Ennedi rock art

Why this is extraordinary

The Ennedi is a sandstone plateau in north-east Chad, cut into canyons and outlier hills, wetter than the desert around it. Rain still comes in summer. Wadis run. Pools called gueltas hold some of the crocodiles west of the Nile. People hunted, fished, gathered, and, from the sixth millennium BCE, kept livestock here. The nomination prepared for the World Heritage listing says thousands of images, from about 5000 BC onward, cover the caves and canyon walls, one of the large rock-art collections of the Sahara. An inventory that the same document calls unfinished had already listed 650 decorated sites and at least 10,000 motifs across the 30,000 square kilometres of the plateau. The pin is Manda Guéli, a painted cave whose photograph records its own position, 16.855 north, 21.807 east. It is one shelter, not the whole massif.

The order of the pictures is the order of the animals, and the animals are a climate diary. An archaic band, about 7000 to 6000 years before present in the nomination’s periods, is wild game. A bovid band, about 5000 to 2000 years before present, is domestic cattle, huts, and people. A camel band runs from about 2000 years before present toward the present day. Unlike other Saharan districts, including the sequence at Tassili n’Ajjer, horses and camels here seem to arrive in the same broad period, horses having come first elsewhere. The flying gallop, legs thrown clear of the ground, is one of the local ways of drawing a mount. The photograph’s own caption says camels at Manda Guéli were painted over earlier cattle, which is the superposition you would want if drying replaced herds with caravans. Cattle need grass. Camels are a technology for a thinner land. The Green Sahara, the wetter Holocene, is the setting. It was never a European meadow. Even at its kindest this plateau was a place you crossed with animals, not a city you stayed in for centuries, except at the water.

The catch is that a camel dates a picture only if nobody painted a camel later on an old wall, and only if the animal is identified right. Superposition helps. A camel over a cow is later than that cow. It does not say how much later, and it does not date the cow. Pigment dates, carbon in the binder or a crust over the paint, are not the clock in the sources used here. The nomination is frank that most walls were painted when herding was underway, after the sixth millennium BCE, and that some human figures now out of reach because the floor has eroded are probably older. “Probably” is the word. Style is a sequence. It is not a year.

No source used here identifies a constellation, a solstice, or a horizon mark in the Ennedi paintings. Dancers, musicians, and scenes of ordinary work are described. They are people on the ground. A sky reading of Saharan art exists for other massifs and is not, in these documents, carried over to this one. The climate is the sky’s only certain role. Rainfall is what made cattle possible, and the loss of it is what the camel pictures are asked to witness.

The end of the tradition is late. The British Museum’s note on Chadian rock art says painting in the Ennedi seems to have lasted at least until the seventeenth century, longer than in many other Saharan districts. A wall that was still being marked in recent centuries is a poor place to treat every animal as Ice Age or early Holocene. The archaic hunters and the seventeenth-century riders are the two ends. The photograph collapses them into one glance, which is what a reused wall does.