Sir John Gardner Wilkinson is considered the founder of British Egyptology. He was born in Little Missenden, Bucks, on October 5, 1797, the son of Reverend John Wilkinson and Mary Anne Gardner. Wilkinson was educated at Harrow and entered Exeter College at Oxford in 1816. He left Oxford in 1818 before earning a degree and joined the army. In 1820, Wilkinson met Sir William Gell in Italy, and Gell convinced him to leave the army and concentrate on the study of archaeology.

                                                    

            In 1821 Wilkinson went to Egypt for the first time.By 1824 and again 1827-1828 he was conducting excavations in Thebes, particularly in the royal tombs, and in 1826 he built a home in Gurna. Wilkinson was the first Egyptologist to make a comprehensive study of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. He walked through the Theban necropolis with a paintbrush and brown oil paint and numbered the 21 open tombs in the Valley of the Kings, four tombs in the West Valley and a great number of the tombs of the nobles. The numbering system, established by Wilkinson, is still used by archaeologists today. In addition, he developed a chronology of the New Kingdom dynasties at Thebes and established dates for the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings using hieroglyphic inscriptions. Wilkinson returned to England in 1833, was knighted in 1839 and granted a DCL from Oxford University in 1852.     

                                                             
                                                                
             Between 1841 and 1849 he returned to Egypt to survey the Wadi Natron and surveyed Montenegro, Herzogovina and Bosnia. All of his surveys were published. Wilkinson spent the winter of 1849 - 1850 in Italy studying the Turin Canon of Kings and published a new translation. He traveled to Egypt for the last time in 1855 - 1856 and married Caroline Catherine Lucas, an actress and botanist, in 1856. Sir John Gardner Wilkinson made many significant contributions to Egyptology. He published the first complete survey of the main archaeological and historical sites in Egypt and Nubia and the first comprehensive plan of ancient Thebes.

                                       
                            
                                           Sir John Gardner Wilkinson   1797 - 1875  

           He also accurately sketched the tomb paintings at Beni Hasan and worked at el-Amarna and the Labyrinth at Hawara. Wilkinson collected nature specimens and published articles in geological zoological journals. He donated antiquities and two large collections of papyri to the British Museum and bequested his personal collection of Classical and Egyptian antiquities to the Harrow School. One of his most important publications was the 5 Volume work  'The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians'. Sir John Gardner Wilkinson died at Llandovery in Wales on October 29, 1875.

                         

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