Badari

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Ancient Badari figure of a woman with incised features (c. 4000 BC), carved out of hippopotamus ivory, located at the British Museum. This type of figure is found in burials of both Badarian men and women, the earliest identifiable culture in Predynastic Egypt.^[1]

The Badarian culture provides the earliest direct evidence of agriculture in Upper Egypt. It flourished between 4500 to 3250 BCE, and might have already existed as far back as 5000 BCE. It was first identified in El-Badari, Asyut.

About forty settlements and six hundred graves have been located. Social stratification has been inferred from the burying of more prosperous members of the community in a different part of the cemetery. The Badarian economy was mostly based on agriculture, fishing and animal husbandry. Tools included end-scrapers, perforators, axes, bifacial sickles and concave-base arrowheads. Remains of cattle, dogs and sheep were found in the cemeteries. Wheat, barley, lentils and tubers were consumed.

The culture is known largely from cemeteries in the low desert. The deceased were placed on mats and buried in pits with their heads usually laid to the south, looking west. The pottery that was buried with them is the most characteristic element of the Badarian culture. It had been given a distinctive, decorative rippled surface.

[edit] Ancestral origins

The Badarian culture seems to have had multiple sources, of which the Western Desert was probably the most influential. Badari culture was probably not restricted to solely the Badari region, because related finds have been made farther to the south at Mahgar Dendera, Armant, Elkab and Nekhen (named Hierakonpolis by the Greeks) and to the east in the Wadi Hammamat.

Numerous anthropological studies were performed on Badarian crania after two successful excavations conducted in the mid- to late-1920s. The usual result was that the Badarians were African hybrids. Notably in 1971 Physical Anthropologist Eugen Strouhal re-analyzed over a dozen independent scientific studies (a couple of which were his own) performed previously and summarized their results to arrive at a similar conclusion: "mixture of races." Recent re-analyses of previous studies, including Professor Strouhal's paper, reveal that only West and South African skulls were included in the baseline for a determination of "true negro" though, while the typically elongated East African skull forms were disregarded, assumed not to indicate true blacks. Some recent studies additionally suggest a modal metric phentoype in Badarian crania that is much more similar to the Tropical African series than to the various European samples studied.[1]

Near the end of his paper (1971), Professor Strouhal further enumerated several archaeological studies that suggest a migration of culture, practice and belief from African regions located to the west and south of the Badarian sites.