Tag Archives: Erg Chebbi

Pre-Islamic tombs in the Sahara

Part of the Sahara A to Z series

See also:
Mysterious circles
Interesting academic document
Nick Brooks’ photos (Western Sahara)
Archeoland / Sahara loads of images and downloads

As on previous occasions, the route of our camel trek through the Immidir will rest a day at Aguelmam Rahla, a reliable waterhole at the mouth of the Oued Tafrakrek canyon (blue line on map, left) where the Tissedit plateau drops down to meet a band of dunes. I’d been wanting to make a diversion here since scanning Google Earth a few years back and noticing the innumerable pre-Islamic tombs (‘PIZ’) in the area (below).

Looking again on Google Earth some time later, less than an hour of nosing around revelled three dozen keyhole, antenna or mound-ring tombs within a few kilometres of the waterhole. I didn’t bother counting the less distinctive mound tombs or just plain tumuli. In fact the proliferation of tombs here isn’t so unusual, given the topographic features already listed: edge of a plateau, former river mouth, band of dunes – all common factors found at former Neolithic occupation sites.

On the first crater tour in 2007 we walked along the base of the dunes, northeast from Aguelmam Rahla, and discovered several grinding stones and other artefacts at the foot of the dunes. And in 2012 one of us came across a near intact pot (left) at the foot of a dune, as well as napping (stone tool chipping) sites. You commonly find ceramic shards or even larger pieces, but I’ve never found an intact pot.

pizeders — Location of tombs along the Oued Tafrakrek canyon and on the Tissedit plateau, with a cluster around Aguelmam Rahla at the canyon mouth.

There’s something compulsive about Sahara tomb spotting on Google Maps, searching the featureless desert floor for the clear signs of prehistoric human activity. Once out there it can give a purpose to a journey that’s otherwise just agreeable recreation and adds a hint of treasure hunting.
It reminds you that the Sahara of 6000 years ago was not a desert, but a much less arid savannah. Among others, KenGrok spent years scanning and collating unusual imagery on Google Earth’s layers, including pre-Islamic tombs in the Sahara. In 2019 Google erased his work, but his baton has been picked up by ‘syzygy‘ on Google Earth Community, as well as Manfred Boelke at archaeoland.eu (his image below).

Image: https://archaeoland.eu/en/sahara-en

Broadly speaking, half a dozen tombs styles have been identified with clear regional limits as shown above. The most common is simply a mound of stones or tumulus which can be huge and can have a central depression to resemble a volcanic crater. Sometimes the mound may be surrounded by a ring – a mound-ring tomb. All over the Sahara tombs are usually found in clusters; find one and you’ll find others nearby. It suggests an auspicious place for burials or just a former occupation site with an adjacent burial ground.

A very unusual assembly of three types of tomb on the edge of the Tassili plateau near Djanet. The superimposed mound suggest the keyhole is older. As we know from rock art found in the same area, it’s common to cover what came before.

Antenna or crescent tombs have open arms spanning out from a tomb mound apex at around 120° and can be up to 250 metres or more, end to end. They are prolific in southeastern Morocco (bottom left; 27.6971, -10.8665), but are also found in Algeria by the thousand (25.86007, 4.36847). The finest ones have long, slender arms while small ones can be stumpy and even almost simple hemispheres.

Keyhole tombs are two concentric round or oval rings with the tomb mound near the middle and a corridor leading to the outer ring. Below is a famous keyhole near Djanet at the base of the Tassili n Ajjer plateau where you’ll find them in their hundreds.

A version of the keyhole is called a goulet tomb (below; French for narrow passage, as in ‘gullet’). They have a large perimeter ring with the tomb mound on the ring’s edge and a line or corridot of stones bisecting the circle. I find these much less common.

A version I’ve read about but not seen is called the rather ill-named compass tomb which is found exclusively in the Tibesti massif of northern Chad (left).
In the clearest examples like below, an arm or spike extends from the oval ring to one side, resembling a tadpole, tennis racket or snow show. As always, in the centre of the ring you will see the tomb mound.

