Heritage: Hampstead resident Sir Flinders Petrie measured the pyramids of Giza and laid the foundations of Egyptology

by Tom Marshall

Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie was a Victorian explorer who measured the Pyramids at Giza, laid the foundations for Egyptology – the study of ancient Egypt – and was the first biblical archaeologist in Palestine.

His insatiable curiosity led him to unearth how ancient civilization lived, worked and functioned. He discovered the world’s oldest portraits and evidence – through inscriptions – of written communication between Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Semitic alphabet. Another find was Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus, the oldest known medical text. He once stumbled across a stone slab with what is believed to be the earliest Egyptian reference to Israel.

His sense of precision was top drawer. Aged 19 he measured Stonehenge with 100 per cent accuracy and was said to know the exact distance between his eye and the tip of his finger.

In the field he was remembered as an eccentric and would dig in the nude, but dress suitably for formal luncheon in his tent. In order to maximise efficiency – on location – he often drew his findings with both hands at the same time, wielding a pencil in each. A forward thinker, he established archaeology as a science by painstakingly documenting his findings. He built a camera from scratch, a contraption that would become famous as the “biscuit-tin camera” and probably took the earliest extant group of pinhole photographs.

At home in Hampstead he would discuss and develop his beliefs in eugenics with his good friend and neighbour, the statistician Karl Pearson (1857–1936). His mission was to preserve and understand artefacts rather than simply pilfer, purloin and profit and once wrote that, “spoiling the past has an acute moral wrong in it”.

A century with the Penn Museum’s Sphinx

By Heather A. Davis

In 1913, a massive piece of granite arrived in Philadelphia that forever changed the scope of the Penn Museum’s collection.

This was the arrival of the Sphinx, an approximately 15-ton single piece of red granite from Memphis, Egypt. The Sphinx—the largest such stone sculpture in the Western Hemisphere and the sixth largest in the world—caused a stir when it landed in the city. According to a Philadelphia Inquirer article from October of 1913, “Its coming was unheralded and street car motorists, taxicab chauffeurs and pedestrians stopped all work to see the strange, solid sphinx, oblivious to the furor it was causing.”

It also helped put the Penn Museum and its then-fledgling Egyptian collection on the map.

“It helped us begin the Egyptological program, both at the Museum and at the University itself, and established this as the center for Egyptology as it is today,” says David Silverman, curator-in-charge of the Penn Museum’s Egyptian Section and the Eckley Brinton Coxe, Jr., Professor in the Department of Eastern Languages and Civilizations. “It anchored the Museum in a fantastic place.”

The Man Who Discovered Egypt (video)

Credits: BBC 2012

Isis, Horus and Madonna

The following is from The Religion of Ancient Egypt by William Flinders Petrie, Edwards Professor of Egyptology, University College, London (1906): 

Isis became attached at a very early time to the Osiris worship; and appears in later myths as the sister and wife of Osiris. ... The union of Horus with the myth, and the establishment of Isis as the mother goddess, was the main mod of her importance in late times. Isis as the nursing mother is seldom shown until the twenty-sixth dynasty; then the type continually became more popular, until it outgrew all other religions of the country. In Roman times the mother Isis not only received the devotion of all Egypt, but her worship spread rapidly abroad, like that of Mithra. It became the popular devotion of Italy; and, after a change of name due to the growth of Christianity, she has continued to receive the adoration of a large part of Europe down to the present day as the Madonna.

Horus became identified with the sun-god, and hence came the winged solar disk as the emblem of Horus of Edfu ... the infant Horus with his finger to his lips was the most popular form of all, sometimes alone, sometimes on his mother’s lap. ... From the twenty-sixth dynasty down to late Roman times the infant Horus, or the young boy, was the most prominent subject on the temples, and the commonest figure in the homes of the people ...

