The Genius of Flinders Petrie Sir Mortimer and Magnus

Do you have any heroes?

Great men that you admire, this side of idolatry?

I don't believe in heroes. I don't know.

It's rather a feminine term, I would suggest, Mag, heroes.

I can imagine a woman having a hero,

but I can't imagine a man having a hero.

The something almost indecent about it.

All right.

Tell me about men of greatness in any field that you particularly admire.

Well, I've had four, four in the whole of my life, four.

I've thought of this, actually,

and have come to the conclusion that of all the people I have known...

many have been able people, some less able,

but only four of them could classify as geniuses.

If you ask me to define the word genius, I'm not going to attempt it.

No, but tell me who the four are.

The four are, well, the late Winston Churchill,

with whom I worked for a year.

Who else? The painter, Augustus John, whom I knew well.

Sir Flinders Petrie, the Egyptologist,

whom I've known on and off all my life.

I went to see him on his deathbed in Jerusalem.

And fourthly, Sir Arthur Evans,

the discoverer of the first civilisation in Europe.

Those four, I think those four,

I can't think of anybody else in the same class. They were all geniuses.

They were all almost superhuman people.

They all had something that nobody else that I can think of had.

And if you want heroes, if you want to call them hero,

a beastly word, you can apply it to them.

But I should begin immediately to find faults in all of them.

Which wouldn't be difficult.

Well, Flinders Petrie, for instance, do you find fault with him?

Anybody can find fault with Sir Flinders Petrie.

I tell you, he was a man who focused his mind on whatever

he was thinking about at the time to the exclusion of everything else.

For instance, one of the first things he did

when he went to Egypt was to make a minutely accurate

plan of the great pyramids, which nobody had done before.

Down to the fraction of a millimetre. That kind of thing.

He... When he got an idea in his head, that idea was there.

And the curious thing about the old man was this.

I knew him well in the latter years, that for instance,

he had his own ideas about the chronology of Egypt,

of the timetable of the Pharaohs and so on.

And his chronology differed by 15 centuries or more,

it varied,

from any other chronology in any university in Europe.

He was almost a laughing stock.

If he had been a lesser man, he would have been laughed out,

laughed off the stage.

But no. To his dying day, he was at least 15 centuries out.

And he was so absolutely devoted to the subject, right or wrong,

that you felt, here is a devotee...

a man who in some mysterious way belongs to his subject.

He began in Egypt at a time when Egyptology was in a very poor way.

It was really he who started the modern science of Egyptology

at a time when it hadn't even become the beginnings of a science.

He had a methodical mind, however wrong his conclusions might be,

he threw off a whole number of ideas which themselves produce

other ideas.

He pointed to the methods.

And it was for others to shape the method and to make it logical

and productive.

It was 1925, I remember vividly,

that I first really got to know him and his wife, Hilda.

We had been in contact with one another. He was back from the East.

He wanted a holiday.

He hadn't the faintest notion of what the word holiday meant.

I don't know much about that.

But he and Hilda wanted to come into the Welsh countryside.

I was then, at the time I think I was a thing called

Director of the Welsh National Museum,

something of that sort, and as a sideline

I was digging up a Roman fort near Brecon in South Wales.

Before the end of the same week, he and Hilda had

arrived at my farmhouse and they'd dug themselves in.

Day by day, they went out into the countryside.

He'd set himself a holiday task, he always had a task.

His task was the task of recording stone circles and stone cairns.

I said to him, "What instruments have you got?"

"Ah-ha," he looked at me with a smile of ineffable cunning.

He produced a pea-stick, a bamboo pea-stick,

to hang peas on to, I suppose...

with one hand and a visiting card from his pocket with the other.

"They are my instruments.

"I put the pea-stick in the ground to show me where I'm going, and

"I use the two sides of the visiting card to give me a right angle.

"That's how I work."

And bless my soul, at the end of the day,

he came in with a notebook full of figures.

After dinner, in this farmhouse, with its oil lamps,

he sat by an oil lamp, produced the figures and a logarithm table

and worked it at all out in a mysterious fashion known to himself.

His was that kind of mind.

A mind full of the most intricate

and difficult solutions to the most simple problems,

and a simple mind when the problems became really complicated.

It was very interesting. Interesting psychology.

Well, we were together then.

