Timothy Kendall received his PhD from Brandeis University in Mediterranean Studies. Before retirement, he was Associate Curator of the Department of Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He is an archaeologist and Egyptologist with a specialty in the ancient Nubian civilization of Kush (Sudan). For 29 seasons (from 1986 to 2015), Dr. Kendall directed an archaeological expedition at Jebel Barkal. In 1982, after organizing an exhibition called Kush: Lost Kingdom of the Nile, drawn from the Boston Museum’s extensive Sudan collection, he received a sabbatical that allowed him to travel to Sudan to visit the sites that the Museum had first excavated between 1914 and 1924: Jebel Barkal, el-Kurru, Nuri, and Meroë. This trip changed his life and his specialty.
In 1986 Dr. Kendall applied for and received a permit to renew the Museum’s archaeological excavations at Jebel Barkal, and his initial discoveries were featured in National Geographic Magazine (Nov. 1990). In the early 1990’s, he helped plan and install the Boston Museum’s first Nubian gallery, and in 1996 he was invited by the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian, to curate a loan exposition from the Boston Museum, called ‘The Ancient Nubian City of Kerma: 2500-1500 B.C.’ He also wrote the exhibit’s catalogue: Kerma and the Kingdom of Kush, 2500-1500 BC: The Archaeological Discovery of an Ancient Nubian Empire. Dr. Kendall is the author of many articles and books on ancient Nubian archaeology, and for his contribution to Sudanese history, he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Khartoum in 2002.