Charles Wilfred Griggs (born 1942) is a professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University.
Griggs was educated at BYU and Stanford University. Griggs received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Griggs currently holds the University Professorship of Ancient Studies at BYU. In addition to being a scholar of early Christian and Latter-day Saint history he is also an archeologist. In 1975–1976 he was part of a team doing excavations at the Nag Hammadi site in Egypt for UC Berkeley. In January–March 1981 he was the field director of the joint BYU and UC Berkeley excavation at Seila, Fayum, Egypt and he has been the head of BYU's Fayum excavation since 1982. Also in 1994 he was invited by the government of the Autonomous Republic of the Crimea to do excavations at Ancient Greek sites on the Crimea.
Griggs is a charter member of the Association of Ancient Historians and the International Association for Coptic Studies.
Among the books Griggs has written is Early Egyptian Christianity: From Its Origins to 451 C.E. (Brill, 2000). He has appeared in Operation Sethos: High Tech in the Tomb of the Pharaoh a TV mini-series and also in another TV episode about King Tut.
At BYU, Griggs has served as the director of ancient studies for the Religious Studies Center. He has also written several works on the Early Christian Church, mainly published in LDS-owned or -related periodicals. He has argued that in the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible (JST), Paul was married. [1] Griggs' interpretation was described by Deirdre Good as "among the more creative", but said she preferred to avoid "adding to Paul's words," as the JST does throughout. [2]
In 1982 Griggs' article, "The Book of Mormon as an Ancient Book" was published in BYU Studies . He has also published in Coptic Studies and the Archaeological Textiles Newsletter. Some of his work has related to DNA issues in studying mummies and has been done in cooperation with Scott Woodward.
Griggs is the father of seven children.
Griggs is a Latter-day Saint. Among other callings he has served as the member of a stake high council and a bishop.
Mummy portraits or Fayum mummy portraits are a type of naturalistic painted portrait on wooden boards attached to upper class mummies from Roman Egypt. They belong to the tradition of panel painting, one of the most highly regarded forms of art in the Classical world. The Fayum portraits are the only large body of art from that tradition to have survived. They were formerly, and incorrectly, called Coptic portraits.
The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) was an informal collaboration of academics devoted to Latter-day Saint historical scholarship. The organization was established in 1979 as a non-profit organization by John. W. Welch. In 1997, the group became a formal part of Brigham Young University (BYU), which is owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 2006, the group became a formal part of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, formerly known as the Institute for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts, BYU. FARMS has since been absorbed into the Maxwell Institute's Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies.
Hugh Winder Nibley was an American scholar and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who was a professor at Brigham Young University (BYU) for nearly 50 years. He was a prolific author, and wrote apologetic works supporting the archaeological, linguistic, and historical claims of Joseph Smith. He was a member of the LDS Church, and wrote and lectured on LDS scripture and doctrinal topics, publishing many articles in the LDS Church magazines.
Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge was an English Egyptologist, Orientalist, and philologist who worked for the British Museum and published numerous works on the ancient Near East. He made numerous trips to Egypt and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan on behalf of the British Museum to buy antiquities, and helped it build its collection of cuneiform tablets, manuscripts, and papyri. He published many books on Egyptology, helping to bring the findings to larger audiences. In 1920, he was knighted for his service to Egyptology and the British Museum.
Donald Bruce Redford is a Canadian Egyptologist and archaeologist, currently Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is married to Susan Redford, who is also an Egyptologist currently teaching classes at the university. Professor Redford has directed a number of important excavations in Egypt, notably at Karnak and Mendes.
Faiyum is a city in Middle Egypt. Located 100 kilometres southwest of Cairo, in the Faiyum Oasis, it is the capital of the modern Faiyum Governorate. Originally called Shedet in Egyptian, the Greeks called it in Koinē Greek: Κροκοδειλόπολις, romanized: Krokodilópolis, and later Medieval Greek: Ἀρσινόη, romanized: Arsinoë. It is one of Egypt's oldest cities due to its strategic location.
