Persona

Posener, (Henri) Georges

1906-1988

French Egyptologist; he was born in Paris, 12 September 1906, son of Solomon Pozner, a Russian lawyer and journalist who left his country in 1905, and Esther Sidersky; the family returned to Russia after the 1917 Revolution but again emigrated to France in 1921; he was educated at the Lycée Russe in Paris, the Sorbonne where he studied history and geography, and the École Pratique des Hautes Études where he studied Egyptology under Sottas, Lefebvre, Weill, and Moret from 1925-31; he was awarded his diploma in 1933 with a thesis on the texts of the Persian period; he exhibited a deep interest in Egyptian philology and literature; from 1931-9 he was attached to the French Institute in Cairo and took part in the excavations at Tod and Deir el-Medina; he was assigned the publication of the literary hieratic ostraca from Deir el-Medina, a task which was to become his life's work and allowed him to reconstruct many ancient Egyptian literary texts; he served in the French army at the beginning of World War II, was taken prisoner and escaped in 1940, and spent the rest of the war in hiding in Paris where he took part in the Resistance; in 1945 he was appointed Director of Studies in history and Egyptian archaeology at the École Pratique until 1976; Professor of Egyptian Philology and Archaeology at the Collège de France 1961-78; Visiting Professor Brown University 1952-3; Member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 1969; President of the Société Francaise d'Égyptologie 1963-71 and editor of Revue d'Égyptologie until 1985; Professor honoris-causa of the University of Heidelberg; Corresponding Member of the British Academy; Member of the German Archaeological Institute and the Academies of Sciences in Göttingen and Munich; he wrote nearly a hundred books and articles covering a wide range of subjects especially history, religion, and literature; his principal works were Catalogue des ostraca hiératiques littéraires de Deir el Médineh I-III, 1934-80; La Première domination perse en Égypte, recueil d'inscriptions hiéro-glyphiques, 1936; Littérature et politique dans l'Égypte de la XlIe dynastie, 1956; Dictionnaire de la civilisation égyptienne, 1959; De la divinité du pharaon, 1960; Catalogue des stèles du Sérapéum de Memphis I, with M. Malinine and J. Vercoutter, 1968; L'Enseignement loyaliste, 1976; Le papyrus Vandier, 1985; he died in Garaches, 15 May 1988.

• Who Was Who in Egyptology (5th ed. 2019), 375 fig. (portrait).