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Henry Hall (Egyptologist)

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Henry Reginald Holland Hall MBE (aka Harry Reginald Hall, 30 September 1873 – 13 October 1930) was an English Egyptologist, historian, museum curator, and editor of the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. He was elected in 1911 a Fellow of the Society of Antiquarians of London (FSA) and in 1926 a Fellow of the British Association (FBA). In British Museum's Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, he was Assistant Keeper from 1896 to 1924 and Keeper from 1924 until his death at age 57.

Quotes

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  • The present energy of the archaeologist in Greece and the modern interest in early Greek archaeology date from and are a consequence of the epoch-making discoveries of the beginning of the XIXth century in the domain of Egyptian and Oriental archaeology. A new world was opened to us by these discoveries; the horizon of our knowledge of the ancient civilizations of the earth was widened indefinitely by them; and it was not long before classical students began, after much doubt and incredulity, to ask themselves how far this new knowledge might bear upon the early history of the Greeks. But not all: many classical scholars were utterly unable to conform themselves to the new order of ideas. The keen intellect of Sir G. C. Lewis, for instance, was unable to grasp the meaning of the new discoveries; he continued to the end of his days refusing to believe that anybody could read a single hieroglyph or interpret a single group of wedges.
  • When Greek kings sat on the throne of the Pharaohs and it became fashionable to inquire into the past history of the extraordinary country which had been brought willy-nilly within the pale of Hellenism, a learned priest named Manetho, "The Gift of Thoth" (Manethoth), or possibly "The Gift of Buto" (Manutjo), of Sebennytos in the Delta, was commissioned by Ptolemy Philadelphos to collect all that was known of the Egyptian annals and translate them into Greek as Αἰγυπτιαϰὰ. This was done, and until the discoveries of Champollion Manetho's work, half destroyed as it now is, imitated and garbled by generations of ignorant copyists, was, with the exception of the sketches by Herodotus and Diodorus, the sole Egyptian authority on the history of Egypt. A similar rôle with regard to the history of Mesopotamia was played by the work of a Babylonian priest named Bērōssos, who is said to have been a contemporary of Antiochus II (250 B.C.). ... Like that of Manetho, his work is only known to us through the labours of copyists and compilers.
  • The new discoveries of the earliest age of Greece are chiefly associated with the name of Schliemann, and rightly so, as his work first revealed prehistoric Greece to us. But since his time a totally new face has been given to our knowledge by the Cretan discoveries of Evans and Halbherr, which has rendered out of date all books on the general subject published before 1902. The now prehistooric Greece is very different from the old one of the two decades succeeding Schliemann’s discoveries. He, however, was the pioneer, and his finds explained various ieolaied discoveries made before his time, chiefly of vases, which it had been impossible to bring into any intelligible relation with our knowledge of the relics of classical antiquity. Best known to us of these are perhaps the vases of Ialysos in Rhodes, presented to the British Museum by John Ruskin in 1870.
  • * In spite of the fact that one knew it all beforehand as an Englishman would to whom India in picture and by hearsay was familiar from childhood, who had played with brass Krishnas and had broken gilt alabaster Ganesas and Sivas and Vishnus (with dire corporeal results) before he donned knickerbockers, it was strange to me to realize the fact of the actual worship of Ganesa and Siva and Vishnu in their own land in the temples of their cults at Bombay, as strange as if I were to find Horus and Hathor still venerated in some Egyptian temple such as Edfu or Denderah. Egypt and her gods and priests all alive, mixed up with London; with the Docks, St. Pancras Station, Dulwich College, the Green Park, and the Elephant and Castle: that was the impression I gained of Bombay. There was no doubt of the specifically English (not merely European) impression, and the combination is extraordinary. I felt I loved better Egypt, where the old gods are safely dead and their lore can be studied by such as I without impossible modern contaminations and antinomies, where the muezzin; now calls uncontradicted the simple praises of the One, where the clean desert air breathes health, not septic soddenness, and where one is not likely nowadays to find an uraeus-cobra in one’s bed.
    • A Seasons̓ Work at Ur, Al-ʻUbaid, Abu Shahrain (Eridu) and Elsewhere: Being an Unofficial Account of the British Museum Archaeological Mission to Babylonia, 1919. Methuen & Company. 1930.  (quote from pp. 6–7; text at archive.org)
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