Percy E. Newberry

Percy Edward Newberry (23 April 1869 – 7 August 1949) was a British Egyptologist.

Biography

Percy Newberry was born in Islington, London on 23 April 1869. His parents were Caroline (née Wyatt) and Henry James Newberry, a woollen warehouseman. Newberry developed a strong attachment to botany in childhood and was also an excellent artist. He studied at King's College School and King's College London, and studied botany at Kew Gardens.

Career

In 1884, on the invitation of Reginald Stuart Poole, Newberry began administrative work at the Egypt Exploration Fund, founded just two years previously. Here he met a number of established Egyptologists, including Flinders Petrie, Amelia Edwards and F. L. Griffith, who acted as his mentor. He continued in this role until 1886, when he began his own research in Egyptology, presenting a paper on botany in excavations to the British Association in 1888, with Petrie making use of Newberry's botanical expertise to identify botanical remains found during past excavations.

In 1890 Newberry travelled to Egypt with Howard Carter, whom Newberry had appointed as a trainee tracer, after recognising his talent as an artist. There they worked on the excavation of Beni Hasan and El-Bersheh, which Newberry led from 1890 to 1894, writing a two-volume monograph on Beni Hasan. From 1895 to 1905 he worked as a freelance excavator in the Theban necropolis, his patrons including Lord Amherst, the Marquess of Northampton, and Theodore M. Davis. In 1902 he joined the staff of the Catalogue Général of the Services des Antiquities of the Cairo Museum.