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00:07Ancient Egypt, a land of treasures, but also of tomb raiders, tourists, and traps in the dark.
00:17I'm following in the footsteps of a Victorian adventurer who took on the treasure hunters and won.
00:27He's the man who measured the pyramids. He described how ancient Egyptians lived and discovered the world's oldest portraits.
00:39He made sure that the legacy of Ancient Egypt was not ransacked and sold off, but explained and understood.
00:46He revolutionised the way we see the ancient world. That man you have probably never heard of is Flinders Petrie.
00:57Petrie was probably the ideal type of archaeologist for a society to sponsor, very driven and very frugal.
01:06Maverick, obsessive, eccentric, he bestrode the world like a colossus.
01:11He established archaeology as a science and without him, Egyptology and archaeology would not be what they are today.
01:19We think of Flinders Petrie as being one of the giants of archaeology of the Middle East as a whole.
01:26All archaeologists working today stand on the shoulders of Sir Flinders Petrie.
01:50To an archaeologist like me, Flinders Petrie is a legendary figure.
01:55He's one of those giants in whose shadows we all walk.
02:03And walk is the word.
02:05He thought nothing of hiking 30 miles a day in baking desert heat, searching for clues to a lost city.
02:11He left Britain every year to excavate, working obsessively from sunrise to sunset.
02:18I want to find out what drove this extraordinary man, and my search begins in southern England.
02:31Flinders Petrie was born in Kent in 1853 to a Victorian middle-class family.
02:41His father, William, recorded the day in his diary.
02:46This is William Petrie's journal entry for the 3rd of June, 1853.
02:515.45 to 5.55pm, child born.
02:56And William's added this beautiful sunburst illustration here.
03:00Nothing like anything else he's added for any other part of the journal.
03:04He was clearly delighted at the birth of his son.
03:12Petrie's father was a surveyor and inventor.
03:16His mother, Anne, spoke six languages and wrote learned articles about mythology and scripture.
03:23Flinders grew up in a Christian home, where science and scholarship were celebrated too.
03:29Flinders was just six when Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was published, making a huge impact on his God-fearing
03:36parents.
03:37But there was always time for good, clean fun.
03:41Petrie's parents took him on healthy walking holidays to collect fossils and visit ancient monuments.
03:47But unlike most families, they measured these things.
03:51And Petrie learned to survey the landscape and its ancient features, and to record the results with great accuracy.
03:58And these were the key skills that would serve him well for the rest of his life.
04:03As a young man, Petrie was an accomplished surveyor.
04:07At just 19, he measured Stonehenge with 100% accuracy.
04:11And through his 20s, he recorded many more of Britain's ancient monuments.
04:18But like so many of his contemporaries, his heart was drawn to ancient Egypt.
04:26Egypt had been opened up half a century before Petrie was born, when Napoleon invaded.
04:34Napoleon failed to conquer Egypt in the late 18th century,
04:37but his campaign led to a huge surge of interest throughout Europe in all things Egyptian.
04:44Egyptomania spread like wildfire in the 19th century, inspiring great opera like Verdi's Aida.
04:50The death of Cleopatra became a Victorian obsession.
04:58Aristocrats like Byron had their portraits painted in Oriental dress.
05:04Cities imported great obelisks, drawing huge crowds.
05:10And national museums competed for the biggest and best statues.
05:17Flinders Petrie was enthralled by all this.
05:20He learned to read hieroglyphics, and spent hours here in the British Museum.
05:28He had a burning desire to go to Egypt, and at the age of 27, he made the journey that
05:34would set the course of his life.
05:40It took him two weeks to sail from Liverpool to Alexandria, setting off in rough seas.
05:46I slept on the engine gratings behind the spray shields, as I was too ill to go below.
05:52I could not even touch a drop of water for nearly two days.
05:56As soon as he set foot in Egypt, he made his way to the pyramids.
06:12His mission was to survey them.
06:15First, he needed a cheap place to live, and so he found an empty rock tomb to rent.
06:20This photo of Petrie at his tomb with a view is famous amongst Egyptologists, but I'm the first one in
06:27living memory to find it.
06:35Well, I've always wanted to see this tomb, and it's been pretty difficult to find, but here we are.
06:41Well, this is where he would have lived.
06:44And actually, it's a bit bigger than I thought it would be.
06:46There's two tombs, in fact, broken into one, so he's got plenty of space, actually, and plenty of light coming
06:52in as well,
06:52because there's not just the one doorway, there are two.
06:55And he's got a cavity over here, which he could have used for storing his supplies, maybe, or some of
07:02his equipment.
07:04Petrie was delighted with his new home. He said,
07:08No place is so equable in heat and cold as a room cut out in solid rock.
07:13It seems as good as a fire in cold weather, and deliciously cool in the heat.
07:20Petrie was proud of his donkey riding skills. I don't know what he'd make of mine.
07:30I just love coming here.
07:32But Petrie doesn't even record what he felt when he got to the site.
07:37He had a job to do. He was going to measure the pyramids.
07:44Petrie didn't work alone, of course. He hired a local man, Ali Gabri, who was hugely knowledgeable about the pyramids.
07:51And the two of them worked together for two years.
07:56Petrie wrote that in the evenings they discussed science and philosophy like two perfect gentlemen.
08:02Their mission was to make the definitive survey of the tallest buildings in the world.
08:06Just the two of them.
08:10I thought I'd have a go with my colleague, Magdy.
