James Henry Breasted
From Wikinfo
James Henry Breasted (August 27 1865-December 1935) was born in Rockford, Illinois and was an archaeologist and historian. He was educated at the Chicago Theological Seminary, Yale University (MA 1891) and the University of Berlin (PhD 1894). He was the first American citizen to obtain a PhD in Egyptology.
He became a teacher at the University of Chicago in 1894 and was appointed Professor of Egyptology and Oriental History at in 1905 (the first such chair in the United States). His principal interest was in Egypt; he began to work on a compilation of all the extant hieroglyphic inscriptions, which was published in 1907 as Ancient Records of Egypt.
In 1919, funding was obtained from John D. Rockefeller for the Oriental Institute of Chicago, under whose auspices Breasted headed the University�s first archaeological survey of Egypt. In 1923 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Breasted is now perhaps most widely known for his coinage of the term Fertile crescent to describe the area from Egypt to Mesopotamia.
Works
- A History of Egypt 1905
- Ancient Records of Egypt 1907
- Outlines of European History 1914
- Ancient Times 1916
- Oriental Forerunners of Byzantine Painting 1924
- The Conquest of Civilization 1926
- The Dawn of Conscience 1933
References
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "James_Henry_Breasted" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Henry_Breasted, used under the GNU Free Documentation License
