Pottery Type Series
The Petrie Museum Pottery Gallery
Evolutionary Typology – modern intent and material resistance
Stephen Quirke
Curator, Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology

The Petrie Museum Pottery Gallery is the largest display of an evolutionary typology from Egypt. A little history may explain what this means, in practice and potential. The first Egyptology Professor in Britain, William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) was appointed to the Edwards Chair of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology at University College London, by the bequest of the writer Amelia Edwards (1837-1892). Amelia clearly had Petrie in mind when she specified in her will that the person appointed should be younger than forty, and not be an employee of the British Museum (since 1886 she had helped him find private funds for new work under the Antiquities Service of Egypt). His energy in excavating and publishing had evidently impressed her, and the same industrious drive can be felt throughout his writings, not least in his 1893 inaugural lecture. There he maps a course for British archaeologists to pursue in Egypt, a land under British military occupation since 1882. In that year, at the orders of Gladstone, the British navy had bombarded Alexandria, and British armed forces using new US artillery had overwhelmed Egyptian nationalist forces at Tell el-Kebir. The following decade, a London university professor could feel the particular confidence and anxiety of empire. The 1893 Petrie lecture is accordingly an ambitious and explicitly nationalist manifesto for the emerging discipline of professional university archaeology. Here Petrie declared study of ancient Egyptian art and language to be already amply covered by, respectively, French and German colleagues. Omitting reference to his Egyptian colleagues such as Ahmad Kamal or Mohamad Shaban, he saw material culture as a third domain awaiting study in London as the other European metropolis of the day. He had a clear concept of the tool needed for studying the material: corpora or bodies of artefact types, placed in chronological order with the help of well-dated examples. Dating was still the dominant problem for interpreting sites and finds. Late nineteenth-century archaeology had not yet developed tools of natural-scientific analysis; the absolute dating techniques of thermoluminescence and Carbon 14 measurement lay half a century and more in the future. Moreover, even in the archaeology of a part-literate society such as ancient Egypt, finds were rarely accompanied by explicitly dated ancient inscriptions. However, a sufficient number of find-groups did include inscribed material to support an initial comparative dataset, compiled from examples that had been not only carefully excavated, but also reliably recorded. Once started, the corpus of dated examples of each object-type could then help date new discoveries, closing the circle to produce a mechanical mill of dating, finding, dating… By 1893 Petrie had been supervising digging in Egypt for a decade, and he could offer a comprehensive dozen suggestions for corpora to be assembled from excavated and purchased antiquities. First among these is pottery, for which he wrote:

“Of the pottery we have – from the work of recent years – an almost complete series through the whole of Egyptian history”.

Here “whole” omits the periods before writing, not so much as the conventional divider between history and prehistory, as because the prehistoric periods in Egypt had yet to be uncovered – twentieth-century knowledge of ‘Egypt before writing’ built largely on discovery and mathematical ordering of finds by Petrie himself between 1894 and 1900, and this omission within the Petrie collection would be corrected in the following decades. More remarkably, and never corrected, “whole” also ignores the last two thousand years: for the first and second millennia AD, historical documents were more abundant, and, like most contemporaries, Petrie considered the written records less in need of support from the rest of the archaeological record in the task of finding the past. He continues:

“Most of the types have been published in various works, but it is still desirable to unite all the information in one hand-book of Egyptian pottery, expressing the forms, colours and materials”.

In this sentence, the aim is clearly not a gallery in a museum, but a book for the library and, even more important for Petrie, the archaeologist on excavation. In relation to the whole, each individual pot would correspond to an abstracted ideal “type” to take its place in a hand-book from which the field archaeologist could interpret finds and identify new “types” to complete the history of the whole. For Petrie, pottery deserved space not for itself but as the new spine of material history:

“The pottery is not of particular value, nor of much beauty,, in general; but it is essential for a key to the age of other objects, as it is universally spread on all sites”.

The same utilitarian character that removed this artefact category from traditional art history, ensured its presence across the archaeological landscape on a scale that defies collection beyond select intact pots and samples from the literally billions of sherds. Where philologists and art historians failed, the mathematical mind of Petrie in the empirical tradition would achieve order, and so conquer time.

