Francis Llewellyn Griffith

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Francis Llewellyn Griffith (born May 27, 1862 in Brighton , † March 14, 1934 in Oxford ) was a British Egyptologist and philologist in the Nubian , Meroitic and Demotic languages . In addition to Flinders Petrie , he was one of the most outstanding Egyptologists of his time. In 1924 he became the first professor of Egyptology at Oxford.

School time and studies

As the youngest son of nine children of Reverend John Griffith, the headmaster of Brighton College , his father wanted Francis ("Frank") to be in college for at least a week so he could call himself "Brightonian" - before he did moved to the parish of Sandridge , Hertfordshire . Here he taught his son mathematics and classical languages ​​himself. Francis is said to have recited the Lord's Prayer in Greek to his godfather, Reverend John Ward, at the age of eight . Impressed by this knowledge, he gave him a will in Greek.

When a friend of Brighton College, Mr. Heppenstall, became head of Sedbergh College in Yorkshire , he took a number of students with him, including Francis Griffith (1875-1878). In 1879 he was awarded a scholarship at the Queen's College of Oxford University . Since there was no chair for Egyptology at that time ( Archibald Henry Sayce became the first professor of Assyriology there in 1891 ), he learned the Egyptian hieroglyphs in self-study .

Griffith and the Egypt Exploration Fund

Griffith also had ties to Amelia Edwards , who founded the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF) in 1882 . When Gaston Maspero gave them the first license to excavate in Egypt that had ever been granted to a foreign organization, diplomatic action was the order of the day. The Swiss archaeologist Edouard Naville , who in December 1879 wrote a letter to the Morning Post to draw attention to the urgent need for funds for excavations in Egypt and who had provided Edwards with the “ammunition” needed to build their find, was the right man. Maspero accepted Naville and allowed him to dig in Wadi Tumilat in the Nile Delta . In his second digging season in 1883, Amelia Edwards insisted that Naville now take Griffith with him, who had an urgent need to get to Egypt. Amelia Edwards had previously raised funds for his scholarship. Also Flinders Petrie , who had received the second excavation concessions, welcomed him as a wizard and found his knowledge of hieroglyphics particularly helpful. Until 1888 Griffith took part regularly in the expeditions of Petrie and Naville.

Griffith founds the Archeological Survey

As an independent division of the Egypt Exploration Fund, Griffith set up the Archeological Survey of Egypt to continue the inventory of monuments in Egypt begun by Jacques de Morgan . He believed that with the help of the Egyptian government it would be possible to index the known ancient sites as well as to explore new ones. He wanted to describe each city as a whole with a detailed list of its tombs and temples, instead of selecting individual architectural features, scenes and inscriptions and publishing them separately. He also wanted all the sources that were already available, such as B. include the descriptions of previous travelers as background material. The increasing decay of the known sites made it essential to document them for science. It was a very ambitious project and required a lot of perseverance because the money had to be available for it. His original plan for the entire inclusion of Middle Egypt soon had to be abandoned. Percy E. Newberry , who also worked in the office of the Egypt Exploration Fund, suggested limiting himself to the graves of Beni Hassan and Dair al-Berscha for the time being. When the necessary funds were finally raised, Griffith was able to send Newberry to Beni Hassan in 1890 together with George Willoughby Fraser, a trained engineer. In 1893 Griffith was able to publish the first volume of the memoir with their work in London. In 1900, Norman de Garis Davies followed in the eighth memoir with the inventory of Sakkara and later Tell el-Amarna .

Griffith had now set the standards for comprehensive documentation of the sites and, with his publications, created a new concept that should serve as a model for other Egyptologists. The Egypt Exploration Fund employed independently of the Archeological Survey of Egypt z. B. Edouard Naville with the excavations in Deir el-Bahari .

