Exhibition: Excavating Egypt

Miami New Times (Carlos Suarez de Jesus)

When 27-year-old British adventurer and archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie first entered the Nile Valley in 1880, he probably believed the people of Atlantis had built the Great Pyramid of Giza — and perhaps the Bible's mysteries were encoded in the ancient structure.

"Back then everyone still thought it contained occult knowledge," observes Dr. Steve Harvey, an archaeologist who was in town last week to lecture on the man many consider to be the real-life inspiration for Indiana Jones. "The British, the French, the Americans — the early archaeologists were more intent on searching for where Jesus was born or excavating sites like Tanis, which was mentioned in the Bible."

Not your garden-variety tomb raider or occultist crackpot, Petrie became known as the father of Egyptian archaeology. He made great breakthroughs in field excavation and invented a sequence-dating method that enabled reconstruction of history from ancient remains. After half a century unraveling the mysteries of Egypt, he was knighted in 1923 for his discoveries.

See the above page for the full two-page story.