FLINT IMPLEMENTS FROM ANCIENT EGYPT. 109 
Usertesen’s pyramid may have been built on the site of an old neolithic town. 
“It is incredible,” replies Mr. Griffith, “that such specimens are really neolithic 
tools which were lying on the surface of the ground when the city of Kahun 
was built in the XIIth dynasty and were afterwards mixed up with the 
handiwork of the inhabitants. . . .” The axes found at Lisht, a 
town of the beginning of the XIIth dynasty, are identical, Mr. Griffith also 
points out, with those from Kahun. It is not, however, disputed, I believe, 
that the views and inscriptions on the walls at Beni Hasan picture for us 
what was actually to be witnessed at the period of their inscribing in the 
XIIth dynasty. 
Mr. Quibell, in Nagada and Ballas, page 50, records how he cleared a small 
town (“South Town”), a settlement of a people, once but no longer, called 
the ‘New Race,” * whom Professor Petrie believes to be of Libyan origin, 
and to be related to the Kabyles and Berbers living to-day in Algeria, who 
occupied Egypt in predynastic times, that is, anterior to 4700 B.C. ; how 
while in the houses of this town occurred pieces of almost “every variety of 
pottery we know from the New [predynastic] Race graves,” he found strew- 

MANUFACTURE OF FLINT KNIVES, FROM THE West WALL oF THE MAIN CHAMBER, 
TomsB 2, Brent Hasan. r 
“The chipping is all done in a downward direction. Two of the workmen are hold- 
ing up their knives to test the accuracy of their work. . . . It is clear the fabri- 
cators were tipped’ with some material different from that of the: shafts. : 
Possibly they consisted of flint flakes set in wooden handles,” Many of the finished 
knives ‘are provided with handles formed by binding round the butt end of the knife 
with cord (?) worked into a little knob at the end” (Griffith, Bent Hasan, vol. iii., p- 35). 
(By the courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Fund.) 
ing over the sites large numbers of flints—rough, ovoid, and rudely chipped 
—so different from the wrought flints on the graves of the same race as to 
suggest that they could not be of the same age and people, yet he concludes 
that “these ovoid flints were the common domestic implements of the New 
[predynastic] Race.” . . . Besides these and a scraper, which, though 
smaller, is very similar in shape to Fig. 47 on page 96 from the Wady 
Sojoor, “many saw-flints were found from sickles, showing that the New 
[predynastic] Race reaped with flint sickles, as did the Egyptians [at 
a later period].” Now in the graves of the sume people the wrought 
flnts . . . “are the finest examples of such work that are known from 
any country or age. The regular and systematic surface flaking and the 
notching of the edges are of the most delicate style, surpassing even the 
Danish art of flint-work.” 

*M. de Morgan a démontre avec beaucoup de probabilities que la race 
découverte par le savant anglais n’etait en realité que la plus ancienne de Egypte. 
Elle representait une sorte de sauvageon sur laquelle se greffa la civilisation soumerique 
de lancienne Babylonia. (Schweinfurth.) 
K 
