About the Book

Petrie's premise is stated flatly on his first page: the subject is boundless, and waiting for completeness would bar any useful result. So he published an outline instead — an index of ornament meant to be added to by others, with blank space deliberately left on the plates for exactly that purpose.

The arrangement is his own. Twenty-four lettered classes run from A, a hero gripping two lions, through to Z, the last of the wave and blob patterns. Within each class, families are lettered again, and every drawing carries a date, a place, and a source reference in Petrie's hand. A leading minus means B.C.; a leading plus means A.D. He is often guessing at the dates and says so — a guess, he writes, is better than nothing, and is marked with a query.

This copy belonged to the Central Archaeological Library in New Delhi, accession number 39205, stamped 29 January 1963. Some earlier reader went through the introduction with a pencil, underlining steadily and arguing in the margins. Their notes have been left where they are.

A word about the text itself. Petrie opens by weighing what his collection might “claim by racial characters”, and reaches for race as an explanation for how ornament travels — the ordinary assumption of a British archaeologist writing in 1930, and one he held more firmly than most. That framing is his, not ours. The plates are reproduced here because the drawings are a remarkable piece of comparative looking; the introduction is shown as a scan rather than retyped, so you can read exactly what he wrote and judge it yourself.