Spotted horses

By Shireen SENADHIRA

First I heard the thunder of the hooves. Then, many horses came galloping by. They were beautiful and they were spotted. As I watched, the spots glistened in the sun and leapt up and danced around. The spot went berserk like the polka dots in a melee of coloured dots in Maria’s blouse. When the spots went back to their correct places on the galloping horses I laughed and clapped my hands.

The horses looked handsome all beige and tawny with spectacular black spots on their flanks and upper legs. I did go on gazing at them till I heard an ominous sound. I heard a haunting musical horn sound nearby. “Oh, oh,” I said to myself, “the dinosaurs are coming.” Then, I turned to see I was in a dimly lit room. I was in bed. I didn’t get up as I so wanted to be on the prairie with the spotted horses.

Engravings

The famous spotted horses are found in Pech Merle cave in the Pyrenees of France. Pech in French means hill and the Pech Merle cave is more than two kilometres long and contains prehistoric mural art, paintings and engravings. These are dramatic murals from Gravettian culture from 27000 – 22000 years ago. Similar paintings too are found in Gargas cave too, in the Pyrenees. Both caves have a large number of stencils of human hands painted on the cave walls.

These are “negative imprints” of real hands, achieved by spitting or blowing paint around and between the fingers while the hand is pressed palm up or down, to the wall surface.

These hand imprints show definitely that women artists too painted these wonderful images. Walls of Seven chambers at Pech Merle have fresh lifelike images of spotted horses, a wooly mammoth, single colour horses, bovids, reindeer, birds, handprints and some humans.

Footprints of children too are preserved in what was once clay. Mention must be made of the spotted horses painted skillfully in the correct perspective that they come alive and you feel them running as you watch them entranced.

The artists of this cave painting would have been familiar with what they painted so decoratively. To get such details on their paintings, these artists would have imbibed the scenes thoroughly. Such scenes of splendour would have been a thrill in their hunting lives and stirred their aesthetics senses too.

Cave paintings

Why did cave men and women draw or paint on cave walls? Did they feel like decorating their walls like we do? Scientists have a theory that since the cave people had no written language, they communicated their stories by using pictures instead. It must have been certainly for communication. Perhaps, they wanted to leave a record of what happened in their lives.

Cave people had to use natural objects to paint the walls of the caves. To etch into the rock they would have used sharp tools and spears. They would have obtained the paint colour from berries, clay, soot or charcoal.

The paint brushes would have been their fingers or sticks with attached straw, leaves, moss or hair. The may have used hollow bones or reeds to spray the colour on, similar to the air brush technique. The most common themes in cave paintings are large wild animals, such as bison, horses and deer and tracings of human hands as well as abstract patterns. Pigments used include red and yellow ochre, hematite, manganese oxide and charcoal.

Painting techniques

Ancient people decorated walls of protected caves with paint made from dirt or charcoal mixed with spit or animal fat. In cave paintings, the pigments stuck to the wall partially because the pigment became trapped in the porous wall, and partially because the binding media (the spit or fat) dried and adhered the pigment to the wall.

The paint was applied with brushing, smearing, dabbing, and spraying techniques. Large areas were covered with fingertips or pads of lichen or moss.

Twigs produced drawn or linear marks, while feathers blended areas of color. Brushes made from horsehair were used for paint application and outlining. Paint spraying yielded a finely grained distribution of pigment. The oxides of iron dug right out of the ground in the form of lumps were presumably rich in clay.

This consistency was similar to crayon sticks and also could be made into a liquid paste more closely resembling paint. Historians believe that the lumps were ground into a fine powder on the cave’s natural stone hollows, where stains have been observed. Shoulder and other bones of large animals, stained with colour, have been discovered in the caves and presumed to have been used as mortars for pigment grinding. The pigment was made into a paste with various binders, including water, vegetable juices, urine, animal fat, bone marrow, blood, and albumen.

The palette

Cave artists used the pigments available in the vicinity. These pigments were the so-called earth pigments, (minerals limonite and hematite, red ochre, yellow ochre and umber, charcoal from the fire (carbon black), burnt bones(bone black)and white from grounded calcite (lime white).

Certainly, the cave dwellers may have discovered that, unlike the dye colours they were using and which were derived from animal and vegetable sources, the colour that came from iron oxide deposits in the earth would not fade with the changing environment. For this reason, it is believed that men travelled far and wide to maintain a steady supply of earth pigments.

