James Peter Allen

James Peter Allen who was born in 1945, is an American Egyptologist, specializing in language and religion. He was curator of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1990 up to 2006.

James P. Allen took his PhD from the University of Chicago. Before joining Brown in 2007, Prof. Allen was an epigrapher with the University of Chicago's Epigraphic Survey, Cairo Director of the American Research Center in Cairo (Egypt), and curator of Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is likewise President of the "International Association of Egyptologists".

Prof. Allen's research concerns take ancient Egyptian grammar and literature, religious belief, and history. He has wrote extensively on these issues, taking Genesis in Egypt: the Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts (Yale, 1988), Middle Egyptian: an Foundation to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs, The Heqanakht Papyri, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), The Study between a Man and His Soul, and The Ancient Egyptian Language, an Historical Study (Cambridge, 2013). He is currently working on issue of corporate from the Metropolitan Museum's digs at Dahshur and on a general grammar of the ancient Egyptian Texts of the Pyramids.

The essential thrust of my explore since 2010 has been on the verbal system of Earlier (Old and Middle) Egyptian. Previous examples of the language have proven either away or overly mechanical in excusing the formal, semantic, and syntactic features of a number of verb forms. As a leave, I and a number of my colleagues in Europe have begun to afterthought our approach to the data. My contribution since 2010 has been to discover the phenomenon of duplication (consonant doubling) as a lexical own rather than an inflectional one, to concentrate the armory of a primary verb form (the sḏm.f)  from six forms to two in Old Egyptian (unmarked and marked, the latter expressing incompletion) and only one in Middle Egyptian, to re-analyze the exercise of two verb forms (the sḏm.f and sḏm.n.f) in relative articles as a have of syntax rather than modulation, and to re-analyze the so-called emphatic construction (in which the verb is thematic rather than rhematic) as conditioned by context rather than by inflection or syntax.

These all shine my conviction that advance analyses of the Egyptian verbal system (accepting some of my own) have been bought by the unconscious biases that stem from versions into our own languages. For example, the Late Egyptian s?m.f has been studied as concealing two inflected forms, preterite and subjunctive, because its uses want one or the other translation. Both forms, nevertheless, look just the same in writing, and it makes more sense to understand them as reflecting only one inflected form, overlooked for either tense or mood.

For the senior few years I have been working primarily on the Pyramid Texts, the oldest essential body of ancient Egyptian literature. Most late, I have began work on a super grammar of the Pyramid Texts, which does not yet survive. To that end, I recently collected a new concordance of all released authors from the Old Kingdom, a six-volume work that has been made freely available online, and the first volume of my grammar, devoted to the greyest Pyramid Texts, those of Unis (Dyn. V, ca. 2323 BC), will come along in Eisenbrauns Languages of the Ancient Near East series in 2016.

Publications:

The Inflection of the Verb in the Pyramid Texts (Malibu: Undena, 1984)

Genesis in Egypt: The Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988)

Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs (Cambridge: University Press, 2000)

The Heqanakht papyri. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002)

The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006)

The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Society of Biblical Literature, 2005)

The Egyptian Coffin Texts, Vol. 8. Middle Kingdom Copies of Pyramid Texts (Chicago: University Press, 2006)

"The Amarna Succession" in Causing His Name to Live: Studies in Egyptian Epigraphy and History in Memory of William J. Murnane, University of Memphis, 2007

Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs 2nd ed. (Cambridge: University Press, 2010)

The Debate between a Man and His Soul, a Masterpiece of Ancient Egyptian Literature (Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 44; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011)

Recent Posts:

Barbara Georgina Adams (1945-2002)
Johan David Akerblad (1763-1819)
Cyril Aldred (1914-1991)

Cyril Aldred (1914-1991)

Cyril Aldred was born in Fulham, London, the son of Frederick Aldred and Lilian Ethel Underwood (Aldred) the 6th of 7 youngsters (5 boys, 2 girls).

Aldred seen Sloane School, in Chelsea, and taken English at King's College London, and gone art history at the Courtauld Plant of Art. While a student, he met Howard Carter, the archaeologist who saw the Tutankhamen tomb, in 1932. Carter invited Aldred to shape with him in Egypt, but Aldred rather pursued a university education. He calibrated from the Courtauld Institute in 1936.

In 1937, he got an assistant conservator at the Royal Scottish Museum, in Edinburgh, where he cultivated for the end of his master life, rising to become Keeper of Art & Archaeology (196174).

