On Christmas Day in 1892 Flinders Petrie wrote to Miss Bradbury, Amelia Edwards's closest friend and companion on her Egyptian travels, of his growing frustration at the excavatory practices of the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF) archaeologist Edouard Naville, who, he claimed, was destroying important Egyptian antiquities. A week later, in a letter to Edward Maunde Thompson, the director of the British Museum, he returned to the subject, concluding that he was concerned ‘solely with the subject of the destruction of archaeological material, which is equally to be deprecated whether done in the name of science or by a plundering Arab’. He proposed that the EEF send as a replacement a more capable man, Howard Carter, ‘who understands what he sees’ even if he had not undertaken the ‘formal education for the best work in excavating’. To be anxious about the loss of precious artefacts is hardly surprising, and it should be even less so in the context of the EEF's stated intention to save Egyptian antiquities from destruction. Yet Petrie's letters do still break certain boundaries of British propriety: of professional courtesy, certainly, but also of personal politeness, by explicitly regarding Naville as having fallen to the level of the Arab antiquities thief. Yet what is most interesting about Petrie's attack on Naville is his excessive anxiety about the loss of artefactual objects: the ‘things’ of Egyptological research.