The Rock Art of Lower Nubia (Czechoslovak Concession

The present publication is concerned with the rock art from two sections of the Nile Valley in Lower Nubia surveyed in the scope of the UNESCO-organised salvage campaign by the Czechoslovak Institute of Egyptology (Charles University in Prague). It has two main objects, first to complete the catalogue of the rock art documented or localised in the two sections of the Czechoslovak concession with hitherto unpublished rock-art surfaces and occurrences (both petroglyphs and rock paintings) and, second, to provide a critical revision of the data published in Katalog der Felsbilder aus der Tschechoslowakischen Konzession in Nubien (edited by F. Vahala and P. Cervicek, Prag 1999). With a view to presenting the results of the critical revision, made on the basis of the field documentation gathered by the Czechoslovak expedition and deposited in the archive of the Czech Institute of Egyptology (Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague), all rock-art data - both unpublished and published - are arranged in the present volume in a tabular form. Tables 1-4 containing the description and revision of the rock-art data from the two sections of the Czechoslovak concession in a succession from north to south and, as distinct from Katalog, separately for each bank of the Nile, are accompanied by introductory notes on the formation of the corpus, hitherto unpublished distribution maps of the completed and revised corpus, 155 hitherto unpublished black-and-white photographs, and four colour plates with the sheets of the colour scale used for the recording of patina difference or colour value of preserved paints. With the two objects accomplished, the present publication constitutes a kind of manual to the rock-art corpus from the Czechoslovak concession in Lower Nubia and is to be regarded, together with Katalog, as the complete and authoritative source of data for evaluation of the significance of the evidence from the two sections of the Nile Valley in Lower Nubia.