The Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty

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 report of 1900 on the royal tombs at Abydos, capital of Upper Egypt, covers the first dynasty (c.3100–c.2900 BCE). Although Petrie acknowledges that it is only a preliminary report of ongoing work, he gives detailed descriptions of six 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 follow-up report, The Royal Tombs of the Earliest Dynasties (1901), and the three-part Abydos (1902–4) are among those works also reissued in this series.