Born in 1905, Richard Parker graduated from Dartmouth College and earned his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1938. A 1947 bequest in Charles Edwin Wilbour’s name created Brown University’s Department of Egyptology and the Charles Edwin Wilbour Professorship, given to Richard Parker in 1948 at the recommendation of History of Mathematics Professor Otto Neugebauer. Accepting the job offer, Parker became the first Chair of the first Egyptology department in the United States. At the time of his acceptance, he was a founding trustee of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) and field director of the University of Chicago’s permanent expedition at Luxor in the Nile Valley. In Parker’s summation, Egyptologists fall into two categories: archeologists (who deal with physical artifacts) and philologists (who decode language). Parker identified himself as an epigrapher, a philologist who records ancient inscriptions. His contributions to the field include significant work in the areas of Egyptian language, astronomy, and chronology (conceptions of time). Parker wrote or collaborated on many books including the four-volume Egyptian Astronomical Texts with Otto Neugebauer. In a 1972 Dartmouth Alumni Magazine profile, Parker compared the study of the ancient world to a medical history: “It is just as important to know what man thought in the past, how he met crises, how he adapted, as it is for a doctor to know his patient’s health record. It gives us background against which to judge ourselves.” After his retirement in 1972, Parker maintained a rigorous research and publication practice. He passed away in 1993.