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Prehistoric rock arts (Petroglyphs) are subjects of study for historians and archaeologists that shed new light on the history and heritage of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Ghazanfar Ali Khan
Photos by Abudulaziz M Alarify

They are, in fact, very prominent and important source of historical information as you set to trek in any nook and corner of the Kingdom. About 110 km drive from the capital city of Riyadh along the Makkah Road to the southeast, you can come across the rock arts that will fascinate any visitor at first sight. This massive slab of sandstone and rocks, called petroglyphs, features ancient rock carvings know as rock art that reportedly date back to about 2,000 BC or even earlier.These drawings or carvings provide us very interesting information about the lives of people inhabited in the area in ancient times of Arabia. This location had been named by previous travelers as graffiti rocks though we believe it will be apt to call it petroglyphs as the right terminology. Name of the place where the petroglyphs exist is added to the location which makes it Musayqirah petroglyphs. Moreover, there are numerous rock arts in the Kingdom and calling it by its name will make it easy to identify. The rock arts near Riyadh have shed new light on the history and heritage of the region in particular and of the Arabian peninsula in general. On some of the rocks, the old school etchings depict human activities, humans throwing sticks, all sorts of animals and animal species, which were were wiped out by hunters in Arabia.
A good number of mixed up petroglyphs have prints of hunters, a family of ostrich, ibex and other animals that provide clues of the life around the area, when most of the deserts were covered in vegetation as recorded. These petroglyphs are said to be of neolithic period, after 3000 BC. The time factor and their traces back to the ancient history vary from historian to historian, and from one excavation to another researcher. Whatever the case may be, but Saudi Arabia possesses world-class rock art in a dazzling desert landscape replete with majestic natural formations. It is interesting to note here that “Stories in the Rocks: Exploring Saudi Arabian Rock Art” is a beautifully illustrated book written in an easily accessible manner, which gives a comprehensive picture of the Arabian rock art. The book enlightens readers about the records created by ancient artists on the sandstone cliffs and outcrops distributed widely down Saudi Arabia from north to south. The book has descriptions of rock arts and those graffiti rocks located not far west of the Saudi capital city. This prominent panel bears a wide diversity of animals and numerous battle scenes. In fact, visitors to Saudi Arabia will have the opportunity to move around the places and discover for themselves the heritage of the Kingdom, its antiquity and its historical genesis. These rocks have been also carved with animals, weapons and people that show everyday life in those times. Some of these rocks date back to even 6,000 years BC, say some historians and researchers. In Saudi Arabia, the rock art has always been there for as long as man had something to express. In ancient times, people did not have access to paper, canvas and conventional art materials so they had to draw on the surfaces around them. 
The graffiti rocks, which is about an hour and a half drive from Riyadh just off the road, have carvings from olden days. Indeed, finding ancient rock art sounded like something too interesting to do so. It is like embarking on an adventure. One of the very impressive images among the rock collection is a family of ostrich. Hyena-like animals, animals with long horns including ibexes, human figures and more could be found on the flat surface of these reddish black rocks as mentioned earlier. To reach graffiti rock, a visitor must take Makkah Road out of the city. At the check point set your odometer to zero. At 90 km approximately, you’ll pass through the town of Jelah. At 105 km, there is an exit to Musayqirah. Take this exit and turn right to find the road that ends in about 500 meters. Follow the trodden track on your left for about four kms to the graffiti rock. As of today, it has been recorded that Saudi Arabia has over 1200 sites with enormous number of carved and pecked petroglyphs. It is further interesting to note that the Kingdom launched an “Arabian Rock Art Heritage Project” with an aim to shed new light on the history and heritage of Arabia. In fact, the “Arabian Rock Art Heritage Project” began in 2010, when a team of researchers first entered the field in Saudi Arabia. One of the major goals of the project is to accurately record and interpret the petroglyphs, using advanced imaging techniques such as GigaPan, Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) (also known as Polynomial Texture Mapping, or PTM), and three-dimensional laser scanning.  The applicability of these techniques to Saudi petroglyphs is being investigated with the hope that other archaeologists will also find them useful in their regions of study. This project also aims to establish a reliable temporal sequence in each region, since petroglyphs cannot normally be dated directly. Despite the lack of applicability of sophisticated chemical or physical dating methods, it is possible to develop a comprehensive chronology that is consistently reliable and aids in developing a time-line for reconstructing ancient cultural developments.
Another goal has been to identify the range of animal species that existed during the Holocene Wet Phase, when much of the Arabian Peninsula was covered in savanna. It is important to document how people and the regional fauna were impacted, adapted, migrated or disappeared from areas as the climate shifted back to greater aridity and sources of water and vegetation disappeared leaving chunks of deserts and lands highly dry. Yet another significant goal is to assess when domestic animals, including dogs, sheep, goats, cattle, horses, and camels, entered the Arabian peninsula and how pastoralism supplanted hunting in the economies of the nomadic Arabian cultures. The horse and camel in particular had wide-ranging effects, including their critical roles in the transportation of people and goods, as well as in warfare. All of these aspects and many more are fortunately reflected in Arabian rock art. However, it is also recognized that artists do not depict every plant or animal species in their environment. Nor is every activity reported in rock art. Some topics would have been too trivial to be reproduced in stone, some would have been considered taboo, but others clearly carried sufficient import or even magical power to merit expression in art.  Rock art is one source of data for archaeologists, but ground surface surveys and excavations provide other, complementary evidence. The art also reveals behaviour of both animals and humans in much greater detail than can be gleaned from artefacts or settlement patterns discovered through excavation and survey. The same is true for clothing, hairstyles, and other perishable data rarely preserved through the millennia by other means. The thorough study of rock art then is critical to fleshing out ancient cultures.