Petrie was responsible for laying down many of the foundations which underlie Egyptology to this day. Recognizing the difficulty (in his day, the virtual impossibility) of establishing an absolute chronology for preliterate, prehistoric periods, he devised the ‘sequence dating’ of predynastic pottery. Though now largely superseded, this system was for a long time a valuable technique by which, by tracing the development (sometimes a theoretical one) of one type of pottery from another and hence establishing a sequence of styles, Petrie believed he was able to give a general structure to the prehistoric past which had not previously been attempted.
He established the three (he would have said four) principal southern predynastic cultures known, from the locations in which they were first recognized, as the Badarian, Amratian, and Gerzean civilizations; the last two are now usually identified as Naqada I and Naqada II, whilst a third Naqada level has been added, representing the period immediately before the unification and the foundation of the kingship, which is sometimes referred to as ‘Dynasty 0’.22
Petrie’s publications of the tombs of the early kings and their supporters and of the prehistoric periods alerted the scholarly world to a whole new dimension of history. He also brought out, in the immense stream of publications for which he was responsible, books on the slate or schist palettes which are so significant a category of late predynastic artefact,23 as well as works on scarabs, tools, and many which described excavated sites with important predynastic and archaic components.
World History
