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Illustrated by several photographs, this work
by Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, Pauline and
Philippe de Flers highlights the rock art
of the Egyptian Sahara. The authors, through
new mythologies, open new perspective in the
understanding of the relationships between
the Nile Valley and the luxurious savannah,
which in the Neolithic stretched from the
Atlantic to Egypt, the fertile Sahara.
Starting in 13,000 B.C. began the climatic
period of Holocene and brought to the Egyptian
Sahara adequate humidity for the development
of hunter-gatherer then pastoral societies.
The book includes the known representations
of Gilf el Kebir (the Great Plateau) and of
Gebel Uweinat, near the Egypto-Libyan and
Egypto-Sudanese borders. The three authors
present for the first time the painting of
Wadi Sora II, discovered in 2003 by an Italian
team led by Massimo Foggini and Ahmed Mestekawi.
M. Le Quellec proposes a relationship between
the Neolithic mythologies represented at Wadi
Sora II (the swimmers and the “Headless Beast”)
and the Book of the Dead of the Egyptian New
Empire. The author detects similarities between
these two types of representation of the beyond.
He infers from this linkage a migration of
Saharan populations toward the Nile Valley,
a thesis advance as of 1986 by Fekri Hassan.
These populations would have brought with
them their mental universe, thus contributing
to the formation of the historical Egyptian
religion.
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