Amulet Atlas

peopleFlinders Petrie

also: William Matthew Flinders Petrie · Sir Flinders Petrie · W. M. F. Petrie

peopleAncient EgyptThe LevantBritain and IrelandEgyptUnited KingdomIsraelPalestine

English Egyptologist, 1853–1942, who dug Egypt for half a century and sorted what came out of it. He held the first chair of Egyptology in the United Kingdom, at University College London, and in 1914 published a catalogue of amulets that arranged them into classes museums still shelve by. He also argued for eugenics in print, and the same books that fixed the amulet classes carry that argument.

cited

When

3 June 1853 – 29 July 1942 cited

PeriodVictorian and early twentieth century
How the date is knowntextual — a dated text describes it
NoteBirth and death dates as given in the biography; he died in Jerusalem.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The story

Petrie taught himself to survey before he could vote. At nineteen he produced the most accurate survey of Stonehenge then made; in 1880 he went to Giza to measure the pyramids and found the place, in his words, "a house on fire, so rapid was the destruction". He called his own job that of a "salvage man".

From November 1884 he dug almost continuously — Tanis, Tell Nebesheh, the Fayum, Amarna from 1891, Tell el-Hesi in Palestine in 1890, the Merneptah stele at Luxor in 1896, the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions at Serabit el-Khadim in the winter of 1904–5. He cut the foreman out of his digs and paid the workmen direct, which he said stopped finds being pulled out fast and sloppily. In 1904 he set the method down in Methods and Aims in Archaeology. In 1913 he sold his Egyptian collection to University College London, where it is the Petrie Museum.

The amulet book is the one this atlas leans on. Amulets: illustrated by the Egyptian collection in University College, London, Constable, 1914, runs to 190 pages and sorts the material by what Petrie took the object to be doing — amulets of power, of property, protective amulets, the human-headed gods, the animal gods, the properties of stones. Inference — a museum drawer labelled by function rather than by find-spot is a drawer laid out on that scheme, and a visitor reading a case label in London, New York or Cairo is usually reading Petrie's categories at one remove.

The other half of the record is dated too. Petrie has been denounced for his pro-eugenics views; he was a dedicated believer in the superiority of the Northern peoples over the Latinate and Southern peoples, and he put the argument into his 1906 series Question of the day, blaming England's social problems on racial degeneration. It ran into his Egyptology: he held that Egyptian civilisation came from an invading "Dynastic Race" that conquered what he called in 1895 an "inferior, exhausted mulatto" population. E. A. Wallis Budge argued against him that Egyptian religion was of a piece with the religions of northeastern and central Africa; most of their colleagues at the time sided with Petrie.

cited

Now

The Petrie Museum at University College London holds the excavated amulet series he sold it in 1913. UCL marked the centenary of his 1923 knighthood by asking, in its own words, "Between investigations on eugenics, decolonial practice, and calls for repatriation, what has become of Flinderella?" Inference — both halves of him are still in the room: the typology is working equipment, and the racial theory it was written beside is now the subject of the museum's own labels.

inference

What this is near

kinWedjat eyeone of the classes his 1914 catalogue fixed, and the amulet his excavations turned up by the thousandkinScarabthe other Egyptian mass-produced amulet his sequence dating and his typology both had to handletraditionEgyptian amulet craftthe tradition he catalogued; his class names are the ones the shelving still usesartPetrie's amulet platesthe plates from his 1914 book, and the reason a museum drawer looks the way it doescontrastE. A. Wallis Budgehis opponent on where Egyptian religion came from — Budge put it in Africa, Petrie in an invading race from outsideorgThe British Museumthe museum whose Egyptology he fought with, and where he showed the Fayum portraits he forced Cairo to give backstoryDating a charmthe long read on how a charm gets a date; his pottery seriation is where the method startspracticeGrave depositthe practice his cemeteries recorded — over seventeen cemeteries between Hu and Abadiya alone

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

personScarabthe excavator whose sequence work made a scarab something you could date a layer withpersonWedjat eyethe excavator who sorted Egypt's amulets into the classes museums still usepersonEgyptian amulet craftthe excavator whose classes museums still label bypersonThe beetlethe excavator whose typology of scarabs is still how museums sort thempersonFaiencethe excavator who sorted the moulded output into the classes museums still shelve it bypersonGrave depositthe excavator whose cemetery work produced the amulet series museums still sort bypersonThe Egyptian galleries, the Metropolitan Museum of Artthe excavator whose method the museum's own Egyptian Expedition followed; he published plates, the Met kept galleriesparallelAugustus Pitt Rivershis contemporary in method — both sorted by small differences, one in trenches, one in casescontrastE. A. Wallis Budgehis opponent: Petrie put Egyptian civilisation's origin in an invading race, Budge put it in AfricapersonPetrie's amulet platesthe excavator who made these plates, and whose sorting is still the shape of a museum amulet drawerpersonDating a charmthe excavator whose sequence dating is the ancestor of every excavated row herepersonThe fake marketthe other response to the same market — dig it before the dealers do

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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