And later on when I was establishing a,

an Institute of Archaeology at the University of London,

he handed over to me a considerable sum

of £10,000, it was, which was a lot in those days.

Which had been given to him for this sort purpose,

just handed it over to me.

He said, "I'm going to Palestine, to Jerusalem.

"I can't pay your damn taxes any longer.

"I'm going to live in Jerusalem."

And he went out to Jerusalem.

"You might as well take this before I go,"

and he handed me £10,000.

That showed that we had got a rapport with one another.

And from that point onwards, I went ahead and founded this institute.

And he went on to Jerusalem.

I must tell you one little incident that happened which rather

showed that aspect of his mind when he was staying with me

in that farmhouse in Brecon, in Wales.

One morning, before he went out for his day's tramp over the hills,

he said, "I found a curious cairn yesterday." Heap of stones, you see.

"There's something about it I don't understand.

"Would you lend me a couple of your men and we'll have a look at it?"

I said, "Yes, of course, take them."

So, he went off into the blue with a couple of my workmen...

and for an hour or two, all went quietly and well.

And then one of these men came running back with his eyes

starting out. "Oh, sir, oh, sir! Come with me, come with me!

"There's a bull chasing the gentleman,

"a bull chasing the gentleman."

And so I picked up a surveying pole,

which was the only thing accessible in the form of a weapon,

and traipsed a mile across the countryside behind this

excited Welsh farm labourer.

When I got to the scene of operations, there was

a sloping hill, with fields stretching down it and two fields

in particular with a hedge between them

which had been carved off at the lower end

so there was a way through from one field to the other, you see?

At the bottom of that hedge, there was a flaming bull,

almost visibly flaming.

With its four legs stretched out and flames, if you will,

a very close approximation to flames, coming out of its nostrils.

And looking up the hedge, there on one side was Flinders Petrie's

magnificent grey beard sticking out of the hedge.

And on the other side was Hilda's bottom,

covered with thick riding cloth, as she used to wear.

I took a little step forward, timidly,

and then another step timidly forward...

and when I got within about 10 feet of the bull, 12 feet of the bull,

it actually drew back one of its four feet, and then the other one,

and the battle was over.

Over his shoulder I saw the farmer coming in,

rather irately into the field with a pitchfork over his shoulder.

He drove the bull off. Down came, from the heights,

came the beard and Hilda, down the two sides of the hedge.

And they, the farmer went up to Petrie and said,

"You ought not to be here, sir!

"You ought not to be here!

"This bull is dangerous."

We'd gathered that.

He drove the bull away with a pitchfork.

I tried to calm the farmer by telling him that

this was a very famous professor who knew all about pyramids,

he thought this might be a pyramid and he wanted to look at it.

Eventually, the Petries went off on the rest of their day's walk,

or day's exploration, and the bull went,

or was driven back through the gate, and I got back.

But the point was this.

This was characteristic of the old gentleman.

He never referred to the bull incident again in his life.

He was hardly conscious of this little interruption

in what he was doing.

His mind was focused entirely upon this heap of stones,

simply a heap of stones thrown there by the farmer. And...

neither at dinner that night, nor ever again,

was the incident referred to.

He... In fact, it had gone from his mind.

His mind was perennially focused on whatever he was doing.

On the one subject, and nothing else mattered.

The last time I saw the old boy was on his deathbed in Jerusalem

in the first months of 1942.

I happened at the time to be doing some

fieldwork of a non-archaeological kind in Egypt

and heard by the grapevine that the old boy was dying,

so I took 24 hours of leave, drove across Sinai,

in the course of which my old staff car shed its track-rod

and turned upside down, I crawled out again and got in somebody

else's car, went on and got to Jerusalem, to the hospital there.

It was a haven of rest, of peace and quiet.

And in the little room, lying on the bed outstretched, was the form

that I knew so well of dear old Petrie.

With his magnificent profile

and around his head a sort of turban of white linen.

It looked to me exactly what my picture is of a Biblical patriarch.

Well...

He looked at me and smiled.

And then he began talking, talking at a great rate,

as though he had a great deal to say before, before the end came.

He talked about bronze implements in Mesopotamia,

about the incidence of the malarial mosquito in Gaza and so forth.

His mind never rested, never rested until the very last moment.

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