Predynastic Egypt

The blog post for this week is written by Yvonne Buskens-Frenken, from the Netherlands. She is a member of the Dutch Egyptology society Mehen and a former student of Egyptology at Manchester University (Certificate 2015 and Diploma 2017). She has visited Egypt many times (but not enough) and hopes to visit the Egypt Centre in the near future.

Introduction
Last week, a new online course was launched by the Egypt Centre called The First Pharaohs: Early Dynastic Egypt, which is hosted by Dr. Ken Griffin. In the following five weeks, the First Dynasty, the Second Dynasty, the origins of Egyptian religion, in addition to art, architecture, and early technologies will be discussed. But the course obviously started with the topic “Egypt before the pharaohs”, the same title as my favourite book of mine from 1980 written by Michal A. Hoffman, which I can recommend outdated perhaps at some points but which book isn’t within Egyptology as discoveries are still being made today and theories are revised and updated?

Egypt’s prehistory
I said “obviously” in the introduction of this blog post because if you want to understand the Early Dynastic Period of Egypt (and beyond) you need to have some knowledge of Egypt’s prehistory: some elements of pharaonic civilisation actually derive from the rather distant prehistoric past. However, the disciplines of Egyptology and Prehistory are in fact completely different with quite distinct primary sources and approaches when it comes to subject and terminology. The prehistory of Egypt starts with the Palaeolithic Period (about 700,000–7,000 BC) and to master that, you need to know a bit about geology, ecology, and climatology. You also need to study of stone tools and geological strata, which is not everyone’s cup of tea. Additionally, this was actually in the beginning of the field Egyptology a real struggle: there was little interest in prehistory (and vice versa in Egyptology within the Prehistory department) as the Palaeolithic and the Predynastic cultures share very few similarities and there are disparate and minimal sources available, which is the opposite for Pharaonic material. Furthermore, the vague dating of the available material is also problematic. However, the dating of objects is an important key in all this and in that context, I would like to discuss here just one sort of dating, namely “seriation”, and I would like to illustrate it with artefacts now held in the Egypt Centre (fig. ***).

 

Fig. 1: The Predynastic case

The Predynastic Period and Seriation
In Egyptian prehistory the Predynastic Period, first termed by Jacques de Morgan in 1896, is from about 5,500–3,200 BC. Basically, it is the time when farming was introduced in ancient Egypt until the time of the unification of Egypt. From this period, Badarian, Amratian, Gerzean, and Naqada cultures are known. Phases of cultural development at Naqada, an Upper Egyptian site, is contemporary with those known in el-Amra (hence Amratian) and el-Gerza (hence Gerzean) It is for this reason that the Predynastic Period has been subdivided into the following:

Predynastic	5,500–3,200 BC	(all dates are approximate)
Early Predynastic	5,500–3,800	Fayum A, Merimda, Badarian
	3,800–3,500	Amratian (Naqada IA–IB)
Middle Predynastic	3,550–3,400	Early Gerzean (Naqada IC–IIA–B)
Late Predynastic	3,400–3,300	Middle Gerzean (Naqada IIC)
	3,300–3,200	Late Gerzean (Naqada IID1–IId2)

From three types of dating used today, known as relative, absolute, and radiometric dating, seriation belongs to the first category. For a quick understanding of all sorts of dating methods, please follow this link https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/archaeology/dating.html
Relative dating leads to the relative chronological position of objects, events, and longer periods. It is not always a very accurate method but for the Predynastic and Protodynastic material it is an important tool as lots of material from that period is pottery, which make perfect objects for relative dating. However, while seriation is a method to place pottery into a chronology, a sequence, it does not tell you how old they exactly are or how much time there is between the different types of pots. It doesn’t measure time.

William Flinders Petrie developed a relative chronology system for the 900 Predynastic graves he investigated in Hiw (also known as Hu or Roman Diospolis Parva) and Abadiya (Petrie 1901). Each grave was a separate unit and physically unrelated to the others; it lacked stratification, which made dating difficult. Petrie discovered that one kind of pottery vessel type was present in several graves, the so-called wavy handle pot, but this pot could vary in form (fig. 2). Some were rounded with proper handles, and some were cylindrical with rudimentary handles. Some had forms in between.

