Ancient people rock paintings png. What paints did ancient people use?

Anyone endowed with a great gift - feel the beauty the surrounding world, feel harmony lines, admire the variety of shades of colors.

Painting- this is the artist’s perception of the world captured on canvas. If your perception of the world around you is reflected in the artist’s paintings, then you feel a kinship with the works of this master.

The paintings attract attention, fascinate, excite imagination and dreams, evoke memories of pleasant moments, favorite places and landscapes.

When did they appear first images created by man?

Appeal primitive people to a new type of activity for them - art - one of the greatest events in human history. Primitive art reflected man’s first ideas about the world around him, thanks to it knowledge and skills were preserved and passed on, and people communicated with each other. In spiritual culture primitive world art began to play the same universal role that a pointed stone played in labor activity.

What gave a person the idea to depict certain objects? Who knows whether body painting was the first step towards creating images, or whether a person guessed the familiar silhouette of an animal in a random outline of a stone and, by cutting it, gave it a greater resemblance? Or maybe the shadow of an animal or a person served as the basis for the drawing, and the imprint of a hand or a step precedes the sculpture? There is no definite answer to these questions. Ancient people could come up with the idea of ​​depicting objects not in one, but in many ways.
For example, to the number the most ancient images on the walls of Paleolithic caves include human hand prints, and a random interweaving of wavy lines pressed into the damp clay by the fingers of the same hand.

Works of art from the Early Stone Age, or Paleolithic, are characterized by simplicity of shapes and colors. Rock paintings are usually the outlines of animal figures, made with bright paint - red or yellow, and occasionally - filled with round spots or completely painted over. Such ""paintings"" were clearly visible in the twilight of the caves, illuminated only by torches or the fire of a smoky fire.

In the initial stage of development primitive art didn't know laws of space and perspective, as well as composition, those. intentional distribution of individual figures on a plane, between which there is necessarily a semantic connection.

Alive and expressive images stands before us life story primitive man the Stone Age era, told by himself in rock paintings.

Dance. Lleid painting. Spain. With a variety of movements and gestures, a person conveyed his impressions of the world around him, reflecting in them his own feelings, mood and state of mind. Crazy jumps, imitation of animal habits, stamping of feet, expressive hand gesturescreated the preconditions for the emergence of dance. There were also war dances associated with magical rituals, with faith in victory over the enemy.

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Composition in the Lascaux cave. France. On the walls of the caves you can see mammoths, wild horses, rhinoceroses, and bison. For primitive man, drawing was the same “witchcraft” as spells and ritual dances. By “conjuring” the spirit of a drawn animal by singing and dancing, and then “killing” it, a person seemed to master the power of the animal and “defeat” it before hunting.

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And these are petroglyphs. Hawaii

Murals on the Tassili-Ajer mountain plateau. Algeria.

Primitive people practiced sympathetic magic - in the form of dancing, singing or painting animals on the walls of caves - to attract herds of animals and ensure the continuation of the race and the safety of livestock. Hunters acted out scenes of a successful hunt to attract energy into real world. They turned to the Mistress of the Herds, and later to the Horned God, who was depicted with the antlers of goats or deer to emphasize his primacy over the herds. The bones of animals were supposed to be buried in the ground so that animals, like people, were reborn from the womb of Mother Earth.

This cave drawing in the Lascaux region of France from the Paleolithic era

Large animals were the preferred food. And Paleolithic people, skilled hunters, destroyed most of them. And not just large herbivores. During the Paleolithic, cave bears completely disappeared as a species.

There is another type of rock paintings, which has a mystical, mysterious character.

Rock paintings from Australia. Either people, or animals, or maybe both...

Drawings from West Arnhem, Australia.

Huge figures and small people next to them. And in the lower left corner there is something incomprehensible.

Here is a masterpiece from Lascaux, France.

North Africa, Sahara. Tassili. 6 thousand years BC Flying saucers and someone in a spacesuit. Or maybe it's not a spacesuit.

