Background
James Henry Breasted was born on August 27, 1865, in Rockford, Illinois, United States, to a family of modest means; his father, Charles Breasted, owned a small hardware business.
archaeologist egyptologist historian scientist
James Henry Breasted was born on August 27, 1865, in Rockford, Illinois, United States, to a family of modest means; his father, Charles Breasted, owned a small hardware business.
It took several false starts - in pharmacology, divinity school, and Hebrew studies - for Breasted to discover the career in which he was to flourish. William Rainey Harper, Breasted’s Hebrew professor at Yale, was so impressed with the young scholar that he offered to make him professor of Egyptology at the new University of Chicago, of which Harper was to become president. There were at that time no programs in Egyptology in the United States, so Haiper proposed to send him to the University of Berlin for training.
The department of ancient history at Berlin instilled a commitment to scrupulous methodology. Breasted studied with Egyptology professor Adolf Erman, who eschewed the prevailing impressionistic, intuitive approach to the field for an emphasis on thorough knowledge of the ancient Egyptian language as a means for understanding the civilization. The ancient history faculty also included Johann Gustav Droysen and Theodor Mommsen, who also emphasized the importance of learning the relevant languages. Breasted also learned to interpret sources in the context of their ancient settings.
He graduated from North Central College in 1888 and attended Chicago Theological Seminary but transferred to Yale to study Hebrew. He received a master's degree from Yale in 1891 and, on the advice of William Rainey Harper, went to Berlin. There Breasted studied under Adolf Erman, who had just established a new school of Egyptology, concentrating systematically on grammar and lexicography. Breasted received his doctorate from Berlin in 1894 with a dissertation on the solar hymns of Ikhnaton.
In Chicago Breasted soon became known as a fine scholar and lecturer, but Egyptology did not catch on right away. He taught in the University Extension program to supplement his salary and to introduce more students to Egyptology. Worn down by a heavy teaching load, including many routine courses, Breasted was happy to accept the Prussian Academy’s invitation to take a lengthy leave of absence to resume work on their Egyptian dictionary project. Wanting Breasted to further his scholarship in Egyptology, the University of Chicago agreed to let him go.
Breasted devoted the years from 1899 to 1908 to the field work that established his reputation. Not only did he contribute to the dictionary project for the first five years, but that work became the foundation for his own scholarship in the field. His work focused on historical texts, leaving to future scholars the literary, religious, and administrative documents and the uninscribed artifacts.
During this period, he began to publish a flood of articles and monograms, as well as his History of Egypt from the Earliest Times Down to the Persian Conquest in 1905, at which time he was promoted to full professor - and its companion, Ancient Records of Egypt: Historical Documents from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (1906-1907), which made his source materials available to fellow scholars. Predominantly a collection of primary texts from three millennia, Ancient Records features translations, a useful organization, and essays; it also glosses its five volumes of material with extensive annotations. Publishing much of the documentation separately enabled his History of Egypt to avoid the dry nature and factual clutter of most books in the field. These books, based entirely on his original research, formed the authoritative modern account of ancient Egyptian history, replacing the often inaccurate hodgepodge of materials that existed up to that time.
In 1903, Breasted secured fifty thousand dollars from the Rockefeller Foundation to found the Oriental Exploration Fund at his university. With this funding, he went to the Nile Valley to create a record of its inscribed monuments. He then spent the winters of 1905 - 1906 and 1906 - 1907 copying, photographing, and taking notes on the monuments of Lower Nubia and the Sudan. A tightening of finances at the University of Chicago put an end to this work, and Breasted returned to his teaching duties in 1908.
Breasted hoped to return to fieldwork after writing a series of textbooks freed him from dependence upon his teaching salary. These included the popular Ancient Times: A History of the Early World (1916), for high school students. A Commonweal reviewer called the second edition, published in 1935, a worthy successor to a “delightfully written volume that has been the inspiration of layman and scholar alike.” An edition of Ancient Times written for adults, The Conquest of Civilization, was published in 1926 and hailed as “one of the best textbooks in history ever written” by a Books contributor.
In 1919, Breasted appealed to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., for a grant to establish the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. Breasted traveled in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria to determine what research would be needed to compose a complete account of ancient history. By 1930, the Oriental Institute was sponsoring a broad scope of interrelated research projects, some still in progress. This project finally gave Breasted the opportunity to make the ambitious scope of his vision take form.
