Saharan

Between roughly 9000 and 3500 BCE the Sahara was not a desert. Monsoon rains reached far north, and the region held lakes, rivers, grassland, and animals now found only far to the south — hippopotamus, crocodile, giraffe, elephant. The people who lived there left one of the largest bodies of prehistoric art in the world, painted and engraved on the sandstone of the central Saharan massifs: Tassili n'Ajjer in Algeria, the Tadrart Acacus across the border in Libya, and the Aïr and the Ennedi further south and east.

The art is not the work of one people. Researchers divide it into broad periods by subject and style — the Large Wild Fauna engravings, the Round Head paintings with their featureless, floating human figures, the Pastoral or Cattle period, then the Horse and Camel periods — and each was made by a different population living in a different climate. As the rains failed and the Sahara dried, the herds and their herders moved toward the Nile, the Sahel, and the Maghreb. The later periods carry inscriptions in Libyco-Berber script, the ancestor of the Tifinagh alphabet still used by the Tuareg.

What these images meant to the people who made them is not known. The masked and horned figures, the scenes of dance and gathering, and the figures that seem to float have been read as ritual, as spirit beings, or as trance experience; each reading is an interpretation, not a record. The directory treats them that way. Today the plateaus lie in the homeland of the Kel Ajjer Tuareg, who guide every visit, and several of the massifs are protected as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.