Flinders Petrie was a 19th century archaeologist who discovered, among many other things, beautifully painted palace pavements and frescoes at Tel Amarna--the capitol of the renegade Pharaoh, Akh-en-Aten. Petrie was very concerned about preservation, and was very much ahead of his time in this regard. At Tel Amarna he built a 250 square foot building over top the painted pavements and frescoes in order for tourists to see them from above without walking on them and destroying them. However, the Egyptian Department of Public Works never built a path to this exhibition building and the visitors trampled the nearby crops getting to and from the site. So, an angry peasant farmer, tired of loosing valuable crops to tourists, took to the frescoes with a hammer and chisel destroying them all. Unfortunately, there are many such stories of lost antiquities in Egypt--usually not by the hand of locals, but by the hand of a tourist or an antiquities dealer. Fortunately, Petrie had documented (he was a pioneer in many ways) the frescoes and pavements in both black-and-white and color drawings on a one-tenth scale before they were destroyed. These photos show all that remains today of the Northern palace at Tel Amarna.
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