Climate change threatens Egypt’s ancient rock art as Polish archaeologists race to document it
Thousands of ancient rock carvings scattered across Egypt’s Western Desert are slowly disappearing. Rising temperatures, stronger winds, increasingly regular heavy rainfall and human activity are damaging some of Africa’s richest collections of prehistoric art, while Polish archaeologists are working to document what remains before it is lost.
The Dakhleh Oasis is one of the largest oases in Egypt’s Western Desert. Located about 350 km west of the Nile Valley, between the Farafra and Kharga oases, it stretches for around 80 km and includes more than a dozen settlements. People have lived there since prehistoric times, and the oasis was once an important stop on caravan routes linking the Nile Valley with the Sahara and Libya.
Among the most important traces of this long human presence are thousands of petroglyphs carved into the desert rocks. Polish scientists have been studying them for more than 40 years.
Since 2016, the Dakhleh Oasis Project Petroglyph Unit has been led by Paweł Polkowski, PhD, from the Archaeological Museum in Poznań and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 2019, he became head of the international Dakhleh Oasis Project, which coordinates a series of archaeological missions in the oasis.
“We have inventoried approximately 350 rock art sites,” Polkowski says. “A site may contain one, sometimes a few petroglyphs, but there are also sites with several hundred or even over a thousand carvings. The petroglyphs date back to both prehistoric and ancient times, to 6,000–5,000 BCE, but some also come from the post-ancient, medieval, and modern periods; we also know of a few finds from the 20th and 21st centuries.”
The researchers are studying far more than prehistoric images. Alongside rock art, they have also discovered hieroglyphic, Coptic, Greek, Graeco-Latin and Arabic inscriptions, creating an unusually rich record of human activity over thousands of years.
“Egypt is one of the richest countries in Africa and globally in terms of rock art,” Polkowski explains. “We are talking about vast complexes of paintings and petroglyphs in southwest Egypt, on the border with Libya and Sudan. These areas have enormous scientific and tourist potential. The entirety of Upper Egypt is one vast complex of rock art, spanning prehistory to the near-modern era. The Eastern Desert is also exceptionally rich in rock art, although there has never been much research there. And the entire Western Desert, where oases are located.”
Despite this wealth, Egyptian rock art remains relatively unknown internationally. One reason is that it competes for attention with the much more famous monuments of pharaonic Egypt, which dominate archaeology, tourism and popular culture.
“Therefore, it's difficult to interest local authorities in sites that are less spectacular from a tourist perspective, such as sites with rock carvings or inscriptions,” Polkowski says. “Unfortunately, they are often left unprotected. We and our colleagues from other missions document numerous destructions, sometimes quite dramatic ones.”
Many carvings have survived only partially because of natural erosion. The Nubian sandstone on which much of the Dakhleh Oasis rock art was created is particularly fragile.
“Many petroglyphs are only fragmentarily preserved. In some cases, this is the result of ongoing natural processes,” Polkowski says. “The Nubian sandstones on which the rock art in the Dakhleh Oasis was created are generally quite brittle. Many of these rocks are so soft that you could make a rock carving with your finger.”
Even harder, iron-rich rocks are not immune to decay. They are slowly worn away by extreme temperature changes and powerful winds carrying fine desert dust.
The process is likely to accelerate as the climate changes.
“In recent years, an additional element has been added in the form of fairly regular heavy rains,” Polkowski says. “This was something that had not been a problem in this part of the world for a long time. Now, with global climate change, we are seeing this again. Rains are devastating to traditional architecture in that region, and to rock art. There is a little less of it each year, and certainly less from decade to decade, or from century to century.”
Because much of this damage cannot be reversed, researchers are focusing on detailed documentation. Their priority is to revisit known sites, record them more precisely and conduct contextual excavations that may help determine when individual carvings were created.
So far, however, dating Egyptian rock art remains difficult. Unlike many archaeological objects, petroglyphs are rarely associated with materials that can be directly analysed. Researchers must rely mainly on comparisons with rock art from other regions and on the archaeological context in which carvings are found.
Scientific work in the field has also become increasingly difficult. Polkowski says that since 2014, his mission and many other archaeological teams have been unable to obtain all the permits needed to resume research in Egypt’s Western Desert.
“For about 10 years, virtually no archaeological missions have worked in the Western Desert, with a few exceptions,” he says.
Conducting research in Egypt, particularly in remote desert regions, requires multiple approvals.
“To conduct research in Egypt, especially in the desert, you need to obtain a dozen or so permits, but three in particular are essential,” Polkowski explains. “The first is a permit from the Antiquities Service, i.e., the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. Every year, we manage to obtain such a permit, and the research programme we propose is approved.”
However, missions must also receive approval from security services.
“It has always been a bit of a lottery, but in recent years, the situation has worsened significantly,” Polkowski says. “Permits never arrive, and there is never any feedback as to why. Once the deadline and time have passed, the mission must submit a new application, and this happens every year. The problem does not concern only us, but that is hardly a consolation.”
Accurate field documentation is becoming increasingly urgent because older petroglyphs are also being covered by newer carvings. From a scientific perspective, these later additions are valuable because they show that humans have continued to use rock surfaces as a medium for thousands of years.
“From a legal perspective, of course, this is a form of vandalism,” Polkowski says. “Unfortunately, these changes are irreversible, and there is no protection for these monuments, so such situations are common. This applies to Egypt, Sudan, and most Saharan countries.”
The practice of adding new carvings over older ones, however, is not a modern phenomenon.
“We have Greco-Roman images and inscriptions found on dynastic and earlier carvings,” Polkowski explains. “The foot motif has been regularly carved over or next to prehistoric carvings throughout history, dating back to the dynastic period.”
Some more recent examples provide a glimpse into the lives of people who passed through the desert centuries later. In the early 20th century, carvings appeared at the Dakhleh Oasis that most likely depict soldiers from the British Army, armed with rifles and flags. In 1916, British forces had a base in the area and conducted military operations there.
But perhaps the strangest modern carving discovered by the archaeologists was a surprisingly familiar object.
“The strangest thing I found carved into the rock was a very small piece of sandstone, carved to resemble a smartphone,” Polkowski says. “It was rectangular, with a screen and a keyboard carved on one side, and camera lenses on the other.”
PAP - Science in Poland, Ewelina Krajczyńska-Wujec (PAP)
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Gallery (4 images)
1/4Dakhleh Oasis. The slope of the Libyan Plateau in the background. Credit: Paweł Polkowski: dr Paweł Polkowski
2/4Credit: dr Paweł Polkowski
3/4Depictions of a boat and sandals from the dynastic period. Credit: Paweł Polkowski
4/4Giraffe held on a rope. Credit: Paweł Polkowski
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