ภาพแผ่นภาพเครื่องรางของพีทรีPetrie's amulet plates

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.

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.