Iconographies of the Sacred and Power of the Desert Nomads: A Reappraisal of the Desert Rock Art of the Late Bronze/Iron Age Southern Levant and Northwestern Arabia
Summary During the Late Bronze and Iron Ages, the vast arid areas of the southern Levant, northwestern Arabia and Sinai were inhabited by populations whose main way of living was nomadic herding and trade, small scale agriculture and occasional mining, complemented with a few settled centers. The nomadic, non literate communities have been traditionally studied through the lenses of the outside written sources (especially, the New Kingdom Egyptian and Neo Assyrian inscriptions) and sometimes seen as intrinsically stable, unranked societies. However, the desert societies left an enormous record of rock art that has not received similar attention. This article aims to study the local rock art and the iconography of other visual media it influenced, focusing on the information they supply on the social organization of these societies. The analysis provides several yet still tentative results on the sacred and power of the desert nomads: it attests the emergence of local nomadic chiefs in the LBA/IA trans.