Petrie's

but not Petrie died in 1942 during World War II. He was 89. He died in a hospital in Jerusalem with his wife by his bedside. Sounds lovely. Here, his story takes an unusual turn, or perhaps not an unusual turn for Petrie. You see, he bequeaths something to the Royal College of Surgeons in London, a special gift, his head. It was given to them for scientific research, but due to the war another famous archaeologist, Nacin Gluck, then the director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, later the Albright Institute, had to store it in the basement of the school for a year before it could make its way to London. The body remained and was buried in Jerusalem. Here, on the previous slide, you saw that Flinders even started out a little bit unusual. He was still born, but somehow the nurse brought him back to life, only to hand him to another nurse who promptly dropped him on said head. He bore that mark for a long time. Now, this may seem a strange way to start and strange behavior to focus on, though for readers of VAR, maybe not. Petrie really was the first near-eastern archaeologist, and his genius has not been surpassed. Petrie excavated more than 50 sites and wrote 98 books. I'm feeling a little behind, but his real achievement was to bring scientific method, sort of for his day, into the field. As a child, he was afflicted with chronic asthma, so severe he could not attend school. Consequently, the greatest archaeological genius of modern times never went to school. Don'teach this at home. Petrie's mother, Anne Flinders Petrie, was a gifted linguist who taught herself Hebrew, Greek, Latin, German, French, and Italian. Petrie was hopeless when it came to languages. The minute he learned one lesson and moved on to the next, he forgot what he had learned in the lesson before. He made ten tries at learning Latin, and five or six he couldn't remember in trying to learn Greek. Never got any of them.