Flinders Petrie

Flinders Petrie by Philip Alexius de Laszlo, 1934 (detail) The distinctive black-topped Egyptian pottery of the Predynastic period associated with Flinders Petrie's Sequence dating system, Petrie Museum

Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie FRS FBA ((1853-06-03)3 June 1853 – (1942-07-29)29 July 1942), commonly known as simply Sir Flinders Petrie, was an English Egyptologist and a pioneer of systematic methodology in archaeology and the preservation of artefacts. 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. Some consider his most famous discovery that of the Merneptah Stele, an opinion with which Petrie himself concurred. Undoubtedly at least as important is his 1905 discovery and correct identification of the character of the Proto-Sinaitic script, the ancestor of almost all alphabetic scripts.