The Man who Discovered Egypt

'Ancient Egypt -

'a land of treasures, but also of tomb raiders, tourists

'and traps in the dark.

'I'm following in the footsteps of a Victorian adventurer

'who took on the treasure hunters and won.'

He's the man who measured the pyramids.

He described how ancient Egyptians lived

and discovered the world's oldest portraits.

'He made sure that the legacy of ancient Egypt was not sold off,

'but explained and understood.

'He revolutionised the way we see the ancient world.

'That man you have probably never heard of

'is Flinders Petrie.'

Petrie was probably the ideal type of archaeologist

for a society to sponsor - very driven and very frugal.

'Maverick, obsessive, eccentric -

'he bestrode the world like a colossus.'

He established archaeology as a science, and without him,

Egyptology and archaeology would not be what they are today.

We think of Flinders Petrie as one of the giants of archaeology, of the Middle East as a whole.

All archaeologists working today

stand on the shoulders of Sir Flinders Petrie.

To an archaeologist like me,

Flinders Petrie is a legendary figure.

He's one of those giants in whose shadows we all walk.

And "walk" is the word.

He thought nothing of hiking 30 miles a day in baking desert heat

searching for clues to a lost city.

He left Britain every year to excavate, working obsessively from sunrise to sunset.

'I want to find out what drove this extraordinary man,

'and my search begins in southern England.

'Flinders Petrie was born in Kent in 1853

'to a Victorian middle-class family.

'His father, William, recorded the day in his dairy.'

This is William Petrie's journal entry for 3 June 1853.

"5.45 to 5.55pm. Child born."

William's added this beautiful sunburst illustration.

Nothing like anything else in the journal.

He was clearly delighted at the birth of his son.

'Petrie's father was a surveyor and inventor.

'His mother, Anne, spoke six languages

'and wrote learned articles about mythology and scripture.

'Flinders grew up in a Christian home where science and scholarship were celebrated too.

'Flinders was just six

'when Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was published,

'making a huge impact on his god-fearing parents.

'But there was always time for good clean fun.'

Petrie's parents took him on healthy walking holidays

to collect fossils and visit ancient monuments.

But unlike most families, they measured these things.

Petrie learned to survey the landscape and its ancient features,

and to record the results with great accuracy -

the key skills that would serve him well for life.

'As a young man, Petrie was an accomplished surveyor.

'At just 19, he measured Stonehenge with 100% accuracy.

'Through his 20s he recorded many more of Britain's ancient monuments.

'But like so many of his contemporaries,

'his heart was drawn to ancient Egypt.

'Egypt had been opened up half a century before Petrie was born,

'when Napoleon invaded.'

Napoleon failed to conquer Egypt in the late 18th century,

but his campaign led to a surge of interest in Europe in all things Egyptian.

'Egyptomania spread like wildfire in the 19th century,

'inspiring great opera, like Verdi's Aida.

'The death of Cleopatra became a Victorian obsession.

'Aristocrats like Byron had their portraits painted in oriental dress.

'Cities imported great obelisks, drawing huge crowds.

'And national museums competed for the biggest and best statues.

'Flinders Petrie was enthralled. He learned to read hieroglyphics.

'He spent hours here in the British museum.

'He had a burning desire to go to Egypt

'and, at the age of 27, he made the journey

'that would set the course of his life.

'It took him two weeks to sail from Liverpool to Alexandria,

'setting off in rough seas.

'"I slept on the engine gratings as I was too ill to go below.

'"I could not even touch a drop of water for nearly two days."

'As soon as he set foot in Egypt, he made his way to the pyramids.

'His mission was to survey them.

'First, he needed a cheap place to live,

'and so he found an empty rock tomb to rent.

'This photo of Petrie's "tomb with a view" is famous among Egyptologists.

'I'm the first one in living memory to find it!'

Well! I've always wanted to see this tomb.

It's been pretty difficult to find, but here we are.

This is where he lived. It's a bit bigger than I thought it would be.

It's two tombs broken into one, so he's got plenty of space.

Plenty of light. There's not just one doorway. There are two.

He's got a cavity over here,

which he could have used for storing his supplies

or some of his equipment.

'Petrie was delighted with his new home.

'He said, "No place is so equable in heat and cold

'"as a room cut out in solid rock.

'"It seems as good as a fire in cold weather, and deliciously cool in the heat."

'Petrie was proud of his donkey-riding skills.

'I don't know what he'd make of mine.'

I just love coming here.

But Petrie doesn't even record what he felt when he got to the site.

He had a job to do.

He was going to measure the pyramids.

Petrie didn't work alone, of course.

