Kathleen L. Sheppard – författare

The Life of Margaret Alice Murray: A Woman’s Work in Archaeology is the first book-length biography of Margaret Alice Murray (1863–1963), one of the first women to practice archeology. Despite Murray’s numerous professional successes, her career has received little attention because she has been overshadowed by her mentor, Sir Flinders Petrie. This oversight has obscured the significance of her career including her fieldwork, the students she trained, her administration of the pioneering Egyptology Department at University College London (UCL), and her published works. Rather than focusing on Murray’s involvement in Petrie’s archaeological program, Kathleen L. Sheppard treats Murray as a practicing scientist with theories, ideas, and accomplishments of her own. This book analyzes the life and career of Margaret Alice Murray as a teacher, excavator, scholar, and popularizer of Egyptology, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and more. Sheppard also analyzes areas outside of Murray’s archaeology career, including her involvement in the suffrage movement, her work in folklore and witchcraft studies, and her life after her official retirement from UCL.

Throughout the professionalization of Egyptology in the nineteenth century, there were several debates that raged: the purpose of the pyramids, and who built them; the meaning of hieroglyphs; the styling of statues and artwork on tomb and temple walls; and the history of ancient Egypt, especially in its relation to Christendom. As hieroglyphs became readable through decipherment, and scholars gained more accurate understandings of the written record, they established testable theories about Egypt’s ancient social, political, and economic past. This volume presents sources within these debates and demonstrates how ideas about the past changed with the understanding and uncovering of more evidence. Of course, most of this investigation was being done in Britain, in the metropolitan center, and so the sources bear the mark of inexperience in the outside field site, scholars’ ignorance about the peoples they study, and the colonial hierarchy present at the time.

While there had technically been people studying the ancient Egyptian world since around 400 BCE, the first Western scholars arrived in Egypt the medieval period. It was in 1798 though that the French under Napoleon invaded Egypt not only with an army of soldiers but with an army of scholars, which resulted in the truly epic Description de l’Egypte (1809-1822). Not to be outdone, under Lord Nelson in 1801, the British defeated France and stole all of their already stolen Egyptian artifacts. From that point on, in the nineteenth century, Britons (and other Europeans) continued to travel to Egypt as tourists, health seekers, engineers, businesspeople, soldiers and more. They arrived in a distinctly foreign land and carried on the legacy of those before them—writing home about their experiences, marveling at the monuments, and taking material remains home with them when they left. They quickly became self-trained experts. The shift from amateur to professional is particularly apparent in travel writing, as this volume will show through letters, journals, diaries, newspaper articles, and some published material.

The earliest collections of Egyptian artifacts were those pieces taken by the Roman empire. There are more Egyptian obelisks in Rome today than there are left in Egypt. In the nineteenth century, British collections were built by the same people whose work comprises volume two. They began as private collections, meant as status symbols usually for the wealthy, or for those who wished to show evidence of their wide travels. However, gradually, many of these collections were left in wills to municipal institutions or turned into publicly available collections themselves. The British Museum, originally founded in 1759, opened its first purpose built gallery for Egyptian antiquities in 1808. The Townley Gallery was built to house the antiquities seized from the French in 1801, including the Rosetta Stone, and the collection has been growing ever since. Later, the British Museum hired people who were already in Egypt, or who were going to Egypt of their own accord, to gather and send back artifacts. As the discipline of archaeology in Egypt became a scholarly pursuit, museums began to sponsor their own expeditions in order to fill their now bursting stores. Collecting in order to possess the past, both physically and ideologically, of a subjected people was the point.

As the general public in Britain read about Egypt’s history, visited collections, and viewed the material remains of a past that had not yet been uncovered by Western scholars, the mysterious nature of Egypt’s past became fertile ground for literary imaginations. Called Egyptomania by some scholars, the public excitement and interest in ancient Egypt ebbed and flowed throughout the nineteenth century. Fear of the unknown shows itself in fictional works about ancient Egypt, contemporary Egypt, Egyptian artifacts, and the people who made them. Authors began to ask questions about magical spells, inexplicable forces, puzzling practices, and strange beings that came from a mysteriously powerful ancient civilization. How did ancient Egypt last for three millennia? Why did Egyptians write with those symbols? Who would agree to be buried in such a way? What power was bestowed on those mummified? As fiction writers and scholars began to answer these questions, they imagined a society with unlimited powers and both unbounded animosity as well as a certain noblesse oblige to their obvious ideological ancestors—the British.

The Life of Margaret Alice Murray: A Woman’s Work in Archaeology is the first book-length biography of Margaret Alice Murray (1863–1963), one of the first women to practice archeology. Despite Murray’s numerous professional successes, her career has received little attention because she has been overshadowed by her mentor, Sir Flinders Petrie. This oversight has obscured the significance of her career including her fieldwork, the students she trained, her administration of the pioneering Egyptology Department at University College London (UCL), and her published works. Rather than focusing on Murray’s involvement in Petrie’s archaeological program, Kathleen L. Sheppard treats Murray as a practicing scientist with theories, ideas, and accomplishments of her own. This book analyzes the life and career of Margaret Alice Murray as a teacher, excavator, scholar, and popularizer of Egyptology, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and more. Sheppard also analyzes areas outside of Murray’s archaeology career, including her involvement in the suffrage movement, her work in folklore and witchcraft studies, and her life after her official retirement from UCL.