The site of Adaima is crucial for understanding the Predynastic cultures of Upper Egypt. Located 8 km south from the modern city of Esna, Adaima occupies an area of 35 ha and consists of a large settlement and two necropoleis. It was occupied from the end of Naqada I (ca. 3900 BCE ) to the 3rd Dynasty (ca. 2700).

The pharaonic funerary conceptions go back to the predynastic, when this civilization took shape in a process that accelerated with time. Since this age, the custom of deposing jx)ttery with the dead, as an offering by itself as well as a receptacle for a food offering, real or fictitious, originates in the need to furnish means of living in the next world. This does not mean that the pottery found in tombs is representative of the household inventory. The pots deposed with the dead are chosen with a specific function, as containers and useful accessories, necessary to the meal, yet, perhaps, substituts to the food-offering itself. Some pots have simply followed the dead to the grave as personal objects, the bowl in which he ate placed before his face or within arms reach. A personal object or symbolic, such as the flint knife of the workman, the pot represents, more rarely however, the deceased. The multiplicity of values conveyed by the objects in the funerary context is such as to render simplistic a solely statistical approach.

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