1. ‘The Excavator’

When he arrived at Hawara in January 1888, William Matthew Flinders Petrie was 34 years old and already an experienced, hands-on excavator.⁹

Born in Charlton, Kent, in 1853, home-schooled, he exhibited ‘unusual scientific ability’ from an early age and was introduced to archaeology by his father, a civil engineer, before he sailed to Egypt for the first time in late 1879 to survey the pyramids.¹⁰ Petrie’s later diagnosis was definite: ‘A year’s work in Egypt made me feel it was like a house on fire, so rapid was the destruction going on’—he had found his purpose: ‘My duty was that of a salvage man, to get all I could’.¹¹ His work attracted the attention of Amelia Edwards, a successful writer who had just founded the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF), for which Petrie would work in the Delta for a few years, arguably already setting new standards.¹² He would resign in 1886 after having accused EEF’s committee of poor management, notably ‘of wasting funds on poorly produced publications’¹³ and find himself without institutional support. But, gracefully, Edwards, who still wanted him back in the EEF, found him a private sponsor in 1887—Jesse Haworth, a cotton magnate from Manchester primarily interested in linen textiles and biblical archaeology—before Petrie met a second financial backer in London—the collector Martyn Kennard, both influencing Petrie’s ‘collecting’ approach in the field.¹⁴ Petrie insisted on paying his own expenses, and the three men agreed to ‘equally divide all [finds] that came to England’, boosting Petrie’s motivation: ‘Thus it was my interest to find as much as I could’.¹⁵

Interestingly, what Petrie did not mention (and Drower characteristically omits) was his long-standing relationship with Francis Galton, pioneer of the eugenics movement and sponsor of any skull photographs Petrie would need.¹⁶ Incidentally, it was also only after a conference presentation and an exhibition of casts of racial types in the autumn of 1887¹⁷ that Petrie, his own boss but attached to new financial strings (which would materialise in field visits from and letters to many stakeholders (Figure 2), left for Egypt, without a dig site defined for the season.¹⁸

2. ‘Discrimination’

Hawara was not Petrie’s first choice. He had previously expressed preferences for Meydum, Abydos, Ahnas el Medineh, and Dashur, but Eugène Grébaut, the French director of the Department of Antiquities, thought the Fayum (Figure 3), untouched for a quarter of a century, needed urgent protection.²⁰

After short stays in Medinet el Fayum and Biahmu, Petrie recognised Hawara’s relevance to his pursuit of a periodisation of Egyptian burial customs.²² Ten kilometres southeast of Medinet el-Fayum, at the entrance of the Fayum, Hawara was indeed a promising, multi-layered site, with its distinctive feature a crumbling but apparently inviolate pyramid—also suspected to encompass Herodotus’ ‘Labyrinth’.²³ According to the Greek historian, the building complex would count more than 3,000 rooms and ‘even surpasses the pyramids’ (Herodotus II: 148).²⁴ Petrie would soon discover not only that the pyramid was built in the Middle Kingdom for Amenemhat III and the correctly identified ‘Labyrinth’ was its temple complex, but also that the site’s cemeteries stretched from Dynasty 12 to the Roman Period and held in store for him possibly his most iconic finds.

Indeed, if Petrie quickly walked the site and defined its excavation strategy in just a few days, aiming initially for the attractive pyramid and the labyrinth, his approach would shift with the first discovery of a ‘portrait-mummy’.²⁵

3. ‘The Labourers’

In the first season, Petrie attacked the pyramid ‘with as many men as possible’, 53 to be exact, drilled in three weeks. Recruiting both local and distant workmen, personally supervising and training them was of utmost importance for Petrie,²⁶ who could be, in a condescending and colonial fashion,²⁷ controlling, harsh on laziness and misconduct, but also caring, on health issues for instance. In fact, the documentation shows that Petrie, commuting between sites and further interests, was not as present as he professed and the basic remuneration and additional reward system he designed to prevent the theft and resale of antiquities (Figure 4) might also have created false incentives. In Petrie’s absence, labourers, who were paid for their finds, could have dug them out or bought them cheaply elsewhere and possibly even forged pieces to get their reward—when Petrie himself did not buy from locals and dealers.²⁸

4. ‘Arrangement of Work’

Efficiency and a focus on a return drove Petrie’s excavation approach. The excavation progress can be retraced in four, overlapping phases (see Figure 5).

