Predynastic Egypt
Egypt Before the Pharaohs  |
Nile silt and clay from the edges of the flood plain provided excellent materials for early Egyptian potters. This pot's tapering base was designed to fit into a stand. The circular spirals are ment to give the impression of a vessel carved from stone. This ivory figure is representative of a 'concubine'. It was placed in a tomb to be a female companion for the tomb's owner in the afterlife.  This cosmetic palette, in the shape of an obese ram, is one of the oldest surviving Ancient Egyptian artifacts. Most of these surviving pallettes are made of slate and are rectangular or carved in the sheape of hippos, hawks, turtles and cows. The surface of an object such as this was used for grinding the minerals used in eye paint. |
| References Used:
David, A. Rosalie "The Egyptian Kingdoms" |
Our human ancestors have been living in the Nile Valley since early prehistoric times. The late Neolithic period in Egypt is referred to as the 'Predynastic Period'. Human settlers first began to farm the Nile Valley from Palestine and Syria, from the Libyan tribes living to the west and from Nubia to the south. All of this migration occured at about 5000 B.C.. These people prospered and eventually formed two kingdoms. Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt.
Archaeologists have found stone axes at Abu Simbel, the site of later temples that tate back about 700,000 years. Unfortunately with the annual Nile floods, much archaeological evidence of prehistoric human life were washed away. We do know that by 10,000 B.C. groups of people were wandering around the fertile regioon around the Nile river, hunting, fishing, gathering roots, seeds and berries.
A little before 3000 B.C., traders from southern Iraq also sailed to Egypt, and some of these people, attracted by the fertile land of the country, decided to stay on. Soon these early settlers to the Nile Valley began to grow barley and to domesticate cattle, sheep and other livestock. They began to build villages of mud huts in areas that seemed to be safe from teh annual flooding of the Nile.
These earliest Egyptians also believed in life after death. Before mummification evolved burials involved arranging the corpse in a sleeping position with the elbows and knees drawn together in a fetal-like posture. The body was placed in a shallow sand pit with a selection of items to see the person into the next life, including valued personal possessions. The sand thrown on top of it would serve to preserve the body. The illustration at the top of this page shows a man who was found and was dubbed "Ginger" by the people who found him because of his reddish hair. (See illustration above).
An absolute chronology of this period has been difficult because of the variance of the types of remains between those found in Upper Egypt and those found in Lower Egypt. Excavations in Upper Egypt consist mainly of cemetaries, whereas in Lower Egypt the primary remains are those of settlements. This situation makes comparisons difficult.
A framework for relative dates for the mid to late Predynastic period in Upper Egypt i.e. the Amaratian and Gerzean periods such as those found at Naqada, was first established by Flinders Petrie in the early 1900's. Later when Gertrude Caton-Thompson excavated the area at Hammamia in the El-Badari region in the 1920's, she found that the stratigraphic evidence matched and confirmed Petrie's dating system. Radiocarbon dating suggest that that the period extended back at least as far as 5500 B.C.
Grave Goods