Egyptology News: Lecture notes: The Many Faces Of Rock Art by Dirk Huyge

My sincere thanks to Christopher Coleman for inviting me to the Bloomsbury Summer School as a guest last week, and to Dr Kathryn Piquette, the Course Director for the Ancient Egypt Before the Pyramids course, for welcoming me. It gave me the opportunity to sit in on some great lectures, by Kathryn Piquette, Dr Dirk Huyge and John Wyatt.

I thought that it might be of interest to people who were unable to attend the course to have an insight into the lectures, so over the next few days I will be posting informal notes which I took during the lectures. This is also by way of an apology that I am not updating the blog, yet again, on an every day basis over the next two weeks whilst I'm working at Bloomsbury (those 6.30am alarm calls are a killer these days). Havind said that I will do my absolute best to keep up with it.

Today I have started my notes with the lectures by Dirk Huyge (Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels) whose excellent two-part lecture was entitled The Many Faces of Rock Art - An Introduction to Ancient Egyptian Petroglyphs. I was particularly keen to hear him speak having read so much of his work on Egyptian rock art. I have always viewed rock art as something of a dark angel, archaeologically speaking. For me there are always two key problems - dating and interpretation - and these make it incredibly difficult to regard rock art as a dataset comparable or compatible with other archaeological data that is far easier to date and interpret. I wrote quite a bit about rock art on my Eastern Desert website and Dr Huyge was immensely kind in replying to the email that I sent to him, with some very helpful answers. I thought that if anyone could bring me round to the idea that rock art can be incorporated into the broader framework of archaeology it would be Dirk Huyge.

Dr Huyge most helpfully began with a definition of rock art. It is surprising how many lecturers don’t bother to define the terms that they are about to use, but we were given the basics straight away, with other terms being added later at the appropriate points. Dr Huyge pointed out that rock art is not canonized. It is not officially instigated by the state or any other form of authority. It is a popular form of art, but this does not mean that it is unsophisticated. There are three forms of rock art world-wide of which petroglyphs (hammered or incised) are the the most common - for example, making up around 99% of Egyptian rock art. Pictographs are paintings on rock, and in Egypt these are quite rare. Finally there are geoglyphs, which are made by arranging the earth or stones over very large areas. There are no known examples in Egypt, but the most famous of the geolgyph sites is Nazca in Peru. However, there are examples in the Neghev desert and elsewhere.

Dr Huyge then took us on a global rock art tour, showing different types and styles of all types of rock art. One of the things that most struck me was how widely distributed the negative hand print images are - from sites in Farafra Oasis and Gilf Kebir in Egypt to sites like Chauvet in France, and the Cueva de las Manos in Argentina. Other types of art were quite unique to the regions in which they were executed - for example Easter Island and Australia. What the survey demonstrated was that rock art is found everywhere - except, bizarrely, Belgium and Poland - that it can vary in size, subject matter and technique, that the subject matter is usually something remarkable or unusual, and that it has been executed for 10s of 1000s of years.

The material focused on by Dr Huyge in Egypt was mainly concentrated in the Nile Valley and the Eastern Desert. The material on the Egypt-Libyan-Sudan borders at Gebel Uweinat and at Gilf Kebir was mentioned in passing, presumably because it has more in common with the Libyan and eastern Saharan tradition of rock painting, and the petroglyphs are less well researched. The rock art of the oases was mentioned, but not in any detail. We focused instead on Dr Huyge's own areas of specialized research and this helped us to engage with it, as his passion for the subject is very clear.

It was good to see a review of some of the early great names of Egyptian rock art research being credited for their efforts - particularly Hans Winkler, who made very good use of local Bedouin knowledge in the Eastern Desert and travelled to the Western Desert as well, making sketches, taking detailed notes and writing up extensive and intelligent hypotheses about the rock art that he was viewing. He published his findings in two volumes in the 1930s.

Dr Huyge took us through his methodology. It was shown in Dutch, but we were talked through it,. It is a highly integrated approach, using as many different techniques as possible in order to give real integrity to the rock art research taking place. This is important - a strategic and consistent approach is key to recording and analysing something as academically ephemeral as rock art. I think that it would be useful to have his process more widely communicated.