In 1938 he married Jessie Kennedy Morton (b. 1909), a physiotherapist. During World War II, Aldred attended in the RAF, returning to Edinburgh in 1946, to undertake a important study of Egyptology.

In 1949, his book Old Kingdom Art in Ancient Egypt was published and was observed by volumes on the middle and new kingdoms in 1950 and 1952. These issues shown his career as an Egyptologist and art historiographer. He also contributed tries on Egyptian woodworking and furniture as a start of the Oxford History of Technology in 1954 and 1956. In 1955, he gone equally an relate curator for a year in the department of Egyptian art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, with the conservator, William C. Hayes. During his time at the Met, Aldred used his artistic eye to dramatically better the presentation of the expos and helped identify and catalogue a number of previously overlooked artifacts in storage. In 1956, Aldred given to the Royal Scottish Museum to heighten the Egyptology team and in 1961 he was raised to steward of art and archaeology, a situation which he held until his retirement in 1974. During his time at the RSM, he not only gave talks but also made healthy purchases and availed the museum vastly better not only the Egyptology displays but also the West African and South Sea's incisions.

Aldred's book "Akhenaten, Pharaoh of Egypt - a new study", was published in 1968. "Jewels of the Pharaohs" seemed in 1971, published by Thames and Hudson. His most important art-historical writing of the period was the catalogue he saved for the Brooklyn Museum expo, "Akhenaten and Nefertiti" in 1973.

Aldred retired in 1974, but his writing stayed. Beginning in 1978, Aldred wrote studies for the French "L'univers des formes" surveys of Egyptian art (other volumes appearing in 1979 and 1980). In 1980, Aldred published "Egyptian Art", although another involved book on Egyptian sculpture was never written. The Times Educational Supplement said of Egyptian Art "His fluent ability to range facts, insights and readings into a compulsively clean account sets his book far above the clogged texts that too often surpass for art history". In 1988, he enlarged his 1968 text in "Akhenaten, King of Egypt" with later findings.

He died peacefully at his home in Edinburgh in 1991 but is remembered as one of the leading characters in bettering archaeology in Scotland at the Burrell Collection in Glasgow.

Publications:

Ancient Egypt in the Metropolitan Museum Journal, Volumes 1-11 (19681976): Articles. [ by Cyril Aldred].

New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977; "The Development of Ancient Egyptian Art: from 3200 to 1315 B. C." 3 vols. London : A. Tiranti, 1952;

New Kingdom Art in Ancient Egypt During the Eighteenth Dynasty, 1590 to 1315 B. C. Published: London, A. Tiranti, 1951;

Akhenaten and Nefertiti. New York: Brooklyn Museum/Viking Press, 1973;

Akhenaten, Pharaoh of Egypt: a New Study. London: Thames & Hudson, 1968;

Egypt to the End of the Old Kingdom. London: Thames and Hudson, 1965;

Jewels of the Pharaohs: Egyptian Jewellery of the Dynastic Period. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971;

Middle Kingdom Art in Ancient Egypt, 2300-1590 B.C. London: A. Tiranti, 1950;

Old kingdom Art in Ancient Egypt. London: A. Tiranti, 1949;

The Egyptians. London: Thames and Hudson, 1961;

"The Pharaoh Akhenaten: a Problem in Egyptology and Pathology." Bulletin of the History of Medicine 36, no. 4 (JulyAugust 1962): 293-316;

Related Posts:

Barbara Georgina Adams (1945-2002)
Johan David Akerblad (1763-1819)

Johan David Akerblad (1763-1819)

Johan David Akerblad, 6 May 1763, Stockholm  7 February 1819, Rome, was a Swedish diplomatist and orientalist. In 1778 he started his studies of classical and oriental languages at the University of Uppsala. In 1782 he opposed his graduate dissertation in front Professor Eric Michael Fant. From 1783, he improved his language skills at the Swedish royal court of chancery in Constantinople.

From 1784 onwards he was a diplomat in Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and North Africa. From 1800 he taken research at the University of Göttingen, and at other places of learning in Paris, The Hague, and Rome. He centered on the study of ancient Egyptian. He also got together material for a lexicon of Coptic language.

