PREHISTORIC EGYPT

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 52, 29 August 1925, Page 16

PREHISTORIC EGYPT

DISCOVERIES OF FOURTEEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO.

Tutankhamen and his tomb are things of yesterday compared with tha spoils of last winter's digging by Sir Flinders, Petrie's workers in Egypt,- which are now on exhibition at University College-, Bays tha London correspondent of 3io "Manchester Guardian. Tho effect of the researches that have bean carried out at Badari and in the Fayum has been to push back our knowledge of early Egyptian civilisation into an njmost. inconceivable past, for, if Professor Flinders Pctrie's dating is correct, the men who worked these (lints, and mado this pottery and those ornaments lived something like 14,000 years ago. This Undarian civilisation, as it has been christened, can be linked up with tho prehistoric work already known in Egypt, wliioh in turn continues unbrokenly into the historic period. The interesting objects found last year show even to a non-expert that these people had begun the life of tha arts. There are fascinating little statuettes in ivory and. in pottery, and there is one quite elaborate piece of jewellery, and palettes of elate which' are supposed to have been used for preparing rouge or some kind of make-up. The impression one gets from the toilet articles and so on buried with the dead is that civilisation was already well developed, and some of the handmade pottery is thinner and better finished than any pottery known of later ages. These people, of course, did not know the use of metals, but there are some stone beads which had formed the girdle of a man. with a green glaze which seems to be derived from copper. Perhaps tlie most beautiful things found was a little limestone statuette belonging to the Eleventh Dynasty. It lias a delicately carved and wistful face. It was found broken in two outside a tomb, and was doubtless thrown aside as worthless by ancient robbers.