digital photograph(colour)
- Museum number
- 2013,2034.16405
- Description
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Digital photograph (colour); view of painted rock art on a rock face, showing several groups of human figures, cows, unidentified animals and signs. Figures are mostly infilled in red, with some of them outlined. Cows are either humped or humpless, most of them depicted upright facing right, with curved or straight horns. Interspersed among the cows there are several red human figures depicted upright facing front, with arms outstretched upwards and in some cases holding bows and arrows with the hands to the right. Other animals (a jackal, an elephant, an ostrich and several unidentified quadrupeds) can be seen throughout the panel, along with many unidentified symbols. The red figures are superimposed by black paintings (one of them a car) and graffiti in Amharic. Saka Sharifa, Ethiopia.
Born digital
- Production date
- 21 March 2014 (Original photograph)
- Dimensions
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File size: 137 megabytes
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Resolution: 300 dots per inch
- Curator's comments
- See 2013,2034.16399 to 2013,2034.16449 for different views and details of this panel. The photograph was taken in Saka Sharifa, an important rock art site near the city of Harar discovered in the late 1940’s.
The geography of Ethiopia is varied, and ranges from high plateaus to savannahs and even deserts. The eastern part mostly consists of a range of plateaus and high mountains divided in two by the Great Rift Valley and surrounded by tropical savannahs and grasslands regions to the west and southwest, and the Danakil desert to the east. The south-eastern corner of Ethiopia, which borders with Somalia, is a semi-desert plateau ranging from 300-1500 meters over the sea level. Rock art is mainly distributed in the aforementioned Sidamo region to the southwest and the area around the city of Harar, to the east, although some rock art sites have been discovered in other areas as the borders with Kenya, Eritrea and Sudan. Research was started in the 30’s by abate Henri Breuil, his studies being followed by were John Desmond Clark in the 50’s and Paolo Graziosi and Francis Anfray during the 60’s. In 1971, the importance of Ethiopian rock art led Červiček to propose of the term Ethiopian-Arabian style, for the whole Horn of Africa rock art. In the 90’s and 2000’s rock art research has been through an increasing interest, with new sites discovered throughout the country
Cattle and cattle-related engravings are the main subject of Ethiopian rock art, including both humped and humpless cows. Domestic animals as camels, goats, sheep or dogs are also depicted. On the contrary, wild animals as giraffes and antelopes are scarce. Figures of cattle appear alone or in herds, and the depictions of cows with calves are a fairly common. Another big group of depictions corresponds to anthropomorphs, usually schematic and often distributed in rows, carrying weapons and sometimes fighting against other humans of big felines. Finally, geometric signs are quite common too. Chronology is difficult to establish, but the oldest depictions could be dated by the mid-third millennium BC according to parallels to the rock art found the Sahara, while the presence of camels and humped cows would indicate a date of the end of the second half of the 1st millennium BC. The last stages of Ethiopian rock art would correspond to camel, warriors and tribal signs can be considered belonging to the historical period, in some cases very near to the present day.
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 2013
- Department
- Africa, Oceania and the Americas
- Registration number
- 2013,2034.16405
- Additional IDs
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Previous owner/ex-collection number: NSETHDAG0010010 (TARA number)