Johann Peter Adolf Erman (; 31 October 185426 June 1937) was a German Egyptologist and lexicographer.
Education
Born in Berlin, he was the son of the physicist Georg Adolf Erman and grandson of the physicist Paul Erman and the astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel.
Educated at Leipzig and Berlin, he became associate professor of Egyptology at the University of Berlin in 1883 and full professor in 1892. In 1885 he was appointed director of the Egyptian department at the royal museum. In 1934 he was excluded from the faculty of the university because he was, according to the Nazi ideology, one quarter Jewish. As his family had converted to Protestantism in 1902, he and his family were not persecuted by the Nazi Party, but they all lost their positions.
Career
Erman and his school at Berlin had the difficult task of recovering the grammar of the Egyptian language and spent thirty years of special study on it. The greater part of Egyptian texts after the Middle Kingdom having been written in what was even then practically a dead language, as dead as Latin was to the medieval monks in Italy who wrote and spoke it, Erman selected for special investigation those texts which really represented the growth of the language at different periods, and, as he passed from one epoch to another, compared and consolidated his results.
