#badarian

Medium:  Hippopotamus ivory

This beaded belt was found wound around the waist of a man. It is one of only six Badarian belts known. All were worn by men, suggesting that belts were a male preogative. Several colossal statues of the fertility god Min demonstrate how such a belt was worn, but interestingly, no belts are currently known from the period between the Badarian and the end of the Predynastic Period, the date of the Min statues. Perhaps beads were replaced by linen or leather, which have not survived.

Predynastic pottery art

Paleolithic refers to the old stone age which started for Egypt around 700,000 bce. This is where we start to find early human-made tools being invented. If there were any wooden tools before this the evidence has been destroyed due to decomposition. The paleolithic lasted for a long long time, all the way to 8000 bce which marks the start of the new stone age (Neolithic). The neolithic period started at around 8000 bce presumably because of the end of the ice age and the global climate changing. The ice didn’t reach Egypt itself, but before the ice age ended Egypt was a lush fertile grassland, when the ice age ended that grassland diminished. So, people moved closer to the largest fresh water source they could find, the Nile. The area around the Nile was settled and there is evidence that agriculture and the domestication if animals became more widely used. Before, nomadic peoples, now, settled farmers. Civilization started after the stone age, coming from a gradual emergence of culture that came about during the last section of the new stone age. The Badarian period is that early predynastic period in which we see the first evidence of the culture we see in predynastic Egypt. They began to develop religion and gods, but it is almost impossible to know the specifics because there was no writing system yet. Artifacts, however, tell us that they had gods for the world like the sun and gods for specific regions. Then comes the Amaratian period, also called Nakada I. The city of Nakada itself is not dated precisely but the early part dates to this time. After that we have the Gerzean period, which is also named Nakada II. This is a major turning point for Egypt, we start to see new development in their society. The most important thing perhaps is that there began a class distinction of burials, so the very wealthy started to have larger and more elaborate tombs. The last section is the Protodynastic period, also called Nakada III. This is the time directly before the dynasties started when Menes brought the north and the south together. Some think that Narmer and Menes are the same person, others think that Menes is Narmer’s son and that he (Menes) got credit for Narmer connecting Egypt.

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