The Correspondence of Flinders and Hilda Petrie

Apollo, March, 2005 by Gertrud Seidmann

The Correspondence of Flinders and Hilda Petrie Edited by Margaret Drower Aris and Phillips, 20 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0 85668 748 0

Remarkable letters bring to life the marriage and careers of two staunch and intrepid pioneering Egyptologists, from fighting off robbers to nearly being buried alive, writes Gertrud Seidmann.

William Matthew Flinders Petrie first went out to Egypt in 1880, aged twenty-seven, intending to make accurate measurements of the Great Pyramid, which had been the subject of a fanciful account by the Scottish Astonomer Royal. This ultimately successful enterprise was undertaken under conditions of considerable hardship, in which he positively revelled, finding his 'ideal habitation' in a stone tomb, constructing a 'very comfortable' bed out of one-inch board that, when hitched up sideways, made 'a very nice easy chair' in which to settle for his weekly letter home. With help from contacts in Cairo, he found trusty, English-speaking Ali, who was to be the overseer of his workforce for many years to come; for his fascination for Egypt was such that this first visit was followed by more than forty years of exploration.

Egypt became his home every winter, as he ranged far and wide from Delta to Upper Egypt, on foot or donkey-back, to prospect for promising sites, then hiring labourers for excavation and recovery of finds. He subjected his workforce to a draconian regime, leaving no room for an idle moment--instant dismissal followed the detection of a man sitting down. Each labourer had his troop of small boys, carrying the excavation spoils in baskets to the surface. They were not treated more leniently. Imps who planned to wait for each other at the bottom of the excavation and come up together, singing, were soon stopped, singing and all. These exploits yielded a host of results: monuments were measured, inscriptions copied, reliefs cast in guttapercha, objects large and small retrieved and shipped home to museums and to finance future excavations.

This satisfying existence was to be further enriched by Petrie's successful wooing of a gifted woman artist, Hilda Urlin, eighteen years his junior. Immediately after their wedding in 1897 they set out for Egypt, where his next campaign was to take place at Dendera, north of Luxor and Karnak. Hilda was overwhelmed by her first experience of exotic Egypt, but took instantly to the austere and hard-working life of excavation.

She turned out to be the explorer's perfect wife, companion and collaborator, accompanying him henceforth year after year, taking on administration, finance, cleaning, copying and recording finds, mending broken sculptures with tapioca, putting her talents to good use (the book includes several delicate watercolours) and, not least, a literary gift that complements Petrie's reports with a wealth of human detail.

Margaret Drower's selections are a delight to read. As an ancient historian and Egyptologist in her own right and biographer of Petrie, her knowledge of his life and exploits is unsurpassed, but this volume adds a further dimension with its portrait of Hilda, undoubtedly a 'character' and a worthy successor of those intrepid Victorian women explorers in long skirts. Not that Hilda held with long skirts--or indeed skirts at all. Getting to the top of a pyramid 'without the usual tedious help', leaping from ledge to ledge, she found 'the clamber of no exertion (with skirt off)'. An assistant describes her outfit: 'Her costume out here takes the biscuit. Usually a blue native gown, such as the poorer class men wear, and a sort of small motor cap, plenty of bare throat and ditto leg, no stockings of course!' How shocked he would have been to read Hilda telling her sister, that 'it has been my practice lately, to wear out of doors, 6-10 a.m. and 4-6 p.m. no underclothes whatever!'

From first to last, she accompanied Flinders, roughing it on his prospecting expeditions and in primitive camps. Reaching one site involved a daily tramp over a slatted bridge, emptiness yawning below. They explored a small tomb with 'a perilous descent of 40 ft, which it was great fun to scramble down, and [we] had to swing ourselves up the slope in the shaft with a rope'. Perils were met with sang-froid: 'Sitting copying in the deep pit of [a] cellar one day, I heard the well-known roar of falling earth, and was immediately buried up to the waist with cartloads of earth and bricks. One of our Arabs near rushed up to help and I made him pick the bricks off me and shovel the earth away. Their first instinct is to drag one out straightaway.'

There are experiences of fearful sandstorms; during a hurricane they stood for three hours holding up the roof of the expedition house. Less perilous but equally disagreeable was a visit to an unspeakably dirty harem--'I had only a brown holland galabieh and high riding-boots to the knee, but twenty fleas were discovered thereon'. She endured almost three weeks of high fever; Petrie had a nasty fall on hard rock and 'found everything difficult for 3 days'. He had his watch stolen, and there were continual worries about marauders and robbers, but 'we are a very happy party', Hilda writes from Palestine, where they moved, further excavating permits for Egypt having been refused, making their home in Jerusalem. She had just seen several of their companions off for New Year's Eve on a tramp of nine miles to Gaza, 'over very rough ground, in ties, collars, and breast-pocket handkerchiefs, and clean boots', complete with ukulele, while the Petries stayed happily in camp.