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.