I note with sadness the passing of Kenneth Kitchen, an extraordinary Egyptologist and individual. Kitchen was phenomenally prolific, an into almost every facet of the ancient Near East. His Ramesside Inscriptions alone would have secured the reputation for an Egyptological career, but Kitchen also produced hefty monographs on South Arabian Inscriptions, a collection of all the treaties and law collections of the ancient Near East (Treaty, Law, and Covenant), sorting out the Third Intermediate Period, and numerous other works.
As a scholar Kitchen was known not only for his meticulous scholarship, but for having strong opinions strongly, bluntly, and vividly expressed. These opinions were not always appreciated but Kitchen had paid the price to have them.
I had the privilege of meeting Kitchen at the Third Intermediate Period conference in Leiden. He was kind and patient with me and let me hang around him through the conference. It was worth sitting a few seats away from him so as to catch his running commentary throughout the proceedings. He would audibly interject comments like "Utter rubbish!" in the middle of presentations. He gave the keynote address of the conference. An hour and a half summary of the chronological basis of the entire Third Intermediate Period with reference to all the primary sources, given from memory without notes. At the end of the conference, he gave a summary of all the presentations extemporaneously, again without notes, with comments about what he could agree with and what he could not.
That was Kitchen as a scholar. As a person, he showed sides that did not always show up in his scholarship. One of his students told me that Kitchen was always a good Christian gentlemen. One day, one of the female students provocatively showed up to class in a diaphanous top, so Kitchen paced the class giving his lecture staring at the floor. I heard another story firsthand from a colleague who found out that Kitchen had been praying for him, unbeknownst to him at the time.
