with his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd, spent years investigating the languages and cultures of the South African bushmen, recording verbatim 12,000 pages of testimony about bushman life, rituals, and beliefs; he also appealed for faithful copies of rock art to be made, backed up by photography, so that the art could be understood in terms of its folklore. Unlike earlier writers who had adopted a somewhat patronizing or simplistic view of African rock art, he urged that one should consider the paintings “not as the mere daubing of figures for idle pastime, but as an attempt, however imperfect, at a truly artistic conception of the ideas which most deeply moved the Bushman mind, and filled it with religious feelings.”

Copies of paintings were produced by enthusiasts in the Cape and shown to bushmen for explanation and comment. Lucy Lloyd bought Stow’s drawings after his death, later willing them to Bleek’s daughter Dorothea, who finally managed to get them published in 1930, almost fifty years after Stow’s death.

Rock images had also been observed by Europeans in North Africa, the Sahara, and the Nile Valley by the mid-nineteenth century. The weathered appearance, alien style, and exotic subjects of the rock images suggested that they must be of some antiquity and had possible associations with vanished peoples. The first discoveries of rock art in these regions were made in 1847 by two soldiers (François Félix Jacquot and Captain Kook of the Foreign Legion) who were part of General Cavaignac’s expedition against tribes in the Ksour Mountains of northwestern Algeria. The soldiers reported seeing large engravings of animals (elephants, lions, antelopes, ostriches, gazelles) and humans with bows, and thanks to the costumes and scenes depicted, they had no doubt whatsoever that these were ancient works, dating from an era before the Arab invasion of the middle ages but after the time of Carthage in the second century b.c. (in 1847 the concept of prehistory had not yet become established). They assumed that the engravings were the work of idolaters believing in fetishes who had been brought to the oases of southern Oran in caravan expeditions from the south of Africa; they believed the artists to have been members of the nomadic Tuareg people.

In 1848, J-J. Ampère mentioned the engravings of nubia on the banks of the Nile in his Voyage et recherches en Egypte et en Nubie, as did the 1842–1845 expedition of karl lepsius. Ampère focused on the engraved rocks on the west bank near Philae: “These signs are not hieroglyphs and bear no resemblance to the letters of any known alphabet.” Among the figures he noticed were the symbol of life and various animals “grotesquely drawn”—lions, giraffes, elephants, ostriches. He also mentioned some not very artistic (and often indecent) depictions of humans.

In 1849, the German explorer Heinrich Barth set out from the Libyan port of Tripoli on a four-year trip and was the first to discover a large number of rock engravings, including the now-famous site of Tilizzaghen (Telizzharen), and the first engravings in Fezzan, Libya. He included some reproductions in a series of five volumes published in Gotha in 1857 and 1858 (Reisen und Entdeckungen in Nord und Central Afrika in den Jahren 1849 bis 1855) and noted that some parts of the figures seemed unfinished, especially the lower extremities of animals’ limbs. He interpreted some scenes as allegories and noted differences in quality and technique among engravings, which he saw as being of chronological significance. The fauna represented, especially the herds of cattle, led him to the conclusion that climatic conditions had once been very different in that desert region.

A Frenchman, Henri Duveyrier, set out in 1859 on a journey that took him to western Tripolitana and the eastern Algerian Sahara in North Africa; in 1865, he published copies of rock engravings in Tassili, a North African location discovered during this expedition, in Les Touaregs du Nord and concurred with Barth about allegorical interpretations and about the existence in earlier times of abundant pastures and water resources. Rabbi Mardokhai-Abi-Sourour, on a journey of exploration in southwestern Morocco in 1875, discovered numerous rocks bearing animal figures and inscriptions and was the first explorer, in that part of the world at least, to make stamped copies by pressing a thin layer of clay, contained between two sheets of