Walter Ewing Crum

Walter Ewing Crum (22 July 1865 – 20 April 1944^{[n 1]}) was a Scottish coptologist. He wrote A Coptic Dictionary, which was completed in 1939 and is considered to be the definitive dictionary of translations from Coptic to English.

Crum was the eldest son of Alexander Crum of Thornlebank, Glasgow. He attended Eton and graduated from Balliol College, Oxford in 1888, after which he continued his studies of Egyptology in Paris and in Berlin with Adolf Erman, who remained a lifelong friend.^[1]

Crum spent much of his career cataloguing various Coptic materials, including the manuscript holdings of the John Rylands Library and the British Museum.^[2] The Coptic dictionary is his most prominenbt publication, but he wrote several additional books and many articles.^[1]

He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Berlin and an honorary D.Litt. from Oxford University.^[1] He was a Fellow of the British Academy and was elected a Foreign Member of the American Philosophical Society shortly before his death.^[1] A festschrift, Coptic Studies in Honor of Walter Ewing Crum, was published in 1950 as a special issue of the Bulletin of the Byzantine Institute of America.^[3][4]

Works

• Catalogue of the Coptic manuscripts in the British Museum. British Museum (1905)
• A Coptic Dictionary. 6 vols. Oxford University/Clarendon Press, 1929–39. Repr. with introduction by James M. Robinson. Ancient Language Resources. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2005. ISBN 9781597523332.

Notes

1. So stated in W. H. Worrell, Review of Coptic Studies in Honor of Walter Ewing Crum, Speculum 27.1, January 1952, pp. 88–94, p. 88. However, Gerald Bonner, "The Crum Papers", The British Museum Quarterly 28.3/4, Autumn 1964, pp. 59–67, p. 59, gives his date of death as 18 May 1941.

References

1. H. I. Bell, "Walter Ewing Crum", The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 30, December 1944, pp. 65–66.
2. "Coptic Monuments By W. E. Crum (Kiraz Historical Catalogues Archive 6)", Gorgias Press, 2005, retrieved 26 June 2014.
3. Coptic Studies in Honor of Walter Ewing Crum, Bulletin of the Byzantine Institute 2 (1950), OCLC 715404377
4. W. H. Worrell, Review of Coptic Studies in Honor of Walter Ewing Crum, Speculum 27.1, January 1952, pp. 88–94.

Sources

• Neal A. Maxwell institute link to works by Crum on Coptic topics
• "A Bibliography of Walter Ewing Crum". The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 25.2, December 1939. pp. 133–38. Completed in the obituary, December 1944.