![]() Petrie, although dismissive of de Morgan’s scholarship and field practices, accepted this and he set about using the assemblages he discovered at Naqada to give a sequential structure to this newly identified prehistoric era. It was Petrie’s rival, the Frenchman Jacques De Morgan, who argued that these remains did in fact belong to prehistoric times. Such knives, along with distinctive pottery and other grave goods were so unusual, so ‘wholly un-Egyptian’ (Petrie 1896, 8), in comparison to what was then known that Petrie believed that they belonged to a ‘New Race’ who had invaded Egypt at the end of the Old Kingdom. Pitt-Rivers sent Petrie a drawing of his knife in 1895, which Petrie then included in his excavation report on Naqada alongside the knives he had discovered. The two men subsequently had a chance encounter in the shadow of the Great Pyramid in February 1881 (Burleigh and Clutton Brock 1982) and were certainly in correspondence until the General's death in 1900. Petrie and Pitt-Rivers had been acquainted since at least 1877, when Petrie is known to have presented his research on British earthworks to the Royal Archaeological Institute (see Drower 1985, 25). Petrie came across identical examples of unhafted flint implements in situ amongst the grave assemblages of a vast cemetery at Naqada. At the time of the knife’s purchase its date was unknown, but in 1894 the pioneering archaeologist W.M.F. The caramel-coloured flint portion of the Pitt-Rivers knife is distinctive and is of a type known in the literature as a ‘ripple-flaked knife’. “.the finest examples of such work that are known from any country or age” (Petrie 1896, 50) Of the pieces the General purchased from Chester the flint knife is undoubtedly not only one of the finest pieces, but also one of the most famous ancient Egyptian objects ever to have been in Pitt-Rivers’s collection. He also sought buyers for his other acquisitions and regularly offered material to Pitt-Rivers, as his letters in the Salisbury and Wiltshire Museum demonstrate. ![]() Chester (1830–1892) regularly wintered abroad in Egypt where he purchased material for the British Museum, the Ashmolean and the Fitzwilliam Museum. In April 1891 General Pitt-Rivers purchased from the Reverend Greville Chester an ancient Egyptian flint knife set in a decorated ivory handle for 10 pounds. The Pitt Rivers Egyptian flint knife Alice Stevenson, Pitt Rivers Museum
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