The rock engravings of Oued Djerat, located in the Tassili n'Ajjer, Algeria, and dated to the Neolithic period, have many affinities with those of the South Oranese (Algeria) and the Fezzan (Libya). According to Henri Lhote, they date back more than 7000 years. He estimated that they comprise more than 4,000 drawings. In terms of subject matter, many depictions feature large game animals found today in East Africa. Domestic animals include sheep, goats, and oxen. Depictions of humans reveal information about their clothing and hairstyles. In the Bubaline period, war scenes are absent and hunting scenes are rare. In contrast, sexual scenes are numerous in several periods.
History It seems, writes Henri Lhote, that the engravings of Oued Djerat "have been known for a long time and have been reported to the explorer F. Foureau, during his expedition of 1892–1893 ". In 1932, Lieutenant Brenans made a survey of a certain number of them that he sent to Maurice Reygasse, then curator of the Bardo Museum in Algiers. During the winter of 1934 the professors Émile Félix Gautier and M. Reygasse studied them and published several notes shortly afterwards. Amazed by his great naturalist engravings, he nicknamed the Oued Djerat "the Vézère of the Sahara". The same year, in November, Henri Lhote accompanied the geographer R. Perret. During the winter 1935 M. Reygasse returned to Oued Djerat, accompanied by the painter Rigal who executed some engravings and paintings. After having raised the paintings of Tassili in 1956–1957, Henri Lhote, encouraged by the General de Gaulle and several ministers, undertakes in 1959, at the head of a team of five people to which several Tuareg collaborators are added, to make an inventory of the engravings of Oued Djerat (which he will see again in 1969 and 1970). Not only did he make surveys and photographs of them, but he also made about sixty casts (liquid latex and siccative). The repertory that he published in 1976 describes 73 stations (numbered by going down the wadi) and includes 2605 figures from different periods. The author, specifying that there are several missing panels that were not numbered, estimates that in total the number of engravings "certainly exceeds 4000". "This figure, exceptional for a single valley and over such a short distance, shows the remarkable character of the wadi Djerat," he concludes. The Lhote expedition was exceptional by the information it was able to provide, by the endurance of its members in the face of difficult living conditions in the Tassili. However, the brutal methods used at the time by the Lhote team (wetting with a wet sponge, scribbling with charcoal) have destroyed in some places the biological information that would have allowed them to be dated. Today, some paintings are falling apart because of the frequent wetting of the visitors.
Localization
The Djerat wadi is a cañon dug in the Tassili siluro-devonian sandstones which runs between very steep cliffs. It flows into the valley of Illizi, about a hundred kilometers from the Libyan border. The wadi is on average 200 meters wide, its cliffs varying from 25 to 30 meters high at the outlet, reaching 150 meters towards the palm grove of Nafeg and reducing towards its sources. It receives many tributaries, including the wadis Afar and Assahor, which provide a large volume of water at the time of rains. The two banks of the wadi are covered with engravings over a distance, according to the maps published by Lhote in his work, of nearly twenty kilometers. They are located on the upper terraces of the wadi, on the vertical walls of fallen blocks, most often on the horizontal surface of rocks in place. Being placed at a height of 8 to 12 meters above the lower terrace, the flood level does not reach them. The research carried out at the foot of the engravings gave no clues as to the polishing process and the tools used, which, given the diversity of the widths and depths of the gutters, must not have been of a single type.
Classification These engravings belong to several periods. Lhote, relying on the differences in the patinas and the techniques of the line, resumes his classification in four periods elaborated from the documents studied in the central Sahara, applied to the rock engravings of the South-Oranese by introducing complementary sub-stages, then extended to those of the Moroccan South and of the Rio de Oro, to the engravings of the South-Algerian and the South-Constantinois, as to those of Fezzan. Lhote thus distinguishes four periods for the engravings of the oued Djerat.
The Bubalus or Bubaline period
According to Lhote, 1060 engravings can be related to the period of Bubalus antiquus, most often of large size. Their outline is generally polished (in a lowered U-shape), but sometimes in a V-shape or simply staked, and their patina is very dark. If some subjects are depicted below their natural size, others are life-size, if not above, and it is rare that the representations measure less than one meter. Lhote cites a dozen cases in which the image was supplemented by a mediocre copy that seems to be contemporary with it. The style is on the whole naturalistic but some animals (giraffes) may be schematized. In sixteen cases the diocular formula (eyes placed one above the other) is used, as in certain engravings of the South Oranese: one can suppose according to the author that they reflect "what there is of more ancient in Djerat". The varieties of styles that remain difficult to place in chronological order "seem to correspond to a very long duration of the bubaline period during which changes in lifestyle must have occurred," writes Lhote. For him, the Oxen only appeared in a second period and the "women with spread legs" in a terminal period. Since the work of Lhote, it appeared that the notion of a so-called "period" of the Bubalus, also called "Bubalin" and which would be prior to the Bovidian, does not correspond to reality, because the Bubalus is one of the styles of engravings of the Bovidian, as demonstrated by Alfred Muzzolini in the early 1980s, in work that has been amply confirmed since.
The period of the Bovidian Pastoralists or Bovidian period
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