John Gardner Wilkinson

John Gardner Wilkinson

Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (born October 5, 1797 in Little Missenden , Buckinghamshire , † October 29, 1875 in Llandovery , Wales ) was a British Egyptologist . He is considered the founder of British Egyptology .

Life

His parents were Reverend John Wilkinson and Mary Ann Gardner. His parents died early and he was orphaned by 1807. Wilkinson attended school in Harrow and began studying at Exeter College , Oxford in 1816 , but dropped out in 1818 to join the army.

Wilkinson was very fond of traveling, and he was drawn to the European continent as early as 1817 and 1818. In 1819 he traveled again to France , Germany and Italy . In Naples in 1820 he met the archaeologist Sir William Gell , who persuaded him to give up military service and study archeology and hieroglyphics under his direction . In October 1821, Wilkinson traveled to Egypt for the first time . He was 24 years old when he arrived in Alexandria , a year before Jean-François Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphs . Up until this point in time, Egypt was the destination of rustic adventurers like Henry Salt , Giovanni Battista Belzoni or Bernardino Drovetti , who used intrigue and violence to open graves and get to suspected treasures. Wilkinson's arrival marked a change in thinking: his goal was to document the objects on site (before they were then removed).

In the years 1824 and 1827-1828 he led excavations in Thebes / West, especially in the Valley of the Kings . He built himself a house in Gurna in 1826 , ran through the Theban necropolis with a drawing pad, brush and brown oil paint, and copied almost all the inscriptions he found. There was no hieroglyph that was not worth recording by him. In the Valley of the Kings he numbered the royal tombs with the color. 21 open graves were known, plus four more in the western valley. This numbering system still applies today. Based on the inscriptions in the royal tombs, Wilkinson developed a chronology of the New Kingdom and created an overview plan of the ancient Thebes .

Wilkinson returned to England in 1833 and was knighted in 1839.
Between 1841 and 1849 he visited Egypt again and did research in Wadi Natron , but also in Bosnia , Herzegovina and Montenegro . He spent the winter of 1849/1850 studying the Royal Papyrus Turin and published a new translation. In 1852 he was appointed DCL (Dr. jur.) Oxford University .

His last trip to Egypt was from 1855 to 1856. He worked on the labyrinth of Hawara and identified it as the mortuary temple of Amenemhet III. In Amarna he was the first to map this area, but Beni Hassan and Gebel Barkal were also visited by Wilkinson and the tomb paintings were documented.

In 1856 Wilkinson married Caroline Catherine Lucas (1822–1881), an actress and botanist , and lived in Tenby / Pembrokeshire on the coast of South Wales until 1866.

Wilkinson's notes are now in 56 large-format volumes in the Bodleian Library in Oxford and are still used for research purposes.

Publications

• Materia Hieroglyphica , 2 vols. (1828-1830);
• Topographical Survey of Thebes (1830);
• Topography of Thebes, and General View of Egypt (1835);
• Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians , 3 vols. (1837);
• A Handbook for Egypt (1847);
• Dalamtia and Montenegro; with a journey to Mostar in Herzegovina, and remarks to the Slavonic nations, the history of Dalmatia and Ragus, the Uskoks etc. (1848), 2 Bde. Dt. Translated by Wilhelm Adolf Lindau , 1849 ( digitized version of part 2 from the holdings of the Institute for East and Southeast European Research );
• The Architecture of Ancient Egypt , 2 vols. (1850);
• The Egyptians in the time of the Pharaohs (1871);
• Desert plants of Egypt (1887).

literature

• Jason Thompson: Sir Gardner Wilkinson and His Circle . University of Texas Press, Austin TEX 1992, ISBN 0-292-77643-8 .

Web links

• Literature by and about John Gardner Wilkinson in the catalog of the German National Library
• Wilkinson in the kv5

Individual evidence

1. ↑ JISC: bibliographic evidence