• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

It is fitting that Petrie’s should be the first name we mention, for he was truly the formidable figure in Egyptology. Some scholars call him the father of “scientific” archaeology (for certain dark reasons of my own, I prefer the adjective “critical”). To list his accomplishments in the methods of excavation alone would take pages, but even his pioneering work in technique was less important than his approach, rigorously logical and painstakingly exact. The new approach came from Petrie himself, not from his training; as he plaintively remarks, there was nobody around to train him. He arrived in Egypt at a time when Gaston Maspero, the dedicated French director of the Egyptian Antiquities Department, was beginning to insist upon rules and regulations in excavation, thus destroying all the fun of what had been a joyous free-for-all of plunder and wanton destruction. But Petrie, who carried on a loud private war with both native and foreign thieves, did not even think much of Maspero. Petrie had a marvelous gift of invective; his blasphemous comments upon inefficiency and crooked dealing were uttered in an elegant scholarly style, which gave them even greater force. In his autobiography, Petrie inveighs against other archaeologists, the Department of Antiquities, Maspero, the British Museum, the French in general, and a good many Egyptians in particular. This may suggest that it was Petrie, and not the rest of the world, who was out of step. He was; but only because he was leading the parade, and his contemporaries had not yet learned the precise and intricate measure of the movements he set. Very little of Petrie’s passion is personal; the people he damns to the lowest pits are those who, through stupidity or venality, allowed his precious antiquities to suffer. He liked most of the Egyptians he worked with, and won their affection and loyalty so completely that the men he trained in excavation, inhabitants of a village called Quft, supplied archaeological expeditions with headmen and diggers for many years.

The aspect of Petrie’s character that astounds us even more than his fanatical insistence on detail is his fantastic energy. He ranged over Egypt from the Delta to the cataracts of Nubia like a mythological dragon, gulping in raw material and ejecting it in the form of neat volumes that cataloged bones, stones, beads, and pots. The real proof of his genius is that stories are beginning to collect about him, as is the case with the absentminded scholars in other fields whose passion for their work leaves them little time for the unimportant amenities of everyday life. Petrie himself describes, with characteristic gusto, how he used to work naked in the stifling corridors of the pyramids like “the Japanese carpenter who had nothing on but a pair of spectacles, except that I do not need the spectacles.” He thought nothing of walking ten or twenty miles across the desert to collect the weekly payroll for his crew; and on one dig in Palestine he and his assistants had to get their drinking water from a well whose contents, in color and consistency, resembled thick split-pea soup. This was all to the good, Petrie comments blandly; in one dish they were getting not only water, but vegetables and meat as well.

Working for Petrie must have been rather a strain. His eating habits, which he expected his students to emulate, were particularly difficult. A row of tin cans and a can opener were set out on a slab in the tomb, which served as the expedition dining room, and when Petrie had finished he left what remained in the can for the next diner. It is rumored that two of his students fell in love while nursing each other through simultaneous bouts of food poisoning.

I have no compunctions about repeating these tales, because in my opinion they add to, rather than detract from, the stature of a great scholar. Most of the major contributions to the sum of learning have been made by men who had something else on