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Henry Mentz MD: Dr. Henry Mentz: Breast Procedures: Moderate Breast... mentzmd.com |
James Henry Breasted (August 27, 1865 – December 2, 1935) was an American archaeologist and historian.
[edit] Early life and educationBreasted's English and Dutch ancestors came to the American continent in the 1600s with the surname Van Breestede.[1] His father was a small hardware business owner in the 8,000-strong town of Rockford, Illinois,[1] where just months after the assassination of Lincoln and end of the Civil War, Breasted was born. He was educated at North Central College (then North-Western College) (B.A. 1888), the Chicago Theological Seminary, and Yale University (M.A. 1892), where he studied under the Hebrew scholar W. R. Harper. Harper encouraged Breasted to go to the University of Berlin, where he earned his (PhD 1894) under the instructions of Adolf Erman. He was the first American citizen to obtain a PhD in Egyptology. That same year he married Frances Hart and the couple honeymooned in Egypt which turned into a working vacation because he had been recruited to build a collection of Egyptian antiquities for the University of Chicago.[2] Hart was in Germany at the same time as Breasted, learning German and studying music along with her sisters; after her death several decades later, Breasted would marry one of her sisters.[1] [edit] Academic careerBreasted was in the forefront of the generation of archeologist-historians who broadened the idea of Western Civilization to include the entire Near East in Europe's cultural roots. Breasted coined the term Fertile Crescent to describe the archaeologically important area from Palestine to southern Iraq (inclusive). He became an instructor at the University of Chicago in 1894 soon after earning his doctorate. Five years later UC agreed to let him accept the Prussian Academy's invitation to work on their Egyptian dictionary project. Therefore, from 1899 to 1908 he devoted himself to field work which established his reputation. He began to publish numerous articles and monograms, as well as his History of Egypt from the Earliest Times Down to the Persian Conquest in 1905. At that time he was promoted to Professor of Egyptology and Oriental History for UC (the first such chair in the United States). In 1901, he was appointed director of the Haskell Oriental Museum, forerunner of the Oriental Institute, which had opened at the University of Chicago in 1896. Though the Haskell Oriental Museum contained works of art from both the Near East and the Far East, Breasted's principal interest was in Egypt; he began to work on a compilation of all the extant hieroglyphic inscriptions, which was published in 1906 as Ancient Records of Egypt, which remains an important collection of translated texts; as Peter A. Piccione wrote in the preface to its 2001 reprint, it "still contains certain texts and inscriptions that have not been retranslated since that time." He died on December 2, 1935 of a streptococcus infection after returning from his last expedition.[3][4]
In 1903 he successfully secured fifty thousand dollars from the Rockefeller Foundation to found the Oriental Exploration Fund so again in 1919 he turned to John D. Rockefeller to obtain funding for the Oriental Institute of Chicago, under whose auspices Breasted headed the University’s first archaeological survey of Egypt. During a visit to Egypt in 1920, he purchased the mummy of Meresamun, a singer in the inner Temple of Amun at Karnak. He worked with Howard Carter when the Tomb of Tutankhamun was opened in 1922.[5] In 1923 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He died in 1935 from pneumonia, while returning from a trip to Egypt. He is buried in Greenwood cemetery, Rockford, Illinois. His grave site is marked with a large marble obelisk, which was a gift from the Egyptian government. He had a personal residence built near the University of Chicago campus which now still stands as the fraternity house for Phi Gamma Delta. [edit] Bibliography
[edit] Further reading
[edit] References
[edit] External linksCategories: Zoologists with author abbreviations | 1865 births | 1935 deaths | American archaeologists | American historians | People from Rockford, Illinois | People from Winnebago County, Illinois | Presidents of the American Historical Association | American Egyptologists | North Central College alumni | University of Chicago faculty | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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