Ancient rock art revealed in all its glory in stunning photographs

Christoph Baumer & Therese Weber
Bloomsbury Academic

In 1954, Pablo Picasso told his secretary that for all the artistic developments in the millennia since humans first engraved images into rock, these works of ancient art had still “never been surpassed”, such was their “purity of expression”. It is easy to see why Picasso was so enamoured. In their book Rock Art and its Legacy in Myth and Art, historian Christoph Baumer and artist Therese Weber catalogue a vast array of petroglyphs, which are made by etching into rock.

“Many of these petroglyphs are masterpieces,” says Baumer. “They are very simple, and just with a few strokes you very clearly recognise not just an animal, but its main attributes.”

The rock art photographed for the book, some of which is shown in this article, comes from a large area, ranging from Mongolia in the east to the Sahara in the west. The oldest dates back at least 8000 years.

This wide swathe of territory means there is remarkable variety, both between and within images, such as in the Bronze and Iron Age tableau of ancient humans and animals seen in a horizontal limestone rock from the desert in northern Saudi Arabia, shown in the main image at the top of this article. But there is also remarkable similarity, given the low populations and enormous separation between them.

Picasso might disagree, but these drawings are still deeply mysterious, in part because they are difficult to accurately date. But Baumer is enthusiastic about how much they can explain: “It tells us something about the beliefs, habits and economy of very ancient peoples, which we otherwise know of very little.”

The image above of a petroglyph found in Sweden shows warriors, ships, farm scenes and a sun-like disc. These Bronze Age images have been painted red for tourists, but would have originally been the colour of the rock.

Above is a shot of one of the largest petroglyphs in southern Saudi Arabia, showing a dromedary camel, from the Iron Age. Below are some human-like stone slabs from a burial site in Xinjiang, China, dated to the start of the second millennium BC.