The ‘lost tombs’ of Naqada: 735 assemblages reconstructed from Petrie’s archival material and a new look at a long-known cemetery site

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 article aims to reinvestigate 735 tombs from this cemetery, which most were thought to be empty or for which most data was lost (not represented in the field notebooks preserved in the Petrie Museum, London), through extensive work on Petrie’s archival material, original publication, recently rediscovered pottery lists, and artifacts known in museums. This first sample is published here as an interim result of the project and will be made available in an online database. The reassessment revealed that the studied assemblages contain many additional artifacts, they could now be dated or their previous dating revised, and the corrected assemblages even give us a chance to highlight some mistakes in the seriation models built on previous ceramic inventories. These preliminary results testify once more to the importance of reexamining seemingly well-known sites in the light of old excavation data.