Of course, in the light of the above comment, the initial point made by Dr Huyge was that the process of surveying and recording rock art images and scenes is of fundamental importance. He showed a photograph of himself with a clipboard with a stack of forms attached to it. As he said, he didn't look very happy in the photograph - but then, as he also said, the job of recording rock art accurately can be endlessly tedious, but absolutely vital. Records are both textual and visual, with tracings of large scenes made in order to piece them together back in the office. Tracing is often regarded as an invasive procedure, but Dr Huyge feels that it is not harmful on engravings although it should not be attempted for painting, where the pigments would be removed in the process.

Next we moved on to dating. Dating of rock art is always a troublesome area. Without dating it is impossible to put rock art into its appropriate cultural context, and this makes it very difficult to interpret in any meaninful way. Dr Huyge offered us a very comprehensive overview of the whole dating issue, highlighting key problems and providing details of certain techniques which can be employed with some degree of success - both absolute and relative.

The most attractive form of dating for any archaeologist is absolute dating. There are dates which are derived by a scientific technique and provide a calendar date which can be slotted into a calendar sequence, rather than a relative date which only shows that something is older or younger than something else. The best known of these techniques is radiocarbon dating, but there are other methods too. The advantage of radiocarbon dating is that it dates the object itself, and has been widely used and refined and is therefore now well understood. This means that dates derived using the technique can be employed with some (statistically speaking) confidence. However the disadvantage from a rock art point of view is that it can only be used to date samples of organic matter - wood, bone, charcoal, plant remains etc. Although ochre and charcoal used in paintings is organic and other organic elements can be captured (see later) the samples required are too large for standard radiocarbon dating to function.

Another possible solution for scientific dating of rock art currently being experimented with is a refined version of radiocarbon dating called accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating. This requires much smaller samples which may allow microscopic amounts of organic matter trapped in desert varnish to be dated to provide a terminus ante quem (a date before which the art was painted). The theory goes like this. Desert varnish is a coating which builds up naturally over rock art and is very thin - around 1/10th of a millimetre. It is made up mainly of clay minerals (2/3rds) and iron and manganese oxides (1/3rd) but may also contain tiny organic inclusions. When a petroglyph is created on a new surface the desert varnish that builds up can trap the tiny inclusions lying on the new surface created by the art. These micro-organisms feed off the minerals which are contained in the varnish. However, a sample of 50mg is required and this is still relatively enormous in rock art terms. These organic remains can then be dated to acquire a terminus ante quem (a date before which the art must have been engraved). One of the problems is that it only dates the substance used as a pigment, not the time at which it was used. Dr Huyge gave the example of a painting which gave a date which was considerably earlier than the typological date assigned to the image in question- and it was concluded that the pigment was made using charcoal picked up opportunistically from a much earlier hearth which was located in the immediate vicinity.

A more optimistic approach is the optical luminescence dating method, which Dr Huyge described for us, and which is of considerable interest. This is a technique that can be used for dating sands, occupation depris and some soils which overlay rock art. Obviously the sand doesn’t date the art, but it does provide a terminus ante quem - a date before which the art must have been made.

There are a number of techniques which might be of use in the future. Uranium Series dating is one of those. I'm going to post during the next few days about dating in Predynastic Egypt, so I'll cover this at that point.

Moving from the absolute to the relative, there are other ways of approaching the dating of the rock art which don’t depend on the limited number of scientific techniques available.

One of these techniques has been to attempt to date rock art by reference to the animal species represented. In Egypt the climate changed after a Holocene “wet” phase, so some of the animals which are shown could only have existed in Egypt at a certain time - giraffes, for example. This has a lot of potential but it has its problems too. Dr Huyge pointed out that ostriches, which were thought to have been widespread in desert areas during this wetter period have been found in contexts which were too modern. Similarly, elephants might be considered to be early when shown in rock art, but there are alternatives. At one site the image is accompanied by text indicating a far more recent date, and it is known that Ptolemy II Philadelphus in the mid 3rd Century BC brought elephants through the Eastern Desert (“the tanks of the period”) so it is possible that representations could have been as late as the Greek period, thousands of years after the Predynastic period had ended. The elephant is also shown in the New Kingdom tomb of Rekhmire, together with a giraffe. The point here is that it is important to use this type of data with care.

Finally, there are a number of way of establishing relative sequences of rock art images which share the same rock face is by working out which ones predate others. There are a number of techniques for doing this, and Dr Huyge talked us through them.

A useful and evocative term used by Dr Huyge was "parasite drawings." These are engravings on sites which are ancient graffiti and obviously post-date the sites on which they were etched. The best known examples are probably the temples of Karnak and Philae.