Rock art from Australia...

Val Camonica, Italy.

and the next photo is from Azerbaijan, Gobustan region

Gobustan is included in the UNESCO heritage list

Who were those “artists” who were able to convey the message of their time to distant eras? What prompted them to do this? What were the hidden springs and driving motives that guided them?.. Thousands of questions and very few answers... Many of our contemporaries love it when they are asked to look at history through a magnifying glass.

But is everything really so small in it?

After all, there were images of gods

In the north of Upper Egypt is ancient city temples of Abydos. Its origin dates back to prehistoric times. It is known that already in the era Old Kingdom(about 2500 BC) in Abydos, the universal deity Osiris was widely worshiped. Osiris was considered a divine teacher who gave the people of the Stone Age a variety of knowledge and crafts, and, quite possibly, knowledge about the secrets of heaven. By the way, it was in Abydos that it was found ancient calendar, dating back to the 4th millennium BC. e.

Ancient Greece And Ancient Rome also left a lot of rock evidence reminding us of their existence. They already had a developed written language - their drawings are much more interesting, from the point of view of studying everyday life, than ancient graffiti.

Why is humanity trying to find out what happened millions of years ago, what knowledge did ancient civilizations have? We look for the source because we think that by revealing it, we will find out why we exist. Humanity wants to find where the starting point is, from which it all began, because they think that there, apparently, there is an answer, “what is all this for,” and what will happen in the end...

After all, the world is so vast, and human brain narrow and limited. The most complex crossword of history must be solved gradually, cell by cell...

On December 18, 1994, the famous French speleologist Jean Marie Chauvet discovered a cave gallerycancient images of animals. The discovery was named in honor of its discoverer — Chauvet cave. We decided to talk about the most beautiful caves with rock paintings.

Chauvet Cave

The discovery of the Chauvet Cave in the south of France near the town of Pont d'Arc became a scientific sensation that forced us to reconsider the existing understanding of the art of ancient people: it was previously believed that primitive painting developed in stages. At first, the images were very primitive, and more than one thousand years had to pass for the drawings on the walls of the caves to reach their perfection. Chauvet's find suggests the opposite: the age of some images is 30-33 thousand years, which means that our ancestors learned to draw even before moving to Europe. The discovered rock art represents one of the oldest examples of cave art in the world, in particular, the drawing of black rhinoceroses from Chauvet is still considered the most ancient. The south of France is rich in such caves, but none of them can compare with the Chauvet Cave either in size, or in the preservation and skill of the drawings. Mostly animals are depicted on the walls of the cave: panthers, horses, deer, as well as woolly rhinoceros, tarpan, cave lion and other animals ice age. In total, images of 13 different species of animals were found in the cave.
Now the cave is closed to tourists, as changes in air humidity can damage the images. Archaeologists can only work in a cave for a few hours a day. Today, the Chauvet Cave is a national treasure of France.

Caves of Nerja

The Caves of Nerja are an amazingly beautiful series of huge caves near the city of Nerja in Andalusia, Spain. They received the nickname "Prehistoric Cathedral". They were discovered by accident in 1959. They are one of the main attractions of Spain. Some of their galleries are open to the public, and one of them, which forms a natural amphitheater and has excellent acoustics, even hosts concerts. In addition to the world's largest stalagmite, several mysterious drawings were discovered in the cave. Experts believe that seals or fur seals are depicted on the walls. Fragments of charcoal were found near the drawings, the radiocarbon dating of which gave an age between 43,500 and 42,300 years. If experts prove that the images were made with this charcoal, the seals of the Nerja Cave will turn out to be significantly older than cave drawings from Chauvet Cave. This will once again confirm the assumption that Neanderthals had the ability to creative imagination no less than that of Homo sapiens.

