Egypt
Hilda left for Egypt for the first time on 25 November 1896, and was thereafter to accompany her husband into the field every year except for a period when their son and daughter were young.
After a few days spent at Cairo, and including a visit to Giza, the Petries travelled to Upper Egypt as part of an expedition to dig on behalf of the Egypt Exploration Fund in the cemetery area behind the temple of Dendera, 70 km north of Luxor.
During this expedition, Hilda worked in the deep shafts of the tombs that were being excavated, climbing down a rope ladder to copy the scenes and inscriptions found deep underground. One large sarcophagus had some 20,000 hieroglyphs to record, and Hilda spent days lying on the ground to copy them.
Her record work also included drawing the profiles of the pots, beads, scarabs and other small finds of the excavation, and sometimes writing the daily journal that was sent weekly to report progress to the Committee, and assisting Flinders Petrie to write the excavation reports. Her role did not include running the domestic side of the expedition, which was undertaken by Flinders Petrie as it had been done for many years, with excavators expected to live on canned food and ship's biscuits.
In the 1898 excavation of the cemetery sites of Abadiyeh and Hu, Hilda helped to survey the site. She used the Naqada plates to identify the shape of pots, slates and flints and, once Flinders had entered these finds onto the plan, Hilda was responsible for writing on each find the number of the grave in which it had been found. Her work was noted by Flinders Petrie in the introduction to the excavation report of that year: "My wife was with me all the time, helping in the surveying, cataloguing, and marking of the objects, and also drawing all the tomb plans here published." Her work at the site continued into 1898–9, and she drew almost all of the pottery marks and arranged the plates, as well as undertaking the continual work to register and attend to the pottery, and to number the skeletons. A plan of a fort was made at this time by both Petries.
In the winter of 1902, the last season spent excavating at Abydos, Hilda was given control of an excavation of her own. The team comprised Margaret Murray, and Miss Hansard, an artist, as well as Hilda, and attempted a difficult and hazardous excavation after the discovery the previous year of what appeared to be the approach to a huge underground tomb discovered in an area at the back of the temple of Seti I. The deep excavation was in constant danger of caving in and, when the wind blew, loose sand and shifting stone blocks threatened the workers below; the work was ultimately abandoned. The report of that year to the Egypt Exploration fund sums up Hilda Petrie's contributions to the work thus:
“My wife was closely occupied with drawing nearly all of the season; especially on the tedious figuring of nearly 400 flints, and the exact facsimile copies of inscriptions.”
In 1904, Hilda Petrie was involved in the work at Ehnasya, contributing almost half of the plates of the resultant volume, and visiting Buto. The following year she remained at Saqqara to copy reliefs in some of the Old Kingdom Tombs, as Margaret Murray had the year before. She went from Saqqara to join Flinders Petrie and Lina Eckenstein at a temple site on a hilltop at Serabit el-Khadim, where there were large numbers of inscribed stones, statues and stelae. Some of these were in a hitherto unknown script, which was dubbed Sinaitic, and her work as a copyist was welcomed. Hilda and the 48 year old polymath Lina Eckenstein took a journey across Sinai accompanied by a single guide. Eckenstein was to write several books about her time in Sinai.
