Wadi Sura II

Why this is extraordinary

Wadi Sura II is a rock shelter, not a closed cave, at the southwestern foot of the Gilf Kebir, in the Western Desert of Egypt. The other Egyptian rooms are on the Egypt page. The overhang is about 20 metres across and about 8 metres deep, open to the day, and the painted panel rises about 4 metres on nearly 100 square metres of wall. It was found in 2002. About 10 kilometres to the east, the shelter called the Cave of Swimmers had been found in 1933 by László Almásy. The name Wadi Sura is the valley of pictures. The 2002 wall holds more than 8,000 figures, people and animals and hybrid creatures, laid over one another until the order of painting can be read where one body covers another. The catalogue called it the Cave of Beasts for a few dozen creatures drawn without heads.

Among the earliest paintings is a crowd of stencils, hands and also arms, feet, disks and sticks. Counts of the hands have moved. One said about 120, another about 400, and the count made for a 2016 study says about 900. Thirteen of them are tiny. Eleven could be measured. From the base of the palm to the end of the middle finger they average 45.3 millimetres, and one table in the same study prints 45.33. The fingers are longer than the palm and they thin to a point. The tiny ones sit about 1.8 metres above the floor as it was when the shelter was found, five of them in a line like a frieze, and one pair is nested inside a pair of larger human hands. They are under 1.5 percent of the stencils.

They were first read as babies' hands. The 2016 study set the eleven measurable stencils against 36 hands of babies born at term and 25 hands of babies born early. Term newborns averaged 62.01 millimetres. On four of eight measurements, the chance that the tiny stencils and the term babies share an average was under 0.01 percent. The early babies failed in the same way on four criteria, even where a couple of single measurements did not rule a shared population out. Proportions differ as well. A human thumb sits off to the side, where it can meet the fingers, and on these stencils the thumb lines up with the other digits. To see whether a stencil simply warps a hand, the study compared 30 large stencils from this wall with 30 living adult hands. The average deformation stayed within about 5.5 percent, too small to turn a baby hand into these shapes. A young monkey's hand matches the length and the long fingers, and it was set aside because the thumb still opposes and the tips are not this pointed. A wooden or clay cut-out is a weaker fit. The fingers shift a little from stencil to stencil, and no retouch shows, which reads as a jointed foot rather than one carved stamp. The closest match in the paper is the forefoot of a desert monitor, Varanus griseus. One adult male specimen matched six of the seven measurements. A young crocodile is not ruled out, and that comparison was still unfinished when the paper was published. The catch is local. The same paper says neither animal had yet been identified in the Gilf Kebir, in the pictures or in the bones. A foot can be carried in. A species missing from the rest of the evidence is a comparison, not a capture.

The small horizontal bodies are the swimmers. Almásy gave the 1933 shelter that name because the figures look as if they are in water, and a vanished lake is part of the ground in front of the later shelter too. Wadi Sura II stands over a playa, a dry lake floor of stacked sediments. The 2002 wall has its own row of the same horizontal figures. A body painted level with the ground can be a swimmer, a person floating, a spirit, or a standing person the wall has laid on its side. That menu is already open for the round-head figures at Tassili n'Ajjer and in the Tadrart Acacus. No source used here names a star, a solstice, or an azimuth for either Wadi Sura shelter. The headless beasts are the other strange body. A few dozen hybrid creatures are drawn without heads, and some of them are surrounded by small humans who touch them. A missing head can be a being, a carcass, or a head painted in a pigment that has since gone. In the beasts photograph on this page the large dark animals still have heads, so that frame is the crowd and the animals, not a labelled headless one.

No pigment from this wall has been dated. The hand stencils belong to the earlier layers in the pile, and a relative chronology puts that phase, tentatively, in the second half of the seventh millennium BC and in the sixth, around 6000 BC. The wider project places the prevailing pictures with hunter-gatherers of the Gilf B phase, about 6500 to 4400 cal BC, and most of the neighbourhood pottery is that phase. Ostrich, giraffe and gazelle on the wall match a hunting menu. Cattle pictures belong with a later pastoral phase, after about 4400 BC, and they are a different subject. The climate is the Green Sahara, and it is not one date for the whole desert. The Sphinx water room lines the gauges up. Off Mauritania a dust core runs from about 14,800 to 5,500 years before 1950. In the eastern Sahara, between about 16 and 24 degrees north, lakes begin near 8500 BC and the stable humid run lasts until about 5300 BC, with refuge country into about 3500 BC. The Gilf Kebir is near 23.65 degrees north, at the north edge of that band. A window of 6500 to 4400 BC sits in the later wet centuries and runs past 5300, which fits a plateau that kept water after the open desert had started to dry. Those years belong to the camps and the pots. The paintings inherit them.

Hands elsewhere on this map: Cueva de las Manos, El Castillo, Cosquer, Gargas, Pech Merle, Maros, Lubang Jeriji Saléh, and Monte Alegre. What this changes: if the tiny stencils are a monitor's forefoot, this shelter has a pentadactyl animal stencil, thirteen times, sometimes set inside a human hand, and the baby story was a trick of scale. If they are infants after all, the hospital sample is what failed, and people here did stencil babies. The swimmers need the wet phase to be a lake, or they need a meaning that does not use water. The paint still has no clock of its own.