The researcher stumbled upon a treasure trove of 115-year-old documents thought to be lost forever. These documents shed light on a little-known cemetery in Lower Nubia and provide a wealth of information about ancient Nubians.
Egyptologist Jenny Metcalfe from the University of Manchester made the remarkable discovery while examining records about the Nubians, an ancient African people who lived in southern Egypt and northern Sudan as early as the 5th millennium BC. He found pre-printed “record cards” from 1908 detailing human remains excavated by British archaeologists in Lower Nubia, Ancient Origins writes.
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Developed by anatomist Grafton Eliot Smith, these cards served as a systematic way to document findings. It contained information on location, historical age, gender, bone size, presence of teeth, and signs of disease or injury. Dr Metcalf described these as important tools for understanding ancient Nubian societies.
Grafton Eliot Smith, a respected anatomist at the University of Manchester, played a decisive role in the early excavations from 1907 to 1911.
During the 1907-1911 surveys carried out by a team of experts, more than 150 Nubian cemeteries were excavated, containing approximately 20,000 graves. Among them, 7,000 graves still contained intact skeletal remains and various grave goods. These discoveries have greatly expanded our knowledge of the ancient Nubian civilization.
“The oldest cemeteries excavated during this study belong to the Nubian ‘Group A’ population, which emerged around 3800 BC, although there is evidence that people lived in the area before that,” researcher Metcalf said.
Anatomists Grafton Eliot Smith and Douglas Derry, who joined the expedition during the second season of the excavation, spent an extraordinary amount of time and effort examining the ancient skeletons and writing descriptions of everything they saw. The detailed data they collected was recorded by hand on filing cabinet-like cards and became the official document of the expedition’s findings.
“Them [карточки] “It allowed anatomists to examine individuals and compare them to build a picture of Nubian communities,” the expert explained. These records were thought to have disappeared during the chaos associated with the World War II era.
Nubians first appear in archaeological and historical sources as a single people with a distinctive culture in the Nile River valley in Southern Egypt and Northern Sudan approximately 5000 years ago.
Important
Although often overlooked due to their closeness to the peoples of ancient Egypt, the Nubians created the Kingdom of Kush, one of the oldest advanced civilizations in Africa. They share power in the region with the ancient Egyptian pharaonic culture and often fight with their northern neighbors for dominance in the region.
The Nubians adopted Christianity in the mid-first millennium AD and gradually converted to Islam by 1500. The modern Nubian population today, numbering between three and five million, are direct descendants of these ancient Nubians. Most live in Egypt, but several hundred thousand also live in Sudan.
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Source: Focus
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