Abridged versionThe high valleys of the mount Bego region (Tende, Alpes-Maritimes, France), in the Mercantour massif, contain about 36,000 engravings commonly attributed to the Neolithic and the Bronze Age lato sensu. The greater popularity of the vallée des Merveilles compared to the val de Fontanalba, the other main engraved area of the region, is partly explained by the presence of several complex and larges anthropomorphs. Overhanging a pastoral path and the left bank of the torrent des Merveilles, which crosses the valley longitudinally, the engraving of "Christ" is isolated on a large wall of very smooth vertical schist. An ampullary face, elongated downwards and at the scale 1/1, appears distinctly. The upper contour of the skull is represented by a convex line. This curved line is reminiscent of a crown of thorns and its discontinuous extension down to the emaciated aspect of the face suggests facial hair. The ensemble has helped to make the anthropomorphic figure an image of Christ for the local tradition. Some authors consider that the heterogeneous aspect of "Christ" reveals at least two stages of realization, its present form resulting from successive additions. The original motif would be a corniform (a stylized bovine) or a four-cell prehistoric reticulated with a pair of one-segment horns, which corresponds to the lower part of the anthropomorph. In spite of a careful observation with a magnifying glass, the picketing and the patina of this part of the engraving are too much affected by the recent alterations for such a hypothesis to be really confirmed or invalidated. However, in a 1950 photography, the lower part of "Christ" does not seem to dissociate De l'ancienneté du « Christ », dans la vallée des Merveilles Préhistoires Méditerranéennes, 6 | 2018 1itself from the whole of the engraving. Moreover, the cups that still remain in the lower two-thirds of the face, overlapping and juxtaposed by the recent scraping series, do not differ from the picking style of the upper third of "Christ" -relatively preserved from any contemporary intervention, and therefore more easily describable. The cup-marks that make up the upper line of the skull are fairly shallow, elongated and narrow (in "grains of rice"), regular and spaced from each other. Such pecking is excessively rare on the site, the prehistoric engravings are generally composed of round and clustered cup-marks made by pressure and rotation of a quartz foam tip. The cup-marks of the "Christ" were obtained by means of a coarse hammering, from right to left, and certainly with the help of a metal point, perhaps in iron (a blade? a nail?). We postulate that this face could be executed at once, later than the majority of etched engravings in the mount Bego area. From the iconographic point of view, surprising similarities exist with certain images of the Iron Age: the Dormelletto stele in Italian Piedmont, the cut heads engraveds of Entremont, in the south-east of France, or the german stele of Hirzenhain. Thus, the "Christ" is perhaps inspired by ce...
