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Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie,
Father of modern Egyptology

Small Coincidences:
Piazzi Smyth, Baden-Powell & Flinders Petrie

Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie is known as a pioneer in the field of archaeology and Egyptology. In his autobiography, Seventy Years in Archaeology, he wrote of an interesting connection with the Smyth and Baden-Powell families:

CHAPTER I.
PREPARATION

THE first chance in life is ever being born at all, and a mighty uncertain affair it seems to us mortals.

My grandfather, Captain Matthew Flinders, who died at forty, left two young friends who kept in touch with his widow and daughter for half a century. One was his cousin, a midshipman on his ship H.M.S. Investigator, John Franklin, of Arctic fame. From his childhood, John was always the heroic gentleman. One evening my great-grandmother, visiting his mother, rose to leave, saying it was getting too late; Johnnie, then four years old, at once said, "Never mind, Mrs. Tyler, I will see you home."

The other friend was William Henry Smyth, but for whom my father and mother might never have met. He was a man of wide interests, known as a literary sailor, as surveyor, astronomer, and antiquary. His sons were notable for rising to the top of their professions, his daughters for marrying men who, later, were equally successful. Some of their names reflected his tastes; Piazzi, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, was named from the Sicilian astronomer; Rosetta, the wife of Sir William Flower, had her name from the Rosetta stone. Their house in London in the ‘forties was a centre of many interests, and my mother, Anne Flinders, often stayed with them when up in town for meetings.

Piazzi Smyth had begun his career as an assistant to Sir John Herschel at the Cape, and thence naturally knew my grandfather, Petrie, who was head of a department there. He brought my father and uncles into the Smyth circle on their return to England. Amid the many friends who went to and fro there, it did not escape the eye of Mrs. Smyth that her eldest daughter, Henrietta, and young William Petrie were very intimate. Now she was a very careful mother, and knew her duties. She felt that my father had not that amount of worldly wisdom which she desired for her daughter’s success, so Henrietta was promptly taken to Cambridge, and soon after married the sexagenarian Professor Baden-Powell.

Meanwhile William Petrie and Anne Flinders had been constantly meeting at the Smyths, and some years later my father and mother were married. So Mrs. Smyth was the agent by whom Scouting and Egyptian archaeology took their present form. B.P. and I both speculate whether either, or neither, of those subjects would have been otherwise so shaped?

He wrote of the role of Piazzi Smyth’s work on the Pyramids had in leading to his own interest in Egyptology. As noted below, he was later to disprove scientifically some of Piazzi Smyth’s central conclusions about the Pyramids.

. A new stir arose when one day I brought back from Smith’s bookstall, in 1866, a volume by Piazzi Smyth, Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid. The views, in conjunction with his old friendship for the author, strongly attracted my father, and for some years I was urged on in what seemed so enticing a field of coincidence. I little thought how, fifteen years later, I should reach the "ugly little fact which killed the beautiful theory"; but it was this interest which led my father to encourage me to go out and do the survey of the Great Pyramid; of that, later on.

Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, Seventy Years in Archaeology (1932)

In The Genesis of British Archaeology, John David Wortham writes about Piazzi Smyth, his influence on Flinders Petrie and Petrie’s ultimate discrediting of Smyth’s work on the Great Pyramid. Obviously, with little patience for the religious interpretations of early pyramid researchers, he coins the term "pyramidiot" to describe the development of what he saw as a quasi-religious cult. To some degree, It remains today in the "New Age" term "Pyramidology."

By 1800, Egyptologists were certain that the Egyptians had used the pyramids as tombs, but during the course of the nineteenth century a multitude of cranks and cultists disputed the idea. Eventually professional Egyptologists would be able simply to ignore the various pyramid cults, but during the nineteenth century, they could not always do so. At least one pyramid cultist, Charles Piazzi Smyth, performed useful work in measuring the Great Pyramid at Giza and thereby made for himself an international reputation as an authority on the structure, origins, and function of the Great Pyramid. A multitude of other pyramidiots attracted considerable attention, scholarly and otherwise. The bizarre speculations concerning the pyramids had a long life, and at least one pyramid cult has succeeded in maintaining itself in the twentieth century.

The next step in pyramidiotic speculation was taken by John Taylor, a friend of Coleridge and Keats and a minor literary critic. In 186o he published a book on the Great Pyramid under the title The Great Pyramid: Why Was It Built? and Who Built It? In 1864 he published another book in which he replied to his critics: The Battle of the Standards.

