Hans Alexander Winkler
German ethnographer; he was born at Bremerhaven 14 Feb. 1900, son of Erwin A. W., director of a technical school at Göttingen, and Margarethe Traenckner; he was educated at Göttingen and then served in World War I from 1917; he studied at the University of Göttingen, 1919-21 when he left for economic reasons and briefly became a miner and a radical; he returned to his studies at the University of Tübingen, 1923-25 specializing in religious history and Semitic philology; PhD 1925, Habilitation 1928; lecturer at Tübingen, 1928-33 when he was dismissed for his previous radical views; he visited Egypt in 1932 and 1933-4 when he became interested in Egyptian folk history; he returned to Egypt in 1935 teaching Semitic philology at Cairo University from Oct.- Dec.; he visited Upper Egypt in early 1936 and copied rock drawings; he then joined the expedition of Sir Robert Mond at Armant and copied further drawings in the Libyan Desert, 1936-7 and 1937-8; apart from his publications on ethnography, he produced Ägyptische Volkskunde, 1936;Völker und Völkerbewegungen im vorgeschichtlichen Oberägypten im Lichte neuer Felsbilderfunde, 1937; and Rock-Drawings of Southern Upper Egypt, 2 vols., 1938-9; he was killed in action at Schlusau, Poland, 20 Jan. 1945.
