(CE:1141b)
GIRGIS MATTHA (1905-1967), Coptic Egyptologist, papyrologist, and a specialist in ancient Egyptian philology. He was one of the early graduates of the newly established Institute of Egyptology in Fouad I University in Cairo. In 1928, he was sent to complete his higher education at the Institut catholique in Paris. Later he studied in England at Queen's College, Oxford, under the famous Egyptologist and Coptologist Francis L. GRIFFITH, who supervised his doctoral thesis on the editing of the Bodleian collection of demotic ostraca.
On his return to Cairo University in 1937, he was appointed lecturer, then assistant professor of philology. He was nominated vice-dean of the Faculty of Letters in 1949-1950, and became director of the Institute of Archaeology in the University from 1950 to 1965.
Mattha's productivity in the field of Egyptology was enormous in quantity and quality. He collaborated with other scholars in the publication of demotic ostraca, notably with Griffith, who spoke highly of him in the preface to his Catalogue of Demotic Graffiti. In Cairo, Mattha made a great number of contributions to the Bulletin de l'Institut français d'Archéologie orientale, the Annales du Service des Antiquités, the Bulletin of the Faculty of Letters, and the Bulletin de l'Institut d'Egypte, mainly on legal and economic subjects from original demotic sources.
Apart from his collaboration with his mentor, Griffith, in the production of the Catalogue of the Demotic Graffiti in Oxford, Mattha wrote many journal articles.
MUNIR BASTA