In every locality where prehistoric sites have been discovered, from the Americas to South Africa, trails lead to near and distant hematite deposits where man mined. Historians have deduced that the impetus behind all mining activities was prehistoric man’s need for ochre pigments. Cave men might have traveled even 25 miles to obtain iron earth pigments for their paint.

Veddah art of Sri Lanka

The Veddah cave drawings , like those found at Hamangala, give graphic evidence of the sublime spiritual and artistic vision achieved by the Veddahs , the ancient inhabitants of Sri Lanka.

It could be said that the artists most likely were the Veddah women who spent long hours in these caves waiting for the men folk’s return from the hunt. Such cave drawings are also found numerously in the eastern province and in the Uva, Sabaragamuwa and north central provinces. Numerous Veddah tribes lived in the area from Badulla to Batticaloa.

Many caves in the area in Nilgala hills, Pihilegodagalge and Henebedde have art on the cave walls. There are figures, animals, reptiles scratched or painted on the walls. Some of them are line drawings like centipedes. The bigger figures are leopards and the smaller ones, dogs. Women and men were shown by the former having lines drawn upward showing that women had their hair in knots. The full paintings depicted hunts. These paintings are photographed and described in detail in Seligman’s book on The Veddas. In the Kalutara district, the Fa Hien cave site has been the archaeological site for excavation of the Balangoda Man dated to about 35,000 years BC. The art work there would have perished with time. There is such exciting news at present though, that a very ancient skeleton all intact has been excavated and is in the process of being dated.

The paints used in the veddah cave art were ashes mixed with water and charcoal for the leopard spots. To keep the paintings intact a binder had been used like gum resins. Yellow ochre and turmeric too had been used for colours yellow and brown, as well as chunam or lime for the white marks.

The cave art of India

it is said, India has the third largest concentration of cave paintings, after Australia and Africa. In India, in more than a million motifs, animals are the most frequent, next humans and then symbols and designs. Traces of dancing figures too have been found. It has been recorded that in the Bhimbetka cave art sites which are in the Raisen district in Madhya Pradesh, the primitive artists have used mineral and vegetable colour.

Moreover, various pigments were used like hematite and other oxides to derive red, yellow orange and brown. In all, it is recorded that twenty- one colours have been used in their paints, and the colours are: white, ashy white, creamy white, yellow, yellow ochre, raw sienna, raw umber, orange, dark orange, vermillion, scarlet, burnt sienna, emerald green, black crimson, crimson lake and purple etc.

The cave paintings of India resemble those of Bushmen art in the Kalahari Desert in Africa, the cave art in the Kakadu national Park in Australia and Lascaux cave paintings in France.

Bushmen of southern Africa

The Bushmen are the indigenous people of southern Africa. Their cave art, date back to thousands of years.

Their paintings and rock carvings are found all over southern Africa in caves and rock shelters. The Bushmen have drawn non-human animals, hunters and half human half animal hybrids. The half-human hybrids are believed to be the medicine men or healers.

Their depictions of these medicine men give us evidence that they did do healing dances. There are records that in Botswana on a high rock face there is an image of a magnificent red eland bull which could have been painted only by a Bushman who had a deep identification with such bulls. Also on this rock face is a female giraffe that is motionless like it is alarmed by a predator. Several other images of animals are on it too, along with the flesh blood-red handprints that are the signature of the unknown artist.

Learning from rock art

It is said that lot of rock or cave art of the Bushmen is actually symbols and metaphors. For example, eland bulls, meant marriage and curing. Rock art gives us a glimpse of the Bushmen’s history, and how they lived their lives. Bushmen also recorded “rain dance animals”. When they did rain dances they would go into a trance to “capture” one of these animals. In their trance they would kill it, and its blood and milk became the rain. As depicted in the rock art, the rain dance animals they “saw” usually resembled a hippopotamus or antelope, and were sometimes surrounded by fish.

We can also learn more about how the Bushmen lived through their rock art. In one art depiction, the people are all in a dancing stance, and the women are all clapping. So, it is believed to be one of their healing or trance dances. Everyone is the same; one is not more elaborate or more detailed than another. This shows that though the healers held special powers, they were not thought of as higher or better. Healing was not for becoming a more prominent and powerful person, it was for the good of the entire community

Kakadu rock art

There are about 11 artistic styles of rock art in Kakadu. Some styles developed a long time ago are still used today. This art is represented by object prints, large naturalistic animals and humans, dynamic figures, and simple figures with boomerangs. Object prints are made as positive imprints. A hand or object can be placed in wet paint and pressed directly onto the rock or paint-covered items such as grass and string can be thrown against a rock. Imprints of thrown objects are generally found on ceilings or overhangs or on out-of-reach walls. These object prints are probably the earliest style of rock art found in Kakadu.

