the smothered fire.
This gas acts as a solvent of magnetic oxide, and hence allows it to
assume a new surface, like the glassy surface of some marbles subjected
to solution in water." This black and red ware appears to be the most
ancient prehistoric Egyptian pottery known. Later in date are a red
ware and a black ware with rude geometrical incised designs, imitating
basketwork, and with the incised lines filled in with white. Later again
is a buff ware, either plain or decorated with wavy lines, concentric
circles, and elaborate drawings of boats sailing on the Nile, ostriches,
fish, men and women, and so on.

[Illustration: 017.jpg (right) BUFF WARE VASE, Predynastic period,
before 4000 B.C.]

These designs are in deep red. With this elaborate pottery the Neolithic
ceramic art of Egypt reached its highest point; in the succeeding period
(the beginning of the historic age) there was a decline in workmanship,
exhibiting clumsy forms and bad colour, and it is not until the time of
the IVth Dynasty that good pottery (a fine polished red) is once more
found. Meanwhile the invention of glazed pottery, which was unknown to
the prehistoric Egyptians, had been made (before the beginning of the
Ist Dynasty). The unglazed ware of the first three dynasties was bad,
but the new invention of light blue glazed faience (not porcelain
properly so called) seems to have made great progress, and we possess
fine specimens at the beginning of the Ist Dynasty. The prehistoric
Egyptians were also proficient in other arts. They carved ivory and they
worked gold, which is known to have been almost the first metal worked
by man; certainly in Egypt it was utilized for ornament even before
copper was used for work. We may refer to the illustration of a flint
knife with gold handle, already given. [* See illustration.]

The date of the actual introduction of copper for tools and weapons into
Egypt is uncertain, but it seems probable that copper was occasionally
used at a very early period. Copper weapons have been found in
pre-dynastic graves beside the finest buff pottery with elaborate red
designs, so that we may say that when the flint-working and pottery of
the Neolithic Egyptians had reached its zenith, the use of copper was
already known, and copper weapons were occasionally employed. We can
thus speak of the "Chalcolithic" period in Egypt as having already begun
at that time, no doubt several centuries before the beginning of the
histori