More than a hundred people gathered in Jerusalem to remember Sir Flinders Petrie, one of the fathers of modern archaeology, in the lovely, little-known cemetery on Mt. Zion where most of him was buried 70 years ago this week.

More than a hundred people gathered in Jerusalem to remember Sir Flinders Petrie, one of the fathers of modern archaeology, in the lovely, little-known cemetery on Mt. Zion where most of him was buried 70 years ago this week.
A towering figure in the study of Egyptology and biblical history, the brilliant, driven and eccentric Briton is no longer a household name. But a memorial for Petrie organized by the Israel Antiquities Authority on Monday at the Protestant Cemetery, just outside the walled Old City, nonetheless drew a capacity crowd of local archaeologists, Bible scholars and aficionados of the ancient past.
Petrie’s modest grave — which houses all of his body except for his head — is marked simply with his name and an ankh, the Egyptian hieroglyph for “life.”
Before Petrie’s groundbreaking work in Egypt and Palestine in the late 1800s and early twentieth century, many archaeologists looked chiefly for spectacular finds and simply discarded the rest. Petrie “established that every single find is important” and could be used to decode history, archaeologist Gabriel Barkay told those gathered at the cemetery.
“He looked at the layers of a site as if they were the pages of a fascinating history book,” he said. “There were none like him, and there have been none like him since.”
Flinders Petrie — his full name, rarely used, was William Matthew Flinders Petrie — was born in England in 1853 to a father who was a surveyor and inventor and a mother who knew eight languages, wrote prodigiously, and said of herself that she was “subject to strange dreams, sometimes allegorically prophetical.”
Petrie was gripped, like others of his time, by the history of ancient Egypt, and after first using his knowledge of surveying to carry out an accurate measurement of Stonehenge he set off by ship to measure the Great Pyramids. He arrived in Cairo in 1880, made his home in an empty tomb, and ended up spending much of the rest of his life exploring the lost civilization of the Pharaohs.
Neglect on the part of local authorities and the booming market in ancient Egyptian artifacts in the West, he found, were leading to the wholesale plundering and destruction of priceless antiquities.
“It is sickening,” he wrote, “to see the rate at which everything is being destroyed, and the little regard paid to its preservation.” His work, he wrote elsewhere, “was that of a salvage man, to get all I could gathered quickly in.” To document