Gardiner, Alan Henderson

Born Mar. 29, 1879, in Eltham; died Dec. 19, 1963, in Oxford. English Egyptologist.

Gardiner studied at the Sorbonne and at Oxford. From the early 1890’s until 1911 he worked in Berlin on the publication of the Dictionary of the Egyptian Language. He was one of the founders of The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology (1914), the British journal of Egyptology. He was elected to the British Academy in 1948. Gardiner annotated and published a large number of literary and historical records that describe the economics, way of life, and social structure and culture of ancient Egyptian society. Gardiner’s publication (with exact translation and commentary) of the Leiden Papyrus No. 344 was extremely significant, since it made possible the study of the oldest known mass uprising of poor peasants and slaves. He wrote the most detailed and carefully worked out grammar of classical Egyptian (so-called Middle Egyptian). In his works on general linguistics, Gardiner advanced a theory of the sentence which stated that the sentence is a fact, not of language in general, but of speech, which by its very nature is subjective.