​This month I launched a new website: www.petra1929.co.uk. It's a digital transcription of a unique document chronicling the first intensive excavations at Petra in 1929.  This is a document I've wanted to do more with for a long time. It's held in the Institute of Archaeology, part of a larger archive of material belonging to the archaeologists Agnes Conway Horsfield and George Horsfield.  They were two key members of the team excavating at and researching Petra in 1929.  
 
I've been researching Agnes Conway and George Horsfield for many years now, but with the project (and the funding supporting it from the Council for British Research in the Levant) I was able to focus on the Petra material in a way I hadn't been able to before. In order to illuminate the Diary further (and with the indispensable help of Stuart Laidlaw in the Institute's Photography Lab) I digitised quite a few negatives in the Horsfield archive as well. About 70 of these have been captioned and incorporated into the website – either added into entries (where that made sense) or into the indexes and essays.  
 
In putting the website together, I wanted to provide users not only with a way to access the Diary, but also to gain a deeper understanding of the time period in which it was written. So there is extra content on the site. You'll find essays exploring different aspects of this historical context, as well as indexes with further information on the people and places mentioned in the Diary.  This contextual research was, for me, just as important as enabling access to the Diary.  

I was all prepared for a bit of T. E. Lawrence celebrity creation in this article, but what I wasn't prepared for was a photograph of one of the Bedouin women who lived at Petra, and a reference to her and other Bedouin women's participation in the "Battle of Petra" in October 1917.*  Just a coincidence, but another illustration of the value of old ephemera (despite its incredibly colonial tone). 
 
You can read more about the project in my post on the CBRL's website, "Digitising Petra 1929".
 
*see my Twitter thread on the magazine.

By Amara Thornton

Do you know about Tausret?  She was a queen in ancient Egypt. 19th dynasty to be precise.  Until a few months ago I'd never heard of her, but now I know more – thanks to a rather intriguing book: Janet Buttles' The Queens of Egypt.*  
 
Earlier this month I was prepping for Suffrage Standup, an event I took part in at LSE Library, and researching Margaret Murray's participation in a suffrage Costume Pageant and Dinner.  As Margaret Murray probably attended the dinner dressed as Tausret, I was hoping to find out a bit more about this ancient royal.  And so I did, thanks to Janet Buttles. 
 
Buttles was an American writer who was associated with American industrialist and archaeology funder/excavator Theodore Davis.  Her biographical details are online courtesy of the Emma B. Andrews Diary project– a fascinating digital diary and data resource revealing early 20th century Egypt through the eyes of  Emma Andrews, an educated American tourist and collector. Andrews was Buttles' aunt as well as Theodore Davis's collaborator and mistress for many years. 
 
Queens was Buttles's attempt to do something innovative in the field of Egyptology. She pulled together in one volume all the details that were known at that time about ancient Egyptian royal women.  And in doing so she articulated one of the main (and continuing) problems with making historical women more visible – missing or inaccessible historical records.  In her Preface she stated: 

Gaston Maspero, a former head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, wrote an introduction to Queens. He mentions the value of Buttles's personal experience with the archaeology of Egypt in making her sympathetic to her subjects.  
 
The book is organised chronologically, from the 1st to 26th dynasty (omitting the Ptolomaic period, which included the reign of Cleopatra VII). Despite the sketchy details available, Buttles's description of Twosret's life is intriguingly dramatic: 

​Archibald Constable & Co published Queens in 1908, at a period when suffrage campaigns were beginning to turn towards greater militancy.  And it was reviewed in a suffrage periodical, Women's Franchise. The review opens with the observation that Buttles's work was "A valuable addition to the knowledge of the position of women in antiquity".  
 
Now I know about it, I'll be dipping into Buttles's book to discover more ancient historical women in influential roles. You should too!
 
References/Further Reading
Buttles, J. 1908. The Queens of Egypt. London: A. Constable & Co. 

Cana, F. B. 1908.  Where Civilization Began. Women's Franchise [British Newspaper Archive] 13 Aug: 80.

*There are many alternative spellings for Tausret's name. Between 2004 and 2016 the University of Arizona ran an excavation project at Tausret's temple in Thebes.  More information and up-to-date analysis can be found here and here.  

By Amara Thornton

When my grandparents retired, they started taking classes for fun.  One of these classes was in memoir writing, so when I was growing up we'd receive a letter every so often with a short memoir-essay enclosed.  I read them at the time, but didn't consider them anything more than entertaining anecdotes.  But now, with my historian's hat on, I see that they are really valuable insights into 20th century experience, and I thank my lucky stars that my grandparents made the effort to write those memories down.  
 
