IFAO

23354

Naqada Unified Base For Tombs Information

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.