July 16, 1954

Henri Frankfort (February 24, 1897, to July 16, 1954) was a Dutch archaeologist and thinker who was the first to suggest the roots of Egypt lay in sub-Saharan Africa rather than the Asian east. He spent much of his career with the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. Frankfort sought to understand the past in its own terms rather than insisting on the superiority of the present. This biographical sketch is a slight introduction to this extraordinary thinker:

....Frankfort’s university studies in history, hieroglyphics, and archaeology were complemented by excavations in Egypt (1922) and travel through the Balkans and the Middle East (1922, 1924–25). From this period he produced Studies in Early Pottery of the Near East, 2 vol. (1924–27). After directing excavations in Egypt at Abydos, Tell el-Amarna, and Armant (1925–29), he led the expedition of the Oriental Institute (University of Chicago) to Iraq (1929–37) and published Cylinder Seals: A Documentary Essay on the Art and Religion of the Ancient Near East (1939).

As professor at the University of Chicago and head of the Warburg Institute of the University of London (1938–54), he brought his far-reaching interests to bear on comparative studies of Egypt and Mesopotamia. He approached archaeological materials with a keen regard for anthropological, aesthetic, and philosophical problems as well as a rare understanding of religious phenomena. His other works include Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature (1948), Ancient Egyptian Religion: An Interpretation(1948), and The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient (1954).

Frankfort also was the lead author of Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (1946), one of his most popular works. We quote a brief passage, in which the author portrays the thinking behind the concept of divine kingship:

The king of Egypt was ...one of the gods....[T]he Egyptian did not distinguish between symbolism and participation...he meant the king was [say] Horus....

How can the king be the god-king unless the god-king is present in him, so that the two become one..."he is Bastet", the goddess who protects and "he is Sekhmet", the goddess who punishes....

Here Frankfort uses names that are familiar in his attempt to understand the thought processes of those for whom things subsist within each other without arousing a critical need to abstractly separate different aspects of the world.  Bastet you probably remember was an Egyptian deity commonly represented as a cat. Sekhmet is also feline but portrayed as a lioness. I am not able, at least now, to speak more clearly than Frankfort does above, about how the king was both a man and a god.