A few years ago I found a binder full of copies of these short memoirs, which my grandmother had kept along with other family papers.  I've now informally digitised it all, so that I can take these little snippets of family history with me wherever I go.  One of my favourites was written by my grandfather, in which he remembered (among other things) how much he loved reading "penny dreadfuls" as a child, and how they instilled in him a love of history.  My great-grandmother disapproved of such books and eventually threw them away. In doing so, my grandfather reasoned, she had gotten rid of what could have been quite a valuable collection. 
 
I'd like to think that I inherited something of my grandfather's appreciation for pulp.  I managed to incorporate a bit of discussion of archaeological pulp (via Margery Lawrence's contributions to Hutchinson's Mystery Stories magazine) in Archaeologists in Print. But I'm always on the lookout, so I was very pleased when I spotted at a recent pulp-focused bookfair in London Pauline Stewart's* Delia's Quest for the Golden Keys, "A Thrilling Desert Adventure Story", on a table.  It is No 549 of "The Schoolgirls' Own Library", priced at 4d (it cost me £3).  Its bright yellow paper cover features a girl dressed in ancient Egyptian garments with a tall headpiece standing on some sort of platform being pushed towards a temple (half submerged in water, so I'm assuming Philae) by a chap looking remarkably like a swimming 1930s filmstar.  It's dated 6 August 1936.   
 
Happily, "The Schoolgirls Own Library" is a series I've come across before, while I was writing Archaeologists in Print and looking for information on pulp serials.  There are a number of websites out there for collectors and readers of such books, and Friardale is one of them. It's excellent, and has loads of resources available in pdf form.  There is also a list of titles in "The Schoolgirls Own Library" (and affiliated publications), so you can get a sense of the adventures those schoolgirls get up to.  
 
A proportion of them have vague connections to places that were for most British readers 'exotic'. So, alongside Delia and her Golden Keys, we have No 688, Hilda Richards'** "Babs & Co in Egypt" (how I wish that one were available!) which has on its bright yellow cover a gaggle of teenage schoolgirls pointing a flashlight at a rather shocked-looking mummy standing at the entrance to an ancient Egyptian tomb.  
 
You can find a list of "Schoolgirls Own Library" titles here.  I haven't yet gotten more than a few pages into Delia's Quest, but I'm intrigued to see whether any archaeologist characters crop up in it. Based on the cover, I'm hoping so.  At the very least, it'll be an insight into how Egypt (and British tourists' relationship to Egypt) is portrayed in this kind of work.  Maybe that portrayal will surprise me. But I'm not getting my hopes up too much.
 
* a pseudonym – the author was Reginald Kirkham.  See Dennis Bird's list of SGOL authors.
** a pseudonym – the author was John Wheway as per Dennis Bird's list. 

By Amara Thornton

Late last year, I wrote a post about the composer and musician Julia Chatterton, who created and performed music for a one-off matinee event at the London Hippodrome in June 1930 to celebrate Flinders Petrie's 50 years in archaeology.
 
One of the other women credited with contributing to the music for the "Egyptian Matinee" was Kathleen Schlesinger.  At the time, I didn't know much about her, but the event programme noted that she provided a number of replica instruments used at the Hippodrome that afternoon from her own collection. 
 
Schlesinger is known in musical theory circles for her work on recreating ancient music, using instruments and tools that she had specially made based on ancient source materials. Nine years after the Hippodrome performance, she published a book, The Greek Aulos, describing her findings.
 
For decades Schlesinger also held a pioneering research fellowship at the University of Liverpool's Institute of Archaeology.  This department was the earliest British-based training institution for archaeologists – being founded decades before the Institute of Archaeology at the University of London (now part of UCL). It instituted a Fellowship in the Archaeology of Music in 1914.
 
Kathleen Schlesinger was the first Fellow – in fact, Kate Bowen's investigation of the Institute of Archaeology's Annual Reports reveals that the Fellowship was designed for her, and her scholarship promoted by John Garstang, then Professor of the Methods and Practice of Archaeology at the Institute.  The Fellowship enabled her to continue her research on the ancient history of musical instruments, in which she was already well-established.
 