08:16Petrie had read all the outlandish construction theories linking pyramid design to the stars and to the Bible.
08:23But these theories couldn't be tested, as there were no accurate measurements.
08:27He was to change all that with his passion for measuring, recording and classifying the world.
08:42By the 1880s, when Petrie was here, Egypt was firmly on the tourist map.
08:47And there were some wonderful photographs of Victorian tourists with their starched collars and very formal dress, despite the baking
08:56heat.
08:57But to Petrie, of course, they were an irritation.
09:01But he had a strategy for keeping them away.
09:06Because it was so hot, he often used to strip down to his underclothes to work, and they were pink.
09:11So from a distance, it looked like he was naked.
09:17And he didn't stop there.
09:19He said of working inside the pyramids, it was often most convenient to strip entirely for work, owing to the
09:25heat and absence of current air.
09:31Petrie's pyramid survey was a great hit.
09:33The Royal Society paid for its publication, and Petrie was the talk of the town in Egyptology.
09:41Egypt was in political turmoil.
09:43Petrie wrote in his journal that if war broke out, he could walk to Alexandria and get a boat home.
09:50In the event, Britain waded in to protect its trade route to India through the Suez Canal.
09:55And from 1882, Egypt was a part of the British Empire.
10:09This smoothed the way for British Egyptologists like Petrie.
10:12He decided to devote his life to studying Egypt's history.
10:19He despised the antique dealers and tomb raiders who vandalised ancient sites in search of profit.
10:28He was so upset about this that he wrote,
10:31A year's work in Egypt made me feel it was like a house on fire.
10:34So rapid was the destruction going on.
10:37My duty was that of a salvage man to get all I could quickly gathered in.
10:43And that's exactly what he would do.
10:45But before he could get on with this salvage work, he needed somebody to fund it.
10:49And that somebody was Amelia Edwards.
10:53A year's work in Egypt.
10:54Her best-selling book, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, was a plea to the world to preserve the splendours
11:00of Egypt.
11:03She put her campaign into action by forming a society to explore and research ancient Egypt.
11:12Amelia Edwards' society was to launch Petrie's career.
11:16It still exists today, and I am now the director.
11:22One of our trustees is Margaret Moundford.
11:24Hi Margaret.
11:25Hi Chris, how are you?
11:26Hello, fine, how are you?
11:27Right, thank you.
11:28Good.
11:29So, Amelia Edwards.
11:31Without Amelia, we wouldn't be here.
11:34No, we wouldn't.
11:35She must have been an amazing woman.
11:36She visited Egypt once from, I think it was about 1872, 1873.
11:41And she realised that a lot of work needed to be done to preserve for posterity, what was still there.
11:48And she set about raising money and forming a society to fund excavations in the Delta.
11:54Phenomenal, actually.
11:54So, it's really energy and enthusiasm she needed to get money.
11:59Well, I think she was quite fortunate in her timing because there was interest then about particularly the Book of
12:04Exodus and the route that was taken.
12:09She badgered and pestered people in the British Museum.
12:12I mean, they must have been fed up with her, but good for her.
12:14I mean, it's a lot of hard work today to get people to provide money, as we know.
12:19Same problem, isn't it?
12:20Same problem, but no, she was really driven.
12:25In 1883, the Egypt Exploration Society had the funds to send Petrie to excavate Tannis in the Nile Delta.
12:32It was what he'd always dreamed of, his own ancient site all to himself.
12:48I'm in Tannis, which looks pretty much as it did in Petrie's time.
12:52A great ruin field.
12:543,000 years ago, this was the northern capital of Egypt.
13:00Petrie wanted to understand the past and its inhabitants.
13:04He wrote of Tannis,
13:07The low mounds of the cities of the dead remained to show that this was once a living land, whose
13:12people prospered on the earth.
13:15You don't get that sort of poetry in archaeological reports today.
13:23He was determined to be different from other explorers who removed beautiful objects from the sand without bothering to understand
13:29how they fitted into Egyptian history.
13:32And here at Tannis, he pioneered a new way of working, methods that underpin modern field archaeology.
13:41At Tannis, Petrie established the ground rules we use today.
13:45When you excavate a site, you can't put it back together, so anything you don't record is lost forever.
13:51It seems obvious to us now, but then it was revolutionary.
13:56He instructed his men, boys and girls to excavate carefully, to dig down layer by layer.
14:02He recorded every stone, copied every inscription and photographed every object.
14:09Nothing was insignificant.
14:12This was the very essence of Petrie's mission.
14:15He wanted to understand the whole picture, and to get to grips with an entire ancient civilization.
14:20He loathed treasure hunters and tomb raiders who made no attempt whatsoever to understand what they found.
14:26Raging, he wrote, spoiling the past has an acute moral wrong in it.
14:35The British Museum was surprised at some of the gifts it received from Petrie.
14:40Including the contents of a burnt house.
14:44Petrie was very much a pioneer in excavating houses, but also excavating them and recording carefully where the objects had
14:51come from.
14:52Which can tell us so much about day-to-day life for the inhabitants.
14:56Unlike other excavators of his day, he wasn't just collecting the beautiful.
15:00So, nice statue, nice blue faience vessel, but also the rather unimpressive looking things.
15:07This mass of material that's corroded, almost beyond recognition, nails and pins and other metal objects.
15:14This is a corroded coal pot.
15:16You'd have had eye makeup.
