James P. Allen is the Wilbour Professor of Egyptology at Brown University. He is a former curator of Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and president of the International Association of Egyptologists. His previous publications include Genesis in Egypt: The Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts (1989), Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs (2000, 2010), The Heqanakht Papyri (2002), The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (2005) and The Debate between a Man and His Soul (2010).