Portrait of Flinders Petrie Flinders Petrie was a British Archaeologist and Egyptologist. Born on June 3rd, 1853 in Charlton, Kent. He was given the name is William Matthew Flinders Petrie. Petrie's mother, Anne, had a love for science, namely fossils and natural minerals. Mrs. Anne Petrie was a daughter of Captain Matthew Flinders, who was a celebrated early explorer of the coasts of Australia.
Petrie taught himself trigonometry and geometry at a young age, with particular interest in varied standards of measurements. Petrie's father was a surveyor who taught his son how to use the most modern surveying equipment of the time. Petrie would go about England measuring Churches, buildings, and ancient megalithic ruins, such as Stonehenge. At thirteen, he read Piazzi Smyth’s Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramids;his interest flourished from this young age and Flinders convinced himself that he would one day see the pyramids for himself.
Flinders began as a Practical Surveyor in south England. During this time he reverted back to studying Stonehenge. He was able to determine the unit of measurement used for the construction of Stonehenge, so in 1880, at the age of 24, Flinders published his first book called Stonehenge: Plans, Description, and Theories; this book would become the basis for future discoveries at that site. That same year, he began his more than forty years of exploration and examination of Egypt and the Middle East.
From 1880 to 1883, Flinders studied and excavated The Great Pyramid of Giza. He was very meticulous and took his time during this excavation. He studied every shovelful of soil. In turn, Flinders' habits led him to be known as one of the great innovators of scientific method in excavation. In 1884, Flinders discovered fragments of the statue of Ramses II during his excavation of the Temple of Tanis.
Petrie spent the next two years performing excavations of two Nile Delta sites at Naukratis and Daphnae. Here, he uncovered pottery and was able to prove that both of these sites were former ancient Greek trading posts. From this excavation he developed a sequential dating method that would enable him to determine the chronology of any civilization by pottery fragment comparison. In the course of a brief interlude in Palestine, a six-week season of excavations at Tell el-Hesi in the spring of 1890, he introduced into Palestine the concept that a Tell is a man made mound of successive, superimposed 'cities'. He established the dating of these 'cities' by means of their associated deeply stratified ceramic remains and of the "cross-dating" of these remains with reference to similar finds made in their Egyptian contexts. Petrie sponsored investigations that followed the stratification of a site in relation to such establishable chronologies.
Over the next forty years, Flinders explored and excavated over thirty sites in the Middle East. Of his most famous finds was a Stele of Mernepath at Thebes which contains the earliest known Egyptian references to Israel (1236-1223 B.C.).
Although Flinders was primarily self-taught and had no formal schooling, he was made Edwards Professor of Egyptian Archeology and Philology at University College, London in 1892. This chair had been funded by Amelia Edwards who was a keen supporter and admirer of Petrie. He was also the founder of The Egyptian Research Account, in 1894, (which eventually became the British School of Archeology in 1905). During his career he also wrote over 100 books and nearly 900 articles and reviews. A work of particular importance being his work entitled "Methods and Aims of Archeology," published in 1904. Flinders Petrie was popularly awarded the title of "The Father of Modern Archeology."
1923 saw Petrie knighted for services to British archeology and Egyptology. In 1927, Flinders Petrie returned to Palestine uncovering ruins and remained there until his death at the age of eighty-nine. He passed away in Jerusalem on July 28, 1942.
