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University College London, Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology

A WOMAN’S TOUCH. During William Matthew Flinders Petrie’s archaeological expedition to Serabit in 1905, his wife Hilda, herself an Egyptologist, noticed some fallen stones inscribed with unusual signs that were clearly not typical Egyptian hieroglyphs. Although Petrie determined that the signs represented an alphabetic script based on hieroglyphic pictograms, he was unable to decipher the curious inscriptions. This photo shows the Petries at the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis in 1910.