According to Taylor, Holy Scripture contained references to the Great Pyramid in many passages; the architect of the Great Pyramid had not been an Egyptian but Noah, the designer of the Ark. Furthermore, locked in the measurements of the Great Pyramid were secrets of which the ancient Egyptians themselves had remained unaware. Among these secrets was the length of the "sacred cubit," identical to the cubit that the Israelites had used in biblical times. Taylor supplied "evidence" that the English system of measurement had derived from the "divine" system embodied in the Great Pyramid. Because many Englishmen admired Taylor’s evident piety-and his opposition to the adoption of the French metrical system-his book enjoyed modest popularity.

Taylor’s chief disciple and the real founder of the Great Pyramid cult was Charles Piazzi Smyth, the astronomer royal of Scotland. Smyth, an inventor known for his improvements in photography, became a convert to pyramidiocy after reading Taylor’s books, and in 1864 he published a defense of Taylor’s ideas: Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid.

In 1865, Smyth, convinced that more precise measurements of the Great Pyramid than those available in published works were necessary, took his own scientific expedition to Giza.

Smyth was interested only in the Great Pyramid. The other monuments of the plateau he considered evil, pagan, and idolatrous. He spent his days making measurements of the exterior of the pyramid, its inner chambers and passages, and the sarcophagus. Smyth hated the tourists who came to Giza. He found them noisy and bothersome, and they forced him to suspend work for several hours each day. Above all, he felt that they did not show enough respect for the Great Pyramid.

Despite his strange ideas and misconceptions, Smyth performed much valuable work at Giza. He made the most accurate measurements of the Great Pyramid that any explorer had made up to that time, and he photographed the interior passages, using a magnesium light, for the first time. In 1867 he published the results of his efforts and his own speculations about the Great Pyramid in his magnum opus, Life and Work at the Great Pyramid.

Smyth’s theories about the Great Pyramid exceeded those of John Taylor in grotesquerie. The Great Pyramid, Smyth maintained, was not an Egyptian monument. Rather, it was the oldest man-made structure; the other Egyptian pyramids were only filthy, pagan imitations. Although the Egyptians might have furnished the physical labor necessary to erect the Great Pyramid, the architectural genius who designed it must have been some personage of the Old Testament. The pyramid was a perfect structure, a product of divine inspiration, which embodied in its measurements a perfect system of weights and measures, among them the sacred cubit of the Israelites, the pyramid inch, and a system of prophecy. By use of the correct mathematical formulas, Smyth intended to unlock the secrets of the pyramid, secrets that included information about the past history of man, his future, and the Christian dispensation. He claimed that he had derived a number of astronomical facts, some dates of important events of the past, and a prediction about when the millennium would begin.

Many scholars published what should have been devastating criticisms of these theories. They showed, for example, that when deriving his formulas Smyth simply juggled facts and figures until he came up with a seeming correspondence and that many of the data upon which he based his theorizing, such as the average size of the casing stones that had once covered the Great Pyramid, were wrong. Contemporary Egyptologists knew that the Great Pyramid was not the earliest of the monuments, but one of the latest. However, pyramidiots were unswayed by facts.

Theories as bizarre as Smyth’s inevitably produced a storm of criticism. What is surprising is the amount of support they received from reputable journals. Smyth responded quickly to all criticism. Shortly after the publication of his Life and Work at the Great Pyramid he produced an answer to its critics: The Antiquity of Intellectual Man. When the Royal Society of Edinburgh refused him permission to read a paper on the Great Pyramid in 1874, he resigned his fellowship in protest and published his reasons for doing so in a pamphlet entitled The Great Pyramid and the Royal Society.

During this controversy Smyth enlisted support mainly from two groups: the opponents of the introduction of the metric system into England and the antievolutionists. Smyth had stated in his books that the English inch was a close copy of the "pyramid inch," a perfect unit of measurement inspired by God. Hence, according to Smyth’s reasoning, Parliament would be committing an irreligious act if it adopted the atheistic French metric system. Furthermore, Smyth continued to insist that the Great Pyramid was the oldest man-made monument in the world and hence that man had always displayed, with the Deity’s aid, a high degree of intellectuality. These views were directly contradictory to theories of the evolutionary nature of man’s development, a fact that the antievolutionists and Smyth clearly realized.

