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By Root 538 0

rich that the excavator, Bruce Williams, considered they must have belonged to great chiefs, or even kings. There is no sneaking around this by claiming that the graves belonged to Egyptians or Egyptian vassals; the artifacts were typical of the A-group Nubian culture, which in its later phases (you might have known there would be phases) was contemporaneous with the late predynastic in Egypt. Williams even put forth the daring suggestion that these Nubian rulers conquered southern Egypt and were the stimulus for, if not the actual founders of, pharaonic civilization. This theory is considered pretty far-out, and the sad thing is that with much of what was Lower Nubia now buried fathoms deep under Lake Nasser, there may never be a definitive answer.

When I was a graduate student—back in antedeluvian times—we were given neat lists of prehistoric cultures, one succeeding the other like steps on a ladder: Tasian, Badarian, Amratian, Gerzean, and Semainean in the south; Fayum A, Merimde, and Maadi in the north. Each culture had a few more amenities than the one that had preceded it, and the latest, Gerzean-Semainean, had achieved a fairly high standard of living for a predynastic society, with painted pottery, beautifully worked flint tools, stone vessels, metal, and neat houses.

These cultures were named after the type site, the place where that particular culture was first unearthed. This is a time-honored and hideously confusing device, as anyone who has encountered the Aurignacians and Levalloisians of European prehistory knows to his sorrow. It becomes even more confusing when archaeologists change their minds about the names—as they almost always do. Semainean was always a suspect culture; it is now generally believed to be a variant of the Gerzean. Tasian may not exist either, except as a form of the Badarian. Amratian is now generally referred to as Naqada I, and Gerzean is Naqada II and III, each with internal subdivisions; so according to some dating systems, late Gerzean (from about 3500 B.C.) is equivalent to Naqada IID–1 and D–2. You will be happy to hear that so far Badarian is still Badarian. It is the one Caton-Thompson found at Hememieh, underneath Petrie’s two major cultures—Amratian and Gerzean.

We may as well get all the names in while we’re at it; Naqada III is also known as the Protodynastic—as compared with the Predynastic in general—and in some quarters Naqada IIIC is referred to as Dynasty O. More about this ambiguous period later. (If you happen to run across a reference to Dynasty OO, take my advice and ignore it.)

Perhaps the most useful remark we can make about the predynastic cultures is that they are related to one another, not only chronologically but also causally; each has certain things in common with the one that followed it. In general, the nearer in time to the First Dynasty, the more complex the society—the more “civilized,” in our terms. Yet conventionally the beginning of civilization in Egypt does not occur until historic times, with the beginning of the First Dynasty. We are cautiously tiptoeing around the edges of a problem that is, in part, one of terminology; scholars are not as precise as they might be in defining words like culture and civilization. The two words are sometimes used interchangeably, but not all cultures are civilizations. Civilization itself may be used specifically, as in the phrases “Egyptian civilization” and “Chinese civilization,” or it may be used as an abstraction, to describe a state of affairs that is contrasted with barbarism. The lack of precision is regrettable; however, we may avoid a certain amount of confusion by restricting ourselves, at this point, to the second of the two meanings. We have been talking about prehistoric, or predynastic, cultures. Gerzean, Amratian, and the rest are not civilizations, nor are they “civilization.” At what point, then, does a culture acquire the traits that enable it to be considered a civilization?

THE WAGON OR THE MOUNTAIN

After the phenomenal leap from nomadism to settled village life, prehistoric culture