He hired a local man, Ali Gabri, who was hugely knowledgeable about the pyramids.

The two of them worked together for two years.

'Petrie wrote that they discussed science and philosophy,

'"like two perfect gentlemen".

'Their mission was to make the definitive survey of the tallest buildings in the world.

'Just the two of them!

'I thought I'd have a go with my colleague, Magdy.'

We need to try and find...

'Petrie had read outlandish theories linking pyramid design to the stars and the Bible.

'These couldn't be tested, as there were no accurate measurements.

'He was to change all that,

'with his passion for measuring,

'recording and classifying the world.'

By the 1880s, when Petrie was here, Egypt was firmly on the tourist map.

There are some wonderful photographs of Victorian tourists

with starched collars and formal dress, despite the baking heat.

To Petrie, of course, they were an irritation,

but he had a strategy for keeping them away.

Because it was so hot, he often stripped down to his underclothes.

They were pink, so from a distance, it looked like he was naked.

'And he didn't stop there.

'He said of working inside the pyramids,

"It was often most convenient to strip entirely for work, owing to heat and absence of current air."

'Petrie's pyramid survey was a hit.

'The Royal Society paid for its publication

'and Petrie was the talk of the town in Egyptology.

'Egypt was in political turmoil.

'Petrie wrote in his journal

'that if war broke out he could walk to Alexandria and get a boat home.

'In the event, Britain waded in

'to protect its trade route to India through the Suez Canal.

'From 1882, Egypt was a part of the British Empire.

'This smoothed the way for British Egyptologists, like Petrie.

'He decided to devote his life to studying Egypt's history.

'He despised the antique dealers and tomb raiders

'who vandalised ancient sites in search of profit.'

He was so upset about this that he wrote,

"A year's work in Egypt made me feel it was like a house on fire,

"so rapid was the destruction going on.

"My duty was that of a salvage man, to get all I could quickly gathered in."

That's what he would do, but before he could get on with this salvage work, he needed somebody to fund it.

That somebody was Amelia Edwards.

'Her best-selling book, A Thousand Miles Up The Nile,

'was a plea to the world to preserve the splendours of Egypt.

'She put her campaign into action by forming a society

'to explore and research ancient Egypt.

'Amelia Edwards' society was to launch Petrie's career.

'It still exists today and I'm now the Director.

'One of our trustees is Margaret Mountford.'

-Hi, Chris. How are you?

-Fine. How are you? All right, thank you.

So, Amelia Edwards. Without Amelia, we wouldn't be here.

No. She must have been an amazing woman. She visited Egypt once!

I think it was about 1872, 1873, and she realised that a lot of work

needed to be done to preserve for posterity what was still there.

She set about raising money and formed a society to fund excavations in the delta. Phenomenal!

So it's really energy and enthusiasm she needed to get money.

She was quite fortunate in her timing because there was interest,

then, about the Book of Exodus, and the route that was taken.

She badgered people in the British Museum.

They must have been fed up with her, but good for her.

It's a lot of hard work today to get people to provide money, as we know!

-Same problem!

-Same problem! But she was really driven.

'In 1883, the Egypt Exploration Society

'had the funds to sent Petrie to excavate Tanis, in the Nile delta.

'It's what he'd always dreamed of - his own ancient site to himself.'

I'm in Tanis, which looks pretty much as it did in Petrie's time -

a great ruin field.

3,000 years ago, this was the northern capital of Egypt.

'Petrie wanted to understand the past and its inhabitants.

'He wrote of Tanis, "The low mounds of the cities of the dead show that this was once a living land,

'"whose people prospered on the Earth."

'You don't get that sort of poetry in archaeological reports today!'

He was determined to be different

from explorers who removed beautiful objects

without bothering to understand how they fitted into Egyptian history.

Here at Tanis, he pioneered a new way of working,

methods that underpin modern field archaeology.

At Tanis, Petrie established the ground rules we use today.

When you excavate a site, you can't put it back together,

so anything you don't record is lost for ever.

It seems obvious now, but then, it was revolutionary.

He instructed his men, boys and girls to excavate carefully,

to dig down layer by layer.

He recorded every stone, copied every inscription

and photographed every object.

Nothing was insignificant.

This was the essence of Petrie's mission.

He wanted to understand the whole picture, to get to grips with an entire ancient civilisation.

He loathed treasure hunters and tomb raiders who made no attempt

to understand what they found.

Raging, he wrote, "Spoiling the past has an acute moral wrong in it."

'The British Museum was surprised

'at some of the gifts it received from Petrie,

'including the contents of a burnt house.'

