Gerzeh Al-Fayyum Egypt

…Gerzeh, …

The Gerzean (Naqada II) Culture, named after the site of Gerza, is the next stage in Egyptian cultural development, and it is during this time that the foundation for Dynastic Egypt is laid.

Gerzean culture is largely an unbroken development out of Amratian Culture, starting in the delta and moving south through Upper Egypt, however failing to dislodge Amratian Culture in Nubia.

Gerzean sites are identified by the presence of pottery distinctly different from Amratian white cross-lined wares or black-topped ware.

Gerzean pottery is painted mostly in dark red with pictures of animals, people, and ships, as well as geometric symbols that appear to derive from pictures of animals.

Moreover, the handles now become "wavy" and reach a highly decorative phase.

The Gerzean Culture uses silver, gold, lapis, and faience ornamentally, and the grinding palettes used for eye-paint since the Badarian period begin to be adorned with relief carvings.

Gerzean culture coincides with a significant drop in rainfall, and farming produces the vast majority of food, although paintings from this time indicate that hunting retains some importance.

With increased food supplies, Egyptians adopt a greatly more sedentary lifestyle, and larger settlements grow to cities with about five thousand residents.

It is during this time that Egyptian city dwellers cease building from reeds, and employ mudbrick, which had been developed in the Amratian Period, en masse to build their cities.

The Mesopotamian process of sun-dried bricks, and architectural building principles—including the use of arch and of recessed walls for decorative effect—becomes popular.

Egyptian stone tools, while still in use, move from bifacial construction to ripple-flaked construction, copper is used as well to make all kinds of tools, and copper weaponry appears for the first time.

Iron objects of great age are much more rare than objects made of gold or silver due to the ease of corrosion of iron.

Beads made of meteoric iron in 3500 BCE or earlier, found in Gerzeh by G. A. Wainwright, contain seven and a half percent nickel, which is a signature of meteoric origin, since iron found in the Earth's crust has very little to no nickel content.

The Egyptians begin to mine copper and turquoise in the Sinai Peninsula about 3400 BCE at what is possibly one of the world's first hard-rock mining operations.

The first walled towns appear in Egypt.

Tombs also begin to be constructed in classic Egyptian style, being modeled like normal houses, and sometimes composed of multiple rooms.

Although excavations in the delta have still to be meticulously undertaken, these traits are interpreted as having come largely from the north, and are probably not indigenous to Upper Egypt.

The Egyptian deity Set, or Seth, is a god of the desert, storms, and foreigners.

Set is mostly depicted in art as a fabulous creature, referred to by Egyptologists as the Set animal or Typhonic beast, known as a Typhon, with a curved snout, square ears, forked tail, and canine body, or sometimes as a human with only the head of the Set animal.

It has no complete resemblance to any known creature, although it could be seen as a composite of an aardvark, a donkey, and a jackal.

The earliest representations of what may be the Seth animal comes from a tomb dating to the Naqada I phase of the Predynastic Period (circa 3790 BCE–3500 BCE), though this identification is uncertain.

If these are ruled out, then the earliest Set-animal appears on a mace-head of the Scorpion King, a Protodynastic ruler.

The head and forked tail of the Set-animal are clearly present.

The characteristic material culture of the Egyptian south has gradually spread in Naqada III times to replaces the once different one of northern Egypt.

Undecorated stone vases from Egypt's Gerzean period supersede vessels of the Amratian culture.

Cylinder seals appear in Egypt, as well as recessed paneling architecture, the Egyptian reliefs on cosmetic palettes are clearly made in the same style as the contemporary Mesopotamian Uruk culture, and the ceremonial maceheads that appear in the late Gerzean and early Semainean are crafted in the Mesopotamian "pear-shaped" style, instead of the Egyptian native style.

The route of this trade is difficult to determine, but contact with Canaan does not predate the early dynastic, so it is usually assumed to have been by water.

A Mediterranean route, probably used by intermediaries through Byblos, is evidenced by the presence of Byblian objects in Egypt.

The fact that so many Gerzean sites are at the mouths of wadis that lead to the Red Sea is indicative of some amount of trade via the Red Sea (though Byblian trade could potentially cross the Sinai and resume sea travel as well).