sites of the Saharan Atlas. He also defended his views on “Egyptian affinities” with rock art, attributed to his NCT where Egypt was regarded as the inspiration and the colonizer.

Libya, an Italian colony since 1912, began to be studied for its prehistory and rock-art sites. A. Desio and P. Graziosi published various sites, mainly rock-art sites, and Graziosi took up that focus again in 1942 in a classical synthesis entitled L’arte rupestre della Libia (cave art of Libya). Another classic work of this time was Frobenius’s Ekade Ektab (1937) on the Mathendous engravings.

The Tassili paintings had been known since 1910, but their importance was not recognized until the 1930s. In 1932 the Tamadjert paintings were discovered, and in 1933 the extraordinary Oued Djerat group. This resulted in several reconnaissance missions to the Djerat, in which the young naturalist, Henri Lhote participated. But World War II halted all projects in central Sahara.

The First Half of the Twentieth Century: The Eastern Sahara Opens

Other Saharan regions had been neglected, and it was not until the 1930s that some reports on the art of Tibesti, Borkou, and Ennedi began to appear. Engravings from Nubian rocks, with their pharaonic boats, were also reported. But between the Nile and the Tibesti stretched 1,000 kilometers of Libyan Desert, the Great Sand Sea—an eternal no-man’s-land.

Yet it was not quite absolute desert. The Gorane caravans spoke of a permanent spring in a mountain situated halfway between the Nile and Kufra. In 1923 an Egyptian, Hassan-Bey, crossed from Sollum, on the Mediterranean, to Darfour with a caravan of camels. On his way he recognized the Uweinat granite massif, where there is, in fact, water, and he remarked on its rock art. This was crucial for the development of Saharan research because with this central watering point, the eastern desert was no longer impenetrable. By 1924 Prince Kemal-el-Din reached Uweinat by tractor and described the paintings of the important site of Karkur Talh. During the following decade the rock art of Uweinat as well as that of the neighboring massif, the Gilf Kebir, were studied by many English missions. The Gilf Kebir was supposed to contain the legendary oasis Zerzura, but its location remains a mystery. Barbary sheep still live in the Gilf Kebir.

From 1938 to 1939 the first synthesis on Nubian engravings by Hans A. Winkler was published. His interpretative schemes, based on “autochthonous” and “Eastern Invaders,” considered bold at the time, have become progressively unacceptable. Immediately after World War II two books on central Sudan appeared, and both had great impact: Early Khartoum (1949) and Shaheinab (1953), both by A.J. Arkell. They were the first reports of true excavations in Sahara—modern, scientific, and multidisciplinary efforts that went beyond mere surface collection. Work on the two Sudanese sites of Khartoum and Shaheinab finally put to rest the Hamitic hypothesis. Indeed, they proved the undoubted antiquity of a Nilotic culture (but not an Egyptian one) and of a “civilization” in black Africa. The discovery of the Sudanese sites had great significance, equivalent to gertrude caton-thompson’s proof, twenty years earlier, that the ruins of great zimbabwe were not Phoenician or Sabean but the product of an authentic indigenous African culture.

Arkell’s work greatly excited Africanists. Some indulged in lyricism, within the context of the fashionable diffusionist tradition, and changed the details of Hamitic theory to that of a mysterious “Sudanese crucible” where an “African Neolithic” was forged, sending its “civilizing” influence toward the west and across the immense Sahara.

Since 1950: The Central and Western Sahara and the Origin of the Saharan Neolithic

During the immediate postwar period and in the 1950s and 1960s, all the states that occupy the Sahara gained their political independence in one way or another. In 1956 the Centre Algérien de Recherches Anthropologiques Préhistoriques et Ethnographiques (CRAPE) was founded in Algiers. Travelers’ reports and the occasional surface collection of tools (e.g., those of the Missions Berliet Tassili-Tchad in 1959 and 1960) gave way to stratigraphical excavations on