When Kathleen Sheppard moved back to the United States in 2002 after earning a masters degree in Egyptian archeology in London, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do.
“I was overeducated and underemployed,” she says.
She began exploring the science of history. This discipline, which combines scientific methods with historical research, allowed her to study Egyptology through a critical lens. While she was working on her thesis, she came across a brief mention of a woman in the autobiography of a famous male archeologist. Sheppard was intrigued and wanted to find out more about her.
She ended up writing her dissertation on Margaret Murray, an Egyptologist, archaeologist, anthropologist, historian, folklorist and the first woman to be appointed as a lecturer in archaeology in the United Kingdom.
Sheppard, who now teaches the history of science at Missouri S&T, discovered that Murray had been an essential contributor to the work of renowned archeologist, Flinders Petrie, but was far less celebrated. Murray had been doing his teaching and administrative work, as well as setting up the museum exhibits for his finds — all crucial work but not as exciting as being out in the field, Sheppard says.
People are also reading…
“She was a force,” Sheppard says. “Everyone who does Egyptology knows about her, but no one was talking about her.” Sheppard wrote a modern biography about Murray in 2013.
It sparked the inspiration for her latest book, “Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age.” (2024, St. Martin’s Press)
She shares the stories of some of the earliest European women who ventured to Egypt as travelers, by researching their travelogs, diaries and maps. The book shows how a group of courageous women also charted unknown territory and changed the field — despite only appearing in footnotes of earlier seminal works.
The history of Egyptology is often told as a grand narrative of powerful men striving to seize the day and precious artifacts for their competing homelands, Sheppard says. Her work upends that narrative.
The men would get the fame and accolades for their “discoveries,” while the women might be mentioned in a footnote or in the acknowledgements. Sheppard’s research found that the work of the women she profiles was not marginal; they are central to the story of this field.
“It’s never that they were not important,” she says. “It’s that they were ignored on purpose.”
It might have been because men doing the early excavation work had harrowing stories to tell, such as using dynamite to blast open centuries old tombs.
Sheppard asks the reader to consider who received the artifacts that were taken. It was likely a woman assistant who cataloged and did all the correspondence with museums and institutions to preserve them. She may have been overlooked because she was sitting at a desk, writing a ton, rather than digging in the field.
“I would argue that this work was much more exciting than opening a tomb,” Sheppard says.
Women were doing foundational labor that the male Egyptologists were standing upon — to much glory.
In her book, Sheppard gives credit to women such as Amelia Edwards, Jenny Lane and Marianne Brocklehurst, early travelers to Egypt. She profiles Maggie Benson, the first woman granted permission to excavate in Egypt and her lifelong companion, Nettie Gourlay. She details the exclusion and roadblocks they battled until they are ultimately credited with excavating the Temple of Mut.
Sheppard makes a compelling argument that if these women had been doing this exact same work as men, the world would already know about them.
“Then, they wouldn’t be untold stories,” she says.