Ancient artists created giant camel engravings in the Arabian desert

Ancient inhabitants of the Arabian desert created monumental works of rock art on cliff faces, including life-sized images of camels, perhaps as a way to mark sources of water.

Michael Petraglia, at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues discovered 176 engravings on 62 panels in the Nefud desert in Saudi Arabia in 2023. There are 90 life-sized images of camels, another 15 smaller camel engravings and two camel footprints.

One of the rock art sites, featuring a 3-metre-tall dromedary, was more than 40 metres up the cliff and impossible for members of the team to safely reach and survey without deploying a drone.

“It would have been dangerous to make these engravings,” says Petraglia. “There’s no way I would go up there.”

Alongside the camels, and highlighting how much more benign the climate must have been, are other large animals including ibex, horses, gazelles and aurochs. The team also found engraved human figures and face masks.

“It’s not just doodling or marking the landscape,” says Petraglia. “These are engravings of things that would have been iconic for them culturally.”

The researchers say the images were possibly carved to warn any outsiders that the land was already occupied or to act as a signpost for ephemeral water sources. The new discoveries add to evidence of extensive past occupation of Saudi Arabia in prehistoric times.

Indicating the antiquity of the images, a natural varnish had formed over the engravings, a process that researchers know would have taken around 8000 years. However, it wasn’t possible to directly date the artwork, so the team excavated in the sediments under the rock art panels.

There, they found stone points, beads and ochres indicating links with Late Neolithic people in the Levant, as well as tools that would have been used to make the engravings. These objects were able to be dated and ranged in age from 12,800 to 11,400 years old.

Excavations were also undertaken in the small temporary lakes, called playas, near the engravings, which the ancient people would have relied on. Sediments and pollen records confirmed that the region would have been much wetter and greener.

But, even so, the environment was challenging and unlikely to be a place where people could settle and stay for long periods of time, says Petraglia.

“These were likely very mobile people and highly innovative,” he says. “These are sophisticated hunter-gatherers and definitely not people just sort of figuring it out.”

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