by Brian Fagan
Work started at 5:30 in the morning and continued until 6:30 PM, except for a rest period during the heat of the day. Petrie would retire to his tent for breakfast and watch the excavations with a telescope. Otherwise, he was always on the site, keeping an eagle eye on the workmen. In contrast, Mariette had visited his dig once every few weeks, ordering the clearing of large areas before his next visit. The foremen had total charge and made huge profits by bribery and levying labor. They were terrified that excavations would be abandoned if they were unproductive. When their digging did not produce enough results, they promptly went to the Cairo dealers and bought sufficient numbers of small antiquities to keep Mariette’s interest alive. Important finds were kept back until a psychologically opportune moment, and then produced out of context with a strict profit motive in mind. The Cairo Museum’s boast that they obtained everything found from foreign excavations was a joke. Everyone disliked Émile Brugsch, for they suspected him of selling their finds out of the museum collections.
Naukratis was a commercial center mentioned by Herodotus with an effective monopoly on Mediterranean trade after the seventh century BC until it was superseded by Alexandria three centuries later. Petrie’s excavations yielded useful results. He cleared part of a temple and great enclosure built by the pharaoh Psusennes I of the Twenty-first Dynasty, and discovered a large quantity of pottery and baskets full of papyri, some of which were later mounted between glass and translated.11 Many of his finds were exported to England and placed on exhibit in the Royal Archaeological Institute. Petrie spent the passage home writing up the results of his work for prompt publication, thereby setting a tradition that he maintained throughout his career. Amelia Edwards had become a good friend. She was constantly asking for copies of his working journals, from which she wrote attractive articles on Petrie’s fieldwork for the London Times. It was an auspicious and successful beginning to a lifetime of excavation in Egypt and Palestine.
Flinders Petrie’s excavations were much more strictly supervised than those of his predecessors, but his techniques were still rough-and-ready by modern standards. Huge labor forces moved mountains of archaeological deposits. At the 1885 Naukratis excavation, Petrie employed 107 men with only two European supervisors, one of them Francis Griffith, soon to become an eminent academic and eventually professor of Egyptology at Oxford University. So many small objects came to light that small change ran out. Complicated accounts kept track of the baksheesh paid to the workmen for their finds. Basically, Petrie was buying the contents of the site in competition with the dealers, as all serious excavators had done before him. He tried to regulate the traffic by paying fixed prices for different categories of objects. If the finder refused Petrie’s price, then the object was rejected, a policy that was reasonably successful.
It was at Naukratis that Petrie discovered the critical importance of accurate dating of objects and the strata they came from. After a time, he developed such a good rapport with the workers that accurate dating of many accidental finds was possible. He began to date temples and other structures by correlating the walls with the layers of foundation deposits under the buildings. Many of the objects found in the soil packed into deep foundation trenches were coins or inscribed ornaments that could be precisely dated, once their context in time and space was accurately established. This was a real innovation, never tried in Egypt before.
In 1887 Petrie headed an important archaeological expedition to the Fayyum. By now he had severed his connection with the Egypt Exploration Fund and was operating as an independent agent. His main objective was the pyramid at Hawara, which Belzoni had admired nearly seventy years before. Working conditions were uncomfortable. Petrie camped in a small tent. “Imagine,” he wrote, “being limited to a space six and a half feet long, and about as wide as the length. Besides bed I have nine boxes in it, stores of all kinds, basin, cooking stove and crockery, tripod stand, and some antiques; and in this I have to live, to sleep, to wash, and to receive visitors.”12 Important mummies lay under his bed for safety.
Petrie combined a tunnel into the center of the pyramid with a detailed survey of the monument. Nothing came from the tunnel, for the diggers reached a massive chamber roof that was impenetrable with the time available for excavation. But by this time, Petrie was more interested in the Roman mummies coming from a nearby cemetery, which he dated to AD 100–250. The mummies bore remarkable portraits painted in colored wax on their wooden panels, portraits that had been hung on the wall of a house during life and then bound to the mummy after death. The deceased were kept in family vaults near the home for at least a generation and then moved in batches into pits in a large cemetery near the pyramid.