While Petrie’s new methodology was revolutionizing archaeology, his discoveries in the field were forcing Egyptologists to rewrite much of their reconstruction of ancient history. Among Petrie’s discoveries were the city of Tanis, the Greek trading outpost at Naucratis, the location of ancient Daphnae, the pyramid of Amenemhet III, the prehistoric cultures at Qift, and the prehistoric and early dynastic remains at Abydos.

Petrie was born at Charlton, England, on June 8, 1853. From a very early age he demonstrated an interest in ancient remains. When he was thirteen, he bought a copy of Charles Piazzi Smyth’s Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid and showed it to his father,’ who was an engineer. William Petrie saw in Smyth’s theories an admirable reconciliation of science and religion, and he wanted to do what he could in support of this reconciliation. He decided that he and his son should go to Giza and use their skills to secure even more precise measurements of the Great Pyramid.

To train for their work, William and Flinders Petrie practiced surveying Stonehenge, assembled a collection of surveying instruments, and read everything they could find on the antiquities of Egypt. In 1875 they published a book they had written on the measurement of ancient earthworks.

William Petrie was something of a procrastinator and kept delaying the trip to Egypt. Eventually his son had to go without him. That was probably just as well, for by this time Flinders Petrie had rejected the ideas of Piazzi Smyth.

Had his father been present at Giza, the probable clash of opinions might have hampered the work.

Petrie arrived in Egypt in December, 188o, and remained until the end of May, 1881.⁴ While he was there, he restricted his activity to surveying, relying primarily on triangulation. In October, 1881, Petrie went back to Egypt, and except for a two-month trip up the Nile, remained at Giza until the end of April, 1882. During this second visit to Egypt he did some excavating.

Petrie’s findings at Giza enabled him to disprove two prominent theories about the Pyramids, the accretion theory of Richard Lepsius and the belief of Charles Piazzi Smyth that the Great Pyramid was a product of divine revelation and, therefore, flawless. Petrie destroyed Lepsius’ theory by showing exactly how the ancient Egyptians had constructed the Pyramids, and he also found much evidence that indicated the Great Pyramid contained imperfections resulting from poor construction and earthquake damage.

In examining the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid, Petrie found that one or more earthquake shocks had broken every roof beam on the south side. Only the inward thrust of the massive walls held the four-hundred-ton granite roof in place. This damage had very likely occurred before the Egyptians had finished the construction, for mortar covered the cracks. Petrie believed that two architects had worked on the Great Pyramid and that the second had possessed much less skill than the first. The second architect had used rough stone and had often forgotten to dress the stone. The plaster applied to such areas failed to hide these imperfections. Petrie also found cracks that the workers had made in cutting the block for the sarcophagus. Charles Piazzi Smyth had noticed none of these defects.

From: John David Wortham, Genesis of British Archaeology, 1549-1906, Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1971.

From: Encylcopaedia Britannica Online (2002).

Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie
born June 3, 1853 , Charlton, near Greenwich, London
died July 28, 1942 , Jerusalem

British archaeologist and Egyptologist who made valuable contributions to the techniques and methods of field excavation and invented a sequence dating method that made possible the reconstruction of history from the remains of ancient cultures. He was knighted in 1923.

Petrie was named for his maternal grandfather, Matthew Flinders, British navigator, pioneer hydrographer, and explorer of Australia and Tasmania. A frail child, Petrie was privately educated, early developing archaeological and ethnological interests, particularly in the area of ancient weights and measures, and in Egyptology.

At the age of 24, Petrie wrote Inductive Metrology, or the Recovery of Ancient Measures from the Monuments, a work that represented a new approach to archaeological study. Fieldwork done at various locations in Britain, including Stonehenge , enabled him to determine by mathematical computations the unit of measurement for the construction of the monument. His Stonehenge: Plans, Description, and Theories was published in 1880, and in that same year he began the surveys and excavation of the Great Pyramid at Giza, which initiated his four decades of exploration in the Middle East.

During the 1884 excavation of the Temple of Tanis , Petrie discovered fragments of a colossal statue of Ramses II. In 1885 and 1886, at Naukratis and Daphnae in the Nile River delta, he uncovered painted pottery by which he proved that those sites had been trading colonies for the ancient Greeks. It was this discovery that caused him to believe that history could be reconstructed by a comparison of potsherds ( pottery fragments) at various levels of an excavation.

