For many years various European collections of Egyptian antiquities
have contained a certain series of objects which gave archæologists
great difficulty. There were vases of a peculiar form and color,
greenish plates of slate, many of them in curious animal forms, and
other similar things. It was known, positively, that these objects had
been found in Egypt, but it was impossible to assign them a place in
the known periods of Egyptian art. The puzzle was increased in
difficulty by certain plates of slate with hunting and battle scenes
and other representations in relief in a style so strange that many
investigators considered them products of the art of Western Asia.

The first light was thrown on the question in the winter of 1894-95 by
the excavations of Flinders Petrie in Ballas and Neggadeh, two places
on the west bank of the Nile, a little below ancient Thebes. This
persevering English investigator discovered here a very large
necropolis in which he examined about three thousand graves. They all
contained the same kinds of pottery and the same slate tablets
mentioned above, and many other objects which did not seem to be
Egyptian. It was plain that the newly found necropolis and the
puzzling objects already in the museums belonged to the same period.
Petrie assumed that they represented the art of a foreign
people--perhaps the Libyans--who had temporarily resided in Egypt in
the time between the old and the middle kingdoms. He gave this unknown
people the name "New Race." But his theory met with little approval,
least of all from German Egyptologists; and even at that time, an
opinion was expressed that this unusual art belonged before the known
beginning of Egyptian culture. However, in spite of much discussion,
the question could not then be decided.