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Monday, December 16, 2024
WOMEN IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age, well worth your effort to be amazed at your foremothers' strength
WOMEN IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age
KATHLEEN SHEPPARD
St. Martin's Press
$30.00 hardcover, available now
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: The never-before-told story of the women Egyptologists who paved the way who paved the way for exploration in Egypt and laid the groundwork 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.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: There's a reason workers are called that. They do the many practical tasks that make discoveries whose credit is assigned to some colonial "master" for the purpose of making "history"; never have I typed his story with more bilious growling.
Kathleen Sheppard does a lot for my mood by not focusing on the colonial "mistresses" shall we say without some acknowledgment of the role of the normally so unacknowledged as to be invisible workers. There is a kind of grim humor in these men and women vanishing into the role of shabtis. I don't know that this term, or even this concept, had made it into Egyptology by the time Author Sheppard writes about (c.1880–1930). I found it...ironic.
Now, to be clear, none of the women under discussion were free of colonial mentality, some more than others. As people experiencing a pretty dramatic regime of prejudice themselves, with belittlement, credit-grabbing, and harrassment their daily lot, one would like to imagine they would be sensitized to the issue of discounting another's labor based on irrelevant externalitites. Alas, real life seldom shows a smooth face to the future.
One thing I was surprised to learn was that not all the men working in Egyptology were abusive in the various ways it was possible for them to be. Few of them hurdled even that low bar, but it was positive that a few did. I myownself wonder if the utter novelty of learning about the ancient culture and its rules, its people, and its existence in relation to its peers for the very first time in thousands of years didn't have some damping effect on them...can't lord it over others when you yourself know so very little. I know it will surprise no one that many tried the tack anyway.
Author Sheppard took time to delve into lives of some women more than others, which is down to survival of records...look at the notes. I'm also unsurprised at the presence of many of my lesbian siblings in these ranks. If there's a place people can be found doing hard, intellectually rigorous work, my siblings will be there and in the forefront as often as not. In dealing with these women's personal lives Author Sheppard is without period-appropriate coyness or reticence, thank goodness. The world has changed for the better in so many ways since the time we're discussing. This is a huge one: Being queer is fairly unremarkable now. It's this reality that makes the hate-filled control freaks so damn mad.
What that leads me to is, in fact, the source of my missing star on the book's rating. It's a terrific breeze of openness and transparency to have the lives, not just the work, of figures from the past openly discussed. It's inevitable that some deeply uncomfortable details emerge, like one woman's husband getting physical with her when she was twelve and he twenty-three, tolerated by her mother in full knowledge of it because she fancied the man herself. *ew* But these are all presented in a way that I found more than a bit irksome. Nothing like an internal chronology of a woman's life is followed, only the general structure of chapters being about one woman in the main, and other women's entries and exits from her story are handled as they arise not placed aside as references to that other woman's chapter (eg, "See chapter 77, page 666"). The narrative thrust of following one story is thus squandered in Wikipedia searches and/or note-taking. It does leave me a bit bumfuzzled as to who in the publishing house signed off on such an organizational idea.
It's a genuine complaint, but the truth is most of these women were unknown to me at all, even as names, so honestly I'd've been doing that searching anyway. In a few hundred pages about one of the most explosive developmental regimes in the entire course of historiography and archaeology as disciplines, and the birth and exponential growth of Egyptology, this was going to be the case.
So don't take this as code for "avoid this read" but as an urging to do the opposite. Get this book and start appreciating that, when our parents, grands, and greats were kids, Humanity was first learning about the people of the distant past in their own fragmentary words, and from their own uncovered material possessions. Author Sheppard has brought the palpable excitement of the women who were there, whose presence and guidance made much of the progress we now stand in top of to look still deeper into the past from the mountains their work made.
It was a flawed, slightly disorganized book, but so was the story its subjects were busy living. A strong recommendation for a self-gift to enjoy on #Booksgiving.
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