From Illinois To Mesopotamia

Excavating sites in Egypt and the Near East, writing groundbreaking books and developing a talent for courting wealthy donors
By JOHN RAY

In 1922, the University of Oxford conferred an honorary degree on James Henry Breasted, who was at the height of his fame as an Egyptologist and historian of the ancient world. As he listened to the Latin oration, the great scholar's mind went back to his days as a boy in Rockford, Ill., barefoot and dusty, watching the local blacksmith shoe his father's only horse. Sooner or later, he felt, somebody would be bound to find him out as an impostor—someone who had risen beyond his merits. We know this because he was not ashamed to record these thoughts in his diary.

The origins of James Henry Breasted (1865-1935) were certainly humble. His small-town background was staunchly Congregationalist, and his family encouraged him toward the ministry. His early training was in pharmacy, but an increasing awareness of apparent contradictions in the biblical narrative began to trouble his faith. It also impelled him to turn to Egypt and Mesopotamia, the civilizations that lay behind much of the world of the Old Testament.

There was no institution in the United States where Breasted could study this sort of ancient history, Jeffrey Abt notes in "American Egyptologist," his authoritative account of Breasted's varied life. Breasted attended the Chicago Theological Seminary and, eventually, received a master's degree from Yale. In 1891, he enrolled at the University of Berlin, which was far ahead of other universities in the sophistication of its Egyptology. Three years later, the young graduate returned to Illinois, where he started as a lowly but enthusiastic teaching assistant at the University of Chicago. His admiration for German scholarship, and his affection for the individual teachers he had encountered in Berlin never left him, though they were to cause him some agony of mind when America entered World War I.

Over the next three decades, Breasted would excavate a series of sites in Egypt, the Sudan and the Near East. He would also develop an important ability to identify rich and influential benefactors and to gain their confidence without resorting to sycophancy. Such an approach was, in the absence of government funding, the only way to get things done. Notable among the Maecenas figures he cultivated was John D. Rockefeller.


Rockefeller had been an early patron of the University of Chicago; he might have done something for Near Eastern studies in any case, but it is clear that without Breasted's energy and enthusiasm, Rockefeller's scholarly philanthropy would never have taken the course it did. Eventually, he provided the funding for an entire Oriental Institute in 1931. (The OI, as it is affectionately known, had existed from 1919 but essentially as a concept between academic committees.) Together with its Egyptian offshoot, Chicago House, the OI is perhaps the leading center of Egyptology and Assyriology in the world. At the moment, on both sides of the Atlantic, we are hearing a lot about the evils of bankers and capitalism, but as far as I know no street protester has yet endowed a university department.

Breasted's growing reputation meant that he was bound to play a role in the greatest discovery of the past century, the treasures of the pharaoh Tutankhamun, made in 1922 by English archaeologist Howard Carter. This episode rapidly became fraught, thanks to a combination of political tensions, personal jealousies and a policy of giving exclusive reporting rights to the Times of London. Here Breasted was able to exert a calming effect, and he emerged as something of a trusted go-between.

Breasted's legacy lies not only in a university building, suggests Mr. Abt, but in the history of thought. Breasted's short book "Ancient Times" (1916) is significant in that he devoted more space to the ancient Near East than to Greece and Rome. This had never been tried before. Even more remarkable was his massive and best-selling "History of Egypt" (1905). Previous histories of ancient Egypt had tended to be impressionistic, and there were doubts whether a connected account could ever be made, given the fragmentary state of many of the sources. Breasted showed that the task not only could be done but could be done with grace and literary skill.

With two other books, "The Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt" (1912) and "The Dawn of Conscience" (1933), Breasted broke more controversial ground. These books arose out of the author's struggle with conventional religion. Though he never entirely lost his belief in God, he subsumed it into a narrative of mankind's continuous progress, spiritual as well as moral. This perspective may seem dated nowadays, but it was influential at the time. Theodore Roosevelt was an admirer of "Religion and Thought," while "The Dawn of Conscience" so impressed Sigmund Freud that he went on to write an even more controversial work, "Moses and Monotheism" (1938). Freud was fascinated by archaeology, which he saw as a metaphor for exploring the layers of the human psyche, and his debt to Breasted is clear.

Simply to read about Breasted's achievements is to feel the academic equivalent of shell shock. The man seemed inexhaustible. Perhaps he was driven by the fear, confided to his diaries, that he would one day be found out and brought back to the obscurity where he belonged. A memoir was published by his son Charles in 1945, and it is still useful. Mr. Abt's biography is almost encyclopedic, but the narrative is always visible amid the detail, and footnotes and references are used wisely. It is unlikely that the story of this restless scholar will need to be written again.

Mr. Ray is a professor of Egyptology at the University of Cambridge and the author of "The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt."
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