Petrie was very much a pioneer

in excavating houses and recording where the objects had come from,

which can tell us so much about day-to-day life.

Unlike other excavators, he wasn't just collecting the beautiful -

nice statue, nice blue vessel -

but also unimpressive looking things.

This mass of material that's corroded almost beyond recognition -

nails and pins and other metal objects.

This is a corroded coal pot, in which you'd have had eye make-up.

-There's some organic material here.

-Very unusual for this period.

Petrie was pioneering in giving find numbers

and collecting the unattractive,

but to have a sample of ancient grain

that has been burnt in the fire that destroyed the house is fantastic.

That can tell us a little bit about what they might have been eating.

'It was easy for Petrie to raise funds for the next three digs.

'Everyone wanted to find evidence for the Biblical story of Exodus.

'He grew increasingly confident.

'While he remained friends with Amelia,

'he resented the interference of her committee.

'They considered him high-handed and arrogant, and in 1886,

'tensions grew to breaking point.'

His expenses were questioned, even though he lived like a hermit.

He was sick of being told how to run an excavation by bureaucrats.

Petrie bellowed he'd rather go into chemistry

and foreswear Egypt altogether than have anything more to do with them.

His resignation was accepted behind Amelia Edwards' back.

She was furious, but powerless to change the decision.

'Petrie had to consider his future.

'Without funding, he couldn't excavate.

'He was glad to accept a commission

'from the British Association for the Advancement of Science

'that took him back up the Nile.

'He was assisting their research on human evolution

'and racial differences.

'His task was to take photographs at temples like the Ramesseum,

'of carved images of the mighty ancient Egyptians

'and their inferior enemies.'

The Egyptians were keen on showing their supremacy over other foreign races that inhabited their world

by depicting them as vanquished foes,

tied up, ready to be smited, beaten with sticks,

their arms tied behind their heads.

They wanted to show the Egyptians were better than everyone else.

'This is a very rare copy of Racial Types,

'Petrie's published photographs of Canaanites, Assyrians and Libyans,

'the enemies of ancient Egypt.

'The man behind the commission

'was Francis Galton, a human biologist

'who was fascinated by Petrie's brilliant mathematical mind.

'Galton was Charles Darwin's cousin

'and shared his interest in the survival of the fittest.'

Why did Galton want Petrie to take these photographs?

Galton was obsessed with the human face.

He thought that the characteristics would show you

the kind of person that you were.

He took photographs of people in asylums, and he thought that,

by looking at these faces and drawing up inheritance -

the idea that characteristics pass from generation to generation -

you would know what kind of person somebody was,

whether they were likely to be a criminal.

He also coined the word "eugenics". This is the idea of inheritance.

Features are inherited, but he thought our moral characteristics could be inherited, too.

What was Petrie's involvement?

-Was he interested in eugenics as well?

-Absolutely.

There was very much an interest in racial groups,

how they mingled, how they didn't mingle.

So he takes the photographs for Galton and his committee

and it follows him all the way through his life.

'Throughout his career, Petrie sent skeletons, skulls and bones

'to Galton's London laboratory for measurement

'and study on their meaning for the history of civilisation.

'Petrie was soon excavating again, now with private funding.

'In 1888, at Hawara,

'he made a remarkable discovery.

'Petrie was looking for the royal burial inside the pyramid,

'but what he found at its base was a Roman-period cemetery

'full of mummies.

'Petrie found himself staring

'into lifelike faces of Egyptians from the time of Cleopatra.

'At the Cairo Museum, Yasmin el Shazly introduced me.'

-Yasmin, tell me what we have here.

-OK. This is a Roman mummy,

discovered by Petrie in Hawara.

It's obviously the mummy of a woman, and it's absolutely gorgeous.

-It's intact.

-It is incredibly well preserved.

You can see the painted sandals.

You can see the portrait, which is beautifully painted.

You can see the jewellery, the hairstyle.

You can date the portrait because of what she's wearing.

It's like now, what's in fashion.

-She wearing the latest styles.

-Yes.

-You can say exactly when it's from.

This is actually intended to show this lady as she was.

-When she was alive. Yes.

-Incredible.

'The painted wooden faces are the earliest known portraits.

'Some are displayed as portraits, separated from their mummies.'

-Wow!

-They look amazing, don't they?

-Absolutely beautiful.

-You see children.

-For example, that child looks very sad.

-He does!

-As opposed to that child.

-Who seems quite contented, very happy.

-They don't look very Egyptian.

-No, they don't.

But actually, the function is very Egyptian.

They served the same function as the mummy mask.

Some people still chose to have mummy masks produced for them.

Why exactly?

Was it cheaper to produce than the masks?

