Amulet Atlas

artPetrie's amulet plates

also: Amulets (1914), plates · Petrie 1914 plates · the UCL amulet plates

artAncient EgyptBritain and IrelandEgyptUnited Kingdom

Plates of small Egyptian amulets, photographed in rows against a plain ground, printed at the back of a slim book: W. M. Flinders Petrie's "Amulets: illustrated by the Egyptian collection in University College, London", published by Constable in London in 1914. Objects sit side by side at a common scale with a class number under each, so a reader can lay a tray beside the page and match shape to shape. The Internet Archive's copy carries the rights note "no visible notice of copyright; stated date is 1914" and the status NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT.

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The story

The plates are a sorting machine. Petrie arranged the amulets by what they are — head, limb, animal, sign, tool — rather than by reign or by site, and gave each class a number that ran across the whole collection. That arrangement is why a museum drawer in 2026 still holds wedjat eyes together and scarabs together instead of holding Eleventh Dynasty together.

Petrie had already written the reason down. "I believe the true line of research lies in the noting and comparison of the smallest details," he wrote of his method, and an amulet is nothing but smallest details — a mould flaw, a drill angle, a glaze that fired green instead of blue.

The pictures also carry the man. Petrie held the first chair of Egyptology in the United Kingdom and has been called the father of Egyptian archaeology; he has also been denounced for his pro-eugenics views, and believed in the superiority of northern over southern peoples. Alice Stevenson's UCL Press volume on the museum, and the 2014 book Archaeology of Race, put that record beside the excavations rather than after them. Inference — this atlas takes the plates as a finding aid and not as an authority on who made what, for the plain reason that the typology outlived the racial theory bolted to it.

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Now

Public domain, free to reproduce, and scanned at a resolution good enough to zoom. The collection they picture went to University College in 1913 and is now the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology at Malet Place in London — over 80,000 objects, entirely digitised, catalogue online, admission free.

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What this is near

personFlinders Petriethe excavator who made these plates, and whose sorting is still the shape of a museum amulet drawercontrastBudge's amulet platesthe other great amulet picture-book of the period, made from purchases rather than from digscarriesWedjat eyethe class that fills the most rows on these plates, because Egypt made more of it than of anything elsecarriesScarabthe other class that runs to page after page heretraditionEgyptian amulet craftthe tradition these plates put in ordermaterialFaiencethe material most of the objects in these rows are made ofparallelThe drawn signsthe atlas's own answer to the same problem — one picture for a class, not a portrait of one objectstoryFree to usewhy these plates can appear here at all: no visible copyright notice, 1914

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

artFlinders Petriethe plates from his 1914 book, and the reason a museum drawer looks the way it doescontrastBudge's amulet platesthe other amulet picture-book of the period — dug up and sorted, where Budge's was bought and comparedoriginThe drawn signsthe 1914 ancestor of the same idea — a picture made to show a class rather than a specimen

Where this came from

Elsewhere

Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.

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