The Ancient Men
The Enigmatic and Mysterious Tassili n’Ajjer Plateau
The enigmatic and mysterious Tassili n’Ajjer Plateau, whose name in the Tamahag language means plateau of rivers, surpasses all possible imagination.
It is a vast sandstone plateau from which secondary massifs and eroded cliffs rise, marked by deep gorges where remnants of primitive populations have been found—people who did not vanish without leaving behind testimony of their existence.
Its highest point is Adrar Afao, reaching 2,158 meters. The nearest town is Djanet, located about 10 kilometers to the southwest.
Much of Tassili n’Ajjer is a protected area, both for its natural significance—home to desert cypress forests—and for its archaeological importance.
It is classified as a National Park, a Biosphere Reserve, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site for both its natural and cultural value.
Here we find the greatest open-air museum of prehistoric art on Earth, images of extraordinary quality, though at constant risk of vanishing forever.
The region resembles a lunar landscape. Henri Lhote described it as:
“The deformed and the fantastic contours resemble ruined granaries, castles of crumbling towers, giants decapitated in attitudes of supplication. Crossing that labyrinth, where sandy-floored gorges crisscross, as narrow as medieval alleyways, one feels transported to a nightmare city.”
But what, ultimately, is Tassili? The plateau has existed since immemorial times. As for the rivers—that is another story.
The massif, stretching 800 kilometers long and 60 wide, varies greatly from one area to another. Countless canyons have been carved by water, deeper the further they are from the ridges. Yet the work of water did not end there: the entire massif has been sculpted by it. The force of the waters shattered the stone, chiseling it into astonishing shapes, collapsing it, piercing it, and sometimes transforming enormous rock masses into delicate lace-like patterns.
Water? In a land where it almost never rains?
Tamrit: The First Rock-Art Station
At Tamrit, we find the first station of rock paintings.
In the maze of rocky corridors, paintings appear everywhere, leading finally to a small valley unlike any other.
The entire place is dotted with taruts—magnificent trees botanists call Cupressus dupreziana, known in Europe simply as cypresses.
These cypresses are among the rarest curiosities of the Sahara. The Valley of the Cypresses in Tamrit ends abruptly in the most impressive canyon of the Tassili Plateau—600 meters of vertical drop where once a colossal waterfall must have roared. The canyon walls are decorated with large herds of cattle painted in white and ochre.
Sixty-five oxen march together, led by their herders. After exploring Tan Zumaitak and Tamir, Henri Lhote and his team turned to the small massif of Jabbaren.
“When you see Jabbaren,” his old companion Brenans had told him,
“you will be left speechless.”
And he had not exaggerated. Jabbaren, in the Tuareg language, means giants. Here we encounter the monumental “round-headed figures,” painted on an immense and bewildering scale.
Lhote wrote:
“When we found ourselves among the sandstone domes that looked like black villages of round huts, we could not suppress a gesture of admiration.”
This area resembles a small city, with its streets and urban-like structures. All the walls are covered with representations of these beings—large-scale images painted between 7,500 and 8,000 BC.
The Art and the People of Tassili
The people of Tassili had a sense of decoration and, without a doubt, knew how to paint. But why did they paint?
In general, prehistoric art is believed to be inspired by magical practices—born, in short, from religion. Yet this rule does not fully apply here, since many of the subjects painted or engraved lack any mystical connotation and seem instead to be pure creations of the imagination.
The artists’ favorite subject was the bull. Thousands of them appear on the walls, almost always life-sized, herded by their keepers. These bulls are rendered with striking artistic quality, drawn directly from nature, with meticulous attention to detail—horns, ears, hooves, and tails carefully depicted.
Curiously, these prehistoric artists engraved figures before painting them. Human figures, clothed in varied garments, are depicted with rounded forms, full of grace and balance.
Their postures primarily reflect movement—shooting arrows in hunts, charging in combat, or gathered in dance scenes.
Everyday life is also represented: domestic tasks, vibrant depictions of private life. They lived in conical huts, rode on cattle, carried women on the backs of oxen, and based their economy on livestock.
Physical types were diverse, suggesting that different races coexisted. The variety of clothing—from long tunics to short loincloths or woven garments—supports this idea. Still, the Ethiopian profile was the most common.
The Tuareg, masters of the desert and rocky plateaus, have always acknowledged that they were not the first inhabitants of this land. Cemeteries, isolated tombs on plateaus and terraces, rock paintings, and flint arrowheads scattered across ancient workshops remain as traces of the Kel Iru—the “ancient men,” also called Ijjabaren.
In fossilized tree trunks, skeletons of Ijjabaren warriors have been found, bearing the wounds that caused their deaths still marked on the wood.
These Kel Iru were said to be of gigantic stature, digging for water with their bare hands, raising dunes of sand as they extracted soil from the desert. Today, the Tuareg still re-excavate these ancient wells, which continue to guide them to water.
Ancient Testimonies
Herodotus, writing in the 6th century BC, stated:
“The Garamantes, Libyan Berbers of Fezzan devoted to herding, used to raid the Ethiopians with four-horse chariots.”
This account is confirmed by numerous rock paintings depicting horse-drawn chariots, especially along two main routes leading to the great bend of the Niger River—one starting in Fezzan, the other in southern Morocco.
These routes validate the historical role of Lixus and Leptis Magna, corresponding to the two main caravan paths of antiquity.
Since wheeled chariots were later replaced in the Sahara by camels, these paintings clearly date to an earlier era, corroborating Herodotus’ words and evidencing regular contact between the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa from at least the 5th century BC.
Those who sustained this contact were, without a doubt, the desert Berbers, herders long before Mediterranean civilizations emerged.
In addition to pastoral connections between northern and southern peoples, long-distance trade must have flourished. Later, as the Sahara underwent desertification, the Mediterranean north became isolated from sub-Saharan peoples—an isolation that negatively affected Africa’s development.
Thus, Neolithic populations who lived in the Sahara during humid periods became dispersed, much like today’s scattered desert communities.
Written by:
Abdurrahman Jiménez