15:18There's even some organic material here, I think.
15:21Yes, very, very unusual for this period.
15:23I mean, Petrie was pioneering in giving fine numbers and collecting the unattractive.
15:28But actually to have a sample of ancient grain that has been burnt in the fire that destroyed the house
15:35is absolutely fantastic.
15:36And that can tell us a little bit about what the inhabitants might have been eating.
15:42It was easy for Petrie to raise funds for the next three digs in the Delta, because everyone wanted to
15:47find evidence for the biblical story of Exodus.
15:52He grew increasingly confident, and while he remained close friends with Amelia, he resented the interference of her committee.
15:59They considered him high-handed and arrogant, and in 1886, tensions grew to a breaking point.
16:10His expenses were questioned, even though he'd lived like a hermit.
16:14He was sick of being told how to run an excavation by the bureaucrats in London.
16:19Petrie bellowed that he'd rather go into chemistry and forswear Egypt altogether than have anything more to do with them.
16:26His resignation was accepted behind Amelia Edwards' back.
16:30She was furious, but powerless to change the decision.
16:36Petrie now had to consider his future.
16:38Without funding, he couldn't excavate.
16:41So he was glad to accept a commission from the British Association for the Advancement of Science that took him
16:46back up the Nile.
16:55He was assisting their research on human evolution and racial differences.
17:05His task was to take photographs at temples like the Ramesseum of carved images of the mighty ancient Egyptians and
17:12their inferior enemies.
17:30The Egyptians were very keen on showing their supremacy over the various other foreign races that inhabited their world by
17:37depicting them as vanquished foes tied up, ready to be smited, beaten with sticks, having their arms tied behind them.
17:44Their heads, whatever it is.
17:46The point was, they wanted to show that the Egyptians were better than everyone else.
17:51This is a very rare copy of racial types, Petrie's published photographs of Canaanites, Assyrians and Libyans, the enemies of
17:59ancient Egypt.
18:05The man behind the commission was Francis Galton, a human biologist who was fascinated by Petrie's brilliant mathematical mind.
18:15Galton was Charles Darwin's cousin and shared his interest in the survival of the fittest.
18:21So why did Galton want Petrie to take these photographs?
18:25Well, Galton was obsessed with the human face. He thought that the characteristics in the face, the physical characteristics, would
18:32show you the kind of person that you were.
18:36So he took photographs of people in asylums and he thought that by looking at these faces and also by
18:42sort of drawing up inheritance, so the idea that characteristics get passed through from generation to generation, that you would
18:49know what kind of person somebody was, whether they were like to be a criminal, that kind of thing.
18:54And he also coined the word eugenics. This is the idea of inheritance. Of course, our features are inherited, but
19:01he thought our kind of moral characteristics could be inherited as well.
19:05What was Petrie's involvement in all this? Was he interested in eugenics as well?
19:10Absolutely. There was very much an interest in race and racial groups and how they mingled, how they didn't mingle.
19:17So he's very much interested in this. He takes his photographs for Galton and his committee and it follows him
19:25through all the way through his life.
19:29Throughout his career, Petrie sent skeletons, skulls and bones to Galton's London Laboratory for measurement and study on their meaning
19:37for the history of civilisation.
19:42Petrie was soon excavating again, now with private funding. In 1888 at Hawara, he made a remarkable discovery.
19:55Petrie was looking for the royal burial inside the pyramid, but what he found at its base was a Roman
20:01period cemetery full of mummies.
20:12Petrie found himself staring into the lifelike faces of Egyptians from the time of Cleopatra.
20:29At the Cairo Museum, Yasmin al-Shazli introduced me.
20:32So, Yasmin, tell me what we have here.
20:35OK. This is a Roman mummy discovered by Petrie in Hawara.
20:40It's obviously the mummy of a woman and it's absolutely gorgeous, it's intact.
20:45It's incredibly well preserved.
20:47You can see the sandals, painted sandals.
20:50You can see the portrait, which is absolutely beautifully painted.
20:55You can see the jewellery she's wearing, the hairstyle, and that could be used for dating.
21:01So you can date the portrait because of what she's wearing.
21:04It's just like now, you know, what's in fashion.
21:06So she's actually, she's wearing the latest style.
21:08And you can say exactly when this is from.
21:10Yes.
21:11So this is actually intended to show this lady as she was in life.
21:16When she was alive.
21:16Yes, exactly.
21:17Incredible.
21:19The painted wooden faces are the earliest known portraits in the world.
21:24Some are displayed simply as portraits, separated from their mummies.
21:29They look amazing, don't they?
21:31Absolutely beautiful.
21:32You see children, for example, here that child, he looks very sad.
21:37He does.
21:38As opposed to that child who looks...
21:41He seems quite contented.
21:42He seems very happy.
21:43Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
21:45They don't look very Egyptian though.
21:47No, they don't, but actually the function is very Egyptian.
21:51So it's basically, they served the same function as the mummy mask.
21:55But some people still chose to have mummy masks produced for them.
22:00Why exactly?
22:02Was it cheaper to produce than the masks or less labour intensive?
22:08I don't know.
22:09It's just a different, slightly different way for some people to achieve the same thing.
22:13The function is the same.
22:14Yes.
22:17Many Huara mummies came to Britain and are now on display in the British Museum.
22:24In 1888, the public clamoured to see them and to buy them.
22:28So Petrie and his sponsors made a lot of money.
