Tag: Gilf Kebir

Prehistoric Gilf Kebir Cave Paintings to Unlock Secrets of Ancient Egypt

Prehistoric cave painters in the Sahara Desert gave rise to ancient Egyptian civilisation, according to a German archaeological team. The paintings in a caves in Gilf Kebir, a vast sandstone plateau near the Egyptian-Libyan border, may be over 400 miles from the River Nile. But the team claims it was once a thriving community which later spread east to create Egypt’s famous cities and landmarks.

The plateau, a Martian landscape the size of Switzerland, is home to two famous caves, the ‘Cave of the Swimmers’ and the ‘Cave of the Beasts’ – Watch our amazing video of the caves and their paintings here. The former was discovered by Hungarian explorer Lszl Almsy and immortalised in the novel and Academy Award-winning movie The English Patient. But it is the latter which the team believe could unlock the secrets of how ancient Egypt began.

Rudolf Kuper, of Kln’s Heinrich Barth Institute, believes the Cave of the Beasts’ detail dates it back around 8,000 years. He claims its artists’ descendents would eventually emigrate to the Nile Valley to create pharaonic Egypt. “It is the most amazing cave … in North Africa and Egypt,” German expert Karin Kindermann tells AP. “You take a piece of the puzzle and see where it could fit. This is an important piece.”

“You take a piece of the puzzle and see where it could fit. This is an important piece.”

The Eastern Sahara is the world’s largest warm dry desert. Modern Egyptians refer to it as the ‘Great Barrier’, known further afield as the Great Sand Sea. Yet at around 8,500 BC the region enjoyed seasonal rainfall and became a fertile savannah. By contrast the Nile Valley was an inhospitable swampland. Settlements sprang up across Gilf Kebir, but the rainfall slowly subsided. By 5,300 BC it has stopped altogether, and by 3,500 BC the settlements had disappeared completely. Ancient Egypt would appear along the now-bountiful Nile just a couple of hundred years later.

“After 3 – 4,000 years of savanna life environment in the Sahara, the desert returned and people were forced to move eastwards to the Nile Valley, contributing to the foundation of Egyptian civilisation, and southwards to the African continent,” says Kuper. “It was a movement, I think, step-by-step, because the desert didn’t rush in. The rains would withdraw, then return, and so on. But step by step it became more dry, and people moved toward the Nile Valley or toward the south.”

HD Video: Prehistoric Paintings in the Gilf Kebir

Read the transcript of this video here

Kuper and his team are conducting tests on the geological, botanical and archaeological evidence at the cave, and will compare it to other sites in the region. They have already discovered more drawings in the cave, which extend up to 80cm below the sand. “It seems that the paintings of the Cave of the Beasts pre-date the introduction of domesticated animals,” Kuper told AP. “That means they predate 6000 BC. That is what we dare to say.”

The Eastern Sahara has been home to some of archaeology’s strangest stories in recent years, including the theory that a necklace belonging to Tutankhamun came from outer space. A pair of Italian brothers also claimed to have discovered a lost Persian army who made a fateful detour through the area, yet the discovery has come under intense scrutiny. Kuper claims his team’s work is further enhancing the area’s profile as a key prehistoric site. “Now we have increasing evidence how rich the prehistoric culture in the Eastern Sahara was,” he says.

Rock Art is ‘Ancient Doodling’, says Expert

Kurangun panels view

A leading language expert claims man’s first forays into the art world may be nothing more than ‘ancient doodles’. Dr Ekkehart Malotki, a professor at Northern Arizona University, told an audience at Deer Valley Rock Art Centre on Saturday the true meanings behind the world’s earliest images etched onto rocks will remain a mystery forever – and that they may have been spurred by nothing more than an inane desire to create. Malotki has laid out his theory in a book entitled ‘The Rock Art of Arizona: Art for Life’s Sake’. “The act of making the image was more important to them than the final result,” he says.

The oldest-known rock art is a 300,000-year-old panel of chipped ‘cupules’ in India. Malotki argues that subsequent famous cave paintings, such as that of Bhimbetka in India and France’s Lascaux caves, evolved from these early ‘doodles’: “They are the same doodles children draw in school and adults draw while talking on the telephone,” he says. Malotki believes humans are simply ‘hardwired’ to create art. Yet the precise reason for each artwork will be lost forever, having died with the people who created them.

