Alan Gardiner

Who was Alan Gardiner?

Sir Alan Henderson Gardiner was one of the premier English Egyptologists of the early and mid-20th century. Some of his most important publications include a 1959 book on his study of "The Royal Canon of Turin" and his seminal 1961 work Egypt of the Pharaohs, which covered all aspects of Egyptian chronology and history at the time of publication.

Two major contributions to ancient Egyptian philology by Gardiner are his famous three editions of Egyptian Grammar and its correlated list of all the Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs in Gardiner's Sign List. Publishing Egyptian Grammar produced one of the few available hieroglyphic printing fonts.

In 1915 Gardiner was also able to crack the so-called Proto-Sinaitic writing system by deciphering the "B'alat inscriptions".

He was educated at Charterhouse and Queens College, Oxford; he was later a student of the famous egyptologist Kurt Heinrich Sethe in Berlin.