15,000 years old rock art discovered in Egypt

Jul 12, 2007 06:49 GMT  ·  By

While early Europeans were decorating cave walls with paintings of bisons, aurochs and lions, 15,000 years ago the ancient Egyptians made similar rock face drawings and etchings.

"It is not at all an exaggeration to call it 'Lascaux on the Nile,'" said expedition leader Dirk Huyge, curator of the Egyptian Collection at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, Belgium.

"The style is riveting. The art is unlike anything seen elsewhere in Egypt," added co-researcher Salima Ikram of the American University in Cairo.

The engravings were sculpted into sandstone cliff faces near the village of Qurta, about 400 miles (640 kilometers) south of Cairo and most of the 160 figures represent wild bulls, the largest being about 6 ft (2 m) wide.

The findings "push Egyptian art, religion, and culture back to a much earlier time," Ikram said.

Qurta art had already been discovered in 1962 by a group from the University of Toronto, Canada. The Canadian researchers suggested then that the figures were more than 10,000 years old, but later they gave up their hypothesis. "The Paleolithic experts told them "It's absolutely crazy-Europe is the cradle of art." They must have accepted the fact that that nobody wanted to believe them, but they were right. Discoveries of Paleolithic art in southern Africa and Australia since then have paved the way for the scientific community to accept what they first diffidently suggested," Huyge said.

The new expedition discovered also several novel panels of artwork over a 1 mi (1.66 km) long area of 230 ft (70 m) tall sandstone cliffs.

"There is little doubt the engravings are 15,000-years-old. They depict a now extinct species of wild cow (aurochs) whose horns have been recovered from Paleolithic settlements nearby. The drawings would be examined for lichens and organic grime called "varnish rind" that could be carbon dated or subjected to another process known as uranium series dating. Because the rocks are inorganic, they cannot be dated directly using these methods," said Huyge.

Qurta art is amazingly similar to contemporaneous European art.

"While the caves at Lascaux are best known for their painted images of bulls and cows, that artwork is actually outnumbered by stone engravings. And the Lascaux engravings are virtually identical to those in Qurta" Huyge pointed out.

"I'm not suggesting that the art in the caves of Lascaux was made by Egyptians or that [European] people were in Egypt. The art is so similar that it reflects a similar mentality, a similar stage of development. When people are confronted with similar conditions, this will automatically lead to a similar kind of thinking, a similar creativity." he said.

Now the archaeologists want to discover new and even older Paleolithic ("old stone age") artwork.

"There must be older art in Egypt, if we can find it. I think open-air sites like Qurta will be found all over North Africa." said Huyge.