“They are the same doodles children draw in school and adults draw while talking on the telephone.”

Malotki has teamed up with eminent psychologist Ellen Dissanayake to surmise that humans have a core repertoire of images they are born with. His book lists 15 ‘human universals’, called phosphenes, found all over the world, to support this view. The universals include dots (cupules), spirals, lines, circles and boxes, and are found as far apart as the Sahara (such as those at Gilf Kebirwatch a great archaeovideo here) and the Americas. Philip DiSilvestro, a prominent collector of rock art, agrees with the theory “I like the expression of spirituality and the fact we are ‘hardwired’ to create,” he says.

Lions of the stone age cave of "Chauvet"

Yet there are many who disagree with Malotki and Dissanayake’s conclusions. They feel that rather than being hardwired with images and symbols, human minds are locked in a state of ‘pareidolia’ – a tendency to see familiarity in randomness. For example, seeing faces in clouds.

Nancy Bodmer, a volunteer at the rock art centre, points to her own experiences. “I’m originally from the Northeast (of America), and I was looking at this image in the Agua Fria National Monument and all I could see was a sailboat with a broken mast,” she says. “I was seeing a pre-set image I had in my mind.”

Are we all hardwired to doodle, as Dr Malotki claims? We’ve made our own list of the world’s top ten cave paintings (see here): Do you agree? Let us know right here, either via the , our contacts page or by emailing me direct. We want your opinions – have your say at Heritage Key!

Cambyses the Persian’s Lost Army found in Egyptian Desert

A pair of Italian brothers believe they have at last discovered the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II in the Egyptian desert, some 2,500 years after they are said to have been swallowed up by a vicious sandstorm. The 50,000-strong army was engulfed as it crossed the Great Sand Sea towards Siwa Oasis, to destroy the oracle at the Temple of Amun. Archaeologists have searched for the legendary lost men for centuries – yet Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni claim that hundreds of human bones and bronze weapons just outside the oasis are the remains of Cambyses’ fateful crew.

Greek historian Herodotus first told the tale of the lost army, sent by Cambyses, son of Cyrus the Great, from Thebes to Siwa to threaten the oracle, after its priests denied his claim to the Egyptian throne in 525 BC. The army trapsed the desert for seven days until it reached an oasis, which many believe to have been El-Kharga, 120 miles west of the Nile.

“In this desolate wilderness we have found the precise location where the tragedy occurred.”

Yet on pressing forward to Siwa the men were hit by a cataclysmic sandstorm and never seen again. Just as the Nazis perished in the foul winters of Russia during World War II, Cambyses soldiers would be fatally thwarted by the tempestuous weather of the arid Egyptian wilderness. “A wind arose from the south, strong and deadly, bringing with it vast columns of whirling sand,” writes Herodotus, “which entirely covered up the troops and caused them wholly to disappear.”

Due to a lack of archaeological evidence, Herodotus’ tale has been written off by many as a myth. Yet the Castiglioni brothers’ recent discovery may prove it happen after all. The duo made their first breakthrough in 1996 just outside Siwa, where they spotted a huge rock 35m long, 1.8m high and 3m deep. “Its size and shape made it the perfect refuge in a sandstorm,” says Alfredo Castiglioni.

Map to show the two routes taken to follow the tracks of the Persian Army.

His Eastern Desert Research Center team excavated a bronze dagger and many arrow heads – proof of Cambyses doomed campaign? “We are talking of small items, but they are extremely important as they are the first Achaemenid objects, thus dating to Cambyses’ time,” adds Castiglioni, “which have emerged from the desert sands in a location quite close to Siwa.”

Moving a quarter of a mile south, the team found an earring, necklace links and a silver bracelet dating to Cambyses’ Achaemenid Dynasty. The Castiglioni brothers spent the next few years mapping possible routes through the desert and painstakingly researching each one. Now the pair feels Cambyses’ army didn’t in fact pass through El Kharga at all – instead chosing a longer route heading east from Thebes to Gilf Kebir, then due north towards Siwa. Their theory was coming together when they found artificial water sources and hundreds of pots dating back 2,500 years along the route.

