The Sahara has a surface of 9.2 million km², making it the largest hot desert in the world. About 20% of the Sahara is covered by sand, and 70% by stone plateaux and mountains that could in principle be sites for rock art. In contrast to Central Asia and Arabia, where rock carvings predominate and paintings appear relatively rarely, in the Sahara the proportions are reversed. Pictographs are widely spread, but petroglyphs are mainly concentrated in a couple of sandstone regions of the central Sahara. One of them is Wadi Djerat in the Tassili n’Ajjer, in today’s south-eastern Algeria. It is one of the world’s most extraordinary petroglyph sites, for in this deep, narrow valley – c.70 to 250m wide and in total more than 50km long – a rich variety of petroglyphs as well as paintings are found spread over a walking distance of some 35km.
Documenting Djerat
Research in Wadi Djerat is closely associated with the French explorer Henri Lhote (1903-1991), who was a pupil of the famous rock-art expert Abbé Henri Breuil. Lhote at first wanted to become an army pilot, but an accident ended his career and instead he travelled to North Africa to participate in a programme to fight locusts. In 1933, Lieutenant Charles Brenans of the French Camel Corps had rediscovered the petroglyphs of Wadi Djerat by chance during a patrol. One year later, Lhote undertook the first of several explorations of the Wadi. Starting at the oasis of Nafeg Supérieur, where the southernmost petroglyphs are recorded as Lhote’s site 1, the rock-art locations follow the flow of the seasonal river northwards as far as site L 75, where the wadi opens out into the vast desert. Today, more than 80 sites are recorded, totalling some 4,500 engravings. The petroglyphs were mostly incised on flat or gently sloping rock panels and blocks that had fallen from the cliffs or, more rarely, on vertical surfaces.
In March 2023, the present author, together with the rock-art expert Andras Zboray, the artist Therese Weber, three Tuaregs, and five camels, explored the wadi. Scouting the petroglyphs, one is struck by two observations: whereas one spontaneously associates camels with the Sahara, in Wadi Djerat there are very few engravings of dromedaries, which appear mainly in paintings of a comparatively late date. In petroglyphs, wild animals abound, above all the Bubalus antiquus (Syncerus antiquus) – which is an extinct species of buffalo characterised by powerful, curved horns – followed by rhinoceros, elephants, hippopotami, giraffes, fish, and crocodiles. None of these animals could survive in today’s prevailing climate. Indeed, the Sahara has had an eventful history in this regard, with its fauna thriving and disappearing to the rhythm of such climatic pulsation. The same observation applies to the human populations and their economies, which adapted to varying climatic conditions. And, as in Arabia and Central Asia, these changes in fauna and human activity were reflected in rock art.