Ironically, though, the sheer quantity and variety of material continually uncovered in each successive year of excavation defeated the archaeologist. Petrie never did publish his hand-book, and his successors had to continue scouring the “various works” to assemble a pottery typology for use in their fieldwork and library study. However, the Professor was a teacher as well as writer, and each year he was building on his own study collection of Egyptian antiquities along with the several hundred artefacts bequeathed by Amelia Edwards to the university. In 1913 he sold his portion of this expanding asset to the university, and he opened an already cramped display to the public in 1915, his time freer for collection work because he was not eligible for active service in the First World War. By the time he moved from London to Jerusalem to take up the archaeology of Palestine a dozen years later, the UCL collection probably contained well over 50,000 items. Scattered comments on his teaching methods and style have never been collectively researched, but one vivid clue survives among the papers of Georgina Aitken, a 1910s student: a notebook of watercolours, mainly of pottery in the Petrie Egyptian Museum. Her sketches imply active use of the Pottery Type Series for training of students in preparation for fieldwork in Egypt. Future research may reveal how long, and how strongly, the Petrie pottery typology remained in use as teaching resource as well as for individual research and as public gallery. Today, new handbooks of Egyptian pottery prepared in Berlin and Giza still use the Petrie Museum and the Petrie publications as a major point of reference, among the numerous more recent publications and excavated contexts with higher standards of recording. Since the Second World War, the collection has been housed in a different but still appallingly cramped space, where the pottery typology fills one of the two galleries – the largest, perhaps the only display of its kind in the world. Inaccessible and forbidding to many visitors, serried ranks of pottery vases continue to insist implicitly on the sequence of time that Petrie sought and built out of his excavation finds. Among visitors and researchers, ceramics specialists and artists may most appreciate the beauty and skill among the utilitarian. The resource is effectively dormant, which itself conveys its power.

At heart, the late nineteenth century Evolutionary Typology built on a lethal faultline between Type and its early nineteenth-century predecessor, Find-Group. For Petrie, it seems that any individual example of a ‘type’ could be replaced by any other, as he recorded from his 1921-1922 season in Egypt: “objects presented by the British School in Egypt, with reservation of future exchange for better specimens” (PMA/WFP1/16/11/1(3), acquisitions book for 1913-1927, p.41). Yet, initially at least, both the place in the type sequence and the use of that sequence for dating other finds depended on finding at least one example in a group of finds believed to be deposited at the same or a similar time. Any example of a type that came from a find-group should therefore have an individual value beyond that of examples without associated objects. In the 1893 inaugural lecture, for several “subjects”, Petrie emphasises this fundamental role of excavated examples: for the “subject of metallurgy and chemistry”, “dated specimens of alloys and compounds are required, and these cannot be usually obtained except from scientific excavations”; for tools and weapons, “here again scientific excavation is necessary for dated examples”; for amulets “again, very little can be done without scientific – and lucky – excavation”; and for the particular Petrie favourite, weights and measures, “yet again accurate excavation is almost the only key to this subject, as to so many others”. For the creator of each evolutionary typology, perhaps the find-group only served to start the process, and could then be discarded as knowledge advanced. Yet then Petrie notes on weights how “fresh and intricate problems arise as materials increase”; in other words, old type-building-blocks might need to be checked. The essential logic behind the formation and survival of collections proves to be not display to the public – the surface rhetoric of the museum – but access for scientific research – an underlying political economy of knowledge ‘capital’. When Petrie considered it possible to discard one item in favour of another, he was following regular practice in numismatics, the home of the “type” (from Greek tuptein to “strike (a coin)”), perhaps from his earliest apprenticeship in antiquity as an English schoolboy collecting Roman coins. From his teenage years into his professorial excavating career, Petrie was a regular salesman at the British Museum Department of Coins and Medals, which regularly exchanged its own coins if better-preserved examples became available. Exchange may seem the antithesis of museum identity, where acquisition freezes an item into perpetual public ownership for all future reference. Yet the practice can be explained by the distinctive properties of coinage. A coin usually offers up its own production date, in words on its surface; its production at a mint, not its deposition context, is the basis for its historical classification. Therefore a better-preserved example can be considered more useful for classification, and so for collection, than a worn example.

