The Badarian culture provides the earliest direct evidence of agriculture in Upper Egypt during the Predynastic Era. It flourished between 4400 and 4000 BC, and might have already emerged by 5000 BC.
Location and excavation
Badari culture is so named because of its discovery at El-Badari (), an area in the Asyut Governorate in Upper Egypt. It is located between Matmar and Qau, approximately northwest of present-day Luxor (ancient Thebes). includes numerous Predynastic cemeteries (notably Mostagedda, Deir Tasa and the cemetery of itself), as well as at least one early Predynastic settlement at Hemamieh. The area stretches for along the east bank of the Nile. Some Badarian sites also show evidence of later predynastic use.
It was first excavated by Guy Brunton and Gertrude Caton-Thompson between 1922 and 1931.Brunton, Guy; Caton-Thompson, Gertrude (1928). The Badarian Civilisation and Predynastic Remains near Badari. British School of Archaeology in Egypt. ISBN 9780404166250. About forty settlements and six hundred graves have been located.
Cultural features
The Badarian economy was based mostly on agriculture, fishing and animal husbandry. Populations in the Badari culture planted wheat, barley, lentils and tubers. Pits that have been found may have served as granaries. They kept cattle, sheep, and goats; their livestock, as well as dogs, were given ceremonial burial. They used boomerangs, fished from the Nile and hunted gazelle.
Little is known of their buildings, although remains of wooden stumps have been found at one site and may have been associated with a hut or shelter of unknown construction.
The deceased were wrapped in reed matting or animal skins and buried in pits with their heads usually laid to the south, looking west. This seems contiguous with the later dynastic traditions regarding the west as the land of the dead. They were sometimes accompanied by female mortuary figures carved from ivory, or with personal items such as shells, flint tools, amulets in the shape of animals like the antelope and hippopotamus, and jewelry made of ivory, quartz or copper. Green malachite ore has also been detected on stone palettes, perhaps for personal decoration. Tools included end-scrapers, axes, bifacial sickles and concave-base arrowheads. Social stratification has been inferred from the burying of more prosperous members of the community in a different part of the cemetery. Black-topped pottery has been discovered in these cemeteries. These works with their distinctive rippled pattern are considered the most characteristic element of the Badarian culture.
British Africanist, Basil Davidson, (1995) observed that the earliest southern Egyptian farmers, Tasian and Badarian communities, were close neighbours of the Middle Nile and would have emerged from regions south-west or west of the Nile territories. In his view, the early Egyptians belonged to wide communities that lived between the Red Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, shared a common 'Saharan-Sudanese culture' and drew their reinforcements from this source whilst absorbing a number of wanderers from the Near East over time.
Trade Basalt vases found at Badari sites were most likely traded up the river from the Delta region or from the northwest. Shells came in quantities from the Red Sea. Turquoise possibly came from Sinai. A Syrian connection is suggested for a four-handled pot of hard pink ware. The black pottery, with white incised designs, may have come directly from the West, or from the South. The porphyry slabs are like the later ones in Nubia, but the material could have come from the Red Sea Mountains. The glazed steatite beads were not made locally. These all suggest that the Badarians were not an isolated tribe, but were in contact with the cultures on all sides of them. Nor were they nomadic, having pots of such size and fragility that would have been unsuitable for use by wanderers.
Physical anthropology
The Badarian culture seems to have had multiple sources, of which the Western Desert was probably the most influential. The Badari culture was likely not solely restricted to the Badari region, since related finds have been made farther to the south at Mahgar Dendera, Armant, Elkab and Nekhen (named Hierakonpolis by the Greeks), as well as to the east in the Wadi Hammamat.
Older and modern scholarship have characterised the Badarians as an indigenous, Northeast African population that was rooted in a localised, context."Some have argued that various early Egyptians like the Badarians probably migrated northward from Nubia, while others see a wide-ranging movement of peoples across the breadth of the Sahara before the onset of desiccation. Whatever may be the origins of any particular people or civilization, however, it seems reasonably certain that the predynastic communities of the Nile valley were essentially indigenous in culture, drawing little inspiration from sources outside the continent during the several centuries directly preceding the onset of historical times..."
An assemblage of archaeological data have identified a common African substratum for early Egyptian cultural practices. Central African tool designs are featured in the Badarian and Naqada archaeological sites. According to archaeologist, Charles Thurstan Shaw, "the early cultures of Merimde, Badari, Naqadi I and II are essentially African and early African social customs and religious beliefs were the root and foundation of Egyptian way of life."
