Born in 1853 in Charlton, Kent, the only child of Ann, daughter of famous navigator, Matthew Flinders, and William Petrie, an electrical engineer and inventor. A somewhat sickly child prodigy, Flinders had no formal schooling but was tutored in French, Latin and Greek from the age of 8.

He taught himself to read hieroglyphics and learned surveying from his father, improving the precision of his instruments and making surveys of numerous ancient sites across England to hone his techniques and further develop his skills.

At age 27, he departed to conduct a survey of the Giza Plateau, intending to debunk the theories propounded years earlier, by older rival, Charles ‘Piazzi’ Smyth. Always a meticulous scholar, Flinders also learned Arabic to help in his work and published his results in 1883, in “The Pyramids and Temples at Gizeh(sic)”.

Flinders went on ‘to introduce meticulous scientific methodology to the whole discipline of archaeology’, developing dating techniques still followed to the present day, work for which he was knighted, in 1923.

Always a pragmatic and logical thinker and  extremely forthright, Flinders fell from grace for the promotion of his highly radical views on eugenics. Somewhat in disgrace, he died in Jerusalem in 1942 but is still widely recognised for his analytical mind and ground-breaking contributions that brought Science to Archaeology.