Palaeo-Ecology

Abstract

Climatic changes in the past in Egypt and Nubia have been referred to in chapter 2 and are taken up in greater detail in the subsequent pages on the Sudan. Sediments, human camp sites, including traces of vegetation and cultivation and food animals have been used to build up a picture of the biological past along the Nile Valley. Another source of possible information is contained in rock drawings. With some discretion these can be taken as man’s reaction to his environment and the fauna present. Winkler (1938, 1939) has published two volumes of ‘Rockdrawings of Southern Upper Egypt’. These were collected in two seasons of explorations (1936–1938) in the Eastern Desert at the latitude of Quena-Luxor, on the eastern and western side of the Nile Valley opposite Luxor, at Silwa, and at Hosh and Aswah. In the Western Desert, the Kharga and Dakhla oases and Gebel Uweinat supplied further material. Dunbar (1930) has collected some in Egyptian Nubia. Winkler has tried to allocate the signs, inscriptions and pictures, often superimposed, to a chronological sequence and to interpret the human development. He distinguishes several phases of these drawings from the oldest, made by the earliest hunters (probably of the late Palaeolithic, to the mainly tribal signs made by Arabs in the last 1,000 and more years. For our purposes only some main points relating to the fauna, as biological indicator, are mentioned.