Almost 3,000 stone tools from Heliopolis, excavated over a century ago, have been re-examined by archaeologists, providing new insights into early farming practices in ancient Egypt. The tools, discovered in 1905 and 1906 by Italian Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli, were stored in 40 wooden boxes at the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy, for over a century. Recently, they were temporarily moved to the Museo del Duomo in Bracciano to be studied. The site of Heliopolis, now buried beneath Matariya, a densely populated district in Cairo, was a major religious and intellectual centre in pharaonic times.
Heliopolis was a farming village before it became a major centre, with people growing crops, brewing beer, and making flint tools shortly before 3000 BCE. The tools served everyday jobs such as cutting, scraping, piercing, and harvesting crops. The collection of flint tools is significant as it includes not only finished tools but also cores, tiny flakes, and debris from working the flint, allowing researchers to reconstruct the chaîne opératoire, or the chain of choices and gestures from picking up a pebble to throwing away a worn-out tool.
The study revealed that knappers picked good quality flint pebbles from nearby gravels and struck long, regular blades from these cores with soft stone hammers. Four different ways of working the cores were identified, with the most telling clue being the balance between cores and blades. The area held many cores but relatively few blades, indicating that most blades were taken elsewhere, suggesting a workshop producing more than its knappers needed.
The discovery of a brewery area 500 metres away, with a layer of the same age containing the same kinds of tools, provided a modern benchmark for the old finds, confirming their date and showing that remains from this period extend across other parts of the site. The study suggests that a division of labour existed before the state, with specialist knappers working within the community, and the habit of relying on someone else for an essential tool already present.
The change in blade production shortly before 3000 BCE, coinciding with the rise of the Egyptian state, was marked by the disappearance of traditional blades and the replacement by more standardized ones from large workshops at desert flint mines. However, the study suggests that early states did not invent economic complexity from scratch but built on arrangements that ordinary villagers had already worked out for themselves.
The study highlights the importance of museum storerooms as archives of lost places, particularly in Africa, where many sites excavated a century ago now lie beneath towns and fields that have grown to meet the needs of expanding populations. The boxes of "ordinary" finds, such as flints, broken pottery, and animal bones, are rarely studied, but our study shows that those doubts can be tested and often overcome.
The research, conducted by Giulio Lucarini, Federica Ugliano, and Lorena Lombardi, has provided new insights into the lives of early farmers in Egypt and the development of specialized work in ancient societies. The study demonstrates the significance of re-examining old finds and the importance of interdisciplinary research in understanding human history.
Key points
- The study reveals that specialized work was already present in ancient Egyptian villages before the rise of the state.
- The discovery of a workshop producing flint tools highlights the division of labour in early farming communities.
- Museum storerooms can serve as valuable archives of lost places and provide insights into human history.
