Gobustan
The collection has been inspired by unique rock art engravings from Gobustan Rock Art Cultural Landscape. The Landscape covers three areas of a plateau of rocky boulders rising out of the semidesert of central Azerbaijan, with an outstanding collection of more than 6 000 rock engravings bearing testimony to 40 000 years of rock art. The site also features the remains of inhabited caves, settlements and burials, all reflecting an intensive human use by the inhabitants of the area during the wet period that followed the last Ice Age, from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Middle Ages. The site, which covers an area of 537 ha, is part of the larger protected Gobustan Reservation. Gobustan has outstanding universal value for the quality and density of its rock art engravings, for the substantial evidence the collection of rock art images presents for hunting, fauna, flora and lifestyles in prehistoric times and for the cultural continuity between prehistoric and mediaeval times that the site reflects.
