3 June
1853 A.D. Famous Egyptologist,
Sir Flinders Petrie, Born. Biblical
studies prompt his work. Wiki tells some
of the story.
Sir William Matthew
Flinders Petrie, FRS[2] (3 June
1853 – 28 July 1942), commonly known as Flinders Petrie, was an
English Egyptologist and a pioneer of
systematic methodology in archaeology and preservation of artefacts. He held the first chair of Egyptology in
the United Kingdom, and excavated many of the most important archaeological
sites in Egypt. Some consider his most famous discovery to be that of the Merneptah
Stele,[3] an opinion with
which Petrie himself concurred.[4] Petrie developed
the system of dating layers based on pottery and ceramic findings.[5]
Contents
- 1 Biography
- 2 Academic career
- 3 Archaeology career
- 4 Discovery of the 'Israel' or Merneptah stele
- 5 Legacy
- 6 Published work
- 7 Gallery
- 8 References
- 9 Further reading
- 10 External links
Biography
William Matthew Flinders Petrie was
born in Maryon Road, Charlton, Kent, England, the son of William Petrie (1821–1908) and Anne (née Flinders
(1812–1892). Anne was the daughter of Captain Matthew
Flinders, surveyor of the Australian coastline, spoke six languages and was an Egyptologist. William Petrie was
an electrical engineer who developed carbon arc lighting and later developed
chemical processes for Johnson,
Matthey & Co.[6]
Flinders was raised in a Christian household (his father being Plymouth
Brethren), and was educated at home. He had no formal education.
His father taught his son how to survey accurately, laying the foundation for
his archaeological career. At the age of eight, he was tutored in French,
Latin, and Greek, until he had a collapse and was taught at home. He also
ventured his first archaeological opinion aged eight, when friends visiting the
Petrie family were describing the unearthing of the Brading Roman Villa in the Isle of Wight. The boy was horrified to hear the rough shovelling
out of the contents, and protested that the earth should be pared away, inch by
inch, to see all that was in it and how it lay.[7] "All that I
have done since," he wrote when he was in his late seventies, "was
there to begin with, so true it is that we can only develop what is born in the
mind. I was already in archaeology by nature."[8]
On 26 November 1896, Petrie married Hilda
Urlin (1871–1957) in London. They had two children, John
(1907–1972) and Ann (1909–1989). They originally lived in Hampstead, where an English Heritage blue plaque
now stands on the building they lived in, 5 Cannon Place.[9] Their son was John
Flinders Petrie, the mathematician, who gave his name to the Petrie
polygon. In 1933, on retiring from his professorship, he moved
permanently to Jerusalem, where he lived with Lady
Petrie at the British School of Archaeology, then temporarily headquartered at
the American School of
Oriental Research (today the W.
F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research).
When he died in 1942, Petrie donated
his head (and thus his brain) to the Royal College of
Surgeons of London while his body was interred in the Protestant
Cemetery on Mt. Zion. World War II was then at
its height, and the head was delayed in transit. After being stored in a jar in
the college basement, its label fell off and no one knew who the head belonged
to.[5] It was identified
however, and is now stored, but not displayed, at the Royal College of
Surgeons of London.
Academic career
The chair of Edwards
Professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology
at University College London was set up and funded in 1892 by a bequest of Amelia
Edwards following her sudden death in that year. Petrie's
supporter since 1880, Edwards had instructed that he should be its first
incumbent. He continued to excavate in Egypt after taking up the professorship,
training many of the best archaeologists of the day.
In 1913 Petrie sold his large
collection of Egyptian antiquities to University College, London, where it is now housed in the Petrie Museum of
Egyptian Archaeology. One of his students was Howard
Carter who went on to discover the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Archaeology career
In his teenage years, Petrie surveyed
British prehistoric monuments [10] (commencing with
the late Romano-British 'British Camp' that lay within yards of his family home
in Charlton) in attempts to understand their geometry (at 19 producing the most
accurate survey of Stonehenge). His father had
corresponded with Piazzi Smyth about his theories
of the Great Pyramid
and Petrie travelled to Egypt in early 1880 to make an accurate survey of Giza, making him the first to properly investigate how they were constructed
(many theories had been advanced on this, and Petrie read them all, but none
were based on first hand observation or logic).[11]
Petrie's published report of this
triangulation survey, and his analysis of the architecture of Giza therein, was
exemplary in its methodology and accuracy, disproved Smyth's theories and still
provides much of the basic data regarding the pyramid plateau to this day. On
that visit, he was appalled by the rate of destruction of monuments (some
listed in guidebooks had been worn away completely since then) and mummies. He
described Egypt as "a house on fire, so rapid was the destruction"
and felt his duty to be that of a "salvage man, to get all I could, as
quickly as possible and then, when I was 60, I would sit and write it
all."
