
AGE OF SURFACE FLINT IMPLEMENTS OF EGYPT AND SOMALILAND. 59 
migrated from the famine-stricken desert to some locality where food was 
to be found and tools would be of use to him. The torrential rains would 
certainly wash down to the river the great mass of the implements embedded 
in the humus. But is it reasonable to think that those lying on surfaces even 
with “no. wash either way,” which finally reached the bed-rock, were lowered 
down so carefully through the humus that when the roots, the remnants of 
vegetation and the soil dried to fine powder, were being borne away by the 
wind, the cores and the flakes struck from them could remain to the present 
day undisturbed, and also be not deeply eroded by the drifting silex which has 
so deeply sand-worn the steles of the Menite kings—which are of yesterday 
when compared with the Quaternary age! If Paleolithic man ever 
inhabited the high plateau of the Nile, I cannot believe that the worked 
flints so frequent there were his implements. If they are his tools (and 
being still so abundant) many of the same pattern ought to be forthcoming 
from the high Nile deposits. If true palwoliths be ever recovered from the 
deposits of the Valley they must be found in association with the remains 
of the fauna and perhaps of the flora of their own epoch ; and till then 
there can be no indisputable warrant for asserting the existence of Paleolithic 
man in Egypt. 
The large flints in the tombs of the Menite kings which Prof. Petrie 
ascribes to the “Paleolithic Age” have nothing to show that they are not 
of manufacture contemporaneous with the tombs. Two questions here 
suggest themselves—Were the flints collected from the ground to be put into 
the tombs? or, Are these the tools of the period placed in the tombs for 
the use of the deceased’s spirit in the other world ? 
I cannot resist the conviction that the whole of the plateau flints of Paleo- 
lithic form, as also all those from the Es Sheikh and Sojoor mines, are chiefly 
of historic age (which must now, according to Petrie’s discoveries, be ante- 
dated to the age of the earliest known writing—the time of Menes), and even 
may be as young as the earlier dynasties. 
In regard to the Somaliland flint implements, Mr. Seton-Karr writes to 
me :— 
“You seem to me to argue that since I found a spear-head and chips in 
situ that therefore Evans was wrong in assuming great age for the paloliths 
from Somaliland. But I found no paleos with chips; the spear-heads are 
Neolithic.” 
While glad of the opportunity of giving correctly Mr. Seton-Karr’s 
opinion on the age of these flints, it may be well in doing so, perhaps, to 
repeat shortly, and in paraphrase, a synopsis of the published history of the 
‘Somaliland implements :— 
“Stone implements are found all over Somaliland” ; those above the 
Issutugan, “lying on the surface in twos or threes on little pillars 
of earth, or in the bottoms of innumerable little gullies,” are 
Paleolithic.—(Seton-Karr.) 
Implements found elsewhere—in retired _ places surrounded by low 
hills, where there are chips in situ and generally no other stones 
upon the surface besides these worked flints—are early Neolithic.— 
(Seton-Karr.) 
“In Somaliland there seemed to be no association of Neolithic forms 
with those of apparently far earlier date.” —(/ vans.) 
The “ Paleolithic” site is on the face of a low hill—3 miles in length, 
3000 ft. above the sea, 200 ft. above the river—‘‘free from river 
action, deposition or denudation” (Sefon-Kurr) ; the implements 
have been “washed out of sandy or loamy deposits by the action 
of rain, or sometimes laid bare by the wind.”—(Evans.) 
