The Predynastic Period: Egypt in the Fourth Millennium bc

With the spread of Neolithic technology to Middle and Upper Egypt in the fifth millennium BC, the subsistence strategies of hunting and gathering were gradually supplemented and later replaced by farming and herding. Although very little archaeological evidence survives, especially in upper Egypt, agricultural villages began to appear by the fourth millennium bc, during the Predynastic Period. The Egyptian nile Valley was an almost ideal environment for cereal agriculture (see 3.4), and eventually some farmers would have been able to accumulate surpluses. Agricultural surpluses were probably used to feed farmers and their families throughout the year, and some seed would have been kept for planting the next crop. But surpluses beyond the necessities of subsistence could be used to obtain goods and materials not available in farmers’ villages.

Although there is evidence of long-distance trade/exchange of exotic materials from before the Predynastic Period, this greatly increased in the fourth millennium BC, when craft production also increased - especially of specialized artifacts such as jewelry, carved stone palettes and vessels, and ripple-flaked chert knives (Figure 4.4), which are found in elite burials of the Naqada culture in Upper Egypt. Craft specialization included (copper) metallurgy, in both southern and northern Egypt. As the Predynastic society became more economically complex, especially in upper Egypt, elites emerged to control it.

Archaeologists have defined two different Predynastic cultures, the culture of Lower Egypt (formerly called the “Buto-Ma’adi culture”), and the Naqada culture of Upper Egypt, based on the distribution of two very different ceramic traditions of the fourth millennium BC. In the north settlements are better preserved, while the southern Naqada culture is mainly known from its cemeteries, which are found in the low desert beyond the floodplain. Cultural differences went well beyond pottery types, however: the Naqada burials may symbolize increasing social rank or inequality through time as the graves became more differentiated, in size and numbers of grave goods, in contrast to Lower Egyptian burials, which are fairly simple and show less evidence of socio-cultural differentiation.