James Burton

James Burton Junior (22 September 1786 – 22 February 1862) (formerly Haliburton and latterly Haliburton) was a British libertine and pioneering Egyptologist who mapped the Valley of the Kings; and was the first post-Renaissance person to enter KV5; and was the discoverer of the Karnak king list; and was the discoverer of TT391.

Family James Burton Junior, who was born at Crescent Place, Bloomsbury, London, was the fourth child and second son of the pre-eminent London property developer James Burton Senior (who was formerly surnamed Haliburton) by Elizabeth Westley (12 December 1761 – 14 January 1837) of Loughton. He was christened 'James Haliburton' but his father changed the family surname to Burton in 1794. He was a cousin and friend of the Canadian author and British MP Thomas Chandler Haliburton:

His great-great grandparents were The Rev. James Haliburton (1681 – 1756) and Margaret Eliott, who was the daughter of Sir William Eliott, 2nd Baronet and the aunt of George Augustus Eliott, 1st Baron Heathfield. He descended from John Haliburton (1573 – 1627), from whom Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet also was descended.

He impressed Susanna Haliburton Weldon, who was the daughter of his cousin Thomas Chandler Haliburton, whom and whose father he hosted and entertained when she and her father resided in England from 1837.

Education James Burton Junior was privately tutored before he was educated at Tonbridge School; and at Trinity College, Cambridge (BA, 1810: MA, 1815) and at Middle Temple

Egyptology and Decadence He between 1815 and 1822 worked with the architects Sir John Soane and Charles Humphreys, the latter of whom became his secretary. He met the Egyptologists Sir John Gardner Wilkinson, and Edward William Lane, and Sir William Gell. In 1822, he was invited by Pasha Mohammed Ali to work as a mineralogist, in the Geological Survey of Egypt, to discover coal, that he left in 1824 to investigate the ancient monuments of Egypt. He located the porphyry quarry of the Romans and the site of Myos Hormos on the Red Sea coast. In 1825, he travelled south on the Nile. He spent months in Thebes, where he camped in the Memnonium, studied the surrounding monuments, and excavated at Medinet Habu, Valley of the Kings, Abu Simbel, and Karnak, including its Temple of Amun-Ra, of which he drew the plan, and its Granite Sanctuary, where he found the Karnak king list which provided information that was not included in the king list from Abydos.

He made the first attempt to excavate KV20 that cleared the tomb's first chamber, and mapped KV21. He also explored KV26, KV9, KV19, with assistance of Charles Humphreys, Joseph Bonomi the Younger, Lord Prudhoe, and Orlando Felix (1790 - 1860). In 1828 he found the trilingual inscription known as the Caristie stone which subsequently came to be housed in the Louvre.

He between 1825 and 1834 stayed in the Egyptian desert for nine years until his father discontinued his funds and he was compelled to return to London in 1834.