Collection Wainwright MSS - Gerald Avery Wainwright Photographs Collection

Identity area

Reference code

Wainwright MSS

Title

Gerald Avery Wainwright Photographs Collection

Date(s)

Level of description

Collection

Extent and medium

Context area

Name of creator

(1879-1964)

Biographical history

British Egyptologist and archaeologist; he was born at Clifton, 4 March 1879, son of William Frederick W., brewer, and Emily Helen Jones; educated Clifton College, but he was unable to go on to University afterwards; his interest in Egyptology was awakened by reading Rawlinson's Ancient Egypt at 15, but he was unable to follow it up and had to work in a timber office when he was 17; in 1900 he attended evening classes in Egyptian and Coptic at the University College, Bristol, Mackay being also a student; he first visited Egypt in 1904, and on meeting Petrie, 1907, asked to be taken on as an assistant on his digs; he went to Sohag and remained excavating with Petrie until 1912, contributing to no fewer than six of Petrie's archaeological vols., Meydum and Memphis III, 1910; The Labyrinth and Gerzeh, 1911; Tarkhan I and Memphis V, 1913; Heliopolis, Kafr Ammar and Shurafa, 1915; and pls. in Memphis I and II, during the summers he studied with Petrie and Margaret Murray at University College London, and received some instruction in language from Griffith in Oxford, in return for help with the Nubian finds; he next joined Wellcome in the Sudan, and having saved enough money was able to study and take his BLitt Oxon, 1913, the subject being The Foreign Relations of the New Kingdom which dealt with the Keftiu and which was published later in Liverpool Annals; Wainwright dug for the EES at Abydos, 1913-14, and at Es-Sawama, and in 1915 at El-Balabish for the American branch; in 1914 he also joined Woolley and Lawrence at Carchemish; to support himself he taught at Christ's Hospital School and the Tewfikia School in Cairo, 1916-21; he was appointed Chief Inspector of Middle Egypt by the Antiquities Service, 1921-4; in 1926 he retired to Bournemouth with sufficient money saved plus the compensation given by the Egyptian Government to retiring officers, to enable him to devote the rest of his life to research and publication; to this end he regularly visited Oxford, and the list of his publications is thus very long, reaching hundreds of items; only two books came out under his own name, Balabish, 1920; The Sky Religion of Egypt, 1937; his interests were very wide and his articles and reviews embraced archaeology and anthropology in areas far beyond Egypt; in all he contributed to at least 15 journals and also reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement, his main studies were technical, e.g. iron, bronze, tin, obsidian; religious and anthropological, e.g. the origins of the gods Amun and Min; and ethnic, e.g. the Sea Peoples; he did much to encourage young people and students, founding a prize of £50 for an essay written on Egyptian Archaeology by a boy or girl at school; he left the bulk of his estate to the University of Oxford to endow two Research Fellowships in the study of Near Eastern Archaeology; he also donated a generous sum for books for the library of the EES; he died in Bournemouth, 28 May 1964.

Archival history

Immediate source of acquisition or transfer

Content and structure area

Scope and content

Photographs of Egyptian sites and museum objects.

Appraisal, destruction and scheduling

Accruals

System of arrangement

Conditions of access and use area

Conditions governing access

Conditions governing reproduction

Language of material

Script of material

Language and script notes

Physical characteristics and technical requirements

Finding aids

Allied materials area

Existence and location of originals

Existence and location of copies

Related units of description

Notes area

Alternative identifier(s)

Access points

Subject access points

Place access points

Name access points

Genre access points

Description control area

Description identifier

Institution identifier

Rules and/or conventions used

Status

Level of detail

Dates of creation revision deletion

Language(s)

Script(s)

Sources

Accession area

Related subjects

Related people and organizations

Related genres

Related places

Physical storage

  • Shelf: 0921