Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – The desert in southern Egypt is stuffed with tons of of petroglyphs and inscriptions relationship from the Neolithic to the Arab interval. The oldest date is from the fifth millennium B.C. and few have been studied.
Egyptologists on the University of Bonn and Aswan University now wish to systematically document and doc the rock work in a database. Among them, is a rock portray greater than 5,000 years outdated depicting a ship being pulled by 25 males on a rope stands out particularly.
Rock picture—with ruler boat procession, ca. 3200 BC, Wadi al Agebab. Credit: Mohamed Abdel Hay Abu Baker
“This cultural treasure within the northeast of Aswan has been largely undocumented, not to mention revealed,” says Egyptologist Prof. Dr. Ludwig Morenz of the University of Bonn. The petroglyphs are present in quite a few and infrequently distant places in dried-up river valleys, known as “wadis” in Arabic.
At the identical time, the petroglyphs, that are typically inconspicuous at first look, are underneath extreme menace, particularly from present quarrying actions within the desert. “Especially lately, there has already been severe destruction of this cultural asset,” says Morenz, who can be a member of the Cluster of Excellence Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) and the Transdisciplinary Research Area “Present Pasts” on the University of Bonn. “Such losses can hardly be prevented fully, given the vastness of the realm, however all of the extra necessary is at the least good documentation.”
Great treasure for science
Together with the Aswan Inspectorate of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, the University of Bonn’s Egyptology Department has already documented remoted inscriptions on rocks. “These rock photos are an ideal treasure for science, which might be systematically developed within the coming years in cooperation between the University of Bonn, the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities and particularly the Aswan Inspectorate,” says Mohamed Abdel Hay Abu Baker, who’s particularly answerable for researching rock photos on the Aswan Inspectorate.
In the course of his doctoral research at Aswan University in Aswan, Abu Baker will now work along with the University of Bonn to create a complete database with a picture archive on the rock photos. For this objective, the University of Excellence Bonn helps the inspector of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities for one yr with a scholarship from excellence funds of the federal and state governments. Prof. Morenz is second supervisor of the dissertation.
Testimony from the time earlier than the pharaohs
The mission will now systematically document the tons of of rock artwork photos in southern Egypt. “The first newly found sources shed new mild on the pre-Pharaonic interval of the Fourth Millennium and the significance of the socio-cultural periphery,” Morenz says.
Among the pictures that Abu Baker captured throughout his explorations within the discipline, one particularly stood out to the Egyptologist from the University of Bonn. From this era of excessive cultural dynamism within the Assuan area of the later Fourth Millennium comes a hitherto distinctive scene that provides perception into faith and cult observe. It is depicted over the bumps and edges of the rock, how a ship is pulled by 25 males with raised arms on a rope.
A ritual is clearly impressively proven right here—specifically the good procession of a picture of the gods, based on Morenz. This is evident from picture particulars, he mentioned, the boat with shrine and commonplace and, particularly, the cattle horns, that are typical of sacred imagery. “This rock picture offers us insights into the sacred design of an apparently distant panorama, the Wadi al Agebab, which continues to be largely unknown in analysis,” says the Egyptologist.
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The complete later Pharaonic tradition is predicated on these beginnings of the pictorial staging of faith. Morenz: “Here, the excessive significance of faith and particularly the cult of the gods within the nonetheless pre-Egyptian society of the second half of the Fourth Millennium is revealed as a culture-creating issue.”
Written by Conny Waters – AncientPages.com Staff Writer
