Schlagwort-Archive: cattle

New progress in the documentation of rock art in the MUAFS concession

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As rock art in Sudan continues to be one of my favourite research topics, I am very pleased that a new article of mine on the rock engravings of Kerma in the MUAFS concession has just been published and that one of the beautiful boulders with cattle depictions has also made it onto the front page of MittSAG 35!

In the paper “Cattle motifs in Nubian rock art of the Bronze Age – a preliminary update from Kosha, Mograkka and Ferka” (Budka 2024), my aim was to show the potential of the little-known rock art from the MUAFS concession, especially for the Kerma period. During this period, cattle motifs are particularly prevalent in rock art in Sudan.

Among other sites, I highlighted some aspects of the largest rock art cluster within the MUAFS concession, 3-P-5, located on the border between Mograkka and Kosha. This remarkable site comprises more than 400 individual rock carvings.

The rock art boulder which made it to the cover of the MittSAG is a prominent rock which shows human-animal interaction and is likely to be interpreted as a ‘pastoral scene’ (see Polkowski 2021). It was already documented by Vila in the 1970s (Vila 1976, 86, fig. 37.3). In various lines, with different styles and shapes of horns, not only cattle, but also birds (probably geese) as well as a goat, a possible calf (or another goat?) and a dog are depicted. Such scenes find plenty of parallels, especially in the Third and Fourth Cataract regions, for which I give the details in the article. It is reasonable to assume that this panel depicts the daily life of pastoralists. All in all, the important role that livestock, particularly cattle, played for people in the Kosha region – during the Bronze Age, but also later – is very clear at site 3-P-5.

In February 2025, I was very fortunate to be back in the Attab-Ferka region and had the chance to revisit the intriguing site 3-P-5. The aim was to test new ways of documentation of the rock art – introducing 3D scanning with the ultrafast, highly accurate mobile app Scaniverse – a tool, we have been using in Egypt and for our ceramics here in Munich in the past two years. 3D modelling in rock art research in general has made great progress worldwide in recent years – from standard image-based techniques to more sophisticated methods such as terrestrial 3D laser scanners. Given the situation in Sudan, where war is still raging, my focus was on testing the quality of an ultra-fast scanning technique.

The results of documenting rock art with Scaniverse were simply amazing – the app makes it possible to capture not only details, but above all the complete shape and position of the boulders. Larger areas were quickly captured with the iPad, smaller boulders and details are well suited to the smaller iPhones.

Here is a screenshot of the 3D scan of the panel that was first published by Vila in the 1970s, relocated by us in 2020, re-photographed and published in 2024, also becoming a cover star (see above), and now 3D scanned in 2025. The high-resolution scan allows extreme zooming in for details and you can measure every tiny detail.

This example shows very nicely the progress in the documentation of rock art in recent years and makes me very positive about the possibilities of tackling new relevant questions on this fascinating research topic in the near future.

References

Budka, J. 2024. Cattle motifs in Nubian rock art of the Bronze Age– a preliminary update from Kosha, Mograkka and Ferka, MittSAG – Der Antike Sudan 35, 9‒19.

Polkowski, P. L. 2021. “Cattle in the Nile Fourth Cataract rock art: the site of El-Gamamiya 67 as an example.” In Bayuda and its neighbours, ed. by A. Obłuski, H. Paner and M. Masojć, 71-91. Turnhout: Brepols.

Vila, A. 1976. La prospection archéologique de la Vallée du Nil, au Sud de la Cataracte de Dal (Nubie Soudanaise). Fascicule 4: District de Mograkka (Est et Ouest), District de Kosha (Est et Ouest). Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

Rock art from the MUAFS concession – preliminary thoughts on cattle depictions

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Rock art in Sudan has become one of my favourite topics ever since I worked in the Fourth Cataract region in the 2000s. Within the MUAFS concession between Attab and Ferka, there are not many sites with rock drawings. Unsurprisingly, rock art is restricted to certain areas with fitting geology and large boulders – in our concession these are the districts of Ferka, Mograkka and Kosha (Fig. 1). Close to Mograkka, one particularly handsome engraving was chosen as the basis for the MUAFS logo.

Fig. 1: Map with rock art sites located in the MUAFS concession (status 2020).

Some of these sites are located in close proximity to Kerma funerary sites. This holds especially true for 3-P-14 (Kosha West), 3-G-18 (Ferka East) and 3-P-5 (Kosha East).

3-G-18 is located on rocky outcrops within the large plain of Ferka and directly adjacent to the Kerma cemetery 3-G-16 (Fig. 2). Kerma cemetery 3-G-19 is also not far away. These sites are of particular interest because they are the northernmost Kerma sites in our concession.

Fig. 2: Map showing the close relations between Kerma cemetery 3-G-16 and rock art site 3-G-18.

The largest rock art site is located at the border between Mograkka and Kosha East, site 3-P-5, with more than 400 individual rock art pictures (Vila 1976, 79‒87). The motifs comprise mostly cattle, antelopes, some human depictions, birds, dogs and other animals (Figs. 3-4).

Fig. 3: Example of rock engravings in 3-P-5. Cattle is the most frequent motif.
Fig. 4: Example of rock engravings in 3-P-5. This boulder shows cattle, but also birds, humans and possibly a dog.

