George Ebers was born on 1 March 1837 in Berlin, a citizen of the Kingdom of Prussia, into a German cultural environment that would orient him toward both scholarly and literary work. He was educated at the Allgemeine Deutsche Bildungsanstalt before continuing his studies at the University of Göttingen, Frederick William University Berlin, and Friedrich Schiller University Jena, a broad academic formation that equipped him to work across German, Latin, Ancient Greek, and Old Egyptian.

Ebers pursued a career as both an Egyptologist and a novelist, producing work across those two distinct fields. His novel An Egyptian Princess was among his notable works, as was the descriptive and historical volume Egypt: descriptive, historical, and picturesque. His most significant scholarly association came in the winter of 1873–74, when he discovered an Egyptian medical papyrus at Luxor. He subsequently purchased the document, which has since borne his name as the Ebers Papyrus. His capacity to engage with Old Egyptian alongside Latin, Ancient Greek, and German placed him in a position to work directly with primary sources of considerable antiquity.

Ebers died on 7 August 1898 in Tutzing, as a citizen of the German Reich.