Kapova Cave (Shulgan-Tash)

This karst cave was found in Bashkiria, on the Belaya River, in the area of ​​which the Shulgan-Tash nature reserve is now located. This is one of the longest caves in the Urals. Cave paintings of ancient people from the Late Paleolithic era, the likes of which can only be found in very limited places in Europe, were discovered in Kapova Cave in 1959. Images of mammoths, horses and other animals are made mainly with ocher, a natural pigment based on animal fat, their age is about 18 thousand years. There are several charcoal drawings. In addition to animals, there are images of triangles, stairs, and oblique lines. The most ancient drawings, dating back to the early Paleolithic, are in the upper tier. On lower tier Kapova Cave contains later images of the Ice Age. The drawings are also notable for the fact that human figures are shown without the realism inherent in the animals depicted. Researchers suggest that the images were made in order to appease the “gods of the hunt.” In addition, cave paintings are designed to be perceived from more than one certain point, and from several angles of view. To preserve the drawings, the cave was closed to the public in 2012, but an interactive kiosk was installed in the museum on the territory of the reserve for everyone to look at the drawings virtually.

Cueva de las Manos cave

Cueva de las Manos (“Cave of Many Hands”) is located in Argentina, in the province of Santa Cruz. World fame Cueva de las Manos in 1964 brought research by archeology professor Carlos Gradin, who discovered in the cave many wall paintings and human handprints, the oldest of which date back to the 9th millennium BC. e. More than 800 prints, overlapping each other, form a multi-colored mosaic. So far, scientists have not come to a consensus about the meaning of the images of hands, from which the cave got its name. Mostly left hands were captured: out of 829 prints, only 36 were right hands. Moreover, according to some researchers, the hands belong to teenage boys. Most likely, drawing an image of one’s hand was part of the initiation rite. In addition, scientists have built a theory about how such clear and clear handprints were obtained: apparently, a special composition was taken into the mouth and forcefully blown through a tube onto a hand attached to the wall. In addition to handprints, on the walls of the cave there are depictions of people, rhea ostriches, guanacos, cats, geometric figures with ornaments, hunting processes (the pictures show the use of bolas - traditional throwing weapons of the Indians South America) and observations of the sun. In 1999, the cave was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Rock paintings of ancient people

Ancient civilizations were not very developed in terms of their knowledge of chemistry and physics. Perhaps because of this, many mystical theories appeared, the deification of natural phenomena; great importance was attached to the death of a person, his departure to another world. Cave paintings of ancient people can tell us about much of what happened in their lives. On the walls they depicted agricultural activities, military rituals, gods, and priests. In a word, everything that their world consisted of and depended on.

IN Ancient Egypt The tombs and pyramids are full of rock paintings. In the tombs of the pharaohs, for example, it was customary to depict their entire life path from birth to death. With all the details, the rock paintings describe the funeral celebrations, etc.

The most primitive drawings They say that from the very beginning a person was drawn to art; he wanted to forever remember some moments of life. On the hunt primitive people saw a special beauty, they sought to depict the grace and strength of animals.

Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome also left a lot of rock evidence reminding us of their existence. The thing is that they already had a developed written language - their drawings are much more interesting, from the point of view of studying everyday life, than ancient graffiti.

The Greeks loved to write down wise sayings, or cases that seemed instructive or funny to them. The Romans noted in rock paintings the valor of soldiers and the beauty of women, despite the fact that Roman civilization was practically a copy of Greek, Roman graffiti is not distinguished by either the sharpness of thought or the dexterity of its transmission.

With the development of society, wall art also developed, moving from civilization to civilization, and giving it a unique flavor. Each society and civilization leaves its mark in history, similar to the one that leaves an inscription on a clean wall.

