Tindaya Guanche sacred mountain, Fuerteventura (Canary Islands, Spain) and its Ibero-Guanche (Latin) rock inscriptions

Abstract

Tindaya volcano is a sacred Guanche (or Majo)* mountain, Canary Islands, Spain. This mountain was probably a religious / pilgrimage place for Guanche/Majo people. Many of its rocks are covered by lineal and figurative motifs with incised or picketed (carved) technology the most abundant reported are podomorphs, which in the Atlantic European façade usually point towards either the summer solstice sunset or the sunset yearly arch at these latitudes (Northwest direction). Podomorphs are generally admixed with other motifs in the rock panel. Among these motifs are the so called Ibero-Guanche incised Lineal Megalithic Scripts or pre-Guanche-Iberian signs. These are similar to those found in other Canary Islands, Algerian Sahara Desert or Iberia, some of them scripted in dolmens themselves (5-3,000 years BC). This finding at Tindaya volcano supports a very early Fuerteventura Island, longer before than Punic or Roman influence, if any; podomorphs todays Bronze Age chronology in Iberia supports ancient peopling in Fuerteventura and other Canary Islands. In the present paper we analyse these incise Iberian-Guanche (or earlier) writing and put forward a mainly religious/ funeral meaning in the context of the Paleolithic/Neoithic widespread Religion of the Mother. The Saharo-Canarian cultural circle may have been the origin of Eurafrican and Mediterranean Lineal scripts, like Runes, Iberian Tartessian, Etruscan, Lepontic, Minoan Lineal A and others. Particularly Iberian- Guanche scripts and their probable precursor Linela Megalithic signs also present in Sahara supports that Saharan people migration when desertification started about 10,000 BC was origin of this culture. *Majos= Lanzarote and Fuerteventura Islands inhabitants.