Iconographies of the Sacred and Power of the Desert Nomads: A Reappraisal of the Desert Rock Art of the Late Bronze/Iron Age Southern Levant and Northwestern Arabia

Abstract

During the Late Bronze and Iron Ages, the vast arid areas of the southern Levant, northwestern Arabia and Sinai were inhabited by populations whose main way of living was nomadic herding and trade, small-scale agriculture and occasional mining, complemented with a few settled centers. The nomadic, non-literate communities have been traditionally studied through the lenses of the outside written sources (especially, the New Kingdom Egyptian and Neo-Assyrian inscriptions) and sometimes seen as intrinsically stable, unranked societies. However, the desert societies left an enormous record of rock art that has not received similar attention. This article aims to study the local rock art and the iconography of other visual media it influenced, focusing on the information they supply on the social organization of these societies. The analysis provides several - yet still tentative - results on the sacred and power of the desert nomads: it attests the emergence of local nomadic chiefs in the LBA/IA transition and later, leaders who relied on their performance in war and on the realization of ritual huntings and cultic practices that ensured control over nature and access to the tribal deities.