At the end of the season, Petrie shipped the splendid collection of portraits and sixty crates of other finds to the Cairo Museum. The staff dumped everything outside to rot in the spring rains. Much to Petrie’s disgust, the museum kept all the best portraits and most of the fine textiles. But he was able to mount a fascinating exhibition of the exported portraits and mummies in a large room of the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, the very same hall used by Giovanni Belzoni for his celebrated exhibition eighty years before. An aged visitor to the exhibition was able to recall the original show and the giant Italian. Petrie’s exhibition was a great success and thronged with large crowds. Egyptology had truly become a respectable and widely appreciated science.
The following season saw Petrie back inside the Hawara pyramid. He found a German dealer named Kruger hard at work in the Fayyum with official sanction from Eugène Grébaut, something that Maspero would never have given. He was only out for pillage. Petrie learned that the German had had little success so was turning his eyes toward the sites under the British concession for that season—the el-Lahun pyramid and the Gurab site that Petrie had planned to investigate in a few weeks. He was forced to put two men digging at the el-Lahun pyramid tombs and two more at Gurab in order to stake out a claim. The supervision of these additional sites required a 27-kilometer (17-mile) walk twice a week, exercise that Petrie described as “very unsatisfactory.” It took a month to break through the roof of the Hawara burial chamber, which turned out to be fashioned from a solid block of quartzite, 6 meters long by 2.4 meters wide and 1.8 meters deep (20 feet by 8 feet by 6 feet). Two empty sarcophagi lay in the chamber, which was waist-high in water. A cartouche bearing the name of Amenemhet III (1842–1797 BC) on an alabaster vase soon established the ownership of the tomb.
While his workers searched for the entrance to the pyramid, Petrie explored a large Twenty-sixth Dynasty tomb in the nearby cemetery. The family vault of an official named Horuta involved a 7.6-meter (25-foot) descent by rope ladder, a squeeze through a narrow doorway, then a slide down a slope into brackish water. Petrie had to strip off his clothes and slide through the mud-clogged passages, taking measurements on the way. “The candle only just shows you where you collide with floating coffins or some skulls that go bobbing around.” A magnificent collection of amulets and hundreds of shabtis rewarded his persistence. All the finds were waist-deep in water so salty that even a drop caused the eyes to smart. Petrie removed the shabtis from their storage place by lying in the water and using his feet to dig. “I was hauled up looking ‘like a buffalo’ as the men said,” he recalled.13 The coffin was eventually moved into the light, where Petrie did not have to wade waist-deep amid rotten wood and skulls.
The hectic season of 1888 continued with work at el-Lahun and the nearby workmen’s community that Petrie named el-Kahun (or Kahun), built in the Twelfth Dynasty to house the families of those building the pyramid. The compact walled town was virtually untouched since its abandonment. Petrie cleared many houses, finding copper tools, lamp stands, pieces of wooden furniture, and flint sickles as well as other domestic trivia that enabled him to build up a picture of the average worker’s life during the Twelfth Dynasty. Previous excavators on the Nile had indulged a preoccupation with large monuments and tombs, at the expense of the archaeology of towns and vil
lages. The finds from the Kahun dig provided much of the basis for Adolph Erman’s Life in Ancient Egypt, published in 1894.14
The finds at Gurab were less spectacular, but the site yielded unexpected chronological riches. He partially cleared the town, especially a large walled enclosure close to the temple that seemed to have been occupied by foreigners. Petrie noticed some foreign pottery on the surface and was soon finding other potsherds of a similar type in houses. It turned out to be Mycenaean ware, of the type found by Heinrich Schliemann at Mycenae in Greece and by others on the Aegean islands, conclusive evidence of contacts between the Nile and the Aegean as early as 1500 BC. Three years later, Petrie was able to visit Mycenae for himself, where he recognized actual Egyptian imports that belonged to approximately the same period—the Eighteenth Dynasty—as the Gurab finds. He declared that the Egyptian imports gave a date for the beginnings of Mycenaean civilization of about 2500 BC, with the later stages of the civilization dating to around 1500–1000 BC. This was one of the first examples of the refined use of the technique of cross-dating, whereby imported objects of historically known age were used to date archaeological sites in countries a long way from the actual point of origin of the imports. This technique is still widely used by European archaeologists.15
Mycenaean archaeologists were enthusiastic. Petrie’s own pupil Ernest Gardner declared that Petrie had done more in a week than the Germans had done in ten years to date the ancient Aegean. The chronology stood unchallenged for many decades and formed an important basis for Sir Arthur Evans’s chronological work at the palace of Minos in Crete. For the first time, an archaeologist had realized that ancient Egyptian civilization had not flourished in isolation, but had enjoyed commercial relations with many other societies, relations that would be reflected in the archaeological record.
