"Ladies were cruising the Nile and excavating tombs in Egypt"
Reviewed by Clare O'Beara
Posted July 17, 2024
Non-Fiction Biography | Multicultural
This detailed and timely study of the people who carried out Egyptology brings to light several names that are less known to the public. WOMEN IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS points out that some particular women did much of the work and got little of the publicity.
While many of us have heard of Howard Carter, Flinders Petrie and Lord Carnarvon, who discovered tombs and organised digs over many seasons, the desert was quiet home to Amelia Edwards, Jenny Lane, and Marianne Brocklehurst during the 1870s and up to the turn of the 20th century. Wealthy people travelled to the heat and dry air to cure ills associated with damp Britain. Those who wanted excitement or developed a passion started to organise and finance digs, with a license from the government. This was not just a period of colonialism for Egypt, but one which saw the beginnings of tourism, with its investments, hiring and building. What better way to draw crowds than publicity for sensational monuments, excavations, unwrapping mummies, and gold antiquities?
Maggie Benson was the first woman granted permission to excavate. Where some women depended on their husband’s presence, two women made a much stronger unit than one woman, and some of the unmarried ladies were in close relationships. Other ladies needed an able assistant, who over time became a companion. Nettie Gourlay was Maggie’s companion. The book explains that several people ended up leaving homes, books, money and antiquities to one another, and many of them worked in similar educational jobs across Britain and the USA. They lectured, archived, catalogued, and taught the next generation of women and men going to Egypt. Some of them developed the first courses on Egyptology as they were the experts in the field – self-taught.
The Rockefellers contributed largesse, and the field was always in need of more funding. Emma Andrews was a patron and archaeologist during the new century. Margaret Murray worked on digs with Flinders and Hilda Petrie – never forget the wives. They did a great deal of organising, recording, feeding and hostess work, which enabled the men to stride around giving orders to local workers and looking for the next site. Women also provided healthcare to any local people who needed it and first aid for workers on the dig. When Margaret returned home to London she was in demand to teach.
The study also includes artists Amice Calverley and Myrtle Broome who faithfully recorded the tomb arts, because exposure to the air would decay the paintings. Photography and art, as well as a knowledge of hieroglyphs, were vital. Their work was published by colleges in massive and costly volumes, as compared to today’s websites. The two World Wars collided with studies, so eager Kate Bradbury and Caroline Ransom could only visit Egypt when it was safe. At this time, women like them were carrying out incredible work in museums, rebuilding tombs, raising funds to build new housing for collections, making vast amounts of finds available for study and interpreting the data. Egyptological institutions didn’t pay very well, and they paid women less than men. We also see that women had to care for older or ailing relatives, and some women took a variety of jobs such as teaching as well as museum work to pay the bills.
I learned a great deal from Kathleen Sheppard’s excellent work WOMEN IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS, which consults personal letters, diaries, and academic records to provide a rounded picture of the ladies and their passion. They must have eaten a lot of sand as they picnicked, but I envied the earlier women, who luxuriated in lengthy cruises and wrote travelogue books like A Thousand Miles Up The Nile.
SUMMARY
The never-before-told story of the women Egyptologists who paved the way of exploration in Egypt and created the basis for Egyptology.
The history of Egyptology is often told as yet one more grand narrative of powerful men striving to seize the day and the precious artifacts for their competing homelands. But that is only half of the story. During the so-called Golden Age of Exploration, there were women working and exploring before Howard Carter discovered the tomb of King Tut. Before men even conceived of claiming the story for themselves, women were working in Egypt to lay the groundwork for all future exploration.
In Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age, Kathleen Sheppard brings the untold stories of these women back into this narrative. Sheppard begins with some of the earliest European women who ventured to Egypt as travelers: Amelia Edwards, Jenny Lane, and Marianne Brocklehurst. Their travelogues, diaries and maps chronicled a new world for the curious. In the vast desert, Maggie Benson, the first woman granted permission to excavate in Egypt, met Nettie Gourlay, the woman who became her lifelong companion. They battled issues of oppression and exclusion and, ultimately, are credited with excavating the Temple of Mut.
