El-Hosh en Qurta: de oudste Egyptische kunst op het spoor
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since 1998, the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels have been conducting rock art research at two different locations in Upper Egypt: el-Hosh and Qurta. The rock art of the former location, besides including a large amount of ‘classical’ Predynastic images (4th millennium BC), is mainly characterized by strange curvilinear designs, which are often associated with other abstract and figurative motifs. Based on ethnographic parallels, little doubt remains that many of these designs represent fishtraps. Aspects of patination and weathering, and the fact that these images are often superimposed by Predynastic rock art, hint at an advanced age. The AMS-dating of organic material trapped in the rock varnish covering the drawings confirms this and yields a minimal date of 5900-5300 BC. The rock art itself may be several millennia older. It was probably done by small groups of hunter-gatherers that dwelled in the Nile Valley and the adjacent deserts. Possibly they congregated at el-Hosh on a seasonal basis, at the time of the inundation, to perform fishing activities, which may have been accompanied by ceremonies and rituals, including the creation of rock art. In 2004, a locality with a completely different type of rock art was found at el-Hosh. This rock art is characterized by images of bovids, executed in a very naturalistic style and closely comparable to European Ice Age art. Similar images had already been discovered in the area in the 1960s by a Canadian archaeological mission. The latter images, however, were never properly studied and published, and remained largely unknown to the scientific community. They were relocated by us in 2005 near the modern village of Qurta. Since then, about 185 individual images have been identified, most of which represent wild animals. Aurochs are predominant, but hippopotami, gazelle, hartebeest, birds and fish are also present. Moreover, there are also several highly stylized human figures with pronounced buttocks. On the basis of the intrinsic characteristics of the rock art (subject matter, technique and style), its patination and degree of weathering, as well as the archaeological and geomorphological context, an attribution to the Late Palaeolithic Period has been proposed. This has been confirmed by the dating of windblown sediments that covered some of the rock art panels. Using Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL), it has been determined that these sediments were deposited about 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, thus confirming the Late Palaeolithic age of the rock art. This makes the Qurta petroglyphs the oldest found so far not only in Egypt, but in the whole of North Africa.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.046 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".