James Henry Breasted

James Henry Breasted (; August 27, 1865 – December 2, 1935) was an American archaeologist, Egyptologist, and historian. After completing his PhD at the University of Berlin in 1894 – the first American to obtain a doctorate in Egyptology – he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. In 1901, he became director of the Haskell Oriental Museum at the university, where he continued to concentrate on Egypt. In 1905, Breasted was promoted to full professor and held the first chair in Egyptology and Oriental History in the United States.

Breasted was a committed field researcher in Egypt and the Levant and had a productive interest in recording and interpreting ancient writings, especially from sources and structures that he feared may be lost forever. In 1919, he founded the Oriental Institute (later known as, the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures) at the University of Chicago, a center for interdisciplinary study of ancient civilizations. That same year, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Early life and education James Henry Breasted was born on August 27, 1865, the son of a small hardware business owner and his wife, in Rockford, Illinois. His ancestors went back to early colonial Dutch and English, with the family name Van Breestede. He was often accompanied to Egypt by his son Charles who, under an assumed name, wrote first-hand reports on the Tutankhamun excavation for the Chicago Daily News and The Christian Science Monitor.

Breasted also collaborated with his University of Chicago colleague Carl F. Huth, Jr. on a very well-received series of historical maps that was published by the Denoyer-Geppert Co. (1916), which were sold both individually and eventually expanded and published in a series of atlases, including (with Huth and Samuel B. Harding) European History Atlas: Ancient, Medieval and Modern European and World History Adapted from the Large Wall Maps, 3rd rev. ed. (1929), which was published in its eleventh revised edition in 1967.

On April 25, 1923, Breasted became the first archaeologist to be elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences. The honor helped to legitimize the struggling profession of archaeology in American academic circles. He served as the president of the History of Science Society in 1926.