e Ist and IInd dynasties, has
brought a new precision into the whole question, but this, of course,
was not known to us at El Kab. Yet Amelineau's association of the
Libyan pottery with inscriptions of an archaic style, which would most
naturally be dated long before the IVth dynasty, made our later dating
of the pottery improbable, and necessitated a re-examination of the
evidence. The crucial case at Ballas was the secondary burial of a
Libyan found in one of a group of stairway mastabas. The mastabas were
believed to be of the IVth dynasty, because the fragments of pottery
and of alabaster bowls found in them were similar to IVth dynasty
objects from the cemetery of Medum.

16. This dating of the alabaster was, as we now think, rather too
late, but the interment certainly proved that one Libyan died when
a tomb of the early Old Kingdom had already been plundered, and lay
open, affording an easy means of burial. But not only was this
intrusive burial found in one stairway tomb; green paint and stone
vases with horizontally-pierced handles, were found in others of the
same group. These Libyan traces were also interpreted as the remains
of secondary interments, but when at El Kab, I saw the same Libyan
remains in the stairway tombs there, it immediately became clear that
the malachite, vases, etc., more probably belonged to the original
interments, not to secondary ones, that the stairway tombs (perhaps,
also, the other mastabas) were but another form of Neolithic burial,
and that the earlier Neolithic tombs were anterior to the Old Empire.
As the digging went on, other scraps of evidence came to support this
view. The coarse pottery which lay in heaps over and near the mastabas
of the IVth dynasty is identical with that found in some of the small
Neolithic graves.

A vase of hard red ware found in Ka-mena's tomb, which was certainly
of Sneferu's time, was almost indistinguishable from a Libyan form
common at Ballas.

One of the incised bowls--a rare but distinctive species of Libyan
pottery--was found in a stairway tomb at El Kab.

The small late-Libyan graves lay between the mastabas of the time of
Sneferu, not interfering with them, or dug through them, giving the
impression that all were approximately of the same date.

In one tomb there was found, with undoubted Libyan pottery, a green
steatite cylinder of a type known in the Old Kingdom.

In a walk taken one day over the cemetery of Kom el Ahmar, opposite t