Early Life and Education
Labib was born in 1905 in Cairo. His father was Cladius Labib, also an Egyptologist and Coptologist who was one of the first Egyptians to learn Hieroglyphics from the French Egyptologists in Egypt and who compiled a Coptic-Arabic dictionary. He grew up in Ain Shams, a suburb of Cairo, where his father had a house with a few acres of land (13 "feddans") that were used to cultivate fruits and vegetables.
For preparatory school Labib went to the "Great Coptic School" and then to Khedivieh Secondary School, both in Cairo. After Labib received his "Bachaloria", he entered the Faculty of Law. However, the Faculty of Archeology had recently opened and he joined this as well. At the final year, exams for both studies clashed, so he choose to sit the Archeology final which he passed with distinction.
Labib was sent for higher studies to Berlin, Germany in 1930. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Frederick William University in 1934. The subject of his doctoral degree was King Ahmose I, founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who expelled the Hyksos from Egypt. Labib showed that the Hyksos stayed in Egypt for 150 years (previously suggested periods were much longer) and that they came from Canaan. He was the first Egyptian to obtain a doctorate in Egyptology. His teachers in Germany included Herman Grapow (with whom he stayed in touch till the latter's death in 1967) and Kurt Heinrich Sethe.
Read more about this topic: Pahor Labib
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“The child-rearing years are relatively short in our increased life span. It is hard for young women caught between diapers and formulas to believe, but there are years and years of freedom ahead. I regret my impatience to get on with my career. I wish I’d relaxed, allowed myself the luxury of watching the world through my little girl’s eyes.”
—Eda Le Shan (20th century)
“His education lay like a film of white oil on the black lake of his barbarian consciousness. For this reason, the things he said were hardly interesting at all. Only what he was.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)