As initially decided, the work 1) started in the first season at the pyramid, but despite a bold approach (‘It seemed the most practicable course to tunnel to the middle’),³¹ it proved more laborious than hoped and the burial chamber with its secrets would only be cracked a year later.³² Meanwhile, 2) the somewhat disappointing ‘labyrinth’ in the south was rapidly surveyed³³ until 3) a first portrait find refocused the effort on the northern cemetery. Indeed, Petrie immediately saw the economic value of its discovery: ‘If we can get one or two a week we shall be well repaid’.³⁴ Moreover, he saw the value those depictions could have for eugenic interpretations, immediately writing a letter to Galton.³⁵ The second season, under increased commute pressure due to dealers operating in the Fayum,³⁶ saw the pyramid painstakingly but finally explored, the northern cemetery exhausted, allowing ultimately 4) the excavation of the north-eastern ‘crocodile tombs’.³⁷

Even if Petrie would use stratigraphy only decades later and cut brutal trenches during his excavation in Hawara, scholars argue that his ‘techniques of excavation were vastly superior to those employed by most of his contemporaries’.³⁸ While he often left his men unsupervised, he dived into the fieldwork on important occasions, or when he thought that ‘far more skill and care than a native workman would use’ was needed³⁹—acting like ‘a proto-Indiana Jones’ as Price puts it.⁴⁰ At the same time, his notes prove abundantly that it was, as Stevenson describes, an ‘imperative to provide for collections that was in his mind’s eye […], not the archaeological landscape that might be revealed’.⁴¹

5. ‘Recording in the Field’

A wealth of notes and relatively detailed sketches (Figure 6) make it, uniquely for the time, possible to reconstruct an archaeological framework for Petrie’s finds, but not without challenges in his record-keeping due to the absence of defined context or relative positioning in terms of find spot.⁴² His discoveries were generally numbered with letter codes, but could be inconsistent, were irregularly dated, and he was ‘only rarely, if ever, present at the time of discovery’, relying solely on oral indication from the men excavating and bringing the artefacts to his tent.⁴³ Subsequently, original findspot, context or positioning were seldom recorded.⁴⁴ What often transpires from his notes are quick conclusions and, for the portraits, an ‘ethnographic identification […] bound up with physiognomic assumptions […] [which] would have ramifications long beyond the nineteenth century’.⁴⁵

6. ‘Copying’

There is little original evidence of epigraphic fieldwork in Hawara, and each time there is, it is Petrie sitting to copy important discoveries, like the sarcophagus in Horuta’s family tomb (Figure 7).⁴⁷ It can only be supposed that the published plates were first drawn in the field, but not how or by whom.

7. ‘Photographing’

Similarly, there are few photographs in the Griffith Institute and Petrie Museum archives from Hawara’s first two seasons, and none show discoveries in situ. Admittedly, photographs may have been technically difficult to take on site at that time, though a dozen portraits would get a special shooting in Cairo and be published rapidly.⁴⁹ Only Petrie’s third season in Hawara, two decades later, would provide more field and portrait photographic documentation.⁵⁰

8. ‘Preservation of Objects’

Petrie had a poor regard for the finds he deemed of lower quality. Mummies were regularly ‘cut open’ for amulets⁵¹ and discarded—generally headless, because skulls were of particular interest for Petrie and his eugenics-fixated colleagues: complete mummies or sectioned heads lucky enough to have a portrait for physical comparison (an endeavour which would never lead to conclusive results)⁵² were kept together, the important ones ‘put under [Petrie’s] bed’⁵³ or in special store,⁵⁴ while orphan heads were aligned in a dedicated ‘skullery’. Other artefacts found with the portrait-mummies are seldomly mentioned and complete preserved assemblages are the exception.⁵⁵ Further finds were regularly brought to nearby houses for storage.

