One of the most significant archaeological finds of recent times was the discovery of hundreds of petroglyphs (rock carvings), in the Ratnagiri and Rajapur area of the state of Maharashtra in western India. The petroglyphs have been etched on the rusty-red coloured laterite rocks that dominate the flat hilltops of the Konkan coastline. On Oct 1, 2018, the BBC ran a story about these petroglyph finds, which brought the matter to worldwide attention.1

1: Ratnagiri, Maharashtra on the Konkan coastline

“Our first deduction from examining these petroglyphs is that they were created around 10,000 BC,” Director of the Maharashtra State Archaeology Department, Tejas Garge, told the BBC. In other archaeological sites, the petroglyph style of art is associated with tools from the Mesolithic period. Mesolithic tools have also been found at a petroglyph site in the village of Kasheli in Ratnagiri.2 This puts the date of creation of these rock carved images at the very beginning of the post-glacial period, when humanity had just emerged from the cataclysms of the Younger Dryas epoch.

A huge 14.5 metre long and 12 metre wide petroglyph depicting an elephant and other animals in Konkan, Maharashtra, India.

While some of the petroglyphs were known to the locals who treated them with reverence, most of them were hidden beneath layers of mud and soil deposited during the intervening millennia. The 52 sites where the petroglyphs lie have been identified over the past 6 years or so by a group of explorers led by Sudhir Risbood and Manoj Marathe, who have a deep interest in the history, architecture, flora and fauna of the Konkan region.

A large elephant petroglyph from Ratnagiri

 

Many of the petroglyphs are not rudimentary scratches on the ground but large carvings executed with a lot of detail. Tejas Garge told the BBC that they might have been created by hunter-gatherer tribes, on account of the numerous images that depict animals, birds and sea creatures.3 However, the petroglyphs also include complex geometric forms and intriguing human figures, whose meanings remain unclear.

When I looked at the images in the BBC News report and then in a video on the BBC News Marathi TV channel,4 I was astonished to see sacred symbols found in the art and culture of many civilisations. Let’s take a look at them and reflect on their significance and implications.

The Winged Scarab

One large petroglyph depicts the Winged Scarab, a popular ancient Egyptian symbol associated with creation and rebirth.

The Egyptians called the scarab beetle Khepri (“He who is Coming into Being”) and worshiped it as the “dawn sun” on the eastern horizon. Just as the scarab beetle pushes its dung ball out of the sand and rolls it along the ground, Khepri pushed the sun disk upwards from the Underworld and rolled it across the sky every day.5

Ratnagiri petroglyph depicting the Egyptian Winged Scarab

 

4: Ancient Egyptian jewellery depicting the winged scarab beetle housed in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. By Ca.garcia.s CC BY-SA 4.0

The winged scarab can be seen on Egyptian tomb paintings, carvings, and manuscripts. From the Middle Kingdom (c.2055 – c.1650 BCE) onwards the scarab-form amulet was very popular, and featured on bracelets and necklaces. Scarabs were used as funerary talismans, and were placed over the heart of the deceased to keep it from confessing sins when the heart was judged by the gods of the underworld.6

The visual similarity between the petroglyph and the ancient Egyptian symbol of the Winged Scarab is quite striking. In the aerial view of the petroglyph we can clearly discern all the features of the Winged Scarab, including the sun-disk.

It boggles the mind to think that the Winged Scarab symbol, which was so popular in ancient Egypt, has been existence since the very beginning of the post-glacial epoch. How did such esoteric concepts and symbolic imagery appear at such an early age?

Surely, this could not have been the work of primitive hunter-gatherers. Who carved these remarkable petroglyphs, and for what purpose?

Is it possible that the Winged Scarab symbol encodes the cosmic wisdom of an erstwhile “Golden Age” civilisation that perished during the cataclysms of the Younger Dryas period (10,900 BCE – 9700 BCE) when our planet was struck by multiple fragments of a giant comet?

It is now well known that a Younger Dryas cosmic impact initiated a vicious cold snap, accompanied by fires, floods, and black rain, which brought about the extinction of a large number of North American megafauna and a North American prehistoric culture.7 Around 9703 BCE, the cold snap ended as abruptly as it had started, for reasons not clearly understood.8 The sudden transition out of the Ice Age to a warm interglacial climate may have precipitated a global flood of mythic proportions, which is recounted in the flood legends of many ancient cultures.

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