3 Review(s)

A pioneering Egyptologist, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) excavated over fifty sites and trained a generation of archaeologists. His meticulous recording of artefacts and his sequence dating of pottery types found in Egypt and Palestine made Near Eastern archaeology a more rigorous and scientific discipline. This fully illustrated report of 1900 on the royal tombs at Abydos, capital of Upper Egypt, covers the first dynasty (c.3100-c.2900 BCE). Although Petrie acknowledges that it is only a preliminary report of ongoing work, he gives detailed descriptions of six tombs and the associated finds. A chapter on the inscriptions is provided by Francis Llewellyn Griffith (1862-1934). Petrie wrote prolifically throughout his long career for both specialists and non-specialists. His follow-up report, The Royal Tombs of the Earliest Dynasties (1901), and the three-part Abydos (1902-4) are among those works also reissued in this series.