According to Unesco, ‘The decorated cave of Pont d’Arc, known as Grotte Chauvet-Pont d’Arc is located in a limestone plateau of the meandering Ardèche River in southern France, and it extends to an area of approximately 8,500 square meters. It contains the earliest known pictorial drawings, carbon-dated to as early as the Aurignacian period (30,000 to 32,000 BP). The cave was closed off by a rock fall approximately 20,000 years BP and remained sealed until its rediscovery in 1994. It contains more than 1,000 drawings, predominantly of animals, including several dangerous species, as well as a large number of archaeological and Palaeolithic vestiges….’.
History of Aurignacian people can be seen through the ancient history of the ‘inhabited world’; the name of Aurangabad reveals their earliest history which cannot be extended more than one thousand years. Name of Arc if looked through biblical story links it with the land of Jerusalem. With biblical events in a chain like manner the story of the entire ‘inhabited world’ gets assimilated.
Aurignacian or Aurigna means Auri and –gna(-gana means ‘people’) which identifies the Uri-people making Arc a part of the Aurignacian and the Ardèche River’s geographical situations. Narratives of the Unesco’s heritage site makes it easier to see their ancient position vis-à-vis land of the Frank people’s homeland. Uraga also means ‘serpent’ or the ‘nagas’.
When scholars see that the drawings of the Cave of Pont d’Arc ‘include several dangerous animal species difficult to observe at that time, such as mammoth, bear, cave lion, rhino, bison and auroch, as well as 4,000 inventoried remains of prehistoric fauna and a variety of human footprints’, it shows how ancient migrants took these ferocious animals with them in their ships to their far off destination.
While Ardèche River pinpoints the River of Arada country as well as the land of the Arc neighbourly to Uri or Ur, Chauvet-Pont refers to the Punt/Pont region where seven rivers met at Panchaia near the City of the Sun(Arc). This sacred place is linked to the story of the Phoenix. This presents a unique geographical picture of the land from where the ancient migrants migrated to France.
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