Thought lost in World War II, records discovery reveals secrets of an ancient people

A researcher has uncovered a set of historical records thought to have been lost during the Second World War, and the information contained in them has shed new light on an ancient people.

Jenny Metcalfe, a biomedical Egyptologist with the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, uncovered documents known as “recording cards” from one of the first-ever excavations conducted in Lower Nubia in the early 20th century.

Nubia was an ancient region in northeast Africa centered on the Nile River valley that extended across what is now northern Sudan and southern Egypt. This region, inhabited by the Nubian people, was the home of one of the earliest civilizations in ancient Africa thousands of years ago.

Over the millennia, various cultures and kingdoms emerged and disappeared in the region, perhaps the most notable being the Kushite Empire. The region-parts of which were ruled by ancient Egyptian pharaohs at times-is traditionally divided into two portions: Lower and Upper Nubia. The “lower” portion is actually the northern part of Nubia.

Metcalfe found the recording cards hidden in an archive at the University of Cambridge while conducting research for her book, “The Archaeological Survey of Nubia Season 2 (1908-9) Report on the Human Remains.”

Between 1907 and 1911, a team of researchers conducted excavations in Lower Nubia throughout four seasons. During this time, they excavated more than 150 Nubian cemeteries and uncovered around 20,000 graves, unearthing over 7,000 bodies and numerous artifacts in the process. These findings provide a unique record of the ancient communities living in the Nile region of southern Egypt.

“The oldest cemeteries excavated in this survey belong to the ‘A-group’ Nubian population, which began around 3,800 B.C., although there is evidence of human occupation in the region before this,” Metcalfe told Newsweek.

Key figures in these investigations were anatomists Grafton Elliot Smith and his colleague Douglas Derry, who oversaw the anatomical work during the second season. The recording cards from seasons three and four remain lost, but most from the second season are fully documented in Metcalfe’s book.

“The recording cards are pre-printed cards designed by Grafton Elliot Smith to help record the individuals they found,” Metcalfe said. “They have boxes for recording details such as site, historical age, age and sex, long bone and skull measurements, teeth present and any evidence of illness or trauma, such as broken bones.”

“They allowed the anatomists to both study individuals and compare those individuals to build up a picture of the Nubian communities.”