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<< Our Photo Pages >> Rock Art near Qurta - Rock Art in Egypt in Lower Egypt (North)

Submitted by Andy B on Thursday, 12 July 2012  Page Views: 11145

Rock ArtSite Name: Rock Art near Qurta
Country: Egypt
NOTE: This site is 181.393 km away from the location you searched for.

Region: Lower Egypt (North) Type: Rock Art
Nearest Town: Edfu  Nearest Village: Qurta
Latitude: 24.822890N  Longitude: 32.917790E
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
5 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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Rock Art near Qurta
Rock Art near Qurta submitted by Andy B : A panel with eight bovids at Qurta I (QI.2.1). (The chalking was not done by the Belgian mission.) Image copyright the Belgian project team, used with permission (Vote or comment on this photo)
An interdisciplinary team of Belgian scientists cooperating with Yale University has discovered the oldest petroglyphs in Egypt and for that matter the earliest rock art known so far in the whole of North Africa.

By dating the wind-blown sediment that covers the rock art using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), the team has been able to demonstrate that the petroglyphs are at least 15 000 years old.

The rock art sites are situated near the modern village of Qurta, on the east bank of the Nile, about 40km south of the Upper-Egyptian town of Edfu. First seen by Canadian archaeologists in the early 1960s, they were subsequently completely forgotten and relocated by the Belgian mission in 2005. The rediscovery was announced in the Project Gallery of Antiquity in 2007:

The rock art at Qurta is essentially characterised by hammered and incised naturalistic-style images of aurochs and other wild animals. On the basis of their intrinsic characteristics (subject matter, technique and style), their patination and degree of weathering, as well as the archaeological and geomorphological context, these petroglyphs have been attributed to the Late Pleistocene, specifically to the Late Palaeolithic Period (roughly 23 000 to 11 000 years ago). This interpretation has met with little criticism from the archaeological community, but proof in the form of indirect or direct science-based dating evidence has hitherto been lacking.

In 2008, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, directed by Dr Dirk Huyge of the Royal Museums
of Art and History in Brussels (Belgium), discovered partly buried rock art panels at one of the Qurta sites. The deposits covering the rock art, in part composed of wind-blown sediments, were dated at the Laboratory of Mineralogy and Petrology (Luminescence Research Group) of Ghent University (Belgium) using a method called optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating. OSL dating can determine the time that has elapsed since the buried sediment grains were last exposed to sunlight. Using the constituent mineral grains of the sediment itself, it offers a direct means for establishing the time of sediment deposition and accumulation.

This resulted in a minimum age of about 15 000 calendar years, providing the first solid evidence for the Pleistocene age of the rock art at Qurta and making it the oldest graphic activity ever recorded in Egypt and the whole of North Africa. The Qurta rock art is therefore more or less contemporaneous with European art from the last Ice Age, as known from such world-famous sites as the Lascaux and Altamira caves.

The discovery of sophisticated ‘Ice Age’ rock art in North Africa is certainly new, but not entirely unexpected as, elsewhere on the African landmass, finds of even older art have been known for some time. Already in 1969, stone plaquettes with painted animal motifs, dated to about 26 000 years ago, were uncovered in a cave in Namibia. More recently, in 1999 and 2000, complex geometric engravings on ochre pieces were brought to light in a South-African coastal site that date back to no less than 75 000 to 100 000 years. But how can it be explained that the rock art of Qurta, executed in Egypt over about 15 000 years ago, is stylistically so similar to what we discern in Ice Age Europe at about the same time?

Can one speak of direct influence or cultural exchange over such a long distance? It is not as improbable as it seems. Finds of Pleistocene rock art in southern Italy and Sicily bear analogies to the Egyptian rock art. In northern Libya, near the coast, a cave site is known with similar naturalistic images of aurochs. Considering the fact that the level of the Mediterranean Sea at the time of the last Ice Age was at least 100m lower than it is today, it cannot be excluded that Palaeolithic people established an intercontinental exchange of iconographic and symbolic concepts. These are new challenges to archaeological thought.

