Gilf Kebir

Gilf Kebir (جلف كبير) (var. Gilf al-Kebir, Jilf al Kabir) is a plateau in the New Valley Governorate of the remote southwest corner of Egypt, and southeast Libya. Its name translates as "the Great Barrier". This 7770-square-kilometre sandstone plateau, roughly the size of Puerto Rico, rises 300m from the Libyan Desert floor.

The name Gilf Kebir was given to the plateau by Prince Kamal el Dine Hussein in 1925, as it had no local name. It is known for its rugged beauty, remoteness, geological interest, and the dramatic cliff paintings-pictographs and rock carvings-petroglyphs which depict an earlier era of abundant animal life and human habitation.

The Uweinat mountain range at the very south of the plateau extends from Egypt into Libya and Sudan.

Gilf Kebir Plateau lies in the heart of the eastern part of the vast Sahara Desert, and, thus, gets some of the most extreme climates on Earth. This is the driest place on the planet, not only because the area is totally rainless (the annual average rainfall amount hardly reaches 0.1 mm) but also because the geological aridity index/dryness ratio is over 200, which means that the solar energy received at the ground evaporate 200 times the amount of precipitation received. Rainfall may fall every twenty years in Gilf Kebir.

The plateau is crisscrossed by Wadis (dry, seasonal riverbeds). These include:

The Gilf Kebir is known for its prehistoric Neolithic petroglyphs

Saharan rock art has been found to resemble art of Nile valleys. The Saharan area was more wet until mid-Holocene or about 4000 BC, when the monsoon retreated southwards, forcing humans to migrate. Some retreated eastward to the Nile valley, taking with them their beliefs and influencing Egyptian art.

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