Sunrise orientation
By now you may have spotted a common directional theme among the non purely circular pre-Islamic tombs: they all have elements which point at about 110° which, at these latitudes of around 25°N is towards the rising sun. Just as with many ancient, pre-monotheistic civilisations, the sun was the key element in their cosmology, with ‘the way to rising sun’ suggesting rebirth or afterlife. But just like builders, occasionally they got it wrong, like the compass tomb above right in the sands of the western Tibesti.

Sunrise and sunset points on the horizon at 25°N (Ie: much of the Sahara)

There is one final category of tomb which is also commonly foiund in the Sahara. The Islamic tomb. Contemporary Moslem cemeteries on the edge of desert towns are relative plain affairs, cleared rough ground covered in plain head stones. The ornate tombs below are out in the desert, far from the nearest village (Arak, Algeria). Usually the headstone is at the eastern end of the tomb, though of course with Islam that’s related to the direction of Mecca, not sunrise. These tombs, which might be said to have an entrance on the left and an east-pointing mihrab (‘altar’ niche) in the perimeter ring, will be a few hundred years old.

Not all pre-Islamic tombs fit the above categories. Below left, a keyhole shape but with no corridor, overlapped by a mound-ring tomb. Perhaps the corridor stones were reused for the mound-ring. Below right, a mound-ring with a perimeter mound like a goulet – a descendant’s tomb? I read here that excavated tombs in the Oued Draa of southern Morocco were more like mausolea, with a walled crypt under the stone mound where successive generations were interred. I’ve never read of a tomb being excavated like this in the Sahara, though I’m sure it must have been done, by either grave robbers, archeologists or the curious. I remember one time in the exceedingly remote Gilf Kebir, we came across a plain, desolate tomb (rare in that area) on a day-walk. Someone half-heartedly dug it up but found neither bones nor treasure. It didn’t seem like the right thing to do.

pizarm — Antenna; unimpressive at ground level

Often this fascination and excitement with pre-Islamic tombs falls a little flat on actually finding one on the desert floor. On a 2012 Immidir trip I was excited about finding a huge antenna tomb that lay close our path on Day 6 or so. On Google (above) the massive structure with a span of over 300m looked amazing, but by the time we tracked it down (left), it was too big to appreciate from ground level. My group seemed to say… ‘and the purpose if this diversion was…?’. ‘Flying’ over these tombs on satellite imagery, like Peru’s Nazca lines, is how they’re best appreciated.

How old are these ‘pre-Islamic’ tombs? Well in the central Sahara I’d say the Islamic era began to have an impact a couple of hundred years after the Arab Conquest of North Africa between AD 647–709. I imagine this swept like a tide west along the south Mediterranean coast, down the Atlantic to present-day Mauritania and then ‘eddied’ back west towards places like Timbuktu. Other eddies may have spun off sooner to places like Ghadames in Libya, following trans-Saharan trade routes into the interior.

Chances are these tombs, like the huge keyhole on the right in the Immidir (above), are only around 4000 years old, maybe double that. That means they followed the apogee of rock art some 6000 years ago following a climate change (the ‘Humide’ in the image below) which briefly repopulated populated what is now the Sahara. By this time megalithic tombs and temples became widespread across the ancient world, most spectacularly in ancient Egypt and western Europe.

You don’t have to venture into the deep Sahara to see keyhole tombs. In southern Morocco, just a short distance from Erg Chebbi and three miles west of Taouz, on the west side of the Oued Ziz are a cluster of tombs. Like Aguelmam Rahla they’re situated on the edge of a plateau and by a former big river as well as an erg – and not all with entrance ways pointing east.

Below, a curious structure on the Oued Tagant valley midway between Tam and Djanet. And below that, another in the Hoggar, just southeast of Assekrem. I’ve seen these elsewhere in southern Algeria but their meaning is unknown. The guides and old Saharan expeditions just call them ‘tombs’ but they look different and newer than PIZs.
More about them here.

Moroccan Sahara – Are we there yet?

