News and Views

Abstract

ON June 19, Dr. and Mrs. Robert Mond entertained a large number of distinguished guests at a dinner held at the Savoy in honour of Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie, who this season has completed his fiftieth year of exploration and research in Egyptian archæology. Addresses and messages of congratulation and good will were received from the British Academy and other scientific and learned bodies. It is no exaggeration to say, however, that outside the immediate circle present on this occasion, the whole world of those who are interested in humane studies now offers its tribute of veneration to a great scholar and research worker. To the historian of the future, Sir Flinders Petrie will not merely rank with the one or two great and familiar names in Egyptology; he will stand out as the first to set the study of Egyptian archæology upon a scientific basis—one whose work has served not only as a model and guide for all subsequent research, but also has made ancient Egyptian culture live in the eyes of a modern generation. The system of sequence dating which he elaborated as a classification and a means of assigning to their proper horizon the material objects of Egyptian culture from pre-dynastic times to the close of its existence as a separate entity in the ancient world, equally with the order and method he exemplified in his own excavations and inculcated and demanded in the work of others, have laid archæological studies under a debt to him which it is difficult to estimate. By maintaining steadfastly the point of view of the anthropologist he has kept Egyptology in relation with wider studies and saved it from the aridity of the specialist outlook with which it was threatened.