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<< Other Photo Pages >> Farafra Oasis - Rock Art in Egypt in Upper Egypt (South)

Submitted by bat400 on Wednesday, 11 June 2014  Page Views: 3336

Rock ArtSite Name: Farafra Oasis Alternative Name: Wadi El Obeiyid Cave, Boat Arch
Country: Egypt Region: Upper Egypt (South) Type: Rock Art
 Nearest Village: Oasr Farafra
Latitude: 27.310000N  Longitude: 27.610000E
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
no data Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
no data Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
3
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Farafra Oasis
Farafra Oasis submitted by Creative Commons : Landscape of the Farafra depression, an area of seasonal lakes and streams (12000 to 6000 BP) "The Saharan White Desert, near Farafra, western Egypt. Photographedy by Omar Kamel September 24 2006 Creative Commons. Attribution 2.5 Generic (CC BY 2.5)" (Vote or comment on this photo)
Rock Art in Upper Egypt (South.) Several rock art sites and the footprint of a village of stone slab huts dating to a main occupation of 6900 bp. Located in the "White Desert" of erroded ancient lake bed deposits. The occupation of this area dates to the Holocene 'green' Sahara when rainfall created ephemeral lakes. The only remains of this wet footprint is the Farafra Oasis.

The rock art sites include those in the Wadi El Obeiyid cave and the recently discovered 'Boat Arch.'
A cave above Wadi El Obeiyid has rock art of animals, a lion "footprint motif," and tracings of human handprints. Charcoal indicated occupation of the cave to 7000 BP, but the rock art itself is difficult to date.
Rock art in the Boat Arch includes figures of boats, a giraffe and hand prints.

Researcher Fekri Hassan believes the art co-incides with the geologic onset of hyper arid climate in the Sahara, leading to the concentration of population to the Nile Valley.
Note: The location is general and does not refer to any one rock art site.

Note: Tourist's find shows Africa 'influenced' ancient Egyptian art. See comment.
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"Farafra Oasis" | Login/Create an Account | 2 News and Comments
  
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Discovering the artists of the Eastern Sahara by bat400 on Tuesday, 17 June 2014
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The identification of rock art found in Farafra as Neolithic adds substance to the argument that Egypt drew on cultural influences from Africa as well as the Near East. At a talk given on 19 May, 2014, archaeologist Dr Giulio Lucarini discussed his fieldwork in the Egyptian Western Desert and show images of newly-identified Neolithic drawings to a public audience for the first time.

Recently discovered rock art on the walls of a cave in the Egyptian Western Desert has been provisionally dated by a Cambridge University archaeologist as between 6,000 and 7,000 years old, created at least 1,000 years before the building of the pyramids. The drawings add weight to the argument that Egyptian culture drew on cultural influences from Africa and not only from the Near East. Spotted by a tourist to Wadi el Obeiyid, north of Farafra Oasis, drawings of a giraffe, a bovid (cow-like mammal) and two boats, plus the outline of a human hand, were examined last month by Dr Giulio Lucarini who co-leads a team of archaeologists looking at the pathways, and timings, by which domestic animals and plants from the Levant arrived in Egypt.

The engravings are thought to have been discovered in 2010. The onset of revolution in Egypt meant that they were not investigated for some time.

Based at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University, Lucarini is an expert in the transition from foraging to farming in North Africa. With Professor Barbara Barich of ISMEO in Rome, he is co-director of a project (the Archaeological Mission in the Farafra Oasis) that has been studying the archaeology of this region of the Eastern Sahara since the late 1980s.

Lucarini will highlighted these artworks in a public talk about his work as part of the Pint of Science series taking place in pubs in eight cities across the UK.

The site of the newly-identified images – which are engraved into the white chalk surface – has been dubbed the Boats Arch, a reference the shape of the shallow cave.The location is 600 km southwest of Cairo and 50 km into the desert from the nearest paved road at Farafra – a journey across a desert track surrounded by beautiful sand dunes. Boats Arch is about 3 km from another site – known as Wadi el Obeiyid Cave - where examples of rock art were first examined by Barich in 1995.

The art in this first cave features representations of engraved boats and animals as well as painted hand stencils. "What's really exciting is that these drawings are among the earliest artistic evidence of the people who lived in the Farafra and possibly in the whole Eastern Sahara," said Lucarini. Rock art is notoriously tricky to date. "The marked similarity in style seen in the bovid, which is probably an oryx, and giraffe in the Boats Arch and the animals in Wadi Obeiyid Cave, dated to around 6000/5500 BC, suggests a similar period for the two sites. In style the boat images correlate to those found on decorated pots from Predynastic sites along the Nile Valley, dated around 3500 BC. But we can presume from the regrowth of calcite crystals along their engravings, possible under humid conditions, that they could be even older," said Lucarini. Farafra's rock art sites are 600 km from the Red Sea, 400 km from the Mediterranean and 300 km from the Nile.

"The location is another important for another aspect of the find," said Lucarini. "Representations of boats in the Egyptian Western Desert are rare in comparison to those in the Eastern Desert, a region which connects the Nile valley with the Red Sea. They could have been created by people who were moving across very long distances and could have visited the sea or the Nile Valley. In the sites we investigated we did not find any faunal remains belonging to giraffe so, like the images of boats, the drawing of the giraffe may represent not a local element but something seen somewhere else and considered exotic."

The Archaeological Mission in the Farafra Oasis is building a picture of the transition from foraging societies

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Tourist's find shows Africa 'influenced' ancient Egyptian art by bat400 on Tuesday, 10 June 2014
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Rock drawings spotted by a tourist reveal ancient Egyptian art "drew upon cultural influences from Africa", archaeologists have claimed.

The Neolithic pictures are 1,000 years older than the pyramids and were discovered in a cave in eastern Sahara.

An archaeologist from Cambridge University examined the finds in April.
Dr Giulio Lucarini said previously archaeologists saw Africa as "somehow lagging behind Europe and the near East" in influence on Egyptian art.

Boat, Wadi el Obeiyid in the Farafra Oasis Dr Lucarini said the boat is similar in style to pictures found on pots in the Nile Valley from 3,500 BC but it could be "even older"

He added: "Our work shows that people living in the Eastern Sahara had a significant and developed culture, which fed into the development of the Pharaonic civilization and beyond."

The archaeologists believe the finds "add substance" to the academic belief that Egyptian art "drew on cultural influences from Africa".

The drawings of a giraffe, a cow-like mammal, two boats and a human hand were examined by Dr Lucarini, who is co-director of the Archaeological Mission in the Farafra Oasis in April.

The project has been studying the archaeology of this region of the eastern Sahara, which is 372 miles (600 km) south west of Cairo, since the late 1980s.

The shallow cave, which the team has called Boats Arch, is three miles (4.8 km) from another site called Wadi el Obeiyid Cave where other examples of rock art were discovered in 1995.

Dr Lucarini said that despite rock art being "notoriously" tricky to date, the marked similarity in style seen in the animal drawings discovered at both sites suggests a similar period of around 6,000 to 5,500 BC.

Thanks to coldrum for this news link: For more, see http://www.bbc.co.uk.
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