Following a long career undertaking excavations in Egypt and Palestine, Sir Flinders Petrie wrote this, his autobiography, reminiscing on some of his greatest accomplishments which included the identification of the site of Naukratis (the first permanent Greek settlement in Egypt) and the discovery Merneptah stele (which contains the earliest reference to the name 'Israel').

Petrie is renowned as one of the great archaeologists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. His work in Egypt introduced systematic analysis of sites and his painstaking research is still of value today. One of several innovations he brought to the field included seriation – the arranging of finds by the layers in which they were found – vastly improving the chronological dating of artefacts.