William Matthew Flinders Petrie was the grandson of the first man to chart Australia. When he was four Petrie became so ill his mother became convinced that he was a weak child. Since she was a scholar herself, she taught him at home and introduced him to Hebrew, Latin and Greek. Later on, he was taught by a governess, but when he became ill again, his official education effectively ended.

Petrie had an inquisitive mind and developed an insatiable appetite for facts, toying with mathematics, discovering geometry and Euclid and devising chemical experiments at the age of 15. His father, an industrial engineer, taught him the use of a sextant and how to map sites, so by the time he was 18 Petrie spent days alone making surveys around his home. He wrote his first book at the age of 22 on the recovery of Ancient Measurements from Monuments, based on work he had done at Stonehenge.

Grandson of Captain Matthew Flinders, explorer of the coasts of Australia, he was judged too frail to attend school and was educated at home by his parents. In his youth, he began studying coins and weights as a boy. With his father he took up surveying, modifying available instruments to make them more precise. His only formal education was a University Extension Course in mathematics.
Under the influence of the pyramidology theories of Prof. Piazzi Smyth, he went to Egypt in 1880 to survey the pyramids of Gizeh. Petrie's measurements proved that Piazzi Smyth's theories were based on a logical fallacy, but he had become 'hooked' on the archaeology of Egypt. With two brief exceptions, he spent the rest of his career studying it. These brief exceptions were the periods he spent excavating in Palestine.
Although these interludes were brief, they were highly significant for Levantine archaeology. The first interlude was a six-week season of excavations at Tell el-Hesy (now transcribed as Tell el-Hesi) in the spring of 1890. During this short period he introduced into Palestine the concept that a tell is a manmade mound of successive, superimposed 'cities'. He established the dating of these 'cities' by means of their associated ceramic assemblage and of the cross-dating of these assemblages with reference to similar finds made in Egyptian contexts. Having thus laid the foundation for all future work in Levantine archaeology, he returned to Egypt, where he excavated for the next thirty years.
His second period in Palestine, 1927-1942, was at the end of his career. At this time he investigated 'Egypt over the Border', the frontier sites between Egypt and Canaan. He excavated a series of sites on the lower reaches of the Wadi Ghazzeh, Tell Jemmeh, Tell Far'a, Tell Ajjul, and Sheikh Zowayd. These sites revealed remains dating from the Chalcolithic to the Hellenistic periods.

Between 1880 and 1882, Petrie went to Egypt to confirm those results, since the book was heavily criticized. He traveled to Giza and the Great Pyramids, Saqqara, Dahshur and the Bent Pyramid, and Abu Rawash, exploring the pyramids’ interiors and measured and triangulated. Petrie also walked through the Theban tombs behind the temple of Medinet Habu. He returned again to Giza, measuring the thickness of sides and base of the royal sarcophagus and of the inside floor. He eventually found that every measurement Piazzi-Smyth had taken was inaccurate. Petrie’s own survey, the Pyramids and Temples of Giza, was published in 1883 and remains a standard in the field.

Petrie's most significant contribution to archaeology was in 1899 when he developed and applied a method of statistical analysis to the material from the prehistoric cemeteries at Naqada, Hu (Diospolis Parva), and Abadiya. Such methods were not applied again until the 1970s, at which time sophisticated computer programs were used, where Petrie had used slips of card.

Over the next few months, more than 2200 shallow pit graves were discovered, each occupant curled into fetal position and accompanied by lavish grave goods, from ivory figurines and combs to simple slate palettes, and a variety of pots and jars. No inscriptions were found, leading Petrie to conjecture that these graves belonged to foreigners who had invaded Egypt during the First Intermediate Period. But by 1899, after examining more cemeteries at Abydos and Hu, Petrie concurred with the theory held by Quibell and others, that these were the cemeteries of the earliest settlers in Egypt.

Petrie began to analyze the grave goods methodically. Grave A might contain certain types of pot in common with Grave B; Grave B also contained a later style of pot, the only type to be found in Grave C. By writing cards for each grave and filing them in logical order, Petrie established a full sequence for the cemetery, concluding that the last graves were probably contemporary with the First Dynasty. The development of life along the Nile thus was revealed, from early settlers to farmers to political stratification.

Three phases of this Predynastic Naqada culture are now recognized, as first set described by Flinders Petrie. The earliest is called Naqada I or Amratian (since similar pottery types were found at the site of el-Amra). This is characterized by black-topped red ware with white cross-lined bodies. The next culture was Naqada II, or Gerzean, characterized by decorated wavy-handled pots.

Flinders Petrie left Egypt in 1923 and went on to excavate in the Near East, where he traced Egyptian trade and cultural links, and added even more information to the field of Egyptology and expanded the breadth of growing knowledge of our ancient past.