While Vila left the dating as unclear, most of the rock art pictures at 3-P-5 seem to belong to the Kerma period (Budka 2020). Similar to 3-G-18 in Ferka, there are Kerma sites in the close proximity to 3-P-5 which support this dating.

In all phases of the Kerma culture, the dominant motif of rock art is cattle. Of course this reflects the importance of cattle herding to Kerma people – some aspects of which were recently addressed by Jérôme Dubosson at one of our DiverseNile Seminar Series 2022. In the words by Louis Chaix: “Cattle are a key constituent element of the civilization of Kerma. They played a major role in the diet of the population and as a source of secondary products such as milk, hides, and raw materials for making tools. They also contributed to agriculture as traction animals.” (Chaix 2017). Within the DiverseNile project, we aim to address the local role of cattle for the Kerma people by means of a multidisciplinary approach, combining landscape archaeology with bioarchaeology and of course analysing all kinds of archaeological findings like animal bones, animal figurines and engraved figures of cattle in rock art.

Coming back to the question of rock art, the spatial proximity of rock art panels depicting cattle and Kerma funerary sites was already noted by Cornelia Kleinitz in the Fourth Cataract region (Kleinitz 2007). As tempting as it is to link these rock drawings with Kerma funerary cult, at the Fourth Cataract and also in the MUAFS concession, a precise dating of cattle depictions in rock art often remains impossible.

Nevertheless, we will soon be back in the field in Sudan – one of the goals for the 2023 season is to expand the documentation of rock art in our concession, with a special focus on possible Kerma sites. Contextualising rock art sites clearly has much potential for a closer understanding of their date and function.

References

Budka, Julia 2020. Kerma presence at Ginis East: the 2020 season of the Munich University Attab to Ferka survey project. Sudan & Nubia 24, 57-71.

Chaix, Louis 2017. Cattle: a major component of the Kerma culture (Sudan). Edited by Umberto Albarella, Mauro Rizzetto, Hannah Russ, Kim Vickers, and Sarah Viner-Daniels. Oxford Handbooks Online 2017 (April), 15 p.; 4 figs. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199686476.013.2

Kleinitz, Cornelia 2007. Rock art and archaeology: the Hadiab survey. Sudan & Nubia 11, 34-42

Vila, André 1976. La prospection archéologique de la Vallée du Nil, au Sud de la Cataracte de Dal (Nubie Soudanaise). Fascicule 4: District de Mograkka (Est et Ouest), District de Kosha (Est et Ouest). Paris.

Pastoralism in the Kingdom of Kerma: upcoming lecture

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I am delighted to announce that the DiverseNile Seminar Series 2022 continues after our short summer break. Next Tuesday, Sept 27, Jérôme Dubosson, Université de Neuchâtel, will talk about “Living and dying with livestock: Some thoughts on pastoralism in the Kingdom of Kerma during the 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE.”

Trained in archaeology and anthropology, Jérôme wrote his doctoral thesis on the cultural and social role of cattle among pastoralists in North East Africa. His interdisciplinary research aims to better understand the development of African pastoralism in time and space. Since 2007, Jérôme has been working with the Swiss Archaeological Mission in Kerma. He recently wrote the article “Cattle Cultures in Ancient Nubia” for the Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia (2021).

In this article, he gives a very useful overview of the ritual and cultural role of cattle in Nubian pre- and protohistoric societies according to archaeological findings like bucrania and engraved figures of cattle in rock art.

The question of the use of bucrania is also a very interesting one for our DiverseNile project. As Jérôme remarks, such deposits are mostly attested in the rich tombs in the main centres of the Kerma empire, at Kerma and Sai Island (Dubosson 2021). In marginal cemeteries of the Kerma kingdom, bucrania are rare and animal deposits are mainly found as meat offerings inside the grave. This also holds true for two of the Kerma cemeteries in our MUAFS concession, at Ferka (3-G-19) and Ginis (GiE 003) as well as for their closest parallels, the cemeteries of Ukma and Akasha in the Batn el-Haggar. Since all these marginal sites, especially GiE 003, find otherwise close parallels in the cemeteries at Sai, this really seems to relate to varying funerary customs in the hinterland of the northern Kerma stronghold.

There is much potential in further research on provincial Kerma cemeteries – as Carl Walsh recently pointed out in an inspiring article with an exciting fresh approach, social and funerary practices in the Kerma kingdom seem to reflect complex interactions between regions and communities in what can be called a “pastoral state” (Walsh 2022). We still know little about the internal structure of this state, but we should probably consider various hierarchical local responses determined by different communities’ ability to consume (cf. Lemos and Budka 2021). In this respect, the different roles of livestock within such marginal communities and regions – despite of a central value given to cattle – are of key interest.

For now, I am very much looking forwards to Jérôme’s upcoming lecture!

References

Dubosson 2021 = Dubosson, J., Cattle cultures in Nubia, in: Emberling, G. & Williams, B. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, Oxford 2021, 908-926, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190496272.013.48

Lemos and Budka 2021 = Lemos, R. and Budka, J., Alternatives to colonization and marginal identities in New Kingdom colonial Nubia (1550-1070 BCE), World Archaeology 53/3 (2021), 401-418, https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2021.1999853

Walsh 2022 = Walsh, C., Marginal communities and cooperative strategies in the Kerma pastoral state, JNEH 10 (2022), https://doi.org./10.1515/janeh-2021-0014