# Rock Engravings of the Tibesti (c. 5,500 BCE)

URL: https://allhistories.com/chad/timeline/-5500-rock-engravings-of-the-tibesti
Location: Gonoa, Tibesti
Themes: main-event

The Tibesti Mountains, rising to 3,415 metres at Emi Koussi, the highest point in the Sahara, received more rain than the surrounding lowlands during the African Humid Period. Their valleys held springs, pools and pasture, and they became one of the main centres of Saharan rock art. The oldest images are engravings pecked or polished into sandstone, depicting large wild animals such as elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, antelopes and cattle together with human figures. One of the best-known sites is Gonoa near Bardaï, where engravings were recorded by European explorers in the twentieth century. These works are undated by direct methods but are generally assigned by style to the early and middle Holocene, with later phases showing domestic cattle and, much later, horses and camels. The Tibesti engravings are a record of an environment that has vanished and of the people who lived in it. They also show the long continuity of human presence in the massif, which later became the homeland of the Teda branch of the Toubou. Remoteness and insecurity have limited research, and many sites remain poorly documented and vulnerable. At this point in the timeline (c. 5500 BC), no ruler is recorded for the lands of present-day Chad; the region was home to hominins, hunter-gatherers and later Saharan herders and fishing communities.

## Why it matters
Tibesti rock art documents the wild fauna and early inhabitants of the Green Sahara in Chad's highest mountains.

## Sources
- [Wikipedia — Tibesti Mountains](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibesti_Mountains)
- [Encyclopaedia Britannica — Tibesti](https://www.britannica.com/search?query=Tibesti)
- [Trust for African Rock Art](https://africanrockart.org/)
- [Wikipedia — Prehistory And The Green Sahara (period overview)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chad)