22:34Petrie started to receive offers of work beyond Egypt.
22:39He was invited to dig at ancient Lachish, an Old Testament city mistakenly identified as Tel El Hesi,
22:4630 miles southwest of Jerusalem.
22:49He arrived in March 1890.
22:53Flinders Petrie was about to initiate archaeology in this promised land of Egyptian conquests and biblical stories.
23:00Although the Victorians were deeply interested in the Bible lands,
23:03everything they knew came from written sources.
23:06Petrie was about to become the first person to excavate ancient Palestine.
23:13I met Geoff Blakely of Wisconsin University, the archaeologist now in charge of Tel El Hesi.
23:20Petrie has been part of my life for 40 years, and I honestly feel more at home around here than
23:29probably most places in the world.
23:33What Petrie realised is that a Tel is a man-made mountain built up of thousands of years of human
23:38habitation,
23:39and digging down takes you back through the history of the place.
23:44Oh, this is it?
23:45This is it. We're there.
23:47There it is.
23:48So we see all the green fields.
23:51This is what he would have seen, except he would have seen none of the trees.
23:54It would have been a stark landscape.
23:56Right.
23:57Why did Petrie come here to work?
24:00The Palestine Exploration Fund wanted to excavate an archaeological site that would be a biblical site,
24:07and what they expected to find was what the houses looked like and things like that,
24:13but also they expected to find tablets.
24:15And you would read the tablets and it would tell you what daily life was like in the Bible.
24:20That would be very convenient.
24:22It would be.
24:22And so anybody studying the Bible would now start to have new sources of information about what happened in the
24:30biblical period.
24:31Mm-hmm.
24:31And what did Petrie find here?
24:33Well, what he found was pottery.
24:35And as you look at it, you can see it's vertical, almost vertical.
24:39It's 120 feet from the bottom to the top of the site.
24:44And he was able to see that there's 60 feet of human occupation spanning 2,500 or more years.
24:52Oh, my gosh, wow.
24:54In just six weeks, Petrie laid the foundations of archaeology in Palestine.
25:08Down a back street in central London, the Palestine Exploration Fund holds Petrie's photographs of Tell El Hesi.
25:18And, um...
25:19Rupert Chapman and Felicity Cobbing showed me the collection.
25:23In some ways, this site lends itself really well to photography, it seems to me, as well.
25:27I mean, these photographs are just fantastic.
25:29That's right. He built his own camera and the first one he made was out of a biscuit tin.
25:38And he didn't like lenses because they introduce a distortion.
25:45So he used a pinhole camera, which gives you absolutely correct images, not distorted at all.
25:54And he was having to do all of this in the field as well.
25:56We have to remember this, don't we?
25:57I mean, he's in the middle of the desert on an archaeological site in a foreign country with no sort
26:02of practical backup.
26:03He's doing all of this himself.
26:05Yes.
26:05You had problems with getting enough water to wash the plates after you had photographed them and developed them.
26:15And to make sure that you got rid of all the developer.
26:21And also problems with the water being full of bits of dirt, which would then get into your emulsion and
26:29spoil the pictures.
26:30Right.
26:30And there was more to Petrie's photography than just archaeological recording.
26:35Wow.
26:36Petrie used the camera and photography to advertise his work, to bring in the money to fund his work.
26:45Here we have 12 camera-scopic views.
26:50On the back of each of these photographs, Sir Flinders Petrie resumes full work in South Palestine if public support
26:59is increased.
27:01And now, let's come to the device itself.
27:04And you take your stereo view of Sir Flinders, hard at work, and drop it in.
27:12And voila.
27:14It comes to life.
27:17Oh my goodness.
27:19Wow.
27:20It really works.
27:21It really does work.
27:22There he is in 3D.
27:23There you go.
27:25That's incredible.
27:26Rupert.
27:27That's incredible.
27:30Oh yes.
27:32And even the background and everything is all in 3D.
27:36It's the closest that we'll ever be to actually...
27:41Oh yes.
27:42Being in the room with him, isn't it?
27:44And he has a wonderful beard.
27:51After his brief interlude in Palestine, Petrie shuttled between Britain and Egypt, constantly raising funds and being drawn into furious
27:58debates on how best to preserve the ancient monuments.
28:06He said,
28:07Every time I come back to England, I am more and more disgusted with the merciless rush and the turmoil
28:13of strife for money.
28:15The writhing and wriggling of the maggoty world is loathsome.
28:22He had to return to Britain every year to publish his discoveries, raise funds and touch base with his mentor.
28:31In 1892, Amelia Edwards died suddenly, aged 61, after a short illness.
28:37Her friendship with Petrie had lasted only 8 years, but she changed his life.
28:42And now, in death, she secured his future.
28:51She left money to UCL, University College London, to fund a new academic post.
28:57Only one candidate was suitable, Flinders Petrie.
29:03He was appointed Britain's first professor of Egyptology and Philology.
29:07And for the first time, he had a permanent base, here, at UCL.
29:12It was the perfect job for him.
29:14He would spend half his year teaching, and the rest of his time on excavation.
29:21Petrie developed the first degree course in archaeology,
29:24and insisted that students combine theory with practice by joining him on excavations.
29:32UCL was the place to study, and Petrie trained many of the 20th century's greatest archaeologists.
29:41He also decided to train up a workforce in Egypt, and he was extremely successful.
