Read The Sahara for Free Online

perhaps after a successful hunt when food was temporarily plentiful, or perhaps there had developed certain individuals in society whose role was making pictures.
    One of the most often proposed functions of parietal art is religious. What constitutes religious feeling is naturally subject to interpretation, and with this in mind there is nothing to suggest that the hunting scenes might not be religious icons, both representing the necessity of securing a food supply and offering thanks for any perceived divine assistance received in the chase. It is equally possible, if impossible to prove, that the hunt was itself a religious event, along the same lines as attending those formalized rituals common to any Sunday, or Friday, or Saturday, service.
    The figure of a large-breasted female on a cave wall is interpreted without controversy as a symbol of fecundity; perhaps a goddess whom the artist’s clan hoped would bless them with healthy children or, for sedentary agriculturists, a good harvest. Similarly, an obviously male figure supplied with an outsized and erect penis might likewise represent a fertility god, or could it just be that it was meant for a spot of fun? There is the hint of a suggestion that certain examples of this megaphallic art may be little more than graffiti, scratches or daubs added later by individuals with a lewd or juvenile sense of humour.
    Although in many cases the works are clearly too elaborate for this suspicion to be justified, one certainly senses levity at work in some of the more sexual images. Dr. Bonnet, working for the Paris Natural History Museum in Algeria in the nineteenth century, noted that a number of the engravings’ hunters “brazenly display monstrous phalluses... in most cases it is easy to recognize, from the form and the colour of the line, that these organs are later additions to the rest of the figure.” In other words, Bonnet saw some of these large erections as little more than early graffiti. There has surely been no time since the emergence of Homo sapiens when those distinctive male and female body parts have not been, so to speak, held up as objects of ribald humour.
    The overtly sexual illustrations so shocked a number of the Europeans who re-discovered this art that many ignored them altogether in their accounts. However, in 1848 the French traveller Jean-Jacques Ampere published an account of his journeys through Egypt and Nubia, which included comments on engravings he had found around Philae. Apart from lions, elephants and ostriches, he noted some distinctly obscene portrayals of humans. Of all the human figures proudly displaying their sex, those engaged in acts of zoophilia have always provoked the sharpest intakes of breath. Even so, bestiality is surprisingly common in the works of these early artists: the shock of the old, perhaps. It also happens that bestiality in Saharan rock art is more common than in other sites around the world of a similar age. Whether this is because most of these works were destroyed elsewhere in the world or whether Saharans had a particularly keen enthusiasm for coupling with animals, it is impossible to say.
    Then there are those images of men copulating with animals far larger than themselves, including giraffes, rhinos and elephants, which certainly raise far more questions than they answer. Whatever the reason for carving these images into a rock face, it was not done lightly. Again, there is nothing to suggest that there is not present here some religious iconography. It is still the case today that hunters in certain tribes will engage in ritual copulation with antelopes they have just killed. Perhaps these images are of great symbolic, rather than literal, importance, votive offerings for human domination over larger and potentially lethal prey. Other forms of bestial activity include engravings of men either urinating or ejaculating into the eyes of rhinos.
    Another opinion is that the images are linked to the existence