Old flint tools show Egyptian villagers specialised before the pharaohs
A team of archaeologists who study north African prehistory re-examined almost 3,000 flint tools from Heliopolis, dug up near Cairo in 1905 and 1906. They say specialised tool-making was already shaping village life before Egypt became a state.
The flints sat in 40 boxes in Turin for over a century. Using faded labels and the notes of the Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli, the team linked the objects to Heliopolis. Many cores but few blades suggest one area was a workshop that made more blades than its own knappers needed. The authors present this in their own article on a new study, so it is not a peer-reviewed text, and it rests on century-old excavation records.