Forgotten flint tools in museum boxes reveal how Egypt’s early farmers paved the way for the pharaohs

More than a century after they were excavated from beneath Cairo, almost 3,000 stone tools from Heliopolis show that specialised 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 centre, 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 north-east of the capital.

Long before its iconic obelisk was built in around 1940 BCE, Heliopolis was a farming village. Shortly before 3000 BCE, 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 metres down to reach that early village. Groundwater flooded his trenches, and workers had to recover artefacts 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.

Opening the boxes

We are archaeologists who study north African prehistory and ancient stone tools. In our new study we went through every box, piece by piece. Faded labels and inventory numbers, checked against Schiaparelli’s notes, allowed us to assign almost 3,000 objects securely to Heliopolis.

Early excavators often kept the beautiful pieces and threw away the rest. This collection was different. Alongside finished tools we found cores (pieces of flint from which blades were struck), tiny flakes and debris from working the flint. Almost everything had been kept, so the flints could reveal how tools were made, not just what they looked like. These tools served for everyday jobs: cutting, scraping, piercing, and harvesting crops.

We also had a reality check. In 2019 an Egyptian-German team digging 500 metres away, beside what appears to be an early brewery, reached a layer of the same age, containing the same kinds of tools. This gave us a modern benchmark for the old finds, confirming their date and showing that remains from this period extend across other parts of the site.

Rather than sorting tools into types, we reconstructed what archaeologists call the chaîne opératoire: the chain of choices and gestures from picking up a pebble to throwing away a worn-out tool. Each step is learned and leaves traces in the stone, so together they reveal who made the tools, how skilled they were and how work was organised – and, more broadly, how people lived.

A workshop of village experts

Knappers (people who shaped flint into tools) picked good quality flint pebbles from nearby gravels and struck long, regular blades from these cores with soft stone hammers. We identified four different ways of working the cores.

The most telling clue was the balance between cores and blades. Unlike other sites of the period, Schiaparelli’s area held many cores but relatively few blades. Yet the cores show that far more blades were struck than we found: so most were taken elsewhere. This was a workshop, producing more than its knappers needed.

The brewery area tells the opposite story: few cores, clumsily worked by less skilled hands. People there got most of their blades from the workshop.

Archaeologists call this “arbitrary craft specialisation”. A few people became skilled experts, but no one controlled access to raw materials or organised production on a large scale. The experts were still farmers, too: flint sickle blades were sharpened and repaired in many different ways, a sign that each user maintained their own. A handful of exceptionally fine, serrated sickle blades, probably finished with metal tools, hint at master knappers who also went out to the fields at harvest time.

There were signs of a wider world as well. Hammamiya knives, elegant flint blades found across Egypt over the same period, turn up at Heliopolis too, along with traces of their making. Perhaps local experts copied a prestigious design, or perhaps travelling craftspeople passed through.

Before the state, a division of labour

Then things changed quickly. Shortly before 3000 BCE, the traditional blades of the Delta region, like those produced at Heliopolis, disappeared and were replaced by more standardised ones. Many of these no longer came from local villages but from large workshops at desert flint mines. The change coincided with the rise of the Egyptian state and its growing demand for agricultural surplus.

It is tempting to see this as a revolution imposed from above by the new state. Heliopolis suggests otherwise. Even before the change, many of its farmers did not make their own blades. The evidence points to specialist knappers working within the community. The habit of relying on someone else for an essential tool was already there. When blades began arriving from distant large-scale workshops, communities were ready for it, which may explain why the change was so fast.

Early states, in other words, did not invent economic complexity from scratch. They built on arrangements that ordinary villagers had already worked out for themselves.

Archives of lost places

Heliopolis is far from unique. Across Africa, many sites excavated a century ago now lie beneath towns and fields that have grown to meet the needs of expanding populations. In Cairo, Egyptian archaeologists and heritage authorities work hard to protect and investigate what survives of ancient Heliopolis, but rising groundwater and the pressures of one of the world’s largest cities make it a constant race against time. Elsewhere, conflict can put sites out of reach for years, as in parts of Sudan today.

For such places, museum storerooms are often the only archive left. Yet they remain underused. The boxes of “ordinary” finds – flints, broken pottery, animal bones – are rarely studied, partly because early records are patchy and researchers assume the material cannot be trusted.

Our study shows that those doubts can be tested and often overcome. Cross-checking labels, archives, raw materials and data from new excavations allowed us to confirm where the Heliopolis flints came from and how old they were. Modern methods helped too: microscope and chemical analyses allowed us to fingerprint the flint and trace it to gravels near the settlement.

There is also a wider point about who gets to see this heritage. Under the old system of partage, finds were split between foreign excavators and the host country, and many collections from African sites ended up in Europe. Studying them and publishing them openly is one way to make this material count again for the people whose past it records.