Petroglyphs (also called rock engravings) are pictogram and logogram images created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, and abrading. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as “carving”, “engraving”, or other descriptions of the technique to refer to such images.
Petroglyphs are found world-wide, and are often associated with prehistoric peoples. The word comes from the Greek words petro-, theme of the word “petra” meaning “stone”, and glyphein meaning “to carve”, and was originally coined in French as pétroglyphe.
The term petroglyph should not be confused with petrograph, which is an image drawn or painted on a rock face. Both types of image belong to the wider and more general category of rock art or parietal art.
Petroforms, or patterns and shapes made by many large rocks and boulders over the ground, are also quite different. Inukshuks are also unique, and found only in the Arctic (except for reproductions and imitations built in more southerly latitudes).
Some petroglyphs are dated to approximately the Neolithic and late Upper Paleolithic boundary, about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, if not earlier (Kamyana Mohyla). Sites in Australia have petroglyphs that are estimated to be as much as 27,000 years old, and in other places could be as old as 40,000 years.
Around 7,000 to 9,000 years ago, other precursors of writing systems, such as pictographs and ideograms, began to appear. Petroglyphs were still common though, and some cultures continued using them much longer, even until contact with Western culture was made in the 20th century.
Petroglyphs have been found in all parts of the globe except Antarctica with highest concentrations in parts of Africa, Scandinavia, Siberia, southwestern North America and Australia.
The oldest reliably dated rock art in the Americas is known as the “Horny Little Man.” It is petroglyph depicting a stick figure with an oversized phallus and carved in Lapa do Santo, a cave in central-eastern Brazil and dates from 12,000 to 9,000 years ago.
At the northeast region of Brazil, distant 87 km from de Joao Pessoa, capital of the state of Paraiba, nearby the city of Ingá, in Sierra Borborema, on the banks of the river Inga, (ancient river Bacamarte) – exists a great archaelogical site. There, is found a one of the most mysterious monuments of the Humanity history. It is the Inga Stone. It is composed of some basalt stones covered with symbols and glyphs undeciphered until now.
The grest wall of gneiss’s rock, dating of 6,000 years, with 46 meters of long by 3,8 meter of height, is covered with figures and signs which meaning is unknown by the archaeologists and anthropologists that examined them. Some of these singns are astonishing, like a cross, a skull, a rose and a strange form that seems an aircraft. It is carved in low relief, several figures, suggest that the representation of animals, fruits, and human constellations like Orion and Milky Way.
Many symbols of the Inga’s monolith are similar to those found in Turkey, in ancient Anatolia of the Hittites. A series of inscriptions speak of a “borders war” between two sovereigns of mesopotamic origin. Another story tells about a terrible volcanic eruption. The ashes covered a stone city on the Atlantic coast, similar to what happened in Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Armenian Highland, 10th mill. BC
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