Kenneth Kitchen, Personal and Brunner Professor Emeritus of Egyptology at the University of Liverpool, died on 6 February aged 92. His formal title does little to sum up this remarkable man.
As well as being one of the world’s leading authorities on the Ramesside kings and Egyptian chronology, Ken, as he liked to be known, was one of very few people in the world who could read Ancient South Arabian and a whole host of other languages once spoken in the Ancient Middle East – Akkadian, Aramaic, Coptic, Elamite, Hebrew, Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian, Phoenician, Sumerian, and Ugaritic.
It was his conversion through the ministry of Leith Samuel at the Liverpool University Christian Union in 1951 that was to change the course of his life. Thereafter Ken ventured boldly into Old Testament scholarship bringing to bear his vast knowledge of surrounding civilisations to argue against minimalist views prevalent in current academia.
