IN THE DESERT

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 122, 19 November 1926, Page 15

IN THE DESERT

I A WOMAN ARCH^OLOGIST HOW LAD? FLINDEBS PETRIE HJ.EPS HER HUSBAND. An alert, fine-featured woman, with an eager face, long artistic-fingered, hands, and grey, hair cut and brushed like a medieval page's, has been telling me how the career of an excavator may grip her sex no less than the other. She is Lady Petrie, wife of Sir Flinders ; Petrie, the distinguished Egyptologist, who knows more about the prehistoric Egyptians than the dynastic Egyptians knew themselves, states a special correspondent of the "Evening Standard." Lady Petrie will—as always—accompany her husband's expedition this month, as its official draughtsman. This time its object is not Egypt, but South Palestine, whore search is to be made for traces of the Badarian civilisation, the earliest yet known. She has been "digging," as she calls it, since 1897, and is a skilled technical draughtsman. The scale drawings required are as highly specialised as engineering plans. "I was making drawings'for my husband years ago, almost before I knew him," she told me.

Life at the diggings is rough, but this has never dismayed her. ' "We live, usually, in tents —or if we are staying very long in mud huts that we build ourselves. Most 06 our food we take with as—in tins! And in most places in the desert one can sink a well and get water, though we have on one occasion had to send fifteen miles for it, every day, and on another seven. In the latter case we used to send a camel. That was at Sinai—in many ways the roughest experience I have over had. We were six days' journey from ainywhere—six days' journey to get rice and lentils! We lived at the valley head, and climbed a precipice every morning to work. . We found many huge monuments that year, and deciphered countless inscriptions." Sir Flinders Petrie's excavating I parties usually include from two to I teh students, who accompany him to be initiated into the work on the spot, I and a nucleus of trained; Arab work- ' men, numbering from twenty to a hundred, who are reinforced by unskilled labour recruited in the locality, and working under them. There are quite often women archaeologists among the students. Lady Petria's work is highly important in her husband's system of excavation, which demands that scale drawings be-,made of every find before it is disturbed, the exact position of the objects discovered, relative to each other, carefully measured, and the objects ticketed —so that .later it is possible to reconstruct the whole thing with perfect exactitude. "It is-desperately hard work keeping up with a big digging," says Lady Potrie. "There may be a number of pits, and of course one cannot watch them all, all the time. The rule is that the native workmen, who are extraordinarily delicate-handed and careful, dig down till they como to :—say the top of a jar or vase. Then they send for us, and we finish getting it out. That part can only be done by the most highly skilled excavators. .Sometimes an inscription will simply vanish if it is exposed to a breath of air.' . . I have had to copy some, aud making drawings before they were moved, that would have perished if I had breathed on them. And of course packing is the most delicate business of all.'

"It is our way always to give good backsheesh to tho workmen for any finds they make themselves. It is the only way to get good results and to make sure that they will not hold backsmall objects" for sale elsewhere.: ,We pay them the market value of the goods —and we get gold-work and gold ornaments every year. In the case of gold finds, in the old days, when we ;had sovereigns, we used to weigh them'- up in front of the men, the ornaments in the scales against the sovereigns!'"

In spite of this precaution against theft, Lady Petrie has nothing but good -to speak pf the Arabs. . She has dealt with gangs of hundreds of native workmen, arid found them less trouble than many an English housewife finds her;cook and hpusc-parlourmaid. "They aro splendid workers, and so industrious," she says, "But of course you have to keep an eye on them. We do everything- with and for them ourselves —we have no foreman between us and, them. ,• In* the morning we call them when it is still dark, and at dawD we are ready to start work with them. "We live on the spot among them, and exactly,as, they live. We talk to them in Arabic. And so they come to like and trust us. In fact, it is all most patriarchal. We doctor them when they are ill, and bank for them all, their money they leave with us, and every week .we have to make up their accounts for them, and recite them out in Arabic. They have marvellous memories, too. Never forget an item on the account from week to week. They workj of course, only six days a week. But we have to work seven, and the extra day is' hardly as much as •■ we need to' catch up the arrears of classification and packing." For what one may call" excavation de luxe" Lady Petrie has nothing but sc6rn. "If you stay at an hotel miles away, and drive out to tho diggings every morning about 11 o'clock to see what has been found, you may expect to discover nothing," she says, "and you may also be sure that if anything has been found it will have been hidden away safely long before you get there." . It is in reconstructing history—"interpreting" the finds, sho calls it—that Lady Petrie insists the greatest work is done. "That is where the master mind comes in," she says. "And another thing, too, is the choice of the site for excavating. No, I'm afraid I cannot tell you how that is done, but there is a great art and a great knowledge in it. We have frequently excavated spots that had been searched and left, as 'finished' by other archaeologists ? and made some of our richest finds there. There are two types of the actual 'diggings,' according to what one expects to find. Sometimes pits aro sunk—l :ivc known some as deep 'as'7oft, and-havo to go up and down b„. rope ladder to do my drawing. Sometimes the soil is rolled back from one spot, in excavating a buried city, on to another; and as soon as one square has been thoroughly searched the pit so made is filled in by the soil rolled back from the next. We practicalljncver are able to leave things where they are found. The Arabs steal the stone, and, besides, the sand blows over them again."