- Egyptology, the study of Ancient Egypt, is an area of research that was once closed to women.
- In the late 1800s and early 1900s, a few women used their wealth to leave their mark on the field.
- Their stories were rarely told before a recent book, "Women in the Valley of the Kings."
In the late 1800s, it wasn't unusual to see well-to-do Europeans climbing Egyptian pyramids in long dresses or peering into crumbling tombs. Many were tourists, but a few were studying the monuments, part of the burgeoning field of Egyptology.
Egyptology, the study of Ancient Egypt, was still developing its scientific methods into the early 20th century. The men who excavated tombs during this period often lacked formal training, sometimes failed to keep detailed records, and typically kept a portion of the treasures they found.
It was difficult for women to break into the profession, but a few prevailed. Female Egyptologists then made room for more women to join their ranks.
"The way that the women who moved into those positions then kept making things better for women after them is one of the biggest impacts on the discipline of Egyptology," Kathleen Sheppard, a history professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology, told Business Insider. She's the author of "Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age."
These women had much in common. Many were wealthy and unmarried but often had same-sex partners who traveled and supported them throughout their lives. Several were ill and traveled to Egypt for the warm, dry climate. They also took home artifacts before present-day laws made buying and taking home such "souvenirs" illegal.
The story of Egyptology's Golden Age, from Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 until Howard Carter found Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, usually highlights the British, European, and American men who made the discoveries.
However, for many of those discoveries, women were there, cataloging the artifacts, making drawings, and doing other valuable work.
"They're just not included in these main histories," Sheppard said. "But their impact is very clear," she added.
Amelia Edwards blazed a trail for women who wanted to study Egypt and set up a foundation to help them do so.
Though she only traveled to the pyramids once, Amelia Edwards had an enormous impact on the study of Ancient Egypt, especially for other British women.
Inspired by Lucie Duff-Gordon, an English writer who lived and wrote about Egypt in the 1860s, Edwards traveled to the Giza pyramids, Dendera temple, and other sites for several months between 1873 and 1874.
While Duff-Gordon's "Letters from Egypt" were focused on modern Egypt and her experiences there, Edwards was fascinated by the country's ancient monuments and history. In 1877, she published "A Thousand Miles up the Nile," describing her travels up the river and the sights along the way. It was an instant hit, going through several editions and reprints.
She described crawling into tombs and temples, occasionally worried about being buried alive in a cave-in. Her lush descriptions of the glittering desert, pink mountains, and misty chasms captured readers' imaginations and spurred many to make their own journeys.
With its vivid imagery and rich historical detail, Edwards' book served as a kind of template for Western women travelers, Sheppard said. She told them where to go and the significance of the monuments they would visit.
In 1882, Edwards founded the Egypt Exploration Fund, which still exists today as the Egypt Exploration Society. Subscribers would help pay for expeditions and receive detailed reports in exchange. Edwards put women in charge of running the fund, while men did the excavation.
When she died in 1892, she left money to the University College London for a department of Egyptology, but there were several stipulations. Some were about who would chair the department — no man above 40 who was affiliated with the British Museum was eligible — while another ensured that women would benefit from her bequest, too. Classes, scholarships, and exhibitions had to be "open to students of both sexes," according to Edwards' will.
There was a specific reason UCL received the money, too. "They were the only ones in 1892 who were allowing women to take degrees on equal terms as men," Sheppard said.
Margaret Murray created a program that taught generations of excavators.
Egyptologist Flinders Petrie spent years excavating important sites in Egypt. For a while, he brought Margaret Murray along to record his findings.
"He specifically would bring Margaret Murray out to sites because his handwriting was so horrible," Sheppard said. "So if he tried to catalog anything, no one could read it."
Murray would go on to have her own successes in the field.
"She had this amazing 70-year-long career because she started in Egyptology when she was 30, and she lived till she was 100, and she was still working when she died," Sheppard said.
For many of those years, Murray was training future Egyptologists. She'd been the one to develop the two-year program at University College London and served as the instructor, drawing on her experiences in Egypt. Students learned about geology, mineralogy, history, religion, languages, and more.
