Les gravures rupestres du Chalcolithique et de l’âge du Bronze ancien de la région du mont Bego. Les mythes cosmogoniques des premiers peuples métallurgistes des Alpes méridionales

Abstract

More than 100,000 graphic signs, of which 40,000 are figurative, were carved on around 4000 rocks in the mont Bego region, in Tende, in the southern Alps, approximately 80 km north of Nice (Alpes-Maritimes). These carved rocks are dispersed at an altitude of 2000 to 2700 m in the high valleys surrounding mont Bego and are regrouped in seven different sectors: the Merveilles valley, Valaurette, val de Fontanalba, val de Sainte-Marie, Valmasque, col du Sabion and the Vei del Bouc lake. The daggers, halberds and axes represented by these carvings make it possible to attribute them to Chalcolithic cultures, like the Remedello, or to early Bronze age cultures, like the Polada or the Rhodanian, and to date them between 3300 and 1800 years BC. Among the 40.000 figurative carvings, very few iconographic themes are represented: corniculates (about 70% of all figurative carvings), harnesses (2.9%), daggers (about 5.4% of all figurative carvings), halberds (1.1%), axes (0.08%), reticulates (5.5%), rectangular or oval shaded zones (6.9%) and several rare anthropomorphous figures. The consistency of the techniques and of the iconographic themes shows that these carvings were not carried out at random. They correspond to a conception of the world, transmitted from generation to generation by way of a graphic code. These representations are in fact ideograms: by carving signs and symbols, these Chalcolithic and Bronze Age populations depicted real or imaginary objects and by combining them, they created ideas in relation to the natural or supernatural world. The rock carvings of the mont Bego region correspond to a symbolic language inscribed in stone at the end of the fourth millenium and throughout the third millennium BC., by the first metallurgic settlers in the southern Alps. The ideograms were thus inscribed on rocks polished by Quaternary glaciers in the sacred Bego mountain. These carvings, the works of agricultural and pastoral populations in the southern Alps during the Chalcolithic and the ancient Bronze age, translate not just the daily preoccupations of these populations who needed rain, sources and lakes in order to fertilise their fields, but also their cosmogonic myths. At the centre of these myths are the bull god, brandishing lightning, master of the storm and provider of fertilising rain, and the high goddess, mother goddess or goddess earth, who needs to be fertilised herself by rain from the sky in order to bring abundance to humans.