Someday in the summertime of 1460, a traveller, Pierre de Montfort, discovered himself within the Alpine Vallée des Merveilles in south-east France. He was horrified. It was, he thought, “a hellish place with figures of devils and a thousand demons carved in all places within the rocks”. So aghast was he that he set his ideas down, thereby leaving us the primary written description of an encounter with rock artwork in European historical past.
Rock artwork takes many varieties, however the selection that De Montfort encountered had been petroglyphs: photos, utilizing varied methods, minimize into non-portable stone surfaces. Actually, as Christoph Baumer reveals in Rock Artwork and Its Legacy in Fable and Artwork, some 80% of the petroglyphs at Mont Bégo, the broader website that encompasses the Vallée des Merveilles, symbolize bulls, with anthropomorphic varieties accounting for simply 1%.
The interpretation of those highly effective, intense however typically opaque figures and marks has all the time been troublesome and all too typically topic to mental bias of 1 variety or one other. Baumer, the president of the Society for the Exploration of EurAsia and a member of, amongst different organisations, The Explorers Membership, New York, and the Royal Geographical Society, London, has little time, for instance, for contemporary theories that hyperlink the manufacturing of rock artwork to shamanistic rituals: such arguments embody “a essentially ahistorical perspective decreasing artwork to determinism”, he writes.
Unknowns beleaguer our understanding of rock artwork. Exact relationship is troublesome and we usually have little thought what occasioned the making of any particular picture. Petroglyphs might have been made on the similar location for something as much as 2,000 years, so even the place a website has tens of 1000’s of photos, annual manufacturing might have been as little as ten or 20 a yr. Whereas the identified mythological tradition of Central Asia and Scandinavia is intensive, for the Sahara it’s near non-existent.
For all that, what these compelling photos can nonetheless inform us is outstanding. The majority of Rock Artwork data both important or attribute examples of outside petroglyph by area, inspecting websites throughout northern Africa, the Center East, Europe and Asia, though in locations it does talk about related cave artwork too. Baumer notes, for instance, how a not too long ago found Neolithic cluster of life-size camels carved into sandstone in northern Saudi Arabia resemble the 2 beautiful bison modelled in clay aid within the Tuc d’Audoubert collapse southern France 10,000 years earlier.
Remarkably well-preserved Bronze Age rock artwork from Saimaluu Tash in Kyrgyzstan depicts scenes of ploughing © Christoph Baumer
Amongst different issues, rock artwork gives an eye-witness account of the emergence of human civilisation. The introduction of home livestock into Arabia some 8,000 years in the past is mirrored in petroglyphs at Jubbah-Ha’il and Shuwaymis, the place herding scenes substitute older looking photos, typically intentionally overlaying them. When the wheel arrived in Mongolia, it got here first in heavy two-axle carts and later in lighter, single-axle chariots. Petroglyphs additionally reveal altering patterns of behaviour. In Central Asia, earlier than the Bronze Age, weapons are solely proven directed at prey. Then the lances and arrows had been turned on fellow people. This doesn’t indicate “that pre-Bronze Age societies had been freed from violence”, Baumer writes, “however that violence was now an admired advantage”.
From chariots to ships
We will see, too, how mythologies unfold and evolve. At Tamgaly in Kazakhstan, petroglyphs present how the horse slowly replaces the bull in the course of the Bronze Age as essentially the most revered animal, changing into related to the solar, doubtless in tandem with its domestication. This Indo-Iranian picture of a sun-headed deity driving a chariot throughout the sky reached so far as Scandinavia, the place the chariot was typically changed by a ship, or the ships themselves got horse-headed prows.
The Museum of Fashionable Artwork, New York, devoted an exhibition to rock artwork way back to 1937, and within the e-book’s ultimate chapter, the Swiss paper artist Therese Weber discusses the affect of rock artwork on trendy inventive follow, together with her personal. Petroglyphs, she writes, are “a way of communication that makes understandable a world that’s now not seen”; her follow seeks to “animate… what has been frozen in time”. This sense of continuity and dialogue with the deep human previous reverberates via the opposite artists mentioned, from the Swiss-born Paul Klee (1879-1940), who needed to “be like a new child, understanding nothing of Europe”, to these such because the Khakass (Siberian) painter Alexey Ulturgashev (1955-2000) and Dale Harding (born 1982 in Moranbah, Australia), who use rock artwork to discover indigenous identities.
Rock Artwork isn’t encyclopaedic, however nonetheless it represents a remarkably intensive survey of the most important petroglyph websites throughout a lot of the world. Bringing collectively analysis from varied fields, together with anthropology, ethnography and archaeology, the e-book gives a profound exploration of the bodily and metaphysical landscapes of our ancestors. It’s also beautifully illustrated, and consequently will certainly show a powerful useful resource for anybody within the very origins of inventive kind.
Christoph Baumer, with an essay by Therese Weber, Rock Artwork and its Legacy in Fable and Artwork: Petroglyphs from Eurasia, Arabia and Northern Africa, Bloomsbury Educational, 488pp, 340 color illustrations, £30, printed 13 November 2025
