Ennedi, tales on stone. 1993-2017: Rock art in the Ennedi massif

N the last few decades, a surprisingly large variety of subjects and styles of rock art have been brought to light in northern Chad by scholars and passionate travellers. In the Ennedi region, relatively recent painted scenes of daily life occur, but also earlier human figures and rare events such as a leopard hunt. However, what is really characteristic of this region are the galloping mounted horses and camels, painted in original styles. Interestingly, the DStretch® plugin to ImageJ© has recently made it possible to see that in some cases the visible paintings are superimposed on older, faint images, very different in style and barely discernible to the naked eye. In some cases, paintings in an archaic style are revealed where just blurry spots appear on rocks. Farther to the east on the Ennedi plateau, the Niola Doa groups of intricately decorated human figures stand out as a superlative example of Saharan art. The focus of the volume is the most significant art, blended into the spectactular landforms of the region. We can only imagine the Ennedi landscape at the time the artists were decorating the rock surfaces with their pictograms and petroglyphs, but it must have been a sensational sight.