Unlike earlier collectors, Flinders Petrie had a broad comparative knowledge of Near Eastern and European archaeology. He moved in a comfortable circle of cultivated and well-versed scholars who were generalists rather than specialists, deeply interested in a wider world than merely that of their own site or the Nile alone. The Schliemanns, Evanses, and Petries of the late nineteenth century enriched one another’s academic researches by a constant interchange of visits and informal discussions, as well as by trading artifacts and corresponding with a Victorian alacrity that leaves even the busiest twentieth-century scholars in awe of their work schedules.
Petrie was well aware of the fame that was now coming his way, but he seemed more concerned with loftier goals. “So far as my own credit is concerned,” he wrote to a friend at the end of the season, “I look mostly to the production of a series of volumes, each of which shall be incapable of being altogether superceded, and which will remain for decades to come—perhaps centuries—as the sources of facts and references on their subject.” This was a contrast to his predecessors who rarely bothered to publish anything or to record the provenience of their finds. He felt that he brought five specific skills to his work, which he set down publicly: First, “The fine art of collecting, of securing all the requisite information, of realizing the importance of everything found and avoiding oversights, of proving and testing hypotheses constantly, as work goes on, of securing everything of interest not only to myself but to others.” Second, “The weaving a history out of scattered evidence using all materials of inscriptions, objects, positions, and probabilities.”16 He listed material culture, archaeological surveying, and “weights” as his other specialties. Prompt publication, accurate plans, excavations, records, and precise chronology were the primary goals of all Petrie’s work, a striking contrast to Mariette, who took forty years to publish anything other than preliminary notices about the Serapeum.
Meanwhile, Petrie was getting drawn into the political arena in Cairo over the thorny issue of excavation permits and the export of antiquities. Since Mariette’s time, French interests had dominated antiquities administration. According to Petrie, the administrative structure was both corrupt and incompetent. Permits were given to dealers and unqualified excavators. The museum was in a shocking state. The staff was uninterested. They left valuable mummies and sculptures in crowded passages and in the open air to rot and decay. Several staff members were covertly in league with Cairo dealers. On one occasion Petrie actually witnessed a transaction between a leading dealer and a keeper at the museum whom a friend had observed with his arms full of packages. He observed that the museum had curious ways of doing business without checks.
By this time, however, there was a rising outcry in England against the destruction of monuments in Egypt, largely as a result of Petrie’s exhibitions and Amelia Edwards’s eloquent lectures and writings. The Society for the Preservation of Monuments was soon formed, with powerful backers. They proposed the appointment of an independent inspector from England, a proposal that was quashed by the French.
The trouble could be laid to the Antiquities Service, dominated by the French and particularly by Wallis Budge’s old adversary, Eugène Grébaut, who was in league with the dealers—or so Petrie alleged. The committee promptly responded to the scheme by introducing new regulations for the export of antiquities that made it quite impossible for any foreign expedition to work in Egypt. Even Petrie was prevented from digging. Intense political pressure ensued, the result of which was stricter but more realistic regulations that defined more closely the specifications regarding exportation, insisted on publication, and made it harder for dealers to make sizable profits.
