Barry Kemp, an archaeologist whose decades of painstaking digging at the abandoned capital of a mysterious pharaoh helped revolutionize our understanding of how everyday ancient Egyptians lived, worked and worshiped, died on May 15 in Cambridge, Britain, one day after his 84th birthday.
The death was announced by the Amarna Project, an archaeology nonprofit where Mr. Kemp was director.
Almost from the moment he arrived to teach at Cambridge University in 1962, fresh out of college, Mr. Kemp was a phenomenon.
Much of his work had little to do with the pharaohs, though.
He was among the first to apply the questions of social history, in which scholars explore the lives of everyday people in the past, to ancient Egypt.
Persons:
Barry Kemp, Kemp
Organizations:
Amarna, Cambridge University
Locations:
Cambridge, Britain, Egypt