F.Ll. Griffith

Brighton, 1862 - 1934, Oxford

BiographyLC name authority rec. n87900110
LC Heading: Griffith, F. Ll. (Francis Llewellyn), 1862-1934
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: "Griffith, Francis Llewellyn"

Griffith, Francis Llewellyn (1862–1934), Egyptologist, was born on 27 May 1862 in Brighton, one of nine children, and the youngest of six sons, of John Griffith (1817/18–1892), headmaster (1856–71) of Brighton College, and later (1872–91) vicar of Sandridge, near St Albans, and his wife, Sara Eliza, daughter of Richard Foster, banker, of Cambridge. Griffith was educated briefly at Brighton College (1871), then privately by his father until he went to Sedbergh School, Yorkshire (1875–8) and Highgate School (1878–80). At Highgate he developed the interest in ancient Egypt that was to determine the rest of his life. He won a scholarship to the Queen's College, Oxford, in 1879 and studied there from 1880 to 1882, but refused to read for honours, preferring to spend his time learning hieroglyphs. Egyptology was not taught in Oxford at that time, but he received encouragement from A. H. Sayce, later professor of Assyriology.

In 1882 Griffith was articled to one of his brothers, a solicitor in Brighton, but he did not enjoy the work. In 1884 he graduated with a pass degree, and on the recommendation of Sheldon Amos, professor of jurisprudence at University College, London, he applied to W. M. Flinders Petrie for a position with the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF). The fund launched an appeal to raise money for an official studentship, and thanks mainly to donations from his aunt, Sophy Foster, and a family friend, Henry Willet, Griffith was enabled to go to Egypt as Petrie's assistant. In the winter of 1884–5 they excavated at Nibeira (ancient Naucratis) and the following season at Tell Nabasha (Imet). In 1886–7 Griffith and Petrie journeyed up river from Minya to Aswan, recording inscriptions, most importantly in Griffith's case those from the rock tombs at Beni Hasan; Griffith then assisted Edouard Naville to excavate at Tell al-Yahudiyyah.

When Griffith's studentship expired, no Egyptological post was open, so in 1888 he became an assistant in the department of British and medieval antiquities at the British Museum. He was, however, allowed to spend his free time on Egyptology. During this period he published his first important book, Inscriptions of Siût and Dêr Rîfeh (1889), based on his work in Upper Egypt, which included a plea for the adequate recording of endangered monuments. As a result, the EEF set up its Archaeological Survey in 1890, with Griffith as its supervisor. He was its director from 1926 until his death. He edited twenty-five of its publications, to an excellent standard. He also initiated and edited the EEF's annual Archaeological Report which appeared from 1892 to 1912, and compiled annual bibliographies of the subject until 1926. In 1892 Petrie became the first professor of Egyptology at University College, London. Griffith acted as his assistant from 1893 to 1901, being responsible for the linguistic side of the new course, although he had to work on an unofficial basis because of opposition from R. S. Poole, the professor of classical archaeology.

In the summer of 1896 Griffith married Kate [Kate Griffith (1854–1902)]. She was born on 26 August 1854 in Ashton under Lyne, the daughter of Charles Timothy Bradbury (d. 1907), a wealthy manufacturer, and his wife, Elizabeth Ann, née Tomlins. Kate became the friend and companion of Amelia B. Edwards, the novelist and principal founder of the EEF (1882), and herself took an active part in the fund's work, serving on the committee and accompanying Edwards on her fund-raising tour of the USA in 1890. In 1892 she became the main executor of Edwards's will, which endowed the new chair of Egyptology at University College, London; she also furthered the process by, among other things, paying most of the legacy duty herself.

The marriage settlement arranged by her father allowed Frank Griffith (as he was generally known) to spend all his time on Egyptology. He gave up his museum post and moved into the Bradbury family home, Riversvale, in Ashton under Lyne, becoming honorary lecturer in Egyptology (1896–1908) at Manchester University. Kate Griffith collaborated on her husband's publications, in particular, a translation of selected Egyptian texts for A Library of the World's Great Literature (1897), and herself translated two standard works on Egyptian religion from the German of Karl Wiedemann (1856–1936).

In 1901 the University of Oxford decided to begin teaching Egyptology, and Griffith was appointed the first reader. That autumn Kate fell ill. She died on 2 March 1902 at Shieling, Silverdale, near Carnforth, Lancashire. At her wish Griffith continued to live at Riversvale until his father-in-law also died (16 April 1907), bequeathing most of his fortune to Griffith. He now moved to 11 Norham Gardens, Oxford, his home for the next twenty-five years. In 1909 he donated £8000 of his new wealth to the university, to establish a fund to encourage Egyptological research, as a memorial to his late wife.

