The great archaeologist: Flinders Petrie

In an epoch in which the archaeologist usually visited the excavations dressed in an impeccable way, Flinders Petrie (Sir since 1923) worked in the mud, with ragged pants and shirt, ruffled hair, fett in grey frayed sandals. He led a rather careless, primitive life and demanded that his helpers returned to the Stone Age.
William Matthew Flinders Petrie from Charlton, is considered one of the greatest archaeologist in the world. He excavated in the Near Orient for forty-two years, discovering more find than anybody else. He has left a scientific property of about one-thousand books, articles, reports. It’s curious to see how, caring about mathematics he ended up in the hand of the Nile. It was the engineer William, his father, that stirred in Flinders the interest for weight and measures. His parent was friend of the Scottish astronom Piazzi Smyth. In Charlton in a library, one day he found his son buying “Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid”, that he devored. Piazzi Smyth stated adventurous theories: the construction the measurements and the corners of Cheope’s pyramid were depositary of important profecies for the universal history.
The angle construction and the calculation of the star trajectory had always fascinated the young Petrie; now, suddenly, he saw all this in relation with history.
He built a telescope, a sextant, a table, he measured pieces of land. At nineteen years old, with his father, he visited the primordial solar observatory in Stonehenge (Salisbury) and he decided to become an archaeologist. Although he didn’t have a specific preparation, Flinders, worked for years on the pre-historic ruins in southern England.
At twenty-seven years old, thanks to the “Queen of Egyptology” of the time, the famous writer “Amelia Edwards”, he was sent to Egypt. Edwards got a job for his favourite in the Egypt Exploration Fund, created by her. He quickly recovered his formative scarcity, which he had because he didn’t go to school nor to university.
From his self-sufficincy it wasn’t difficult to foresee that, sooner or later, there would have been a conflict between him and his protectors, which happened two years later. Ever since Petrie worked on his own. He founded the Egyptian Research Account, that later became the British School of Arcaeology in Egypt, nevertheless he returned to the Egypt Exploration Fund, for which he researched for other ten years.
There is no Egyptian place of historical importance, in which Petrie hasn’t found valuable finds. He was a man who crossed Egypt for and wide with his wife and his daughter, studying mummies, discovering monuments such as the labyrinth in Hawara, whole cities as the workers’ city Kahuum, tombs and beautiful treasures such as bracelets, rings, gold and precious stones necklaces. But Petrie didn’t keep anything for himself. Everything he found was sent to the museums. He began to work in Tanis, Naukratis, Daphnae, Nebesha, Arsinoe and Howara; he moved toward Illahum, Kahn, Meidum and Abu Gurob; He excavated in Tell el-Amarna, in Tebe, in Dendera, in Giza, in Menfi, in Eliopoli on Sinai, in Palestine and in Abydo.
And it’s right here that he immediately visited the tombs in Umm al Qaab, totry to stop the destruction caused by Amelineau.
In his writings he doesn’t hide rage for what Amelineau had done. We can understand Petrie’s bitterners and rage: he, for twenty years, had excavated in Egypt searching for small fragments of history, and certainly not after treasures, although during his career he had found more than anybody else. Petrie discovered thousands of pre-dynastic burials (which belonged to the period before the unification of Egypt in the I dynasty) searching for what in the epoch he like to call “the missing link”, in this case, the point of union between the epoch of the pyramids (from the III dynasty on) and the pre-dynastic Egypt.
That missing link is actually the burial of the firts kings of Egypt, together with all the information about the firts dynasties that, thanks to inscriptions and other finds, can be gathered from those tombs. Exactly those documents that had been stolen, broken and crumbled by Amelineau.
Petri wasn’t discouraged. In the two years when he worked in Umm el Qaab, he excavated following his scientific method. He classified everything, he marked the position of the objects, he is able to survey the plan of the tombs, he gathers thousands of finds and above all he reconstruct the series of royal names of the firts dynasties.
In Egypt the Antiqyuity office, that after Maspero had always been in entrusted to a French, had the task to control and administrate the archaeological places that were considered particularly important.
It hadn’t been easy to obtain the permit: to excavate in Tell-el-Amarna; Petrie was on target as never befor: for the authorities, actually, Amarna was the real promised land, yet practically unexplored and probably rich of hidden treasurs. Flinders Petrie, instead, at thirty-eight years old, in the cream of his archaeological activity, penetrated confidentally in the land where the past scemed to offer its wrecks without difficulties.
