History of Egypt | Page 5

streams flowing down from wooded heights, but of torrents like those
of to-day, which fill the wadis once in three years or so after heavy rain,
but repeated at much closer intervals. We may in fact suppose just so
much difference in meteorological conditions as would make it
possible for sudden rain-storms to occur 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 Palæolithic 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 Palæolithic 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 Palæolithic 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
Palæolithic 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 Palæolithic 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 Palæolithic man in Egypt was contemporary
with the cave-man of Europe. We have no means of gauging the age of
the Palæolithic 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 Palæolithic 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