Thomas Glen Alexander is an American historian and academic who is a professor emeritus at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah, where he was also Lemuel Hardison Redd, Jr. Professor of Western History and director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies. After studying at Weber State University (WSU) and Utah State University (USU), he received a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965. He taught history at BYU from 1964 until 2004, and served in the leadership of various local and historical organizations.
Coptic art is the Christian art of the Byzantine-Greco-Roman Egypt and of Coptic Christian Churches. Coptic art is best known for its wall-paintings, textiles, illuminated manuscripts, and metalwork, much of which survives in monasteries and churches. The artwork is often functional, as little distinction was drawn between artistry and craftsmanship, and includes tunics and tombstones as well as portraits of saints. The Coptic Museum in Coptic Cairo houses some of the world's most important examples of Coptic art.
Medinet Madi, also known simply as Madi or Maadi (ماضي) in Arabic, is a site in the southwestern Faiyum region of Egypt with the remains of a Greco-Roman town where a temple of the cobra-goddess Renenutet was founded during the reigns of Amenemhat III and Amenemhat IV. It was later expanded and embellished during the Greco-Roman period. In the Middle Kingdom the town was called Dja, later the town was known as Narmouti, Narmouthis and Narmuda.
John Laurence Gee is an American Latter-day Saint scholar, apologist and an Egyptologist. He currently teaches at Brigham Young University (BYU) and serves in the Department of Near Eastern Languages. He is known for his writings in support of the Book of Abraham.
Scott Kent Brown is an emeritus American professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University (BYU) where he was also the director of ancient studies and for three years head of the university's Jerusalem Center.
Richard Lloyd Anderson was an American lawyer and theologist of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who was a professor of church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University (BYU). His book Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses is widely considered the definitive work on this subject. Anderson was the brother of Karl Ricks Anderson.
Paul Robert Cheesman was an American academic and a professor of religion at Brigham Young University (BYU).
The Religious Studies Center (RSC) is the research and publishing arm of Religious Education at Brigham Young University (BYU), sponsoring scholarship on the culture, history, scripture, and doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The dean of Religious Education serves as the RSC's director, and an associate dean oversees the two branches of the RSC: research and publications.
El Hiba is the modern name of the ancient Egyptian city of Tayu-djayet (t3yw-ḏ3yt), an ancient nickname meaning "their walls" in reference to the massive enclosure walls built on the site. In Coptic, it was known as ⲧⲉⲩϫⲟ Teujo, and during the Graeco-Roman period it was called Ἀγκυρῶν πόλις and Ancyronpolis. In antiquity, the city was located in the 18th Upper Egyptian nome, and today it is found in the Bani Suwayf governorate.
Fagg El Gamous is an ancient Egyptian cemetery located in the Faiyum Governorate dating from the 1st to the 7th century AD, the period of Roman rule in Egypt.
Usermontu is an ancient Egyptian mummy exhibited at the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California.
The monastery of the Archangel Gabriel at Naqlun – a Coptic monastery of the Archangel Gabriel located in northern Egypt, in the Faiyum Oasis, 16 km south-east of the city of Faiyum in the Libyan Desert. Since 1986, it is investigated by a team of researchers from the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology University of Warsaw, headed by Prof. Włodzimierz Godlewski. In 1997, the Church of St. Gabriel was restored.
Arthur Frank "Peter" Shore was a British Egyptologist, academic and museum curator, who specialised in Roman Egypt and Late Antiquity. He took degrees in classics and Oriental studies (Egyptology) at the University of Cambridge, before being elected a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge in 1955. He then worked at the British Museum from 1957 to 1974, and was Brunner Professor of Egyptology at the University of Liverpool from 1974 to 1991.
William Kendrick Pritchett was an American scholar of ancient Greek history. He authored over 30 books on the subjects of Greek warfare, topography, and time-keeping.