Wadi Mathendous
Interesting facts
- The German explorer Heinrich Barth found these engravings in 1850, as the first European to cross the Messak plateau from east to west.
- The ethnologist Leo Frobenius made the first systematic study of the valley's rock art during his 1932 expedition.
- A 2015 Cambridge study found the Messak strewn with an average of 75 stone artefacts per square metre, calling it the earliest known human-scarred landscape.
- Beside the great animals, the walls show therianthropes, figures that mix human and animal features, as well as later horses and camels.
- Many engraved surfaces carry a dark desert varnish only micrometres thick, rich in iron and manganese oxides.
- The valley lies about 150 km south-west of Germa, the ancient capital of the Garamantes.
- The Messak plateau itself runs for about 350 km with an average width of some 60 km.
- Henri Lhote's five-period scheme for Saharan rock art, which gave the Bubaline period its name, has since been strongly challenged by researchers such as Jean-Loïc Le Quellec.
Why it is worth it
Deep in the Libyan Sahara, the Messak Settafet — a dark sandstone plateau rising between the Ubari and Murzuq sand seas — is cut by dry valleys whose walls carry some of the finest prehistoric engravings in Africa. Wadi Mathendous is the most celebrated of them. Along its rocky banks, hunters and herders of a green Sahara carved the animals of a landscape that no longer exists: elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, crocodiles, wild asses, great cats, and the extinct long-horned buffalo that gave its name to the so-called Bubaline period of Saharan rock art.
What sets Mathendous apart is scale and assurance. The figures are cut in deep, confident lines and polished grooves, often life-size or nearly so — one elephant runs to about 2.65 metres, and a crocodile's tail alone stretches over two metres. The human figures beside them are tiny by comparison, a disproportion that has prompted much speculation about what these beasts meant to those who carved them. The engravings are generally attributed to the Neolithic, broadly between ten and eight thousand years ago, when lakes and grasslands covered what is now stone desert. Look for the celebrated scene known as the "fighting cats", and for the fragments of petrified wood scattered across the plateau, relics of the same vanished savanna.
The setting is part of the experience. The wadi is a rocky valley in open desert, far from any settlement; the engravings are found by walking the ledges and looking closely as the sun moves, since a raking light brings out lines invisible at noon. Libya honoured the site with a set of five postage stamps in 1978, and it remains one of the reference points for anyone interested in the rock art of the central Sahara.
Getting there
Wadi Mathendous lies in the remote south-west Fezzan, roughly 110 km in a straight line from Ubari and well over 100 km south-west of the oasis of Germa, the usual starting point. Sabha Airport (SEB) is about 265 km away. There is no road to the site: the approach is by four-wheel drive across the desert with experienced local drivers, normally as part of an organised expedition to the Messak.
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From the encyclopaedia
Wadi Mathendous is a prehistoric archaeological site in the Mesak Settafet escarpment, located in the southwestern Fezzan region in Libya. It contains many petroglyphs of figures and objects, as well as other rock art. The chiseled animals include elephants, giraffes, aurochs, wildcats, and crocodiles. These rock engravings and cave paintings have been dated to the Neolithic period, around 6000 BC.
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