Samuel A. B. Mercer

Samuel Alfred Browne Mercer was born in Bay Roberts, Newfoundland, in 1879. An Anglican clergyman and orientalist, he was dean of Bexley Hall at Kenyon College in Ohio before moving to Trinity College in the University of Toronto in 1923, where he was dean and professor of divinity and later professor of Semitic languages and Egyptology until he retired in 1946. He was called Canada's foremost Egyptologist, and he died in Toronto in 1969.

His most cited work is The Pyramid Texts in Translation and Commentary (1952), in four volumes. The Pyramid Texts are spells carved on the walls of royal burial chambers at Saqqara from the reign of Unas, around 2350 BCE, onward. They are the oldest large body of Egyptian religious writing, and many of them describe the dead king rising to join the stars and the sun god. Mercer's was the first complete translation in any language.

R. O. Faulkner's 1969 translation is considered the standard today, but Mercer's version is widely available online and is still often quoted.