Hands That Drew the Tombs: British Women and the Making of Egyptology

Egyptology was not built only in trenches. It was built in lecture rooms, in museum stores, in the margins of excavation reports and in the careful copying of tomb walls. British women were present at every stage, yet the discipline has often remembered them as assistants, hostesses or colourful exceptions. That framing is due for revision — not because the past can be made tidy, but because the record is fuller and more troubling than the old stories allow.

Amelia Edwards: The Novelist Who Built a Discipline

Amelia Edwards is the name most likely to survive in a general survey. A novelist and travel writer, she went to Egypt in the 1870s and turned the experience into A Thousand Miles up the Nile, a book that mixed wonder with alarm at the destruction of monuments. She campaigned for excavation and conservation, helped found the Egypt Exploration Fund, and left money to endow a chair in Egyptian archaeology at University College London. Her influence was institutional as much as literary: she helped make Egyptology a funded, organised pursuit in Britain.

That legacy also sits inside a Victorian culture of travel, collecting and imperial confidence. Edwards opposed careless destruction, but she worked within a system that assumed British scholars and donors had a rightful place in Egypt’s past. Recovering her work does not require pretending otherwise. It requires holding the reformer and the imperial context together.

Margaret Murray: The Lecturer in the Attic

Margaret Murray is often remembered for her later folklore writing, but her Egyptology career was substantial. She studied under Flinders Petrie, worked on excavated material, and became a lecturer at University College London, where she taught and catalogued Egyptian collections. She was one of the first women to teach archaeology in a British university, and she did so in a discipline that was still largely organised around male field directors and male-led institutions.

Her position was real, but it was also constrained. Women could be indispensable in the lab, the catalogue and the classroom while remaining marginal in the field hierarchy. Murray’s career shows how women entered Egyptology through the doors that were open — teaching, classification, publication — and then found those doors did not always lead to the same recognition as men’s.

Margaret Benson: The First Woman with a Trowel

Margaret Benson is a useful corrective to the idea that women only processed other people’s finds. In the 1890s she worked at the temple precinct of Mut at Karnak, becoming one of the first women to lead an excavation in Egypt. She published The Temple of Mut in Asher with Janet Gourlay, and her work contributed to the study of a complex site.

Benson was an amateur in the formal sense, and her health limited her later work. But amateur is not the same as insignificant. Her example shows how British women used family connections, private means and personal determination to enter the field before professional pathways existed. It also shows how easily such work can be reduced to a footnote when it does not fit the standard biography of a career archaeologist.

Nina de Garis Davies: The Eye Behind the Facsimile

Nina de Garis Davies is one of the most important figures in the visual record of Egyptian tombs, and one of the most easily overlooked. Her facsimiles of Theban tomb paintings — precise, patient copies made before photography could capture colour and detail reliably — remain essential to scholars. She worked alongside Norman de Garis Davies, but the language of collaboration has often blurred her individual contribution.

Illustration is not decoration. A good facsimile is an argument about what is visible, what is missing and what has been restored. Davies’s work helped preserve scenes that have since deteriorated, and it shaped how generations of readers imagine New Kingdom elite life. To call her an assistant is to misunderstand the intellectual labour of the copy.

Hilda Petrie: The Organisation of the Dig

Hilda Petrie is usually introduced through her marriage to Flinders Petrie, which is precisely the problem. She was an archaeologist and artist in her own right, involved in excavation work, drawing and the practical management of digs. She copied inscriptions, helped organise sites and navigated the social and logistical realities of working in Egypt.

Fieldwork is not only discovery. It is housing, labour, equipment, recording and diplomacy. Women like Hilda Petrie often held together the conditions that made discovery possible, while the published record credited the director. Recognising that labour changes the shape of the story.

Barbara Adams: The Curator in the Store

Barbara Adams, who worked at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at UCL, represents a later generation of British women whose influence ran through collections rather than headlines. She was a curator and scholar of predynastic Egypt, and her knowledge of objects, sites and archives shaped the museum’s holdings and its research culture.

Curators are often invisible in public narratives because their work is cumulative: cataloguing, advising, teaching, improving storage, answering queries. Yet without such work, collections become inaccessible. Adams’s career reminds us that Egyptology depends as much on the store as on the tomb.

Why the Margin Persists

The sidelining of British women in Egyptology is not a simple story of deliberate erasure. It is the product of institutional habits: who gets named on a title page, who is pictured at a site, who is funded to travel, who is remembered as a scholar rather than a helper. The colonial context adds another layer. Many of these women worked within excavation and collecting systems that removed objects from Egypt and placed them in British museums. Their achievements and the unequal structures that enabled them belong in the same account.

A better history would not merely add women to an unchanged list. It would ask why the list was built as it was. It would read museum labels, accession registers and excavation photographs for the labour they conceal. And it would treat recovery as a critical exercise, not a celebration. The women who read Kemet deserve that more honest attention.