Evidence obtained in the decade before the Second World War allows us, however, to solve the problem, at least as far as it concerns the formative phase of Egyptian civilization. For the discovery in Mesopotamia of remains of the Protoliterate period revealed the source from which curious and passing features of Egyptian culture in late predynastic and protodynastic times were obviously derived. The strongest evidence of this contact between Mesopotamia and Egypt is supplied by three cylinder seals shown by their very material and by their designs to have been made in Mesopotamia during the second half of the Protoliterate period (Figs. 33, 34), but found in Egypt. One was excavated at Naqada (Fig. 32), in a Gerzean grave; and the same origin is probable for the other two.[171] These importations were not without consequence: from the beginning of the First Dynasty the cylinder seal was adopted in Egypt and made at once in considerable quantities. Since it is an odd form for a seal, used only in countries in contact with Mesopotamia, and since one of the Mesopotamian cylinders was found in Egypt in a context just ante-dating the earliest native seals, it would be perverse to deny that the Egyptians followed the Mesopotamian example. But it is quite characteristic for them that they exploited the new suggestion with the greatest freedom. They even used engraved cylinders for a purpose for which there is no Mesopotamian prototype: some of these objects, found in the graves of the First Dynasty, are not seals at all but funerary amulets showing the dead man at the table (Figs. 37, 38, 39).[172] In addition, the Egyptians used cylinders as seals, but they very rarely covered them with pictorial designs. They engraved upon them the names and titles of officials written in hieroglyphs (Figs. 35, 36). In Mesopotamia the earliest cylinders (Figs. 14-16, 42, 44) bear designs, not inscriptions; inscribed seals are unknown before the second Early Dynastic period, and then even the inscribed examples always bear a design as their distinctive feature. Moreover, the early Egyptian seals are usually made of wood, a material not used in Mesopotamia, as far as we know. Since, on the other hand, the cylinder was better adapted to the sealing of merchandise and clay tablets than to that of documents on papyrus, it was replaced in Egypt during the Middle Kingdom by the stamp seal in the shape of a scarab. The Egyptians, therefore, in no way copied slavishly the Mesopotamian invention, but adapted it to their own needs until such a time as they had discovered a more suitable form of seal.