21 Facts About Hilda Petrie

Hilda travelled and worked with Sir Flinders Petrie to excavate and record numerous sites in Egypt, and later in Palestine.

Hilda Petrie took part in archaeological excavations and surveys throughout her married life, except for a period while their two children were young.

Hilda Petrie's work was published, and she gave public lectures in London and elsewhere.

Hilda Petrie Mary Isabel Urlin was born in Dublin in 1871, the youngest of five daughters of an English couple long resident in Ireland, Denny Urlin and Mary Elizabeth Urlin.

When Hilda Petrie was four years old, her family moved back to London and she was educated by a governess along with other children of similar age.

Hilda Petrie preferred the country life and initially disliked London, but as she grew older she enjoyed visiting its museums and art galleries.

Hilda Petrie studied at King's College for Women, where she took Professor Seeley's geology course, and would go on field trips equipped with a notebook and hammer.

Hilda Petrie took courses in facsimile drawing, for which she displayed a considerable talent.

When she was twenty-five, she was introduced by Henry Holiday to Egyptology Professor Flinders Petrie at University College London, who needed to employ someone with the accurate copying skills Hilda had by then acquired.

In 1957, Lady Hilda Petrie died of a stroke in University College Hospital, on the opposite side of the road to where she and her husband had worked to found and to fund what was England's first training school for archaeologists.

Hilda Petrie left for Egypt for the first time on 25 November 1896, and was thereafter to accompany her husband into the field every year except for a period when their son and daughter were young.

One large sarcophagus had some 20,000 hieroglyphs to record, and Hilda Petrie spent days lying on the ground to copy them.

Hilda Petrie's role did not include running the domestic side of the expedition, which was undertaken by Flinders Petrie as it had been done for many years, with excavators expected to live on canned food and ship's biscuits.

Hilda Petrie used the Naqada plates to identify the shape of pots, slates and flints and, once Flinders had entered these finds onto the plan, Hilda was responsible for writing on each find the number of the grave in which it had been found.

In 1904, Hilda Petrie was involved in the work at Ehnasya, contributing almost half of the plates of the resultant volume, and visiting Buto.

Hilda Petrie went from Saqqara to join Flinders Petrie and Lina Eckenstein at a temple site on a hilltop at Serabit el-Khadim, where there were large numbers of inscribed stones, statues and stelae.

Hilda Petrie left for Egypt again in January 1913 to rejoin Flinders Petrie at Kafr Ammar; three painted Twelfth Dynasty tombs had been found a few miles away at Riqqeh and urgently needed recording.

When war broke out in 1914, Hilda Petrie turned her attention to several women's organisations, including using her fundraising expertise as Honorary Secretary of the Scottish Women's Hospitals, which maintained hospital services for the Serbian division of the Russian army; she was later awarded the Serbian order of St Sava.

Hilda Petrie arrived in Gaza on 26 November 1926, where she supervised, registered, and paid the excavation workers, although she spent most of the next three years in England seeking to raise funds for the work, which, unfortunately, did not have the same appeal to her supporters as had the work in Egypt.

Flinders Petrie died on 29 July 1942, and Hilda Petrie saw out the rest of the war living at the American School of Palestine while editing his papers, which she had determined to send to the newly formed library of the Department of Antiquities at Khartoum.

In 1947 Hilda Petrie returned to Hampstead, England where she wound up the affairs of the British School and was in 1952 at last able to publish the tomb reliefs that she had copied in 1905 at Saqqara, before her death in 1957.