While in Paris, he was a student of Silvestre de Sacy. Sacy's investigation of the Rosetta Stone resulted in him being able to showed five names, such as "Alexandros". This was reported by him in 1802. Åkerblad played his work, and his major part in this area was issued the same year in Paris

?kerblad managed to identify all unique names in the demotic text in just two months. He could too read words like "Greek", "temple" and "Egyptian" and got out the correct sound rate from 14 of the 29 signs, but he wrongly considered the demotic hieroglyphs to be entirely alphabetic. One of his strategies of comparisons the demotic to Coptic later gone a key in Champollion's eventual decipherment of the hieroglyphic script and the Ancient Egyptian language.

In 1810, Åkerblad sent to Sacy for publication his work entitled MEMOIRE: Sur les noms coptes de quelques villes et villages d'Egypte. Yet, unfortunately, its publishing was delayed, and it was not published until 1834. Some scholarly people saw such delay as motivated by political or personal circumstances.

Publications:

 Johan David Akerblad, Lettre sur l'inscription Egyptienne de Rosette: adresse au citoyen Silvestre de Sacy, Professeur de langue arabe  l'Ecole spciale des langues orientales vivantes, etc.; Rponse du citoyen Silvestre de Sacy. Paris: L'imprimerie de la Rpublique, 1802
Om det sittande Marmorlejonet i Venedig (18003)

1802: Inscriptionis phoenicie? Oxoniensis nova interpretatio

1804: Lettre sur une inscription phnicienne, trouve  Athenes

1804: Notice sur deux inscriptions en caractres runiques, trouves  Venise et sur les Varanges, avec les remarques de M. d'Ansse de Villoison

1811: Sopra due laminette di bronzo trovate ne' contorni di Atene. Dissertazione letta nell'accademia libera d'archeologia al campidoglio li 30. Giugno 1811 Digitalisat at Google Books

1813: Inscrizione greca sopra una lamina di piombo, trovata in un sepolcro nelle vicinanze d'Atene

1817: Lettre  M:r le cheval. Italinsky sur une inscription phnicienne

Johan David Akerblad, MEMOIRE: Sur les noms coptes de quelques villes et villages d'Egypte. Journal asiatique, 1834, vol. XIII p337

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Barbara Georgina Adams (1945-2002)

Hieroglyphic Signs: Figures of Animal
Hieroglyphic Signs: Members of the Bod
Hieroglyphic Signs: Figures of Gods and Goddess  
Hieroglyphic Signs: Figures of Women ·   
Hieroglyphic Signs: Figures of Men

Barbara Georgina Adams (1945-2002)

In June of 2002, archaeology and especially Egyptian archaeology lost one of its stars in the early death of Barbara Georgina Adams who was born on February 19, 1945 in Hammersmith, west of London, to Elaine and Charles Bishop.  Barbara Adams had get a world known archaeologist, with many books to her credit and an expert on Predynastic Egypt, who worked for legion years at the most essential Predynastic site in Egypt, Hierakonpolis.  Yet her life history did not get in archaeology, but in the very different science of bugology with work as a scientific assistant in the British Museum of Natural History, where she trained in museum functions such as enrolment and marking of specimens.  She educated to analyze and mount good specimens using the microscope and became the under to the world expert in Symphyta, Mr. R.B. Benson.  In 1964 Barbara changed to the department of anthropology to assist Dr. K.P. Oakley.  Here she gained some knowledge of early instruments, Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic, and learned a basic knowledge of human skeletal anatomy which would be an advantage in her future work at very early graveyard sites in Egypt.