Some of the students became famous in their own right. "They're known to history, to everybody else as Petrie's pups because Petri trained them in the field," Sheppard said. Yet many acknowledge Murray's influence as well.
In 1908, Murray performed Britain's last public unwrapping of mummified remains. It was controversial, even at the time.
Letters in the newspaper suggested Khnum-Nakht, the man who Murray was going to unwrap, should be left in peace. Yet 500 people came to watch her at Manchester University as she peeled off layers of linen, which were then given out as souvenirs.
For her own research, Murray published an influential report about a structure she said was used for worshiping the god Osiris. Her discredited folklore work on witchcraft has overshadowed her work in Egyptology.
Still, her legacy remains thanks to her many students and their followers. "People who are still alive today can trace their academic genealogy back to Margaret Murray in the 1930s," Sheppard said.
Maggie Benson was the first woman to officially excavate a site in Egypt.
In 1894, Margaret "Maggie" Benson went to Egypt, hoping to ease her rheumatism, which affected her joints and lungs. Like many of the other women Egyptologists, the 28-year-old fell in love with the country, Sheppard said."They go home, and they keep wanting to go back."
During her first trip, she went with one of the popular Thomas Cook & Son tours, which took thousands of tourists up the Nile each year, per The BBC. They traveled in comfort and style, with daily excursions to see tombs at Saqqara or Beni Hasan's cliffs.
Benson decided she wanted to kickstart her own excavation. There were granite statues sticking out of the earth at the dilapidated Temple of Mut in Luxor.
Though Benson had no formal training in archaeology, neither did many of the men who were excavating tombs and temples. It wasn't yet the careful, scientific discipline it would become in the next century.
Money was the workaround. "If these women had enough money and if they had enough time, they could go be archeologists too, because that's all that the men had at that point," Sheppard said.
Using her connections and supplying her own funding, Benson got permission to excavate the temple, making her the first woman who was officially allowed to do so. Nearly two dozen Egyptian men and boys did the digging and the hauling and sifting of dirt. Benson's brother Fred lent his expertise, having worked on excavations in Athens before.
By the end of the first season in 1895, the excavators had dug up dozens of statues, coins, and other artifacts. The next year, they found over a dozen lion-headed statues and countless fragments of others.
One of Benson's most important collaborators at the site was Janet "Nettie" Gourlay, with whom she had an intense, long-lasting relationship. Together, they published "The Temple of Mut in Asher" in 1899, "which became a groundbreaking report, revealing the temple as it had never been seen before," according to "Women in the Valley of the Kings."
Emma Andrews kept critical records during excavations of significant sites.
Today, archaeologists meticulously track the locations of artifacts when they find them, but this wasn't always the case.
"In British Egyptology, you have these stories of people going in and using explosives to get through a wall so they can pull out the big statue, and you don't need to record what was on that wall," Sheppard said.
Luckily for Theodore Davis, he had Emma Andrews by his side. The two wealthy Americans were in a relationship, though Davis also had a wife. By 1900, they'd been traveling to Egypt for over a decade, often with a copy of Edwards' "A Thousand Miles" in their luggage. Together, they helped fund or excavate 24 tombs.
In 1902, Davis received the coveted permission to excavate the Valley of the Kings, where many rulers were buried. It soon paid off, with his team rediscovering tomb 46, which belonged to Yuya and Thuya, Tutankhamun's great-grandparents. Unlike many looted tombs, it still had many of its treasures inside.
While Davis marveled over an exquisite chariot or gilded chair, Andrews documented artifacts, drew maps, and kept a list of visitors to the site. These records were crucial because Davis could be slipshod in his own accounts. "Her diaries are the most accurate record historians and archaeologists have for over a dozen tombs," Sheppard wrote.
Andrews also wrote about the work the Egyptian men did at the tomb, including much of the physical labor, something often omitted in official reports.
In 1908, Davis started excavating a different tomb, KV55. He believed the mummified remains belonged to Queen Tiye and wrote his report based on that incorrect assumption. Archaeologists are still unsure whose tomb it was, though they've learned the body belonged to an adult male.
