Tell el-Hesi, or Tell el-Hesy, is a 25-acre archaeological site in Israel. It was the first major site excavated in Palestine, first by Flinders Petrie in 1890 and later by Frederick Jones Bliss in 1891 and 1892, both sponsored by the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF). Petrie's excavations were one of the first to systematically use stratigraphy and seriation to produce a chronology of the site. Tell el-Hesi is located southwest of the modern Israeli city of Qiryat Gat.

Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, commonly known as simply Sir Flinders Petrie, was a British Egyptologist and a pioneer of systematic methodology in archaeology and the preservation of artefacts. He held the first chair of Egyptology in the United Kingdom, and excavated many of the most important archaeological sites in Egypt in conjunction with his wife, Hilda Urlin. Some consider his most famous discovery to be that of the Merneptah Stele, an opinion with which Petrie himself concurred. Undoubtedly at least as important is his 1905 discovery and correct identification of the character of the Proto-Sinaitic script, the ancestor of almost all alphabetic scripts.