A researcher combing through the archives at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom discovered a set of 115-year-old documents that were believed to have been permanently lost eight decades ago. They have revealed a ream of evidence from a little-known cemetery in Lower Nubia, providing a deluge of data on ancient Nubians.
University of Manchester biomedical Egyptologist Jenny Metcalfe recently visited the archives, to search for information about an ancient African people known as the Nubians, who lived in southern Egypt and northern Sudan as long ago as the fifth millennium BC. While checking through records from excavations that took place in the early 20th century, she found a set of what she refers to as “recording cards,” which provided detailed descriptions of human remains unearthed in ancient cemeteries in Lower Nubia (another name for southern Egypt and northern Sudan) by British archaeologists in 1908.
“The recording cards are pre-printed cards designed by Grafton Elliot Smith to help record the individuals they found,” Dr. Metcalfe told Newsweek. “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.”
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