Elise Jenny Baumgartel

Vocation

Traits

German Egyptologist and prehistorian who pioneered the study of the archaeology of predynastic Egypt. Since her marriage to Hubert Baumgärtel in 1914, Elise Goldtschmidt was known as Baumgärtel, which she changed to Baumgartel on emigration. She enrolled at the University of Berlin with the intention to study medicine, but became interested in Egyptology, which she studied under Adolf Erman and Kurt Heinrich Sethe. Baumgartel had spent much of her time in Berlin cataloguing the extensive collections of lithic artefacts in the city's museums. After receiving her doctorate in 1927, she obtained a scholarship to study under the noted French lithicist Henri Breuil in Paris. For the next six years she worked on the lithic chronology of the southern Mediterranean. During this time she participated in excavations, including at Wadi Sheik in Egypt and Monte Gargano in Italy, and visited ancient and modern flint mines across Europe. When the Nazi Party seized power in Germany in 1933, Baumgartel (who was Jewish) lost her state funding. She was forced to flee to England the following year. After World War II, she began working on a comprehensive overview of predynastic Egypt, published in 1947 as The Cultures of Prehistoric Egypt (I). When the Petrie collection became available again after the war, she added a second volume and revised the first. Upon the completion of her two volume study, Baumgartel relocated to the United States, helping her family to set up a confectionary factory. Together with compensation from the German government for property lost during the war, this made her financially secure for the rest of her life. Baumgartel died in Oxford, England on 28 October 1975, aged 83. Link to Wikipedia biography