Abstract
PREHISTORIC IVORY FIGURINE FROM EGYPT.—Among the more important objects discovered by the British School of Archaeology at Qau in Egypt during the excavations of last season was a female figure rudely carved in ivory. It differs from any of the prehistoric ivories hitherto known. On the same site were found ripple pottery and a number of objects—a globular vase with four small handles, a long narrow palette, a flint dagger, and a small oval vase with cylindrical neck, all of types not previously known. It would appear that these finds represent a culture apart from the usual prehistoric Egyptian, though on much the same level and using the same materials but in a different way. The ivory figure is not of the steatopygous type. The arrow heads and other flint work point to a connexion with the makers of the Fayum desert flints, which are of Solutrean style. Sir Flinders Petrie in describing these finds in Ancient Egypt, 1924, Pt. ii., suggests that the culture may have originated in Central Asia, whence the Solutrean workers are supposed to have come. This civilisation, for which the name Badarian is suggested provisionally, from Badari, the district around Qau, would thus be the earliest of any known in Egypt, though not necessarily contemporary with the European Solutrean period.
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Research Items. Nature 114, 587–589 (1924). https://doi.org/10.1038/114587a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/114587a0