When Petrie built his corpora to demonstrate Type over time, he must have felt free to follow the same numismatic principle of exchange that most collectors may feel. Only from the bitter experience of needing to check an example that had not been retained, would a collector or curator learn a need to keep every object that had been used as a unit of information in historical research. In practice, for pottery, even experience would not enable an archaeologist to continue amassing more material: the ground simply contains too much, and the city too little affordable space to display it. The Petrie Museum Pottery Gallery demonstrates the limits of the original ambition of encyclopaedic collections, to cover everything ever existing and ever produced. Type-selection offered one solution, ideal for the time when the world seemed to Europeans to have lived a simple line of progress from a primitive to a complex technological life. As comparison between different continents and regions revealed different lines of history, and the global tale of progress became a web of conflicting stories, evolutionary typology sank into the background of specialised artefact studies. More lethally for its survival by use, the type collection never fulfilled its teaching ambition: the 1893 lecture seems now prescient in locating the production-sites of archaeological knowledge in the field and in the library – not in the museum. The Petrie collections had grown as by-product of fieldwork, available as teaching material for drawing classes, but never rival to fresh excavation, and rarely more than an illustrating slide. A small proportion of objects might be robust enough to be handled in class, but tend in general to be used mainly to stimulate enthusiasm among already enthusiastic learners. In the mid-late twentieth century, with no distinctive reason to exist in university practice, most study collections from the historical phase of direct European imperialism survived only by apathy. The Petrie typological series stand as closed works of their time, exhibiting not Egypt, so much as the man who collected them and the time when type solved history. In other words, the Pottery Typology in its gallery is a finished work, of an individual, from another time: the definition perhaps of Artwork.

In these terms, the Pottery Gallery is not a dead set, but a dormant volcano. From the original tension between unique item in historical find group, and abstracted type in historical production series, the thirty-six pottery-cases become an archaeological echo of time, unwittingly echoing the ancient Egyptian division of time into three decans or dominant star-groups each of the twelve months of the solar year. Forty centuries ago, charts of decans painted on coffin-lids guarded immortal life against the shock of historical destruction, in the aspiration of those who could afford the expression to aspire to eternal life after death, in the art and script of eternity in ancient Egypt. After the Blitz destroyed their prewar UCL gallery, the postwar curators Anthony Arkell, then Harry Smith, then Barbara Adams reassembled the Petrie pottery series in solid wood glass-fronted cases paid by the Hill bequest, in the new space assigned after the Blitz had destroyed their prewar UCL gallery. Here the hundreds of pots look out on the interested and disinterested visitor. As a coin carries its life history in its mint and wear, each pot has its “context”, an original moment of deposition: solemn burial, or daily discard, or sometimes modern forgery and deposit in the salesroom. In the Petrie Pottery Typology, there is a record for that context for a greater proportion than in any other museum. Where the archaeologist recorded it, we can tell that this seven-thousand-year-old food-bowl was held by the hands of an old man to the mouth, the only object preserved from his burial, or that these two pots lay with two teenagers placed almost touching side by side five and half thousand years ago, or that this handle from a small flask rested for two thousand years beside a woman of a city they then called Akanthon, and that she wore a ring of gold incised with the figure of a woman in flowing Greek robes. Then we turn to the rest of their life-stories, the unknown part, did these past people choose these vessels themselves, did others, who used them, did the user make the vessel herself or himself, did the makers know the users, did the vessel travel… or to the other pottery for which we know less, or nothing, about the finding, or to the rest of their object lives. Out of each object, in turn and in unison, a tumult of sound explodes over the viewer who can listen and hear. Nor are the sounds of the past always a comfort: they often carry conflict, in resistance to the glass cases and conformist labels, by which we anaesthetise the past. In the middle of the sequence, a plain food-bowl gives voice to the pain and pleasure of the past as a man writes a letter to his dead father on the inner, and to his mother on the outer face of the bowl. The bowl is from Middle Egypt, close to a site destroyed by the Nile floods of 1821 where the ancient city Tjebu lay beneath the houses of the medieval village Qau al-Kabir. By the pottery typology, and by the handwriting on the bowl, the tomb can be dated to about 2100-2000 BC. The lives in the letter are known only by this one source:

“Shepsi addresses his father Inkhenmut:
This is a reminder of your journey to the dungeon, to where Hetepwy son of Senu was,
when you brought the leg of beef, when this your son came with Newayf,
and you said “Welcome! both, sit and eat meat!”
… Am I being injured in your presence?”.

And in disbelief again on the other side:

“Shepsi addresses his mother Iy:
This is a reminder of your telling this your son,
“Bring me quails for me to eat!”
And this your son brought you seven quails, and you ate them.
Am I being injured in your presence?”.

Shared time and injury: which medium today allows the material of another time its own power to explode into ours?