Ritner passes-Sad!

[Res Ipsa]

It might be interesting to research the legality of urinating in a vessel and pouring the contents of that vessel out on to Louis Midgley's grave.

If it were legal I think it would certainly be a well deserved show of respect for the man.

That just sounds like pissing on someone’s grave, but with extra steps.

-Doc

Yeah, but drumdude's way avoids the risk of getting on a sex offender list.

[Kishkumen]

Sure: that's real believable. I notice that Dr. Gee is claiming that Yale U. "removed" Ritner from Gee's doctoral committee. That clashes with what Ritner himself said, which is that he (i.e., Ritner) *removed himself* from the committee after discovering "many errors" in Gee's work. DCP may claim that he's not using the occasion to "denounce" Ritner, but he, Gee, and the other Mopologists are certainly "using the occasions" as a means of trying to get the last word in.

After listening to Ritner’s account in his RFM-MoSto interview, I concluded that Ritner left Gee’s committee in conjunction with his departure from Yale to take up a position at UChicago. It’s an undramatic and common story. I am sure Gee’s early draft was not the best—few early drafts are genius—and, had Ritner been really enthused about Gee and his work, it might have been possible for him to stay in the committee. I get the sense that Ritner never really cared for Gee, thought he was an off-putting weirdo in fact, but was willing to do his duty as a faculty member for a Yale student. Yale doesn’t matriculate dummies, after all.

Subsequent tales have been told by both sides to make the other look bad. Interpretations of those stories reinforced what people wanted to believe about the relationship. The only thing truly noteworthy about this very common tale is that the relationship between student and former professor went very sour afterward, leading to more tales and clashes. In the end, both parties look somewhat culpable for their behavior, although I would argue that Ritner is a more sympathetic figure and a better scholar.

[Dr Exiled]

Ritner seemed like a good guy that didn't want to be tied to his student's questionable beliefs about the book of abraham "translation" and the papyri. Who can blame him. Gee's views are nonsense regarding this and so it's natural to want to distance oneself from it.

Wasn't Gee pursuing his studies with religion in mind? DCP and his mope cabal love to bootstrap academic credentials with mope legitimacy. Ritner wisely didn't want to play. Academic credibility is important.

[simon southerton]

Sad news.
I will not be reading a word an apologist has to say about his passing. It would be too triggering right now.

[Moksha]

Bad behavior is bad behavior, period.

Excellent point. Best to let death be a demarcation from anger.

[Dr Moore]

It occurs to me that the passing of an “adversary” really exposes the deeply rooted “us vs them” mentality and a gross kind meanness bred from Mopologetics. They expend so much energy making things personal, while swearing it’s not personal and nit picking if a word or phrase fits the proper definition of ad hominem. But then someone dies and they can hardly offer one genuine, unqualified nice thing to say. Gee’s words are an embarrassing capstone to decades of ugliness over Book of Abraham research. So are Peterson’s. They couldn’t just say nice things because they never have.

Honest academics engaged in honest academic debate should not feel the need to toss barbs at the passing of a contemporary. It should come as a privilege to share words of gratitude, admiration and sadness at the loss. Gee and Ritner could have gone down as an epic collaboration that elevated LDS participation in Egyptology. Instead Gee chose the low road every time, even at the end. Hopefully this reminds all of us to do better - to try harder to take the person out of the debate.

[Philo Sofee]

It occurs to me that the passing of an “adversary” really exposes the deeply rooted “us vs them” mentality and a gross kind meanness bred from Mopologetics. They expend so much energy making things personal, while swearing it’s not personal and nit picking if a word or phrase fits the proper definition of ad hominem. But then someone dies and they can hardly offer one genuine, unqualified nice thing to say. Gee’s words are an embarrassing capstone to decades of ugliness over Book of Abraham research. So are Peterson’s. They couldn’t just say nice things because they never have.

Honest academics engaged in honest academic debate should not feel the need to toss barbs at the passing of a contemporary. It should come as a privilege to share words of gratitude, admiration and sadness at the loss. Gee and Ritner could have gone down as an epic collaboration that elevated LDS participation in Egyptology. Instead Gee chose the low road every time, even at the end. Hopefully this reminds all of us to do better - to try harder to take the person out of the debate.

An superb observation! Take the person out of the debate, sage advice which, I for one, will work on doing, and immediately at that. In fact, thank you for this since I am doing another podcast very soon, and I can already see I have put people into the debate more than I need to, which I will correct so that I focus only on the issues...

[consiglieri]

Don’t you have a Sunstroke presentation to get ready for?

[Tom]

Here is the entirety of John Gee's blog post.

My take is that trying to play the victim-card on a guy who just died isn't the best look.

______________________________

Robert Kreich Ritner Jr. (1953-2021)

I just learned that Robert Kriech Ritner, Jr. passed away yesterday. Professor Ritner served as my dissertation advisor until Yale University removed him from the position. An official obituary has been posted. This is very sad.

I do not think I ever held Professor Ritner in the contempt or disdain in which he came to hold me. Still, I will share some positive memories of Professor Ritner.

I met Professor Ritner for the first time at my first international conference. It was devoted to magic in the ancient world and was held in August 1992 in Kansas. I had already been accepted to study under him at Yale.

One of the essentials I learned from Professor Ritner was demotic paleography. When he was a graduate student, Ritner worked on the Chicago Demotic Dictionary. One of his jobs was to take an exacto knife to photographs of papyri and to separate every demotic word. From that, he learned to account for every speck of ink on the papyrus and he taught us to do the same.

I appreciated how he tried to integrate the archaeology, texts, and art of Egypt. Too many disciplines fail to do so, and Egyptology is not as good as it once was in doing so.

Professor Ritner was an engaging lecturer. He knew how to entertain an audience. Professor Ritner was very skilled at turning a phrase. While this mostly came out in his more vituperative passages, he occasionally turned it with felicitous results into his translations.

Professor Ritner was very ambitious. Twenty-five to thirty years ago he intended to publish a number of unpublished texts, such as OIC 25389 and another manuscript of the Bentresh Stele, along with the definitive study of tribalism in the Libyan period and a demotic paleography.

My condolences to his family.

______________________________

The penultimate paragraph seems an additional slam on Ritner, implying he never got around to publishing these unpublished texts he had been intending to for a quarter century.

Or am I reading that wrong?

That's probably right. I will say, though, that Dr. Ritner is in good company in that respect. I must admit that I will probably never finish my long-awaited documentary history of Cassius University, my forever-forthcoming cultural biography of Dr. Scratch, my concordance of Dr. Midgley's works, and my 50-plus-volume The Annotated Sic et Non. I don't know that we will ever see Dr. Gee's reply to Andrew Cook's "Formulas and Facts: A Response to John Gee." And the world may never see the publication of a monograph by Gee titled "The King's Name is ...." or the publication of an article by Gee titled "The Two Inks: A Reply."

Dr. Ritner's 2020 C.V. lists the following as "in progress":

Libya in Egypt: The Impact of Tribalism on Dynasties 19 through 26. Study of Libyan dynastic rule in Egypt, tracing cross-cultural interactions from the Predynastic through the Saite eras.

The Hynes Papyrus (OI 25389). A Roman Mortuary Compendium. Editio Princeps of the Chicago papyrus, with transliteration, translation, textual commentary and plates, undertaken for the series Oriental Institute Publications (Chicago).

“The Possession of Bentresh: A Parallel Text from the Luxor Blockyard,” to be included in a future publication of The Epigraphic Survey’s Luxor Project. Author's text completed, awaiting Survey drawings. (Chicago)

[Kishkumen]

Don’t you have a Sunstroke presentation to get ready for?