Prof. A. Wiedemann

Abstract

ALFRED WIEDEMANN, professor of Egyptology at the University of Bonn, died suddenly at the end of 1936 in Bonn, at the biblical age of over eighty years. Both on his father's and his mother's side he belonged to academic families: his father, like his elder brother, Eilhard, was a well-known professor of physics and chemistry, and so was his mother's father, Mitscherlich. Wiedemann himself, although devoted from his youth to Egyptology, felt always a keen interest in natural history and anthropology, and was one of the first among his Egyptological fellow-students to become enthusiastic over de Morgan's theories on Neolithic Egypt. To the latter's book on the tomb of Naqada he contributed an exhaustive study on the methods of burial in the Naqada necropolis, and the origin of the Egyptian people: it was characteristic of Wiedemann to attempt to draw historical conclusions by interpreting Egyptian religious texts and Egyptian rites in the light of recently established archaeological facts.