CHAPTER II.
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.