Rock Art of South Oran (Algeria) - Interpretation

Interpretation

Henri Lhote identified among the south Oran engravings 41 images of rams or of sheep-like creatures, which is comparatively few in the sum of the representations, "especially as this figure includes small scale images and the uncertain ones of the decadent school." Their symbolic attributes (spheroids, manes, collars) remain very variable, in contrast to those of the Egyptian ram of Ammon, which was furnished right from the start with the symbols which it would always keep, one could claim, according to the author, that they had not yet been fixed in a definitive fashion and we find ourselves here looking at a cult which was just beginning to take form." The difference "shows, if it were still necessary to show, that the South Oranians had not adopted the cult from Egypt.

In 13 cases the engraved rams are associated with human figures. Analyzing their possible relations, the author's conclusion is "that the Ram played a religious role of first importance to the south-Oranians, that its association with man, though he may have been in a praying position, should have been armed with an axe, shows that it certainly had the character of a divinity which one would ask things of and which one might, on suitable occasions, sacrifice." This role, he adds, "is well attested in the two hartebeest stages of large and small scale, but disappears in the age of the decadent style where nothing of it remains except the mere vestige."

The representations of hartebeest, more numerous (73 for the region) and in 13 cases associated with the presence of a human, show despite the absence of the spheroid "which may have been the object of rites associating it with men," that it "held an eminent place in the beliefs of the ancient populations of the South Oranians. As for the lion, represented with facing head in the old hartebeest stage where it is only a single time associated with a man, but shown in profile in the decadent style where its associations with humans are on the contrary quite frequent, it seems to have replaced hartebeest and rams. One should be able, according to Lhote, "to interpret this phenomenon as a radical modification in the behaviour of south Oranians, a real change, unless it represents the arrival of new human populations."

For Henri Lhote, "the south Oran engravings are certainly among the oldest artistic and cultic manifestations of Africa which we know of, and the beliefs of which they are the reflection may perhaps have helped to influence the later populations of the Nile valley and of black Africa where animism was to undergo so great a development."