Walter Ewing Crum

Walter Ewing Crum (born July 22, 1865 in Glasgow , † May 18, 1944 in Bath ) was a British Coptologist and Egyptologist .

Walter Ewing Crum was the grandson of the chemist and entrepreneur Walter Crum , his father was a member of parliament. He attended Eton College and then studied at Balliol College of Oxford University . In 1888 he went to Paris, where he studied with Gaston Maspero , in the same year he went to Munich , from 1888 to 1892 to the University of Berlin , where he heard from Adolf Erman and turned to Coptic Studies. Since then he has had a lifelong friendship with Erman. In Berlin he began to work on a Coptic dictionary. In 1892 Crum applied for a position at the British Museum , but was turned down for health reasons. After that, Crum did not embark on an academic career, but was able to devote himself entirely to his studies as a private scholar due to the inherited family fortune . From 1892 he collected material for his dictionary in museums and libraries in Europe and in Cairo. His main work A Coptic Dictionary appeared between 1929 and 1939 in six parts and covered all dialect levels of the Coptic language . He took the 3308 words recorded from both literary and non-literary texts; he evaluated published and partly unpublished texts. The work made Crum famous and the most important coptologist of his generation. In addition to the dictionary, he also researched and published on many other areas of Coptology, with a focus on apocryphal and biblical texts, Gnosis and Manichaeism , patrology and hagiography and others. He also dealt with non-literary documents and was the first to write a church history of Egypt. Since 1893 he has also edited many texts from European museums.

Crum was a member of the British Academy (1931) and the American Philosophical Society . In 1910 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Berlin University, and in 1937 an honorary doctorate from Oxford.

literature

Battiscombe Gunn, Harold Idris Bell: Walter Ewing Crum, 1865-1944. In: Proceedings of the British Academy. Volume 34, 1948, pp. 281-291.
Coptic studies in honor of Walter Ewing Crum. Boston 1950. Therein pp. Vii – xi: A bibliography of Walter Ewing Crum ( full text) (PDF; 754 kB).
Martin Krause : Crum, Walter Ewing. In: The Coptic Encyclopedia. Volume 2, Claremont Graduate University School of Religion, New York 1991, p. 663 ( full text ).
Robert S. Simpson: Crum, Walter Ewing. In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . Volume 14, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004.
Paola Buzi: Walter Ewing Crum (1865-1944). In: Mario Capasso (Ed.): Hermae. Scholars and Scholarship in Papyrology. Serra, Pisa 2007, ISBN 978-88-427-1442-2 , pp. 107-113 (with picture).
Reinhard Grieshammer: Crum, Walter Ewing. In: Peter Kuhlmann , Helmuth Schneider (Hrsg.): History of the ancient sciences. Biographical Lexicon (= The New Pauly . Supplements. Volume 6). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02033-8 , Col. 255 f.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Crum, Walter Ewing
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	British coptologist and Egyptologist
DATE OF BIRTH	July 22, 1865
PLACE OF BIRTH	Glasgow
DATE OF DEATH	May 18, 1944
Place of death	Bath