This striking sentence, which captures the sentiments of countless educators at Israeli universities and yeshivas, was written in 1917 by Flinders Petrie, in the introduction to his book Tools and Weapons. An English archaeologist, Petrie was one of the founders of modern Egyptology, but carried out excavations in the Land of Israel as well. He also supported Zionism and was the first to uncover an Egyptian inscription mentioning the name “Israel.”
The book includes hundreds of drawings of weapons and tools from the collections of the British School of Archaeology in Egypt, and was published to raise funds for a field hospital. Though he was sixty-one when World War I broke out, he submitted several applications to leave his academic post to join the war effort, but was turned down.
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