Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie

Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) was an English archeologist who revolutionized excavation methods, thus laying the basis for modern archeological techniques.

Flinders Petrie was born on June 3, 1853, at Charlton near Greenwich. He was educated at home because of his ill health. At the age of 22, he published his Inductive Metrology, a study of ancient weights and measures. He also studied British archeological sites, including Stonehenge, from 1875 to 1880. From 1880 onward, he plunged into an active career of surveys and excavations in Egypt and Palestine interspersed with lectures in London and the publication of a prodigious output of 40 large volumes furnished with numerous plates, a series of popular books, and his autobiography.

Petrie began his excavations at the Giza pyramids in Egypt (1880). From 1881 to 1896 his archeological work was done on behalf of the Egypt Exploration Fund. He next excavated the Temple of Tanis (1884), the city of Naucratis (1885), the town of Daphnae and its environs (1886), the sites of Hawara, Illahun, and Ghurab in the Faiyûm, Egypt (1888-1890), and the temple and pyramids of Maydum (1891). In 1892 he was appointed Edwards professor of Egyptology at University College, London, a post he held until 1933. He then excavated the town of Coptos (Qift; 1895), discovering also the painted pavement of Tell el Amarna, the predynastic site of Nakada (1895), and the temples at Thebes (1897). In 1894 he founded the Egyptian Research Account as his own fund-raising and publishing venture.

Petrie spent 6 years (1898-1904) excavating the necropolis of Abydos, uncovering the royal cenotaphs of predynastic times. He excavated at Dandarah, Memphis, and again in the Faiyûm. Here he found a magnificent collection of Twelfth-Dynasty jewelry. He excavated in Palestine from 1922 to 1938.

Before Petrie, archeologists merely extracted from excavation sites any objects they considered to be works of art. But they did not follow the stratification of a site in relation to established chronologies. Petrie and his students and followers introduced systematic examination of any object found in a site. Second, he excavated so as to uncover and leave intact the different layers of the site and their relative position within it. Third, he developed what is known today as sequence dating, a system of chronology based on close study of the stylistic and technical development which every object found on a site exhibited. It was thus in his work as an excavator that Petrie made his biggest contribution. His views on epigraphy and the origin of the alphabet roused strong opposition. He was knighted in 1923 and died on July 23, 1942, at Jerusalem.

Petrie's best-known works are A History of Egypt, 6 vols. (1894-1925); The Royal Tombs of Abydos I and II (1900-1902); Abydos I-III (1902-1904); Researches in Sinai (1906); The Formation of the Alphabet (1912); Tombs of the Courtiers (1925); and Seventy Years in Archaeology (1931).

Further Reading

Petrie's work is discussed in Charles M. Daugerty, The Great Archaeologists (1962).

Additional Sources

Drower, Margaret S., Flinders Petrie: a life in archaeology, Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. □

magnetic compass, a compass which depends for its directive property on the horizontal component of the earth's magnetic field. Its origins are obscure and although the earliest references to its use at sea are Chinese (before 1050), there is no direct evidence that it came to the West from China, nor that Arab ships were instrumental in bringing it. The earliest recorded mention of its use in the West was in 1180, although there are grounds for thinking it was in use well before that. No one person has been credited with the invention of the magnetic compass but it is clear that, in the West, it first appeared in the Mediterranean (by local legend in Amalfi).

The forerunner of the modern magnetic compass consisted of a magnetized needle thrust into a straw or piece of cork which floated freely in a basin of water. On settling, the marked end of the needle indicated the direction of magnetic north. In later times a primitive pivoted needle or needle system was used to serve the same purpose, and later still a compass card, on which the points of the compass were drawn, was attached to a needle magnetized by the oxide of iron lodestone, and the whole was enclosed in a suitable bowl to afford protection, the bowl in turn being mounted in gimbals in a binnacle.

The magnetic compass was an imperfect instrument until after the time when the first iron ship appeared. The magnetism inherent in an iron ship's structure caused considerably difficulty in the early days, to such an extent that it was suggested seriously that such ships would never be successful for they would be quite unsafe in the absence of well-behaved compasses.

On wooden vessels the directive power of a magnetic compass is dependent, apart from relatively minor effects of ironwork fittings in its vicinity, on the earth's magnetism. Nevertheless, as far back as the beginning of the 19th century, Matthew Flinders, the British navigator and explorer, discovered that the compass needle might be deviated from the direction of magnetic north as a result of local attraction, as it was termed, of the ship's iron. He demonstrated that this deviation was at a maximum with ships' courses of east or west by compass and disappeared when a ship steered north or south. He also showed how the ship's magnetic effect could be neutralized by means of an unmagnetized rod of iron placed vertically near the compass. This form of corrector is still universally used and is named a Flinders bar.

With the advent of iron and steel ships, a great deal of study was directed to the nature of ship magnetism with the object of devising a method of neutralizing it at the compass position. Among those who engaged themselves in this important work was the Astronomer Royal, Sir G. B. Airy, who had the iron steamer Rainbow placed at his disposal in 1838. From his careful examination of the vessel's magnetic condition, he introduced a method of neutralizing a ship's magnetism by placing magnets and pieces of unmagnetized iron, or correctors, in the vicinity of the compass. To find what correctors are needed to neutralize a ship's magnetism it is necessary to swing every vessel fitted with a magnetic compass, including yachts.

See also Thomson, William.

Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie , 1853-1942, English archaeologist, a noted Egyptologist. He excavated ancient remains in Britain (1875-80), Egypt (1880-1924), and Palestine (1927-38) and was (1892-1933) professor of Egyptology at University College, London. In 1894 he founded the Egyptian Research Account, which became (1905) the British School of Archaeology in Egypt. His most important excavations were at Memphis, but he made many other outstanding discoveries. Among these are the sites of Greek settlements at Naucratis (1885) and Daphnae (1886); tombs of the first dynasty at Abydos (1899); the stele of Merneptah at Thebes (1896), inscribed with the earliest known Egyptian reference to Israel; and ruins of 10 cities at Tel-el-Hesy (S of Jerusalem). His writings include many works on ancient Egypt, Methods and Aims in Archaeology (1904), and Seventy Years in Archaeology (1931). He edited A History of Egypt (6 vol., rev. ed. 1923-27), of which he wrote the first three volumes. A tireless and meticulous excavator, Petrie was responsible for greatly advancing the methodology of archaeology. He was particularly innovative in the interpretation of deeply stratified deposits, undertaking the seriation of undecorated pottery and demonstrating how ceramics from Egypt could be used to establish the age of archaeological strata outside Egypt, a technique known as cross-dating.

magnetic compass an instrument containing a freely suspended magnetic element that displays the direction of the horizontal component of the earth's magnetic field at the point of observation.

Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie see Petrie, Sir William Matthew Flinders .