Or less labour-intensive? I don't know.

A different way for some people to achieve the same thing.

The function is the same.

'Many Hawara mummies came to Britain

'and are on display in the British Museum.

'In 1888, the public clamoured to see them and to buy them,

'so Petrie and his sponsors made a lot of money.

'Petrie started to receive offers of work beyond Egypt.

'He was invited to dig at Lachish,

'an Old Testament city mistakenly identified as Tell el-Hesy,

'30 miles southwest of Jerusalem.

'He arrived in March 1890.

'Petrie was about to initiate archaeology

'in this promised land of Egyptian conquests and Biblical stories.'

Although the Victorians were interested in the Bible lands,

everything they knew came from written sources.

Petrie was to be the first person to excavate ancient Palestine.

'I met Jeff Blakely of Wisconsin University, the archaeologist now in charge of Tell el-Hesy.'

Petrie has been part of my life

for 40 years.

I honestly feel more at home around here than most places in the world.

'Petrie realised that a tell is a manmade mountain,

'built over thousands of years of habitation.

'Digging down takes you through the history of the place.'

-This is it?

-This is it. We're there.

-There it is.

We see all the green fields.

This is what he would have seen, except the trees.

It would have been a stark landscape.

Why did Petrie come here to work?

The Palestine Exploration Fund

wanted to excavate an archaeological site that would be a Biblical site.

What they expected to find was what the houses looked like and things like that,

but also they expected to find tablets.

The tablets would tell you what daily life was like in the Bible.

-It would be very convenient.

-It would be!

So anybody studying the Bible would have new sources of information

about what happened in the Biblical period.

-What did Petrie find here?

-What he found was pottery.

As you look at it, you see that it's almost vertical.

It's 120 feet from the bottom to the top of the site.

He was able to see that there's 60 feet of human occupation

-spanning 2,500 or more years.

-Wow!

'In just six weeks, Petrie laid the foundations of archaeology in Palestine.

'Down a back street in London, the Palestine Exploration Fund

'holds Petrie's photographs of Tell el-Hesy.

'Rupert Chapman and Felicity Cobbing showed me the collection.'

In some ways, this site lends itself really well to photography.

These photographs are fantastic.

That's right. He built his own camera, and the first one he made

was out of a biscuit tin.

He didn't like lenses,

because they introduce a distortion.

So he used a pinhole camera,

which gives you absolutely correct images, not distorted at all.

He was having to do all this in the field, we have to remember.

He's in the middle of the desert on an archaeological site

with no back-up, he's doing this himself.

Yes. You had problems with getting enough water to wash the plates

after you had photographed them and developed them.

And to, um... to make sure that you got rid of all the developer.

And also problems with the water being full of bits of dirt,

which would get into your emulsion and spoil the picture.

'There was more to Petrie's photography than archaeological recording.'

Wow!

Petrie used the camera and photography to...advertise his work,

to bring in the money to fund his work.

Here we have 12 camerascopic views.

On the back of each of these photographs...

Ah!

-Now, let's come to the device itself.

-Oh, right.

You take your stereo view of Sir Flinders hard at work.

Drop it in.

And voila!

-It comes to life.

-Let me have a go on this.

Oh, my goodness! Wow!

It really works. There he is in 3D.

-That's incredible.

-Rupert.

That's incredible!

Oh, yes!

Even the background and everything is all in 3D.

It's the closest that we'll ever be

to actually being in the room with him.

You have a wonderful beard.

LAUGHTER

'After his brief interlude in Palestine,

'Petrie shuttled between Britain and Egypt,

'raising funds and being drawn into furious debates on how best to preserve the ancient monuments.

'He said, "Every time I come back to England,

'"I'm more disgusted with the merciless rush and the turmoil of strife for money.

'"The writhing and wriggling of the maggoty world is loathsome."

'He had to return to Britain

'every year to publish his discoveries, raise funds

'and touch base with his mentor.'

In 1892, Amelia Edwards died suddenly, aged 61,

after a short illness.

Her friendship with Petrie had lasted only eight years, but she changed his life.

And now, in death, she secured his future.

'She left money to UCL,

'University College London, to fund a new academic post.

'Only one candidate was suitable - Flinders Petrie.'

He was Britain's first Professor of Egyptology and Philology.

For the first time, he had a permanent base, here at UCL.

It was the perfect job for him.

He'd spend half his year teaching and the rest on excavation.

'Petrie developed the first degree course in archaeology,

'insisting that students combined theory with practice, by joining him on excavations.

'UCL was THE place to study.

'Petrie trained many of the 20th century's greatest archaeologists.

