Biography
Romer was educated at Ottershaw School, a boarding school near Woking, Surrey, and came to archaeology through his epigraphic studies of painting and drawing at the Royal College of Art in London. He later worked as an artist in Persepolis and Cairo, drawing and studying ancient inscriptions.
He began his archaeological work in 1966 when he participated in the University of Chicago’s Epigraphic Survey at the temples and tombs of the ancient Egyptian site of Thebes (modern-day Luxor). From 1977 to 1979 he originated and organised a major expedition to the Valley of the Kings which carried out the first excavation there since the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb in 1922. In 1979 he headed the Brooklyn Museum’s expedition to excavate the tomb of Ramesses XI.
In 1979 Romer and his wife (Elizabeth Romer, also an archaeologist and designer) founded The Theban Foundation, in Berkeley, California, a body dedicated to the conservation and documentation of the Royal Tombs of Thebes. One result of this was the creation of the Theban Mapping Project.
Romer's books (some co-written with his wife) include Valley of the Kings, Ancient Lives, Testament and The Seven Wonders of the World, many of which were televised. His most recent work, The Great Pyramid: Ancient Egypt Revisited, was published in April 2007.
Romer lives in Tuscany, Italy.
Read more about this topic: John Romer (Egyptologist)
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)