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Plethora of rock carvings found in Azerbaijan is a very peculiar phenomenon in the
country’s tangible cultural heritage, a phenomenon hard to overestimate. Rock carvings
constitute one of the basic and most important parts of local archaeological finds. A
noteworthy detail in this respect is that Azerbaijan was the first place in the Caucasus
where the major clusters of rock carvings were discovered.
The pioneer and first researcher of these newly-discovered traces of human culture was
Izhaq Jafarzadeh, a recognized Azerbaijani archaeologist who back in the late 1930’s
succeeded in finding out a large number of petroglyphs in Gobustan, the area in the
immediate vicinity of Baku.
The period of 1960-1970’s presented a new set of unique rock carvings revealed by
the Azerbaijani archaeologists like G.M.Aslanov, V.G.Aliyev, G.S.Ismayilzadeh at the
peninsula of Absheron, in Gemigaya, Nakhchivan, and the Kalbajar Highland.
Meanwhile, large-scale research activities undertaken in the same period by J.N.Rus-
tamov and F.Muradova doubled the number of discovered rock carvings in Gobustan.
That was the way a very special type of archaeological evidence pertaining to the
earliest human life, economic activities, deeply rooted cults, traditions, beliefs and
other forms of tangible and intangible cultural heritage was uncovered in Azerbaijan.
Rock carvings embracing an enormous time span from about 15th millennium B.C.
to the Middle Ages, provide invaluable authentic data regarding the basic milestones
of human development and testify to the vibrant contacts among various ethnic and
cultural communities for millennia.
The major clusters of cave art are the following:
1)
Gobustan, 65 kilometers to the south of Baku;
2)
Peninsula of Absheron, environs of the capital city of Baku;
3)
Gemigaya area, south-west of the Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan, 60
kilometers from the town of Ordubad, at Mount Gapyjik, the highest peak of the
Lesser Caucasus;
4)
Kalbajar District, western Azerbaijan, the foot of Delidagh Mount;
5)
Garabagh, south-west Azerbaijan, Azykh cave.