Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [8]
Petrie had developed a framework into which newly discovered graves could be fitted by a simple comparison of pottery types. There was still no way of dating prehistoric objects in terms of absolute time. However, the framework did provide a comparative chronology, and it was more capable of being broken down into broader subdivisions than single sequence dates. Certain groups of graves, and hence of sequence dates, formed distinctive assemblages, which had enough in common to be labeled as separate “cultures.”
The criteria used to distinguish cultures involve materials other than pottery—stone tools, weapons, ornaments, and so on. An increasing number of prehistoric village sites have turned up; the objects found at these sites also form coherent assemblages. At one of these sites, a discovery made in 1925 took Petrie’s work out of the realm of theory. Gertrude Caton-Thompson, working at Hememieh, found a stratified site, and there were Petrie’s prehistoric cultures in the sequence he had postulated. Below the earliest he had identified she found a still earlier culture, which was assigned sequence dates from the numbers the great pioneer had left open for just such an eventuality. Since Petrie’s day his work has been refined and to some extent revised, but the basic sequence remains.
Thanks to the work of Petrie and Caton-Thompson and their successors, we now have a very general picture of prehistoric life in ancient Egypt. Even at this early period we must distinguish between the two major geographical subdivisions of the country—Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt.
In order to comprehend this terminology, the reader must adjust to what may seem a piece of striking illogic: Upper Egypt is the valley of the Nile, from the Cairo region south, and Lower Egypt is the Delta. The illogic is only illusory; it arises from the fact that the Nile flows from south to north, and the region nearest the source is properly “upper” in relation to the mouth of the river. Since the Delta is at the top of modern maps, with the river hanging down like a tail, most people find the Upper Egypt–Lower Egypt concept hard to keep in mind. I don’t blame them. It was years before I could read “Upper Egypt” without making a conscious mental effort to remember where it was. All I can do, however, is sympathize, because the names are often used by archaeologists, and there is no changing them now. To confuse the issue still more, some scholars believe that in ancient times Upper Egypt ended near Assiut, with Lower Egypt being everything north of that city.
The two regions differ from each other in many ways, the most obvious being that of physical topography. Upper Egypt is a fantastic country—five hundred miles long by perhaps five miles wide. On either side of the river is a narrow strip of fertile black soil, bounded by sand and by the steep cliffs of the desert plateau through which the river has, through immemorial ages, carved and deepened its channel. The line between living and dead land is sharply defined; one may stand today with one foot on the sand and the other on the green-growing fields. The ancient Egyptians were keenly conscious of the difference between the “black land” and the barren “red land,” and these two terms occur frequently in their literature. The black land was precious and cherished. Temples, palaces, and towns were built whenever possible on the wasteland of sand, which lay between the fertile strip and the barrier of cliffs, so that not an inch of cultivable soil would be wasted. The two narrow ribbons of black land, one on either side of the river, have always supported a disproportionately large population, when one considers the actual acreage under cultivation. In ancient times this situation was possible because of the unfailing fertility of the soil, which was the result of a unique phenomenon—the annual