Forgotten flint tools in museum boxes reveal how Egypt’s early farmers paved the way for the pharaohs
Election
Originally published by The Conversation – Articles (AFRICA) — Read the original article →
More than a century after they were excavated from beneath Cairo, almost 3,000 stone tools from Heliopolis show that specialised work was already reshaping village life before Egypt became a state.
Few places have a grander origin story than Heliopolis. It flourished thousands of years before the founding of Cairo, now Egypt’s capital and largest city. In pharaonic times Heliopolis was a major religious and intellectual centre, devoted to the cult of the sun god Ra. The ancient Egyptians believed the world itself began here, when the creator god Atum rose from the waters of chaos. In the early 1900s, the area was still largely open farmland on the edge of Cairo. Today it lies buried beneath Matariya, a densely populated district in the north-east of the capital.
Long before its iconic obelisk was built in around 1940 BCE, Heliopolis was a farming village. Shortly before 3000 BCE, when the first pharaohs united the Nile Valley into one of the world’s earliest states, people here grew crops, brewed beer and made razor-sharp flint tools.
