Revisiting Petrie’s excavations at Naqada

Cross-matching the available documentary evidence and new digital map

Abstract

When W. M. F. Petrie published the results of his archaeological fieldwork at Naqada in 1895, he included a single map on which over 2,200 tombs are shown at a tiny scale, with most left unnumbered. A series of sketch-plans included among the pages of excavation notebooks preserved at the Petrie Museum, UCL, are all presented here in facsimile and compared with the published plan of the cemeteries. Together with other occasional notes, they provide the basis for a new, digitised, searchable, and zoomable map of Naqada’s cemetery N (Great Cemetery), B, and T. These cemeteries are also re-situated in their landscape using freely accessible aerial images, since most of this archaeological area has been destroyed and is today under cultivation.

This article demonstrates the usefulness of thoroughly analysing manuscript documents written during excavations to correct and supplement published material; this approach can be applied to other archaeological sites.