Abstract
CAPSTANS AND BADABIANS.—In Ancient Egypt (pt. 1, 1928), Prof. V. Gordon Childe criticises some of the arguments adduced by Dr. Scharff, the German orientalist, as proof of the western origin for Early Predynastic culture in Egypt. Dr. Scharff notes the appearance in Mauretania of tanged and concave-based arrow heads, but while these in Egypt go back to Badarian times, the native Capsian form of the Mediterranean coast-lands was the chisel-ended variety, tipped with flint trapezes or lunates. These are foreign to the Badarian and Fayum cultures; they seem to have been used by the Libyan element in Egypt, but only after the development of the barbed and tanged varieties. The first tanged arrowhead cited from Mauretania by Scharff comes from ‘dolmenic’ tombs, the general affinities of which are with the Nubian C-group. Its arrival in Africa Minor is actually a good deal older. It is found in early neolithic deposits at Abd el-Adhim and at Redeye in Tunisia as an intruder in a Final Capsian microlithic context, while in the oasis of Négrine, south of Tebessa, in a late Tardenoisian context, only the lunate and trapeze are found—types also predominant at Abd el-Adhim. None of these tanged forms is so old as Badarian, and in Spain they belong to the relatively late Los Millares. Hence the neolithic begins on the Nile with a form secondary farther west, and the true North African begins at a later date with the white cross-lined pottery. This suggests that in addition to the current from the west affecting Egypt in the First Predynastic age was a counter current reaching Mauretania after Egypt. Other western parallels may be similarly explained, the conchision being that there are elements in Badarian that are not African in the same sense as Early Predynastic is where these elements are blended with others that are truly western; but even so a western crossed an eastern drift.
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Research Items. Nature 122, 288–290 (1928). https://doi.org/10.1038/122288a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/122288a0