George Andrew Reisner

Background

George Andrew Reisner was born on November 5, 1867 in Indianapolis, Indiana, the oldest of several children of George Andrew and Mary Elizabeth (Mason) Reisner, natives, respectively, of Virginia and Indiana. His paternal grandfather, John Jacob Reisner, a Napoleonic soldier, had emigrated from Alsace; his father was a clerk and later partner in a shoe store.

Education

George Reisner graduated from the Indianapolis Classical High School in 1885, at the top of his class, and in 1889 (A. B. summa cum laude) from Harvard College. A year spent working in Indianapolis in a law office, as athletic director of the Y. M. C. A. , and as a census taker enabled him to earn enough to return to Harvard for graduate work in Semitic languages and history.

After taking a Ph. D. in 1893, Reisner went to Germany for further study. Originally an Assyriologist, he continued his early interest at Göttingen, but as a second subject studied Egyptology with Kurt Sethe and Adolf Erman, an association which was to determine his future career.

Career

Under Erman's aegis, Reisner was in 1894 appointed a scientific assistant in the Egyptian department of the Berlin Museum. He returned to Harvard in 1896-97 as an instructor in the Semitic department.

In 1897 Reisner went to Egypt as American member of an international commission designated to catalogue the Khedivial Museum in Cairo. While engaged in that task he met the wealthy Mrs. Phoebe Apperson Hearst, then traveling in Egypt, who engaged him as director of an expedition that she planned to finance under the auspices of the University of California, of which she was a regent. Reisner began excavating in 1898 at Quft in Upper Egypt, where he assembled a team of workmen that was to remain with him for more than forty years. He was a pioneer among American archaeologists, the first to develop a system of scientific excavation, setting a pattern of thorough recording which has served as a model to both American and foreign scholars.

In 1903, when the Egyptian Department of Antiquities unexpectedly granted concessions to excavate the valley temples and tombs near the great pyramids at Giza, Reisner began work in a singularly fruitful area that contained the great royal cemetery laid out by Cheops and his architects when the First Pyramid was built. He had scarcely begun to explore this magnificent site when Mrs. Hearst notified him that she could no longer afford to support the expedition. As it would have been unthinkable to abandon this superlative concession and break up his efficient organization, he sought another sponsor. Albert M. Lythgoe, curator of Egyptian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, who was in Egypt at the time, saw the crisis as a providential opportunity for the museum to sponsor excavations directly. Thus in 1905 a Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Egyptian Expedition was created, of which Reisner was director until his death in 1942.

Although he left Egypt only infrequently, Reisner was a member of the Harvard faculty, as assistant professor of Semitic archaeology, 1905-10, assistant professor of Egyptology, 1910-14, and professor of Egyptology, 1914-42. From 1910 to 1942 he was also curator of the department of Egyptian art of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, whose collections were constantly enriched by the results of his excavations.

Reisner's activities ranged geographically over a wide area. During the years 1908-10 he was director of Harvard's Palestinian Expedition; his excavation of the palace of Mori, Ahab, and Jeroboam II and other buildings in Samaria was a brilliant example of the handling of a complex stratified site. Meanwhile his work in Egypt continued.

At Giza he excavated progressively from 1899 to 1938 large portions of the cemetery west of the Great Pyramid; the entire royal family cemetery to the east, including the intact tomb of Queen Hetepheres, mother of Cheops, an outstanding example of archaeological dissecting which resulted in the recovery of the only household furniture of the 4th Dynasty; and the temples of the Third Pyramid of Mycerinus, which yielded some of the most distinguished royal sculpture of the Old Kingdom. The whole Giza area provided new evidence on the family relationships of the 4th Dynasty and on the development of funerary architecture in the Old Kingdom. Farther south, at Deir el Bersheh, Reisner worked on Middle Kingdom tombs of provincial nobles, discovering the finest wooden painted coffin and funerary equipment of the period.

His excavations in the Girga district of provincial cemeteries at Naga-ed-Der, Mesheikh, Mesaeed, and Sheikh Farag, ranging from early Predynastic down to Roman times, threw new light on the evolution of burial customs and funerary architecture. In 1907-09, during construction to raise the height of the Aswan Dam, Reisner was in charge of the Egyptian government's archaeological survey in Lower Nubia of the area soon to be flooded between the First Cataract and the Sudan border. These survey excavations uncovered burials of all periods from Predynastic to Meroitic. Reisner also worked extensively in the Sudan. The forts which he uncovered at Semna, Uronarti, Shalfak, and Mirgissa, in the Second Cataract region, added to the knowledge of Egyptian military architecture.

