Naqada culture


The Naqada culture is an archaeological culture of Chalcolithic Predynastic Egypt, named for the town of Naqada, Qena Governorate. A 2013 Oxford University radio carbon dating study of the Predynastic period, however, suggests a much later date beginning sometime between 3,800-3,700 BC.
The final phase of the Naqada culture is Naqada III, which is coterminous with the Protodynastic Period in ancient Egypt.

Chronology

William Flinders Petrie

The Naqada period was first divided by the British Egyptologist William Flinders Petrie, who explored the site in 1894, into three sub-periods:
Petrie's chronology was superseded by that of Werner Kaiser in 1957. Kaiser's chronology began c. 4000 BC, but the modern version begins slightly earlier, as follows:
ians in the Naqada I period traded with Nubia to the south, the oases of the western desert to the west, and the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean to the east. They also imported obsidian from Ethiopia to shape blades and other objects from flakes. Charcoal samples found in the tombs of Nekhen, which were dated to the Naqada I and II periods, have been identified as cedar from Lebanon.
Craniometric analysis of predynastic Naqada fossils found that they were closely related to other Afroasiatic-speaking populations inhabiting the Horn of Africa and the Maghreb, as well as to Bronze age and medieval period Nubians and to specimens from ancient Jericho. The Naqada skeletons were also morphologically proximate to modern osteological series from Europe and the Indian subcontinent. However, the Naqada fossils and these ancient and recent skeletons were phenotypically distinct from fossils belonging to modern Niger-Congo-speaking populations inhabiting Tropical Africa, as well as from Mesolithic skeletons excavated at Wadi Halfa in the Nile Valley.

Relative chronology