The word Hieroglyph in Greek means “sacred carving”. Ogham an early
form of Irish writing was also called “The Tree Alphabet”. Chinese
Kanji characters are derived from pictographs. The Rosetta Stone,
found in 1799, gave scientist the keys to translate Egyptian
hieroglyphs – it took fourteen years to decipher them. Petroglyphs
(petro = rock; glyph = carving) are man-made images which were
pecked, scratched, incised or abraided into stone.
Petroglyphs date back thousands of years and are found all over
the world. They were used by early man to record events, visions
and story telling. They were produced using crude tools such as
sticks, rocks or bone.
Such pictures convey ideas or meaning to the mind without the
use of words, sounds or other language form. This primitive method
of communication is known as pictography (picture-writing) and it
formed the basis of the Chinese and Japanese characters used today.
Indians found North of the Rio Grande had no written language. They
managed to keep alive traditions and tell stories by passing them
down by word of mouth.
Picture writing was helpful in aiding memory and communicating
ideas from one generation to the next.
My example is of the Native American Indians along the Columbia
River in Washington State. The rock the pictographs are on was
excavated from its original location at the river’s edge just
before Well’s Dam was constructed in 1967. Hundreds of similar rock
paintings lie deep under water behind the Columbia River Dams.
Pictographs or rock paintings were created by Native Americans
over many years, or even centuries. Although difficult to say with
certainty, anthropologists believe that pictographs chronicle the
history of countless generations and provide a record of what was
important in their lives. References to natural resources are
central – the earth provided food, shelter, and fulfilled spiritual
needs. Unfortunately those stories in stone also tell of disease
and death – indicated by an upside down figure. When Euro-Americans
arrived, diseases quickly followed ravaging the native populations.
The animals depicted in pictographs may represent prey, or they
might identify particular tribes. Native Americans groups recognize
one another by clan names – the turtle people, the crayfish people,
the big fir people – when Euro-Americans arrived, native groups
were often given new names like Methow, Chelan, and Moses.
Some pictographs were created with paints made exclusively from
natural materials. Minerals, plant extracts, blood, urine and fat
were used to produce a rainbow of colors. Here in the Columbia
Plateau, pictographs are predominantly red. Erosion, pollution,
development and vandalism have taken a toll on this rock art.
Your challenge if you choose to accept it is to find ancient
native pictographs on stone in the area you live or travel in. In
doing so keep the following rules: Please do NOT mark the
pictographs with chalk, markers, spray paint etc. They should not
even be touched with your hands, as doing any of this will speed up
the destruction of these historical works of art.
IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO READ ALL LOGS BEFORE YOU LOG IN TO
MAKE SURE YOU ARE NOT DUPLICATING A SITE. THANK YOU.
The following guidelines MUST be followed:
1. Picture of pictograph and gpsr. (Picture must be clear and
large enough to recognize objects)
2. Coordinates, country, state, nearest town and name of site
need to be included with description of site and people who created
the pictograph. The exception to this rule is if you find a
pictograph on private land or that is not open to the public or not
well known you may exclude the coordinates and location. I still
would like the state and/or country.
3. One log per site
4. One log per team
5. HAVE FUN!