Ricardo Augusto Caminos was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 11 July 1915 to Carlos Norberto Caminos and Maria Etelvina Caminos (née Crottogini). His mother’s family originated in the Dolomites of northern Italy, a place traversed (in 1872) by Amelia B Edwards, founder of the Egypt Exploration Society (EES). Ricardo grew up surrounded by literature and the arts, a lifelong love of which was instilled in him by his parents. His education focused on history at the University of Buenos Aires, where he achieved an MA in 1938. It is around this time that he began collecting books, amassing a small library of literary works which long remained in storage. While engrossed in his studies, Ricardo enjoyed the wider cultural scene of the vibrant city, and became ‘an exponent of the tango’, as chronicled after his death in 1992 by his friend and biographer T G H James.
In 1941, Ricardo received a scholarship from the Institute of International Education in New York and relocated to the Oriental Institute, now the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC), at the University of Chicago. There, he devoted himself to scholarship with a single-minded focus that may have given his later life a somewhat ‘monkish’ character. His studies concentrated on the texts of the Bubastite Gate at Karnak – though he remained somewhat self-taught in the field of Egyptology. He achieved his PhD in 1947, after a year of studies at the University of Oxford, which was made possible thanks to support from a Rockefeller Foundation Scholarship in 1945-1946.
It was in post-war Oxford that Ricardo met Battiscombe Gunn and Alan Gardiner, who were both impressed by the young scholar’s devotion to literature and Egyptology. This formative year left a lasting impression on Ricardo and, no doubt, led to his incorporation into British Egyptological circles for the rest of his life.
