James Peter Allen

• 1. Born Into The Army

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  James Peter Allen was born on the 22nd of April 1945. His father proposed to his mother on an Army requisition form while stationed in Burma. Both parents served in the U.S. Army during World War 2. The family moved to Frankfurt, Germany when Allen was two weeks old. He learned to speak fluent German as a child. The war ended in Europe just after he turned two months old. In 1953, the family relocated to San Antonio, Texas. Later they settled in Baltimore where Allen bought a copy of Mercer's An Egyptian Grammar. He began learning Middle Egyptian from that book alone.

• 2. Curator At The Met

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  Allen served as curator of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1990 until 2006. He specialized in the culture's language and religion during this tenure. A new translation of the papyrus appeared in the museum's exhibition catalog in 2005. The publication titled Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids came out in 1999. He worked on a history of the Egyptian language with help from the Demotic dictionary. Allen described the Chicago Demotic Dictionary as doing what the Oxford English Dictionary does for English. The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt was published by the museum in 2006.

• 3. Wilbour Professorship

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  Brown University offered Allen the Charles Edwin Wilbour Professorship of Egyptology in 2006. He accepted the role and moved to Rhode Island to teach there. His responsibility included expanding their Department of Egyptology into a full department of Egyptology and Assyriology. The couple had lived part-time in Luxor, Egypt starting in 1973. They spent time living in Zamalek and Giza before moving to Newport. Allen taught at Yale University after leaving his field work in Egypt. The university named the chair after Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour who graduated in 1854.

• 4. Grammar And Phonology

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  Cambridge University Press published Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs in 2000. A second edition of that text appeared in 2014. The publisher released The Ancient Egyptian Language: An Historical Study in 2013. Coptic: A Grammar of Its Six Major Dialects came out from Eisenbrauns in 2020. Ancient Egyptian Phonology was also published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. The Inflection of the Verb in the Pyramid Texts was issued by Undena in Malibu in 1984. Genesis in Egypt: The Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts was published by Yale University Press in 1988.

• 5. International Leadership

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  Allen received his PhD from the University of Chicago of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. He met his future wife Susan while studying there as she researched Near Eastern archaeology. They were married in 1970. In 2008, he was elected president of the International Association of Egyptologists. Allen worked for the Epigraphic Survey first at the temple of Khonsu in Karnak. He then worked on the Seti Wall on the north side of the Hypostyle Hall. Finally he documented the Opet Colonnade in the Luxor Temple. His thesis Genesis in Egypt would later be published in 1988 after graduation in 1968.