Battiscombe George "Jack" Gunn FBA (30 June 1883 – 27 February 1950) was an English Egyptologist and philologist.

His paternal grandparents were Theophilus Miller Gunn FRCS, a prominent London surgeon originally from Chard, and Mary Dally Battiscombe, from Bridport.

While often described as entirely self-taught, the Griffith Institute Archives say that he studied hieroglyphs at University College, London, as a student of Margaret Murray.

[4][6][7] In 1905, he played the role of "Priest of the Floods and Storms" in the Theosophical Society of London's production of The Shrine of the Golden Hawk, written and directed by Florence Farr.

[11] R. A. Gilbert's biography of Waite describes Gunn as "an artist, an Egyptologist and an oriental linguist", and says that, in 1910, he "argued at great length over the correct transliteration of Hebrew terms used in the Grade rituals".

He originally (1904) had it translated by the assistant curator of the Boulaq Museum in Cairo, under the supervision of the Egyptologist Émile Brugsch.

In Volume 1, number 8 (Sept. 1912), Gunn appears in "Waite's Wet", a fictitious account of Waite's return to Crowley's group: "Waite's photograph, frock-coat and all, was carried in its red plush frame shoulder high by Mr. Battiscombe Gunn..." In Volume 1, number 10 (Sept 1913), Gunn appears in "Dead Weight" a false description of Waite's death (he actually lived until the 1940s): "Mr. Battiscombe Gunn was rapidly revising the funeral arrangements of the dying saint, which he proposed to found on some unedited documents of the Second Dynasty, which showed conclusively that the sacred lotus was, in reality, a corset, and the Weapon of Men Thu a button-hook".

[14][15] By 1918, Gunn had lost interest in the occult, but had become an admirer of another former member of the Golden Dawn, the British Buddhist Allan Bennett, also known as Bhikkhu Ananda Metteyya.

Gunn experienced a conflict between the scientific and secular aspect of his professional career, and his spiritual interests.

[19] A later examination by John D. Ray (then the Sir Herbert Thompson Professor of Egyptology at the University of Cambridge) confirmed "there could be no mistaking Hulme's incompetence".

In 1913 he visited Egypt for the first time, as epigrapher on the staff of Flinders Petrie's excavation at Harageh, near Fayum, working with Reginald Engelbach.

[25] In the winter of 1921 and 1922, he was a member of the team led by Thomas Eric Peet and Leonard Woolley excavating at Amarna.

During the time he lived in Maadi, outside Cairo, he experimented with the manufacture of papyrus, growing the plant in his garden.

During World War II several of his students (including Alec Naylor Dakin) worked on code breaking at Bletchley Park.

Other students include Ricardo Caminos, Warren Royal Dawson, Peter Lewis Shinnie,[1] Paul E. Kahle and T. G. H. James.

Agatha Christie's 1944 detective novel Death Comes as the End, set in Thebes in the Middle Kingdom, is based on a series of letters that he translated.

She was born Lillian Meacham, in Maidstone, Kent, but had spent most of her teenage years in Cape Town, South Africa, where her father, C.S.

Her younger sister was Gwendoline Meacham, who became a Scots Nationalist, and changed her name to Wendy Wood.

In 1907, not long before her marriage to Hughes, she had a brief affair with the sculptor, printmaker and typographer Eric Gill, with whom both she and Gunn were lifelong friends.

[30] Gunn rented a cottage in Ditchling, where Gill was located, in the summer of 1919, and he, Meena and Pat all stayed there.

In his autobiography, "Opening Bars", Pat describes his part in her decision to return to England and marry Gunn.

While Gunn was Professor of Egyptology at Oxford, Meena maintained a psychoanalytical practice on Harley Street in London.