Concordia

Concordia Winter 2021

ARCHAEOLOGY AT MERCHANT TAYLORS’

The winter 2019 issue of Concordia contained a very interesting article by former Archivist, Sally Gilbert, on the late Eiddon Edwards (1909- 1996, OMT 1919-1928) who spent most of his professional career at the British Museum. From 1955 until 1974 he served as Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities, one of his greatest achievements being organisation of the hugely popular and influential Tutankhamun exhibition in 1972. Long before Sally’s piece appeared in Concordia , Eiddon’s autobiography, From the Pyramids to Tutankhamun: memoirs of an Egyptologist , had been published in 2000 by Oxbow Books of Oxford. It provides a fascinating insight into schooldays at Charterhouse Square, and I hope that a copy has found its way into the school’s archives or library. During Eiddon’s time at Merchant Taylors’ the school was still based at Charterhouse Square, where he was one of the last pupils to be taught Hebrew. The school’s City location aided development of close contacts with the British Museum, and interested pupils formed an Archaeological Society and Museum which

David W. Phillipson (1953-1961) entered Merchant Taylors’ as a Third Former, sponsored by Middlesex County Council, in 1953. From his third year there, he opted to specialise in Classics. In 1961 he entered Gonville & Caius College to read Archaeology & Anthropology. On graduating, he was appointed to head the National Monuments Commission in Northern Rhodesia, soon to become the independent Republic of Zambia. After fifteen years’ residence in Africa (latterly based in Kenya, but with research extending into Ethiopia and South Sudan) he returned to Britain in 1978 and, three years later, was appointed Curator (latterly re-designated Director) of the University Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology in Cambridge, where he remained until retirement in 2006. At Cambridge, he has been for 33 years a Fellow (now Emeritus) of his undergraduate college, was awarded the Litt.D. degree, was appointed to a concurrent Professorship of African Archaeology, and became both a Fellow of the British Academy and an Associate Fellow of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. He and his wife now live in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, within five miles of the village where he was born.

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Aksum, Ethiopia. The carved monoliths marked tombs, almost certainly royal, dating from the fourth century A.D.