James Henry Breasted Quotes

United States, Archaeologist
August 27, 1865 – December, 2, 1935.

James Henry Breasted (/ˈbrɛstɪd/; August 27, 1865 – December 2, 1935) was an American archaeologist, Egyptologist, and historian. After completing his PhD at the University of Berlin in 1894, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. In 1901 he became director of the Haskell Oriental Museum at the university, where he continued to concentrate on Egypt. In 1905 Breasted was promoted to full professor, and held the first chair in Egyptology and Oriental History in the United States. In 1919 he became the founder of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, a center for interdisciplinary study of ancient civilizations. Breasted was a committed field researcher, and had a productive interest in recording and interpreting ancient writings, especially from sources and structures that he feared may be lost forever.

Also known as Historian

To the present writer a careful study of the facts now available seems to leave no doubt that civilization was born at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean.

James Henry Breasted
- Present
- Study
- Doubt
This recognition of the earlier human background, now so obvious to us, did not come all at once, for the inclusion of history itself in university instruction is an event less than two centuries old.

James Henry Breasted
- History

Today the traveller on the Nile enters a wonderland at whose gates rise the colossal pyramids of which he has had visions perhaps from earliest childhood.

James Henry Breasted
- Today
- Childhood
But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors.

James Henry Breasted
- Great
- Lonely
There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time.

James Henry Breasted
- Time
- Art
- Age
By 3000 B.C. the art of Egypt was so ripe and so far advanced that it is surprising to find any student of early culture proposing that the crude contemporary art of the early Babylonians is the product of a civilization earlier than that of the Nile.

James Henry Breasted
- Art
- Culture
In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.

James Henry Breasted
- Life
- Time
- Knowledge
We of America are especially fitted to visualize and to understand the marvellous transformation of a wilderness into a land of splendid cities.

James Henry Breasted
- America
- Transformation

There is but little room for doubt that Egypt led the way in the creation of the earliest known group of civilizations which arose on both sides of the land bridge between Africa and Eurasia in the fourth millennium B.C.

James Henry Breasted
- Doubt
- Bridge
It is this conception of the unity of the human career which is perhaps the greatest achievement of historical study, since it gained a place analogous to that of natural science.

James Henry Breasted
- Career
- Science
- Study
Disapproval is a very important factor in all progress. There has really never been any progress without it.

James Henry Breasted
- Important
- Progress
In the more recently disclosed field of history in the ancient Near East, however, there has been no such sense of responsibility displayed by historians either in Europe or America.

James Henry Breasted
It is the recognition of history as a record of human experience which has inevitably resulted in the inclusion of this conquest of civilization within the framework of a complete human history.

James Henry Breasted
- Experience
- History
The man who first gave history a recognized place in science was an ancient historian.

James Henry Breasted
- History
- Science