What is this?     This is a 8 year counter, an elaborate version of Venus Calendar

How to Interpret Rock Art

Interpreting rock art is, in essence, an archaeology of the ancient mind. Rock art are not random scratches or simple scenes; they embody the cultural knowledge and imagination of ancient societies. Decoding these images is an attempt to uncover long forgotten beliefs and ideas. An interpretation demands a multidisciplinary lens, drawing upon archaeology, comparative mythology, ancient astronomy, anthropology, and the history of religions. Without such knowledge, the observer risks reducing the engravings to mere depictions of pastoral life, overlooking the profound symbolic content that underpins them. (Anati 1999).

Moving Beyond Literal Representation

One of the most common interpretive pitfalls is to approach rock art as a literal record of daily activity. A hunter aiming at an ibex may seem at first to be a simple hunting scene. Yet comparative evidence shows that such representations are rarely descriptive. Rather, they dramatize cosmic struggles, ritualized hunts, that symbolically reenact myths of death, renewal, and fertility. In the Ugaritic texts of Late Bronze Age Canaan, for example, the conflict between Baal and Mot is cast as a cyclical struggle between fertility and death (Gibson 1977). Egyptian temple reliefs similarly portray the pharaoh’s hunt as a metaphor for cosmic order (Hornung 1982). To view Negev hunting scenes as purely economic records is therefore to miss their mythological depth. Thus, a guiding principle: all rock art is linked to the heavens—either directly through astronomy or indirectly through myth.

Principles for Interpretation

Based on years of fieldwork in the Negev Desert and comparative research, several assumptions help orient the interpreter:

• Rock art describes a heavenly story. Even when drawn from earthly life, its referent is mythic or cosmic.
• Hunting scenes are cosmic struggles. They encode fertility rituals, seasonal myths, or the battle between life and death.
• Rock art is sacred. These engravings belong to the sphere of faith, ritual, and myth, not secular art.

Understand the Historical Background

Rock art did not emerge out of thin air. This symbolic art drew upon a vast reservoir of myths and ritual traditions transmitted orally across millennia. Long before the advent of writing, wisdom was preserved through mythic narratives and only much later embodied in rock art as part of man evolution. Rock art thus functions as a cultural memory device, a visual mnemonic of stories that were already ancient when first engraved. In the Levant, the motifs of the Cosmic Egg, the divine hunt, and the solar journey across the sky recur in later literary sources and in prehistoric engravings. Egyptian funerary texts depict the solar boat’s nightly journey through the underworld (Assmann 2005); and Ugaritic hymns describe astral deities governing fertility cycles (Wyatt 1998). These parallels illuminate the Negev corpus, situating it within a broader Near Eastern cosmological discourse.

Classify Your Rock Art

Isolated rock-art scenes rarely yield definitive interpretations. Meaning emerges through systematic classification, comparison, and collation across multiple images. Repetition is the key to deciphering symbolic art. I treat rock-art categories as recurrent scenes or stable configurations of motifs, not necessarily identical symbols, but similar arrangements, that encode myth, ritual or cosmological events. By grouping such scenes, one can reconstruct underlying patterns of thought. In many engravings, repeated symbols (sun, moon, ship, fish, ibex, weapon) or full scenes (creation, fertility, hunt) gain meaning, and their co-occurrence signals deliberate intent. From my surveys, I have identified the following categories, each linked to an article that explores the respective theme.

Astronomy
Hunting
Mythology
Sun journey
Afterlife
Fertility

Find a Connection to Astronomy

Sky worship is attested in a range of ancient religious expressions, including burial grounds, tomb iconography, rock art, and the earliest forms of writing. In classical astrology, the stars were understood as active, formative forces; to ancient observers, celestial bodies embodied divine powers believed to shape human destiny (Barton 1994).

In the interpretation of rock art, attention to small details is essential. Dots may denote stars or constellations, while orientations, lines, grids, squares, and circles suggest systematic attempts to chart the heavens or inscribe cosmic order. Repeated marks may reflect early counting systems, such as the Moon Calendar. Symbolic motifs, such as constellation figures, can also be associated with the seasonal cycle.

The stars not only marked the passage of time but also provided the framework for ritual calendars, guiding seasonal rites of renewal, fertility, and communal gathering. Comparable practices are observed throughout the ancient world, where societies celebrated the solar year’s turning points in diverse ways, from the megaliths of Stonehenge to the desert circles of Nabta Playa and the solar temples and pyramids of Egypt. These parallels underscore how universally the heavens provided both a practical calendar and a sacred framework for human life.

Find a Connection to Myth

Before the invention of writing, wisdom and knowledge were transmitted through myths, stories that preserved cultural memory across generations. Rock art translates these narratives into visual form, engraving motifs of belief and imagination directly onto stone. Creation may be expressed through cosmic-egg motifs, spirals, or circular patterns that evoke the birth and unfolding of the cosmos. Fertility appears in ibex motifs, their horns echoing the crescent moon and their seasonal cycles linked to human survival and agriculture. The afterlife is vividly suggested in bird-and-ship scenes, resonating with Egyptian solar-boat journeys in which Ra sails the heavens, and with Mediterranean psychopomp traditions where birds guide the soul to the beyond (Assmann 2005; Hornung 1982). In this way, rock art becomes a visual mythology—a nonverbal counterpart to later literary traditions—preserving the origins, hopes, and fears of societies long before the written word.

Conclusion

'Interpreting rock art is an archaeology of the ancient mind." It requires a multidisciplinary lens, careful classification, and the courage to move beyond first impressions. The Negev engravings show that early visual expressions were not simple depictions of daily life but deeply symbolic,encoding myths of origin, cycles of nature, and visions of cosmic order. Each engraving preserves a fragment of humanity’s earliest thought. Interpreting them reveals the beliefs and worldview of vanished cultures, the task is daunting. Thus I maintain: “To decipher the past is more difficult than to decipher the future.”

Bibliography

Anati, Emmanuel. The Rock Art of the Negev. Near Eastern Archaeology 62 (1999): 22–34.
Assmann, Jan. Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.
Barton, Tamsyn. Ancient Astrology. London: Routledge, 1994.
Gibson, John C. L. Canaanite Myths and Legends. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1977.
Hornung, Erik. Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.
Wyatt, Nicolas. Religious Texts from Ugarit. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998.

See examples of deciphered rock art in our Articles section and more in my book Rock Art in Israel available online.

Copyright © All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or part without the express written permission of negevrockart.co.il

Yehuda Rotblum