RIDDLES OF THE PREDYNASTIC PETROGLYPHS ADJUSTED FOR CLIMATE AND HYDROLOGY: BOATS (AND RIVERS?) IN THE UPPER EGYPTIAN EASTERN WADIS

Abstract

Prehistoric rock drawings of large boats in wadis of the central Eastern Desert, Egypt, divided their investigators into two main groups with quite different views about their origins and cultural affiliation. One of the groups (P. Červiček et al.) insisted on ‘religious’ (cultic, magic, etc.) nature of these petroglyphs attributing them to local traditions but actually tearing away from the reality, primarily on the ground that boats could have never come to be in the desert many tens of kilometers from both the Nile and the Red Sea. Another one, following ideas of W. M. Flinders Petrie, interpreted these boat images as ships of a ‘Dynastic Race’ of oversea invaders who conquered Egypt and consolidated her under their power. This hypothesis, once disapproved by most of archaeologists and Egyptologists, has recently acquired many new adherents; it assumes, in particular, the most real rivers to have flown at the time of the earliest boat petroglyphs (5th to 4th Millennia B.C.) along Wadi Hammamat and Wadi Barramiya, where short routes pass from the Red Sea coast to the Nile. Even rejecting Petrie’s ‘diffusionistic’ version on the whole, one cannot ignore the palaeogeographical fact that the climate of Predynastic Egypt was moist, characterized by monsoon rains which, in combination with geomorphology of the Eastern Desert, could only have favoured here in the period under consideration the formation of regular tributaries of the Nile.