1 Reply

To paraphrase the cop addressing Jack Nicholson’s character at the end of Chinatown:
‘Forget it Jake, it’s the internet.’

Exactly where does the iconic and eminently Instagramable majesty of Sahara start in Morocco? Like Keyser Söze, is it even there at all?
Years ago I came across an internet forum argument on the now defunct LP Thorn Tree (I gave my 2ç then left them to it). There, a couple of know-alls lambasted the callow innocents daring to enquire where they could ‘see the Sahara in Morocco’ – in most cases referring to the famous Erg Chebbi dunes. ‘I told you: there is no Sahara in Morocco!’. All concerned have now migrated to TripAdvisor from where the quotes below were copied. It staggers me that some of these individuals can assert their unsubstantiated beliefs with such conviction, but such are the times. According to one of TA’s wise owls, ‘Erg Chebbi is not in Sahara, desert it is but not Sahara‘. So the Sahara is ringed by an unnamed desert that is not the Sahara?

… neither … Erg Chebbi/Erg Chigaga are the Sahara. For that you need to head to Western Sahara.
Ok, we know that but we want just see Sahara and ride camel
The limit of the Sahara is classified by the limit of the Date Palms
the Sahara,… lies 100 km or more to the south in Algeria.
Although not part of the Sahara , the dunes are pretty amazing.
It also corresponds to the 100mm isohyet in the north and the 150mm isohyet in the south. Long term average rainfall. A further definition is where the evaporation potential exceeds the presipitation [sic].
I don’t care what “Sahara” means. I am talking about the actual geographical boundaries of the area. And your definition of those boundaries is as incorrect and misleading as that of the ridiculous tour companies’ one.
Erg Chebbi is not in Sahara, desert it is but not Sahara. If you by reading see on website about Sahara tour, then it is only marketing to attract customers. But Sahara begin first in Algeria or you have to go to the South of Guelmim, to Western Sahara.
Here we go again with the “Erg (Chebbi/Chiggaga) is not the Sahara” brigade. What’s wrong with you? What’s a few hundred miles between friends? Jesus H. Christ.
May I just make one thing clear? You will not be travelling through the Sahara desert until you have gone south of La’ayoune. References to the Sahara in other places such as Erg Chebbi and so on are simply concoctions dreamt up by tour companies to fool their victims into thinking that they have been to the Sahara – they haven’t. To the east, the Sahara starts way over the other side of the border, deep into Algeria.
the Sahara if [sic] 100’s of kilometers away from the big dune areas over the border in Algeria and not in Morocco [continues] ... [Chebbi] is more spectacular than any of the places in the Moroccan Sahara that I have visited.

This knotty problem of the Sahara’s precise extent may be unique to Morocco. You start with the very concept’s compelling mystique. It’s hard to think of other wilderness regions that conjure up such strong imagery and notions, maybe because it’s so close to Europe compared to other iconic wastelands.
Then you mix in the unceasing clash between gullible bucket listers wanting to definitively tick off the Sahara – and devious local tour ops who promise the earth and deliver a turd. One wily tour agency has even managed to insert themself as a ‘reference’ on Wiki’s ‘Sahara desert (ecoregion)’ page.
This seems to be the angled grinder which the naysayers above fixate on: if some Moroccan cat in an oversized cheche strolls up and says ‘Hello my friend. Come, we will drink tea with nomads and I will show you Sahara’, you can expect to be a little disappointed.

As with all geographical features (seas, mountains, etc), it’s tempting but futile to apply fixed boundaries to their precise extent, as if they were a country. Where exactly does the Southern Ocean become the Atlantic? Where does the Karakoram become the Himalaya, or the High Atlas become the Anti Atlas for that matter (along the N10 highway, of course!).

It’s the same with hot deserts, commonly defined as arid regions with less than 100mm of average annual precipitation. Unlike a sea shore, there can be no finite edges identifying this change in rainfall; to imply otherwise would be absurd. In this way the NOAA map (above) is rather more nuanced, showing blurred transitions, not fixed isohyets (rainfall contours) between regions. Both the hard-edged yellow and red maps below could benefit from the same idea.

