|
||
 |
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
|
The caves of Altamira in northern Spain and Lascaux in southwestern France are famous for their Paleolithic artwork, at least 15,000 years old. Many of those images are of wild cattle and are strikingly similar to those shown here. But these carvings in sandstone are near the village of Qurta, southeast of Cairo—a world away, in Paleolithic terms.
Could there be a connection? The first archaeologists to examine some carvings at Qurta, in the early 1960s, decided they could not be Paleolithic. But after a recent re-analysis and use of a new dating technology, Dirk Huyge, of the Royal Museum of Art in Brussels, and an international research team, including Yale Egyptologist John Coleman Darnell, say there’s no doubt. In the December 2011 issue of Antiquity, they show that the Qurta images—at least 185 in all, from birds to hippopotami—are not only contemporaneous with those in France, but also share their style and groupings. Though artists in western Europe and Upper Egypt “did
not share a common physical culture and probably did not trade materials
directly,” says Darnell, “it looks like they were trading ideas and artistic
styles. Long before there was an economic trade route, there may have been an
intellectual one.” |
||
Related The Lost City The Birthplace of the ABCs |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
||
©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu |
||