As each woman scored a success in the desert, she set up the women who came later for their own struggles and successes. Emma Andrews’ success as a patron and archaeologist helped to pave the way for Margaret Murray to teach. Margaret’s work in the university led to the artists Amice Calverley’s and Myrtle Broome’s ability to work on site at Abydos, creating brilliant reproductions of tomb art, and to Kate Bradbury’s and Caroline Ransom’s leadership in critical Egyptological institutions. Women in the Valley of the Kings upends the grand male narrative of Egyptian exploration and shows how a group of courageous women charted unknown territory and changed the field of Egyptology forever.
ExcerptCopyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
Prologue: A New Golden Age
Our story begins not with Napoleon in 1798 but in 1873, with the
earliest British women who ventured to Egypt as travelers. Amelia
Edwards and Marianne Brocklehurst went to Egypt in search
of something—health, sunshine, a life’s purpose—and they found
- Both women, independently of each other, had been inspired
to travel by Lucie Duff Gordon’s Letters from Egypt. These letters
from a lonely woman who had tried to find fresh, dry air for her
tuberculosis-ridden lungs inspired countless women and men to
travel to Egypt. Amelia and Marianne both established institutions
that soon became centers of the burgeoning discipline of Egyptology
in Britain. As we dig down into their stories, the timeline of
activity and opportunity reveals itself like a new stratigraphic layer
each time. As each won her own battles, she set up the women who
came later. Because of Amelia and Marianne, women in Britain like
Maggie Benson and Nettie Gourlay were able to be educated in
Egyptology, and they worked together to do their own excavations
while battling issues of oppression and exclusion. Emma Andrews’s
incredible success as a patron and archaeologist both depended on
Maggie and Nettie’s work and helped pave the way for Margaret
Murray to teach women to go into the field. Margaret’s work in the
university department that Amelia Edwards created allowed the
artists Myrtle Broome and Amice Calverley being on-site,
where they used their abilities to create brilliant reproductions of the art
on the walls of the Temple of Seti I at Abydos. Amelia Edwards’s
influence and money also resulted in Kate Bradbury and Emily
Paterson, as well as Caroline Ransom, having leadership positions
in central institutions, both small and large.
Women led the field of Egyptology in a number of ways despite and
sometimes because of the obstacles men put in their way.
Each new step, professionally, broke barriers for the next generation.
Barred from education, they traveled, experienced, learned, and
wrote about Egypt in ways they couldn’t do in a classroom. Excluded
from field training, they found opportunities to be present
and excavate on their own. Prohibited from theorizing or imagining
at the site, they re-created Egyptian art in astounding and wonderful
ways. Forbidden from being allowed to find the artifacts, they
acquired, organized, and maintained the world’s largest and most
important collections.
It is because of these women that we have the legacies of richly
illustrated travelogues, of valuable excavation seasons on sites that
had been deemed unimportant, of long-lost beautiful murals copied
and presented in books for future scholars to learn from, of great
collections in famous museums and foundational research institutions
that survived and thrived during wartime and depression.
Women were, in fact, the reason that any of the “Great Men” of
Egyptology were able to be “Great” at all.
Frequently, these women worked in tandem with Egyptians, too.
Both groups understood their usually subservient role to the Great
Man on-site. But their work—excavating, training, guarding, funding,
and selling pieces—made sure the European and American
men were successful in the field. Egyptian workers appear alongside
these women throughout the story of early Egyptology, likewise
fighting for inclusion. Egyptians are not as well-known historically
as Western women (which is really saying something), and their
stories in the archives and published sources are virtually nonexistent,
so their stories will be centered and significant, however small.
As the story here unfolds, we will meet and follow men such as
excavators, dahabeah captains, guides, ru’asa (excavation foremen),
consuls, and dealers. Their accomplishments run through this history
like a central thread that, if left out, would unravel the rich and
varied tapestry of the story.
Women in the Valley of the Kings presents a new idea of a Golden
Age, defined not by what men did politically but by the arrival of
women on their own terms, beginning with Amelia Edwards’s journey
in 1873 and ending with Caroline Ransom Williams’s death in
- These women and their professional and personal activities
cause us to rethink the era and ask questions like: For whom was
this age golden? What roles did women play in building and maintaining
the colonial structures in Egypt? When, how, and by whom
were Egyptians finally allowed to participate in the study of their
own ancient remains? Make no mistake, these women still took artifacts
during this so-called Golden Age, but their main disciplinary
work was more constructive and sustainable, and less destructive,
than men’s work.
