Abstract
ROCK-PAINTINGS IN THE LIBYAN DESERT.—In Antiquity for September, Mr. D. Newbold describes a number of rock-paintings not previously seen by Europeans from various localities in the Libyan Desert. These were visited in the course of two expeditions in 1923 and 1927. Stone implements and pottery were also collected. The object of the expeditions was to examine archæological evidence with the view of the elucidation of the ethnological history of the area, to which there are references going back so far as the eighteenth dynasty in the Egyptian monuments. The rock pictures are here classified into four groups: (a) Bushman—late palæolithic or early neolithic; (b) Early Libyan—early neolithic, predynastic, and Old Empire; (c) Middle Libyan—Middle and Late Empire down to the introduction of the camel into the Sudan, that is, the early Meroitic period; and (d) Roman, medieval and modern. For (b) and (c) there are references to Libyans in the Egyptian monuments; for the latter half of (c) the evidence of Greek and Roman geographers and a few vague references in native ‘Histories ’; and for (d) the same authorities and Arabian geographers. In the areas visited, of which the pictures are here described, Owenat shows examples ranging from the earliest to the third period, Nukheila, Zolat el Hammad, and Um Tasawir examples from the second and third, while those at Qalaat el Wish and Abu Sofian are of the last modern period. The Kordofan pictures are difficult to date.
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Research Items. Nature 122, 707–709 (1928). https://doi.org/10.1038/122707a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/122707a0