Tel Erani as an Egyptian colony

Yesterday Jessica Saraceni posted a summary of Science In Poland's report from Marcin Czarnowicz’s expedition at Tel Erani. This is an Egyptian colony in Early Bronze… I guess they’d call it Retenu. It’s eight miles southwest of Gath. The region would be called Canaan, to West Semites; this is all before Aramaic split off. Maybe even before before Ugaritic.

I must say, Science In Poland hasn’t done well on the reporting. That report is talking a “culture of Nagada” 3150-3050 BC. That, to me, smells like an outgrowth of radiocarbon dating “BP”, which date is subtracted from 1950 AD. I disapprove BP, and I outright hate BP where we’re entering the literate age. I suppose it does offer some precision but I question how much precision we can get 5000 years ago; I mean, look at Thera. I’d have preferred the release had said “about 3100 BC according to Nagada radiocarbon specialists”.

The Nagada in question corresponds best to “Naqada III” also known as Dynasty Zero or (for Dwayne Johnson fans) the Scorpion Kingdoms. Indeed, before the modern Polish digs, Israeli archaeologist Shmuel Yeivin had found therein a sherd from a pot that bore the royal crest of ol’ Catfish-Chisel himself, conventionally pronounced “Narmer”.

Czarnowicz tells us they are now looking at the “earlier phase”, before Narmer’s great unification. Egyptians who weren't yet "the Egyptians" – says he – founded Tel Erani 3300 BC(ish). That’s the end of the Gerza period. This is sometimes labeled “Naqada II” but the Girza site would have enjoyed better access to the Med and thereby to the colony. The Upper Egyptian despotates, of which Naqada was one, hadn’t yet reached that far north. And so the Poles report – Egyptian Mediterranean Retenu was an economic extension of Lower Egypt (pace Saraceni). Think of mediaeval Dalmatia’s relationship to Venice; with the other Italians doing their own thing.

I am, therefore, curious about the early-Bronze Egyptian “Dalmatian” patois spoken at this tel. Egypt is a long country whose antique people tended to be homebodies; even its last phase, Coptic, came to break into dialects. Given that Narmer’s boys would march down from the south, I expect the Archaic Egyptian tongue as we’ve read it derives from Upper Egyptian. Did it replace the dialect spoken at the tel?

I’m not reading about Girza-era Tel Erani writing, beyond seal-stamps. At this stage, as hinted above, Egyptian written communication was still pictographic, Aztec-style (or Cycladic), not yet even hieroglyphic. Per Mattessich’s “Oldest Writings, and Inventory Tags of Egypt” (2002) we might also get accounting data but, as we know from Susa III in Elam, such data can encode negligible linguistic content (draw a picture of a wheat sheaf and then a number… yay).