George Andrew Reisner

George Andrew Reisner
George Andrew Reisner
Born	(1867-11-05)November 5, 1867 Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.
Died	June 6, 1942(1942-06-06) (aged 74) Giza, Egypt
Known for	Ancient Egypt
Spouse	Mary Putnam Bronson
Children	Mary B. Reisner
Parent(s)	Mary Elizabeth Mason George Andrew Reisner I

George Andrew Reisner Jr. (November 5, 1867 – June 6, 1942) was an American archaeologist of Ancient Egypt, Nubia and Palestine.

Reisner was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. His parents were George Andrew Reisner I and Mary Elizabeth Mason. His father's parents were of German descent.^[1]

He married Mary Putnam Bronson, with whom he had a daughter, also called Mary.

In 1889, Reisner was head football coach at Purdue University, coaching for one season and compiling a record of 2–1.

Reisner attended Harvard University from 1885 onwards, where he gained a B.A. degree in 1889, followed by a M.A. in 1891 and a Ph.D in Semitic Languages in 1893.^[2] With the support of his advisor, assyriologist David Gordon Lyon, he became a traveling fellow and started postdoctoral work in Berlin for three years.^[3] In Germany, Reisner studied hieroglyphics with Kurt Sethe and turned definitely towards Egyptology as his main field.^[4]

Reisner was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1914 and the American Philosophical Society in 1940.^[5][6]

On his return from Germany in 1899, Reisner organized his first archaeological expedition to Egypt (1899-1905), founded by philanthropist Phoebe Hearst. In subsequent seasons, he excavated the Middle Kingdom sites of Deir el-Ballas and El-Ahaiwah, where he developed a careful archaeological methodology that characterized his work from that moment on.^[7]

In 1902 permission to excavate the Western cemetery in Giza was granted by Gaston Maspero, director of the Egyptian Antiquities Service. The area was divided into three sections, and chosen by lot. The southern section was given to the Italians under Ernesto Schiaparelli, the northern strip to the Germans under Ludwig Borchardt, and the middle section to Andrew Reisner. He met Queen Marie of Romania in Giza. During this first expedition, Reisner gathered and catalogued approximately 17.000 objects.^[8]

In 1907, Reisner was hired by the British occupation government in Egypt to conduct an emergency survey in northern Nubia in response to the damage that the construction of the Aswan Low Dam could cause. There, he developed a still-in-use chronology that divided the earliest history of Ancient Nubia according to four successive cultural groups that he named Group A, Group B, Group C, and Group X (although the term “group B” has fallen into disuse).^[8]

After a decade in Egypt, Reisner headed the Harvard excavation of Samaria, first in 1908 and together with Gottlieb Schumacher, and for a second time in 1910, when he discovered written documents testifying the presence of Egyptian population in 8^th century BCE Palestina.^[9]

In 1910 he was appointed Curator of Egyptian Art at Boston Museum of Fine Arts and in 1911 Resiner and his family traveled back to America, where he reassumed teaching at Harvard.^[10] In 1913 Reisner was tasked with training the young archaeologist O.G.S. Crawford in excavation techniques, Crawford was later to warmly recall that Reisner was "an excavator of the first rank".^[11] Soon after, he organized the joint expedition Harvard-Boston. Between 1913 and 1916 excavations were conducted in the ancient site of Kerma (Nubia).^[3] He also excavated two cemeteries at Jebel Moya, encouraged by the director of the team leading the diggings there, Sir Wellcome.

From 1919 to 1921, Resiner excavated the sites of Jebel Barkal (The Holy Mountain), el-Kurru and Meroe. Upon his studies at Jebel Barkal, in Nubia he found the Nubian kings were not buried in the pyramids but outside of them. He also found the skull of a Nubian female (who he thought was a king) which is in the collection of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard. His studies in the Pyramid field of el-Kurru led him to reconsider the role of this royal cemetery, where kings of the 25^th dynasty of Egypt were buried. The chronology of the tombs that he developed and the interpretations that followed have been more recently disregarded as erroneous.^[12]

Upon his studies at Jebel Barkal (The Holy Mountain), in Nubia he found the Nubian kings were not buried in the pyramids but outside of them. He also found the skull of a Nubian female (who he thought was a king) which is in the collection of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard. Reisner believed that Kerma was originally the base of an Egyptian governor and that these Egyptian rulers evolved into the independent monarchs of Kerma.

He also created a list of Egyptian viceroys of Kush. He found the tomb of Queen Hetepheres I, the mother of King Khufu (Cheops in Greek) who built the Great Pyramid at Giza. During this time he also explored mastabas. Arthur Merton (London Times) remarked in 1936 in the aftermath of the Abuwtiyuw discovery that Reisner "enjoys an unrivalled position not only as the outstanding figure in present-day Egyptology, but also as a man whose soundness of judgement and extensive general knowledge are widely conceded."^[13]

In Egypt, Reisner developed a new archaeological technique which became a standard in the profession, combining the British methods of Petrie, the German methods of Dorpfeld and Koldewey, his own American practicality and his skill for large-scale organization. Despite later being recognised as a mark of good practice, this technique was at the time controversial, and was criticised as being overly elaborate.^[11]

• 1897–1899: Classified Egyptology collection of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo
• 1899–1905: Led the Hearst Expedition of the University of California to explore burial grounds at and around Qift
• 1905: Edited The Hearst Medical Papyrus
• 1905–1914: Assistant professor of Egyptology at Harvard University
• 1907–1909: Directed archaeological survey of Nubia (Nilotic Sudan) for Egyptian government
• 1910–1942: Curator of Egyptian collections at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts
• 1914–1942: Professor of Egyptology at Harvard University
• 1916: Discovers in Jebel Barkal, in two separate caches, hard stone statues, representing Taharqa and four of his five successors: Tanwetamani, Senkamanisken, Anlamani, and Aspelta
• 1916–1923: Explored pyramids of Meroë, dug out temple at Napata
• 1931: Wrote Mycerinus (alternative name of Menkaure)
• 1942: Published final work, A History of the Giza Necropolis

• Amulets. Cairo: Impr. de l'Institut français d'archéologie orientale. 1907. (reprint ISBN 978-1-57898-718-4)
• Early dynastic cemeteries of Naga-ed-Dêr. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs. 1908.
• The Egyptian conception of immortality. Cambridge: The Riverside Press (Houghton Mifflin). 1912.
• Excavations at Kerma. Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Harvard University. 1923. (reprint ISBN 0-527-01028-6)
• Harvard excavations at Samaria, 1908-1910. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1924. (with Clarence Stanley Fisher and David Gordon Lyon)
• Mycerinus, the temples of the third pyramid at Giza. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1931.
• The development of the Egyptian tomb down to the accession of Cheops. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1936.
• A history of the Giza Necropolis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1942.
• Canopics. Cairo: Impr. de l'Institut français d'archéologie orientale. 1967. (completed by Mohammad Hassan Abd-ul-Rahman)

• Reisner Biography
• "Reisner, George Andrew." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2005. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 11 Nov. 2005 <http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9063116>.
• Merton, Arthur (July 1936). "George Reisner". The Rotarian. Rotary International. p. 23. ISSN 0035-838X. Retrieved October 12, 2012.

• Works by George Andrew Reisner at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about George Andrew Reisner at the Internet Archive
• George Andrew Reisner at Find a Grave