Although she accredited the Hollywood film Valley of the Kings with raising her worry in ancient Egypt, Barbaras exercise at the Petrie Museum, which began in 1965, really started her teaching about the Nile valley cultures.  There she cultivated with Professor Harry S. Smith who given the Edwards Chair in Egyptian Archaeology at University College London, the position first held by the identified Sir William Mathew Flinders Petrie.  Dr. Smith, a kind, beautiful as well as erudite valet, was credited by Barbara as her most serious wise man who gratified the fledgling to take escape in his own taken field of Egyptian archaeology.  She would see more by hands-on experience in museums and in the subject than in the classroom.  Barbaras first archaeological have was in England, nevertheless, when she cultivated with the University of Leeds excavations in Yorkshire on solitary medieval villages.  She helped Don Brothwell, who was the Assistant Keeper of Anthropology at the British Museum of Natural History, good with him on cemetery digs such as Winchester in 1965. The following year she engaged the University of Nottingham digging of a Romano-British site at Dragonby, Linconshire. At the Petrie Museum, Barbara shown objects, served inquiries, and did conservation work, notably pot reconstruction and bronze stabilization.  Mud-incrusted ivories from the Main Deposit at Hierakonpolis were her first link to the archaeological site that would be a leading part of her future work in Egypt.  She married Robert F. Adams on September 27 th , 1967, and attributable her husband with being quite collateral of her career and her independency. That same year Barbara took an Archaeological Field Techniques and Pursuing Course at the University of Cambridge. Her first trip to Egypt came in 1969: a standard tour.  In 1974 appeared her best book, Ancient Hierakonpolis,  about 450 miles south of Cairo and the only leading site of the Pre-dynastic period which is still continued as a unit. Her book is a catalog of objects in the Petrie Museum found by the early Twentieth Century excavators Quibell and Green in the alluvial town temple, where the main deposit disciplined some of the most essential early dynastic objects, such as the Narmer Palette and the Scorpion Macehead..  Her real achievement was the issue and explication of the original field notes of F.W. Green, which she published as Ancient Hierakonpolis Supplement the like year.  This began her career in the excavation of museum basements and archives end-to-end the United Kingdom, which would developed stunning results in the future.

By 1975, because of her large knowledge of the vast properties of the Petrie Museum, Mrs. Adams was promoted to Academic Staff of the Petrie Museum as Assistant Curator. She produced the first guide book to the collecting in 1977 (revised edition 1981) and supervised students learning conservation at Londons Institute of Archaeology.  In 1976 Adams visited senior museums in the United States, specifically to study targets from the early mining of Hierakonpolis by Quibell and Green (1898-1900).  In 1978 she linked the University of the Negev excavation at Tell esh-Sharia, Israel, a Late Bronze-Iron Age site.

1980 was the year she joined the American Research Center- supported team big by Michael A. Hoffman at Hierakonpolis, where she served in the digging of the Pre-dynastic cemetery of the elite universe, such as the princes in Locality 6, in 1980, 82, and 86, with study seasons devoted.to that work in 1988 and 1992. This has been seen as the senior landmark in her vocation as an archaeologist.   She worked there likewise at the site of the ancient township Nekhen with Walter Fairservis in 1981 and 84, having an important donation to the ceramic dating of Hoffmans stratigraphic sondage in Nekhens straight 10N5W.  When Hoffman died circumstantially and still quite young in 1990, the task of printing his work fell to Barbara.  As co-director of the dispatch with Renee Friedman from 1996, Barbara kept the work going at this essential site, resuming digs in the elite cemetery which, although affected as over-worked by earlier excavators, still yielded vital data, just as Barbara  had anticipated.  She discovered Egypts first funerary cloaks and the earliest life-sized statue in what was the deepest tomb (from 3600 B.C.).  Hierakonpolis doubtless has provided the most data on the origin of Egyptian culture thanks to such past work at both the Predynastic cemetery and villages and the Dynastic city site of Nekhen.  Meanwhile in England too, Adams rediscovered important ancient Egyptian objectives such as the lions of Coptos (found in the Wellcome Museum memory and released in 1984) and objects from Garstangs mining in the Fort cemetery at Hierakonpolis in the National Museums on Merseyside, Liverpool, in the Bolton Museum, and in  both the British Museum and the University Museum, Swansea.  Thus a break picture of the culture of Hierakonpolis was now fit to be rebuilt and studied.

The early 1980s saw Barbara much complicated in fund producing for a new Petrie Museum (over which she was now Curator). To prepare herself and the museum for modernisation, she attended seminars on the computerization of tapes and monitored a computer database for the collecting.  She was successful in obtaining a grant towards the cost of substitute of a whole archive collection, approximately 9000 cellulose nitrate negatives, and also for the conservation of wax encaustic Roman period mummy portrayals.

Public talking, museum seminars and exhibits organized by Adams were means to disseminate information about the on-going breakthroughs that were making light on the origin of the Egyptian civilization and the break of the city.  Two trips to the United States come this.  In 1987 she worked with Michael Hoffman and the stave of the Hierakonpolis expedition on a traveling exhibition The First Egyptians corporate ab initio in Columbia, South Carolina. Her books The Fort Cemetery at Hierakonpolis appeared in 1987 was the next year by Predynastic Egypt (in the Shire Egyptology series).  Back in England, Barbara union the Friends of the Petrie Museum to concur with the museums re-opening in June, 1988 and continued the museums guiding force in attendant years. Traveling expos of Predynastic and Early Dynastic physical from the Petrie collection were sent to France (Marseilles) and she cooperated with the choice of ancientnesses for a large number of museum expositions during the 1980s and 1990s around the world.

