The picture that emerges for the Egyptian Middle Palaeolithic is rather complex. It originated in the Late Acheulean, when handaxes became associated with bifacial foliates and a typical Nubian knapping method. Such assemblages may date from before 250,000 bp. The fate of sites with such assemblages is similar to that of the Acheulean: all over the desert one can collect scattered artefacts which once belonged together in a site that is now destroyed. Judging from the high number of such artefacts, it is tempting to assume that the population density was high.
As in many areas of the Old World, the Egyptian Middle Palaeolithic is characterized by the introduction of the Levallois method, a special technique designed to produce flakes and blades of fixed dimensions from a flint nodule. In addition to the classical Levallois approach, the Nubian Levallois knapping method was introduced for the production of pointed flakes. In the Egyptian Middle Palaeolithic, several artefactual ‘entities’ can be distinguished. The chronology is still unclear, but research, especially in the Western Desert and in the Qena area, provides some clues.
The Nubian Middle Palaeolithic is characterized by the Nubian Levallois technique and by bifacial foliates and pedunculates. It is mainly known from Nubia, where several sites have been discovered. Although it is certainly also present in Egypt, no well-preserved sites have yet been found there. Lastly, important information has been disclosed in relation to the mid-Middle Palaeolithic. At Bir Tarfawi and Bir Sahara in the Western Desert, numerous well-preserved sites from the Saharan Mousterian were excavated. It is clear that sites in this area were accessible only during wet phases, which should probably be regarded as short spells punctuating a mainly dry climate.
During most periods of occupation, there were permanent lakes in the Western Desert, or, in some intervals, seasonal playas, fed by local rainfall of up to 500 mm. per annum. In some phases the lakes could be more than 7 m. deep. The area was abandoned during the periods of hyperaridity that separated the lacustrine events. Side-scrapers, points, and denticulates are the best-represented tools. The lake and playa environments were probably rich in floral resources that could easily be exploited, but unfortunately there is no archaeological evidence available. The fauna apparently exploited by people at this date consist of hare, porcupine, and wild cat, at one end of the size spectrum, and buffalo, rhinoceros, and giraffe, at the other end. Small gazelles, mainly the dorcas species, dominate the assemblage. The presence of such animals suggests that selective—perhaps seasonal—hunting of small gazelles was combined with more opportunistic meat procurement from bigger game.
The apparent differences in content among sites in different settings may reflect variations in activities carried out at the sites. Sites embedded in fossil hydromorphic soils, characterized by low artefact densities, indicate limited use, probably comprising several brief phases and these only during very dry years. Sites embedded in beach sands were accessible for a greater part of the year, but probably not during the season of highest water, presumably in summer. Sites associated with dry lake bottoms reflect unusually arid episodes when the lakes dried up and their beds were exposed.
Excavations in the Sodmein cave near Quseir in the Red Sea mountains disclosed similar wet conditions during part of the midMiddle Palaeolithic, with the presence of crocodile, elephant, buffalo, kudu, and other large mammals. The cave was apparently visited over a long period but always for a short time. Sometimes, large hearths were utilized.
A comparable way of life may have existed in the Nile Valley, but no sites from the floodplain have yet been disclosed. On the other hand, the Nile Valley has furnished us with many sites that document the extraction of raw material. Sites that are contemporaneous with the Western Desert occupation occur at Nazlet Khater and Taramsa, where mid-Middle Palaeolithic groups were in search of raw material, mainly comprising chert cobbles from terrace deposits. These groups differ in terms of the knapping methods they used: Egyptian group K utilized the classical Levallois method, in addition to flake production from single and double platform cores, while Egyptian group N frequently used the Nubian Levallois method. Tools are always rare at such quarrying sites, because the artefacts produced at such sites were meant to be exported to the living sites, which were probably situated on the Nile floodplain. Unfortunately, such floodplain sites have probably been covered by recent alluvia and remain unknown.
Late Middle Palaeolithic material, along with Halfan and Safahan (Levallois Idfuan) artefacts, has been recovered from extraction sites, such as Nazlet Safaha, near Qena, as well as from living sites near Edfu. The Halfan industry, however, was mainly restricted to Nubia. In comparison with the earlier mid-Middle Palaeolithic, the Nubian Levallois technique was disappearing, and, in addition to flake and blade production from single and double platform cores, only an evolved classical Levallois was utilized for production of thin Levallois flakes. At living sites, burins, notches, and denticulates were being used. Meanwhile, the climate had again become arid to hyperarid and continued to be such. The evolution of the climate changed the living conditions completely, in that food resources were now almost entirely restricted to the floodplain. This climatic development must have obliged people living in the Sahara to leave the area, resulting in a concentration of human population in the Nile Valley.
During the last period of the Middle Palaeolithic (the Taramsan) there was a clear tendency towards blade production from large cores, where, instead of obtaining a few Levallois flakes from each individual core, a virtually continuous process of blade production made it possible to create a large number of blades from each core. At Taramsa-i, an impressive extraction and production site of this date near Qena, it can be observed that there was increasing interest in blade production, a system that was later to be generalized during the Upper Palaeolithic. Similar assemblages have been identifled in the Negev, where the Transition from Levallois flaking to blade production has been documented at the site of Boker Tachtit, around 45,000 bp. A burial of an ‘anatomically modern’ child at Taramsa-i is associated with the late Middle Palaeolithic. This burial is probably the oldest grave that has so far been identified in Africa.
Map of Egypt showing the principal Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Badarian sites
The techniques employed at the extraction sites were simple but well adapted to the natural chert occurrences. The chert cobbles were removed from the terrace deposits by means of open-trench and pit systems with a maximum depth of about 1.7 m. Only the uppermost part of the cobble terrace was mined, and the pits and trenches are characterized by a very irregidar planimetry, with many tentacles and bulges. They have vertical walls with only minor undercutting, and their widths vary from about i m. to nearly 2 m. Since the chert cobble deposit was not consolidated, only simple extraction tools were required. Depressions in the trenches were often used as workshops for the fabrication of Levallois products. Extraction was very extensive and, in the region of Qena, affected areas covered many square kilometres. The search for good-quality chert and the use of specialized tool production demonstrate the complex organization of the inhabitants of the Nile Valley at that time. It also indicates that Middle Palaeolithic humans were not only capable of tridimensional reasoning but also had developed a knowledge of geology and geomorphology.
If the ‘out-of-Africa’ theory of human origins is true (and it is still contested by some good anthropologists), anatomically modern Homo sapiens should have passed through the Nile valley on its way out of East Africa to Asia. However, it remains unclear as to whether archaeological data can confirm that there were similarities between the Middle Palaeolithic in Egypt and in south-west Asia. Finally, it is to be noted that the Aterian industry, which is so important for the rest of North Africa, is present only in some oases in the Western Desert.
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