Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology (Wisconsin Studies in Classics)

University of Wisconsin Pres, 1995. Paperback. Good. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine. Flinders Petrie has been called the "Father of Modern Egyptology"--and inde ed he is one of the pioneers of modern archaeological methods. This fascina ting biography of Petrie was first published to high acclaim in England in 1985. Margaret S. Drower, a student of Petrie's in the early 1930s, traces his life from his boyhood, when he was already a budding scholar, through h is stunning career in the deserts of Egypt to his death in Jerusalem at the age of eighty-nine. Drower combines her first-hand knowledge with Petrie's own voluminous personal and professional diaries to forge a lively account of this influential and sometimes controversial figure. Drower presents Petrie as he was: an enthusiastic eccentric, diligently plu nging into the uncharted past of ancient Egypt. She tells not only of his s pectacular finds, including the tombs of the first Pharaohs, the earliest a lphabetic script, a Homer manuscript, and a collection of painted portraits on mummy cases, but also of Petrie's important contributions to the scienc e of modern archaeology, such as orderly record-keeping of the progress of a dig and the use of pottery sherds in historical dating. Petrie's careful academic methods often pitted him against such rival archaeologists as Amél ineau, who boasted he had smashed the stone jars he could not carry away to be sold, and Maspero and Naville, who mangled a pyramid at El Kula they ha d vainly tried to break into. Editorial Reviews Review "[An] admirable and immensely readable biography, Mar.