Milton C. Fisher
“This stele will be better known in the world than anything else I have found, “1 Petrie announced to his surprised team. They were seated at dinner the evening of the discovery at Luxor (ancient Thebes) of the now-famous Merenptah Stele in the mortuary temple of the pharaoh of that name. The year was 1896, and Petrie was just one-quarter into his amazingly long career. He saw at once the significance of this inscription for Biblical history.
Merenptah was pharaoh of Egypt from about 1213 to 1203 B.C., and his naming on this stone of Israel (“YSRL”) as a national entity in the land of Canaan (though his boast, “laid waste without seed” proved a gross exaggeration!) is of real significance for the dating of the Exodus-Conquest. This contemporary Egyptian record provides compelling evidence that the Israelite conquest of Canaan occurred early in the Late Bronze Age, in keeping with the ca. 1400 B.C. date one arrives at from Biblical chronology.
Flinders Petrie had begun his career as an Egyptologist in 1880, at age 27, urged on by his father, who funded his early investigations and measurements of the great pyramids at Giza. He labored slowly and methodically, because he realized how the gold-rush mentality of most explorers seriously threatened all hope of accurate historical analysis. His own cautious and meticulous approach dated back to his boyhood, which justifies the “Seventy Years” in the title of his 1932 book,
BSP 4:2 (Spring 1991) p. 35
published at age 79. Petrie had, in fact, expressed a mature archaeological opinion at age eight, upon hearing grownups talking about the frantic digging out of a Roman villa on the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England. The lad protested that the earth should be “pared away, inch by inch, to see all that was in it and how it lay.”2
Though this great patriarch of archaeologists, as some call him, spent the bulk of his active career in Egypt, it was a four-month foray into Palestine in 1890 under the auspices of the Egypt Exploration Fund (allowing time for a feud with the EEF to clear) that led Petrie to some conclusions which were indeed to establish him as the father of Palestinian archaeology. He had long championed the importance of commonplace artifacts, especially pottery, even broken sherds, as the key or “alphabet” of archaeological dating. Now he hit upon an observation which triggered application of his theory.
Satisfied that little was to be accomplished by further probing at a couple of coastal sites, Petrie busied himself exploring further inland. Something very special struck him about the appearance of an imposing mound known as Tell el-Hesi. The wadi along one side had for years, each rainy season, cut away the hill, exposing what was to his practiced eye a clear cross-section of the stratified remains of a notable town. We recall that the German banker-turned-archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann was first to recognize such a mound to be an accumulated succession of rebuilt cities, back in the 1870’s (see Archaeology and Biblical Research, Winter 1990, pp. 8-9). Now for the first time came a genius who could actually draw a full vertical section of such a ruin, then begin to roughly date the individual strata from simple pottery remains embedded at each level.
It was Flinders Petrie’s fascination with Egyptian pottery that led him first of all to familiarize himself with the chronological sequence of the forms and decorations, relative to dated dynasties. This provided the key to dating otherwise undatable strata in Palestine. Thus, two factors combined here: first, that the trained eye could discern an evolution of styles in pottery manufacture in successive periods; second, the presence of some imported Egyptian ware, already known to Petrie, made possible the fixing of a relatively definite date to Palestinian pottery unearthed from the same level of occupation. Mystery solved!
Any number of his excavations could have made a name for this self-schooled genius. His work in Egypt continued to 1926, when he returned to Palestine, where he remained until his death in 1942. Work at Akhenaton’s palaces at Tell el-Amarna, in the tombs of Abydos, on numerous temples, pyramids, and mastabas from Cairo to Luxor was followed by discovery of proto-Canaanite inscriptions in Sinai — the oldest known alphabet on earth.
As W.F. Albright summed it up in his October 1942 tribute, “Not only was Sir Flinders Petrie fabulously industrious, he was also amazingly original. To him the archaeologist must trace nearly all the fundamental discoveries with regard to the principles of our science.”3