Petrie first applied his principle of sequence dating in Palestine, at the site of Tel Hasi, south of Jerusalem. In 1890, in a period of only six weeks, the indefatigable excavator found a series of occupations for which he was able to supply tentative dates of habitation. Petrie’s work at the hill site marked the second stratigraphic study in archaeological history; the first was carried out at Troy by Heinrich Schliemann. The excavations of these two men marked the beginning of the examination of successive levels of a site, rather than the previously practiced method of haphazard digging, which had produced only a jumble of unrelated artifacts. Most of Petrie’s contemporaries in archaeology questioned his hypothesis that chronology could be established by potsherds, whether painted or undecorated. But, with the progressive sophistication of archaeology, the examination and classification of broken pottery became routine procedure.

Petrie made other important discoveries in the Al-Fayyum region of Egypt . At Gurob he found numerous papyri and Aegean pottery that substantiated dates of ancient Greek civilizations, including the Mycenaean. At the Pyramid of Hawara he searched through the tomb of Pharaoh Amenemhet III to discover how grave robbers could have found the tomb’s opening and made their way through the labyrinth surrounding the two sarcophagi that they emptied. He concluded that they must have been given the master plan by an informer. At Al-Fayyum also he made a rich find of 12th-dynasty jewelry (housed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City since 1919). He was delighted by his discovery of the earliest-known Egyptian reference to Israel on the stela (a stone slab monument) of Merneptah, king of ancient Egypt from 1213 to 1204 BC.

In 1892 Petrie was made Edwards professor of Egyptology at University College, London, and he served in the position until 1933, when he became professor emeritus. In 1894 he founded the Egyptian Research Account, which in 1905 became the British School of Archaeology.

Petrie added to the knowledge of the pyramid builders during his exploration of the necropolis of Abydos, holy city of the cult of Osiris, god of the dead. At Tell El- Amarna he excavated the city of Akhenaton, or Amenhotep IV, ruler of Egypt from 1353 to 1336 BC, revealing the now-famous painted pavement and other artistic wonders of the Amarna age (14th century BC). Three thousand graves found by Petrie at Naqadah, northeast of Thebes, were identified as those of primitive ancient Egyptians.

In 1904 Petrie published Methods and Aims in Archaeology, the definitive work of his time, in which he lucidly defined the goals and methodology of his profession along with the more practical aspects of archaeologysuch as details of excavation, including the use of cameras in the field. With uncommon insight, he noted that research results were dependent on the personality of the archaeologist, who, in addition to possessing broad knowledge, had to have insatiable curiosity. His own abundance of that characteristic was never questioned.

Inscriptions that Petrie found on the Sinai Peninsula represented an intermediate stage (not later than 1500 BC) of written communication between Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Semitic alphabet. Although he wrote The Formation of the Alphabet (1912), language was not Petrie’s forte, and he depended on a sixth sense for free translation of inscriptions and for establishing dates through the study of the forms of hieroglyphs.

Under the auspices of the American School of Research, he excavated in Palestine from 1927 until 1938, when he was 85. In those years, again at Tel Hasi, he uncovered the ruins of 10 cities. His scientific methods provided the guidelines for all subsequent Palestinian excavations. He died in Jerusalem at the age of 89.

"Petrie, Sir Flinders" Encyclopædia Britannica
<http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=60991>
[Accessed December 25, 2002].

		Charles Piazzi Smyth was Henrietta Grace’s brother and hence Uncle to B-P. He was well known as an astronomer (he was Astronomer Royal of Scotland) and was considered an authority on the pyramids of Giza.
		In 1865 Charles Piazzi Smyth traveled to Egypt to produce accurate measurements of the Great Pyramid. The photographs he took inside the Great Pyramid are amongst the earliest known. The Plates reproduced here are from an original 1877 copy of Smyth’s Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid. Plate Index.
		Baden-Powell Family History. A series of links based on the research of Robin Baden Clay, a grandson of Baden-Powell. They are focused on the genealogy of the Powell family. The author is extremely grateful to Mr. Clay for sharing the results of his labors with the Scouting community. Links are provided to pages for three of B-P’s brothers: Baden, Warington and Sir George Baden-Powell as well as to the genealogy of the Smyth and Warington families.

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