Stunning 12,000-year-old rock art emerges in Saudi Arabia

In the spring of 2023, at an isolated archaeological site in the Nafud Desert of northern Saudi Arabia, a day labourer named Saleh Idris stood beside a test trench, awaiting the next bucket of sediment to be sieved. But when he glanced up at the sandstone cliff before him, he was stunned by what he saw: A secret that had never been documented.

- Franz Lidz

Excavation of Trench 1 directly beneath a rock art panel at Jebel Arnaan, where an engraving tool was discovered.

(Sahout Rock Art and Archaeology Project via The New York Times)

A panel of weathered, two-dimensional carvings depicting 19 life-size camels and three donkeys was etched into the escarpment 130 feet above. The engravings, on the side of a mountain known as Jebel Misma, were later found to have been created between 11,400 and 12,800 years ago. They are the oldest large-scale naturalistic animal art ever found in the Middle East and are among the oldest in the world.

"We got really lucky with this discovery," said Maria Guagnin, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany who directed the field project. "The engravings are so faded that they are only visible for about 90 minutes in the morning, when the sun rises over the mountain and the light hits the rock art at just the right moment."

Guagnin is the lead author of a study published last month in the journal Nature Communications that helps to close a gap in the archaeological record for this region. The paper argues that freshwater sources such as water holes and seasonal lakes shaped early human settlement in the desert after the ice age.

Corroboration for this claim includes an analysis of the sediment at Jebel Misma and the discovery of artwork and chisel-like tools from the same era at two other previously unexcavated sites, Jebel Arnaan and Jebel Mleiha, within a 20-mile radius.