IFAO

The 5^th session of the Séminaire de recherche de l’Ifao for this academic year 2024/2025 features NUBTI team (Naqada Unified Base for Tomb Information). It will be introduced and moderated by Pierre Tallet, director of the Ifao.

The seminar is open to all interested participants, in person, subject to availability.

Abstract

The site of the ‘Main Cemetery’ of Naqada, north of Luxor, has yielded significant material remains that provide insights into this culture which played a vital role in the early development of Egyptian civilization in the fourth millennium BCE. Unfortunately, of the 1918 tombs listed by W.M.F. Petrie during his excavation of the site, only 138 were described in the 1896 publication. This NUBTI project aims to reinvestigate the tombs and their contents, through extensive work on Petrie’s archival material, original publication, recently rediscovered pottery lists, and artifacts known in museums, and compiling the data in an online evolutive database to be made accessible for researchers as well as the general public.

The NUBTI project (Naqada Unified Base for Tomb Information) aims at gathering, cross-checking and rationalizing all information known about the tombs excavated under the supervision of Flinders Petrie in the so-called “Great Cemetery” of Naqada between 1895 and 1896. Indeed, the final publication mentions only a handful of tombs deemed “notable”, the incredible work carried out by Elise Baumgartel and Joan C. Payne in the 1960s through 1980s, while extremely precious, focuses only on objects re-located in museum collections, and the notebooks give an invaluable insight on the layout of the tomb, but need to be matched with a more precise description of each object rapidly sketched on the tomb plan. These sources complete but also, sometimes, contradict each other, and only a collective endeavor can help gather and check them against each other in order to reconstruct the original assemblage of each tomb in the best possible way. The goal of this project, supported by the IFAO in partnership with the Petrie museum who curates this archival material, is to make all of this information available on the internet in searchable form, especially for research purposes, and finally reevaluate all data retrievable from this major site from the points of view of funeral archaeology, material culture, and chronology, among others.

Le séminaire de recherche de l'Ifao

Le séminaire de recherche de l'Ifao est un lieu d'échange et de dialogue scientifique sur les recherches en cours sur l'Egypte, l'ensemble du Proche-Orient ou parfois les espaces plus vastes dans lesquels s'inscrit l'histoire égyptienne. Y sont présentées et discutées par un ou plusieurs intervenants les recherches menées par les membres de la communauté scientifique de l'Ifao, ainsi que par des chercheurs invités.

Le séminaire vise tout à la fois à exposer et confronter des savoirs, et à s'interroger sur des questions d'ordre méthodologique (appréhension du terrain, écriture, interdisciplinarité, humanités numériques, comparatisme, etc.).

Modalités : présentiel, distanciel ou mode hybride, le mercredi après-midi, de 16 à 18h (horaire susceptible d'être modifié en fonction de l'actualité).

Lieu : salle de conférence de l'Ifao.