The art reached its peak during what was clearly the golden age of the Tassili

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 265.  In the Sahara.

Our journey began with a backbreaking four-hour climb, taking us through scenery of almost unbelievable splendor but leaving us limp with exhaustion. After over five weeks in the Sahara I felt myself to be more or less acclimatized and in moderately good physical condition; but several of the others were septuagenarians twice my age, who had left France only two days before, who had only twenty-four hours to adapt themselves to the heat and the altitude, and who were now being asked to climb from a starting level of 4,000 feet to a plateau another 2,000 feet above that, under a blistering Sahara sun. Nor was that all: there followed another three miles of stony, shadeless desolation.

Then, suddenly, everything changed. Instead of the usual limitless expanses, the eye was brought up short by soaring verticals—mountain walls rising perpendicular, wind-sculpted columns of rock like petrified tornados, transforming the land into the semblance of an empty city, dividing it into streets and alleys and crescents and an occasional vast piazza. The next three days were a revelation. As we walked, some twenty miles a day, the rocks grew ever wilder in color, ever more fantastic in shape, corkscrewing up from the desert floor, forming arches and viaducts and colonnades. And, most fantastic of all, the paintings: paintings in their thousands, little patches of ochre and yellow on the rock walls, the documents of a savannah people and its herds, dating from the early Neolithic times of around 6000 bce down to that melancholy day, only a few centuries before our era, when increasing desiccation finally put an end to settled life on the plateau and the shepherds wandered off to seek richer pastures elsewhere. The art reached its peak during what was clearly the golden age of the Tassili—say around 4,000 bce. The subjects are surprisingly varied: there are no longer the hippos and rhinos, the elephants and giraffes and ostriches that we see in the earliest paintings, but there are sheep and oxen and goats and deer and antelope, no two of them ever exactly alike, seldom even drawn from the same angle. But the artists did not confine themselves to animals: they painted themselves, their wives, and their children: hunting, eating, running, making love. One picture shows a particularly nasty murder—a man clubbing another to death—but apart from this one instance the paintings are remarkably free of violence.

Nowadays the Tassili is empty apart from a few wandering Touareg. The Tibesti had been the land of the Toubou, who are probably the last surviving remnant of a prehistoric and probably aboriginal Saharan race: noble, immensely tough, but in appearance fairly unprepossessing. The Tassili, on the other hand, has always been Touareg country, and the Touareg must be among the most picturesque people on earth: the men immensely tall, in long robes of blue or sometimes green, with that huge black veil—it is really more of a mask—which they never seem to remove, even when eating and drinking. Just about every European in the Sahara wears a chèche, a length of white cheesecloth wrapped round the head and face as a protection against sun and wind, and one naturally assumes that the Touareg litham serves a similar purpose; but this does not explain why Touareg women never veil their faces at all, despite the fact that they are out and about every bit as much as their menfolk. The Touareg woman, though, is an exception to every rule, since hers is one of the most feminist societies on earth. It is she who chooses her husband—whom, if he proves unsatisfactory, she is free to leave whenever she likes.