29:49On archaeological sites across Egypt today, the most skilled people are the direct descendants of workers trained by Flinders Petrie.
29:59Ali Farouk has been the chief supervisor at this Italian excavation near Luxor for 15 years.
30:10Ali's great-great-grandfather came from this rural village called Guft, where the new Professor Petrie excavated in 1893.
30:20Almost all the Guftis work in archaeology today.
30:39Ali's brother Omar also works as a chief supervisor on archaeological digs.
30:43They're deeply proud of their Gufti family history.
30:46This is the family, and this is the place.
30:48Yes.
30:48You've been involved in archaeology for a long time, this family.
30:51Yes.
30:51How many of you are involved?
30:54My family, a lot of them, like 100 people, maybe 200 people.
30:59Working in archaeology, yes, sure.
31:01All working in archaeology?
31:02Yes.
31:03And they have like 30 houses here, 35 houses here.
31:07All belonging to your family?
31:08Yes, from this village, close to this village.
31:10And they show you something you like, it's very nice.
31:15Wow, this looks very old.
31:18Yes, it's very old.
31:19So, I'm sorry, who was it who used this stick?
31:22This is Rais Hussein.
31:24Mm-hmm.
31:24And he's a member of your family?
31:26Yes, and he's my grandfather when he worked with Petrie.
31:29Ah, it's your great-grandfather who worked with Petrie.
31:31So this is actually the stick that he used when he was working with Petrie?
31:35Yes.
31:36That's incredible.
31:37What does a Rais use the stick for?
31:40Mm-hmm.
31:41Yallah, yawala!
31:42Yallah, yawala!
31:43Just to keep the workmen going?
31:44But he not hit the workmen.
31:46Only scared.
31:46No, no, okay.
31:47Because my family, he said before he died, not hit the workmen.
31:51So you use the stick as a sign of authority.
31:54It shows that you are the Rais, that you are in charge, and you tell them what to do.
31:58And that's exactly the same as when Petrie was working.
32:01Yes.
32:04When Petrie began to train his workforce, he was the leading figure in world archaeology.
32:09Amazing.
32:13He had made the definitive survey of the pyramids, developed modern excavation techniques, pioneered photography, and developed the academic discipline.
32:27Petrie worked closely with the Egyptian antiquities authorities, and helped to build the Cairo Museum collection.
32:36The museum has over a thousand objects that were discovered by Petrie.
32:41And among them are some of the most important objects in the Egyptian museum, like the Meran Ptah victory stela,
32:50also known as the Israel stela.
32:54This granite stela is Petrie's most famous discovery.
32:58It displays an inscription by the 13th century BC King Merneptar, celebrating his victory over Israel.
33:04It's the only mention of Israel in any ancient Egyptian document.
33:14This ivory statue is the only known image of Khufu, a great pyramid builder, and it's just seven centimetres high.
33:22Petrie promised the workman who found the broken body a huge fee if he could find the head, which, after
33:28three weeks sieving, he did.
33:36Petrie was painted in front of the Ramiseum in 1895, a hero of the British Empire, surrounded by half-naked
33:44Egyptians.
33:46The painting of Henry Wallace, I think, is very racist, very colonial.
33:53It gives the impression that the Egyptian workmen were more like slaves.
33:59Petrie holding a cane, giving the impression that he was beating them to work harder, which wasn't the case.
34:06And we know for a fact that Petrie had good relations with the people he was working with, the Egyptians,
34:11the locals that he worked with.
34:14Popular with his workers, but not so popular with women.
34:18Petrie was now in his 40s, but he seems to have been a celibate bachelor, until Hilda Erlin walked into
34:23his life in 1896.
34:26She came to University College London to draw Egyptian costumes.
34:35Petrie fell for her at once. He was 43, and she was only 25.
34:41Growing up in the Sussex countryside, she loved cycling, swimming and walking.
34:45She was an avid reader and collector of geological specimens, and she was strong-minded and from an intellectual family.
34:52In fact, she could have been made for Petrie.
34:58Flinders proposed.
35:00Hilda was reticent about the gap in age and status, but finally agreed to become Mrs Petrie.
35:06They were married in November 1897.
35:09Within hours, they were at Victoria to catch the boat train to Egypt.
35:16Hilda adored Egypt immediately.
35:18She said it was a delicious medley of Biblical and Arabian knights pictures.
35:23I shall never forget the narrow Arab alleys of tiny shops full of gorgeous stuffs, and scarlet slippers, and red
35:31and orange dates and pomegranates.
35:38Hilda loved the digger's life, and became indispensable to Petrie.
35:55She got on well with Petrie's right-hand man, alias Suwafi, who worked with them for 30 years.
36:01She learned Arabic, and embraced camp life.
36:05Petrie had no problem with women, and welcomed female students.
36:08If they could do the job, that was fine with him.
36:13His only condition was not to expect luxury.
36:17Anyone who was going to work on a Petrie dig knew what they were in for.
36:21Long hours, hard beds, and terrible food.
36:24If there were any supplies left over at the end of the season, he'd bury them and then dig them
36:29up again the next year.
36:36And he had a novel way of finding out if his tins of food were good to eat.
36:42Any that didn't explode would be fine.
36:47However eccentric he was, there was no doubt about Petrie's serious mission, to record as much of ancient Egypt as
36:54possible.
36:56For years, Petrie had searched for the origins of the mighty Egyptian race.
37:01Now, at sites north of Luxor, he was finally rewarded.
