Gaston Camille Charles  Maspero  ( 24.06.1846  -  30.06.1916 )

Gaston C.C. Maspéro was a French Egyptologist who became interested in Egyptian hieroglyphs while still a teenager and quickly became Professor of Egyptology at the École des Hautes Études in 1869 – he was only 23 years old. He married his first wife Harriet Yapp in 1871; she died in 1873, the year he obtained his doctorate. In was appointed Professor of Egyptian Philology and Archaeology at the Collège de France on 04.02.1874. He remarried in 1880 with Louise Justine Elisabeth Madeleine Thérèse Catherine Balluet d’Estournelles de Constant de Rebecque (1856–1953). 

He first went to Egypt in 1880 as head of the French archaeological mission which would later become the Institut français d'Archéologie orientale. He notably worked in the Valley of Kings. He then succeeded Auguste Mariette as director of the Bulaq Museum (1881–1886) and also of the Antiquities Service. Gaston Maspero continued his predecessor's work on the Pyramids Texts and opened three new pyramids in which he copied and translated 4,000 lines of inscription, making the first edition of these famous texts.  Among his many endeavours, he arranged and catalogued the ever-increasing collections of the Cairo Museum, enlarged the Antiquities Service with five additional inspectorates, initiated the overall clearance and preservation of the temple of Karnak, and excavated at numerous sites in the country until he spend an extensive period of time in France 1886–1889). He returned to Egypt and assumed again his directorship until July 1914, when he fell ill and went back to France, where he soon became Secrétaire Perpétuel of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. Despite his untimely death in 1916 at the age of 50, he was a prolific scientist who published enormously.