In contrast, valuable pieces, generally portraits, were eligible for preservation by Petrie experimenting—not always successfully—with various techniques, well attested to in the documentation.

9. ‘Packing’

Likewise, Petrie, not all too confident in the prudence of local transporters as well as in museum staff at destination, organised custom-made boxes and packed his important finds carefully, even if he had to separate portraits from their mummies for security and for train shipment to Cairo.⁵⁶

10. ‘Publication’

Quite characteristically, Petrie put his ‘Publication’ chapter before further analytical guidance in his Methods & Aims,⁵⁷ as part of the process and final product of the fieldwork. Believing more in rapid dissemination than academic analysis but also economically pressured to satisfy subscribers, he had the urge and discipline to publish rapidly, generally the year following the field season, which he did for Hawara.⁵⁸ After a short chronological abstract, he would go through the main discoveries, with occasional involvement of further specialists, and present comprehensive, packed plates. He has been accused of heavily condensing his published results⁵⁹ but, while it may also be true for his Hawara volumes, he did not yet respect his later rule of thumb of ‘twice as many plates as there are pages’⁶⁰—quite the reverse in fact. While both publications already fulfil his later edition requirements in terms of format and quality, the content may have suffered from the speedy process. Academic language and discipline are limited: references and datings are not necessarily consistent, especially with field notes, and texts and illustrations do not always cover one another, as Drower notes for many of his publications.⁶¹

Interesting add-ons to his ‘publication’ process were his systematic exhibition and press relations efforts. As Thornton notes, both Hawara seasons would immediately be followed by a one-month display in London’s Picadilly Egyptian Hall⁶² along with organised media coverage,⁶³ underlining Petrie’s recognition ‘of the value of marketing for archaeology’,⁶⁴ notably in raising funds.⁶⁵

11. ‘Systematic Archaeology’

Petrie was obsessed by the systematic analysis and arrangement of his discoveries. His exemplary constitution of corpora organised in chronological sequences, neatly shown in Hawara’s unpublished (Figure 8) and published (Figure 9) documentation became iconic but may also have led to overzealousness. Roberts points out that in his ‘need to forge links’ Petrie may occasionally have manipulated the facts and led later scholars to erroneous conclusions, citing assumptions and omissions in Hawara’s family groupings.⁶⁶ Furthermore, as remarks Stevenson, the unique object was awarded higher importance at the cost of the find site itself, moving the ‘wondrous curiosity’ to become ‘merely one nod in the wider taxonomic schemes that pervaded intellectual thought and practice in the late Victorian era’.⁶⁷

12. ‘Archaeological Evidence’

While Hawara’s evidence value is diminished for modern scholars by the lack of context record, Petrie’s finds of 1888–1889 count among the most spectacular in his career.⁷⁰ As intended, he successfully surveyed and properly attributed the pyramid, as well as cleared and definitively identified the ‘labyrinth’. Although, as Petrie admitted himself, ‘perhaps the greatest success at Hawara was in the direction least expected’,⁷¹ with the astonishing portraits, but also the gilded mummies (whilst abhorred by Petrie) and the intact family tomb of Horuta. Along the way, he cleared tombs from Dynasties 12, 20, 26, and 30 on top of the Ptolemaic and Roman burials (condescendingly disregarded by a Petrie ‘establishing a system of values that has endured in Egyptological thinking’),⁷² collected Greek papyri—a copy of the Iliad among them—as well as botanical remains. For roughly ten months on site, often part-time, the discoveries were impressive. The conclusions Petrie drew from them, less so: flawed with prejudice (against the gilded masks, for instance), physiognomic assumptions (creating entire life stories), and pure speculation (portrait-mummies displayed for years in Roman houses), they certainly fall short of the ‘legal proof’ standards he would demand later.⁷³