Anthropology

by A. L. Kroeber

240. Predynastic Egypt

Egyptian civilization was already in full blown flower at the time of the consolidation of Lower and Upper Egypt under the first dynasty in the thirty-fourth century. Its developmental stages must have reached much farther back. Hieroglyphic writing, for instance, had taken on substantially the forms and degree of efficiency which it maintained for the next three thousand years. An elaborate, conventional system of this sort must have required centuries for its formative stages. A non-lunar 365-day calendar was in use. This was easily the most accurate and effective calendar developed in the ancient world, and furnished the basis of our own. It erred by the few hours’ difference between the solar and the assumed year. This difference the Egyptians did not correct but recorded, with the result that when the initial day had slowly swung around the cycle of the seasons, they reckoned a “Sothic year” of 1,461 years. One of these was completed in 2781; which gives 4241 B.C. as the date of the fixing of the calendar. This is considered the earliest exactly known date in human history. Of course, a calendar of such fineness cannot be established without long continued observations, whose duration will be the greater for lack of astronomical instruments. Centuries must have elapsed while this calendar was being worked out. Nor would oral tradition be a sufficient vehicle for carrying the observations. Permanent records must have been transmitted from generation to generation; and these presuppose stability of society, enduring buildings, towns, and a class with leisure to devote to astronomical computations. It is safe therefore to set 4500 B.C. as the time when Egypt had emerged from a tribal or rural peasant condition into one that can be called “civilized” in the original meaning of that word: a period of city states, or at least districts organized under recognized rulers. From 4500 on, then, is the time of the Predynastic Local Kingdoms.

Beyond this time there must lie another: the Predynastic Tribal period, before towns or calendars or writing or metal, when pottery was being made, stone ground, boats built, plants and animals being domesticated—the typical pure Neolithic Age, in short. Yet with all its prehistoric wealth, Egypt has not yet produced any true Neolithic remains. It is hardly likely that the country was uninhabited for thousands of years; much more probably have Neolithic remains been obliterated. This inference is strengthened by the paucity and dubiousness of Upper Palæolithic artifacts in Egypt. Lower Palæolithic flint implements are abundant, just as are remains from the whole of the period of metals. What has happened to the missing deposits and burials of the Upper Palæolithic and Neolithic that fell between?

Apparently they have been buried on the floor of the Nile valley under alluvial deposits. The Eolithic and Lower Palæolithic implements are found on the plateau through which the valley stretches; also cemented into conglomerate formed of gravel and stone washed down from this plateau and cut into terraces by the Nile when it still flowed from 30 to 100 feet higher than at present; and on the terraces. Just when these terraces were formed, it is difficult to say in terms of European Pleistocene periods; but not later than the third glacial epoch, it would seem, and perhaps as early as the second. As the Chellean of Europe is put after the third glaciation in the chronology followed in this book, the antiquity of the first flints used, and perhaps deliberately shaped, in Egypt, is carried back to an extremely high antiquity by the specimens imbedded in the terrace cliffs.

About the time of the last glaciation—the Mousterian or end of the Lower Palæolithic in Europe—the Nile ceased cutting down through the gravels that bordered it and began to build up its bed and its valley with a deposit of mud as it does to-day. From excavations to the base of dated monuments it is known that during the last 4,000 years this alluvium has been laid down at the rate of a foot in 300 years in northern Egypt. As it there attains a depth of over a hundred feet, the process of deposition is indicated as having begun 30,000 or more years ago. Of course no computation of this sort is entirely reliable because various factors can enter to change the rate; but the probability is that, other things equal, the deposition would have been slower at first than of late, and the time of the aggrading correspondingly longer. In any event geologists agree that their Recent—the last 10,000 years or so—is insufficient, and that the deposition of the floor of the Nile valley must have begun during what in Europe was part of the Würm glaciation.

This is the period of transition from Lower to Upper Palæolithic (§ [69], [70], [213]) in Europe. The disappearance of Upper Palæolithic remains in Egypt is most plausibly explained by the fact that the Upper Palæolithic, just as later the Neolithic, was indeed represented in Egypt, very likely flourishingly, but that in the mild climate its artifacts were lost or interred on or near the surface of the valley itself and have therefore long since been covered over so deep that only future lucky accidents, like well-soundings, may now and then bring a specimen to light.

For the Neolithic, there actually are such discoveries: bits of pottery brought up from borings, 60 feet deep in the vicinity of one of the monuments referred to, 75 and 90 feet deep at other points in lower Egypt. The smallest of these figures computes to a lapse of 18,000 years—nearly twice as long as the estimated age of the earliest pottery in Europe. It is always necessary not to lay too much reliance on durations calculated solely from thickness of strata, whether these are geological or culture-bearing. But in this case general probability confirms, at least in the rough. In 4000 B.C., when Egypt was beginning to use copper, western Europe was still in its first phase of stone polishing; in 1500 B.C., when Egypt was becoming acquainted with iron, Europe was scarcely yet at the height of its bronze industry. If the fisher folk camped on their oyster shells on the Baltic shores were able to make pottery by 8000 B.C., there is nothing staggering in the suggestion that the Egyptians knew the art in 16,000 B.C. They have had writing more than twice as long as the North Europeans.

The dates themselves, then, need not be taken too literally. They are calculated from slender even though impressive evidence and subject to revision by perhaps thousands of years. But they do suggest strongly the distinct precedence of northern Africa, and by implication of western Asia, over Europe in the Neolithic, as precedence is clear in the Bronze and early Iron Ages and indicated for the Lower Palæolithic.

If, accordingly, the beginning of the Early Neolithic—the age of pottery, bow, dog—be set for Egypt somewhere around 16,000 B.C., about coeval with the beginning of the Magdalenian in middle western Europe (§ [215]), the Full Neolithic, the time of first domestication of animals and plants and polishing of stone, could be estimated at around 10,000 B.C., when Europe was still lingering in its epi-Palæolithic phase (§ [216]). One can cut away several thousand years and retain the essential situation unimpaired: 8000, or 7000 B.C., still leaves Egypt in the van; helps to explain the appearance of eastern grains and animals in Europe around 6000-5000 B.C.; and, what is most to the point, allows a sufficient interval for agriculture and the allied phases of civilization to have reached the degree of development which they display when the Predynastic Local Kingdoms drift into our vision around 4500 B.C. A long Full Neolithic, then, is both demanded by the situation in Egypt and indicated by such facts as there are; a long period in which millet, barley, split-wheat, wheat, flax, cattle, sheep, and asses were gradually modified and made more useful by breeding under domestication. This Full Neolithic, or its last portion, was the Predynastic Tribal Age of Egypt; which, when it passed into the Predynastic Local Kingdoms phase about 4500 B.C., had brought these plants and animals substantially to their modern forms, and had increased and coördinated the population of the land to a point that the devising of calendar, metallurgy, writing, and kingship soon followed.