26/12/1870 –10/05/1938
Scottish Egyptologist, archaeological author and Keeper of the Cairo Museum
Relatives
Research:
Campbell Cowan Edgar was a noted Egyptologist of the early 20th century and a respected authority on Classical Egyptian Archaeology and ancient papyri. Originally from Scotland, he lived and worked internationally, spending several years in Egypt. He specialised in the study of 3rd century BC Hellenistic Egypt and Egyptology scholars studying the Ptolemaic Kingdom still refer to the works of C.C.Edgar today.
It is not currently known how or when he came to live in Berkhamsted, but his address appears in a few publications as living at a house called “Vaureal” on Doctors Commons Road in Berkhamsted. His grave can be seen in Rectory Lane Cemetery, the headstone carved appropriately in the form of a papyrus scroll.
Early life
Campbell Cowan Edgar was born on Boxing Day 1870 in Tongland, Kirkcudbrightshire, about 22 miles south-west of Dumfries in Scotland. He was born in the Manse, the son of a Church of Scotland minister. His parents, Rev Andrew Edgar (1830-1890) and Mary Sybilla Edgar (neé Cowan) (1845-1928), had nine children:
- Andrew Colville Edgar (1866-1883)
- Mary Campbell Edgar (1869-1960)
- Campbell Cowan Edgar (1870-1938)
- John Stewart Edgar (1872-1916)
- Charles Samuel Edgar (1874-1945)
- Jean Violet Edgar (1875-?)
- Sybil Frances Edgar (1877-1957)
- Magdalen Grace Edgar (1880-1943)
- Audrey Colville Edgar (1884-1953)
Rev Andrew Edgar was quite prominent in the Kirk and a scholar of ecclesiastical history. He wrote a chapter on “The Discipline of the Church” in Robert Herbert Story’s 1890 book The Church of Scotland, Past and Present. He later went on to serve as Minister of Mauchline Parish Church in Ayrshire, possibly his last appointment. Four of his children were born in Mauchline. After Andrew’s death in 1890, it appears that his widow Mary moved to Edinburgh; in the 1891 census she is recorded as living at 23 Dalrymple Crescent in the Grange.
Education
Campbell was educated at Ayr Academy. He began his undergraduate studies at Glasgow University 1887-91 under noted classical scholars Richard Claverhouse Jebb and Gilbert Murray, and later went on to study Classical Archaeology at Oriel College, Oxford 1891-95. He also spent some time studying in Munich. In 1896 he was awarded the Craven Fellowship and went to Greece, where he studied at the British School at Athens under Cecil Harcourt Smith. In 1896-7, Edgar investigated the temple at Kynosarges near Athens, and led the archaeological excavations at Pelos, a prehistoric burial site on the island of Milos in the Cyclades. He attained a doctorate in literature at Dublin University.
Archaeological work
Edgar’s next engagement was a career-defining move. Already a specialist in classical archaeology of Greece, he branched out into the study of Greco-Roman Egypt. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Cairo Museum in Egypt began a project to catalogue its collection. Edgar’s specialist Hellenist knowledge was in demand, and in 1900 he was appointed by the Egyptian Government Ministry of Public works as a temporary Egyptologist to assist with the Catalogue Générale. For this appointment, Edgar was required to learn Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The only photograph we have of C.C. Edgar dates from this period. He is pictured at a 1903 excavation of the ancient city of Naukratis, where he was assisting the renowned archaeologist David George Hogarth. The Naukratis dig was a highly significant excavation and yielded many important artefacts which are now displayed in museums all over the world. Inscribed pottery items were also discovered, a source of some of the earliest Greek writing ever found.
In 1905 Edgar was appointed Chief Inspector of Antiquities in the Nile Delta. In 1910 he excavated the Tomb of Khesuwer at Kom el-Hisn, where he discovered a stone head of a 12th Dynasty Pharaoh, along with statues of Pharaoh Amenemhat III.
