Badarian Culture

[Fenix]

From my notes on Prehistoric Africa

Badarian Culture:
The culture of the Badari is the earliest known “civilized Egyptian civilization�. The Badarians settled just south of Assiut. The culture was based on farming, fishing, hunting and mining. The Badarian culture is the earliest direct evidence of agriculture in Upper Egypt. The civilization flourished between 4400 and 4000 BCE. The civilization is said to have existed as far back as 5500 BCE and lasted until around 3800 BCE. Forty settlements and 600 graves have been located. Badarian remains exhibit characteristics of social complexity. Social stratification, the hierarchical arrangement of social classes, etc within a society, has been inferred from the burying of more prominent members of the community in a different part of the cemetery.

Origins:
Badarian civilization has multiple sources, with the culture of the Western Desert being most influential. Anthropological studies on Badarian crania suggest that the race is an African hybrid. Studies done on hair remains suggest that the Badari were Africoid in origin. There have also been suggestions of a migration of culture, practices and beliefs from African regions located to the west and south of the Badarian sites.

Farming and Food:
Farmers grew barley, wheat, flax and wove linen fabrics in addition to tending flocks (cattle, sheep, and goats). Grain was used to make bread, remains of which have been found in grave sites. Porridge was a common food, as were tubers. The castor plant, which grows wild in the area supplied oil for their lamps and a lubricant for the skin.

Mining:
The Badari mined malachite ochre in the Eastern Desert, a strip of land between the Nile Valley and the Red Sea. The malachite ochre was ground and used as green eye paint. This civilization is also the first evidence of copper working. It has been said that items such as awls and pins are Palestinian in origin. But the presence of copper ores in the Eastern Desert along with the lack of such items in sites contemporary to the Badarian culture in Lower Egypt, points to an independent center of copper working in Upper Egypt.

Pottery and Tools:
Badarian pottery consisted of reddish-brown bodies and black-tipped rims. Pottery was mass produced by a community of craftsmen operating under the control of a “hierarchical, city-state bureaucracy�. This allowed Badarian leaders to appropriate large quantities of pottery for their own use. Badarian pottery has been connected with pottery of Khartoum (Sudan) Neolithic Culture. The two cultures share characteristics of shell fishhooks, black top and ripple pottery, and flat-topped axes. Other tools used included end-scrapers, perforators, axes, bifacial sickles, and arrowheads.

Burial:
The deceased were placed on mats and buried in pits in fetal position (an emphasis on rebirth). They were laid to the south, the “land of beginnings� where the souls of the ancestors dwell, and looking west to the “hidden land� where the soul of the departed journeys after it quits the body. The dead were buried with their finest possessions and clothing for use in the next world, suggesting a belief in the afterlife. Amulets with animal heads (hippopotami and gazelles) have been found with human skeletal remains.

Notes compiled from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badarian
http://www.homestead.com/wysinger/badarians.html
http://www.antiquityofman.com/badarian.html

[Jalili]

Interesting

Thank you for sharing queen

[SonOfIsis]

Anthropological studies on Badarian crania suggest that the race is an African hybrid.

This is based on stereotyped thinking. Prof. Keita begs to differ, demonstrating that the Badari are a lot more closely related to tropical East Africans than to Europeans. As a matter of fact, by mean cranial measurement, they are almost indistinguishable from the Teita of Kenya. The relevance of course being that Badari culture/people is/are predecessor to ancient Egyptian culture/people.

Early Nile Valley Farmers From El-Badari
Aboriginals or "European"AgroNostratic Immigrants? Craniometric Affinities Considered With Other Data
S. O. Y. Keita

National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution

Male Badarian crania were analyzed using the generalized distance of Mahalanobis in a comparative analysis with other African and European series from the Howells’s database. The study was carried out to examine the affinities of the Badarians to evaluate, in preliminary fashion, a demic diffusion hypothesis that postulates that horticulture and the Afro-Asiatic language family were brought ultimately from southern Europe. (The assumption was made that the southern Europeans would be more similar to the central and northern Europeans than to any indigenous African populations.) The Badarians show a greater affinity to indigenous Africans while not being identical. This suggests that the Badarians were more affiliated with local and an indigenous African population than with Europeans. It is more likely that Near Eastern/southern European domesticated animals and plants were adopted by indigenous Nile Valley people without a major immigration of non-Africans. There was more of cultural transfer.

Full paper:

http://wysinger.homestead.com/badari.pdf

[Jahness]

Greetings Everyone!

Much appreciation to you Fenix for sharing this information.

Peace & Blessings!