According to this ridiculous website, (sadly, the first that popped up on my Google) it appears to rain every other day in Merzouga/Erg Chebbi. (The ‘sea temperature’ there gets pretty balmy too – or maybe they mean ‘sand sea’).
This source for Merzouga looks rather more plausible: 65mm. Another estimates 53mm. yet another 172mm. This French Wiki gives 59mm. Let’s assume it’s not Kew Gardens down there and it comes in under a 100 mil most years.

Another map with a red zone straying over the Moroccan border. Can’t be right! Source

Archway into the desert, south of Guelmim (iirc)

Not all accept the level of aridity as a definition (‘I don’t care what “Sahara” means…‘), but they don’t cite any sources to explain their assertions about the Sahara’s boundaries. Instead, some of the TA dolts avow the Sahara lies ‘100km south of Erg Chebbi’ (ie: in Algeria). Others insist ‘200 miles’ from Chebbi. Final answer: ‘100’s of kilometers away’. Some even proclaim they magically entered the Sahara at Guelmim in western Morocco because ‘it is officially known as ‘The Gateway to the Sahara’’, surely a bald, tourist-oriented claim in a town famously thick with faux Tuaregs.

Others insist that, to be in the Sahara in Morocco, you must go ‘beyond Layounne’ (left), a fairly boring road trip, even for a dedicated bucketeer. What will they see on the way there? It may look like a desert, walk like a desert and quack like a desert, but it sure won’t be the Sahara!
No matter – give it a few decades because it’s said the climate in Morocco will see the Sahara creep over the berm and into Morocco.

You can see why some of your forum know-alls get cynical, myself included, even if I believe they’re dying on the wrong hill on this one. Lately, some canny marketing has designated an area of eroded wasteland ever so conveniently close to Marrakech’s gated resorts as ‘the Agafay Desert’ or ‘le petit Sahara’ which ‘extends over several hundred acres’.
There you can do all your favourite deserty things: sip tea in a tent, wear a cheche or ride camels, quads and 4x4s across a landscape where the barren rounded hillocks of dried mud resemble dunes. Insta heaven!

Some academics have sought to reclassify the liminal sweep in question as the ‘North Saharan steppe and woodlands‘. Aka: the edge of the Sahara where things gradually become less arid, like the Sahel in the south. But looking at the zone on the map below, ‘woodland’ is not a word which springs to mind. The band encompasses the vast Grand Erg Oriental spreading across Algeria (left) and southern Tunisia – about as Saharan an expanse anyone could wish for which would swallow up hundreds of Chebbis. The only woodland here is of the petrified fossil variety, west of Hassi bel Guebbour.

Me? Having travelled much of the Sahara over the last five decades, if you pushed me blindfolded out the back of a Hilux behind Erg Chebbi and removed the hood, I’d get up, smell the air, squint at the sun and guess I was in the Sahara. It may transpire to be the edge of the Sahara in boring old Marrokie, because vegetation and rainfall change in a very short distance (by Saharan standards) in the mountains to north.
But from Chebbi south and west along the Algerian border all the way to Tan Tan, it all resembles the Sahara I’ve seen – often dreary, sometimes epic, often barren, vegetated in patches, hyper arid elsewhere – all the way from Mauritania’s Adrar plateau to the Selima Sand Sheet (left) close to the Nile.

Camels? Dunes? Palms? What else could be be?

If anything, Erg Chebbi is just too darn Saharan for school and so has become one trampled terminus of Morocco’s Axis of Tourism, a quad-busting desert resort. I avoid the place. Over the years the pretty cluster of dunes at the end of the road has become choked with desert camps, kasbah-hotels, a few opportunist sharks and us tourists doing the dunes by various means.
In that sense it is very much not what I know of the real Sahara, but caught right, Chebbi can still be an amazing sight for a desert first timer. You’re on the very edge of the Sahara. Which side you’re on is up to you.