Marriage
Correspondence from this period between Edgar and the Egyptian Antiquities Service suggests that Edgar divided his time in between Egypt and the UK. There are a number of his letters preserved in the Library of the Institut de France, and one dated 1907 gives his home address as 36 Fountainhall Road, Edinburgh (not far from his mother’s 1891 address).
Sometime around 1907 or 1908, Campbell Cowan Edgar married Jessie Robertson Smith. Jessie came from Gunnersbury in West London but she had grown up in Italy. She had been deaf since the age of 14 and spoke English with an Italian accent. The Edgars had four children:
- Cicely Edgar, born in Edinburgh in 1909
- Margaret (“Peggy”)
- Andrew
- Jimmy
The move to Egypt
Shortly after his marriage, CC Edgar took his family to live in Egypt. It seems that the family lived in Mansoura, near Cairo, and their other three children were all born in Egypt.
Edgar had become established as a respected authority on Egyptian archaeology. He started work at the Cairo Museum in 1920, and in 1925 was appointed as its Keeper and Secretary-General.
The move to Berkhamsted
Around 1921 (when Cicely was 12) the family moved back to Britain. Instead of returning to Scotland, they chose to live close to London (presumably for easy access to the British Museum for Campbell). Berkhamsted offered not only a good location but also good public school education for both the girls and the boys. The Edgars lived at a house named “Vaureal” on Doctor’s Commons Road. Edgar retired in 1927.
Campbell’s career evidently had an influence on Cicely, who followed in her father’s footsteps and went on to read Classics at Oxford University (Somerville College) and then won a scholarship to the British School at Athens. She married her childhood sweetheart, Neil Cowan, and moved to London, but the onset of the Blitz during WWII encouraged them to move back to Berkhamsted. Mrs Cicely Cowan might have become a renowned archaeologist herself, but instead became a Classics teacher at Berkhamsted School.
Death and legacy
Campbell Cowan Edgar died aged 68 in 1938, and was buried in Rectory Lane Cemetery. Edgar’s death was announced in the scientific journal Nature:
WE regret to record the sudden death of Dr. Campbell Cowan Edgar, distinguished as an authority in Egyptian archaeology, which took place on May 10 at Berkhamsted.
Nature 141, 18 June 1938.
A number of artefacts held in the collection of the British Museum were donated by Edgar, including items excavated in Greece around 1900.
In the 1939 Census, Jessie Edgar is recorded as a widow living at Vaureal. She outlived Campbell by 32 years, and when she died in 1970, she was buried with her husband.
Campbell’s younger brother, Charles Samuel Edgar (1874-1945), also followed a path into classical scholarship. After studying at the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford, he eventually became Professor Of Greek at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.
Publications
Edgar is especially known for his published translations (with A. S. Hunt) of the Zenon Papyri, a large collection of ancient 3rd-century BC documents written in Greek and Demotic that was discovered in 1914 in the Nile Valley. The translations have provided Egyptologists with a hugely significant window onto the society of the lost city of Philadelphia.
C.C. Edgar wrote a number of books on archaeology, and his works are frequently cited in museum research.
- Greek Sculpture (1903)
- Zenon Papyri (1925)
- Sculptors’ Studies and Unfinished Works (1906)
- Greek Bronzes (1904)
- Greek Vases (1911)
- Greek Moulds (1903)
- Graeco-Egyptian Coffins, Masks and Portraits (1905)
Sources
- Bierbrier, M.L. Who was who in Egyptology, Egypt Exploration Society 2012
- Guérud, O. , “Campbell Cowan Edgar (1870-1938)” in Annales du Service des Antiquités de l’Égypte, Service des Antiquités de l’Égypte, Cairo 1939
- Letters to the directors of the Egyptian Antiquities Service – Library of the Institut de France (Ms 4016 / Feuillets 249-386, Ms 6336)
- Campbell Cowan Edgar, Department Of Antiquities, Cairo – Dalrymple Crescent Families – a Snapshot of Victorian Edinburgh, 2012
Special thanks to Kacper Laube of the University of Warsaw Institute of Archaeology for his assistance in compiling this biography