PAPERS ON EGYPTOLOGY
4 - ABYDOS IN THE EGYPTIAN PREDYNASTIC
by JUAN JOSÉ CASTILLOS
(Aegyptus Antiqua 10, Buenos Aires, Argentina)
5 - THE PREDYNASTIC CEMETERIES AT
MATMAR, MOSTAGEDDA AND BADARI
by JUAN JOSÉ CASTILLOS
ABSTRACT - A more detailed study of the published Egyptian Predynastic cemeteries can yield valuable new information that was overlooked by the authors of earlier reports on those sites. The general characteristics of the Predynastic cemeteries at Matmar, Badari and Mostagedda are discussed here as well as the size and the contents of remarkable graves, possibly belonging to prominent members of the local communities at the time, who were buried there. The evolution of the funerary practices in this region differs to some extent from that detected at other contemporary cemeteries elsewhere and might indicate variations in social or political conditions. This paper summarizes such conclusions which in some aspects agree with the results obtained by other scholars using different approaches to the subject. A comparative study of these cemeteries is included in order to determine the general lines of social evolution in this area of northern Upper Egypt.
When I became interested in Predynastic Egypt many years ago, scholars with very few exceptions still drew conclusions based mostly on subjective estimations on the special relevance of certain features of the archaeological data such as unusual tombs or objects found in them with the result that in many areas there was a diversity of conflicting theories, some of which were later proved wrong. It is regrettable that even today some scholars still cultivate such an approach.
I thought then that a statistical evaluation of all adequately published Egyptian Predynastic cemeteries might provide a more consistent and reliable picture of social conditions at the time. After building up a large data base of approximately 8,000 Upper and Lower Egyptian tombs, belonging to all periods since the Early Predynastic to the Protodynastic, I was rewarded with a number of firm and mutually supporting indicators of cultural and social changes in Predynastic Egypt.
For instance, variations in the shape of the tombs, their size and the size distribution, their wealth in funerary objects, the drop in the number of subadults in the graves, the drastic and widespread change in body orientation, among other findings, indicated that there had been significant changes in Predynastic Egypt after the Badarian and during Naqada I.
The fact that in spite of this, some authors continued to insist that the Early Predynastic Badarian society as represented by their funerary practices, was more socially stratified than my studies had indicated, led me to carry out further studies that confirmed my previous conclusions.
In recent years some scholars have continued to insist on the lack of a guiding principle in the Upper Egyptian orientation of the body in Predynastic tombs in spite of the fact that we put forward compelling evidence for an alignment of the main axis of the body parallel to the local course of the Nile, something that has been confirmed in recent archaeological work, for instance, at Elkab.
Having obtained such encouraging results in this preliminary quantitative approach to the Egyptian Predynastic cemetery data, I decided to concentrate on an adequately published area of Upper Egypt in order to try to detect the evolution of social inequality. My study of the Badari / Mostagedda / Matmar data produced a picture that reveals the probable changes that took place in each one of these areas of northern Upper Egypt as they moved forward in time.
The recently published study on the Predynastic cemeteries at Mostagedda1 is part of a larger project which also includes the contemporary cemeteries at Matmar2 and those at Badari3, as well as the published data on other Predynastic sites in Egypt. I will confine my present discussion to the three above mentioned areas at and north of Badari itself.
First of all, I would like to say a few words in order to explain some of the variables that I considered in my study. The G (Gini), T (Theil) and V (coefficient of variation, another way to present the standard deviation of the sample) indices that appear in Tables 1, 2 and 3 below, are measurements of inequality used in sociology4 and which have been occasionally applied recently to study inequality in Predynastic Egypt5.
In my view, these indices represent measurements of what I called the internal inequality in a given group, which were conceived for modern purposes such as comparing the incomes of people and were therefore not designed to express the absolute values of the variables considered. This is understandable if we bear in mind that some of the data may be expressed in those cases in Hong Kong dollars or Deutschmark or US dollars and the different values of such currencies should not distort the general picture. But when we apply these measurements to archaeological data, we want to be aware of such absolute values in order to include the level of inequality and to avoid comparing apples and oranges, which we would be doing if we considered as similar the inequality of two groups of tombs or two groups of say, floor areas of houses in a village, that have an identical internal ratio but that differ substantially in actual numbers. For the purpose, we conceived a fourth variable, AD (average difference), that expresses the difference between the averages of the upper and lower (richer and poorer) groups within a community as expressed, for example, in tomb size or wealth or the size of the houses in which they lived in their village. The G, T and V values in each case are valid but if we attempt to compare the inequality of a group with that of another, we should bear in mind the AD figures as well.
As archaeology and egyptology become more multidisciplinarian, with all the advantages such approach implies, it would be unwise to ignore the advances in modern sociological research in order to refine our perception of the social structure and the degree of inequality in early Egyptian communities. Very limited attempts in this direction have been made, although I have applied this methodology to a large data base of over 8,000 Egyptian Predynastic and Early Dynastic tombs, using the variables that involved aspects of these funerary practices that could yield enough information to make the results significant.
The measurements that I obtained can be summarized as shown in the following Tables, the figures that appear to the right of Size and Wealth Inequality represent the number of tombs involved in each case.
This method to appraise inequality that I confined to funerary data due to the scarcity of comparable published information concerning the settlements associated to these cemeteries, can and hopefully will be expanded so as to achieve more reliable results from the realm of the living as well as from that of the dead.