Returning to England at the end of
1880, Petrie wrote a number of articles and then met Amelia
Edwards, journalist and patron of the Egypt Exploration
Fund (now the Egypt Exploration
Society), who became his strong supporter and later appointed him as
Professor at her Egyptology chair at University College London. Impressed by his scientific approach, they offered him work as the
successor to Édouard Naville. Petrie accepted
the position and was given the sum of £250 per month to cover the excavation’s
expenses. In November 1884, Petrie arrived in Egypt to begin his excavations.
In 1886, while working for the Egypt
Exploration Fund, Petrie excavated at Tell
Nebesheh in the Eastern Nile Delta. This site is located 8 miles southeast
of Tanis and, among the remains of an ancient temple there, Petrie found a royal
sphinx, now located at the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston.[12]
By the end of the Tanis dig, he ran
out of funding but, reluctant to leave the country in case this was renewed, he
spent 1887 cruising the Nile taking photographs as a less subjective record
than sketches. During this time, he also climbed rope ladders at Sehel
Island near Aswan to draw and photograph
thousands of early Egyptian inscriptions on a cliff face, recording embassies
to Nubia, famines and wars. By the time he
reached Aswan, a telegram had reached there to confirm the renewal of his
funding. He then went straight to the burial site at Fayum, particularly interested in post-30 BC burials, which had not previously
been fully studied. He found intact tombs and 60 of the famous portraits,
and discovered from inscriptions on the mummies that they were kept with their
living families for generations before burial. Under Auguste
Mariette's arrangements, he sent 50% of these portraits to the Egyptian
department of antiquities.
However, later finding that Gaston
Maspero placed little value on them and left them open to the
elements in a yard behind the museum to deteriorate, he angrily demanded that
they all be returned, forcing Maspero to pick the 12 best examples for the
museum to keep and then returning 48 to Petrie, which he sent to London for a
special showing at the British
Museum. Resuming work, he discovered the village of the
Pharaonic tomb-workers.
In 1890, Petrie made the first of his
many forays into Palestine, leading to much
important archaeological work. His six-week excavation of Tell
el-Hesi (which was mistakenly identified as Lachish) that year represents the first scientific excavation of an archaeological
site in the Holy Land. Petrie surveyed a group
of tombs in the Wadi al-Rababah (the biblical Hinnom) of Jerusalem, largely dating to the
Iron Age and early Roman periods. Here, in these ancient monuments, Petrie
discovered two different metrical systems.
From 1891, he worked on the temple of
Aten at Tell-el-Amarna, discovering a 300-square-foot (28 m2) New
Kingdom painted pavement of garden and animals and hunting
scenes. This became a tourist attraction but, as there was no direct access to
the site, tourists wrecked neighbouring fields on their way to it. This made
local farmers deface the paintings, and it is only thanks to Petrie's copies
that their original appearance is known.
Discovery of the 'Israel' or Merneptah stele
In early 1896, Petrie and his
archaeological team were conducting excavations on a temple in Petrie's area of
concession at Luxor.[13] This temple
complex was located just north of the original funerary temple of Amenhotep III
which had been built on a flood plain.[14] They were
initially surprised that this building which they were excavating:
'was also attributed to Amenophis III
since only his name appeared on blocks strewn over the site...Could one king
have had two mortuary temples? Petrie dug and soon solved the puzzle: the
temple had been built by Merenptah, the son and successor of Ramesses II, almost entirely
from stone which had been plundered from the temple of Amenophis III nearby.
