What is now the Sahara—an extreme of aridity—was, some 5,000 years ago, covered with rich grasslands. Across this desert remain countless rock paintings depicting the lives of that time. Among them, in the rock shelters of the central Saharan mountains known as Tassili n’Ajjer, there are thousands of paintings created over a span of more than 5,000 years. They form an invaluable record for tracing the history of the Sahara.
I have visited Tassili n’Ajjer four times. In 1978, together with guides and camel handlers, I camped in rock shelters and spent about a month traversing the mountains on foot. “Tassili n’Ajjer” in the language of the Tuareg means “the plateau of rivers,” yet today it is a lifeless tableland crisscrossed by deeply eroded dry riverbeds (wadis), a place utterly devoid of water. The vast plateau, with an average elevation of 1,500 meters, is dotted with rows of sandstone pillars carved by deep erosion. Their bases, hollowed out by ancient waters, provided ideal dwellings for prehistoric people. It is on the walls of these shelters that the paintings remain.
The motifs of the rock art begin with the lives and rituals of hunter-gatherers who first settled there around 7000 BCE. They are followed by the countless depictions of cattle left by pastoralists who came later. Then come scenes from the age of horse-drawn chariots, which emerged as aridity advanced, and finally the era of the camel beginning around the turn of the Common Era—altogether spanning roughly 5,000 years. Among these, the works from the flourishing period of the cattle herders display a remarkable command of draftsmanship, rivaling that of modern artists. Yet as the environment grew harsher, the quality of the art clearly declined.
Why did successive inhabitants of Tassili n’Ajjer—despite being entirely replaced over time as the environment changed—continue to paint for such a long span? Some works were clearly created as objects of worship, depicting deities, but most were likely decorative. That the paintings were carefully preserved is suggested by the fact that those on the walls of inhabited shelters show no traces of soot from smoke that might have obscured them.
I spent my days absorbed in photographing, searching for paintings along corridors of rock shelters wrapped in deep silence. At night, like people of ancient times, I lay in my sleeping bag beneath the shelters, gazing up at a sky filled with stars. Long ago, the lowing of cattle must have echoed through these corridors. The French bread I had bought in quantity at an oasis at the foot of the plateau had hardened like stone; I broke it up, softened it in soup, and survived on a strange kind of porridge. Water, apart from what was needed to drink, was limited to a single cup for washing my face and hands. Yet it was November, and the plateau was cool and utterly dry, so the lack of cleanliness did not trouble me much.
Beneath a sky of flawless blue that stretched unbroken all day, I felt fulfilled. In this ultimate land where all living things had perished, I found myself face to face with undeniable human records that had endured across thousands of years. As I continued to photograph them, I came to realize, deeply, that I possessed an irrepressible longing for desolate lands.
From To a Land Beyond Dimensions, published by Kochi Shimbun.
