Petroglyphs are found all over the world, sometimes in locations where you find Rockpaintings too.
In Australia some native people still live in close relations to old religious rituals including sacred work with Rockpaintings and engraving Rockcarvings.
The shamans of Siberia worked on the rocks. In California the Shumash carved and painted their saga on the rocks. In the Italian alps people told thir saga of transportation and hunting. In bronze age Scandinavia the golden age of Petroglyphs seem to have occurred.
All these old global pictograms and ideograms have quite a few resemblance's with the oldest Chinese written "language".
From the darkness of prehistory until as recent as the bronze age the signs seem to have been globally understood; there were precise pictures of many different animals, there were the colors, probably with a very clear symbolic meaning, as in Nature, there were human features - the hand, one, two...feet and the easily understood body language of humans and animals.
But since the latest great geological catastrophe on Earth (the eruption of Thera/Santorrini, ca.1560 B.C.) language step out of petroglyphic symbolizing (passing through the hieroglyphs) into letters and words.
All this is in itself an interesting phase in human evolution when the pictures designed for the eyes loses power and words designed for the ears take over as main channel of human signaling.
Petroglyphs are the eldest signs on earth and they exist in an abundance that perplex experts as well as laymen.
In Scandinavia the conditions for making Rockcarvings are extremely benign with rocks, raising from the sea, in fjords and on islands polished during several glaciations.
Wide areas of perfect surfaces for the Rockcarvers, who did send their messages in and outside their own time, have been found during the last twenty years.
You always find the richest petroglyph sites perfectly adapted to natural surroundings.
When you are at such a site you feel that you are in the Temple of the Rockcarving people. Sometimes you feel that you are in their University.
No human structures though, only human symbols and natural beauty and the sound of the seabirds.
It it´s possible to "learn" the language of vision.
It it´s possible to get the message from the oldest times - how to try to live a Good life!
How to limit oneself, how to understand nature and avoid arrogance!?
Everyone knows that you don´t bring the structures of your wealth - the castles, the churches, the skyscrapers with you when you go, still modern man work like mad during a short lifetime to aggregate as much material stuff as possible around his tiny Human Spirit.
Even if  the tagging outlaws of the urban jungle are fierce reminders of the eventual destruction and decline of all concrete structures most superegos seeem to go on manifesting themselves in bigger and bigger structures.
The Rockcarving artists left their humble signs on Nature herself thus bringing their spiritual world to us - we who are able to see their pictograms.
The vision of the peaceful civilization of the Rockcarvers with it´s temples and universities on the smooth rocks of the Scandinavian Archipelago are utterly provincial and cannot exist in an urban context.
That's for sure.

                                                 
Tomas Brusell

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