Showcasing Egyptian prehistory and prehistoric material culture “Assessing the significance of the integration between archaeology and museology”

The Prehistoric archaeology in Egypt has received increasing interest over the past decades. This is reflected in a number of publications that aim at analyzing and interpreting the prehistoric Egyptian material culture. However, this level of interest is not yet reflected through the displays of the Egyptian Museums which should serve as platforms of knowledge about the entire Egyptian history. The current research offers solutions against the traditional challenges that contribute to the exclusion of prehistoric objects especially stone tools from museum displays and also offers innovative approaches for the investigation and interpretation of prehistoric objects. This is mainly approachable by integrating the approaches driven from archaeological sciences with those driven from museological practices. The concept of integration is possible through the investigation of collections of objects through combining three main concepts namely people, things, and spaces. This implies the application of the biographic approach where stone tools as "things" might be investigated through ancient and modern spaces namely archaeological sites and museums. Through combining these concepts, it's also possible to trace the various levels of people-object interaction through past and present, namely the interactions between objects and their original producers and users, and the interactions between objects and modern users and viewers inside museums. In this regard, special focus was given to investigate the changing meanings and roles of lithics during the Prehistoric/Predynastic period mainly based on their manipulation between domestic and non-domestic contexts. In addition, a selected collection of flint knives was used as a case study to test the success of such a proposed approach. The adopted methodology proved to be of high significance in inferring a wide range of new data on flint tools especially those uncovered from funerary context, proposing a new methodology for the application of the biographic approach on prehistoric material culture, and proposing a typology for flint knives in Ancient Egypt.