Petrie’s next excavation was at Tell el-Amarna, where he discovered the magnificent painted pavements and frescoes of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten’s palace and the remarkable “Amarna correspondence,” which he described in his Ten Years’ Digging in Egypt, published in 1892. The painted pavements were so important that Petrie arranged for a building to be erected over the palace pavement, which measured about 76 meters (250 feet) square. He erected a walkway over the paintings so that visitors could pass through without damaging the art. Tourists flocked to see the pavements, which were some of the first domestic Egyptian palace art to be exhibited. Unfortunately, the Department of Public Works never built a path to the exhibition shed, and the visitors trampled down valuable crops. An angry peasant hammered the paintings to fragments, and all was lost. Fortunately, Petrie had followed another of his basic precepts and recorded the scenes in color and black-and-white drawings on onetenth scale.
A peasant woman unearthed the first Amarna tablets, which she sold to a neighbor for ten piastres. A few reached Europe, where they reached, among others, Wallis Budge, who had a working knowledge of cuneiform. He realized their significance and snapped them up. Flinders Petrie identified the spot from which they came and found yet more in a chamber and two pits. Years later, another Egyptologist, J. D. S. Pendlebury, identified the mud-brick building as “The House of Correspondence of Pharaoh, Life! Prosperity! Health!”17
The more than three hundred pillow-shaped clay tablets from Amarna bore inscriptions in wedgelike cuneiform, the diplomatic lingua franca of the time. They offered a remarkable window into the eastern Mediterranean world of the day—correspondence about the exchange of gifts, diplomatic marriages, and rivalries between small states to the east. Modern research has shown they were written over about a fifteen- to thirty-year period beginning in about year 30 of pharaoh Amenophis III’s reign (ca. 1360 BC) and continuing into Akhenaten’s tenure on the throne.
Many young archaeologists learned their craft on a Flinders Petrie excavation, among them Alan Gardiner, a consummate philologist, and a young Howard Carter. Carter had come out to Egypt as a copyist for the Egypt Exploration Fund and shown such ability that he was sent to elAmarna to learn excavation with Petrie. Nothing prepared him for the austere conditions in the Petrie camp, where he had to build his own mud-brick room, with a board-and-reed roof and a mat door. The interstices between the unplastered bricks provided a wonderful nesting place for beetles and scorpions. Bedding was scorned, but newspapers could be us
ed. He received strict instructions to keep all empty cans for storing small finds. Food came mainly from cans, with everyone foraging from what was open on the table.
At first Petrie had been dubious about Carter, but he soon changed his mind. His technique was to give a newcomer a week to observe the work, then to hand him some trusted workers and part of the site. Carter received the Great Temple of Aten and large portions of the town. The temple was very productive and confusing to a neophyte, but Carter was learning from a master and absorbed his expertise like a sponge. Few better trainings in Egyptian archaeology were available at the time.18
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Britain’s greatest Egyptologist had begun his work with no financial support at all. But in 1892 Amelia Edwards died, leaving her money to endow a professorship of Egyptology at the University of London. Flinders Petrie was the first holder of the chair, an appointment he celebrated with the discovery of Predynastic Egypt.
For years, Egyptologists had puzzled over the apparent lack of ancestors for dynastic civilization on the Nile. It was thought that the first rulers of a unified Egypt had arrived in the Nile Valley from Mesopotamia, bringing their distinctive civilization with them. Then, in 1894, Petrie got wind of a vast cemetery near the town of Naqada in Upper Egypt where numerous skeletons accompanied by pottery and other grave furniture were coming to light. The pots found with these skeletons were quite unlike those associated with Old Kingdom graves, but were skillfully made and the work of a well-established Egyptian culture. At first he thought that the burials were those of Libyan invaders, but he soon realized that the cemetery had been filled in prehistoric times, and set out with his usual gusto to excavate it. In the 1894 season alone, he uncovered nearly 2,000 graves. A few years later, a royal grave found at Naqada itself provided a link between the prehistoric burials and the culture of the earliest dynastic Egyptians. So the roots of ancient Egyptian civilization were now traced back to prehistoric cultures in the Nile Valley, and the migration theories of earlier times fell into disrepute.