Stylistic and thematic representations are amongst the best hopes for dating Eastern Desert rock art. Two examples were given by Dr Huyge - elephants and boats. Elephants have been touched upon before, but a specific way of depicting elephant ears has apparently been of considerable help. On Naqada I vases a way of depicting the elephants’ ears in a style known as “butterfly ears” has been found in the Eastern Desert. It is a completely unique way of showing the ears of elephants, and offers considerable confidence that the Eastern Desert elephants with this feature date to the same time as comparable images on Naqada I vessels.

The second category of motifs mentioned by Dr Huyge is the boat. Boats are one of the recurring images in Eastern Desert rock art. Comparison of the rock art images against images on vessels and in tombs of all periods has suggested that they were painted for several thousand years. The challenge is to work out which boats belong to which periods and which motifs are associated with those that might be Predynastic. Dr Huyge emphasized some of the difficulties, but thinks that the boats may be the most diagnostic of the rock art images because their features change so considerably over time (unlike, for example, cows which look pretty much like cows from one millennium to the next). A number of attempts have already been made to use boats to form typological sequences which assign the images to different periods of the ancient Egyptian past, and Dr Huyge brought up some slides showing the attempts made by Cervicek to use existing publications to bring some sort of order to the chaos. However, there are various problems with the typology proposed and Dr Huyge emphasised that there was still a lot of work that needed to be completed before a reliable framework based on the boat images could be established.

From there Dr Huyge moved onto the subject of interpretation. Interpretation is another bundle of archaeological joy - how on earth does one begin to move oneself beyond the images on the rock surfaces and find a way into the thoughts, ideas and beliefs that led to the images being created? It is an incredibly difficult field, and I have never been convinced that there is any testable way of reading images in the way that their cultural background intended them to be read. Huyge says that for him this considerably challenging area is one of the more exciting areas of archaeology, and he was very persuasive whilst being perfectly up front about the problems.

Dr Huyge’s opening gambit was a similie - he put up a slide showing the familiar modern Egyptian house painted with colourful motifs of various scenes - aeroplanes, cars, boats, symbols etc. These are of course the communication that the occupant of the house has completed the haj, a religious pilgrimage to Mecca. And Huyge used these images to ask the question - what if coming as archaeologists to these painted walls we didn’t know the cultural context? How would we interpret the motifs? We would certainly struggle to come up with an interpretation approximating the truth and we might well misinterpret them completely and embarrassingly. It is important, therefore, to incorporate all that we can about the cultural context into any interpretation that we attempt. My thought at this point was that this whole area comes back to dating - we have to be able to date the rock art in order to assign it to its appropriate cultural context.

In Huyge’s view we can move beyond the mere description of rock art and use various techniques, including ethnographic analogy and context to assist with broader interpretation. As a starting point Huyge makes the simple statement that in nearly all ethnographic (i.e. surviving) cultures with whom one can talk today about the art they create on rock surfaces the unusual and the remarkable is what is represented, not the mundane. He also pointed out, in response to a question, that images which have been assigned meaning may not have the same meaning associated with them over long periods of time - there is no reason to believe that types of image and motif separated by 10s and 100s of years will have the same meaning as they did in the past.

Finally, Dr Huyge highlighted the fact that in Egypt very few missions are focusing exclusively, or even mainly, on rock art. Most other missions are dealing with rock art as an add-on to their other archaeological projects. Huyge seemed to imply that this was not necessarily positive, but I am glad that there are missions who are trying to tie in both their archaeological data with the rock art found within the geographical areas under consideration. Farafra, for example, falls into that category with the Wadi Obeyid cave occurring in an area of rich archaeological remains.

As I said at the beginning the lectures focused mainly on the Nile Valley and Eastern Desert rock petroglyphs. It would be interesting to examine possible linkages between different rock art areas and types currently being considered by different missions, but this was out of the scope of the lectures.

My own conclusion following Dirk Huyge’s massively enjoyable lectures is that there is still a lot of work to be done before the gaps between rock art and archaeological datasets are bridged in a convincing way. In broad terms it is the sort of problem that archaeology faced before the introduction of radiocarbon dating, when chronologies were relative, not absolute, and perhaps the scientific dating solution lies just around the corner for rock art too. Until then, if anyone is going to bridge the gap with research projects then it will be Dirk Huyge and other researchers working in this field. I look forward to reading much more of Dr Huyge’s work in the future.

Further reading online:

Antiquity journal (free online article):