Arthur Weigall was born in the year in which his father, Major Arthur Archibald Denne Weigall, died on the
North West Frontier of
British India. The Weigall family were prominent in Victorian society as artists, marrying into the aristocracy; his cousins were Conservative politician Sir
Archibald Weigall, 1st Baronet,
Governor of South Australia from 1920 to 1922, and the cricketers
Gerry and
Louis Weigall. As a young widow, his mother, the former Alice Henrietta Cowen, worked as a missionary in the inner-city slums of
late-Victorian England. Arthur Weigall went from an unconventional home life in
Salford to
Wellington College, a school with strong establishment and military connections. He started work as an apprentice clerk in the
City of London, but a youthful fascination with
genealogy led him to the
pharaohs of
Ancient Egypt and so into
Egyptology. A mysterious patroness encouraged him to apply for
New College, Oxford. This was a mistake (Egyptology was not yet studied at Oxford) so before completing his admission tests he went on to
Leipzig, hoping to learn German and then enrol in a German university. This didn't happen, and on his return to England Weigall found work with Egyptologist
Flinders Petrie, first at
University College London and then at
Abydos in
Egypt. Life with Petrie was notoriously harsh, and after a while Weigall went to work for
Friedrich Wilhelm von Bissing, a German Egyptologist. In early 1905
Howard Carter was staying with Weigall at
Saqqara when, after an incident with some French tourists, Carter was forced to resign his post as
Chief Inspector of Antiquities for Upper Egypt. Suddenly, at the age of 25, Weigall was appointed to replace Carter at
Luxor, responsible for protecting and managing the antiquities of a region that extended from
Nag Hammadi to the border with
Sudan. At Luxor, Weigall threw himself with immense energy into aspects of the job that in his view had been somewhat neglected – the protection and conservation of monuments that were steadily being bought up and moved to Europe and North America. He remained in Luxor until 1911. This was a time of intense activity for Weigall, both in the field and in writing. He participated in the discoveries of
KV46 (the tomb of
Yuya and
Tjuyu),
TT8 (the tomb of Kha and Merit),
KV55 (a mysterious tomb whose contents are still debated), and
KV57 (the tomb of
Horemheb). Weigall also travelled in the
Eastern Desert, wrote a popular biography of
Akhenaten, and worked on a
Guide to the Antiquities of Upper Egypt. He worked with
Alan Gardiner on the
tombs of the nobles and may well have helped Howard Carter to the placement with
Lord Carnarvon that led to the discovery of the tomb of
Tutankhamun. He was deeply enmeshed in the bureaucratic and social entanglements of Luxor and
Cairo, coming into close contact with Carter, Flinders Petrie,
Gaston Maspero,
Theodore Davis,
Percy Newberry, and others, and making friends with
Sir Ronald Storrs and the wider
Edwardian society in Egypt. However, a breakdown took him from Egypt, and
World War I cut off his plans to create an institute of
Egyptology for Egyptians. In
London during World War I Weigall became a successful set-designer for the
revue stage. An association with
film began: he worked with
Bannister Merwin,
Jack Buchanan, and
Phyllis Monkman on the film
Her Heritage (1919), and in the 1920s
Lord Northcliffe appointed him film critic for the
Daily Mail. Later,
one of his novels was made into the film
Burning Sands (1922) by the producer
George Melford. Journalism brought him back to Egypt. He covered the opening of the tomb of
Tutankhamun as correspondent for the
Daily Mail, in direct opposition to Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon's attempts with
The Times to monopolise the story, which Weigall regarded as both wrong and politically damaging to British relations with Egypt at a time of strong nationalist feeling. Seeing Carnarvon joke as he prepared to enter the tomb, Weigall is reported as saying 'if he goes down in that spirit, I give him six weeks to live'. Arthur Weigall died in 1934. During his first marriage to Hortense Schleiter, an
American, he wrote vivid personal accounts of his life in Luxor and
Upper Egypt. His second marriage (to the pianist Muriel Lillie, sister of the comedian
Beatrice Lillie) returned him to the world of show business as a talented writer of lyrics. == Selected publications ==