paper, onto the reliefs and depressions of the rock surface (by coincidence, in 1874–1878, the famous Finnish linguist and ethnographer Matias-Alexander Castren was working in the Yenisey Valley in Siberia and likewise developed a mechanical stamping method for copying rock drawings and inscriptions).

Some sixty-eight stamps, including forty-six of engravings, were sent by the rabbi to the Société de Géographie de Paris where they were studied by Duveyrier. They featured depictions of elephant, rhinoceros, horse, giraffe, fox, birds, etc., as well as objects such as harnesses and shields. Duveyrier noted a difference between lines drawn deeply and clearly, which had been made with a metal point, and lines that were broad and blurred, which had been made by percussion or rubbing with a hard stone. Still, he attributed everything to a single period because, as he was working from a uniform stamped impression, he could not see differences in patina and weathering. Rejecting an attribution to modern people, Portuguese merchants, Romans, or Phoenicians, he eventually ascribed the figures to an indigenous black race, “the Ethiopians-Daratites” mentioned by the Romans in their histories.

It was in 1882 that V. Reboud became the first person to suggest that the North African engravings might be prehistoric; and in 1889, Bonnet of the Paris Natural History Museum, while on a botanical expedition in Algeria, was the first to note the presence of worked flint tools near some of the rock-art sites. Indeed, Bonnet is especially important for his archaeological observations: he noticed prehistoric weapons and tools around the engraved rocks on the ground surface—worked flints, arrowheads, knives, scrapers, etc.—and he supposed that it was probably with a fragment of worked flint that “the primitive artists engraved this gigantic page of their history.” He was thus able to concur with Reboud that the figures were prehistoric, particularly those depicting pachyderms or ruminants that had already left the region for Central Africa by Roman times.

It was in the second half of the nineteenth century that India, too, was placed on the rock art map, in particular by one astonishing and farsighted pioneer, Archibald Carlyle (or Carlleyle), first assistant to the Archaeological Survey of India, who discovered rock paintings in shelters at Morhana Pahar above the Ganges Valley in the 1860s. He wrote in his notebooks:

Lying along with the small implements in the undisturbed soil of the cave floors, pieces of a heavy red mineral colouring matter called geru were frequently found, rubbed down on one or more facets, as if for making paint—this geru being evidently a partially decomposed haematite.… On the uneven sides or walls and roofs of many of the caves or rock shelters there were rock paintings apparently of various ages, though all evidently of great age, done in the red colour called geru. Some of these rude paintings appeared to illustrate in a very stiff and archaic manner scenes in the life of the ancient stone chippers; others represent animals or hunts of animals by men with bows and arrows, spears and hatchets.… With regard to the probable age of these stone implements I may mention that I never found even a single ground or polished implement, not a single ground ring-stone or hammer-stone in the soil of the floors of any of the many caves or rock shelters I examined.

Since Carlyle found only stone tools and bits of pottery in the vicinity, he attributed the paintings to various periods, including that of the makers of thousands of microliths. His recognition that some of the paintings must be prehistoric had no precedent in Europe and was probably the first in the world. But, alas, he published nothing about the paintings; he merely placed some notes with a friend, and these were published in 1883 by one A. Smith. It is known from the index books of Carlyle’s microlith collections that he prepared copies and tracings of rock pictures, but unfortunately these have never been found.

The first scientific article on Indian rock art was published in 1883 by John Cockburn, a government agent who gave “a short account of the petrographs [rock drawings] in the caves or rock-shelters of the Kaimur range in the Mirzapur district.” He had found paintings of rhinoceroses and boars, and in the “exceedingly numerous” rock shelters containing drawings in