At Kerma he excavated an Egyptian frontier post of Middle Kingdom and First Intermediate date, whose fortified buildings and cemeteries revealed the hitherto unknown impact of Egyptian culture on native Sudanese civilization of the period. In the Napatan district, his excavation of temples and cemeteries at Gebel Barkal and pyramids at Barkal, Kurru, and Nuri brought to light tombs of the 25th Dynasty kings of Egypt, their ancestors, and their descendants. Reisner's work on three cemeteries at Meroë explored pyramid tombs of the kings and queens of the Meroitic Kingdom of Kush, and private and princely tombs of the inhabitants of Meroë from 700 B. C. to 300 A. D.

All told, his Sudanese investigations from Kerma to Meroë made possible the reconstruction of the ancient history of Kush-Ethiopia from the Middle Kingdom to the fall of Meroë and the recovery of the names and chronology of the Kushite royal family from 700 B. C. to 300 A. D. The results of George Reisner's labors have appeared in definitive book form in only fourteen titles (19 volumes), although he published a host of pioneering articles in the form of preliminary reports and special studies in many scholarly journals throughout his active career.

He has sometimes been criticized for not publishing more definitive works, but it was Reisner's belief that, owing to political conditions, active field work by foreign expeditions in Egypt would not be possible for long; that the scientific results, if adequately recorded and preserved, would constitute a mine of source material for future scholars; and that, as long as the opportunity for active field work continued, the excavator was not justified in delaying operations unduly in order to write and publish.

Time has shown much merit in this view.

Reisner suffered from increasing blindness in the final years, but struggled to continue his work despite this calamitous handicap. His last visit to the United States was in 1939, when he returned for the fiftieth reunion of his Harvard class; at this time Harvard awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters. He had continued his excavations relentlessly through the first World War; in the second, he remained in his camp at Giza, working on excavation reports, even though, out of concession to air raids, he placed his records in a subterranean rock-cut tomb and rigged offices and sleeping quarters for his staff in other underground chambers. Although his wife and daughter were persuaded to return to the United States in the summer of 1940, he remained at Giza.

Blind, bedridden, and speechless at the end, he was taken to a Cairo hospital, but he insisted on being carried back, and in June 1942, aged seventy-four, he died at his home camp behind the Great Pyramid in Egypt. He was buried in the European Cemetery in Cairo.

Achievements

• 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.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Catalogue Général Des Antiquités Égyptiennes Du Musée Du Caire: Nos 5218-6000 Et 12001-12527; Amulets (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Catalogue Général Des Antiquités Égyptiennes...)

  • The Egyptian Conception of Immortality

    (Of the nations which have contributed to the direct strea...)

  • Ideas Of Immortality Of The Ptolemic-Roman Period - Pamphlet

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • The Egyptian Conception of Immortality - Primary Source Edition

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • The Egyptian Conception of Immortality The Ingersoll Lecture, 1911

    (HardPress Classic Books Series)

  • The Egyptian Conception of Immortality

Personality

His outstanding characteristics were two: his amazing energy and capacity for continuous hard work, and his utter devotion to scholarship, for which he made many sacrifices, both of his own comfort and that of his family and associates. He was as indifferent to the amenities of life as he was to its financial rewards; to him money was simply a necessary means to furthering the work of the Expedition. He was a great teacher, but he could not abide incompetence or any lack of complete integrity.

Hospitable and helpful to many colleagues, he had a gift for friendship for those he respected. His affection for his Egyptian workmen was deep, and his understanding of their mentality and customs profound.

Quotes from others about the person

• In the opinion of the Egyptologist Herbert E. Winlock, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "George Andrew Reisner was without any doubt the greatest excavator and archaeologist the United States has ever produced in any field. "

Connections

On November 23, 1892, he married Mary Putnam Bronson of Indianapolis; they had one child, Mary Bronson, born in 1903.

Father:

Mary Elizabeth Mason

Mother:

George Andrew Reisner I

Spouse:

Mary Putnam Bronson

Grandfather:

John Jacob Reisner

Daughter:

Mary B. Reisner