37:08He found unusual burials, with skeletons in foetal positions, their faces to the west, following Egyptian custom, but with none
37:16of the usual objects nearby.
37:21With these discoveries, Petrie took us even further back into prehistory.
37:26These objects, flints, stone vases, ivories, which give us no writing at all, are the evidence for a civilisation in
37:35Egypt before even the first dynasty.
37:40Petrie realised they predated the dynasties of the pharaohs, but he thought that they were a new race from across
37:46the Red Sea.
37:47Later, he accepted that they were just prehistoric Egyptians.
37:53The burial objects were impossible to date without writing.
37:58Petrie came up with the solution.
38:03Mmm, that's good.
38:05Nice cup of tea in a plain white mug.
38:08But if I'd been here 50 years ago, I might have been drinking out of something more like this.
38:22Petrie seized on this idea that pottery design changes over time.
38:27Of course, wherever you excavate, you find masses of pottery of all different periods.
38:33And Petrie realised that if you can date the pottery, then you can also date the other objects that are
38:39buried with it as well.
38:43In the Petrie Museum, you can walk through prehistoric Egypt by looking at the pottery Petrie collected from those early
38:49burials.
38:51His brilliance was to put millions of pieces of pottery into chronological order.
38:56And to find out how he did it, I asked Professor Stephen Quirk.
38:59He's the first person who sees, if you go to a site and you look over all of the finds
39:07in general, and you know them in general, you know roughly which are the main types of pottery.
39:14And so you can track each of those main types as it is changing in time together.
39:20And you can do a wonderful chart where you put all of those separate types of pottery changing over time
39:27in columns.
39:28And hey presto, that is what he manages to do.
39:32You get this beautiful visual chart published in 1901.
39:36He didn't know exactly how early, he doesn't have an absolute date.
39:39But he knows these at the left end are coming before the others at the right end.
39:44The one he saw as the best key was the one right in the middle.
39:49These little wavy handle jars which come in from outside Egypt and they change gradually.
39:55They become more and more slimline until their little wavy handles turn into a band of decoration.
40:01So he thought, ah, these ones at the end we have writing.
40:05They must be at the end of the sequence.
40:08These are the original slips that he used to produce that beautiful visual chart.
40:14So these are Petrie's very own handwritten slips.
40:18And the little bits of cardboard that he was using.
40:21And they look as if he's just cut up little cardboard boxes like shoe boxes.
40:27Petrie made a slip of cardboard for each grave with details of each piece of pottery found in it.
40:34With this makeshift database he put the different types of pottery into chronological order.
40:40Petrie was appreciated for having that special mathematical computational quality
40:46that very few of his contemporaries or people after him have ever had.
40:51So we take that for granted now. We have the computer.
40:54But they needed their Petrie.
40:59Today, archaeologists the world over use Petrie's method.
41:02It's called seriation, using pottery to date other objects.
41:09Petrie scarcely realised how important his discoveries were.
41:14He was too busy excavating at Abydos, a royal burial site for the earliest pharaohs.
41:20He was too busy.
41:26He was too busy.
41:27Following in his footsteps today is Joseph Wegner of the University of Pennsylvania.
41:34What are we looking at here?
41:36This is the first example of a hidden royal tomb in Egypt.
41:40In terms of just what this looks like, it looks like a good old-fashioned, old-school excavation.
41:47We've got lots of debris coming out. You've got lots of workmen here.
41:50Sure, yeah.
41:50Does this look like a Petrie dig?
41:53This strongly resembles a Petrie dig.
41:55It's really the only way to get this material out is by hand.
41:59There's no machinery that really can remove this amount of sand.
42:03So we have a large workforce. We use buckets and, you know, they hand it up from one to the
42:09next, all the way to the surface.
42:13So here we enter the actual passageway that takes you down to the tomb entrance.
42:19So this is where it all begins?
42:22This is the men are bringing the debris up bucket by bucket from the interior of the tomb.
42:28About 30, 40 metres to the surface. Can we get in?
42:34Sure.
42:38In Petrie's 1904 archaeology handbook, he says,
42:41the man who cannot enjoy his work without regard to appearances,
42:45who will not go into the water or slither on slimy mud through unknown passages,
42:51had better not profess to excavate.
43:07So we're under the vertical shaft. As you come down, you enter the first chamber.
43:12All lined in fine dressed masonry.
43:13Oh my goodness.
43:14There's a little staircase here.
43:16And this wonderful carved ceiling simulates the style of logs.
43:20Oh my god, yeah. They went to all the trouble to do this.
43:23When Flinders Petrie saw this in 1903, he was just moved by this architecture.
43:29He said it was one of the most beautiful architectural spaces he'd ever seen.
43:32Incredible.
43:33And at that time, the debris was almost up to the ceiling.
43:37And that's actually, that's the job you've had.
43:38We know that the debris was really up, you know, just like a metre below the ceiling at that point.
43:43Right.
43:43And since then, we've excavated all the way down to floor level in this chamber.
43:48This is just the first part of it. It goes on and on another 180 metres, including the burial chamber.
43:54And so we have a good number of years of excavation ahead of us.
43:56And that's all still full of debris as soon as it goes.
43:59Yeah.
43:59Piece by piece, we'll bring that debris out and excavate it and see what clues we find in the objects.
44:05So from here, we climb up into the unexcavated part of the tomb.
44:10Wow.
