London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Story time. History time.
It’s July 29th.
And today we celebrate the man who changed archaeology forever.
But first things first.
What a wonderful name.
Flinders Petrie.
It sounds like the name of an archaeologist.
Or perhaps the hero of an Edwardian adventure story.
And somehow it fits.
Petrie.
Stone.
Rock.
Think of the word petrify.
It comes from the same ancient root as Peter.
Always reminds me of one of the loveliest puns in history.
Jesus put his hand on Simon’s shoulder and said, “Behold – this chap here, named Peter, on this rock I will build my church.”
A perfect little play on words.
Our Lord with a twinkle in his eye.
And then there’s “Flinders.”
I don’t know about you, but every time I hear it I think of flint.
Flint tools are an archaeologist’s bread and butter.
Flinders.
Petrie.
Flint.
Stone.
Even his name sounds as though destiny had a hand in it.
And destiny certainly did.
Because before Flinders Petrie…
Archaeology was largely a treasure hunt.
After Flinders Petrie…
It was a science.
That’s his achievement.
He didn’t discover
Tutankhamun.
He didn’t unearth a glittering lost city.
He did something much more important.
He changed the way people looked for the past.
He was born in 1853 at Charlton, just by Greenwich. So, yes, yet another world-changing Londoner. His father was an engineer and surveyor. His mother taught him history, French and music. Too delicate to go to school, he was educated at home.
By his teens he was haunting the galleries of the British Museum.
By his early twenties he was tramping across southern England with a measuring tape and one and one of those surveyors’ telescopes on a tripod, a theodolite.
One of his first great achievements?
Stonehenge.
He measured it with a precision nobody had managed before.
That was Petrie all over.
Measure first.
Guess afterwards.
Then came Egypt.
His father had become fascinated by a theory that the Great Pyramid concealed mysterious measurements and divine messages.
Petrie thought there was only one way to settle the matter.
Get out there.
Measure it properly.
So in 1880 he sailed for Egypt.
He spent two winters almost alone around the pyramids of Giza, painstakingly surveying every angle, every passage, every stone he could reach.
The result?
The famous “pyramid inch” turned out to be nonsense.
The evidence had spoken.
Petrie had gone looking for mystery.
Instead, he found truth.
But something else happened while he was in Egypt.
Everywhere he looked, ancient sites were being ransacked.
Treasure hunters hacked into tombs.
Collectors wanted statues.
Museums wanted masterpieces.
Everybody was after the spectacular.
Petrie looked around in despair.
Years later he wrote: “Egypt was like a fire… My duty was that of a salvage man.”
That sentence tells you almost everything about him.
He wasn’t chasing glory.
He was trying to rescue history before it disappeared forever.
And here’s the revolutionary bit.
Everyone else wanted the gold mask.
Petrie wanted the broken flowerpot.
Everyone else wanted the colossal statue.
Petrie wanted the chipped bead.
Everyone else wanted the glitter.
Petrie wanted yesterday’s rubbish.
Because he realised something nobody else had fully grasped.
The broken pot mattered because of where it was found.
The bead mattered because of the layer of earth around it.
The ash.
The seeds.
The scraps of bone.
The things everyone else threw away.
That was the evidence.
He even rewarded his Egyptian workmen for bringing him tiny fragments that other excavators ignored or sold off to dealers. Everything was recorded. Everything had a story to tell.
Then he made another breakthrough.
Pottery.
To most people, old pots were just old pots.
To Petrie they were calendars.
Styles changed over the centuries.
Learn the pottery…
…and you could date the site.
He put it beautifully.
“Once settle the pottery and the key is in our hands for all future explorations.”
That insight transformed archaeology.
Suddenly excavation wasn’t about digging deeper.
It was about recording better.
Every trench.
Every layer.
Every object.
Every scrap.
Once you’d dug through a layer, it had gone forever.
You couldn’t put history back.
So you’d better record it properly.
He became the first Professor of Egyptology at University College London.
He trained generations of archaeologists.
He founded what became the Petrie Museum, one of the world’s great collections of Egyptian antiquities.
He published more than a hundred books.
His archaeological camps became legendary for their austerity.
Comfort was never high on the agenda.
Discovery was.
One historian summed him up perfectly.
“He found Egyptology a treasure hunt, and left it a science.”
Now…
Just when you think the story can’t get any stranger…
It does.
On this day, July 29th, 1942, Flinders Petrie died in Jerusalem.
But he wasn’t quite finished with science.
He’d arranged for his head to be sent back to London.
Not his watch.
Not his walking stick.
His head.
He believed that even his brain might still be useful to science.
The Second World War intervened.
The journey took months.
Somewhere along the way…
…the label came off.
Imagine that.
One of the greatest archaeologists who ever lived…
Arrived in London as an unidentified head.
There’s something wonderfully Petrie about that.
The man who devoted his life to identifying ancient human remains…
Briefly became one himself.
You couldn’t invent it.
Or if you did…
Nobody would believe you.
And if you’d like to tip your hat to this extraordinary Londoner, make your way to
5 Cannon Place in Hampstead. It’s a handsome Georgian house tucked away just off the High Street. On the wall is an English Heritage blue plaque. It simply says: “Sir Flinders Petrie. Egyptologist. Lived here.”
Rather understated, don’t you think?
They could just as easily have written: “The man who reinvented archaeology lived here.”
One other thing.
Blue plaques for archaeologists are a rare species.
London has hundreds of blue plaques.
Very few honour archaeologists.
Which makes Petrie’s all the more special.
And if you’ll forgive a moment of special pleading…
We rather hope there’ll be another one someday.
For our own Kevin Flude.
Former London Museum archaeologist.
Superb London Walks guide. Kevin’s the rock on which we build our host of archaeology walks.
But we hope the Kevin Flude plaque’s a long way in the future. Kevin’s got a lot more London to uncover. A lot more archaeology walks to guide.
Anyway, there you go. That’s London.
Home to a man who taught the world that the smallest discoveries can be the biggest of all.
See you tomorrow.