All the panels for the Typecast: Flinders Petrie and Francis Galton exhibition are now downloadable from petriemuseum.com. Each blog post gives additional information, research or audience reactions to the exhibition. Please feel free to comment in response. For more information on the Francis Galton Centenary and related events, please visit the Galton Centenary page.
For about 3-4 months in 1886-87 Flinders Petrie took photographs and casts of different ‘racial types’ on Egyptian monuments, mainly in and around Luxor and Thebes at Karnak and tombs in the Valley of the Kings. This panel (02_04_V3) describes what Petrie did and how the ‘types’ were chosen. Tracking down these images in their [...]
Flinders Petrie prepared the casts for display and to be photographed in the publication Racial Photographs from Egyptian Monuments. This panel (TypecastPanel_06) considers the nature of the contents and the materials used. the publication itself, though debated at the large BAAS conference as well as through papers at the Anthropological Institute, did not have a [...]
Objects in museums and collections often have labels that use expressions or descriptions now considered outmoded or even offensive. This panel (TypecastPanel_07) discusses the meaning ‘race’ in the nineteenth century and the terminology used around a specific object. What does ‘political correctness’ mean anyway? Does it describe an over sensitivity to language and offense that [...]
The next big archaeological project Petrie went on to was his first excavation at Hawara in the Fayum in 1888-89. Petrie was searching for the lost Labyrinth from the Middle Kingdom period of Egypt but also found a Roman cemetery full of mummys with ‘portrait’ panels attached. This panel (TypecastPanel_08) explores how these panels were [...]
Francis Galton (1822 – 1911) was a scientist who worked on biostatistics and human genetics, as well as a traveller and inventor of scientific instruments. This panel (TypecastPanel_09) explains why his material is in University College London. This panel used a photograph taken in 1882 by Galton of six patients in the Bethlem Royal Hospital [...]
Flinders Petrie returned to his 1887 racial photographs many times throughout his work. We have one example in the Petrie Museum of a ‘racial type’ cast that he took due to his belief that it looked like the pharaoh Akhenaten and his inclusion of it in a in his 1894 excavation report on Amarna (detailed [...]
In this panel (TypecastPanel_11) the cast of the racial type of the ‘man from Mitanni’ is shown alongside the profiles of Akhenaten and his family to try and illustrate what Petrie was arguing. In the Museums Journal, the journalist and cultural commentator did not feel that Typecast: Flinders Petrie and Francis Galton went far enough [...]
Flinders Petrie had strong political views which he publicly expressed in the 1900s as a member of the Anti-Socialist Union and in his argument for eugenics Janus in Modern Life (1907). This panel (TypecastPanel_12) explores those views within the context of Petrie’s time. Interestingly, though Petrie was anti-socialist, in 1900 he moved next door in [...]
Francis Galton visited Egypt twice. Once as a young man and once as an old man in 1899-1900, when he also visited Flinders Petrie at his excavations in Abydos. This panel (Text for Panel 14) considers Galton’s trips to Egypt and the influence of travel on his ideas. Flinders Petrie worked at Abydos for the [...]
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