Sir Flinders Petrie

Sir Flinders Petrie (born June 3, 1853, Charlton, near Greenwich, London, England—died July 28, 1942, Jerusalem) was a British archaeologist and Egyptologist who made valuable contributions to the techniques and methods of field excavation and invented a sequence dating method that made possible the reconstruction of history from the remains of ancient cultures. He was knighted in 1923.

Petrie was named for his maternal grandfather, Matthew Flinders, British navigator, pioneer hydrographer, and explorer of Australia and Tasmania. A frail child, Petrie was privately educated, early developing archaeological and ethnological interests, particularly in the area of ancient weights and measures, and in Egyptology.

At the age of 24, Petrie wrote Inductive Metrology; or, The Recovery of Ancient Measures from the Monuments, a work that represented a new approach to archaeological study. Fieldwork done at various locations in Britain, including Stonehenge, enabled him to determine by mathematical computations the unit of measurement for the construction of the monument. His Stonehenge: Plans, Description, and Theories was published in 1880, and in that same year he began the surveys and excavation of the Great Pyramid at Giza, which initiated his four decades of exploration in the Middle East.

During the 1884 excavation of the Temple of Tanis, Petrie discovered fragments of a colossal statue of Ramses II. In 1885 and 1886, at Naukratis and Daphnae in the Nile River delta, he uncovered painted pottery by which he proved that those sites had been trading colonies for the ancient Greeks. It was this discovery that caused him to believe that history could be reconstructed by a comparison of potsherds (pottery fragments) at various levels of an excavation.

Petrie first applied his principle of sequence dating in Palestine, at the site of Tel Ḥasi, south of Jerusalem. In 1890, in a period of only six weeks, the indefatigable excavator found a series of occupations for which he was able to supply tentative dates of habitation. Petrie’s work at the hill site marked the second stratigraphic study in archaeological history; the first was carried out at Troy by Heinrich Schliemann. The excavations of these two men marked the beginning of the examination of successive levels of a site, rather than the previously practiced method of haphazard digging, which had produced only a jumble of unrelated artifacts. Most of Petrie’s contemporaries in archaeology questioned his hypothesis that chronology could be established by potsherds, whether painted or undecorated. But, with the progressive sophistication of archaeology, the examination and classification of broken pottery became routine procedure.

Petrie made other important discoveries in the Al-Fayyūm region of Egypt. At Gurob he found numerous papyri and Aegean pottery that substantiated dates of ancient Greek civilizations, including the Mycenaean. At the Pyramid of Hawara he searched through the tomb of Pharaoh Amenemhet III to discover how grave robbers could have found the tomb’s opening and made their way through the labyrinth surrounding the two sarcophagi that they emptied. He concluded that they must have been given the master plan by an informer. At Al-Fayyūm also he made a rich find of 12th-dynasty jewelry (housed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City since 1919). He was delighted by his discovery of the earliest known Egyptian reference to Israel on the stela (a stone slab monument) of Merneptah, king of ancient Egypt from 1213 to 1204 bce.

In 1892 Petrie was made Edwards professor of Egyptology at University College London, and he served in the position until 1933, when he became professor emeritus. In 1894 he founded the Egyptian Research Account, which in 1905 became the British School of Archaeology.

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Petrie added to the knowledge of the pyramid builders during his exploration of the necropolis of Abydos, holy city of the cult of Osiris, god of the dead. At Tell El-Amarna he excavated the city of Akhenaton, or Amenhotep IV, ruler of Egypt from 1353 to 1336 bce, revealing the now-famous painted pavement and other artistic wonders of the Amarna age (14th century bce). Three thousand graves found by Petrie at Naqādah, northeast of Thebes, were identified as those of primitive ancient Egyptians.

In 1904 Petrie published Methods and Aims in Archaeology, the definitive work of his time, in which he lucidly defined the goals and methodology of his profession along with the more practical aspects of archaeology—such as details of excavation, including the use of cameras in the field. With uncommon insight, he noted that research results were dependent on the personality of the archaeologist, who, in addition to possessing broad knowledge, had to have insatiable curiosity. His own abundance of that characteristic was never questioned.

Inscriptions that Petrie found on the Sinai Peninsula represented an intermediate stage (not later than 1500 bce) of written communication between Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Semitic alphabet. Although he wrote The Formation of the Alphabet (1912), language was not Petrie’s forte, and he depended on a sixth sense for free translation of inscriptions and for establishing dates through the study of the forms of hieroglyphs.

Under the auspices of the American School of Research, he excavated in Palestine from 1927 until 1938, when he was 85. In those years, again at Tel Ḥasi, he uncovered the ruins of 10 cities. His scientific methods provided the guidelines for all subsequent Palestinian excavations. He died in Jerusalem at the age of 89.