Tadrart Acacus
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- In the Uan Muhuggiag rock shelter archaeologists found the mummy of a boy about two and a half years old, thought to predate the earliest Egyptian mummies.
- The child had been eviscerated, curled into a foetal position and wrapped in antelope skin insulated with leaves, wearing an ostrich-eggshell necklace.
- The mummy was discovered in 1958 by the Italian archaeologist Fabrizio Mori of the University of Rome and is now kept in Tripoli.
- Uan Muhuggiag alone has more than 100 paintings on its walls and ceiling, many in the so-called Round Head style with large featureless heads.
- One painting shows a boat full of people with one figure upside down, which Mori interpreted as a dead person.
- The Takarkori rock shelter yielded the first ancient DNA ever recovered from the Sahara, from two naturally mummified women.
- A 2025 genetic study found that the Takarkori women descended mostly from a previously unknown North African lineage.
- Pottery from Takarkori and nearby Uan Afuda carries the world's earliest evidence of plants being cooked in pots, dated to about 8200 to 6400 BC.
- Woven baskets from Takarkori survive in at least eight different twining techniques, a rare find since fibre usually decays.
- Fish bones are the most common animal remains from Takarkori's early layers, showing that people once fished in lakes that vanished around 5000 years ago.
Why it is worth it
In the far south-west of Libya, close to the Algerian border, a range of dark sandstone rises out of the Sahara and stretches north for about 100 km. The Tadrart Acacus — "tadrart" is the Berber word for mountain — is a landscape of arches, gorges, isolated towers of rock and deep wadis, with dunes of different colours banked against the cliffs. Its rock shelters hold one of the richest bodies of prehistoric art in Africa, and since 1985 the rock-art sites have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The paintings and engravings span an extraordinary stretch of time, from around 12,000 BCE to the first century CE, and they record the transformation of the Sahara itself. Elephants, giraffes and ostriches — animals of a wetter Sahara, when lakes and grassland covered what is now desert — share the rock with horses and camels, and the changing cast of animals mirrors the slow drying of the land. People appear everywhere, in scenes of daily life, making music and dancing. Archaeologists divide the human story of the range into three phases: the Early Acacus, when small mobile groups lived by the valleys and lowland lakes; the Late Acacus, a drier period with larger, more settled groups who ground and stored wild grain and made pottery; and the Pastoral Neolithic, when domesticated animals arrived, by around 7000 years ago. Pottery from the Acacus also carries the earliest known traces of processed milk fats, dated to about 7,500 years ago.
Despite its extreme aridity, the range is not lifeless: there are springs and wells among the rocks and plants such as the medicinal Calotropis procera. Among its best-known natural landmarks are the rock arches of Afzejare and Tin Khlega.Rain, wind and sand have shaped the soft sandstone into the arches and pinnacles that frame the painted shelters, so that the art and the landscape are seen together.
Getting there
The Acacus rises east of the town of Ghat, the main centre of the district. Ghat Airport (GHT), about 18 km north of the town, has flights to Tripoli; the nearest airport by straight line, Tiska Djanet (DJG), is in Algeria, across a border. The nearest larger Libyan airport is Sabha (SEB), about 480 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Acacus Mountains or Tadrart Akakus form a mountain range in the desert of the Ghat District in western Libya, part of the Sahara. They are situated east of the city of Ghat, Libya, and stretch north from the border with Algeria, about 100 kilometres (62 mi). The area has a particularly rich array of prehistoric rock art.
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