Mostagedda exhibits in all aspects, as seen from the evolution of the funerary practices, what we could call the most normal development from the Badarian to the Protodynastic, which in neighbouring areas of northern Upper Egypt, to the north and to the south, was affected by other conditions which altered this expected trend. For instance, the stagnation and regression exhibited by the Protodynastic cemeteries at Matmar is not present at Mostagedda, where this period marks the highest point altogether when we compare its funerary manifestations with those at Matmar or Badari.
I have already suggested6 that the probable centre of the Badarian culture was situated at Badari itself, an idea that seems natural due to the number of tombs belonging to it as excavated by Brunton and to the extent of the area covered by its remains as compared to its northern counterparts.
But although convincing in itself, these characteristics of the site might not be considered sufficient evidence of the special status during the Badarian of the Badari area and sites in its immediate neighbourhood such as Qau and Hemamieh.
However, the average size of the Badarian tombs at Badari is well above that of Mostagedda or Matmar and the average wealth of the tombs measured as the extant number of objects found in them7 also largely exceeds the figures for Mostagedda and Matmar, which in both aspects appear as very similar.
Besides this evidence, the internal evolution of each area as reflected in the cemetery data shows that at Badari the cultures that followed had a more limited expression at Badari than at the other two areas farther north, which is the expected result for the centre of a culture where resistance to the penetration of outside influences would be higher and which was increasingly becoming a provincial outpost of later cultures.
At Badari both the internal inequality for size and wealth and the level of such inequality reveal relatively little change from the Badarian to the Protodynastic, the more notorious trend is actually a drop in the internal wealth inequality in the tombs as we move forward in time, expressed in all G, T and V indices.
At Mostagedda, the situation differs from Badari in the sense that the average size and wealth of the tombs steadily increase through time. The internal inequality for both size and wealth, like at Badari, also decrease until the Protodynastic where it climbs to the Badarian level or higher, but the level of such inequality differs from Badari in the sense that it increases steadily from the Badarian and all through the following periods.
At the Matmar cemeteries, the farthest from Badari, the averages for both size and wealth of the tombs exhibit higher figures after the Badarian and the size inequality peaked during the Gerzean (Naqada II) in both its internal and level expressions. In what concerns the extant wealth of the tombs, there was a decrease in the internal inequality through time but the level of such inequality reached in the following periods considerably higher values than during the Badarian. The unexpected drop during the Protodynastic could be due, as I suggested, to the even more considerable distance of Matmar to the cultural centre at the time which perhaps turned its settlements into a sort of backwater, of reduced political and economic status.
The fairly consistent picture revealed by these studies should perhaps encourage others to use this approach to the archaeological data in order to gain new insights into the social conditions and development through time of Predynastic communities in Egypt.
NOTES
1 - J. J. Castillos, "The Predynastic cemeteries at Mostagedda", GM 175, 2000, pp. 23-28.
2 - J. J. Castillos, "Social development in Predynastic Egypt: Matmar, a case study", Proceedings of the 1997 Poznan Symposium on the Stone Age of Northeastern Africa, to appear soon.
3 - J. J. Castillos, "The Predynastic cemeteries at Badari", RdE 51, 2000.
4 - J. J. Castillos, "Inequality in Egyptian Predynastic cemeteries", RdE 49, 1998, pp. 25-36.
5 - W. Griswold, "Measuring social inequality at Armant" in R. Friedman and B. Adams, "The Followers of Horus", Oxford, 1992, p. 196.
6 - J. J. Castillos, "New data on Egyptian Predynastic cemeteries", RdE 48, 1997, p. 251-252.
7 - J. J. Castillos, "Wealth evaluation of Predynastic tombs", GM 163, 1998, pp. 27-33.
IF YOU WISH TO USE THESE PROCEDURES TO MEASURE SOCIAL INEQUALITY, YOU MAY USE A COMPUTER PROGRAM THAT I HAVE WRITTEN FOR THAT PURPOSE, AS WELL AS ANOTHER THAT CALCULATES STATISTICS AND PRINTS A HISTOGRAM WITH THE DATA. FIRST, YOU HAVE TO DOWNLOAD TO YOUR PC THE FOLLOWING PROGRAM THAT ALLOWS YOU TO USE THE ONES I HAVE WRITTEN, IT IS CALLED "LIBERTY BASIC":
AFTER YOU DID, RUN THIS PROGRAM AND INSTALL IT IN YOUR PC. WHEN YOU USE IT, YOU WILL BE ABLE TO "RUN" A NUMBER OF PROGRAMS IN BASIC, AS WELL AS THE ONES I HAVE WRITTEN, WHICH YOU CAN DOWNLOAD BELOW. SAVE THEM INTO A SPECIFIC FOLDER OF YOUR COMPUTER SO THAT YOU CAN OPEN AND RUN THEM LATER USING THE "LIBERTY BASIC" PROGRAM.
DOWNLOAD HERE THE "STATIST.BAS" FILE FOR STATISTICS
WHEN YOU OPEN THESE FILES IN "LIBERTY BASIC", YOU WILL ONLY HAVE TO USE THE "RUN" OPTION, ENTER YOUR DATA AND YOU WILL GET THE FIGURES YOU ARE LOOKING FOR. IF YOU HAVE ANY DOUBTS ABOUT THESE PROCEDURES, YOU CAN EMAIL ANY QUERIES TO:
PRESS HERE FOR AN INTERVIEW BY "EGYPT REVEALED" WITH THE AUTHOR ON THIS SUBJECT
CLICK HERE TO GO TO OUR MAIN PAGE