Source: Antiquity - the dating results will be published in the December issue (Vol 85 Issue 330, pp. 1184–1193).


Note: Comparisons of European paleolithic art in the Nile Valley, a new paper by Emmanuel Guy
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Rock Art near Qurta
Rock Art near Qurta submitted by Andy B : A panel with four bovids at Qurta II (QII.4.2). (The chalking was not done by the Belgian mission.) Image copyright the Belgian project team, used with permission (Vote or comment on this photo)

Rock Art near Qurta
Rock Art near Qurta submitted by Andy B : Three incised stylised human figures with pronounced buttocks (superimposed by the belly-line of a large bovid) at Qurta II (QII.3.1). Image copyright the Belgian project team, used with permission (Vote or comment on this photo)

Rock Art near Qurta
Rock Art near Qurta submitted by Andy B : Fig 1 from Emmanual Guy's paper: Panel 1, aurochs, bird and anthropomorph, total length: 4m, (Qurta 1, based on Huyge et al.). (Vote or comment on this photo)

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"Rock Art near Qurta" | Login/Create an Account | 4 News and Comments
  
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Comparisons of European paleolithic art in the Nile Valley by Andy B on Thursday, 12 July 2012
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Emmanuel Guy writes: In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a Belgian scientific team discovered (or more precisely rediscovered) a group of about 180 rock engravings near the village of Qurta some 30 kilometers to the south of the city of Edfu in the Nile Valley. These engravings are located near the limestone cliffs on the east bank, 3.5 km from the Nile.

Similar engravings exist in El-Hosh, about ten kilometers to the north on the opposite side of the river. Others have subsequently been found in Wadi Abu Subeira, approximately fifty kilometers south of Qurta. The Qurta engravings represent animals (aurochs, hippopotamus, gazelles, fish, birds, etc.) and a few anthropomorphs.

The arrangement of the animals – superimposed, facing and crossing in front of one another, and the absence of explicit narration and context (landscape, plants, stars, ground line) all suggest the Paleolithic world.

This impression is strengthened by the discovery – very nearby – of stone tools associated with the local Ballanian-Silsilian culture, dating from between 16,000 BP and 15,000 BP (Huyge, 2008). The Paleolithic origin of the Qurta engravings was confirmed in 2011 by the dating of sediments that covered a carved panel, which had been buried. These indicate that the panel was covered at least 15,000 years ago. Given the patina of the incised lines, the age of the engravings is estimated at between 19,000 BP and 17,000 BP (Huyge et al., 2011).

The dating of Qurta as contemporary with European Paleolithic art (between 35,000 BP and 10,000 BP) makes its close formal and thematic resemblance all the more perplexing. How could these engravings, separated by several thousand kilometers from the southwestern region of Western Europe and across the Mediterranean Sea, have such close affinities with the contemporary art of European hunter-gatherers?

Read more, with diagrams at paleoesthetique.com or download the PDF version of Guy's paper.

http://www.paleoesthetique.com/eng/the-european-palaeolithic-art-of-the-nile-valley/

http://www.paleoesthetique.com/eng/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Qurta-E.GUYEng.pdf
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    Re: Comparisons of European paleolithic art in the Nile Valley by Andy B on Thursday, 12 July 2012
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    Emmanuel is the author of Préhistoire du sentiment artistique - L’invention du style il y a 20 000 ans
    Published by Les presses du réel – domaine Fabula
    French edition, 17×24 cm (softcover)
    196 pages (200 ill coul.)
    25 €
    ISBN : 978-2-84066-369-0