Isis and Horus, the Queen of Heaven and the Holy Child, became the popular deities of the later age of Egypt, and their figures far outnumber those of all other gods. Horus in every form of infancy was the loved bambino of the Egyptian women. Again Horus appears carried on the arm of his mother in a form which is indistinguishable from that adopted by Christianity soon after.

We see, then, throughout the Roman world the popular worship of the Queen of Heaven, Mater Dolorosa, Mother of God, patroness of sailors, and her infant son Horus the child, the benefactor of men, who took captive all the powers of evil. And this worship spread and increased in Egypt and elsewhere until the growing power of Christianity compelled a change. The old worship continued; for the Syrian maid became transformed into an entirely different figure, Queen of Heaven, Mother of God, patroness of sailors, occupying the position and attributes already belonging to the world-wide goddess; and the Divine Teacher, the Man of Sorrows, became transformed into the entirely different figure of the Potent Child. Isis and Horus still ruled the affections and worship of Europe with a change of names.

Ancient Amarna Letters of Egypt Now Online

High-resolution images of the famed Amarna letters, the ancient 14th-century B.C.E. diplomatic correspondence between the New Kingdom pharaohs of Egypt and the kings of various Canannnite city-states, among others, have been placed online by Berlin's Vorderasiatisches Museum, which houses more than 200 of the total of over 300 tablets that define the ancient corpus.

Among the images are those representing letters written by Abdi-Heba, king of Canaanite Jerusalem, to the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten. In that correspondence the Canaanite king, allied with Egypt, requests the Pharaoh to send troops to Jerusalem for the defense of the city against other threatening Canaanite kings. In other correspondence, King Biridiya of Megiddo complains about the King of Gezer's attacks on his territory and attempts to improve his status with the Pharaoh. Although these events are but a small portion of the variety of issues and events presented through the ancient writings, they have represented a tantalizing window on the political affairs and times of 14th-century rulers in the ancient Middle East.

The letters, consisting of baked clay cuneiform tablets written primarily in Akkadian (the language of diplomacy for this period), were initially discovered in 1887 in the ruins of Tell el-Amarna (ancient Akhetaten, the capital city founded by the "heretic" Pharaoh Akhenaten), by local Egyptians who secretly dug and then sold them on the antiquities market. The first controlled excavation of the site by archaeologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie in 1891–92 recovered 21 more fragments. Later, additional tablets or tablet fragments were recovered from various sources. The Amarna letters are now scattered among museums in Cairo, the United States, and Europe, although the majority of them are in the possession of the Vorderasiatisches Museum. Spanning a correspondence period of fifteen to thirty years, the tablets have been dated to the period between about 1388 to 1332 B.C.E., which included the reigns of Amenhotep III, Akhenaten, and the first year or two of Tutankhamun's reign. Dating is still a matter of some scholarly debate.

Source: http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/september-2011/article/ancient-amarna-letters-of-egypt-now-online

Egyptian mummy portraits go on display at Ashmolean museum

£5m Egypt project is allowing Oxford's Ashmolean museum to display stunning objects kept in storage for years

by Mark Brown for guardian.co.uk Wednesday 19 October 2011

Three beautifully restored mummy portraits of well-off young people who were, 2,000 years ago, probably members of a mysterious group called "the 6475" are to go on display at the new home for one of the most important Egyptian collections in the world.

The three faces - an enigmatic, beguiling young woman and two handsome men - will go on permanent display at Oxford's Ashmolean museum next month as part of the second phase of its redevelopment.

The £5m Egypt project is allowing the museum to display stunning objects which have been in storage for years with twice as many mummies and coffins being shown.

The oldest, on linen, is of a young woman dating from 55-70AD, excavated by Flinders Petrie - the founding father of Egyptology in the UK - at the Roman cemeteries of Hawara in Fayum, south-west of Cairo, in 1911.

Petrie had to do some immediate field conservation which involved him heating up paraffin wax in a double boiler and pouring it over the portraits he found.