Prehistoric rock paintings discovered near Hyderabad

Few know that there are several rock sites in and around Hyderabad hidden inside hoods on innumerable hills.

In a recent discovery by Dyavanapalli Satyanarayana, ten prehistoric rock art sites in one cluster of four kilometers area with hundreds of red and white colour paintings in Daasarlapalli, Mulugu Mandal of Siddipet District and Yadaram of Medchal District is attracting a lot of attention.

“While proceeding towards Daasarlapalli alongside of Koyala Guttalu in the Mulugu mandal of Siddipet district one can see near Narsugutta a monolithic stone of some 12ft height.

On the southern face of the stone two elephants with tusks and trunks lifted are engraved as leaping further.

The time period of the engravings cannot easily be determined a Hanuman figure is also chiseled nearby the elephant figures during subsequent times,” says Satyanarayana.

In the last six-and-a-half decades the Department of Archaeology discovered 68 sites but in the last few years Satyanarayana has discovered 26 ones across Telangana.

He says there are several sites still to be explored that have a huge tourism potential. For instance, only 30km away from the city there are majestic rock paintings but no one seems to bother.

Generally rock paintings are said to be 200 years old but there have been some discoveries that are much older.

What is even more interesting is they take one back in time and also throw up questions on how people lived in those times.

Citing an example, he says, “In Kollagela Gundu cave, two beautiful bullocks are drawn one after the other in red ochre colour with straight horns and humps.

Since the oxen look young and energetic local people call them as Kollaagelu. It appears that the artist might have drawn first the outlines of the oxen and then filled them with flat wash.

An unclear painting of a man with a weapon over the oxen is also visible.”

There are also animal paintings of horned buck, wild sheep, cheetah, nilgai / buffalo. “Red ochre letters resembling Telugu – Kannada characters mai sa mma are identified in the cave.

One Talaari Nagaraju of the locality told that a local person named Maisayya rubbed and obtained red colour from the old paintings and wrote his name a few decades ago.

Three more letters are also found on another stone of the cave. The nature and style of these paintings prompt us to date them to Neolithic and Megalithic phases,” says the historian.

Cautioning about the destruction of these rock sites, Satyanarayana says they are threatened by granite quarries and already three rock art sites are lost.