'He also decided to train up a work force in Egypt,

'and he was extremely successful.

'On archaeological sites across Egypt today, the most skilled people

'are direct descendants of workers trained by Flinders Petrie.

'Ali Farouk has been the chief supervisor

'at this Italian excavation near Luxor for 15 years.

'Ali's great-great-grandfather came from this rural village, Quft,

'where the new Professor Petrie excavated in 1893.

'Almost all the Quftis work in archaeology today.'

-KNOCKS ON DOOR

-Salaam.

-How are you?

-I'm delighted to see you.

-This is Ali, my brother.

-Salaam...

'Ali's brother, Omar, also works as a chief supervisor on archaeological digs.

'They're deeply proud of their Qufti family history.'

-You've been involved in archaeology for a long time, this family?

-Yes.

-How many of you are involved?

-My family... A lot of family.

-100 people, maybe 200 people.

-Really?

-Yes. Sure.

-All work in archaeology.

-Yes.

And they have, like, 30 house here, 35 house.

-All belonging to your family?

-Yes. From this village.

I show you something. You'll like it. It's very nice.

Wow! This looks very old.

Yes, it's very old.

I'm sorry. Who was it who used this?

-A member of your family?

-Yes. He's my grand-grandfather...

Oh, your great-grandfather who worked with Petrie!

-This is the stick he used when he was with Petrie.

-Yes.

That's incredible.

What did he use this stick for?

SHOUTS

-Just to keep the workmen...

-Not hit the workmen, only scare.

-OK.

My family, he said before he die, "Not to hurt the worker."

You use this stick as a sign of authority.

-It shows that you are in charge.

-Exactly.

-Exactly the same as when Petrie was working.

-Yes.

'When Petrie began to train his workforce, he was the leading figure in world archaeology.

'He had made the definitive survey of the pyramids,

'developed excavation techniques, pioneered photography

'and developed the academic discipline.

'Petrie worked closely with the Egyptian antiquities authorities

'and helped to build the Cairo Museum collection.'

The museum has over 1,000 objects that were discovered by Petrie.

Among them are some of the most important objects in the museum,

like the Merneptah Victory Stele, also known as the Israel Stele.

'This granite stele is Petrie's most famous discovery.

'It displays an inscription by the 13th-century King Merneptah,

'celebrating his victory over Israel.

'It's the only mention of Israel in any ancient Egyptian document.

'This ivory statue is the only known image of Khufu,

'the great pyramid builder, and it's just seven centimetres high.

'Petrie promised the workman who found the broken body a huge fee

'if he could find the head, which, after three weeks' sieving, he did.

'Petrie was painted in front of the Ramesseum in 1895,

'a hero of the British Empire surrounded by half-naked Egyptians.'

The painting of Henry Wallis, I think, is very racist.

Very colonial.

It gives the impression that the Egyptian workmen were more like slaves.

Petrie holding a cane,

giving the impression that he was beating them to work harder.

Which wasn't the case, and we know for a fact

that Petrie had good relations with the locals that he worked with.

'Popular with his workers, but not so popular with women.

'Petrie was now in his 40s, but he seems to have been a celibate bachelor

'until Hilda Urlin walked into his life in 1896.

'She came to University College London to draw Egyptian costumes.'

Petrie fell for her at once.

He was 43 and she was only 25.

Growing up in the Sussex countryside, she loved cycling, swimming and walking.

She was an avid reader and collector of geological specimens.

She was strong-minded from an intellectual family.

In fact, she could have been made for Petrie.

'Flinders proposed.

'Hilda was reticent about the gap in age and status,

'but agreed to become Mrs Petrie.

'They were married in November 1897.

'Within hours, they were at Victoria to catch the boat train to Egypt.

'Hilda adored Egypt.

'She said it was a delicious medley of Biblical and Arabian Nights pictures.

'"I shall never forget the narrow Arab alleys of tiny shops full of gorgeous stuffs and scarlet slippers

'"and red and orange dates and pomegranates."

'Hilda loved the digger's life and became indispensable to Petrie.

'She got on well with Petrie's right-hand man,

'Ali es Suefi, who worked with them for 30 years.

'She learned Arabic and embraced camp life.

'Petrie had no problem with women and welcomed female students.

'If they could do the job, that was fine with him.

'His only condition was not to expect luxury.'

Anyone going to work on a Petrie dig knew what they were in for -

long hours, hard beds and terrible food.

If there were supplies left over at the end of the season,

he'd bury them, then dig them up the next year.

He had a novel way of finding out if his tins of food were good to eat.

Any that didn't explode would be fine.

'However eccentric he was, there was no doubt about his serious mission,

'to record as much of ancient Egypt as possible.

