Bruno Hugo Stricker was an Egyptologist and historian of the religions of Antiquity. He was born in Rotterdam on 23 August 1910 and was educated at the Gymnasium Erasmianum, Rotterdam, where he also learned Hebrew. He subsequently studied at the universities of Leiden, Oxford, Berlin and Paris, where he met the foremost Egyptologists of his day. In 1932 he obtained a first in Egyptology from Leiden University. He spent part of the following years until shortly before the outbreak of World War II in Cairo, where he engaged in linguistic research rather than fieldwork. In 1945 he obtained a doctorate from Leiden University under the supervision of Adriaan de Buck (1892-1959) with his dissertation De indeeling der Egyptische taalgeschiedenis ('The Classification of the History of the Egyptian Language'). Though written in Dutch, this work nevertheless attracted the attention of the international scholarly community. In the 1950s his research interests gradually shifted from linguistics to the comparative study of religions. In the meantime, he had deepened his academic knowledge of other languages, including Sanskrit, Old Persian, Arabic and Berber, with the purpose of filling the gaps in the cultural history of Egypt by the study of contiguous areas and contemporary cultures.

In 1939 Stricker obtained a position at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, soon afterwards becoming Curator of its Egyptological department. He was for all practical purposes an armchair scholar, with a marked reluctance against fieldwork and teaching. This, if nothing else, would have prevented Leiden University from offering him the Chair of Egyptology after the death of his master De Buck in 1959. He subsequently declined an offer from the University of Amsterdam, fearing that it would jeopardise the completion of what he had come to regard as his magnum opus, De geboorte van Horus ('he Birth of Horus'). The first volume of this work appeared in 1963. It would seem that the post of curator at the museum offered him more opportunities for writing and research than the university. He retired in 1975 and the last three decades of his life were devoted to finishing this work, the fifth and last volume of which came off the press in 1989. In 1994 he finished another voluminous work, De praehelleense ascese ('he Pre-Hellenistic Ascesis'). He evidently chose to emulate this particular ascetic tradition of Antiquity in his own personal lifestyle, dying a bachelor on 18 September 2005.

Stricker was a productive and multifarious author. He wrote 24 monographs, all characterised by their numerous references to almost exclusively primary sources of almost all cultures of the Near East and the Hellenistic world. In 1960 he published a groundbreaking text edition and French translation of the Berber epic L'Océan des pleurs (Bahr al-dumu'). Some of his publications are regarded as highly controversial, for instance the five-volume De geboorte van Horus already mentioned above. He bore the costs of many of his works himself. In his last published work, Zijn en Worden I ('To Be and to Become, I') his thinking enters a profoundly metaphysical dimension. He never finished the second volume.

As a matter of principle, he wrote almost all of his publications in Dutch, and some admirers actually undertook efforts to learn the language or have his works translated into English or Dutch, but without tangible results.

From 1963 onwards Stricker was a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. In 1995, on the occasion of his 85th birthday, he was offered a Festschrift, Hermes Aegyptiacus (DuQuesnes 1995). Five years later an article was written in his honour, Der Sonnenaufgang als Geburt eines Babys (Renggli 2000). In 2007 the late Professor Joris Frans Borghouts (1939-2018) published an obituary (Borghouts 2007). In 1999 Stricker wrote a brief autobiography, Herinneringen (Memoirs) at the request of his nephew and heir B.H.C. Stricker (Stricker 2018).