A pioneering Egyptologist, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) excavated over fifty sites and trained a generation of archaeologists. A great many of his publications have been reissued in this series. In the 1890s, the Irish scholar Sir John Pentland Mahaffy (1839–1919) took the lead on the considerable task of cataloguing, transcribing and commenting on the Greek papyri found by Petrie in mummy cartonnage on recent digs in Egypt. This three-volume collection is the result. The texts, comprising private correspondence, legal records, petitions and many other types of document, reveal a great deal about life in Egypt in the third century BCE. Volume 1 (1891) contains thirty autotype reproductions of key examples. Volume 2 (1893) contains eighteen reproductions, while Volume 3 (1905), largely the work of J. G. Smyly, contains seven autotypes in addition to a review by Mahaffy of the entire project and its scholarly reception.
