Professor of Art, Design, and Art History, Emeritus
Alexander Badawy was born in Cairo in 1913. He received three degrees from the University of Cairo: A B. Engineering in Architecture in 1936; a diploma of the Institute of Archaeology in 1939, and a Ph.D. in 1942. Between 1941 and 1955 he taught at the Universities of Cairo and Alexandria. In 1957 he came to United States as a professor at the School of Engineering and Architecture at the University of Kansas, and in 1961 he came to UCLA, where he remained until his retirement in 1981.
Badawy’s training as an architect, an archaeologist, and a philologist in both hieroglyphs and Coptic gave him a range of skills which was almost unique among Egyptologists. As an archaeologist, he participated in and directed a number of excavations in Egypt; the most important of these was the Middle Kingdom fortress at Askut, which he directed from 1962-1963. He also devoted a great deal of time to measuring and recording the plans and wall decorations of private tombs at Saqqara and Giza. His precise drawings of the bas-reliefs on the walls constitute a valuable record of decoration which is rapidly disintegrating due to neglect. His prompt publication of the record of this work is something of a rarity among archaeologists.
Badawy’s scholarly output is prodigious, not merely in quantity (some 160-odd items, including reviews, articles, and a number of books), but also in its range and solidity. His three-volume History of Egyptian Architecture is a standard reference work, made especially useful by the accuracy of its descriptions and by the reconstructions which he drew himself. His Coptic Art and Archaeology is the first overall survey of this field.
Badawy’s work on Egyptian architecture is not merely descriptive. His philological training qualified him admirably to interpret the difficult Egyptian texts referring to methods of building design and to architectural symbolism. His articles on these subjects, some of which are purely philological, are recognized as major contributions. I.E.S. Edwards, Emeritus Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities in the British Museum, commented: “Symbolism was one of the most important features in Egyptian funerary and temple architecture. Its interpretation is often difficult, either because too little is known about the source of its inspiration or because elements have become stylized and their original hard to recognize. Dr. Badawy devoted a number of articles to various aspects of this subject; they show that he had a deep understanding of the mentality of the ancient Egyptians and of the conventions which they observed. His articles on the so-called air shafts of the Great Pyramid paved the way to the final elucidation of these features — so long a puzzle to students.”
Thus, Badawy has made lasting contributions to our knowledge and understanding of Egyptian architecture by a combination of original archaeological investigations, synthetic descriptions and careful reconstructions, and analyses of the symbolism of Egyptian architecture based on a study of both texts and monuments. His scholarship will serve as a fitting memorial.
(Written in memoriam in 1987 by former faculty Susan B. Downey and Donald F. McCallum)
After his retirement from UCLA, Prof. Badawy donated an Endowed Chair in Egyptology to Johns Hopkins University, The Alexander Badawy Chair in Egyptian Art and Archaeology.
