Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

POSTSCRIPT
DISCOVERY OF THE KIFAH CAVE
On November 26, 2010, while this book was receiving the final editing at our publisher, we got news from Mark Borda
(the Maltese desert explorer who back in 2007 had found the hieroglyphic inscriptions at Jebel Uwainat) that he had just
returned from one of his daring solo expeditions in the Sahara and had made a new and stunning discovery, this time at
Jebel Arkenu, the “sister-mountain” of Jebel Uwainat (located within the Libyan border some 50 kilometers northwest of
Uwainat): a massive prehistoric rock-art site, perhaps the largest known in Libya!
The reader will note that the main events discussed in our book occurred in the vast eastern segment of the Sahara
Desert known as the Libyan Desert. The area is bounded on the west by various mountain ranges that extend down the
center of Libya, in the east by the River Nile, in the north by the Mediterranean Sea, and in the south by the Tibesti and
Ennedi mountains. Measuring some 1,100,000 square kilometers, this area is ten times dryer than the rest of the Sahara
and is the world’s largest hyper arid hot desert. Harsh, inhospitable, and waterless, its dune belts, sand sheets, bare rocky
plateaus, and mountains are almost completely void of life of any kind, and the little of it that exists is mostly
concentrated into a handful of oasis scattered throughout the region. The reader will also recall that in the early to mid-
Holocene period (roughly ten to five thousand years ago) the picture was very different. The area was relatively moist
with plants, wild animals, and human settlements in considerable abundance.
Today this vast area is teeming with prehistoric remains that date from this period. The Sahara has long been noted
for its rock art, primarily in the more accessible and thus more explored Western Sahara. But in recent years a handful of
modern-day explorers, equipped with GPS devices and satellite maps are now also penetrating the less accessible wastes
of the Eastern Sahara. From their numerous discoveries over the past ten years it now appears that the area contains an
immensely rich treasure trove of prehistoric paintings, engravings, and other archaeological remains, ranking it as one of
the most important rock-art regions in the world. The distinctively different rock-art styles at the various sites, without
the need for tedious and lengthy archaeological excavations, immediately impart a wealth of information about the
distribution and movements of the ancient cultures that created them. The ever-growing inventory of sites is gradually
building up a map that is revealing the geographical extent of the areas occupied in various ages. It is hoped that more
detailed scientific investigation of the rock-art sites will eventually establish the chronological movements of the various
groups of people as their populations expanded, contracted, mixed, and migrated, and thus providing a clearer picture of
why, how, and when these mysterious desert people impacted the area of the Nile Valley and the later Pharaonic
civilization. These discoveries, therefore, have a direct bearing on the various themes discussed in our book.
The “Kifah Cave” is a most dramatic and impressive example of these ongoing recent discoveries and was found by
Borda in a previously unexplored area of Mount Arkenu. Mr. Borda, who, as we have seen, had already impressed the
archaeological world in 2007 by finding Pharaonic hieroglyphs at Jebel Uwainat, the “sister mountain” of Arkenu, found
the cave on the morning of November 13, 2010, while exploring the chasms and spires of the much broken sandstone
plateau that straddles the northeast of Arkenu. The cave, which is 28 meters wide and only a little more than a meter high
at the opening, has the appearance of a horizontal slit sitting atop a series of ledges at the base of a cliff face. The Kifah
cave is the most conspicuous of a group of shelters that attracted Borda’s attention from a considerable distance. Being
on the highest part of the ridge, where the shelters are located, the Kifah site was one of the last he inspected. The shelters
lower down had proved to contain some rock paintings but in spite of the large size of these shelters, as well as the good
headroom, light conditions, and ideal and ample rock surfaces on the ceiling, the rock art there consisted only of three
cows and a single human figure. Based on this, Borda did not hold much expectations of finding anything more
substantial as he proceeded farther up the ridge. When he got onto the final ledge, he could see from a distance of about
20 meters many dark markings on the ceiling of the cave, and within a few moments he was stunned to note that across
its entire width, the shelter was filled with painted rock art! His immediate reaction was one of astonishment at the
existence of such a large site at Arkenu, mixed with wonderment at the quality and details of the paintings he was seeing!
Borda describes the paintings in the Kifah cave as being from “the Uweinat Pastoralist period.” It is concentrated in
the front ceiling area of the cave to a depth of around 4 meters, yielding a continuous painted area of roughly 100 square
meters, which makes it one of the largest, if not the largest, rock-art shelter in Libya. The evenness of the ceiling and the
unbroken progression of paintings give the impression of a single vast mural. The many hundreds of motifs mainly
portray cattle, goats, and other animals such as giraffes (see image of an aardvark on p. 277). Hundreds of humans are