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George Robbins Gliddon (1809 – November 16, 1857) was an English-born American Egyptology. He worked as a United States vice-consul in Egypt and assisted Muhammad Ali Pasha's plans to modernize Egypt by attaining sugar, rice, and other mills from the United States. In 1841, he became frustrated with Pasha's destruction of archaeological sites and wrote Appeal to the Antiquaries of Europe on the Destruction of the Monuments of Egypt.
Gliddon worked with Samuel George Morton to define the race and physical type of the ancient Egyptians, published in the article Crania Aegyptiaca, one of several publications that Gliddon worked on. He created interest in the field of Egyptology through his lectures in the United States, including the Panorama of the Nile with Egyptian mummies.
Gliddon returned to Egypt by 1829, and worked for his father who was director of the Alexandrian Insurance Company. John was also promoted to consul, for the only consulate office in Egypt at that time. He became a United States vice-consul in the new consulate office in Cairo, subordinate to the office in Alexandria, beginning September 11, 1833. He was appointed to the position by his father.
He took a great interest in antiquities. Father and son, in a quest for commercial enterprises between Egypt and America, developed relationships with Americans traveling to Egypt, including Sarah Rogers and Richard K. Haight, for whom he offered a guided trip down the Nile on his boat in the 1830s. In addition to several excursions, Gliddon sought to make American travelers comfortable by offering them lodging in his mansion and performed other favors which led to life-long connections with the Americans. Due to the stellar reviews that Gliddon received, including the actions he took when Cairo was quarantined due to epidemics, his request for the consulate to become an agency independent of Cairo was approved. He co-founded an organization to help foreigners in Egypt in 1836.
He also developed relationships with visiting British people and governmental and other Egyptian leaders. He was friends of Egyptologists Jean-François Champollion, Samuel Birch, and Karl Richard Lepsius. Gliddon assisted Muhammad Ali Pasha's plans to modernize Egypt by suggesting the use of American machinery for mills. Gliddon traveled to the United States in 1836 and contracted for a variety of mills to be used in Egypt, including sugar and rice mills. The consulate office in Cairo was closed in 1840, after which Gliddon discontinued his work on commercial ventures with people in the United States and sailed to England.
Gliddon created a Panorama of the Nile rolling painting show with four Egyptian mummies. In late 1851 he used it during a presentation at the Chinese Museum in Boston. In Philadelphia in 1852 he made souvenirs of the material used to wrap the mummies. Using mummies in presentations sparked interest and attendance at Egytology lectures.
Gliddon measured and studied the skulls and concluded, like Augustus Granville, that ancient Egyptians were racially European. The result was an elaborate work dedicated to Gliddon and published the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, entitled Crania Aegyptiaca (1844), about the race and physical type of the ancient Egyptians. Their theory, and that of John Speke's, was the reigning opinion of Europeans for some time about Africans of foreign descent—Caucasus, Aryan, Hamites, Abyssinian, Oromo people, and Wahinda—which was that,
From his studies of ancient Egyptian monuments and hieroglyphics, Gliddon developed his theory that early ancient Egyptians had been white, and that even in the ancient world there had been distinctly different races. He posited that Whites and Negroes had never changed their racial appearance and features. He believed that neither environment or climate could change a race into another. He rejected , and claimed that the Bible supported . Gliddon believed the differences of the races had been impressed upon them by the Creator himself since the beginning.
Gliddon entered the fields of anthropology and ethnology before there was sufficient research to make solid conclusions.
Upon further research, Morton and Gliddon's opinions about Biblical genealogical theory changed, doing away with Hamitic, Japhetic, and Semitic terms to categorize racial and linguistic groups.
Specifically, in 1854, Josiah Nott and George R. Gliddon noted that according to majority of ethnographers and Samuel George Morton's own anthropological works, "the Fellahs of Upper and Middle Egypt, at the present day, continue to be an unmistakable race, and are regarded by most travelled authorities as the best living representatives of the ancient population of Egypt." They would also take the position that, "the iconographic monuments of the IVth, Vth, and VIth dynasties, is closely analogous to the predominant type of that day; which fact serves to strengthen our view that the Egyptians of the early dynasties were rather of an African or Negroid type-resembling the Bishari tribe in some respects, and in others the Fellah, or peasantry of Upper Egypt."
In the 19th century the word "Negro" is reserved only for people who display the highest degree of stereotypical black African characteristics, with the suffix in "Negroid" making the word literally mean "Negro like". From the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica "It is most convenient, however, to refer to the dark-skinned inhabitants of this zone by the collective term of Negroids, and to reserve the word Negro for the tribes which are considered to exhibit in the highest degree the characteristics taken as typical of the variety."
Samuel Morton addressed several letters to George Gliddon and stated that he modified many of his old views on ancient Egypt, believing their origins to be similar to Barabra populations, but not Negroes.
Gliddon married his cousin Anne Gliddon, daughter of John Gliddon of Holly Terrace, Highgate, London. They married in Paddington, London in April 1846. Anne was an artist and illustrator. Gliddon and a 17-year-old Henry A. Gliddon went to the United States for another lecture series in major cities like Boston, New York, Charleston, and Philadelphia from October 1846 until August 1848.
The couple had a son, Charles Americus Quarite Gliddon, who was born about 1847 with birth defects. Charles at age 9 traveled with his parents to New York City in 1856.
Three years after his death, Anne (52, born in England) and Charles (13, born in England) lived on Long Island in Islip, New York. Charles was a talented artist, who died as a young man in 1872. He was buried in Kensington and Chelsea, London, England. She died in 1878.
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