William matthew flinders petrie biography examples

The Archaeological Record: Flinders Petrie in Egypt

William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) first went to Egypt in 1880 at the age of 26, to survey the Great Pyramid. For the next five decades he was at the forefront of the development of archaeology in the country, before turning in the 1920s to the archaeology of Palestine.

He worked at a much higher number of sites, and with much greater speed, than an archaeologist would today; he saw his life as a mission of rescue archaeology - to retrieve as much information as possible from sites that were shrinking dramatically in size as Egypt modernized.

The following table offers a year by year guide to his main archaeological activity.

Note on the column 'sponsors'

During the Petrie decades there was no government grant to fund excavation - money was needed to pay for travel, accommodation and food, packing costs, labour costs, photography, drawing, publication.

Excavators had to seek funds, or work for societies that