Serious study of cave dyes is just beginning. And questions immediately arise: why were only inorganic paints used? The primitive man-gatherer distinguished more than 200 different plants, among which were dyeing plants. Why are the drawings in some caves made in different tones of the same color, and in others - in two colors of the same tone? Why did the colors of the green-blue-blue part of the spectrum enter early painting for so long? In the Paleolithic they are almost absent; in Egypt they appear 3.5 thousand years ago, and in Greece only in the 4th century. BC e. Archaeologist A. Formozov believes that our distant ancestors did not immediately understand the bright plumage of the “magic bird” - the Earth. The most ancient colors, red and black, reflect the harsh flavor of life at that time: the sun's disk on the horizon and the flame of a fire, the darkness of the night full of dangers and the darkness of the caves bringing relative peace. Red and black were associated with opposites ancient world: red - warmth, light, life with hot scarlet blood; black - cold, darkness, death... This symbolism is universal. It was a long way from the cave artist, who had only 4 colors in his palette, to the Egyptians and Sumerians, who added two more (blue and green) to them. But even further from them is the 20th century cosmonaut who took a set of 120 colored pencils on his first flights around the Earth.

The second group of questions that arise when studying cave painting, concerns drawing technology. The problem can be formulated as follows: did the animals depicted in the drawings of Paleolithic man “come out” of the wall or “go into” it?

In 1923, N. Casteret discovered a Late Paleolithic clay figure of a bear lying on the ground in the Montespan cave. It was covered with indentations - traces of dart strikes, and numerous prints of bare feet were found on the floor. A thought arose: this is a “model” that incorporates hunting pantomimes around the carcass of a dead bear, established over tens of thousands of years. Then the following series can be traced, confirmed by finds in other caves: a life-size model of a bear, dressed in its skin and decorated with a real skull, is replaced by its clay likeness; the animal gradually “gets to its feet” - it is leaned against the wall for stability (this is already a step towards creating a bas-relief); then the animal gradually “retracts” into it, leaving a drawn and then a pictorial outline... This is how archaeologist A. Solar imagines the emergence of Paleolithic painting.

Another way is no less likely. According to Leonardo da Vinci, the first drawing is the shadow of an object illuminated by a fire. Primitive begins to draw, mastering the “outlining” technique. The caves have preserved dozens of such examples. On the walls of the Gargas cave (France) 130 “ghost hands” are visible - human handprints on the wall. It is interesting that in some cases they are depicted with a line, in others - by filling in the external or internal contours (positive or negative stencil), then drawings appear, “torn off” from the object, which is no longer depicted in life-size, in profile or frontally. Sometimes objects are drawn as if in different projections (face and legs - profile, chest and shoulders - frontally). Skill gradually increases. The drawing acquires clarity and confidence of the stroke. By best drawings biologists confidently determine not only the genus, but also the species, and sometimes the subspecies of an animal.

The Magdalenian artists take the next step: through painting they convey dynamics and perspective. Color helps a lot with this. Full of life the horses of the Grand Ben cave seem to be running in front of us, gradually decreasing in size... Later this technique was forgotten, and similar drawings are not found in rock paintings either in the Mesolithic or Neolithic. The last step is the transition from a perspective image to a three-dimensional one. This is how sculptures appear, “emerging” from the walls of the cave.

Which of the above points of view is correct? A comparison of the absolute dating of figurines made of bones and stone indicates that they are approximately the same age: 30-15 thousand years BC. e. Maybe the cave artist took different paths in different places?

Another of the mysteries of cave painting is the lack of background and frame. Figures of horses, bulls, and mammoths are scattered freely along the rock wall. The drawings seem to hang in the air; not even a symbolic line of ground is drawn under them. On the uneven vaults of caves, animals are placed in the most unexpected positions: upside down or sideways. No in drawings of primitive man and a hint of the landscape background. Only in the 17th century. n. e. in Holland the landscape is designed into a special genre.

The study of Paleolithic painting provides specialists with abundant material for searching for the origins various styles and directions to contemporary art. For example, a prehistoric master, 12 thousand years before the advent of pointillist artists, depicted animals on the wall of the Marsoula cave (France) using tiny colored dots. The number of similar examples can be multiplied, but something else is more important: the images on the walls of caves are a fusion of the reality of existence and its reflection in the brain of Paleolithic man. Thus, Paleolithic painting carries information about the level of thinking of a person of that time, about the problems that he lived with and that worried him. Primitive art, discovered more than 100 years ago, remains a real Eldorado for all kinds of hypotheses on this matter.