'For years, Petrie searched for the origins of the mighty Egyptian race.

'Now, at site north of Luxor, he was finally rewarded.

'He found unusual burials with skeletons in foetal positions,

'their faces to the west, following Egyptian custom,

'but with none of the usual objects nearby.'

With these discoveries, Petrie took us further back into pre-history.

These objects -

flint, stone vases, ivories - which give us no writing at all,

are the evidence for a civilisation in Egypt before the first dynasty.

'Petrie realised they pre-dated the dynasties of the Pharaohs,

'but he thought that they were a new race from across the Red Sea.

'Later, he accepted that they were just prehistoric Egyptians.

'The burial objects were impossible to date without writing.

'Petrie came up with the solution.'

Mm. That's good.

A nice cup of tea in a plain white mug.

If I'd been here 50 years ago,

I might have been drinking out of something more like this.

If I'd been here 100 years ago,

it might have been something more like this.

Petrie seized on this idea that pottery design changes over time.

Of course, wherever you excavate, you find masses of pottery

of all different periods.

Petrie realised that if you can date the pottery,

you can also date the objects that are buried with it.

'You can walk through prehistoric Egypt

'by looking at the pottery Petrie collected from those early burials.

'His brilliance was to put millions of pieces of pottery

'into chronological order.

'To find out how he did it, I asked Professor Stephen Quirke.'

He's the first person who sees,

if you go to a site and look over all the finds in general,

you know them in general,

you know roughly which are the main types of pottery.

So you can track each of those main types

as it is changing in time together.

You can do a wonderful chart,

where you put all of those separate types of pottery

changing over time in columns.

And, hey presto! That is what he manages to do!

You get this beautiful visual chart, published in 1901.

He doesn't have an absolute date,

but he knows these at the left end are coming before

the others at the right end.

The one he saw as the best key was the one right in the middle,

these little wavy-handled jars

which come in from outside Egypt and gradually become more slimline

until their little wavy handles turn into a band of decoration.

These ones, we have writing, they must be at the end of the sequence.

These are the original slips that he used

to produce that beautiful visual chart.

These are Petrie's very own, hand-written slips?

The little bits of cardboard that he was using.

They look as if he's just cut up cardboard boxes, like shoe boxes.

'Petrie made a slip of cardboard for each grave,

'with details of each piece of pottery found in it.

'With this makeshift database,

'he put the different types of pottery into chronological order.'

Petrie was appreciated for having that special mathematical,

computational quality that very few of his contemporaries

or people after him have had.

We take that for granted.

We have the computer, but they needed Petrie.

'Today, archaeologists the world over use Petrie's method.

'It's called seriation, using pottery to date other objects.

'Petrie scarcely realised how important his discoveries were.

'He was too busy excavating at Abydos,

'a royal burial site for the earliest Pharaohs.

'Following in his footsteps is Josef Wegner of the University of Pennsylvania.'

What are we looking at here?

This is the first example of a hidden royal tomb in Egypt.

In terms of what this looks like,

it looks like a good old-fashioned, old-school excavation.

-We've got lots of debris coming out, lots of workmen here.

-Sure.

-Does this look like a Petrie dig?

-It strongly resembles a Petrie dig.

The only way to get this material out is by hand.

There's no machinery that can remove this amount of sand,

so we have a large workforce.

We use buckets and they hand it up from one to the next,

all the way to the surface,

Here we enter the passageway that takes you down to the tomb entrance.

So this is where it all begins.

The men are bringing the debris up, bucket by bucket,

from the interior of the tomb,

about 30 or 40 metres to the surface.

-Can we get in?

-Sure.

'In Petrie's 1904 Archaeology Handbook he says,

'"The man who cannot enjoy his work without regard to appearances,

'"who will not go into the water or slither on slimy mud through unknown passages,

'"had better not profess to excavate."'

So we're under the vertical shaft. You enter the first chamber.

-All lined in fine dressed masonry.

-Oh, my goodness!

-A little staircase.

This wonderful carved ceiling simulates the style of logs.

They went to all the trouble to do this.

When Flinders Petrie saw this in 1903,

he was moved by this architecture.

It was one of the most beautiful architectural spaces he'd ever seen.

And at that time, the debris was almost up to the ceiling.

That's the job you've had to do.

The debris was just a metre below the ceiling at that point.

We've excavated all the way down to floor level in this chamber.

This is just the first part. It goes on and on 180 metres,

so we have a good number of years of excavation.

-That's all still full of debris?

-Yeah.

Piece by piece, we'll bring that debris out and excavate it and see what clues we find.

