Letters from the Desert: The Correspondence of Flinders and Hilda Petrie

Flinders Petrie began his long association with ancient Egypt and the Near East when he went to Giza to survey the pyramids in 1880. Until his death in 1942, he dug almost continuously. During his long career Petrie revolutionised Egyptian archaeology but this book is not about his scientific work or finds, which are published elsewhere. The letters and journals that make up this book have been selected by Margaret Drower for the vivid picture they paint of living in Egypt and Palestine over sixty years. They describe Petrie's austere approach to excavating and life on a dig where creature comforts were non-existent. Petrie married in 1897 and many of Hilda's accounts of workmen, villagers and dig life are just as fascinating and vibrant. Above all they reveal how she took to dig life like a duck to water.