Palimpsests of a lost paradise
Two Paris exhibitions reveal the variety and multi-layered history of the Algerian Sahara, writes David Tresilian
With more than 80 per cent of its land area covered by desert, visitors to Algeria have traditionally confined themselves to the country's coastal regions. Yet, as twin exhibitions on the Algerian Sahara in Paris confirm, the desert, though inhospitable, is not uniform, and it contains the remains of some of Africa's oldest cultures, making parts of it at least a kind of vast museum open to the sky.
The two exhibitions, "Tassili d'Algérie -- Mémoires de pierre" at the Musée de l'homme and "Saharas d'Algérie" at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, present the prehistoric rock paintings and engravings from the Tassili n'Ajjer area of the Algerian Sahara near the country's borders with Libya and Niger, placing them in the context of the Sahara as a whole.
Tassili means plateau in tamahaq, the language of the local Touareg people, and the Tassili n'Ajjer is one of two vast desert plateaux in the south-east of Algeria, the other being the nearby Tassili Hoggar, containing one of the most important groupings of prehistoric rock art in the world and recording the climatic changes, animal migrations and development of human life in the Sahara from around 6,000 BC to the first centuries of the present era.
The rock images, thought to number some 15,000, were discovered in the early 20th century by French archaeologists working in Algeria, and they were first displayed outside Algeria in 1958 at a Paris exhibition of full-size copies made by archaeologist Henri Lhote, according to André Malraux "one of the most striking exhibitions of the half century". The present exhibition presents a selection from these copies, starting with rock engravings from the so-called "bubaline" period around 6,000 BC, which show animals that are now confined to more southerly temperate zones of Africa, such as elephants, giraffes and rhinoceros, indicating that at this early date this now extremely arid area would have enjoyed a quite different climate. Later images, and those most beautifully copied by Lhote and his team, are the rock paintings from the "round head" and "bovidian" periods, that show human figures and animals painted in strong, dark colours, often in bizarre and impossible arrangements.
The earliest of these paintings from the "round head" period, so-called because of the human figures' rounded heads which are geometrically decorated but without features, show early agriculture and animal husbandry, again featuring elephants, giraffes and early domesticated animals. The human figures, in dark ochre with pointillist decoration, float above and within such scenes, some of them being as much as six metres long and surrounded by other floating or "swimming" figures in attitudes that are sometimes difficult to interpret. Later paintings adopt a more naturalistic style, showing scenes of daily life, as well as scenes showing animal husbandry and herds of cows and other animals. At this time the Saharan climate would have been humid but not tropical, ideally suited to this type of husbandry and similar to that found in parts of sub-Saharan Africa today. From 4,000 BC on the climate became progressively more arid, with desertification pushing the local populations further south, and later paintings record the introduction of the horse into the region around 2,000 BC, and finally of the camel in around 200 BC.
These final images, called "cameline" because of their subject matter, record the beginnings of the nomadic lifestyle associated with today's Touareg populations in Algeria, Mali and Niger, as increasing desertification and the disappearance of previous eco-systems favoured the development of regional trading caravans and nomadism. Camels, now associated firmly with north Africa in the popular imagination, originated in Central Asia, but they swiftly proved their worth in the now arid Sahara. Such images, the exhibition suggests, superimposed on those drawn or painted thousands of years earlier, still preserve the memory of an earlier Sahara of animal and vegetable abundance, the tropical climate then supporting what was later to become something of a "lost paradise".
"Saharas d'Algérie", the parallel exhibition at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, across Paris at the Jardin des plantes, explains the geography and animal and human populations of the present Algerian Sahara, drawing attention not only to the region's geographical diversity, with its vast reg and hamada, rocky plateaux uniform in every direction as far as the eye can see, erg, or sand seas, tassili and scattered oases, but also to its different human populations and how these have adapted themselves to the harsh environmental conditions. The exhibition focusses on the Algerian Touareg, former nomads now mostly settled around Tamanrasset to the south of the Tassili n'Ajjer plateau and in Djanet, the nearest settlement to it. Called Kel-Tagoulmoust, or the "veiled people", on account of elaborate turbans worn to protect themselves from the heat, the Touareg have now found a new role as guides to the growing numbers of tourists visiting Tassili n'Ajjer and Tassili Hoggar, both Algerian national parks.
Saharas d'Algérie also presents materials on the desert's many oases, the best known of which for foreign visitors is still likely to be Biskra in the north, described by André Gide in his novel L'Immoraliste. Gide, like most of his contemporaries, did not venture to the oasis settlements further south, which include the M'Zab Valley, 400km directly south of Algiers, classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site along with the Tassili n'Ajjer plateau. This oasis, containing seven towns, among them the fortified city of Béni Isguen founded in the 11th century, would once have played a significant role as a staging post on caravan routes across the Sahara and from sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean. Today, the Sahara's main product is not dates but oil and gas, and immense pipelines run from the gas field of Hassi R'Mel, north of M'Zeb and one of the largest in the world, to the Mediterranean coast from where gas is shipped to Europe. An asphalt road has linked Algiers to Tamanrasset since 1978, and more recently a similar road has reached Djanet, leading the Touareg to abandon their camels for lorries.
It is a matter for regret that the Musée de l'homme exhibition, presenting the splendid copies made by Lhote of the Tassili n'Ajjer rock paintings to the public for the first time since 1958, has been able to present so few of them: according to exhibition material Lhote made hundreds of such copies, but only a handful of these are on display. More distressing still, however, is the condition of the palais de Chaillot itself, now a fast-deteriorating and empty shell following the removal of the museum's collections to the Louvre prior to the opening of the new Musée des arts premiers on the Quai Branly in 2005.
The future of this landmark building on the place du Trocadéro is apparently under debate. But at present its condition makes a depressing introduction to an otherwise fascinating exhibition.
"Tassili d'Algérie: Mémoires de pierre", Musée de l'homme, palais de Chaillot, Paris. 21 May 2003 to 5 January 2004; "Saharas d'Algérie, les paradis inattendus", Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Jardin des plantes, Paris. 30 April to 12 October 2003.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 10 - 16 July 2003 (Issue No. 646)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/646/cu4.htm