Milestone: Donald Redford (1934–2024)

COURTESY OF SUSAN REDFORD

Donald Redford, renowned Egyptologist and longtime professor of the ancient world at Pennsylvania State University, passed away on October 18 in College Station, Pennsylvania. He was 90 years old.

Redford graduated from the University of Toronto and served there as an associate and then full professor from 1962 to 1998. He then took a position in Penn State’s Department of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, where he taught until his retirement early last year.

In the 1960s, Redford excavated for several seasons in the Old City of Jerusalem under famed British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon. In 1972, he started the Akhenaten Temple Project in Karnak, Egypt, which uncovered the oldest known temple of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten. He continued to excavate in Karnak and Thebes until 1991, revealing a major domestic area of the ancient Egyptian capital city. Afterward, he excavated at the site of Mendes in Egypt’s eastern Nile Delta.

In addition to his fieldwork, Redford was a prolific scholar, publishing extensively on Egypt and its interactions with ancient Canaan and Israel. Among his many books are Akhenaten the Heretic King (Princeton Univ. Press, 1984) and Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton Univ. Press, 1992), the latter of which won a BAS Publication Award for Best Scholarly Book on Archaeology. Redford was also a well-known public scholar, appearing in many television documentaries about ancient Egypt and writing in popular magazines and journals, including his article “The Monotheism of the Heretic Pharaoh” in the May/June 1987 issue of BAR.