Rock Art Research

The author has previously reviewed the animal petroglyphs in the Eastern Desert of Egypt which appear to represent giraffes. In the present paper attention is turned to images of ‘cattle’. Style and location are analysed with particular reference to specific images which are unique or nearly so to the region, occurring only very rarely elsewhere in north-east Africa. It is argued that the images relate in some way to the domestication of cattle, that some of them are contemporaneous with the Old Kingdom of the third millennium B.C.E., and that they constitute one of the roots from which the classical Egyptian artistic tradition sprang.