The show-stopping moment for the Castiglionis would come in 2002, however, when at the end of their last expedition, they explored Bedouin tales of hundreds of bones rising from the desert in certain wind conditions. It would turn out to be much more than an old wives’ tale – a mass grave contained the bones, alongside Persian arrow heads and a horse bit. Sadly they had not been the first there: “We learned that the remains had been exposed by tomb robbers and that a beautiful sword which was found among the bones was sold to American tourists,” says Castiglioni.

The brothers handed in their findings to the Egyptian authorities, from whom they haven’t heard since. Yet they are convinced Cambyses’ men dispersed during the storm and that their bodies are still somewhere in the area. “In the desolate wilderness of the desert, we have found the most precise location where the tragedy occurred,” says Dario Del Bufalo, a Lecce University official who helped the brothers. Their findings will be presented in a Discovery documentary, out soon. The brothers had their first taste of archaeological fame two decades ago when they uncovered the ancient Egyptian ‘Golden City’ of Berenice Panchrysos.

Since this post was published, doubts have been raised as to whether the Castiglioni brothers actually did locate the city of Berenice Panchrysos. For a full SCA statement via Egyptology News, read the .

ArchaeoVideo: Prehistoric Paintings, The Swimmers and The Beast in Gilf Kebir

Its hard to imagine that anyone could have once lived on the Gilf Kebir, an arid, remote, desolate sandstone plateau the size of Switzerland, located in the far southwest of Egypt. Yet, as we discover in an exclusive new Heritage Key video report by Nico Piazza, around 10,000 years ago water, and with it vegetation and animal and human life, once ran through the barren land Egyptians today call the Great Barrier.

This long-forgotten prehistoric civilization that once called Gilf Kebir home left their mark in the form of cave paintings and other forms of rock art, in locations such as the spectacular Cave of Swimmers. Located in the 1930s by Hungarian Count and explorer Lszl Almsy (who was later fictionalised as the core character in Michael Ondaatjes book The English Patient, which was adapted into a multi-Academy Award-winning movie) it features images of scores of tiny people swimming elegantly across the walls.

The big question everyones asking is: what the heck are these animals?

Even they pale in comparison to the scenes depicted in the Foggini-Mestekawi Cave, however, discovered much more recently in 2003 by members of a party led by desert tours company Zarzora Expeditions. It bears silhouettes of dozens of hands (not dissimilar to Cueva de la Manos in Argentina) as well as representations of hunting, fishing, games, parents holding their childrens hands even, in some cases, what looks a bit like people taking dancing lessons.

Animals feature heavily too gazelles, giraffes, dogs and lions. Most strange and fascinating of all is the beast a weird, headless creature, with a body like a bull or elephant and the legs of a man. It features frequently, and often appears to be feasting on humans. The big question everyones asking, ponders tour guide Mahmoud Nour El Din in the video, is: what the heck are these animals?

ArchaeoVideo: Prehistoric Paintings in the Gilf Kebir

(What’s said in this short docu? If in doubt, check out the video’s transcription here,
or press the arrow in the right below corner of the player, chose ‘CC’ – close captions – and turn the subtitles on!)

They were probably imagined by the prehistoric Egyptian artists, and somehow represent their understanding of the transition from life to death. Hybrid creatures such as the god of the desert and chaos Set were a common element in the belief system of later Egyptian civilizations, many of whom worshipped animal cults. As Foggini-Mestekawi Cave proves, the germ of the idea of the afterlife and mans ability to communicate with it clearly began to gestate very early in the minds of Egyptians, in a long-forgotten corner of the cradle of civilization.

Sandro Vannini and the Lost Tombs of ThebesFascinated by ‘hidden heritage’ locations in Ancient Egypt?

Then make sure to watch this video, where Sandro Vannini and Nico Piazza take you on a journey exploring the Lost Tombs of the Theban necropolis.

Dr Janice Kamrin and Dr. Zahi Hawass supply us with more information on the over 800 tombs that can be found in the necropolis.

Each one of them is unique and offers us a glimpse into what life on earth must have been like in the Egypt of the Pharaohs.

Follow these experts while they explore TT69, TT79, TT104 and TT100, the tomb of Rekhmire.