[Ernest Alfred Wallis]. English archæologist, born in Cornwall on the 27th of July 1857 and educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he became Assyrian scholar and Tyrwhitt Hebrew scholar. In 1885 he became keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities in the British Museum, and he conducted excavations at Assuan, at Gebel Barkal on the island of Meroe (the site of the capital of ancient Ethiopia), at Nineveh and Der in Mesopotamia (1888–89) and in the Sudan, when the ancient monuments on the banks of the Nile were threatened with inundation by the raising of the Assuan dam. His long list of publications includes The Gods of Egypt (1903); The Egyptian Sudan (1907); The Nile (1910; 12th ed., 1912); Literature of the Ancient Egyptians (1914); By Nile and Tigris (1920), and very many others. He was knighted in 1920.
