African Art History.

Geometric lines engraved on red ocher stone
(Blombos Cave, South Africa, about 80,000 BC)

People were producing art in South Africa even before the first people left Africa for other parts of the world. The earliest art we know about comes from South Africa, where there are carvings from about 80,000 BC. After that, however, there's a big gap. By about 27,000 BC, San people, also in South Africa, may have been painting pictures of people and animals on rock walls (It's hard to date rock walls.).

Wadi Methkandoush cats
Sahara Desert, ca. 10,000 BC (modern Libya)

African art picks up steam when we begin to find art made in northern Africa. First there are rock carvings of animals in the Sahara Desert, possibly as early as 10,000 BC or so. These rock carvings are found all the way across the Sahara Desert, from Egypt to Niger. Some of the carvings show people, while others show cats or giraffes or other animals. In Nubia (modern Sudan), there are rock carvings from about4000 BC. These Saharan carvings are the ancestors of later Egyptian carvings. The figures are carved in profile (seen from the side), and they stand one picture on top of another in registers (like comic strips).

Rock carving of giraffes. Tenere Desert (modern Niger), 10,000-7000 BC

By 3000 BC, Egyptian artists were doing very similar carving, but thanks tofarming Egypt was richer and could afford better trained artists and more time spent on each carving. The tomb carvings in thePyramids and other tombs from Old Kingdom Egyptare also carved in stone, in profile, and in registers, but they are carved on built stone walls, instead of into natural rock.

Head from Kerma (modern Sudan),
about 1600 BC.

By about 2500 BC, the artists of Kerma (along the Nile River in northern Sudan) were producing art in styles relatfashioninn4us.blogspot.comed to the Egyptian art to their north.

Zambian mask (ca. 1900 AD)