Griffith marries Kate Bradbury

In 1896 Griffith married the intelligent and financially independent Kate Bradbury (1854–1902), daughter of a rich cotton fabric manufacturer from Ashton under Lyne. His wife had worked closely with Amelia Edwards and accompanied her on her trip to America in the winter of 1889/90. She translated the chapters on Egyptology in Gaston Maspero's book Les Origines and edited the English edition of Alfred Wiedemann's book "The Religion of the Ancient Egyptians." Münster (1890). She also wrote on folkloric subjects and edited poetry. She also translated parts of Heinrich Heine's “Bimini”. Egyptology linked the two. Griffith moved in with his in-laws so that he could devote all of his time to studying the Egyptian scriptures. His wife died after six years of marriage.

The philologist

In 1891 Griffith had a position in the British Museum as an assistant to the British and Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography department - but not in the Egyptian and Assyrian departments. However, he had access to all of the documents stored there, including those of Robert Hay (1799–1863), who had traveled extensively between 1824 and 1838, often accompanied by artists, to Egypt and northern Sudan. Before Howard Carter went to Percy E. Newberry in Egypt for the Egypt Exploration Fund, he studied Egyptian art under the guidance of Griffith here in the museum .

Griffith's love was for philology . In 1898 his fundamental work The Petrie-Papyri appeared , in which he deciphered italic (hieratic) texts of the Middle Kingdom from Al-Lahun (Kahun) and Gurob for the first time . Around the 7th century BC The hieratic was simplified and shortened even further. The demotic script emerged , which became more and more everyday script . The hieratic script was still used mainly for religious texts on papyrus . This is where the two Greek names come from. “Demotic” means something like “folk writing” and “hieratic” can be translated as “priestly writing”.

His next publication was, in collaboration with his friend Sir Herbert Thompson , a gifted philologist, The Demotic Magycal Papyrus of London and Leyden (3 volumes, 1904-1909).

Griffith provided his masterpiece with the deciphering and translation of 106 papyri in demotic script in the John Rylands Library in Manchester. They were published in 1909 as Catalog of the Demotic papyri in the John Rylands library, Manchester: with facsimiles and complete translations . This work showed the development of this typeface and became an indispensable tool for everyone who dealt with it.

He was also interested in the language and culture of ancient Sudan . Inscriptions were known from the kingdom of Kush and Griffith studied the Meroitic script , which he deciphered in 1907. While the ancient Egyptian language used up to 9000 characters, the Meroites transformed the hieroglyphs into pure alphabet letters. This came out with just 23 letters including a character for word separation. In 1908 the British Museum bought the complete manuscript of the Menas legend , which Griffith published at the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin , of which he was a corresponding member since 1900.

Expeditions to Nubia (now Sudan)

Map of Sudan in antiquity (also Nubia or Kush)

Interest in the history and archeology of Nubia was nourished by the construction of the first Aswan Dam by the British engineer Sir William Willcocks . This was completed in 1902 and should be increased as early as 1907 to 1912. That meant a danger to the antiquities there. From the University of Chicago , James Henry Breasted had traveled 1,600 km along the Nile on an expedition from 1905 to 1907 and had copied and photographed the inscriptions in Nubia. His book was a unique snapshot and showed the archaeologists the urgency.

During the University of Pennsylvania expedition to Nubia from 1907 to 1910, led by British archaeologists Leonard Woolley and David Randall-MacIver , a number of Meroitic inscriptions were found in Shablul Areika, Aniba, Karanog, and Buhen. George Andrew Reisner (1867–1942) came to Napata am Gebel Barkal from Harvard University / Boston Museum . From 1909 to 14 John Garstang from the University of Liverpool exposed the city of Meroë on a large scale.

The University of Oxford , supported by various museums and also with personal funds from Griffith, finally sent him to Nubia. Between 1907 and 1913 he explored the ancient sites of Faras , Kawa and Sanam . In return for their support, many museums received valuable pieces from these expeditions.

They discovered the temples and pyramid tombs of the "black pharaohs" - above all the last pharaoh Taharqa . In Kawa they limited themselves to the uncovering of the temple and the palace complex without excavating the urban settlement in the vicinity. Griffith found one of the most spectacular finds in Kawa: "The sphinx of Taharqo" when he led the excavations in this city for the Oxford Excavation Committee from 1929 to 1931. The Shinx is approx. 40 cm high and 73 cm long and bears the face of the Pharaoh. It is in the British Museum.