Egyptologist Frank Yurco considered the Badarians as exhibiting a "mix of North African and Sub-Saharan physical traits", and referenced older analysis of skeletal remains which "showed tropical African elements in the population of the earliest Badarian culture".
Recent archaeological evidence has suggested that the Tasian and Badarian Nile Valley sites were a peripheral network of earlier Northeast African cultures that featured the movement of Badarian, Saharan, Nubian and Nilotic populations.
Cranial traits In 1971, Eugene Strouhal came to the conclusion that the distribution of the Badarian skulls extends from the "Europoid" to "Negroid" range, according to an obsolete racial categorization that has been disproven. Of the total 117 skulls, the majority of 94 skulls showed mixed Europoid-Negroid features. The share of both components was nearly the same, with some overweight to the Europoid side. Even though the share of 'pure' Negroes is small (6-8%), being half that of the Europoid forms (12.9%), the high majority of mixed forms (80.3%) suggests a long-lasting dispersion of African genes in the population. Additionally, in some of the Badarian crania hair was preserved, in the first series they were curly in 6 cases, wavy in 33 cases and straight in 10 cases. They were black in 16 samples, dark brown in 11, brown in 12, light brown in 1, and grey in 11 cases. In 2007, Strouhal would characterize the physical features of ancient A-Group Nubians as being "Caucasoid" which were "not distinguishable from the contemporary Predynastic Upper Egyptians of the Badarian and Naqadian cultures", based in reference to previous anthropological studies from 1975 and 1985. According to Strouhal, the Predynastic Egyptians seemed to be similar to the Capsian culture of North Africa and to Berbers.
A 1993 craniofacial study performed by the anthropologist C. Loring Brace reached the view that: "The Predynastic of Upper Egypt and the Late Dynastic of Lower Egypt are more closely related to each other than to any other population. As a whole, they show ties with the European Neolithic, North Africa, modern Europe, and, more remotely, India, but not at all with sub-Saharan Africa, eastern Asia, Oceania, or the New World."
However, various biological anthropological studies have demonstrated strong biological affinities between the Badarians and other Northeast African populations."When Mahalanobis D2 was used, the Naqadan and Badarian Predynastic samples exhibited more similarity to Nubian, Tigrean, and some more southern series than to some mid- to late Dynasticseries from northern Egypt (Mukherjee et al., 1955). The Badarian have been found to be very similar to a Kerma sample (Kushite Sudanese), using both the Penrose statistic (Nutter, 1958) and DFA of males alone (Keita,1990). Furthermore, Keita considered that Badarian males had a southern modal phenotype, and that together with a Naqada sample, they formed a southern Egyptian cluster as tropical variants together with a sample from Kerma". S.O.Y. Keita, a biological anthropologist, in 1990 conducted a craniometric analysis, which included early pre-dynastic Badarian and Naqada I skulls. Both series were found to "cluster with tropical Africans", and with the latter overlapping with Kerma.
In 2005, S.O.Y. Keita examined Badarian crania from predynastic upper Egypt in comparison to European (Norway and Hungary) and various tropical African crania (Southern Africa, Mali and Kenya). He found that the predynastic Badarian series clustered much closer with the tropical African series. Although, no West Asian or other North African samples were included in the original study as the comparative series were selected based on "Brace et al.'s (1993) comments on the affinities of an upper Egyptian/Nubian epipalaeolithic series". Keita further noted that "additional analysis using material from Sudan, late dynastic northern Egypt (Gizeh), Somalia, Asia and the Pacific Islands show the Badarian series to be most similar to a series from the northeast quadrant of Africa and then to other Africans". Moreover, Keita criticised the methodology of the 1993 Brace study for excluding "the Maghreb, Sudan, and the Horn of Africa" from the designated Sub-Saharan group samples which he argued was nearly categorised and "(incorrectly)" as monolithic". Keita further commented on the findings of Boyce that whilst the "post-Badarian southern predynastic and a late dynastic northern series (called "E" or Gizeh) cluster together, and secondarily with Europeans", in the primary cluster with Egyptian groups there were also remains representing populations from ancient Sudan and recent Somalia.
In 2008, Keita found that the early predynastic groups in Southern Egypt which included Badarian skeletal samples, were similar to Nile-Valley material from areas to the south and north of Upper Egypt. Overall, based on the 9 variables, the dynastic Egyptians (includes both Upper and Lower Egyptians) showed much closer affinities with the included Northeast African populations than Europeans, who were more similar to the set of Late Dynastic Egyptians. In his comparison to the various Egyptian series, Greeks, Somali/Horn, and Italians were used. He also concluded that more material was needed to make a firm conclusion about the relationship between the early Holocene Nile valley populations and later ancient Egyptians.