team of artists, photographers and archaeologists would return to Tassili to fully document--on enormous rolls of canvas--the full extent of the desert fastness's holdings. But the world remembers only two features of the hard work of these French scientists: their discovery of the Great Horned God or God of Sefa (a flat-headed, horned figure that towers with outstretched arms over a multitude of animals, dancers and "floating" characters) and the disturbing "roundheads" in their modern clothes.

Perhaps one of the least-known aspects of the Tassili-N-Ajer petroglyphs has been the discovery of an "alphabet" that hails back to an age where writing was supposedly unknown. Pierre Colombel, who has followed the footsteps of Henri Lhote in analyzing the desert images, has worked on an image involving hunters surmounted by glyphsconsisting of regular geometrical shapes and dots, which roughly resemble the "writing" found on the haloes of Australia's enigmatic Wondjina figures. According to Colombel, the message could be something as insignificant as a hunter bragging about his prowess with the lance or a significant legacy to our times which shall forever remain undecipherable.

Mystery of the Veiled Nomads

After the conquest of the Fezzan by the victorious armies of the Omayyad Caliphate, the Garamantians and their works vanished from history. Some historians have seen them as the progenitors of the mysterious veiled desert nomads known as the Tuaregs, who bear no physical resemblance to other Berber peoples, who appear to have arrived from the deep Sahara in the 5th century as the Roman Empire disintegrated. However, there exist other traditions