Barbara Adams (Egyptologist)

British egyptologist

Barbara Georgina Adams, FRSA (19 February 1945 – 26 June 2002) was a distinguished British Egyptologist, archaeologist, and academic, who was a specialist in Prehistoric Egypt. She worked for many years at Hierakonpolis, where she was the co director of the expedition. She worked at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London, latterly as curator (1984–2001), and also worked on excavations across Britain.

Barbara Bishop was born in Hammersmith Hospital in London to Charles and Ellaline Bishop. Her parents had unskilled jobs but she gained a scholarship to Godolphin and Latymer School but her finances did not run to study after sixteen. In 1964 she won the Miss Hammersmith beauty contest and a book of her poetry Bones in my Soul was published. Her employment with Professor Harry Smith, Edward Chair in Egyptian Archaeology of the University College, helped her career. She was promoted to assistant curator and academic staff in 1975, and made curator of the Petrie Museum in 1984. She would head the museum until her cancer diagnosis in 2001. After Hoffmann's death in 1990, Adams and Renée Friedman became co directors of the Hierakonpolis excavation which continued until 1996. She has been credited with the discovery of previously unknown funeral masks and a life size statue. She was editor of the Shire Egyptology Series (numbering 25 books in total). Her final work was based upon vase fragments from a cemetery at Abydos. Adams died from cancer in 2002.