[3] He held the first chair of Egyptology in the United Kingdom, and excavated many of the most important archaeological sites in Egypt in conjunction with his Irish-born wife, Hilda Urlin.

He also ventured his first archaeological opinion aged eight, when friends visiting the Petrie family were describing the unearthing of the Brading Roman Villa in the Isle of Wight.

In 1904, Petrie published Methods and Aims in Archaeology, the definitive work of his time, in which he defined the goals and methodology of his profession along with the more practical aspects of archaeology—such as details of excavation, including the use of cameras in the field.

Insights include the contention that research results were dependent on the personality of the archaeologist, who, he felt, needed to possess broad knowledge as well as insatiable curiosity.

Mr. Flinders Petrie, a contributor of interesting experiments on kindred subjects to Nature, informs me that he habitually works out sums by aid of an imaginary sliding rule, which he sets in the desired way and reads off mentally.

[13] In his teenage years, Petrie surveyed British prehistoric monuments,[14] commencing with the late Romano-British 'British Camp' that lay within yards of his family home in Charlton, in attempts to understand their geometry.

His father had corresponded with Piazzi Smyth about his theories of the Great Pyramid [citation needed] and Petrie travelled to Egypt in early 1880 to make an accurate survey of Giza, making him the first to properly investigate how the pyramids there were constructed; many theories had been advanced on this, and Petrie read them all, but none was based on first hand observation or logic.

[15] Petrie's published reports of this triangulation survey, and his analysis of the architecture of Giza therein, were exemplary in its methodology and accuracy, disproving Smyth's theories and still providing much of the basic data regarding the pyramid plateau to this day.

He described Egypt as "a house on fire, so rapid was the destruction" and felt his duty to be that of a "salvage man, to get all I could, as quickly as possible and then, when I was 60, I would sit and write it all".

[17] By the end of the Tanis dig, he ran out of funding but, reluctant to leave the country in case it was renewed, he spent 1887 cruising the Nile taking photographs as a less subjective record than sketches.

During this time, he also climbed rope ladders at Sehel Island near Aswan to draw and photograph thousands of early Egyptian inscriptions on a cliff face, recording embassies to Nubia, famines and wars.

Petrie surveyed a group of tombs in the Wadi al-Rababah (the biblical Hinnom) of Jerusalem, largely dating to the Iron Age and early Roman periods.

[citation needed] From 1891, he worked on the temple of Aten at Tell-el-Amarna, discovering a 300-square-foot (28 m2) New Kingdom painted pavement[dubious – discuss] of garden and animals and hunting scenes.

[6] They were initially surprised that this building which they were excavating During the field season of 1895/6, at the Ramesseum, Petrie and the young German Egyptologist Wilhelm Spiegelberg became friends.

Spiegelberg was in charge of the edition of many texts discovered by his British colleague, and Petrie offered important collections of artefacts to the University of Strasbourg.

In 1897, the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität Straßburg gratefully conferred to Petrie the title of doctor honoris causa,[21] and in June 1902 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).

The dig team included Beatrice Orme, David Randall-MacIver, Arthur Cruttenden Mace, Henrietta Lawes and Hilda Petrie.

As they were thoroughly exploring and studying the temple of Hathor and the surrounding mining area, they discovered amongst, the Egyptian texts, a significant series of foreign inscriptions.

In 1928, while digging a cemetery at Luxor, this proved so huge that he devised an entirely new excavation system, including comparison charts for finds, which is still used today.

His body was interred in the Protestant Cemetery on Mount Zion, but he donated his head (and thus his brain) to the Royal College of Surgeons of London.

[8] In his 1906 sociological series "Question of the day", he expressed these views, ascribing social problems of England to racial degeneration brought on by communism, trade unionism, and government assistance to people groups he found inferior.

Believing that society is the product of racial biology,[37] he contended that the culture of Ancient Egypt was derived from an invading Caucasoid "Dynastic Race", which had entered Egypt from the south in late predynastic times, conquered the "inferior, exhausted mulatto" natives, and slowly introduced the higher Dynastic civilisation as it interbred with them.

[8][38] With relation to some of his earlier conclusions in 1895, where Petrie had written: "the Egyptians were largely formed from Libyan immigrants to begin with; the basis of the race apparently being a mulatto of Libyan-negro mixture judging from the earliest skeletons at Medum.