Forgotten flint tools reveal how Egypt's farmers organized work before the pharaohs

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: More than a century after they were excavated from beneath Cairo, almost 3,000 stone tools from Heliopolis show that specialized work was already reshaping village life before Egypt became a state. Few places have a grander origin story than Heliopolis.

It flourished thousands of years before the founding of Cairo, now Egypt's capital and largest city. In pharaonic times, Heliopolis was a major religious and intellectual center, devoted to the cult of the sun god Ra. The ancient Egyptians believed the world itself began here, when the creator god Atum rose from the waters of chaos.

In the early 1900s, the area was still largely open farmland on the edge of Cairo. Today it lies buried beneath Matariya, a densely populated district in the northeast of the capital. Long before its iconic obelisk was built around 1940 B.C., Heliopolis was a farming village.

Shortly before 3000 B.C., when the first pharaohs united the Nile Valley into one of the world's earliest states, people here grew crops, brewed beer and made razor-sharp flint tools. In 1905 and 1906, the Italian Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli dug almost 9 meters (30 feet) down to reach that early village. Groundwater flooded his trenches, and workers had to recover artifacts straight from the water.

Schiaparelli kept the flints, but his research mainly focused on monuments and inscriptions, so the flints sat in 40 wooden boxes at the Museo Egizio in Turin, almost forgotten, for over a century. Recently, they were temporarily moved to the Museo del Duomo in Bracciano to be studied. The spot where Schiaparelli dug no longer exists as an archaeological site.

Those boxes are all that is left of it. We are archaeologists who study North African prehistory and ancient stone tools. In our new study, published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, we went through every box, piece by piece.