44:12You're pretty nimble at this.
44:15Just be careful here. There's a little loose debris, which is easy to slip on.
44:19Okay.
44:22It's part of the essential archaeological skill set, isn't it, to be able to shin up these.
44:27And from here, the temperature and humidity rise significantly.
44:30Oh, wow, yeah. Oh, my goodness me. Wow. Look at this.
44:35So this passageway goes 50 metres on into the tomb.
44:38Uh-huh.
44:38From this point on, it's unexcavated still.
44:41Wow. So it looks exactly as it did in the days that Petrie was here and saw this tomb.
44:44Incredible.
44:48Hilda loved the work, but she didn't want a family.
44:51In fact, she had a terror of pregnancy.
44:54But after ten years of marriage, Petrie won her round.
44:59In 1907, Hilda gave birth to a son, John, and a daughter, Anne, followed two years later.
45:07Petrie continued to spend the winters excavating in Egypt, and as the children grew, Hilda sometimes joined him.
45:15This period of Petrie's life consisted of multiple excavations at a frenetic pace.
45:22By modern standards, it was too much and too fast.
45:26Today's archaeologists wince at the photographs of waterlogged Memphis with workers who couldn't see what they were digging up.
45:34The First World War put a stop to excavation, and Petrie was forced to stay at home while Egypt was
45:39a theatre of war between the British and the Ottoman empires.
45:48He volunteered for war service, but unsurprisingly, at 61, he was turned down.
45:57He bought a substantial family house in Hampstead, and threw himself into British intellectual life.
46:05Fatherhood prompted Petrie to write two books about eugenics.
46:09He wrote that the fittest members of society should be encouraged to breed, and the unfit lower classes to seek
46:15voluntary sterilisation.
46:17In the early 20th century, these now shocking views were fashionable, with the likes of Winston Churchill, Mary Stopes, and
46:24George Bernard Shaw.
46:29Flinders was churning out a huge range of books.
46:32He wrote about ancient Egyptian tools, weapons, art, architecture, papyri, you name it.
46:38But he also wrote about modern Britain, and this is when he wrote his book on eugenics.
46:44In fact, he seems to have been angry with just about anyone who wasn't like him.
46:48People who read down-market newspapers, people who craved unwholesome excitement, and people who wasted time watching sport.
46:59For the first time, the Petries could enjoy a stable family life.
47:03But even on holiday, they did something productive, like measuring figures in the landscape.
47:11Lizette, what was life like for the Petries as a family here back in the UK during the First World
47:17War?
47:17Well, I don't know Chris, I think it must have been really nice for them actually, because it was about
47:21the only time in the children's childhood that they had their parents there all the time.
47:27And what exactly were they trying to teach them? Why were they here?
47:31I'm not sure they were exactly trying to teach them.
47:33What they were concerned with was surveying the hill figures of England.
47:38Both the long man that we have here, and the CERN giant, and the Uffington white horse, and one or
47:43two others.
47:44And so it was something that the children could enjoy without it being difficult or dangerous or anything, I suppose.
47:51It was something that they enjoyed.
47:52But certainly Anne, the little one, who was only nine when they were here, said that it was terribly, terribly
47:58boring holding the end of the tape measure all day.
48:03Right.
48:06Lizette has inherited her grandfather's mathematical gifts and teaches astronomy at the Open University.
48:16In 1919, within a year of the war's end, the Petreys were back in Egypt.
48:21He was now 66, and Hilda was 48, but they had no desire to stay in England all year round
48:27to look after the children.
48:30John and Anne were sent to boarding school while their parents resumed their winters in Egypt and summers in Britain.
48:38In Egypt, the nationalists who had resisted British rule for 40 years finally won a degree of independence.
48:45In 1922, Britain granted free elections to an Egyptian parliament.
48:53Petrie was working in Egypt in 1922, but it wasn't the new political freedom that worried him.
48:58It was the most famous archaeological discovery of all time.
49:07That November, as if fate had decreed it, one of Petrie's former students, Howard Carter, discovered Tutankhamun's tomb.
49:15The Egyptians changed the rules of the game by tightly controlling distribution of their treasures.
49:20And this meant that Petrie could no longer fund his work by exporting what he found.
49:32Ultimately, when the Department of Antiquities in Egypt acquired the capability to enforce their rules,
49:44he left Egypt and went to Palestine to dig because he couldn't get his own way any more.
49:52Certainly, it was not the case that he lost interest in Egypt.
49:56It was more that he wanted to keep on doing what he did best.
50:06In 1926, Petrie moved his focus to Palestine, now under British rule following the First World War.
50:13Thirty years after his seminal work at Tal al-Hesi, he excavated a series of frontier cities.
50:22Petrie was now a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Knight of the Realm for services to archaeology.
50:27But even at 73, he didn't want to retire.
50:35His work in the 1920s and 30s was very productive.
50:39He brought a huge collection home to University College London
50:42and founded a new institute housing over 20,000 of his finds.
50:47Every season they got masses of finds, really good quality material as well,
50:51so complete pots from the tomb assemblages, but also lots of small objects like amulets, beads,
50:57lots of weaponry tools, the sort of everyday thing he was really interested in anyway.
51:01Some of this material he'd actually encountered before in places like the Egyptian Delta.
51:06We have to remember that Petrie was quite an old man at this point,
51:08but working with much younger people, so did this cause any friction at all?