Fig. 2: Petrie's Naqada Seriation

Petrie dived the series he found in 50 groups (fig. 3), numbering them from 30–80.  

Fig. 3: Petrie's pottery series

They are dived into three different groups: Naqada I (SD 30–38), Naqada II (SD 39–60), and Naqada III (SD 61–80). The SD numbers can vary a bit depending on which publication you read, more about this later below. Petrie, clever as he was, left the numbers 0–30 open for possible future finds, which would predate his earliest finds.

The cylindrical types were found in the First Dynasty tombs. Under the assumption that in an undisturbed grave all material is contemporaneous, other grave goods could be relatively dated. Wavy-handled pottery was never found in graves holding Amratian vessels (so-called white cross-line vessels). This led to the assumption that Amratian pottery (Naqada I material) was earlier than wavy-handled ones. So what does Naqada I, II, and III pottery looks like? Here are some fine examples from the Egypt Centre.

Naqada I pottery
In fig. 4 you see a black-topped redware pottery vessel from the Egypt Centre (EC276). It is from Petrie’s excavation in Naqada. Black-topped redware is a fine red pottery with blackened rim. How such vessels were decorated has been much debated. This vessel can be given a sequence day between 34–46. 

Fig. 4: Black-topped redware vessel (EC276)

Naqada II pottery
Pottery from this period is probably the most famous of all decorated pottery (D-Ware). Who cannot fall in love with these sometimes very small pots with their geometrical patterns, depictions of boats, humans, animals, and particularly ostriches and gazelles. Here is W5308, a wonderful small specimen (fig. 5). It is about 10cm in height, made of Marl clay, and has a small flat base, rolled rim, two pierced lug handles, and painted decoration (D-Ware). According to the auction catalogue, it was found opposite Gebelein. 

Fig. 5: D-ware vessel (W5308)

Another Naqada II pottery vessel is W1045 (fig. 6). It is small-shouldered ovoid jar with a flat base, recurved rim, and two wavy handles (wavy-handled ware). It is made of red Marl fabric with many small limestone inclusions. The vessel was excavated from grave 42 within the Fort at Hierakonpolis in 1905 by John Garstang. This is one of the earlier types of Petrie’s wavy-handled sequence, dating to the Naqada II Period, which derived from Palestinian imports. It is sorted in Petrie’s sequence (SD 62–72) and belongs to one of the true wavy-handled jars, before they transmuted into cylindrical jars.

Fig. 6: Wavy-handled jar (W1045)

Naqada III pottery
Speaking of cylindrical jars, AB107 (fig. 7) is an example of the last in the line of wavy handled jars from the sequence by Petrie. It is a medium cylindrical Marl clay jar with a flat base, rolled rim, and string-line decoration just below the rim.

Fig. 7: Cylindrical jar (AB107)

As noted above, seriation is not an accurate method and Petrie’s sequence dating had some flaws. W. Kaiser and S. Hendrickx updated his work. Kaiser came up with another subdivision about 60 years after the work of Petrie, a fine tuning as it was based on excavations at Armant by Mond and Myers in the 1930s. This led to the following (see chart below)

 

Naqada I	SD 30–38
Naqada II a and b	SD 38/40–45
Naqada II c and d	SD 40/45–63
Naqada III	SD 63–80

In 1989, Hendrickx’s thesis allowed Kaiser’s system to apply to all of the Naqada culture sites in Egypt, resulting in slight modifications (transitional subphases between Naqada I and II).

Bibliography:

Adams, Barbara 1988. Predynastic Egypt. Shire Egyptology 7. Princes Risborough: Shire Publications.

Hoffman, Michael A. 1991. Egypt before the pharaohs: the prehistoric foundations of Egyptian civilization, revised ed. Austin, Tex.: Univ. of Texas Press.

Midant-Reynes, Béatrix 2000. The prehistory of Egypt: from the first Egyptians to the first pharaohs. Translated by Ian Shaw. Oxford; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Petrie, W. M. Flinders 1901. Diospolis Parva: the cemeteries of Abadiyeh and Hu 1898–99. With chapters by A. C. Mace. Egypt Exploration Fund, Special Extra Publication 20. London: Egypt Exploration Fund.