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ing predynastic people, it is distinguished from it in a number of ways. The Badarian skulls are more prognathous than those of their successors, and have higher nasal indices. The nasal index is just on the line between mesorrhiny and chamaerrhiny. In fact, while the prognathism and nose form would suggest a negroid tendency, this cannot be established, since the hair form is definitely not negroid.

Morant shows that the Badarian cranial type is closely similar to that of some of the modern Christians of northern Ethiopia—who incidentally do not show negroid characteristics in the skull—and also to the crania of Dravidian-speaking peoples of southern India. One might add that living Somalis show a close approximation to this physical type in most respects, and the extremely narrow jaw in which the Badarians seem to reach a world extreme may be duplicated among both Somalis and the inhabi­tants of southern India. In Europe, the closest parallel to the Badarian type is found among modern Sardinians, but this is not as close as their relationships to other and later Egyptians.

On the basis of these racial comparisons, it seems reasonable to suggest that this Badarian physical type may have come from the south, near the headwaters of the Blue Nile. It may represent an early Hamitic racial strain, which persists despite some negroid admixture in Ethiopia and Somaliland to the present day.

The Badarian was succeeded in Upper Egypt by a sequence of cultures which may be treated under the collective term predynastic. In predynas­tic Egyptian times, the inhabitants of Lower Egypt, that is the region around Memphis and the modern Cairo, were physically and culturally distinct from those of Upper Egypt. The Egyptian writing was developed in Lower Egypt where reeds, birds, and other natural objects typical of that environment were incorporated into the syllabic and alphabetical signs. In predynastic times, there were two kingdoms of Lower and of Upper Egypt. The union of the two under Menes, around 3000 B.C., marks the beginning of the dynastic tradition. Predynastic times may be considered, therefore, to have occupied most of the preceding millennium.

In Upper Egypt, the early predynastic physical type is best represented by the series from Naqada.²¹ (See Appendix I, col. 6.) The Naqada peo­ple, although they resembled the Badarians in many respects, yet differed from them sufficiently in others to assure us that these were two popula­tions of separate though related origins. The Naqada people were fairly tall, with a mean stature of 167.5 cm. for eighty males. They were prob­ably taller than the Badarians, although we have no definite data on Bada­rian stature. Both heads and faces were wider and larger than those of the Badarians; the noses were narrower, and there was less prognathism.

21 Morant, g. M., Biometrika, vol. 17, 1925, pp. 1-52.