Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Short biography of Flinders Petrie

http://jameslogancourier.org/index.php?itemid=2139
"After surveying British prehistoric monuments in his teenage years (commencing with the late Romano-British 'British Camp' that lay within yards of his family home in Charlton) in attempts to understand their geometry (at 19 tackling Stonehenge), Petrie travelled to Egypt early in 1880 to apply the same principles in a survey of the Great Pyramid at Giza, making him the first to investigate properly how they were constructed (many theories had been advanced on this, and Petrie read them all, but none were based on first hand observation or logic - the English astronomer Piazzi Smith, for example, argued that the number of stones in each row represents the upward rise of civilization).On that visit he was appalled by the rate of destruction of monuments (some listed in guidebooks had been worn away completely since then) and mummies (once the treasures had been removed, the mummies were then used by Egyptians for fuelling trains and steamships - he often heard the cry "We need more steam, throw a pharoah on the fire!")."
See the above page for the full story.

There's a link to the Project Gutenberg download site, where free of charge copies of two of Petrie's works are stored:
Egyptian Tales, Translated from the Papyri First series, IVth to XIIth dynasty
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7386
Egyptian Tales, Translated from the Papyri Second series, XVIIIth to XIXth dynasty
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7413

1 comment:

Chuck Jones said...

You'll find links to a couple of dozen of Petrie's books in Abzu
http://www.etana.org/abzu

Just search on his name.