A life-sized, naturalistic camel engraving documented at Jebel Misma. Photo / Sahout Rock Art and Archaeology Project via The New York Times
In the spring of 2023, at an isolated archaeological site in the Nafud Desert of northern Saudi Arabia, a day labourer named Saleh Idris stood beside a test trench, awaiting the next bucket of sediment to be sieved.
When he glanced up at the sandstone cliff before him, he was stunned by what he saw: a secret that had never been documented.
A panel of weathered, two-dimensional carvings depicting 19 life-size camels and three donkeys was etched into the escarpment 40m above.
The engravings, on the side of a mountain known as Jebel Misma, were later found to have been created between 11,400 and 12,800 years ago.
They are the oldest large-scale naturalistic animal art ever found in the Middle East and are among the oldest in the world.
“We got really lucky with this discovery,” said Maria Guagnin, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany who directed the field project.
“The engravings are so faded that they are only visible for about 90 minutes in the morning, when the sun rises over the mountain and the light hits the rock art at just the right moment.”
Guagnin is the lead author of a study published yesterday in the journal Nature Communications that helps to close a gap in the archaeological record for this region.
The paper argues that freshwater sources such as water holes and seasonal lakes shaped early human settlement in the desert after the ice age.
Corroboration for this claim includes an analysis of the sediment at Jebel Misma and the discovery of artwork and chisel-like tools from the same era at two other previously unexcavated sites, Jebel Arnaan and Jebel Mleiha, within a 32km radius.
“I was amazed at the find of actual engraving tools,” said Meinrat Andreae, a biogeochemist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry.
“How cool is it that you can hold the actual tools in your hand, which the Neolithic artists used?”
Guillaume Charloux, an archaeologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris, concurred.
“Our understanding of prehistoric art in the Arabian Peninsula is profoundly transformed,” he said.
“These representations are now potentially contemporary with the peak of cave art in Western Europe.”
While Saudi Arabia is well known for its monumental stone structures from the Neolithic period, which lasted from 10,000 BC to 2200 BC, and later, knowledge of the area’s earlier history remains limited.
“This paper provides evidence suggesting that people were not only in northern Arabia 12,000 years ago but were creating complex rock art and producing tools suggestive of contact with the Levant,” said Hugh Thomas, an archaeologist at the University of Sydney who was not involved with the project.
Carvings cited in the study offer a glimpse into forgotten cultures that coexisted with wild camels and donkeys.
The 176 petroglyphs reveal what appears to modern eyes as a vibrant cast of characters, but which the artists may have viewed as dinner; besides camels and donkeys their menu would have included ibex, horses, gazelles, and aurochs.
The etchings predominantly feature male camels in their rutting season, which runs from November to March.
This is apparent from their visibly swollen necks and bellies and the thicker, winter-weight coats they had not yet shed.
Guagnin noted that a camel’s breeding season generally aligns with the rainy or cooler months, since the increased availability of food and water during this period supports camels’ reproductive cycles and the survival of their offspring.
“So even if you move them to a different area, their mating season will recalibrate to the wet period,” she said.
All the camels in the carvings would have been feral, since dromedaries were domesticated in the Arabian Peninsula only later, roughly 3200 years ago.
The excavation also yielded 532 stone tools, which share features with those of other ancient Middle Eastern cultures.
Researchers are cautious about concluding that the same group created both the tools and the nearby rock art.
Jebel Misma is about 300km from Sahout, a site sometimes called Camel Rock, where in 2018 archaeologists began investigating a series of 21 life-size camel and equine sculptures cut into the sandstone spurs.
Portable X-ray fluorescence measurements of the rock patina originally suggested that the camel reliefs were about 7600 years old, but new research indicates this was just a later touch-up; the original artwork is much older.
In contrast to Sahout, which may have been a rest stop or a place of worship, the cluster of camel carvings in the new study is believed to have a different function: to mark water sources and travel routes.
Ceri Shipton, an archaeologist at University College London who collaborated on the study, speculated that the works also denote “territorial rights and intergenerational memory”.
Instead of being tucked away in crevices as with other sites, the three locations in the paper feature panels carved prominently on boulders or high, commanding cliff faces.
The panel that Idris, the day labourer, spotted would have required ancient artists to work precariously on narrow ledges without the benefit of scaffolding, underscoring the immense effort and significance of the imagery.
“I’m guessing that the adrenaline of the carvers was high, because one step backward and your camel does not get finished,” Guagnin said.
“There is maybe some street cred that comes from having your handiwork displayed in a really difficult location.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Franz Lidz
Photographs by: Sahout Rock Art and Archaeology Project, Guagnin et al., Nature Communications, 2025, via The New York Times
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