writing system emerged full-blown at this same time tended to reinforce the clear division between Egypt’s literate and sophisticated Dynastic culture and the preliterate, prehistoric past that preceded it. Much of the efforts of recent archaeological work on the Predynastic period has been to understand the process of state formation that culminated in the transition to the Pharaonic Egyptian state. One of the major insights of the work of recent decades has been evidence for the long-term development during the later Predynastic period of features such as hieroglyphic writing, royal iconography, administrative institutions, and increasingly organized trade links both within Egypt as well as between Egypt and foreign lands (including Syro-Palestine areas, mesopotamia, and nubia). The evidence suggests a complicated process of cultural and political unification spanning centuries and not occurring virtually overnight as suggested by the tradition of the Sema-Tawy.

Predynastic Egypt was not culturally homogeneous; archaeological work has defined a series of different cultural traditions characterized by different artifacts, tool types, burial practices, and architecture. Broadly speaking, the Predynastic period of Egypt is divided between two cultural spheres: the Nile delta and southern Egypt. Regional variation is, however, a marked feature of both culture areas. Predynastic settlement sites in the northern part of the country include the sites of Merimda Beni-Salama (ca. 4200–3400 b.c.) on the southwest edge of the Nile delta; el-Omari (ca. 3600– 3200 b.c.) south of Cairo; and a group of settlements on the edge of the Fayum (Fayum B culture, ca. 4500–4000 b.c.) that display the transition from a fishing/gathering to mixed farming/fishing lifestyle. These sites show regional cultural variations. The main type-sites that have defined the northern cultural tradition are Maadi (just south of modern Cairo) and Buto (near modern Alexandria). The late Neolithic cultural tradition of Lower Egypt has in recent years become generally known as the Buto-Maadi culture and shows many connections with the contemporary culture of Chalcolithic/Early Bronze I of southern Palestine.

A quite different Predynastic cultural tradition occurs in Upper (southern) Egypt. Unlike the wide Nile delta of Lower Egypt, the valley south of the delta is characterized by an undulating low desert terrain that flanks either side of the floodplain of the Nile River. Predynastic Egyptians, like their later Dynastic descendants, used the arid low desert for burying the dead. Cemetery archaeology has been the foundation of work on the southern Predynastic cultures since the end of the nineteenth century. Several major settlement sites (including Nagada, Hierakonpolis, and Mahasna) have been excavated and settlement archaeology in southern Egypt promises to continue to add crucial information on the Predynastic cultural development in southern Egypt.

An early Predynastic culture in Upper Egypt is the Badarian (named after the site of el-Badari) dating ca. 4500–4000 b.c. The Badarian culture displays the earliest reliance on domesticated plants and animals in the Nile Valley. The Badarian most likely represents a regional variant, or facies, of a wider southern cultural sphere that includes the succeeding Nagada culture (dating ca. 4000–3050 b.c.). The Nagada culture is named after the type-site of Nagada in southern Egypt where a series of large cemeteries provided the basis for defining the evolution over time of the Nagada tradition. The early geographical range of the Nagada culture extended approximately from the region of Hierakonpolis (south of modern Luxor) to just north of abydos. However, in its later phases (ca. 3600–3050 b.c.) the Nagada culture expanded dramatically both southward and northward, where it ultimately replaced the Buto-Maadi material culture by the end of the Predynastic period. Understanding how and why this expansion of the Nagada culture occurred is a central topic of current research on Predynastic Egypt.

The first serious work on the archaeology of the Predynastic cultures of southern Egypt was undertaken by william flinders petrie at the end of the nineteenth century. Petrie applied a technique that he termed sequence dating (known today as seriation) to organize a chronological sequence of Predynastic tombs from southern Egypt. This technique was based on an ordering