Statues of the latter had been smashed and the pieces thrown into the
foundations; fragments of couchant stone jackals, which must have once formed an
imposing avenue approaching the pylon, and broken drums gave some idea of the
splendour of the original temple. A statue of Merenptah himself was found—the
first known portrait of this king....Better was to follow: two splendid stelae
were found,[15] both of them usurped on the reverse side by Merenptah,
who had turned them face to the wall. One, beautifully carved, showed Amenophis
III in battle with Nubians and Syrians; the other, of black granite, was over
ten feet high, larger than any stela previously known; the original text
commemorated the building achievements of Amenophis and described the beauties
and magnificence of the temple in which it had stood. When it could be turned
over an inscription of Merenptah recording his triumphs over the Libyans and
the Peoples of the Sea was revealed; [Wilhelm] Spiegelberg [a noted German
philologist] came over to read it, and near the end of the text he was puzzled
by one, that of a people or tribe whom Merenptah had victoriously smitten-"I.si.ri.ar?"
It was Petrie whose quick imaginative mind leapt[t] to the solution:
"Israel!" Spiegelberg agreed that it must be so. "Won't the
reverends be pleased?" was his comment. At dinner that evening Petrie
prophesied: "This stele will be better known in the world than anything
else I have found." It was the first mention of the word
"Israel" in any Egyptian text and the news made headlines when it
reached the English papers.'[14]
During the field season of 1895/6, at
the Ramesseum, Petrie and the young German Egyptologist Wilhelm Spiegelberg
became friends. Spiegelberg was in charge of the edition of many texts
discovered by his British colleague, and Petrie offered important collections
of artefacts to the University of Strasbourg. In 1897, the
Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität Straßburg gratefully conferred to Petrie the title
of doctor honoris causa.[16]
In 1923, Petrie was knighted for
services to British archaeology and Egyptology. The focus of Petrie’s work
shifted permanently to Palestine in 1926 (although he did become interested in
early Egypt, in 1928 digging a cemetery at Luxor that proved so huge that he
devised an entirely new excavation system, including comparison charts for
finds, which is still used today). He began excavating several important sites
in the south-west of Palestine, including Tell el-Jemmeh and Tell el-Ajjul.
Legacy
His painstaking recording and study of
artefacts set new standards in archaeology, saying "I believe the true
line of research lies in the noting and comparison of the smallest
details." By linking styles of pottery with periods, he was the first to
use seriation in Egyptology, a new method for establishing the chronology of a site.
Flinders Petrie was also responsible for mentoring and training a whole generation
of Egyptologists, including Howard
Carter. After his death, his wife, Hilda
Petrie created a student travel scholarship to Egypt on the
Centennial of Petrie's birth in 1905. Petrie remains a controversial figure for
his pro-eugenics views and opinions on other social topics, which spilled over into his
disputes with the British Museum's Egyptology expert, E. A. Wallis Budge.
Budge's contention that the religion of the Egyptians was essentially identical
to the religions of the people of northeastern and central Africa was regarded
by his colleagues as impossible, since all but a few followed Petrie in his
contention that the culture of Ancient Egypt was derived from an invading
Caucasoid "Dynastic Race" which had conquered Egypt in late prehistory and introduced the
Pharaonic culture (Trigger, 1994). Petrie was a dedicated follower of eugenics, believing that there was no such thing as cultural or social innovation
in human society, but rather that all social change is the result of biological
change, such as migration and foreign conquest resulting in interbreeding.
Petrie claimed that his "Dynastic Race", in which he never ceased to
believe, was a "fine" Caucasoid race that entered Egypt from the
south in late predynastic times, conquered
the "inferior" and "exhausted" "mulatto" race then inhabiting Egypt, and slowly introduced the finer Dynastic
civilization as they interbred with the inferior indigenous people (Silberman,
1999). Petrie, who was also affiliated with a variety of far right-wing groups and anti-democratic
thought in England and was a dedicated believer in the
superiority of the Northern peoples over the Latinate and Southern peoples
(Silberman, 1999), derided Budge's belief that the ancient Egyptians were an
African people with roots in eastern Africa as impossible and
"unscientific", as did his followers.
His involvement in Palestinian archaeology was examined in the exhibition "A Future for the Past: Petrie's
Palestinian Collection".[17][18]
Published work
A number of Petrie's discoveries were presented to the Royal Archaeological Society and described in the society's Archaeological Journal by his good friend and fellow archaeologist, Flaxman Charles John Spurrell. Petrie published a total of 97 books.
- Tel el-Hesy (Lachish). London: Palestine Exploration Fund.
- "The Tomb-Cutter’s Cubits at Jerusalem,” Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly, 1892 Vol. 24: 24–35.
Contributions to the Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed.
Selected works
- Migrations, Anthropological Inst. of Great Britain and Ireland, 1906.
- Janus in Modern Life, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1907.
