Walter Ewing Crum

Walter Ewing Crum ( born July 22, 1865 in Glasgow, † May 18 1944 in Bath ) was a British Egyptologist and Koptologe.

Walter Ewing Crum attended Eton College and then studied at Balliol College, University of Oxford. In 1888 he went to Paris, where he studied under Gaston Maspero, the same year he went to Munich, from 1888 to 1892 at the University of Berlin, where he heard Adolf Erman and turned to the Coptic. With Erman joined him since a lifelong friendship. In Berlin, he began preparations for a Coptic dictionary. In 1892 Crum applied for a job at the British Museum, but was turned down for health reasons. Then Crum hit a no academic career, but was able to devote due to the inherited family fortune entirely to his studies as a private scholar. From 1892 he collected in museums and libraries of Europe as well as in Cairo material for his dictionary. His major work, A Coptic Dictionary published 1929-1939 in six parts and included all levels dialect of the Coptic language. The 3308 recorded words he took from literary and non-literary texts; He also analyzed a published and partly unpublished texts. The work made ​​Crum famous and the most important Koptologen his generation. In addition to the dictionary researched and he also published many other areas of Coptic Studies, an emphasis on the research he put on apocryphal and biblical texts, Gnosticism and Manichaeism, Patristic and hagiography, and more. In addition, he also dealt with non-literary documents and wrote first a church history of Egypt. Since 1893 he also edited many texts from European museums.

Crum was a member of the British Academy (1931 ) and the American Philosophical Society. In 1910 he was made an honorary Doctor of Berlin University, 1937 Honorary doctorate at Oxford.