In Memoriam Prof. Dr. J.F. Borghouts
Prof. Dr. Joris F. Borghouts (1939-2018) was Full Professor of Egyptology at Leiden University and a specialist in ancient Egyptian grammar and magic.
He was born in Ginneken (now part of Breda) on 17 June 1939. He studied Egyptian Language and Literature in Leiden and defended his dissertation The magical texts of Papyrus Leiden I 348 in 1971. From 1969 to 1976 he was a fulltime lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, after which he returned to Leiden as lecturer. In 1985 he was appointed Full Professor in Egyptology, and he remained in that function until his retirement in 2004. In 1999 he was elected member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, and in 2004 he became a research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for the Near East (Leiden), where he had an office as well as a desk inside the library.
After his retirement he continued working with his PhD students and he worked on his research projects daily, until shortly before his death. His wide reading in Egyptian texts was without compare, including the later phases of the language, Demotic and Coptic. Among his most important publications are his anthology Ancient Egyptian Magical Texts, Leiden 1978, and his Middle Egyptian grammar in two volumes Egyptian: An Introduction to the Writing and Language of the Middle Kingdom, Leiden and Louvain 2010. He also published a range of important articles.