From here, we climb up into the unexcavated part of the tomb.

Wow!

You're pretty nimble at this!

Be careful here.

-There's a little loose debris which is easy to slip on.

-OK.

It's part of the essential archaeological skill set, to be able to shin up these...

-The temperature and humidity rise significantly.

-Oh, wow. Yeah.

Oh, my goodness me! Look at this!

This passageway goes 50 metres on into the tomb.

-It's unexcavated, so it looks exactly as it did in the days that Petrie saw this tomb.

-Incredible.

'Hilda loved the work but she didn't want a family.

'In fact, she had a terror of pregnancy.

'But after ten years of marriage, Petrie won her round.

'In 1907, Hilda gave birth to a son, John,

'and a daughter, Ann, followed two years later.

'Petrie continued to spend winters in Egypt and, as the children grew,

'Hilda sometimes joined him.

'This period of Petrie's life consisted of multiple excavations

'at a frenetic pace.

'By modern standards, it was too much, too fast.

'Today's archaeologists wince at the photographs of waterlogged Memphis

'with workers who couldn't see what they were digging up.

'The First World War put a stop to excavation.

'Petrie was forced to stay at home while Egypt was a theatre of war

'between the British and the Ottoman Empires.

'He volunteered for war service.

'Unsurprisingly, at 61, he was turned down.

'He bought a substantial family house in Hampstead

'and threw himself into British intellectual life.

'Fatherhood prompted Petrie to write two books about eugenics.

'He wrote that the fittest members of society should be encouraged to breed

'and the unfit lower classes to seek voluntary sterilisation.

'In the early 20th century, these now shocking views were fashionable

'with the likes of Winston Churchill, Marie Stopes and George Bernard Shaw.'

Flinders was churning out a huge range of books.

He wrote about ancient Egyptian tools, weapons, art, architecture,

papyri, you name it.

He also wrote about modern Britain.

This is when he wrote his book on eugenics.

He seems to have been angry with anyone who wasn't like him -

people who read down-market newspapers, people who craved unwholesome excitement

and people who wasted time watching sport.

'For the first time, the Petries could enjoy a stable family life.

'Even on holiday, they did something productive,

'like measuring figures in the landscape.'

What was life like for the Petries as a family back in the UK during the First World War?

Well, it must have been really nice for them.

It's the only time in the children's childhood

that they had their parents there all the time.

What exactly were they trying to teach them? Why were they here?

I'm not sure they were trying to teach them.

They were concerned with surveying the hill figures of England.

The Long Man here, the Cerne Giant and the Uffington White Horse, and one or two others.

It was something that the children could enjoy

without it being difficult or dangerous, I suppose.

Certainly, Ann, the little one, who was only nine when they were here,

said that it was terribly boring holding the end of the tape measure all day.

Right!

'Lisette has inherited her grandfather's mathematical gifts

'and teaches astronomy at the Open University.'

In 1919, within a year of the war's end,

the Petries were back in Egypt.

He was now 66 and Hilda was 48.

They had no desire to stay in England all year to look after the children.

'John and Ann were sent to boarding school,

'while their parents resumed their winters in Egypt and summers in Britain.

'In Egypt, the nationalists who had resisted British rule for 40 years

'finally won a degree of independence.

'In 1922, Britain granted free elections to an Egyptian parliament.'

Petrie was in Egypt in 1922, but it wasn't the new political freedom that worried him.

It was the most famous archaeological discovery of all time.

'That November, as if fate had decreed it, Petrie's former student,

'Howard Carter, discovered Tutankhamun's tomb.

'The Egyptians changed the rules

'by tightly controlling distribution of their treasures.

'Petrie could no longer fund his work by exporting what he found.'

Ultimately, when the Department of Antiquities in Egypt

acquired the capability to enforce their rules,

he left Egypt and went to Palestine to dig

because he couldn't get his own way any more.

It was not the case that he lost interest in Egypt.

It was more that he wanted to keep on doing

what he had...what he did best.

'In 1926, Petrie moved his focus to Palestine,

'under British rule, following the First World War.

'30 years after his seminal work at Tell el-Hesy,

'he excavated a series of frontier cities.

'Petrie was now a Fellow of the Royal Society

'and a Knight of the Realm for services to archaeology.

'But even at 73, he didn't want to retire.

'His work in the 1920s and '30s was very productive.

'He brought a huge collection home to University College London

'and founded a new institute housing over 20,000 of his finds.'

Every season, they got masses of finds, really good quality material.

Complete pots, but also lots of small objects like amulets, beads,

weaponry, tools - the sort of everyday thing he was interested in.

Some of this material he had encountered in the Egyptian delta.

