James Peter Allen

• 1. Introduction

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  James Peter Allen was born on the 22nd of April, 1945, into, as his wife Susan put it, "the U.S. Army." His father had proposed to his mother on an Army requisition form while stationed in Burma. Both parents were in the military, and Allen was barely two weeks old when the war in Europe ended. The family moved to Frankfurt, Germany, where he learned to speak fluent German. How this Army child became a leading voice in the study of ancient Egyptian language and religion is a question with an unlikely answer. The path runs through an Indiana seminary, a fellowship in Chicago, and the carved walls of ancient temples.

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• 2. A Grammar and a Calling

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  In 1953, the family moved to San Antonio, Texas. A later move to Baltimore introduced Allen to Mercer's An Egyptian Grammar, and he began working through Middle Egyptian on his own. That self-directed study led him to Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in Indiana, where he graduated in 1968. His thesis there examined the philosophical framework of ancient Egyptian creation accounts, exploring how those ideas compared to the opening of the Hebrew Bible. Two decades later, Yale University Press would publish that work as Genesis in Egypt. A scholarship brought Allen to the University of Chicago's program in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. There, the writings of linguist Hans Polotsky proved decisive, reshaping how Allen thought about Egyptian verbal structure. He also began working through Gardiner's sign list and the Akkadian language. Susan, who was studying Near Eastern archaeology at Chicago, became his wife in 1970. Within three years, the couple would begin spending part of every year in Luxor, Egypt.

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• 3. Karnak to Luxor Temple

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  In 1973, Allen and Susan began spending part of each year in Luxor, Egypt, where he joined the Epigraphic Survey. The Survey focuses on recording the hieroglyphic inscriptions carved on ancient temple walls. Allen's first assignment was at the temple of Khonsu in Karnak. He then moved to the Seti Wall on the north side of the Great Hypostyle Hall. His final posting with the Survey brought him to the Opet Colonnade in the Luxor Temple. Between field seasons, the couple lived in the Cairo neighborhoods of Zamalek and Giza. They eventually made Newport, Rhode Island their base. From Newport, Allen was teaching at Yale University while building toward a career that would center on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

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• 4. Sixteen Years at the Met

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  The Metropolitan Museum of Art appointed Allen its curator of Egyptian art in 1990, a position he would hold until 2006. He worked as a specialist not just in physical objects but in the culture's language and religion. In 1999, the Museum published Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids. Allen was among the co-authors of that major exhibition catalog. In 2002, his edition of The Heqanakht Papyri appeared under the Met's imprint. It made a set of ancient Egyptian letters and accounts available to scholars. By 2005, Allen's new translation of a papyrus appeared in a further Met exhibition catalog. That same year, the Society of Biblical Literature published his edition of The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts. His final year at the Museum, 2006, was also prolific in print. The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt and The Egyptian Coffin Texts, Vol. 8, Middle Kingdom Copies of Pyramid Texts both appeared that year. Also in 2006, Brown University extended an offer that would draw Allen away from the Museum and toward a new phase of academic life.

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• 5. The Wilbour Chair

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  Allen joined Brown University as the Charles Edwin Wilbour Professor of Egyptology in 2007. Part of his charge was to expand Brown's existing program into a full department combining Egyptology and Assyriology. In 2008, he was elected president of the International Association of Egyptologists. By 2012, Allen was at work on a history of the Egyptian language, using the Chicago Demotic Dictionary as a central resource. He compared its scope to the Oxford English Dictionary, saying "What the Chicago Demotic Dictionary does is what the Oxford English Dictionary does." His publication output continued at a steady pace throughout the Brown years. Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs first appeared in 2000. Cambridge University Press published a third edition in 2014. The Ancient Egyptian Language: An Historical Study came out from Cambridge University Press in 2013. A Grammar of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Vol. I: Unis followed in 2017 from Eisenbrauns. In 2020, Ancient Egyptian Phonology appeared from Cambridge University Press and Coptic: A Grammar of Its Six Major Dialects from Eisenbrauns. A further work, Ancient Egyptian Thought, is listed as forthcoming from the American University in Cairo Press.

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