Flinders Petrie
At a time when archaeologists used to visit digs impeccably dressed, Flinders Petrie (sir since 1923) worked muddy, ragged trousers and shirt, hair tousled, bare gray black feet in frayed sandals. He had an almost neglected, primitive life, and demanded that even his helpers return to the stone age!
William Matthew Flinders Petrie from Charlton is regarded as one of the world's leading archaeologists. He has excavated in the Near East of Egypt for forty-two years, uncovering more artifacts than anyone else, leaving a scientific heritage of about a thousand books, articles and reports. It is curious to note how he, dealing with mathematics, ended up landing on the Land of the Nile.
It was the engineer William, his father, to reawaken Flinders's interest in weights and measures. The parent was a friend of the Scottish astronomer Piazzi Smyth. In Charlton, in a bookshop, one day he found his son buying Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid, which he then devoured. Piazzi Smyth enunciated adventurous theories: the construction, measurements and angles of the Cheops pyramid were repositories of important prophecies for universal history. Angled constructions and the calculation of stellar trajectories had always fascinated the young Petrie; now, suddenly, he saw all this in relation to history. He built himself a telescope, a sextant, a table with which he measured land.
At nineteen, in the company of his father, he visited the primordial solar observatory of Stonehenge (Salisbury) and decided to become an archaeologist. Although he did not have a specific preparation, Flinders dealt with the prehistoric rubble in southern England for years.
At the age of twenty-seven, due to the interest of the then "queen of Egyptology", the famous writer Amelia Edwards, he was sent to Egypt. Edwards got her favorite a job at the Egypt Exploration Fund she created. He quickly recovered from the educational deficiencies deriving from not having attended school or university. From his self-sufficiency it was not difficult to foresee that sooner or later the conflict would arise between him and his protectors, which happened two years later. From then on Petrie worked on his own. He founded the Egyptian Research Account, which later expanded into the British School of Archeology in Egypt; he ended up however returning to the Egypt Exploration Fund, for which he researched another ten years. There is no historically important Egyptian locality where Petrie has not unearthed valuable finds. He was a man who traveled the length and breadth of Egypt with his wife and daughter, studying mummies, discovering monuments such as the labyrinth of Hawara, entire cities such as the working-class one of Kahum, tombs and marvelous treasures such as bracelets, rings, necklaces in gold and precious stones. But Petrie kept nothing to himself. Everything that he gradually found was entrusted to the museums. He began work at Tanis, Naukratis, Daphnae, Nebesha, Arsinoe and Hawara; he moved towards Illahun, Kahun, Meidum and Abu Gurob; he excavated at Tell el-Amarna, Thebes, Dendera, Giza, Memphis, Heliopolis on Sinai, Palestine and Abydo. And it is precisely here that he rushed to visit the tombs of Umm al Qaab, to try to remedy the havoc caused by Amélineau.
In his writings he does not hide his anger at what Amélineau had done.We can understand Petrie's bitterness and anger: for twenty years now he had been digging in Egypt in search of minute fragments of history, and certainly not hunting for treasures, even though in his career he has unearthed more than anyone else. Petrie discovered thousands of predynastic burials (that is, belonging to the period just before the unification of Egypt under the 1st dynasty) looking for what at the time he liked to call "the missing link", in this case the meeting point between the pyramid age (3rd dynasty onwards) and predynastic Egypt. That missing link is precisely the burial of the first kings of Egypt, together with all the data relating to the first dynasties which, thanks to inscriptions and other finds, can be collected from those tombs. Precisely those documents that had been stolen, crushed and crumbled by Amèlineau.
Petrie was not deterred. In the two years he worked at Umm el Qaab; he digs following his scientific method and classifies everything, indicates the position of the objects, manages to detect the plans of the tombs, collects thousands of finds and above all reconstructs the series of royal names of the first dynasties. In Egypt, the Antiquities Office, which from Maspero onwards had always been entrusted to a Frenchman, had the task of controlling and administering the archaeological sites considered particularly important. It had not been easy to obtain the concession to excavate Tell el-Amarna; Petrie had made a target like never before: for the authorities, in fact, Amarna was the promised land par excellence, still almost unexplored and probably full of hidden treasures. Flinders Petrie, on the other hand, at thirty-eight, in the prime of his archaeological activity, penetrated safely into the earth precisely where the past seemed to offer its wrecks without difficulty. Despite the stubbornness of the new Director General of Antiquities, it was finally possible to obtain the concession to excavate at Amarna: on one condition, however: the tombs were to remain taboo. There were twenty-six of them in the Armanian rocks, historical documents of inestimable value.
Flinders Petrie accepted the challenge. "
I took with me five of my old collaborators who had worked in Illahun. We reached Amarna on November 17, 1981. It took us a couple of days to build the huts and to inspect the surroundings; on November 23 my work begans"
At that time the rubble of Amarna consisted of foundation walls that the desert wind had blown over for millennia. In the early morning and late afternoon, when the sun's rays were slanted, the streets and the perimeters of the buildings could clearly be seen. Here and there there had already been attempts at excavations with always interesting finds. But it was above all the hundreds of tablets from the so-called Amarna archive (the correspondence between the pharaohs and the kings of Anterior Asia discovered by chance by a peasant woman four years earlier), which gave hope of discovering even more remarkable things. Based on the rubble, Petrie was able to locate the streets, to imagine the temple buildings and the structures of a palace: he was also the first to set to work in a systematic way: he probed the palace with excavations and, after three days, he came across marvelous floor paintings, with aquatic birds among the reeds and beautifully colored exotic flowers. The government inspectors who watched Flinders in every move, immediately communicated the discovery to Cairo; two weeks later, the government proceeded to have protective walls built around the trimillennial floor, walls and roof which were paid for by the British. Flinders later found a second floor, to safeguard which it was necessary to expand the protective structures. With J. Hawarth and M. Kennard, the two assistants participating in the expedition at their own expense, Petrie unearthed the Amarna Palace.
One hundred thirty-two crates with partially worthless finds were the result of his work between November and June: it took two months to pack all the objects found by Petrie. Although doubts had arisen about the identification of three large plots, Petrie was convinced that only the land in which he was excavating belonged to the palace. In addition to having numerous rooms, those fragments of pottery had been found which, for example, it was unthinkable to attribute to temples.
Petrie made three types of breakthroughs in the building: brick building structures, sandstone column foundations, and stone masonry foundations. On the southern side of the building, a portico measuring five hundred and forty-two columns was discovered. Southeast of this porch, Flinders unearthed numerous wine and oil jars. Most of them bore the deuce written, a clear reference to Akhenaten's second year of rule. To the northeast of the porch were the pantries; fragments of blue vases were found with the name of Akhenaten and that of Nefertiti. But the most interesting find came to light outside, on the longest side of the building. In his account, Petrie speaks of a "great pillar or city gate of a non-Egyptian style", under which the main street passed: it resembled a pompous Roman arch over a 'On the historical events brought to light by the excavations of Tell el_Amarna (1891-92).
Flinders Petrie wrote an intelligent work, whose cultural level is surprisingly high. In this regard, it should be remembered that well-known archaeologists (Ludwing Borchardt, Thomas Eric Peet and John DS Pendlebury) stuck their pickaxe in Amarna tens of years after Petrie. The famous bust of Nefertiti now in Berlin was found in Armenian territory when twenty years had already passed since the British excavations.
The onset of warm weather forced the diggers to stop their work. Petrie wanted to return to London, where a chair in Egyptology had been reserved for him.
