Much of the evidence in the preceding discussion derives from rock art, and we need to return to this vast area of African symbolic endeavour. Although described by Tom Phillips as ‘the longest continuous artistic tradition in Africa’ (1995, 14), it has yet, according to Whitney Davis, hardly been confronted in studies of Egypt's relationships with Africa: ‘Although prehistorians working in North Africa perceived connections between rock art in the Sahara and in the Nile Valley, due to gaps in communication and the isolation of Egyptology this insight was not followed up systematically until the 1960s…. [The] study of rock art became increasingly independent of Egyptology’ (1990, 276). Peter Ucko and Andre Rosenfeld's Palaeolithic Cave Art (1967), still described in the 1990s as ‘the most balanced and wide-ranging survey of the whole topic’ (Cunliffe, 1994, 485), simply ignores African rock art. Barring David Coulson and Alec Campbell's relatively recent African Rock Art (2001), comparative studies of rock art across Africa barely exist (but see Ki-Zerbo, 1981b; Willcox, 1984; Davis, 1990; Smith 2006a). Yet the subject cries out for exploration, and is resonant with Egyptian-Saharan-African synergies. Toby Wilkinson (2003) has drawn crucial connections between the rock art of the Egyptian eastern desert and early pre-Dynastic art, but there are many other connections still to pursue.

Bushman or San rock painting in southern Africa has been referred to as ‘our Linear B’ (Anthony Thorold, personal communication); that is, an enigmatic sign system for which we do not yet hold the key. What is true of this arcane southern African rock art holds for most African examples. Yet it is also true that in many parts of the continent, artists seem to have been driven by similar impulses – similar themes are recurrent and variations on a fundamental repertoire of images are repeated everywhere.