DATE OF THE “NEW RACE” REMAINS.

14. The greatest interest of El Kab lay in the light that it shed on the same civilisation which had been disclosed two years before at the cemeteries of Naqada and Ballas. In these we had examined 3000 graves of a type till then unknown, and as different from the graves of the historic Egyptians as if they had come from China or Peru. The most obvious characteristic of these burials was the position of the body, which always lay in a contracted attitude, with the head to the south, never at full length, as in all other Egyptian interments. All the furniture of the graves—beads, slate palettes, green paint, ashes, flint knives and pottery—were of novel types, and without any admixture of the mirrors, ushabtis, scarabs, or any of the other furniture of ordinary tombs. Hieroglyphic inscriptions were also absent. The results of the excavations were published in “Naqada and Ballas,” and the main conclusions there set forth were that these graves were the interments of a foreign race, differing from the Egyptians of the dynastic periods in physical features and in habits; that they were probably a white race akin to the modern non-Semitic inhabitants of North Africa; and, further, that they invaded Egypt at the close of the Old Kingdom, and were again expelled by the rising strength of the Xth and XIth dynasties.

[These people were at first called by Dr. Petrie “the New Race,” but they have received other names. M. de Morgan, in his Ethnographic PrÉhistorique, has attributed this class of monuments to the Neolithic period, and called the men of the contracted burials “les indigÈnes.” The name “Libyans” has also obtained some vogue; it emphasises the undoubted distinction of race between this people and the historic Egyptians, and may perhaps be used as a general name for the people of the contracted burials until a clearer distinction than is now possible be made between (a) the Neolithic period before the advent of the dynastic Egyptians; (b) the time between the Egyptian arrival and the consolidation of the kingdom under Menes; and (c) the first three dynasties.]

15. The conclusion that these people differed from the Egyptians has not been much disputed, but the above dating has been opposed, and the evidence from El Kab convinced me that we were wrong, and that M. de Morgan was right in attributing the bulk of this civilisation to the praedynastic period. Of this dating, the remarkable finds of M. AmÉlineau at Abydos, and those of M. de Morgan himself at Naqada, have given very strong proof; but the more fragmentary evidence of El Kab, which led me independently to the same conclusion, may retain still a certain interest.

M. AmÉlineau’s excavations at Abydos began at the end of 1896—the winter after our Naqada campaign—and many of the objects he found are already exhibited at Ghizeh, others are at Paris, and a few have found their way to England. Among them are many pots and stone bowls of undoubted late Neolithic type, with whole classes of objects which did not occur at Naqada, stelÆ, inscribed scarabs of limestone, and clay seals stamped with the Ka names of kings. The long pots on which these inscribed clay seals still fit are of a type found once at Ballas, and so prove some connection of the Ka names with the contracted burials.

This year Sethe’s important paper (A. Z. XXXV, 1) identifying three of AmÉlineau’s names with known kings of the Ist and IInd dynasties, has brought a new precision into the whole question, but this, of course, was not known to us at El Kab. Yet AmÉlineau’s association of the Libyan pottery with inscriptions of an archaic style, which would most naturally be dated long before the IVth dynasty, made our later dating of the pottery improbable, and necessitated a re-examination of the evidence. The crucial case at Ballas was the secondary burial of a Libyan found in one of a group of stairway mastabas. The mastabas were believed to be of the IVth dynasty, because the fragments of pottery and of alabaster bowls found in them were similar to IVth dynasty objects from the cemetery of Medum.

16. This dating of the alabaster was, as we now think, rather too late, but the interment certainly proved that one Libyan died when a tomb of the early Old Kingdom had already been plundered, and lay open, affording an easy means of burial. But not only was this intrusive burial found in one stairway tomb; green paint and stone vases with horizontally-pierced handles, were found in others of the same group. These Libyan traces were also interpreted as the remains of secondary interments, but when at El Kab, I saw the same Libyan remains in the stairway tombs there, it immediately became clear that the malachite, vases, etc., more probably belonged to the original interments, not to secondary ones, that the stairway tombs (perhaps, also, the other mastabas) were but another form of Neolithic burial, and that the earlier Neolithic tombs were anterior to the Old Empire. As the digging went on, other scraps of evidence came to support this view. The coarse pottery which lay in heaps over and near the mastabas of the IVth dynasty is identical with that found in some of the small Neolithic graves.