51:13It's interesting because in the beginning, when they first started working in Palestine,
51:16everybody got on very well.
51:18But in the early 1930s, I think there were some tensions that developed at the dig house.
51:23Petrie and his wife were happy sitting at the dig house talking about history and archaeology
51:28and cracking a few jokes.
51:30His staff really wanted to go off and have fun.
51:33And at one stage they actually built a new annex to the dig house
51:37and the younger people would go off there after dark.
51:39And there was a bit of smoking going on, there was a bit of drinking going on,
51:43beer was mentioned, and they had a gramophone.
51:46This really was something Petrie didn't approve of at all.
51:48You know, he thought the gramophone was part of the nastiness that comes with modern life.
51:54You know, the thing of having cars that are too fast
51:56and this dreadful new machine that created a lot of noise.
51:59And he liked the peace and tranquility of a dig and it was sort of taking it away from him.
52:04Petrie's idea of a fun evening in was to read a good book.
52:09Petrie often read long into the night in the dark of the dig house.
52:12He would balance a candlestick on his head.
52:17Which works, you just have to keep very still.
52:25This is the only moving footage of Flinders Petrie.
52:29Shot in 1934 with Hilda, their daughter Anne and the painter de Laslo.
52:34This was the Petrie's last summer in Britain before they moved permanently to Jerusalem.
52:46They found a warm welcome at the American School of Oriental Research, now the Albright Institute.
52:54Hi, Simone. Hi, nice to meet you.
52:56The Petrie's spent their last eight years together here.
53:04When he was living here, I mean, a lot of people came to visit Petrie.
53:09He was already such an important and well-known figure in his latter years.
53:16And so everyone who passed through Jerusalem would have to knock on his door and come visit, have a cup
53:21of tea.
53:22Yes, exactly.
53:23They bought an old bus and converted it into a caravan complete with bench beds, cooking equipment, water canisters and
53:30a hurricane lamp.
53:32In this, they set off to find archaeological proof of the Bible.
53:37He really refused to recognise old age.
53:41He was just going to carry on.
53:43And he did.
53:47Petrie finally stopped working at the age of 86 when Britain went to war against Germany.
53:54Eugenics was now a dirty word linked to the Nazis' grotesque ideas about racial purity.
54:02With hindsight, we look back on the eugenics movement and it horrifies us and it horrifies me.
54:08But I don't know if Petrie knew where things were leading.
54:13I don't think he had that in his mind.
54:17I wouldn't say he was a racist.
54:19I would say that he had his ideas about the differences between people and those ideas conformed to the ideas
54:28which were prevalent at his time.
54:33Petrie certainly didn't sanction the use of his discoveries in anti-Semitic propaganda.
54:39The Hawara mummy portraits were used in a twisted argument about the influence of Jews through the ages.
54:51And Petrie didn't know that his adopted country of Palestine would become the new state of Israel.
54:57When his health failed in 1940, he was cared for in the British government hospital, now a Jerusalem council building.
55:03Hilda visited every day.
55:08One friend reported that on his deathbed, Petrie's mind was running even faster than usual.
55:13He talked without pause on a range of subjects from copper implements in Mesopotamia to malaria mosquitoes in Gaza.
55:26He died on the 29th of July 1942 and was buried the next day in the Protestant cemetery on Mount
55:33Zion.
55:39This grave is simply marked with a roughly cut headstone engraved with his name and the Egyptian symbol for life.
55:45And isn't it touching to see that somebody's left a scattering of potsherds here.
55:51But before he died, he made an extraordinary request.
55:55He wanted to donate his brain to medical science.
56:00Now, I didn't believe this story.
56:04I thought it was too fantastic to be true.
56:06So, I asked someone who would know, and it turned out she had been there in Jerusalem on the day
56:14that Petrie died.
56:16And she had been going through the hospital.
56:18And there in the corridor was a hospital trolley with a glass bell jar sitting on it and Petrie's head
56:27underneath it.
56:29And so the story was true.
56:31The head was kept in Jerusalem for the duration of the war in the American School of Oriental Research.
56:41And at the end of the war, Lady Petrie is reputed to have flown home from Palestine to London with
56:51her husband's head in a hat box on her lap.
56:57Petrie's head is stored but not displayed at the Royal College of Surgeons.
57:01His brain has not yet been studied for the secrets of its genius.
57:10Petrie's true legacy is in the way we now understand ancient civilizations.
57:15We should all remember the maverick genius who gave us the tools to unlock the secrets of the past.
57:23I think he made archaeology popular.
57:26He brought the attention of the world to the work he was doing, yet in a way that made it
57:31exciting and interesting and very humane.
57:34We did learn a lot about archaeology from Petrie.
57:39He established archaeology as a science and we did learn from him.
57:45There's something very special about Petrie, not only because of his achievements but also because of all the stories which
57:51surrounded him.
57:53And for that reason also I think he'll always be remembered and he'll have his part in the history of
58:00archaeology forever.
58:05To walk in the footsteps of Flinders Petrie is to witness the invention of archaeology itself.
58:10For 70 years he gave his life to understanding the ancient peoples of Egypt and Palestine and he left us
58:17all the richer for it.
58:18He was stubborn, obsessive and eccentric, but perhaps those were the very qualities he needed to be a pioneer.
58:36Exploring more of the country's fascinating past, Egyptian Journeys with Dan Cruikshank is on BBC iPlayer. Watch now.
58:58Twinders Petrie
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