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(1876–1956)
Born in England, John Garstang was educated at Blackburn Grammar School and owing to his excellence in mathematics, won a scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford, in 1895. He became interested in archaeology while he was still at school and after excavating the Roman camp of Bremetennacum at Ribchester, he published his findings in 1898. Garstang spent his undergraduate vacations excavating, and after he graduating with third-class honors in mathematics, he took up archaeology full time, joining sir william matthew flinders petrie at abydos in Egypt and discovering and excavating the tomb of Beyt Khallaf.
Garstang was appointed reader in Egyptian archaeology at Liverpool University in 1902 and led expeditions to Negadah, Hierakonpolis, Esneh, and Beni Hassan in Egypt over the next two years. By then his interests in the Hittites had been aroused, and in 1904, he traveled to Asia Minor and received permission to excavate the Hittite capital of bogazköy, turkey. In 1907, at the personal request of the Kaiser of Germany, this site was instead given to German archaeologists to excavate.
From 1907 until 1941, Garstang was professor of the methods and practice of archaeology at Liverpool University where he contributed to the establishment of the Institute of Archaeology and the journal Annals of Archaeology and Anthropology. In 1908, he returned to Asia Minor, excavating the late Hittite site of Sakje-Geuzi in Turkey; in the winter, he returned to Abydos in Egypt to continue excavating there. His topographic study of Hittite monuments, The Land of the Hittites, was published in 1910.
From 1909 to 1914, Garstang excavated at Meroe in the Sudan, the site of the capital of Meriotic civilization from early third century b.c. to the early fourth century a.d. He served with the Red Cross in France during World War I, and in 1919, he became head of the newly created School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (serving in that post until 1926) and working as director of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine (1920–1926). Among his many achievements during this time was the discovery of the site of Hazor in israel, an important Canaanite town. He published Joshua Judges in 1931 and The Heritage of Solomon in 1934, and from 1930 until 1936, he excavated Jericho until the political situation made it impossible to continue.
In 1936, Garstang returned to Turkey to survey the Cilician plain, and he excavated the site of Yumuk Tepe near Mersin until the outbreak of World War II. He returned to complete this work in 1946, published in Prehistoric Mersin (1953), and to help establish the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara in 1948, becoming its first director. He received honorary degrees from Aberdeen University, received the Legion of Honour in 1920, and became a Commander of the British Empire in 1949.
(ca. 1100–1154)
It is thought that Geoffrey of Monmouth was born in Monmouth, Wales, at the beginning of the twelfth century. The son of the family priest of William, earl of Gloucester, an influential aristocrat of the time, Geoffrey was brought up by his paternal uncle Uchtryd, archdeacon and later archbishop of Llandaff, Wales. Geoffrey attended Oxford University where he met another archdeacon, Walter Calenius, from whom he was supposed to have obtained the material for his monumental book Historia Regum Britannia. This book was widely available in some form by 1139, because it was reported on and examined by Henry of Huntingdon in Normandy on his way to Rome with Theobald, the archbishop of Canterbury. Geoffrey of Monmouth became a Benedictine priest at the age of fifty in 1152, was consecrated as a bishop by Theobold that same year, and was buried in Llandaff two years later.
Geoffrey of Monmouth was a significant medieval scholar and historian whose great knowledge of both older and contemporary writers was evident from the acknowledged sources in his book, although he was criticized in his day for his bad Cymric (Welsh) and vulgar Latin. Victorian scholars dated the surviving edition of the Historia Regum Britanniae as the last 1147
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