- Some Sources of Human History, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1919.
- The Status of the Jews in Egypt, G. Allen & Unwin, 1922.
- The Revolutions of Civilization, Harper & Brothers, 1922.
Gallery
Flinders
Petrie, by Ludwig Blum. Painted in Jerusalem in 1937.
Sir William
Matthew Flinders Petrie, in Jerusalem, ca. late 1930's.
Flinders
Petrie, as a young man, n.d.
Sir
Flinders Petrie, by George Frederic Watts.
Flinders
Petrie and Hilda Petrie in 1903.
Flinders
Petrie, c. 1886.
Petrie
at Abydos, Egypt, 1922.
Flinders
Petrie, 12 years old, c. 1865.
Petrie
Exhibiting Material from Tell Fara in London.
Flinders
Petrie, Luncheon Party at the House of Commons, 1908.
References
1.
Jump up ^ Hirst, K. Krist. "An Introduction to Seriation". About.com
Archaeology. About.com. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
2.
^ Jump up to: a b Smith, Sidney (1945). "William Matthew Flinders Petrie. 1853-1942". Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 5 (14): 3. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1945.0001. edit
7.
Jump up ^ William Matthew Flinders Petrie, Seventy Years
in Archaeology, H. Holt and Company 1932. p.10
10.
Jump up ^ Stevenson, Alice. 2012. 'We seem to working in
the same line'. A.H.L.F. Pitt Rivers and W.M.F. Petrie. Bulletin of the History
of Archaeology 22(1): pp.. 4-13.
11.
Jump up ^ "Sir William Flinders Petrie". Palestine
Exploration Fund. 2000. Retrieved 2007-11-19.
12.
Jump up ^ Donald P. Hansen, Erica Ehrenberg, eds. Leaving No Stones Unturned: Essays on the
Ancient Near East and Egypt in Honor of Donald P. Hansen. Eisenbrauns,
2002 ISBN 1575060558
16.
Jump up ^ Frédéric Colin, "Comment la création d’une
'bibliothèque de papyrus' à Strasbourg compensa la perte des manuscrits
précieux brûlés dans le siège de 1870", in La revue de la BNU, 2,
2010, p. 28-29 ; 33 ; 40–42.
Further reading
- E.P. Uphill, “A Bibliography of Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942)," Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 1972 Vol. 31: 356–379.
- Joseph A. Callaway, “Sir Flinders Petrie, Father of Palestinian Archaeology.” Biblical Archaeology Review, 1980 Vol. 6, Issue 6: 44–55.
- Margaret S. Drower, Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology, (2nd publication) University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. ISBN 0-299-14624-3
- Margaret S. Drower, Letters from the Desert – the Correspondence of Flinders and Hilda Petrie, Aris & Philips, 2004. ISBN 0-85668-748-0
- William Matthew Flinders Petrie, Seventy Years in Archaeology, H. Holt and Company 1932
- Janet Picton, Stephen Quirke, and Paul C. Roberts (eds), “Living Images: Egyptian Funerary Portraits in the Petrie Museum.” 2007. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek.
- Schultz, Teresa and Trumpour, Mark, “The Father of Egyptology” in Canada. 2009. Journal of the American Research Centre in Egypt, No. 44, 2008. 159 - 167.
- Stephen Quirke: Hidden Hands, Egyptian workforces in Petrie excavation archives, 1880–1924, London 2010 ISBN 978-0-7156-3904-7
- Silberman, Neil Asher. “Petrie’s Head: Eugenics and Near Eastern Archaeology”, in Alice B. Kehoe and Mary Beth Emmerichs, Assembling the Past (Albuquerque, NM, 1999).
- Stevenson, Alice "'We seem to be working in the same line'. A.H.L.F. Pitt-Rivers and W.M.F. Petrie. Bulletin of the History of Archaeology, 2012 Vol 22, Issue 1: 4-13.
- Trigger, Bruce G. "Paradigms in Sudan Archeology", International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol. 27, no. 2 (1994).
External links
- William Matthew Flinders Petrie: The Father of Egyptian Archaeology, 1853–1942
- Works by William Matthew Flinders Petrie at Project Gutenberg
- Works by William Matthew Flinders Petrie at Internet archive
- Manchester Museum
- Hilda Mary Isobel Petrie born Urlin (1871–1956)
- The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London
_Flinders_Petrie_by_George_Frederic_Watts.jpg){kind=link}
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