History of Egypt | Page 5

over the desert at far more frequent intervals than at present. That would account for the detritus bed at the mouth of the wadi, and its embedded flints, and at the same time maintain the general probability of the idea that the desert plateaus were desert in Pal?olithic days as now, and that early man only knapped his flints up there because he found the flint there. He himself lived on the slopes and nearer the marsh.
This new view seems to be much sounder and more probable than the old one, maintained by Flinders Petrie and Blanckenhorn, according to which the high plateau was the home of man in Pal?olithic times, when the rainfall, as shown by the valley erosion and waterfalls, must have caused an abundant vegetation on the plateau, where man could live and hunt his game. [*Petrie, Nagada and Ballas, p. 49.] Were this so, it is patent that the Pal?olithic flints could not have been found on the desert surface as they are. Mr. H. J. L. Beadnell, of the Geological Survey of Egypt, to whom we are indebted for the promulgation of the more modern and probable view, says: "Is it certain that the high plateau was then clothed with forests? What evidence is there to show that it differed in any important respect from its present aspect? And if, as I suggest, desert conditions obtained then as now, and man merely worked his flints along the edges of the plateaus overlooking the Nile valley, I see no reason why flint implements, dating even from Pal?olithic times should not in favourable cases still be found in the spots where they were left, surrounded by the flakes struck off in manufacture. On the flat plateaus the occasional rains which fall--once in three or four years--can effect but little transport of material, and merely lower the general level by dissolving the underlying limestone, so that the plateau surface is left with a coating of nodules and blocks of insoluble flint and chert. Flint implements might thus be expected to remain in many localities for indefinite periods, but they would certainly become more or less 'patinated,' pitted on the surface, and rounded at the angles after long exposure to heat, cold, and blown sand." This is exactly the case of the Pal?olithic flint tools from the desert plateau.
[Illustration: 012.jpg UPPER DESERT PLATEAU, WHERE PALEOLITHIC IMPLEMENTS ARE FOUND, Thebes: 1,400 leet above the Nile.]
We do not know whether Pal?olithic man in Egypt was contemporary with the cave-man of Europe. We have no means of gauging the age of the Pal?olithic Egyptian weapons, as we have for the Neolithic period. The historical (dynastic) period of Egyptian annals began with the unification of the kingdom under one head somewhere about 4500 B.C. At that time copper as well as stone weapons were used, so that we may say that at the beginning of the historical age the Egyptians were living in the "Chalcolithic" period. We can trace the use of copper back for a considerable period anterior to the beginning of the Ist Dynasty, so that we shall probably not be far wrong if we do not bring down the close of the purely Neolithic Age in Egypt--the close of the Age of Stone, properly so called--later than +5000 B.C. How far back in the remote ages the transition period between the Pal?olithic and Neolithic Ages should be placed, it is utterly impossible to say. The use of stone for weapons and implements continued in Egypt as late as the time of the XIIth Dynasty, about 2500-2000 B.C. But these XIIth Dynasty stone implements show by their forms how late they are in the history of the Stone Age. The axe heads, for instance, are in form imitations of the copper and bronze axe heads usual at that period; they are stone imitations of metal, instead of the originals on whose model the metal weapons were formed. The flint implements of the XIIth Dynasty were a curious survival from long past ages. After the time of the XIIth Dynasty stone was no longer used for tools or weapons, except for the sacred rite of making the first incision in the dead bodies before beginning the operations of embalming; for this purpose, as Herodotus tells us, an "Ethiopian stone" was used. This was no doubt a knife of flint or chert, like those of the Neolithic ancestors of the Egyptians, and the continued use of a stone knife for this one purpose only is a very interesting instance of a ceremonial survival. We may compare the wigs of British judges.
[Illustration: 014.jpg FLINT KNIFE]
We have no specimen of a flint knife which can definitely be asserted to have belonged to an embalmer, but of the archaistic flint weapons of the XIIth Dynasty we