Ancient street art: 10 most beautiful and unusual petroglyphs (11 photos)

There are about 20,000 petroglyphs on Earth - carved in stone images. They and the rock paintings are the oldest that have come down to us. art forms. Some of them have been known since antiquity, some hid from view for thousands of years and were only recently found.





Why did the Indians of six different tribes come to this rock in the west of modern USA and carved drawings, unknown. They did this even before they met with white people, and after (this is indicated by the images horse riders). Now this place is called Newspaper Stone (Newspaper Rock), Utah.

In the language of the Navajo Indians, the name of this place means "a stone that tells stories." Total carved into the rock over 650 images - mostly people and animals. Sometimes there are also abstract symbols. The first drawing was carved into the rock about 2000 years ago.



First images along the shore of the fjord in Tanum, Sweden, were made 3800 years ago. In the Bronze Age (however, as now) the population of this territory was very fond of boats. They were drawn: out of more than 1000 drawings, the most a common motif is a boat and people in it.





To touch the ancient street art, it is not necessary to go to the Indians or the Swedes; you can, for example, bypass the surroundings of Lake Onega. Archaeologists believe that the Onega petroglyphs outline a giant sanctuary with a common area around 20 kilometers: its walls were cliffs, and the dome is the sky.

So far, far from all Onega petroglyphs: they hide in mosses and lichens and disappear over time, so chances are that you can discover new drawings.



Carved in stone during shamanic rituals, the stone beasts of Twyfelfontein in Namibia are older than all those listed above the petroglyphs: they were made about 6000 years ago. Here there are giraffes, rhinos, antelopes, zebras, lions, elephants, and people depicted with a bow and arrows. Total stone age artists left about 2500 drawings on this mountain.



If you drive 700 kilometers along the Chuisky tract, you can find the largest collection of petroglyphs in Siberia. It is located in the Kalbak-Tash tract in Altai. Drawings on the rocks there left by the people of the Stone Age, and the Scythians, and the Turks (the latter also wrote letters on the stone).



These creepy eyes have been staring for 10,000 years from the rocks of what is now British Columbia In Canada.



The Tassili-n-Ajer plateau resembles the landscapes of Tatooine, but Arab guides know where to find rocks in the desert with delicate figures of prehistoric hunters dating back to 4 millennium BC.



Petroglyphs of Lake Kanozero in the Murmansk region were discovered only in 1997, although tourists walked past these rocks decades, leaving more modern drawings and inscriptions. Now the famous "crocodiles of the Kola Peninsula" were covered with a glass dome. Anyone can admire the three-thousand-year-old images.



This is not a late Picasso, this is the work of prehistoric tribes, ancestors of the Indians of Patagonia. In the Cueva de las Manos cave (“Cave of Hands”) in Argentina, many boyish left hand prints. Scholars believe that leaving imprint was part of the initiation rite.

Strictly speaking, hands and other images from Cueva de las Manos are not petroglyphs, and petrograms, because they are drawn on a stone, and not carved in it. But we included the cave in this list, because it is no worse than petroglyphs allows you to see the creations of the hands of people who lived thousands of years before us.



Images carved in stone meet and beyond the Arctic Circle (albeit in a single copy): these are strict silhouettes of hunters and deer on gray stones Pegtymel in Chukotka.