While he developed the programs of the Oriental Institute and maintained a busy fund-raising and lecturing schedule, Breasted was invited to contribute to a number of other projects, including writing the Egyptian section for the prestigious Cambridge Ancient History. When Tutankhamen’s tomb was discovered in 1922, Breasted was asked to contribute the historical material to the subsequent publication; he also attempted, unsuccessfully, to mediate disputes between Egyptian authorities and the discoverers of the tomb.
The fact that Breasted’s later years were plagued by ill health made his prodigious energy even more impressive.
In 1935, Breasted died suddenly from an infection contracted during his return from Europe.
Due to Breasted's extensive travels and knowledge of the political situation throughout the Middle East, Lord Allenby, at that time the High Commissioner for Egypt, requested that he inform the British Prime Minister and Earl Curzon about the hostility of the western Arabs to the occupying British forces before returning to America.
Breasted’s scholarly work joined meticulous research with a humanistic appeal. For example, in The Battle of Kadesh, his classic account of the first recorded example of military strategy, he not only analyzed sources and determined the battle’s location but made it invitingly readable and related this Egyptian achievement to modem Western military history. He countered the tendency to see ancient Egypt as exotic; instead, he wrote it into a common history of the progress of humankind.
His A History of Egypt, too, made the dramas of Egyptian history accessible to the lay person as well as the scholar. He structured his historical narrative around the relationship between what he saw as the Egyptians’ creative energies and the political circumstances that either enabled civilization to flower or thwarted the people’s elemental strength. His Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt, which grew out of a series of lectures he gave at the Union Theological Seminary in 1912, fit Egypt into a larger narrative of human moral evolution; 1933’s The Dawn of Conscience extended and shaped these ideas into the first comprehensive account on the subject based on primary materials. His humanistic approach popularized the study of ancient Egypt in his time, replacing much of the existing, tedious, quantitative scholarship, but it also made many of his interpretations seem dated to later readers. While his ideas about universal humankind and its moral progress seem rooted in the nineteenth century, however, his rigorous scientific methods and the interdisciplinary nature of his work looked forward into the twentieth.
Quotations:
"By 3000 B.C. the art of Egypt was so ripe and so far advanced that it is surprising to find any student of early culture proposing that the crude contemporary art of the early Babylonians is the product of a civilization earlier than that of the Nile."
"It is this conception of the unity of the human career which is perhaps the greatest achievement of historical study, since it gained a place analogous to that of natural science."
"Today the traveller on the Nile enters a wonderland at whose gates rise the colossal pyramids of which he has had visions perhaps from earliest childhood."
"We of America are especially fitted to visualize and to understand the marvellous transformation of a wilderness into a land of splendid cities."
"It is the recognition of history as a record of human experience which has inevitably resulted in the inclusion of this conquest of civilization within the framework of a complete human history."
"Disapproval is a very important factor in all progress. There has really never been any progress without it."
"But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors."
"There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time."
Prussian Royal Academy of Sciences , Berlin
Society of Antiquaries , London
National Academy of Sciences, American Oriental Society
1918
American Historical Society
1928
American Council of Learned Societies
1933 - 1935
Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland
History of Science Society
1926
Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres
Archaeologisches Institut des De-utschen Reiches
Bavarian Academy
Belgian Academy
British Academy
Danish Royal Academy
By the time of Breasted's death, Egyptology was a flourishing field of study and Breasted’s reputation was at its zenith. Although his own fieldwork had given way to more administrative duties, Breasted had shaped the programs of the Oriental Institute with foresight into the future developments of his profession. His own tireless, life-long dedication to establishing and expanding his field was a personal expression of his scholarly belief in the prodigious creative energies and unstoppable progress of humankind.
Quotes from others about the person
“If one were asked to name a scholar who, above all others, stimulated the development of ancient historical studies in the United States during the earlier part of the twentieth century, that honor would have to fall to the colossal figure of James Henry Breasted.” - William J. Murnane, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography
In 1894, Breasted married Frances Hart. The couple honeymooned in Egypt. Hart died four decades later in 1934, after which Breasted married one of her sisters.