A vase of hard red ware found in Ka-mena’s tomb, which was certainly of Sneferu’s time, was almost indistinguishable from a Libyan form common at Ballas.

One of the incised bowls—a rare but distinctive species of Libyan pottery—was found in a stairway tomb at El Kab.

The small late-Libyan graves lay between the mastabas of the time of Sneferu, not interfering with them, or dug through them, giving the impression that all were approximately of the same date.

In one tomb there was found, with undoubted Libyan pottery, a green steatite cylinder of a type known in the Old Kingdom.

In a walk taken one day over the cemetery of Kom el Ahmar, opposite to El Kab, I observed again the same mixture of Old Kingdom and Libyan pottery near a group of mastabas.

17. To this evidence must be added some considerations about the first cemetery of Naqada and Ballas, which were felt by us from the beginning as difficulties in the way of accepting the later dating to the VII-X dynasty.

The entire absence of distinctly Egyptian objects from so large a series of tombs, and even from the villages of the same period, was difficult to explain on the supposition that the Egyptians were already in the land.

The Libyans, too, as lovers of fine pottery, would surely have learnt the use of the wheel from the Egyptians, if they had come in contact with them at all; yet all the Libyan pottery (with the rarest exceptions) is handmade.

The Libyans habitually placed green paint among the other toilet articles buried near the head. The Egyptians of the early Old Empire are sometimes represented with green paint upon the face. It is more natural to suppose that this was a fashion inherited from the praedynastic times, than to suppose that so peculiar a mode of ornamentation was practised at two independent periods in the history of the country.

Lastly, there is the negative evidence from the mound of Nubt. Here Dr. Petrie found on the surface walls of the XVIIIth dynasty, with inscriptions and dated pottery; below them walls of the XIIth dynasty, with pottery again, and lower still, walls and layers of pottery of the Old Kingdom. But between these last two, no scrap of the Libyan pottery occurred, though a Libyan town lay but a quarter of a mile away.

On an examination, then, of the whole evidence from our two cemeteries of Naqada and El Kab, I came to the conclusion that our first dating had been not early enough, that the latest type of tomb at Naqada was contemporary with the mastabas of the Old Empire, and that the earliest type (characterised by dissevered skeletons, very fine flint knives, great quantities of ashes, and a small number of red and black pots of good quality) must be attributed to a much earlier period.

Since then much more information has come to light. M. de Morgan’s second volume of “Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte” contains a summary of the discoveries made by M. AmÉlineau at Abydos, together with an account of the great royal tomb found by M. de Morgan himself at Naqada. M. AmÉlineau’s finds are recognised as being chiefly of the first three dynasties, and on an ivory plaque from the royal tomb of Naqada, Dr. Borchardt has pointed out the name of Menes himself.

The objects from this tomb are now exposed in the museum at Ghizeh, and it is interesting to observe that the pottery, the slate palettes, and the flint knives are distinctly of the later type of Ballas.

It has, then, become now fairly clear that the earliest known inhabitants of Egypt were a tall, fair race akin to the modern Kabyles. They buried their dead in a contracted position with the head to the south, and in the earliest times either mutilated the dead before burial, or kept the bodies for a long time before the final burial. The relative dates of the different varieties of their tombs can be made out, and the graves with mutilated bodies found at Naqada are much earlier than those at Abydos containing the names of I-II dynasty kings. At some period which we cannot yet date, even on the rough scale of Libyan pottery, another race or races entered the country, bringing with them writing, the practice of mummification, the art of building in brick with recessed panels, and perhaps, as M. de Morgan suggests, metals. Thus was formed the Egyptian people of historic times.

18. A point that has not been explained is the different position of the bodies in the open graves and in the stairway tombs. In the former, the head lies south; in the stairways and in the graves of Medum, it is to the north.

The burials, too, under the large pots which we call majurs, are not understood, nor is their exact period known. As they were found in the later cemeteries of Ballas, El Kab, and Kom el Ahmar, but not at Naqada, it seems likely that they belong to the later division of the Libyan period, viz., after the Egyptian invasion, perhaps even after the time of Menes. But to which race, if to either, is not clear.