In 1909 Griffith had married Nora Christina Cobban MacDonald (1873-1937), who had studied Egyptology with him in Oxford. She helped him on his expeditions to Egypt, Nubia and Sudan, and after his death in 1934 prepared his unfinished manuscripts for publication.

Taharqua's shrine

The Sudanese government gave Griffith the shrine of Taharqa , which was part of a temple in Kawa and was built around 680 BC. BC, in recognition of his services to the excavations in Nubia. It consisted of 236 sandstone blocks that had to be mined, numbered and treated with an acid solution for conservation. The workers were plagued by horrific mosquitoes that crawled into their hair, eyes and nostrils. The blocks were carefully packed in 200 wooden boxes and pulled on barges 300 km on the Nile to the nearest railway station. The train took them to Port Said, where they started their journey to England by ship.

Mrs. Griffith donated it to the Ashmolean Museum in 1936 in memory of her husband. The Ashmolean Museum had to build a 2 m deep concrete slab on which the shrine could be rebuilt. It is the largest intact Egyptian structure from the time of the pharaohs in Great Britain.

Taharqua's shrine was part of a temple dating from around 680 BC. It was built in Kawa on the orders of Taharqa, who lived from 690 to 664 BC. Was the last pharaoh of Egypt. The temple was to be of assistance to him in governing his great kingdom. The shrine was dedicated to Amun-Re , the god of the sun and fertility. On the representation of Amun-Re found in the temple, the god is embodied by a ram's head with twisted horns. Therefore, a ram figure is in the foreground.

From 1924 Griffith was the first professor of Egyptology at Oxford , which he remained for eight years until 1932. He died in 1934 of complications from a heart attack . The Griffith Institute at Oxford was established under his will in 1939 and named after him.

Griffith Institute

The Griffith Institute, part of the University of Oxford, was opened in 1938 on the legacy of Francis Llewellyn Griffith to - according to his last will - "create a permanent place ... for studying the ancient languages ​​and antiquities of the Middle East". His extensive library and the collected papyri on the old writings, notebooks, together with his desk, were the basis. Griffith's widow, Nora Christina Cobban Griffith, who died three years after her husband, also bequeathed her estate to the institute in 1937. The old building has since been demolished and in 2001 the institute found a place in the new Sackler Library , near the Ashmolean Museum.

Publications

  • Publications by Francis Llewellyn Griffith at archive.org

literature

  • Alan H. Gardiner : Francis Llewellyn Griffith. In: The Journal of Egyptian Archeology. Volume 20, No. 1/2, June 1934, pp. 71-77.
  • British Academy: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2004.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Alan H. Gardiner: Francis Llewellyn Griffith. In: The Journal of Egyptian Archeology. Volume 20, No. 1/2, June 1934, p. 71
  2. ↑ Kate Griffith: Poems and Translations. Private print, Alden & Co., Oxford, first edition
  3. ↑ Egyptian Literature by Francis Llewellyn Griffith and Kate Bradbury Griffith
  4. ^ Papyri in the John Rylands Library ( Memento of July 24, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ H. Junker in: Almanach for 1934. Academy of Sciences in Vienna, page 296 ff.
  6. ^ Members of the previous academies. Francis Llewellyn Griffith. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , accessed on March 31, 2015 .
  7. ^ The 1905-1907 Breasted Expeditions To Egypt and The Sudan
  8. ↑ Gebel Barkal (shrine of gods)
  9. ↑ Sphinx of Taharqo ( Memento from February 19, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  10. ↑ Nora Christina Cobban MacDonald ( Memento from August 19, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ↑ TaharqaShrineInfoSheet.pdf
  12. ↑ The Ashmolean. Volume 16, 1989, pp. 5-7.
  13. ^ The main records in the Archive of the Griffith Institute

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Griffith, Francis Llewellyn
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British Egyptologist, first professor of Egyptology at Oxford
DATE OF BIRTH May 27, 1862
PLACE OF BIRTH Brighton
DATE OF DEATH March 14, 1934
Place of death Oxford