Petroglyph is one of the most over-used terms in archaeology. Everyone, it seems, knows all about them. Everyone has seen them—in textbooks, in museums, in slide presentations. And then you look, and you stop.
These, for instance, come from the Trişin plateau south of Van: pre-pottery Neolithic. The drawings are scratched into volcanic rock—andesite—with volcanic glass, that same obsidian we were discussing: glossy, brittle, and razor-sharp all at once. Picture it: thousands of years ago somebody picked up a splinter of the stuff and drew this ibex on a rock. Or is it a deer? Or perhaps just an invention.
The word, while we are here
Since the term is worn out, it is worth taking it apart. Greek πέτρα ‘rock’ plus γλύφω ‘to carve.’ And that second element will look familiar, because it also sits inside hieroglyph—hieros, ‘sacred,’ and the same carving.
So petroglyph and hieroglyph are brothers: the profane carving and the sacred one. Which is worth holding on to, because everything about this ibex suggests the profane brother.
A goat on the threshold
That question—ibex or deer?—turns out to carry more weight than it looks.
The wild bezoar goat, Capra aegagrus, is the direct ancestor of every domestic goat alive. And it was domesticated on this ground: the arc running from the Zagros through eastern Anatolia, at roughly the period these lines were scratched.
Which means the artist with the obsidian splinter may have been drawing the animal at the exact moment it was ceasing to be wild. Not a hunting trophy and not yet livestock—something in between, in the few centuries when the distinction was being invented. He did not know he was recording a turning point in the history of the species. He was drawing a goat.
Not the first, but the first time
There are, of course, far older and far more sophisticated petroglyphs in the world. There are hunting scenes, rites, myths. But in these there is something else. Not ritual, not a message—delight. The joy of recognition.
This is not humanity drawing for the first time; humanity had been drawing, superbly, for tens of thousands of years by then. But every culture passes through its own first time, whenever the calendar happens to place it. And this is what that looks like: a hand discovering that a line can become an animal. Like a child who has just learnt to hold a pencil, in a world where every child is the first child.
Petroglyphs are not merely archaeology. They are the world’s first graphic art. The first attempt to express oneself. The first art of all. And let us be honest: can one ever tire of art?
