George Gliddon
He created interest in the field of Egyptology through his lectures in the United States, including the Panorama of the Nile with Egyptian mummies.
[8] Gliddon assisted Muhammad Ali Pasha's plans to modernize Egypt by suggesting the use of American machinery for mills.
[8][9] The consulate office in Cairo was closed in 1840, after which Gliddon discontinued his work on commercial ventures with people in the United States and sailed to England.
[10] Gliddon took a deep interest in the studies of Jean-François Champollion, Ignatius Bonomi, Henry Salt, Howard Vyse, and other Egyptian scholars and explorers.
[13] Gliddon studied with Samuel Birch, Baron Bunsen, Émile Prisse d'Avennes, Karl Richard Lepsius, and Jean-Antoine Letronne.
[1] With his father, Gliddon collected mummy skulls for Samuel George Morton,[1] for a total of 137 crania that remained intact after shipping.
[17] The result was an elaborate work dedicated to Gliddon and published the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, entitled Crania Aegyptiaca (1844), about the race and physical type of the ancient Egyptians.
[9] Their theory, and that of John Speke's, was the reigning opinion of Europeans for some time about Africans of foreign descent—Caucasian, Aryan, Hamitic, Abyssinian, Galla, and Wahuma—which was that, all were the progeny of ancient invaders from the Middle East who had conquered Abyssinia and then moved into East Africa, sometimes intermarrying with black Africans, sometimes driving them out, and sometimes ruling over them as a racially separate royal class.
[19] The conclusion bolstered the polygenist argument and lead to Louis Agassiz sharing the same opinion and beginning of the "American School" of anthropology.
[13] Upon further research, Morton and Gliddon's opinions about Biblical genealogical theory changed, doing away with Hamitic, Japhetic, and Semitic terms to categorize racial and linguistic groups.
[20] Gliddon and Morton relied on craniology, evaluating facial angle and volume, to identify racial and linquistic groups.
Other elements, often hard to discern, were the gender, age, and whether they had sufficient food to avoid starvation to perform a meaningful study.
[23][24] While originally believing that the Egyptians were purely Caucasian, the authors of Types of Mankind (1854) modified their views based on excavations from earlier dynasties.
"[26]Specifically, in 1854, Josiah Nott and George R. Gliddon noted that according to majority of ethnographers and Samuel George Morton's own anthropological works, "the Fellahs of Upper and Middle Egypt, at the present day, continue to be an unmistakable race, and are regarded by most travelled authorities as the best living representatives of the ancient population of Egypt."
[28] From the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica "It is most convenient, however, to refer to the dark-skinned inhabitants of this zone by the collective term of Negroids, and to reserve the word Negro for the tribes which are considered to exhibit in the highest degree the characteristics taken as typical of the variety.
"[29] Samuel Morton addressed several letters to George Gliddon and stated that he modified many of his old views on ancient Egypt, believing their origins to be similar to Barabra populations, but not Negroes.
[35] George Robbins Gliddon was an agent for the Honduras Railroad Company in 1857, hired for his experience opening the Suez or Overland route to India.
