UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In 1998, Canadian retirement requirements forced Donald Redford to leave the University of Toronto after 36 highly distinguished years. But the world-renowned Egyptologist’s career was far from over.
Eventually, some colleagues convinced him to move to the United States and take a new faculty position in Penn State’s Department of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies (CAMS).
“They were looking for a roster of experts from all over the world to put it on the map, as it were,” Redford said.
Twenty-six years later, the department is among the world’s leaders in the study of ancient Egypt largely thanks to the efforts of Redford, who recently retired from his position as professor of CAMS and history.
Redford’s absence will be deeply felt, said Tawny Holm, CAMS head and associate professor of CAMS and Jewish studies.
“Don's arrival made Penn State a reference for ancient Egypt across the world,” Holm said. “We will greatly miss Don — a kind friend, a generous colleague and a beloved teacher, who for decades engaged thousands of undergraduate and graduate students with the fascinating world of ancient Egypt, its language, and its history and culture.”
A historian and philologist of northeast Africa and the Near East, Redford received his doctoral degree from the University of Toronto. Fluent in ancient Egyptian, Semitics and Akkadian, he served under Dame Kathleen Kenyon in the excavations of the old city of Jerusalem from 1964 to 1967.
Among Redford’s major accomplishments was his 1976 discovery of the oldest temple of the heretic monotheistic Pharaoh Akhenaten. A few years later, he and his team revealed a major domestic area of the capital city of Thebes.
For decades, Redford supervised annual excavations in Egypt, including those to Mendes and Thebes as part of the University of Pennsylvania-based Akhenaten Temple Project, which he co-directed with his wife and former CAMS faculty member Susan Redford. That work in the Nile Delta has contributed much to the current knowledge of complex society and state formation in Egypt circa 3100 BCE and has refined and added to the knowledge of the civilization during its Late and Hellenistic Periods (circa 700-200 BCE).
“The discoveries don’t seem to stop — Egyptology is an ongoing field that never seems to let up,” Redford said. “I’m a little nostalgic looking back at all the work we’ve done and all that remains to be done. I’ve made a lot of friends and a lot of memories along the way.”