Anthony John Arkell

Anthony John Arkell (born July 29, 1898, Hinxhill, Kent, Eng.—died Feb. 26, 1980, Chelmsford, Essex) was a historian and Egyptologist, an outstanding colonial administrator who combined a passion for the past with a humanitarian concern for the peoples of modern Africa.

After serving with the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force, Arkell joined the Sudan Political Service in 1920 and set about abolishing the slave trade between the Sudan and Ethiopia, establishing villages for the freed slaves, who called themselves “the Sons of Arkell.” He was appointed commissioner for archaeology and anthropology in 1938 and undertook several digs that opened up the previously unknown field of Sudanese prehistory. He returned to England in 1948 and was appointed curator of the Flinders Petrie Collection of Egyptian Antiquities at University College, University of London; he reorganized and cataloged this collection while writing his authoritative History of the Sudan (1955). He was professor of Egyptology at University College until his retirement in 1963, when he was ordained.