    Based on the analysis of hundreds of representations dated around 20 000 years, the book shows the existence of a unified pictorial tradition throughout Europe. A long distance diffusion suggesting that Palaeolithic painters have received an art education. The book also shows how this artistic school has evolved over the millennia. A transformation of the perception that reveals the existence, in prehistoric times, of an « artistic » research which we thought to belong only to later periods of art history.

    http://www.lespressesdureel.com/EN/ouvrage.php?id=1731
    [ Reply to This ]

Long-forgotten Canadian find shakes up understanding of ancient humans by bat400 on Tuesday, 29 November 2011
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A Canadian archeologist is being credited — nearly 50 years after the fact — with discovering a prehistoric petroglyph site in southern Egypt that is now being described as a "Lascaux-on-the-Nile" because of its similarity in age and style to France's world-famous, cave-wall gallery of Stone Age cattle, deer and horses.

The inscribed Egyptian images of extinct wild oxen, hippopotami, fish, gazelle and other animals — now firmly dated to a time in the late Pleistocene era at least 15,000 years ago — are being hailed as the oldest rock art in North Africa and as a pivotal discovery in the evolution of artistic behaviour by ancient humans.

It has taken nearly a half-century for experts to obtain a reliable age for the animal figures, which number close to 200 and are found etched into a sandstone cliff high above the banks of the Nile River at Qurta, about 600 kilometres southeast of Cairo.

That's where the young Canadian scientist Philip Smith — a University of Toronto archeologist from Fortune, N.L. — was working in 1962 and 1963 as part of a federally sponsored series of "rescue" digs aimed at preserving traces of ancient Egyptian settlements before their potential destruction from the building of the Aswan Dam.

Smith, who went on to a distinguished 40-year career at the University of Montreal, was probing an archeological site from thousands of years before the Egyptian pyramids were built when he "accidentally" discovered the carvings at Qurta.

Now 84 and long retired from archeological field work, Smith told Postmedia News on Thursday that he remembers scrambling up the cliffs to take a photograph of a dig site on the plain below when he suddenly spied scores of animals carved into the rocks.

"They were everywhere on the rock," Smith said. "But we weren't able to date it directly. At that time there was no way of dating art on the cliffs themselves."

He recalls, though, that he "speculated that it was certainly pre-pharaohnic — before the pharaohs — and probably pre-neolithic, before the introduction of agriculture. But, of course, I wasn't able to go much further back than that."

A lengthy article about the work of the Canadian Prehistoric Expedition in Egypt appeared in a 1965 issue of the Canadian Geographical Journal, forerunner of today's Canadian Geographic. Descriptions and pictures of the prehistoric rock art at Qurta were published at the time, but Smith was never able to pin down a solid date for when the carvings were made.

Years passed. Then decades. No further study of the Qurta animal engravings was carried out, and even knowledge of their whereabouts was lost to a younger generation of scientists.

Then, about five years ago, Belgian archeologists working on paleolithic sites in Egypt found evidence of prehistoric rock art at a different site and began a broader study that turned up the Canadian research at Qurta from the early 1960s.

That led to the latest research on the Qurta carvings, to be published in the December edition of the journal Antiquity by a team of scientists from Belgium and the U.S.
Their study pegs the creation of the artwork at between 15,000 and 19,000 years ago using optically stimulated luminescence. That places the Egyptian carvings in roughly the same timeframe as the famous cave paintings of animals at Lascaux and other Ice Age sites in Europe.

Smith, whose other work at ancient aboriginal digs in the U.S. and at paleolithic sites in Spain and France continues to generate interest among today's archeologists, said he's equally pleased his Egyptian find is still yielding new insights today.

"It is," he said, "very gratifying."

Thanks to coldrum for the link. Read more: http://www.canada.com.
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Re: Rock Art near Qurta by Andy B on Saturday, 19 November 2011
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Previous news reports about these finds:

Egypt's rock drawings 15000 yrs old
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=2146413176

"Lascaux on the Nile"
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=2146413094

Antiquity Project Gallery
http://www.antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/huyge313/

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