Although the new general director of Antiquity was stubborn, it was finally possible to get a permit to excavated in Amarna: but with a pact: the tombs had to remain taboo. In the armaniane rocks there were twenty-six of them. Historical documents of an incalculable value. Petrie accepted the job. “I brought with myself Five of my old collaborators who had worked in Illahum. We reached Amarna November 17th 1981. We needed a couple of days to build the huts and inspect around november 23 my work begins”.
At the epoch the ruins in Amarna included the foundation walls that the desert winds had sweeped for millenniums. Early in the morning anda late in the afternoon, when the sun rays were oblique, the streets and the perimeters of the buildings were clearly seen. Here and there had already been attempts of excavations with always more interesting finds. But mainly the hundreds of tablets of the so-called Amarna archive (the correspondance between the pharaohs and the Asian Kings discovered casually by a peasant four years earlies), that gave the hope of discovering things even more important. On the base of the ruins, Petrie was able to find the roads to imagine the temple constructions and the structures of a palace: he also was the firts one who worked in a systematic way: he surveyed the palace with excavations and, in three days he founde beautiful floor paintings, with acquatic birds among the canes and exotic flowers beautifully colored. The government inspectors who supervised Flinders’s every move, immediately reported the find to Cairo; two weeks after, the government ordered to build protective walls around the three-millennium floor, walls and roof were paid by the English. Later Flinders found a second floor, and to protect it the protective structures were expanded.
With J. Hawarth and M.Kennard, the two assistants, who partecipated in the expedition at their own expense, Patrie brought to light the palace in Amarna.
One-hundred-thirty-two chests with finds of no value were the result of his work from November to June: they needed two months to pack all the objects Petrie had found. Although there were doubts on the identification of three great plots of land, Petrie was sure that only the land in which he was excavating belonged to the palace. Besides having many rooms, those ceramic tragments were found, that for example, was essential to attribute to the temples. Petrie made three kinds of discoveries: brick building structures, foundations of sand-stone colomns and foundations of stone walls. On the southern side of the palace a portico and five-hundred forty two colomns were found. At south-east of this porteo, Flinders, unburied many winne and oil jars. On the best part of them the number two was written, a clear reference to Akhenaton’s second year of reign. At north-east of the portico there ere the pantries; some fragments of azure vases were found with Akhenaton’s or Nefertiti’s name. But the most interesting find was brought to light outside, on the longest side of the palace.
In his report, Petrie, talks about “a great pilaster or the door of a city not in Egyptian style, under which a main road passed: it resembled the roman arch of triumph above a carriageable sided by two pedestrian trails”.
The archaeologist wasn’t late in finding an explanation: it was a connecting construction between the palace west of a King street and the sovereigns’ private home which was on the opposite side. The bridge was needed by Nefertiti and Akhenaton to cross the underlying road.
The royal couple’s elegan rooms were grouped around on inside coust, one after the other, Petrie found various rooms and services: a great bedroom with side doors that led to rooms where three was the morning dressing and where there was the bathroom, the separate toilette and a room for the children similar to a pavilion with lodgings for the tutors.
About the historical events brought to light in the excavations in tell el-amarra (1891-92) Flinders has written an intelligent work, of surprising very high cultural level. About this, it should be remembered that very famous archaeologist (Ludwing Borchardt, Thomas Eric Peet and John D. S. Pendlebury) stuck their picks in Amarna decades after Patrie. Nefertiti’s famous bust, which is in Berlin, was found in the armaniano area twenty years after the British excavations.
The beginning of the hot season forced the excavators to interrupt their work. Petrie wanted to return to London, where a chairs in Egyptology had been reserved for him.

A photograph from the beginning of ‘900 taken during Petrie’s excavations in Abydos: the woman sitting is Amy Urlin, his collaborator. In the necropolis the English archaeologist tried to repair the damages caused by his predecessor Emile Amelineau.

Margaret Murray Studies a mummy in Petrie’s presence in the university in Manchester.

The famous archaeologist poses besides some pieces of crockery. In his hand he holds a small alabaster cup