โ Scribed by Valerie M. Fargo
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Sir Flinders Petrie by Valerie M. Fargo ir Flinders Petrie is a seminal figure in Near Eastern archaeology. Renowned for his great industry (in the course of over half a century of work he excavated fifty sites and published nearly one hundred books) and intellectual ability (he has been called "the greatest archaeological genius of modem times"), he is generally recognized as having singlehandedly established Near Eastern archaeology as a scientific discipline.
William Matthew Flinders Petrie was born on June 3, 1853. As a child he suffered from chronic asthma and was too weak to attend school regularly; in fact, he never received any formal training. His mother, who was a linguist, attempted to teach him Latin and Greek, but this was a marked failure. He later claimed that once he had finished a lesson, he forgot it. He was a curious child, however, and read a wide range of books. He also took long walks, exploring the countryside, and he spent a lot of time studying the exhibits at the British Museum. From his father, a civil engineer, Petrie learned planning and drawing, and from his mother he developed an interest in collecting coins, minerals, and fossils. He attributed his interest in exploring to his maternal grandfather, Captain Matthew Flinders, an early explorer of Australia.
When he was thirteen years old, Flinders Petrie read Piazzi Smythe's Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid. This volume attempted to show that the plan of the Great Pyramid concealed prophecies concerning the children of Israel and the British people. Both Petrie and his father were intrigued by this book, and a number of years later Petrie's father encouraged him to go to Egypt to measure the pyramid with the intention of proving Smythe's theories. Instead, Petrie's first surveying work took place at Stonehenge when he was nineteen. His father provided an old theodolite (a surveyor's instrument that measures horizontal and vertical angles, and can also be used to determine levels and elevations), and together they remodeled and updated it, with the result that it functioned quite accurately although only they could operate it.
Throughout the 1870s Petrie made trips to survey sites in England, and this early work resulted in his first two publications, Inductive Metrology (1877) and Stonehenge (1880). The former was an attempt to explain the history of weights and measures from extant objects and monuments, while the latter presented the findings of his survey at that site.
In 1880, when he was twenty-seven, Petrie set out on
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES