Gaston Maspero
Sir Gaston Camille Charles Maspero (23 June 1846 – 30 June 1916) was a French Egyptologist known for popularizing the term "Sea Peoples" in an 1881 paper. Maspero's son, Henri Maspero, became a notable sinologist and scholar of East Asia. Early life Gaston Maspero was born in Paris in 1846 to Adela Evelina Maspero, who had been born in Milan in 1822, daughter of a Milanese printer, and of an unnamed father, but identified by family tradition with Camillo Marsuzi de Aguirre, Italian revolutionary on the run. He was educated at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and Jesuit boarding school, followed by university studies at the École Normale Supérieure. While at school he showed a special taste for history and became interested in Egypt following a visit to the Egyptian galleries of the Louvre at the age of fourteen. At university he excelled in Sanskrit as well as hieroglyphics. It was while Maspero was in final year at the École normale in 1867 that friends mentioned his skills at reading hieroglyphics to Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, who was in Paris as commissioner for the Egyptian section of the Exposition universelle. Mariette gave him two newly discovered hieroglyphic texts of considerable difficulty to study,