Flinders Petrie has been called the ""Father of Modern Egyptology"" - and indeed he is one of the pioneers of modern archeological methods. Here Margaret S. Drower, a student of Petrie's in the early 1930s, traces his life from his boyhood, when he was already a budding scholar, through his stunning career in the deserts of Egypt to his death in Jerusalem at the age of 89. Drower presents Petrie as he was: an enthusiastic eccentric, diligently plunging into the uncharted past of ancient Egypt. She tells not only of his spectacular finds, including the tombs of the first Pharaohs, the earliest alphabetic script, a Homer manuscript, and a collection of painted portraits on mummy cases, but also of Petrie's important contributions to the science of modern archaeology, such as orderly record-keeping of the progress of a dig and the use of pottery sherds in historical dating.