(ORDO NEWS) — There are about 20,000 petroglyphs on Earth – images carved in stone. They and cave paintings are the most ancient forms of art that have come down to us.
Some of them have been known since antiquity, some have been hidden from view for thousands of years and have only recently been found.
Why the Indians of six different tribes came to this rock in the west of the modern USA and carved the drawings is unknown.
They did this before they met white people, and after (this is evidenced by the images of horse riders). Now this place is called Newspaper Rock (Newspaper Rock), Utah.
In the Navajo language, the name of this place means “stone that tells stories.” In total, more than 650 images are carved into the rock – mostly people and animals.
Sometimes there are also abstract symbols. The first drawing was carved into the rock about 2000 years ago.
The first images along the shore of the fjord in Tanum, Sweden were made 3,800 years ago. In the Bronze Age (however, as now), the population of this territory was very fond of boats.
They were drawn: out of more than 1000 drawings, the most common motif is a boat and people in it.
To touch the ancient street art, it is not necessary to go to the Indians or the Swedes; you can, for example, bypass the vicinity of Lake Onega.
Archaeologists believe that the Onega petroglyphs outline a giant sanctuary with a total area of about 20 kilometers: its walls were the coastal cliffs, and the sky was its dome.
So far, not all Onega petroglyphs have been found and sketched: they are hidden in mosses and lichens and are erased over time, so it is likely that you will be able to discover new drawings.
Carved into stone during shamanistic rituals, the stone beasts of Twyfelfontein in Namibia are older than all the petroglyphs listed above: they were made about 6,000 years ago.
Giraffes, rhinos, antelopes, zebras, lions, elephants are found here, and people are depicted with bows and arrows. In total, Stone Age artists left about 2,500 drawings on this mountain.
If you drive 700 kilometers along the Chuisky tract, you can find the largest collection of petroglyphs in Siberia. It is located in the Kalbak-Tash tract in Altai.
The drawings on the rocks were left there by the people of the Stone Age, and the Scythians, and the Turks (the latter also wrote letters on the stone).
For 10,000 years, these eerie eyes have been staring from the rocks of what is now British Columbia in Canada.
The Tassili-n-Ajer plateau resembles the landscapes of Tatooine, but the Arab guides know where to find rocks in the desert with delicate figures of prehistoric hunters dating back to the 4th millennium BC.
The petroglyphs of Lake Kanozero in the Murmansk region were discovered only in 1997, although tourists have walked past these rocks for decades, leaving more modern drawings and inscriptions.
Now the famous “crocodiles of the Kola Peninsula” are covered with a glass dome. Anyone can admire the three-thousand-year-old images.
This is not a late Picasso, this is the work of prehistoric tribes, the ancestors of the Indians of Patagonia. In the cave of Cueva de las Manos (“Cave of the Hands”) in Argentina, there are many prints of boyish left hands on the walls. Scientists believe that leaving an imprint was part of the initiation rite.
Strictly speaking, the hands and other images from Cueva de las Manos are not petroglyphs, but petrograms, because they are drawn on the stone, not carved into it.
But we included the cave in this list, because it is no worse than petroglyphs and allows you to see the creations of the hands of people who lived thousands of years before us.
Images carved in stone are also found beyond the Arctic Circle (albeit in a single copy): these are strict silhouettes of hunters and deer on the gray stones of the river. Pegtymel in Chukotka.
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