Dublyansky V.N., popular science book

Ancient rock paintings (petroglyphs) are found all over the world and have one common feature, they describe animals, including those that are no longer found on earth today. Many of these drawings were so well preserved that at first glance experts considered them to be fakes. However, after careful examination, the images were found to be genuine. Below is a list of ten well-preserved prehistoric cave paintings.

Chauvet Cave

A cave located near the commune of Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, in the Ardèche River valley in southern France. Contains the earliest known and best-preserved rock art in the world, dating from the Aurignacian era (36 thousand years ago). The cave was discovered on December 18, 1994 by three speleologists - Eliette Brunel, Christian Hillaire and Jean-Marie Chauvet. The paintings in the cave depict various Ice Age animals.

Magura Cave

Magura is a cave located near the village of Rabisha in the Vidin region, Bulgaria. In the cave, bones of a cave bear, a cave hyena and other animals were found. And on its walls you can see drawings from different historical periods. They mainly depict female figures, hunters, animals, plants, sun and stars.

The find includes about 5,000 drawings made by Aboriginal people on rocks in national park Kakadu, Australia. Most of the paintings were created about 2000 years ago. Interestingly, they depict not only animals, such as white sea ​​bass, catfish, kangaroo, rock couscous and others, but, and their bones (skeletons).

Tadrart-Akakus

Tadrart-Akakus is a mountain range in the Ghat Desert in western Libya, part of the Sahara. The massif is famous for its prehistoric rock art, which covers the period 12000 BC. e. - 100 AD e. and reflects cultural and natural changes in the area. The drawings depict animals such as giraffes, elephants, ostriches, camels and horses, as well as people in various situations Everyday life, for example, dancing and playing musical instruments.

Serra da Capivara - national park, located in the northeastern part of Brazil in the east of the state of Piaui. The park contains many caves containing examples of prehistoric art. The drawings, in great detail, depict animals and trees, as well as scenes from hunting. A prominent site in the park, Pedra Furada contains the oldest remains of human activity on the continent, which significantly changed the understanding of the peopling of the Americas. In order to preserve numerous prehistoric exhibits and drawings, the Brazilian government created this national park.

The Lascaux Cave is located in southwest France and is famous for its cave paintings dating back to the Paleolithic period. The cave contains about 2,000 drawings, which can be grouped into three main categories: animals, human figures and abstract characters. The cave is one of the places on the planet where you will not be allowed.

Bhimbetka rock shelters are an archaeological site consisting of over 600 rock shelters located in Raisen district, Madhya Pradesh, India. These shelters contain the earliest traces of human activity in India; according to archaeologists, some of them could have been inhabited more than 100 thousand years ago. Most of the designs are in red and white colors and depict animals such as crocodiles, lions, tigers and others.

Laas Gaal

Laas Gaal is a cave complex located on the outskirts of the city of Hargeisa in Somalia. Known for its well-preserved rock art. The drawings date back to the ninth - third millennia BC. e. and depict mainly cows, people, giraffes, wolves or dogs.

The Altamira Cave is located near the town of Santillana del Mar, Cantabria in Spain. It was accidentally discovered in 1879 by amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola. This great archaeological discovery is famous for its ancient cave paintings from the Upper Paleolithic era (35 - 12 thousand years ago), which depict bison, horses, wild boars, human handprints and more.

Cueva de las Manos

Cueva de las Manos is a cave located in southern Argentina, in the province of Santa Cruz, in the valley of the Pinturas River. Known for archaeological and paleontological finds. First of all, these are rock paintings depicting human hands, the oldest of which date back to the ninth millennium BC. e. The left hands of teenage boys are depicted on the walls of the cave. This fact suggested that these images were part of an ancient ritual. In addition to hands, on the walls of the cave there are depictions of guanacos, rheas, cats and other animals, as well as scenes of hunting them.

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