place is littered with Egyptian rock art.
"There are some sites where the tableaux covered by the art are enormous - high cliff faces - and one has to imagine that these are the temples of prehistoric Egypt, these are sacred places to which people came back on a regular basis."
Dr Wilkinson's survey pinpointed hundreds of sites at which, 1,000 years before the founding of ancient Egypt, cattle herders had left intricate carvings of hippos and crocodiles, cattle, and above all, boats carrying godlike figures.
Each had been painstakingly "pecked" into the rock by an artist with a stone stylus. There are no written records. There is almost no other evidence of the people who fashioned the stories in the rock.
But the carvings tell of seasonal nomads who would have left the river valley with the annual flooding, and taken their herds to what had once been grassland savannah.
"I think one of the most striking things is the shape of the boat, with an upright prow and an incurved, sickle-shaped stern, very distinctive in the rock art.
"It is found throughout Egyptian history, and particularly in the Valley of the Kings, where it is quite specifically a divine boat, a boat associated with the king's voyage in the afterlife. I feel strongly that this particular shape of boat, already, in 4000BC, is associated with the spiritual dimension."
Some motifs in the desert stone explain other Egyptian puzzles. "On the coffin of Tutankhamun, there is the king, holding across his chest symbols of kingship which people have never thought about - and these are symbols of animal husbandry. Why does the king wear a bull's tail, why does he carry a crook?"
