William Matthew Flinders Petrie, 1853 - 1942

Abstract William Matthew Flinders Petrie, the son of a civil engineer who was engaged at the time of his son’s birth on surveying the routes for railways, and later in an attempt to introduce an electric lighting system, inherited his taste for planning and drawing; and he claimed that his passion for discovery descended through his mother from his grandfather, Captain Matthew Flinders, who charted the Australian coasts in the Investigator, with John Franklin on board. Though he was sickly from his birth on 3 June 1853 onwards, largely owing to asthmatic attacks, the passion developed; he never attended any school regularly but learnt, principally from his mother, to interest himself in collecting coins, minerals and fossils. The desire to classify these led him into bypaths of ordinary scientific training. At the age of thirteen his interest in Egypt was roused by a chance purchase, Piazzi Smyth’s Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid; talks with his father, who had known Piazzi Smyth in his youth, led to the forming of a project for a joint survey. About the same year the boy began to purchase coins, and as time passed he secured specimens that the Coin Department of the British Museum, presided over at that time by W. S. Vaux and later by Stuart Poole, bought from him; so the search for unknown types became a habit. Elementary training in surveying from his father was followed by a holiday spent in planning Stonehenge in 1872. Between 1875 and 1880 it was Petrie’s hobby to go twice yearly on short tours to survey earthworks, using his father’s sextant and plotting what he called a ‘three-point survey’, which he had devised for himself. These surveys constituted the commencement of his life’s work.