The women in this volume came to Egyptology because of a
love for the ancient monuments, the people, and their history, not
to mention the mystery of it all. For the most part, women’s work
in the field happened at different times and in different spaces than
men’s. Western women arrived in Egypt later than men did. Once
they were in-country, their focus tended to be more on experience,
travel, and preservation of material remains than discovery,
although several women did uncover a number of important sites
and artifacts. While they worked both on-site and off, women often
used their money, influence, and expertise to create, support, and
maintain institutions instead of spending most of their time excavating
in the field. The discipline of Egyptology, therefore, looks
different when women dominate the field. Based on their work as
artists, diarists, and collectors, these women will be called Egyptologists.
Based on their jobs in university classrooms, home museum
collections, and disciplinary societies, Egyptology will be defined as
building institutions and not deconstructing sites. Egyptology will
finally be seen as women’s work.
There are many different definitions of Egyptology, and even more
that try to simultaneously carve out a definition of a “Golden Age”
of the discipline. Egyptology could comprise the “wonderful things”
to which the famous British archaeologist Howard Carter referred
when he was asked what he saw as he first peered through the dark
and dust into Tutankhamun’s almost undisturbed tomb. Egyptology
could include the wide public interest in Egypt’s history that trailblazer
Amelia Edwards said “never flags” in those who truly love
Egypt. It could be the study and mastery of the ancient script of the
people who walked, talked, lived, and loved in Egypt five thousand
years ago. It could be the study of their remains, with the discerning
mind put to solving the questions and problems that continually
arise with new finds. It very well is all of these things.
The term ancient Egypt, usually designated as the period from
around 3250 BCE to the arrival of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE
at the end of the Late Period, commonly defines the general era
studied by people who call themselves Egyptologists. The Greco-Roman
period is a separate period, but is still considered Egyptology,
beginning in 332 BCE and ending with the death of the final
Ptolemaic ruler, Cleopatra VII, in 30 BCE. That does not mean that
other periods and topics of Egyptian history do not matter—in
fact, the geology, climate, economy, politics, and anthropology of Egypt
matter a great deal. It is simply that those topics are not usually
considered to be part of Egyptology, specifically. The study of many
of the Egyptian scripts—at any point on the ancient timeline—is
often understood as Egyptology. The search for, excavation of, and
study of the material remains of ancient Egyptian civilization are
usually understood as Egyptian archaeology, the discerning factor
between the two being the focus on and comprehension of ancient
scripts. Egyptian archaeologists can be Egyptologists and vice versa;
it certainly helps to be both.
The term “Golden Age” of this discipline is also up for some
debate. Typically, “Golden Age” refers to the period defined by the
common Grand Narrative, from the coming of Napoleon and the
French in 1798 to the finding of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922.
It is a period in which wealthy, white Europeans and Americans ran
rampant over the cultural heritage of a colonized country and its
people, vandalizing and pillaging as they went. To be clear, the 130
or so years of European dominance in Egypt was a “Golden Age”
for the Western study of Egyptology because neither the laws in
place at the time nor the cultural norms put in place by the Western
rulers stopped this looting behavior—in fact, the laws actually encouraged
violence and oppression by allowing the men and women
who came to Egypt to take what they wanted, with impunity, and
reasonably expect to be safe and remain unmolested while doing it.
Writing mostly about Western women without acknowledging
their role in the colonized history of Egyptology doesn’t reflect the
true story. These women were part of the colonizing institutions and
were, therefore, colonizers themselves. The reality of the situation,
however, is more complex because, for far too often, women and
Egyptians were also the colonized. If one looks clearly at the accomplishments
of the explorers in the following pages, one can see
that they are the pillars on which the male heroes of Western Egyptology
stood in order to rise to their lofty status. If we are to see the
fascinating history of discoveries in Egypt clearly, we have to look
at the women and prominent Egyptians who did the groundbreaking
work among the pyramids and temples and place them where
they really belong within the history of Egyptology—directly
at the center. By finally acknowledging the accomplishments of these
individuals, a more realistic picture of the history of the field and a
truer, more inclusive definition of Egyptology emerge.
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