Both Davis and Edwards left money and hundreds of Egyptian artifacts to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Winifred Brunton created portraits of Egyptian pharaohs.
Two of Margaret Murray's students were Guy and Winifred Brunton. The UCL students were married and spent their lives working at archaeological sites.
Together, they worked at Lahun, a site in Faiyum, Egypt, in 1914, alongside Petrie. They found a tomb belonging to an unknown princess from around 1897 to 1878 BCE. Though people had plundered the tomb during antiquity, they left behind several items of jewelry, including a gold diadem adorned with gems.
Winifred Brunton was an artist and painted portraits and scenes from the excavations. Some of her best-known works were her Kings and Queens of Ancient Egypt. She published books of portraits of Tiye, Nefertiti, Ramesses II, and other rulers.
Myrtle Broome and Amice Calverley helped preserve the art of a historic temple.
Construction began on the Temple of Seti I, now known as the Great Temple of Abydos, in the 13th century BCE. Ramesses II, Seti I's son, completed the temple to honor the deceased pharaoh.
Scenes of the king making offerings to the gods and receiving the symbols of life decorate the walls of the temple's seven chapels. In the late 1920s, it was difficult for photographs to accurately reflect all the nuances of the artwork or inscriptions.
To preserve these scenes, Egyptologist James Breasted created a laborious process for creating detailed copies that evolved over the years. Using a lighted tracing board, an artist would trace the lines of the enlarged photograph to pick up as many details as possible. An on-site expert would then compare the drawings to the original to make sure everything was identical.
"It's neck cramping," Sheppard said. "It's backbreaking." Amice Calverley was one artist who was very skilled at it.
In the late 1920s, she became field director for the Abydos temple project, doing much of the work herself along with help from an Egyptian staff. Fortunes literally changed when John D. Rockefeller Jr. visited and donated the equivalent of over $1 million to the project, Sheppard said. It "was a huge coup in Egyptology at the time," she said, because one of the requirements was that Calverley continue to lead the project.
Due to the funding, Myrtle Broome, one of Margaret Murray's first students, joined the team. Together, they eventually published four volumes of "The Temple of King Sethos I at Abydos," with their intricate recreations of the scenes. With the onset of World War II, several volumes were left unpublished.
Caroline Ransom Williams was the first woman in the US to earn a PhD in Egyptology.
Caroline Ransom Williams earned her PhD in 1905 from the University of Chicago, becoming the first woman in the US with an advanced degree in Egyptology. Nearly 30 years had passed since Amelia Edwards published "A Thousand Miles up the Nile." Sheppard said Ransom WIlliams followed her and other female Egyptologists' examples.
"All of these women who came before Caroline set up these steps that she could follow along," she said.
In 1910, she began working in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Egyptian Art Department. By then, she'd already been a professor in art history and archaeology at Bryn Mawr and spent months traveling in Egypt.
One of her most influential projects at the Met was her reconstruction of Perneb's tomb. British Egyptologist Edward Quibell had uncovered it a few years earlier, and Edward Harkness bought it for the museum. Ransom Williams went through over 600 boxes of limestone.
She preserved both the stone and its artwork by sealing everything in a varnish-like coating. Prepping and rebuilding the tomb indoors took about three years, and Ransom Williams and her team completed the work in 1916. Visitors can still see the tomb on display today.
In the accompanying booklet, Williams explained that the tomb's hieroglyphs said that Perneb's family visited him regularly, helping to personalize the life of someone who had lived over 4,000 years earlier.
Drawing on her expertise in art history, Ransom Williams said the artists' use of the Egyptian blue pigment was significant and part of "a sophisticated color scheme."
Over a decade after finishing Perneb's tomb, Ransom Williams helped refine Breasted's epigraphic process for capturing scenes and reliefs on tomb and temple walls, which Myrtle Broome and Amice Calverley would use soon after.
The combination of the way Ransom Williams' presented Ancient Egypt to the public as a museum curator and her work with the University of Chicago's Epigraphic Survey made her career one of the most significant in Egyptology at the time.
"If she had been a man, we would be talking about her way more than we talk about even James Breasted or Howard Carter because she was so impactful with the work that she did," Sheppard said.
