Edward R. Ayrton

[1] Ayrton was the son of William Scrope Ayrton (1849-1904), a British consular official in China, and his wife Ellen Louisa McClatchie, and was born in Wuhu, China, on 17 December 1882 (coincidentally, the same year as the formation of the Egypt Exploration Fund).

He began his career in Egyptology at the age of 20, assisting the pioneer of systematic methodology in archaeology William Matthew Flinders Petrie.

Ayrton's first independent work was the excavation of the Second Dynasty site of Shunet ez Zebib (at Abydos).

In 1904–05, he excavated and recorded graves of several ancient princesses found in the funerary temple complex of king Mentuhotep II at Deir al-Bahari, as part of the expedition led by Édouard Naville and Henry Hall.

On the 18 May 1914 he drowned while on a shooting expedition, in an accident on the Tissa Tank lake, Tissamaharama, in southern Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).