The same year he married his second wife, Nora [Nora Christina Cobban Griffith (1870–1937)]. She was born on 7 December 1870, the daughter of Surgeon-Major James Macdonald of Aberdeen, and sister of General Sir J. R. L. Macdonald (1862–1927). She took a keen interest in antiquities and was for a while a conservator in the Archaeological Museum of King's College, Aberdeen. She had become interested in Egypt on a visit in 1906, and had briefly been a pupil of Griffith's at Oxford. After their marriage she assisted with many of her husband's projects, especially as an illustrator, at which she showed considerable skill. She accompanied him as an assistant and recorder on a series of Oxford excavations in Nubia which he organized in 1910–13, financed partly by the fund he had set up in 1909. They excavated at Faras and Sanam in the Sudan before the work was interrupted by the First World War, during which Griffith spent most of his time helping in Oxford hospitals. The Griffiths mounted further excavations in Egypt (Tell al-Amarna, 1923–4) and the Sudan (Kawa, 1930–31). In 1924 Griffith was elected a fellow of the British Academy, and the same year Oxford appointed him first professor of Egyptology, which he remained until his retirement in 1932. He then moved to Sandridge, Boars Hill, on the outskirts of Oxford, but continued as deputy professor, and was made professor emeritus in 1933.

Griffith was one of the fathers of British Egyptology, and his reputation and generosity combined to give the subject a permanent base in Oxford. His impressive talents lay mainly in linguistics and decipherment, and his archaeological work was always primarily concerned with the discovery and recording of texts. His first step in the subject had been to learn the language by himself, a formidable task in the days before modern grammars, and his first publication in this area, Hieratic Papyri from Kahun and Gurob (1898), was a masterpiece of the decipherer's and editor's skills, for the diverse texts were mostly fragmentary and written in an early cursive previously untackled by scholars. He then became involved with the latest and most difficult cursive form of Egyptian writing, demotic, about which relatively little was known at the time. His edition of two long literary texts, Stories of the High Priests of Memphis (2 vols., 1900), placed him at the forefront of this discipline, which few even among Egyptologists master. It became a standard work, as did The Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden (3 vols., 1904–9), produced in collaboration with his former pupil at University College, Herbert Thompson. His greatest achievement was the monumental Catalogue of Demotic Papyri in the John Rylands Library (3 vols., 1909), which became known as the ‘demotist's bible’ because of its accuracy and exhaustiveness. From 1907 he turned much of his attention to the obscure languages of the kingdoms to the south of Egypt, Meroitic and Old Nubian, in which he made considerable progress, especially by his decipherment of the Meroitic script (see Griffith, Karanòg: the Meroitic Inscriptions, 1911). A full bibliography of his prolific output, by Nora Griffith, is given in Studies Presented to F. Ll. Griffith (1932), to which seventy scholars contributed. Another of his legacies to Egyptology was the foundation of the long-term project to index the inscriptions from all the sites of Egypt, the Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Reliefs, and Paintings, edited by Bertha Porter and Rosalind Moss, and from 1973 by Jaromír Málek (7 vols., 1927–51; revised edn, 1960–).

By nature Griffith was shy and unassuming, and often absent-minded, but good-natured, patient, hard-working, and always ready to further the studies and careers of his pupils. They did not always find it easy to follow his lectures, although his written answers to problems were greatly valued. Apart from Egyptology, his chief interests in youth were natural history, walking, and croquet; in later life, under the influence of his second wife, he became more sociable, taking up golf and tennis; the couple became well known for their extensive hospitality.

Griffith died suddenly from a heart attack at home on 14 March 1934 and was buried in Holywell cemetery, Oxford, on 17 March. He left most of his substantial fortune (after his wife's life interest) to Oxford University, to build and endow a permanent centre for teaching and research in Egyptology and related subjects, and to house his superb library of more than 20,000 volumes, the finest private Egyptological library in the world. After his death Nora Griffith kept it up to date; she devoted most of her time to preparing her husband's numerous unfinished works for press, and organized and financed further Nubian excavations in 1934–6. She died of peritonitis, following an appendectomy, at the Acland Home, Banbury Road, Oxford, on 21 October 1937, leaving her own considerable fortune to be added to her husband's bequest.
“Griffith, Francis Llewellyn (1862–1934),” R. S. Simpson in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, May 2008, accessed August 17, 2015, www.oxforddnb.com.

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