Petrie was quite an old man, working with younger people.

Did this cause any friction?

When they first started working in Palestine,

everybody got on very well.

In the early 1930s, there were some tensions that developed.

Petrie and his wife were happy sitting at the dig house,

talking about history and archaeology, cracking a few jokes.

His staff wanted to go off and have fun.

They built a new annexe to the dig house, and the young people went off there after dark.

There was a bit of smoking going on, a bit of drinking going on.

Beer was mentioned, and they had a gramophone -

something Petrie didn't approve of at all!

He thought the gramophone was part of the nastiness that comes with modern life.

Cars that are too fast and this dreadful machine that created noise.

He liked the tranquillity of a dig

and it was taken away from him.

'Petrie's idea of a fun evening in was to read a good book.'

Petrie often read long into the night in the dark of the dig house.

He would balance a candlestick on his head...

which works.

You just have to keep very still.

'This is the only moving footage of Flinders Petrie, shot in 1934,

'with Hilda, their daughter Ann and the painter de Laszlo.

'This was their last summer in Britain before they moved,

'permanently, to Jerusalem.

'They found a warm welcome at the American School of Oriental Research

'now the Albright Institute.'

Hi. Nice to meet you.

'The Petries spent their last eight years together here.'

When he was living here, a lot of people came to visit Petrie.

He was such an important and well-known figure

in his latter years.

Everyone who passed through Jerusalem would knock on his door.

-Have a cup of tea.

-Exactly.

'They bought an old bus and converted it into a caravan,

'complete with bench beds, cooking equipment, water canisters and a hurricane lamp.

'In this, they set off to find archaeological proof of the Bible.'

He really refused to recognise old age.

He was just going to carry on. And he did.

'Petrie finally stopped working at the age of 86,

'when Britain went to war against Germany.

'Eugenics was now a dirty word linked to the Nazis' grotesque ideas

'about racial purity.'

With hindsight, we look back on the eugenics movement.

It horrifies us. It horrifies me.

But I don't know if Petrie knew where things were leading.

I don't think he had that in his mind.

I wouldn't say he was a racist.

I would say that he had his ideas about the differences between people

and those ideas conformed to ideas which were prevalent at his time.

'Petrie certainly didn't sanction

'the use of his discoveries in anti-Semitic propaganda.

'The Hawara mummy portraits were used in a twisted argument

'about the influence of jews through the ages.

'And Petrie didn't know that his adopted country of Palestine would become the new state of Israel.

'When his health failed in 1940, he was cared for in the British Government Hospital,

'now a Jerusalem council building.

'Hilda visited every day.

'One friend reported that on his death bed,

'Petrie's mind was running even faster than usual.

'He talked without pause on subjects from copper implements in Mesopotamia

'to malaria mosquitoes in Gaza.

'He died on 29 July 1942 and was buried the next day in the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion.'

His grave is simply marked with a roughly cut headstone

engraved with his name and the Egyptian symbol for life.

It's touching to see that somebody's left a scattering of potsherds.

Before he died, he made an extraordinary request.

He wanted to donate his brain to medical science.

Now...

I didn't believe this story.

I thought it was too fantastic to be true.

So I asked someone who would know, and it turned out she had been there

in Jerusalem on the day that Petrie died.

She had been going through the hospital and there, in the corridor,

was a hospital trolley

with a glass bell jar sitting on it and Petrie's head underneath it!

And so the story was true.

The head was kept in Jerusalem for the duration of the war,

in the American School of Oriental Research.

At the end of the war, Lady Petrie is reputed to have flown home,

from Palestine to London,

with her husband's head in a hat box on her lap.

'Petrie's head is stored, but not displayed,

'at the Royal College of Surgeons.

'His brain has not yet been studied for the secrets of its genius.

'Petrie's true legacy is in the way we now understand ancient civilisations.

'We should all remember the maverick genius who gave us the tools

'to unlock the secrets of the past.'

I think he made archaeology popular.

He brought the attention of the world to the work he was doing

in a way that made it exciting

and very humane.

We did learn a lot about archaeology from Petrie.

He established archaeology as a science and we did learn from him.

There's something special about Petrie.

Not only because of his achievements but also because of all the stories which surrounded him.

For that reason, I think he'll always be remembered.

He'll have his part in the history of archaeology for ever.

To walk in the footsteps of Flinders Petrie is to witness the invention of archaeology.

For 70 years, he gave his life to understanding the ancient peoples of Egypt and Palestine.

He left us the richer for it.

He was stubborn, obsessive and eccentric.

Perhaps those were the very qualities he needed to be a pioneer.

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