Sent from Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie
1 Feb 1895
Description:

[from ‘Naqadah, Upper Egypt’:]

‘My dear Sir,

As I corresponded with you before about the skeleton business I now send you an outline of what is going forward, which please pass on to all who, it may concern.

When I began here I stacked skulls & bones on a broad shelf in my bedroom, with a pleasingly perfect mortuary lying below. Soon I had to stack them in boxes to await packing. Then they overflowed & formed a heap, which encroached on our courtyard until I could hardly get into my room. Now the heap is extending daily & threatening to cut off the entrance to our visitor’s room. The skulls were laid on shelves across the end of the court, but I have now filled all of the ornamental openings of the brick wall. And still every day more come in.

We have cleared over 400 graves, & from them have over 100 good skulls & probably a large part of each of 200 skeletons. Many graves had been anciently plundered & the bones broken up.

Every grave has the contents sketched in position, every bone is marked with the number given to the grave (except ribs & fingers & toes, which go in marked bags); every object & every pot is kept (except the very commonest pottery) & also marked.

So when I return I hope to supply to you this summer about 200 skulls & 400 skeletons, more or less. The bones I propose to have classified all of one kind together; so that all the femurs for instance – will go in a row, each numbered. Thus peculiarities will be more easily seen, & the measuring can be more quickly done. Nearly the whole of this material is of some age & of one race. It belongs to a most unexpected people; a cannibal race occupying upper Egypt about 3000 B.C. There has not been any suspicion of them hitherto, & their pottery has been attributed to the Egyptians. But they were quite distinct & not a single object in their cemetery or town is in the least like any Egyptian product. The full study of them will therefore be a matter of great ethnographic interest. The skulls are very fine, orthoganthous[?], with small hook noses, & strong brows.

I hope that when the boxes arrive in May or June some energetic medical or art students will be encouraged to help in all the sorting and classifying of the bones, so that they can be measured this summer. There are interesting diseases; hunch backs, chalky patches in bones, lateral curved spine, diseased spine patched with added growth joining 6 vertebrae, &c. But I have only seen one fracture, an arm.

You could not have a better lot of material for homogeneousness & age: and I think it deserves to be worked up into a classical memoir in anthropology.

All the bodies are decapitated, & the skulls displaced. In one tomb -  a grand one – the human bones were broken & scooped out for marrow & gnawed by teeth. But in general the cannibalism appears to be only ceremonial. I suspect the people were Libyans.

Yours sincerely,

W.M. Flinders Petrie.’