Henry George Fischer


Henry George Fischer was an American Egyptologist and poet.

Biography

Born on May 11, 1923, in Philadelphia, Fischer graduated from Princeton University in 1945, after that he was sent teaching English at the American University of Beirut. Returned in the USA, he became an assistant at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and in 1955 he received a Ph.D. from the same university. Shortly after he joined an expedition to Egypt and later he became an assistant professor of Egyptology at Yale University.
In 1958 he started working as an assistant curator at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, forming a bond with this place that will last for his entire life. In 1963 he became associate curator and in 1964, head of the Department of Egyptology. Since the same year until 1970 Fischer was a member of the committee for the salvage of Abu Simbel temples from being submerged by the Lake Nasser following construction of the Aswan Dam: the small temple of Dendur, which was donated to the USA in 1965 as a gratitude for its efforts, was originally intended to be reconstructed on the banks of the Potomac or the Charles River, but Fischer persuaded the presidential committee that such a placement would have exposed the sandstone blocks to excessive degradation, and the temple was reconstructed and exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum since 1978. In 1970 Fischer was awarded by the museum patron Lila Acheson Wallace, earning a special chair as the curator of Egyptology. When he retired in 1992, he became a curator emeritus.
Fischer's fields of interest were the arts and culture of the ancient Egyptian nomoi and their differences, as well as the Metropolitan Museum collection and the hieroglyphic writing system. After his retirement he focused on his other interests, such as writing poetry and playing the Renaissance sackbut.
Henry George Fischer died on December 11, 2005, in Newtown Township, Delaware County, Pennsylvania, aged 82.

Significant works