Abner Ravenwood in 1926.
Abner Ravenwood (1868 - 1935) was an American Egyptologist and archaeologist at the University of Chicago in the 1920s.
Biography[]
Abner Ravenwood was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1868. He spent his early days assisting Flinders Petrie, helping excavate Palestine, and earned degrees in history and archaeology at Yale and Harvard. At some point in his career, Ravenwood explored Malekula, an island in the Pacific Ocean, where he lost an Ebony Dove after being chased off by the island's inhabitants.
Abner Ravenwood in 1898.
In March 1909, Ravenwood's daughter Marion was born. Later, in June, Abner for the first time met the young boy Henry Jones Jr, later known as Indiana Jones, in Jerusalem. Jones learned that Ravenwood owned a map showing the potential resting place of the Ark of the Covenant under the Temple Mount. Ravenwood later explained that he believed the Ark was buried somewhere else, and that one day a real archaeologist would find it.
By the 1920s, Ravenwood was a longtime professor of archaeology at the University of Chicago. Among his students were Harold Oxley and Indiana Jones. Ravenwood considered Jones to be the most gifted student he had ever trained, and as their relationship evolved, came to love him like a son.
In 1926, Jones started a romantic relationship with Marion sometime later Abner discovered it. Abner was so dissapointed that he ended his friendship with Jones and left his job at the University of Chicago travelling to Nepal where he lived with his daughter during the next 10 years. In 1935, after months of research in the mountains following a theory that the Ark had been taken through Nepal by Alexander the Great's army, Ravenwood was believed to have perished in an avalanche while searching for the artifact in Nepal, shortly after realizing the Ark was back in Tanis, Egypt.