Breasted was a committed field researcher in Egypt and the Levant and had a productive interest in recording and interpreting ancient writings, especially from sources and structures that he feared may be lost forever.

[1] James Henry Breasted was born on August 27, 1865, the son of a small hardware business owner and his wife, in Rockford, Illinois.

[2] Breasted popularized the term "Fertile Crescent" to describe the archaeologically important area including parts of present-day Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Israel.

He began to work on a compilation of all the extant hieroglyphic inscriptions, which was published in 1906 as Ancient Records of Egypt, and continues to be an important collection of translated texts.

Breasted had two key objectives for the field trip: to purchase antiquities for the Oriental Institute and to select sites for future excavation.

The general itinerary of the expedition was: As Breasted scouted future archaeological sites and visited antiquities dealers, he came to know many of the British political figures and scholars working in Egypt.

Due to Breasted's extensive travels and knowledge of the political situation throughout the Middle East, Lord Allenby, at that time the High Commissioner for Egypt, requested that he inform the British Prime Minister and Earl Curzon about the hostility of the western Arabs to the occupying British forces before returning to the United States.

[12] He was often accompanied to Egypt by his son Charles who, under an assumed name, wrote first-hand reports on the Tutankhamun excavation for the Chicago Daily News and The Christian Science Monitor.

[13] Breasted also collaborated with his University of Chicago colleague Carl F. Huth, Jr. on a very well-received series of historical maps that was published by the Denoyer-Geppert Co. (1916), which were sold both individually and eventually expanded and published in a series of atlases, including (with Huth and Samuel B. Harding) European History Atlas: Ancient, Medieval and Modern European and World History Adapted from the Large Wall Maps, 3rd rev.

[16][17] If one were asked to name a scholar who, above all others, stimulated the development of ancient historical studies in the United States during the earlier part of the twentieth century, that honor would have to fall to the colossal figure of James Henry Breasted.

[19] Breasted's book Dawn of Conscience (1933) was a major influence on Sigmund Freud, who completed his Moses and Monotheism in London in 1938.

[20] It has now become a sinister commonplace in the life of the post-war generation that man has never had any hesitation in applying his increasing mechanical power to the destruction of his own kind.

The only force that can successfully oppose it is the human conscience – something which the younger generation is accustomed to regard as a fixed group of outworn scruples.

Everyone knows that man's amazing mechanical power is the product of a long evolution, but it is not commonly realized that this is also true of the social force which we call conscience – although with this important difference: as the oldest known implement-making creature man has been fashioning destructive weapons for possibly a million years, whereas conscience emerged as a social force less than five thousand years ago.

May we not consciously set our hands to the task of further developing this new-born conscience until it becomes a manifestation of good will, strong enough to throttle the surviving savage in us?