Large naturalistic animals and humans are the earliest drawn images found in the region. The animals are usually drawn in outline and filled in with contour lines, stipples, patches, and occasionally an ochre wash. They are often larger than life.

Wallabies and kangaroos are the most common images, but other animals such as freshwater crocodiles and extinct mainland species such as the Tasmanian devil are also painted in this style. The dynamic figures are small, exquisitely drawn humans, animals and part-humans.

The human figures are drawn in action, with their legs widespread and their bodies thrust forward. Generally, the male figures wear an elaborate head-dress and a belt from which one or two skirts are suspended. Necklaces, pendants and armlets are also worn.

Weapons such as barbed spears, boomerangs, clubs, stone axes and sticks are also shown. Figures with the head of an animal and the body of a human are usually depicted with the humans and are involved in a variety of hunting activities. The animals portrayed are usually kangaroos or wallabies, although some birds and freshwater fish are also painted in this style.

An event of special interest is that in June 2012, vividly portrayed in many newspapers, the latest find, was the oldest piece of rock art in Australia and one of the oldest in the world: an Aboriginal work created 28,000 years ago in an Outback cave in the Northern Territory rock shelter known as Nawarla Gabarnmang.

Lascaux Cave art

Lascaux Cave is a rock shelter in the Dordogne Valley of France with fabulous cave paintings, painted between 15,000 and 17,000 years ago. Unfortunately, not open to the public any longer because of too much tourism and the encroachment of dangerous bacteria, Lascaux has been recreated, online and in replica format, so that visitors may still see the amazing paintings of the Upper Paleolithic artists. It is one of the world’s great treasures. Its vast interior revealed about six-hundred paintings and almost 1,500 engravings reflect the climate of the time of their painting.

Unlike older caves which contain mammoths, woolly rhinoceros, the paintings in Lascaux are birds and bison and deer and aurochs and horses, all from the later warm period. There are hundreds of “signs”, quadrilateral shapes and dots and other patterns, some of which are difficult to decipher. Colours in the cave are blacks and yellows, reds and whites, and were produced from charcoal and manganese and ocher iron oxides, which were found locally and do not appear to have been heated prior to their use.

We did think that agriculture gave rise to civilisation. First, to cities, then, later to writing, art and religion. Now, after finding the world’s oldest temple, the above theory is disarrayed. The urge to worship may have sparked agriculture and then civilisation.

On a remote hilltop in southern Turkey, dozens of massive stone pillars are arranged into sets of rings, some smashed up against each other. The site is Gobekli Tepe and it is slightly reminiscent of Stonehenge. There is a big difference though. Built much earlier than Stonehenge, Gobekli Tepe was made, not from roughly hewn rock like in Stonehenge but from clean carved lime stone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals – numerous gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, charging wild boars and ferocious lions.

This assemblage has been dated to have been built some 11600 years which is 7 millennia before the great Pyramid of Giza was constructed. In fact, Gobekli Tepe is the oldest known monumental architecture as at the time there was nothing of comparable scale in the world. It is still a puzzle how the pillars and the carvings on stone were achieved with no implements but shaped flint.

In such an ancient age, imagine the tall pillars looming overhead like rigid giants and the animals on the stones pillars, shivering in the firelight – emissaries from a spirit world that the nomadic people may have only begun to envision.

Marvel

How the cave art or the picture galleries in caves and rock shelters created eons ago still remain for us to see and marvel is in itself a wonder. Imagine, seeing the spotted horses running by. The sense of freedom of the galloping horses would have been tremendous. One can see in them an expression of one’s own restless spirit. Charged with an appetite for adventure the horses take the land and the wind on their faces, without hesitation. They are pure power.

This is the force in the world that lies beneath the surface, something primitive and wild that awakens when we need an extra spurt to survive. Just like the wild flowers that bloom after a wildfire burns the forest black.

Most people are timid and keep it hidden inside them. But many are courageous to love what is untamed inside them. Maybe our ancestors felt the same. Surely, the artist/artists would have had these feelings to reproduce the paintings on their walls because they were such splendid scenes and they just couldn’t get them out of their minds and I am just waiting to dream of the spotted horses again.