Following  Michael Hoffmanns untimely death due to cancer in 1991, Barbara Adams collaborated with fellow-expedition penis Renee Friedman on a memorial volume for Hoffmann, traveling to Oakland California where Friedman was then based. Later Adams would write that she was most pleased of this volume: The Followers of Horus. The pursuing year, 1992, took her to Tenerife in the Canary Islands as a seeing expert on Egyptian pottery in their Archaeological Museum. In 1994, 95, and 96 Adams was awarded the Gertrude Caton-Thompson (q.v.) Egyptology Department allows by University College London towards comparative research in the Brussels Museum.  In particular she had guaranteed to study inflamed greywacke vase fragmentise from the Umm el Qaab graveyard at Abydos, a exercise that she was able to good and which will be published posthumously.  In 1996 she travel to Melbourne, Australia to advise on the Predynastic and Dynastic Egyptian collecting in the National Gallery of Victoria.  By the fall of 1997, Barbara Adams taken the Directorship of resumed digs in the locality of the elite memorial park at Hierakonpolis.

Her editorship of the Shire Egyptology Series, small books given to a single topic and written by experts, now counting  over 25, have offered up-to-date information on a form of matters of interest to masters and non-professionals,  running from Mummies (her own, 1984 and 92) to Materials, to Pottery, to Warfare and Weapons. The world of Egyptology and archaeology must mourn the new red of such a winning woman scholar: museum conservator, educator, and digger.  Particularly important about her effective career and her writing of ten scholarly monographs is Barbara Adams lack of ball education in her field.  She named her early experience at the Natural History Museum her true alma mater and due Harry Smith for promoting her to dare to follow her dreams, citing jobs with other male university profs who apparently frustrated to hold her back due, probably, to her lack of formal classroom study. Adams achievement was undoubtedly due to brilliance and determination and to the persistence she inspired on younger people to which she added: work hard, but on no account back stab to gain advance.

Publications:

Ancient Hierakonpolis and Supplement  Warminster, 1974.

With Angela P. Thomas, translation and adaptation of Guide Poche Marcus:
Egypt.  Paris and Cairo, 1976.

et. al.  Guide to the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, 1977, revised 1981,
1988, 1990, 1994.

Egyptian Objects in the Victoria and Albert Museum  Warminster. 1978.

With Richard Jaeschke, The Koptos Lions,  Milwaukee, 1984.

Sculptured Pottery from Koptos, Warminster, 1986.

Predynastic Egypt, Aylesbury, 1988.

Egyptian Musssies, Aylesbury, 1988.Egyptian Mummies, revised reprint, Aylesbury, 1992.

Editor with Renee Friedman, The Followers of Horus: Studies Dedicated to
Michael Allen Hoffman 1944-1990, Egyptian Studies Association publication 2,
Oxford, 1992.

Ancient Nekhen: Garstang in the City of Hierakonpolis, Egypt Studies
Association Publication, No.3, 1995.

With Krzysztof Cialowicz,  Protodynastic Egypt,  Aylesbury, 1998.

Birds and the Pharaohs,  Birds of the World, Part 5, Vol. 4, 1969, 1134-1138.

Petries Manuscript: Notes on the Foundation Deposits of Tuthmosis III,
Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 61 (1975)m 102-111.

With R.H. Brill and I. L. Barnes, Lead Isotopes in some ancient Egyptian
Objects, Recent Advances in Science and Technology of Materials, vol. 3 (1975),
9-27.

Hierakonpolis, Lexicon der ?gyptologie,  Band II, Lieferung 16, 1977, 1182-
1186.

With Rosalind Hall. New Exhibitions in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian
Archaeology, The Museum Archaeologist, Dec., 1979, 9-12.

A Lettuce for Min,  G?ttinger Miszellen, no. 37, 1980, 9-15.

The Re-Discovery of the Koptos Lions,  London Federation of Museums and
Art Galleries Newsletter, no. 3, Dec., 1980, 3-4.

Petrie Museum Appeal,  London Federation of Museums and Art Galleries
Newsletter, no. 6, May, 1982, 6.22-6.4.