Page 127 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition

bore evidence that the wadis had been deep rivers in early prehis­
toric time. The barren plateau around them down to the Red Sea
had formerly been amply watered by rain and covered by grass and
forests. The change had taken place some five or ten thousand years
ago, before the days of the Pharaohs. Whether the climate had
changed because the forest disappeared or the forest disappeared
because the climate had changed is still a matter of dispute among
botanists and climatologists. It is a documented fact that
Mesopotamia, too, had been wooded in early Sumerian times. The
Sumerians describe their own hills as wooded.2 The Pharaohs do
not. But archaeology shows that there were people in Egypt long
before the Pharaohs, and they have something to say as well.
It was well known that the desolate desert wadis we entered were
filled with ancient petroglyphs illustrating forest animals and ships.
And we found them everywhere. Many had never been reported
before, but all repeated the same restricted repertoire: antelopes,
waterbuck and other long-horned species, giraffes, lions,
crocodiles, ostriches and, in addition to these animal pictures,
hunters with dogs, and a great number of ships. Boats and ships of
all sizes. Some were propelled by rows of oars, others by mast and
sail. As could be expected from pre-dynastic art, all represented
strongly sickle-shaped reed-boats. The size of some must have been
quite formidable, since anything from twenty to forty oars were
common, and a few were shown with a crew of fifty or more on
deck. Many had two cabins, one on either side of the mast. A few
carried horned cattle or other large animals on board, which were
dwarfed in proportion to the big vessel transporting them.
As Gherman and I came out ofWadi Abu Subeira, the wide desert
canyon between Aswan and the Red Sea, it was clearer to me than
ever that water transport on a large scale had been of paramount
importance in the Red Sea area long before man domesticated the
horse and invented the wheel. Had the full story which this
prehistoric desert art could tell us been properly appreciated? The
fact that the Egyptian petroglyphs were surviving examples of the
unsophisticated local art in pre-Pharaonic time seemed to have over­
shadowed their deeper implications. To me their real value had
ceased to be a matter of artistic quality, becoming instead the simple
fact that they reflected what the artists had seen in a period leading
up to known civilisation. Forest animals and watercraft. Besides the
beasts around them the artists had cut into the solid rock their
testimony of man’s earliest achievements in architecture: huge
watercraft for transport and security. Ships were built and depicted

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