The Royal Tombs of the Earliest Dynasties

A pioneering Egyptologist, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) excavated over fifty sites and trained a generation of archaeologists. His meticulous recording of artefacts and his sequence dating of pottery types found in Egypt and Palestine made Near Eastern archaeology a more rigorous and scientific discipline. This fully illustrated follow-up report of 1901 on the royal tombs at Abydos, capital of Upper Egypt, covers the early dynastic period (c.3100–c.2700 BCE). Petrie gives detailed descriptions of eight tombs and the associated finds. A chapter on the inscriptions is provided by Francis Llewellyn Griffith (1862–1934). Petrie wrote prolifically throughout his long career for both specialists and non-specialists. His preliminary report, The Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty (1900), and the three-part Abydos (1902–4) are among those works also reissued in this series.