Seventy Years in Archaeology
THE MAN of the MONTH
[Henry Holt & Co., $4.00]
THIS is the record of an ascetic life devoted to the untiring quest after knowledge. It is a statement of events, accomplishments, and opinions, written with an economy of language which, while it does not make for ease of reading, yet lends power to the book as a revelation of the man who wrote it.
Sir Flinders Petrie at seventy-nine is still actively engaged in archæological research, as he has been without interruption since the age of ten. After collecting coins as a boy and surveying ancient monuments in Britain as a youth, both giving him invaluable training in careful observation and accurate recording, he first went to Egypt in 1880 to measure the Great Pyramid. The intervening fifty-odd years have seen him, with hardly an exception, excavating all over that country and adding year by year to the growing knowledge of Egypt’s past, a knowledge no mean part of which is due to his almost unaided efforts. During these years he has published innumerable books, given innumerable lectures, and, since 1892, has occupied the chair of Egyptology at Loudon University. When we consider that all his life he has struggled against poverty and a far from robust health, his accomplishments have been truly amazing.
While this book is the story of a working life, it is far from a mere statement of the deeds of one of the world’s great archæologists. Interspersed through the accounts of his many activities are absorbing comments on the customs and psychology of the Egyptians of to-day, fascinating details of the vicissitudes and hardships of an excavator’s life, and no small amount of bitter complaint against the ignorance, hostility, and corruption of the official world with which his work brought him into contact.
The following quotation from a letter written to a friend gives a revealing picture of the inner man. After a particularly trying experience with official obstruction in Cairo he returned to work in the desert —the Great Peace, he calls it. ‘It would do many a modern more good than anything else, both for mind and body, just to come and live in a cave, and cultivate a litile bean plot like an ancient eremite, for half a year, and then return to the jangle of Europe. Every time I come back to England I am more and more disgusted with the merciless rush, and the turmoil of strife for money, and the pauseless scheming and ousting of one struggler by another. . . . The writhing and wriggling of this maggoty world is loathsome. . . . It is delightful to have done with the degradation of having always a lackey — or, still worse, a woman — helping you when you don’t need it; degradation to you, because a degradation to them. When I see an obsequious waiter, I can hardly help begging his pardon for being accessory to a condition which so unmans him.’
Petrie is the dean of Egyptian excavators, and, while his methods have been to a considerable extent superseded in recent years, to him belongs the credit tor a large part of the pioneer work, especially oi the last century. To those who seek stirring tales of the unearthing of hidden treasure — the romantic thrill of buried gold — this book will give but little satisfaction. Such matters are dealt with, to be sure, but not in the spirit of romance. Rather are they regarded as an incident in the quest of knowledge, as yielding the quiet satisfaction of the scientist in significant additions to his store of facts. The true interest of the book to the general reader lies in the story of the busy life of an archæologist, and above all in the unconscious revelation of the personality of a great man.
DOWS DUNHAM