Arthur Weigall was born in the year in which his father, an army officer, died on the North West Frontier. As a young widow, his mother turned missionary in the inner-city slums of late-Victorian England. So Arthur Weigall went from an unconventional home life in Salford to Wellington College, a school with strong establishment and military connections. He started work as an apprentice clerk in the City of London, but a youthful fascination with genealogy led him to the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt and so into Egyptology. A mysterious patroness encouraged him to apply for New College, Oxford. This was a mistake (Egyptology was not yet studied at Oxford) so he went on to Leipzig, and on his return to England found work with Flinders Petrie, first at University College London and then at Abydos in Egypt.
Life with Flinders Petrie was notoriously harsh, and after a while Arthur Weigall went to work for Friedrich Wilhelm von Bissing, a German Egyptologist. In early 1905 Howard Carter was staying with Arthur Weigall at Saqqara when after an incident with some French tourists, Howard Carter was forced to resign his post as Chief Inspector of Antiquities for Upper Egypt. Suddenly, at the age of 25, Arthur Weigall was appointed to replace Howard Carter at Luxor, responsible for protecting and managing the antiquities of a region that extended from Nag Hammadi to the border with Sudan.
At Luxor, Arthur Weigall threw himself with immense energy into aspects of the job that in his view had been somewhat neglected � the protection and conservation of monuments that were steadily vanishing into the ravenous markets of Europe and North America. He remained in Luxor until 1911. This was a time of intense activity � the discovery of the tombs of Yuya and Tuya, KV55, the tomb of Horemheb, travels in the Eastern Desert, a popular biography of Akhnaten, a Guide to the Antiquities of Upper Egypt. He worked with Alan Gardiner on the tombs of the nobles and may well have helped Howard Carter to the placement with Lord Carnarvon that led to the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. He was deeply enmeshed in the bureaucratic and social entanglements of Luxor and Cairo, coming into close contact with Flinders Petrie, Gaston Maspero, Theodore Davis, Percy Newberry, Howard Carter and others, and making friends with Sir Ronald Storrs and the glittering world of an Edwardian society in Egypt.
