Arthur C. Mace

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Arthur C. Mace (center) with Howard Carter and an Egyptian worker opening the burial chamber of KV62 , the tomb of Tutankhamun , 1923

Arthur Cruttenden Mace (born July 17, 1874 in Hobart , Tasmania , † April 6, 1928 in New York City ) was a British Egyptologist .

Life

Mace was born in Hobart, Tasmania in 1874, the son of John Cruttenden Mace and his wife Mary Ellen "Minna". Bromby was born. His grandfather Charles Henry Bromby had been the Anglican Bishop of Tasmania since 1864 . When he retired in 1882 and accepted an appointment as assistant bishop in Lichfield , the family moved with him to England . At the age of 13, Mace moved to Bethnal Green to live with his uncle Henry Bromby . From the age of 16 he attended St Edward's School in Oxford and from 1893 Kebble College . There he graduated in 1895 and worked for a short time as a teacher in Bath .

However, since this work did not satisfy him and he also did not aspire to a church career like his grandfather and parents, he took a different path in 1897. Presumably through his mother's family connections, he got in touch with his distant cousin, the Egyptologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie , who hired him as an assistant. Mace first took part in Petrie's excavation in Dendera , then in 1898/99 in Diospolis Parva and from 1899 to 1901 in Abydos . In the fall of 1901 he left Petrie's excavation team and worked first for the American George Andrew Reisner , who dug in Naga-ed-Deir and later in Giza .

Mace made the acquaintance of Albert M. Lythgoe on Reisner's excavations . When he was appointed curator of the newly established Egypt department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1906 , he hired Mace as an employee. For the museum he took part in the excavation of the Amenemhet I pyramid in Lisht until 1908 . In 1909 he was appointed assistant curator and worked until 1912 on the exhibition rooms of the new Egypt department and on the processing of the finds from Lischt. In 1912/13 he again took part in excavations in Lischt.

With the outbreak of the First World War he enlisted in the British Army . Much to his disappointment, because of his health, he was not sent to the front, but transferred to the Royal Army Service Corps , for which he worked in England and Italy .

Excavations at the Amenemhet I pyramid in Lischt 1921/22 under the direction of Arthur C. Mace

In the winter of 1919/20 Mace returned to New York and continued the excavations in Lischt between 1920 and 1922. In 1922 he was appointed Assistant Curator of the Egypt Department of the Metropolitan Museum. Another campaign in Lischt had to be canceled at short notice. Mace and most of the rest of the museum's excavation team were recruited by Lord Carnavon to help Howard Carter uncover and document the recently discovered tomb of King Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor .

After working with Carter for two years, Mace suffered a collapse in health. He spent the next few years in England, the Italian Riviera , Switzerland, and New York, hoping his health would improve. He also tried to organize his records of the excavations at the Amenemhet I pyramid and to bring them to publication readiness, but he was no longer successful. So it remained with some preliminary reports published in the Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art . His condition deteriorated noticeably and he died on April 6, 1928 at the age of only 53.

Mace's relatively early death led to speculation that he fell victim to the " Pharaoh's curse " because of his work on the tomb of Tutankhamun . However, his health had already been badly damaged.

Fonts

  • with William Matthew Flinders Petrie: Diospolis Parva. The Cemeteries of Abadiyeh and Hu, 1898-9. (1901)
  • with David Randal-MacIver: El Amrah and Abydos 1899–1901. (1902)
  • The Early Dynastic Cemeteries of Naga-ed-Dêr. Part 2. (1909)
  • The Murch Collection of Egyptian Antiquities. (1911)
  • with Herbert E. Winlock: The Tomb of Senebtisi at Lisht. (1916)
  • with Howard Carter: The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen. Discovered by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter. (1923)

literature

  • Arthur Cruttenden Mace. Died April 6th, 1928. In: The Journal of Egyptian Archeology. Volume 15, 1929, pp. 105-106 ( online ).
  • In Memory of Arthur Cruttenden Mace. In: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin. Vol. 23, No. 5, 1928, pp. 122-123 ( JSTOR 3255618 ).
  • Christopher C. Lee: The Grand Piano Came by Camel. Arthur C. Mace - The Neglected Egyptologist. Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh 1992, ISBN 978-1851584345 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Hoving: The golden pharaoh Tut-ench-Amun. Droemer Knaur, Munich / Zurich 1978, ISBN 3-426-03639-8 , p. 183.
personal data
SURNAME Mace, Arthur C.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mace, Arthur Cruttenden (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British Egyptologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 17, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Hobart , Tasmania
DATE OF DEATH April 6, 1928
Place of death New York City