Written by Maiken Mosleth-King. Maiken is a Business Officer for Historic England’s Heritage At Risk Capital Fund. Her academic background is in Egyptology, with a PhD in ancient history at the University of Bristol. Maiken is a published author and teaches courses on Egyptology to non-academic audiences.
The scientific discipline of Egyptology began to develop in 1799, when Napoleon embarked on a military expedition aiming to seize control of the Ottoman province of Egypt. As well as soldiers, there were scientists aboard Napoleon’s fleet and the expedition resulted in numerous ancient Egyptian objects being brought to Europe.
The British Museum in London quickly established itself as one of the largest Egyptological collections in the world, and continues to draw millions of visitors each year. Britain was also home to a number of pioneering early Egyptologists, whose work laid important foundations for subsequent generations of archaeologists worldwide.
Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie
One of these pioneers was Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853 to 1942), born in Kent to William Petrie, son of navigator Matthew Flinders. As a child and teenager, he spent much time exploring old ruins and churches in the Kentish countryside, and took an interest in his parents’ collection of fossils and Roman coins.
He developed an interest in measuring ancient sites and objects, a practice that laid the foundations for his later work as a professional archaeologist.
In his twenties, he surveyed Stonehenge with his father, producing the first accurate plan of this Neolithic and Bronze Age site.
In 1880, Flinders Petrie visited Egypt for the first time, and soon joined the Egyptian Exploration Fund as Secretary. He carried out his first season of archaeological fieldwork in Egypt in 1884, based primarily at the badly preserved Delta site of Tanis, which had been an important regional capital in Egypt during the first half of the 1st millennium BC.
In 1892, he became the first holder of the Chair of Egyptology at the University College London, funded by Amelia Edwards.
In 1895, he directed a season of fieldwork at the prehistoric site of Naqada in Upper Egypt, where thousands of pit burials and enormous quantities of pottery were uncovered.
These ceramic finds allowed Flinders Petrie to begin establishing an archaeological chronology for Egyptian prehistory using an innovative method now called seriation dating, which involves meticulously mapping gradual changes in ceramic patterns and forms over time. Flinders Petrie published a large number of excavation reports, and his methodology was adopted in the wider discipline of archaeology. He later also used these methods excavating Levantine sites from 1926 to 1938, whose chronology had previously been based primarily on Biblical texts.
Flinders Petrie died in Jerusalem in 1942. Many of the objects from his excavations are now housed at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, created by Amelia Edwards in 1892 as a teaching resource for the University College London.
Amelia Edwards
Amelia Edwards, a female pioneer of early Egyptology, was born in London in 1831 to a middle-class family. Although she was barred from pursuing higher education due to her gender, during her childhood she developed a love for history, languages and literature.
She began writing short stories at the age of 9, and her first novel, My Brother’s Wife, was published in 1855. The income received from her writing allowed her to support herself and her parents. She never married and remained in her parents’ house until their deaths in 1860, one week apart.
Soon afterwards, she moved in with a married woman named Ellen Drew Braysher, which marked the beginning of a lifelong and complicated romance. After the death of Mrs Braysher’s husband in 1863, the 2 women relocated to Bristol and settled into a house at Westbury-on-Trym. Braysher remained Edwards’ companion until they both died of influenza in 1892, and they were buried together at St Mary’s Church in Henbury, Bristol, in a grave decorated with an Egyptian ankh-symbol.
In 1873, Edwards travelled to Egypt, spending months visiting archaeological sites in the Nile Valley and Sudan. Her travelogue ‘A Thousand Miles Up the Nile’, published in 1876, became an international bestseller due to its vivid descriptions of the people and places she encountered on her journey.
Upon her return to Britain, Amelia Edwards founded the Egypt Exploration Fund in London, which continues to provide support and funding for the conservation of archaeological sites and cultural heritage in Egypt and Sudan. Her writing inspired generations of Egyptophiles, and her legacy lives on at the University College London, one of the first universities in Britain to confer degrees upon women.
Margaret Murray
Edwards’ efforts paved the way for Margaret Murray (1863–1963), who attended University College London as one of the first female students of academic Egyptology in the world. In 1898, Murray was appointed Lecturer in Egyptology at the same university, working alongside her mentor, Sir Flinders Petrie.
She conducted many excavations in Malta and Egypt, including the so-called Osireion at Abydos, a large underground structure believed in antiquity to represent the tomb of the resurrected god Osiris.
Outside the Egyptological community, Murray is primarily known for her work on the history of witchcraft in Britain. She was also president of the Folklore Society in London from 1953 to 1955. Her influential book ‘The Witch-Cult in Western Europe’ (1921) proposed that contemporary witches represented the continuation of a prehistoric female-dominated cult centred on the worship of a ‘Horned God’, whom Christians erroneously regarded as Satan.
Although now debunked by more recent scholarship on folklore and the history of religions, her ideas became instrumental in the creation of the occult religious movement of Wicca, founded in Britain by Gerald Gardner (1884 to 1964). This belief system centres on witchcraft and magical practices, and involves the worship of a ‘Triple Goddess’ and her horned male consort. Murray wrote the foreword to Gardner’s book Witchcraft Today (1954), and remained a prolific writer throughout her life. She published her last book in 1963 at the age of 99, titled ‘The Genesis of Religion’.
Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge
The British Museum has been a major institution of British Egyptology for the past 2 centuries, and has produced some of Britain’s most prolific scholars. One of these scholars is Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge (1857 to 1934), curator of Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum from 1894 to 1924.
Born into poverty in rural Cornwall, he was taken under the wing of former Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone as a young boy. Gladstone’s patronage allowed Budge to pursue university studies in Semitic languages, and he graduated from Christ’s College at Cambridge in 1883. Soon afterwards, he joined the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum, working under the prominent curator Samuel Birch.
Working in an era before international laws curtailed the moving of archaeological objects across national borders, Budge travelled to Egypt multiple times and procured a large number of ancient manuscripts and artefacts for the British Museum. For his efforts, he was given the Arabic nickname abu al-ra’wus, ‘father of skulls’.
He went on to become a highly prolific writer, and authored numerous books about ancient Egypt, many of which were aimed at non-specialists. Among his most famous publications is his translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead which, despite its now-outdated linguistic methodology, continues to inspire the imagination of Egyptophiles worldwide. He died in London in 1934, and is buried at London’s Nunhead Cemetery.
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