By this stage, Schlesinger was also an experienced lecturer, working as an Extension lecturer for the University of London.  She is to be added to the ranks of women I've written about in Archaeologists in Print who organised and delivered lectures and courses at the British Museum, incorporating collections on display into their curricula.  Schlesinger also created and delivered a set of lectures on the history of musical instruments in the galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum. In addition, she was featured as a lecturer at the 1914 Children's Welfare Exhibition at Kensington Olympia, discussing musical instruments to accompany a special display at the event. 
 
While she is now known for her work on ancient Greek music and instruments, she had a wide-ranging field of investigation, and her museum lectures sought to appeal to audiences interested in Biblical history (and by extension the archaeology of the Levant, Egypt/Sudan and Mesopotamia) as well.  For these lectures she created models of instruments.  
 
Kate Bowen's detailed research on Schlesinger and her musical collaborator Elsie Hamilton also highlights Schlesinger's role in innovative performances combining music and archaeology before her contributions to Julia Chatterton's 1930 Hippodrome programme. These include, intriguingly, the music for a drama called "Sensa" (the result of a collaboration between two other women, Maud Hoffman and Mabel Collins) which was set in ancient Egypt, and performed in theatres in London in 1914 and 1919.*   
 
In the 1930s, an American musician came to visit an elderly Kathleen Schlesinger in her home in Highgate. He was Harry Partch, and his memory of tea with Schlesinger makes for fascinating reading. She told him about using a British Museum vase as model for her replica kithara, which was made to her specifications by a handy gas-meter man during the First World War out of wood from a crate that had once contained oranges.
 
Today, researchers continue to work on replicating ancient music. Armand D'Angour's article published in The Conversation this summer promised that the mystery of ancient Greek music had now been solved. There is also a large-scale European Music Archaeology Project and there are YouTube videos of Stefan Hagel's performances on a replica kithara.
 
But it's important to remember this sort of research has a long history – and to ensure that the early pioneering music archaeology, performance and lectures of Kathleen Schlesinger are not forgotten.
 
References/Further Reading
 
Bowen, K. 2012. Living Between Worlds Ancient and Modern: the Musical Collaboration of Kathleen Schlesinger and Elsie Hamilton. Journal of the Royal Musical Association 137 (2): 197-242. 
 
Collins, M. 1913. The Story of Sensa: an interpretation of The Idyll of the White Lotus. New York, NY: J. W. Lowell.
 
D'Angour, A. 2018. Ancient Greek Music: now we finally know what it sounded like. The Conversation 31 July.
 
Hindson, C. 2017. Beautiful Pagans: When a Best Selling Author and a West End Actress Made a Spiritualist Performance. In Guy, J. (Ed).The Edinburgh Companion to Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Lee, B. 2006. Kathleen Schlesinger and Elsie Hamilton: Pioneers of Just Intonation.  

Partch, H. (ed. McGeary, T.) 2000. Bitter Music: Collected Journals, Essays, Introductions, and Librettos.Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
  
*The idea for Collins's book Idyll of the White Lotus (on which "Sensa" was based) came to her after seeing Cleopatra's Needle being placed on Embankment in 1878. Collins was very interested in the occult, and spotting the Needle triggered visions of ancient Egyptian priests. Her interpretation of their presence - and through this the inspiration for Idyll and "Sensa" - drew on British Museum Curator Wallis Budge's book Egyptian Magic. For more on Collins, Hoffman, and the creation and performances of "Sensa", see Catherine Hindson's chapter referenced above. 

By Amara Thornton
 
As all those who write about historical women can attest, uncovering women's personal histories, even if those women end up being relatively public figures later in life, can be hard work.  In researching for Archaeologists in Print, I was very glad to have been able to illuminate the early lives and professional careers of some of the women I included in the book.  UCL's student Session Fees books were a wonderful resource for this, as were many digitised newspaper articles that allowed me to chart the frequency and development of women's public lectures and tours.
 
I wasn't always successful though, as the short biographies in the Appendix reveal. At the time of writing I was unable to track down information on the early life of Dorothy Mary Simmons Mackay, for example, so I couldn't include her birth or death dates or whether she went to university. A biographical article from 2010 on her husband Ernest Mackay (see below) in the University of Pennsylvania Museum magazine Expedition simply said she was an anthropologist. 
 
Thankfully, I'm now able to add a bit more detail. Dorothy Simmons was born in Croydon, around 1881. Her father owned "Simmons & Co." a company manufacturing prams. She entered UCL as a student in the autumn of 1901, but not in Archaeology or Egyptology (the two departments I looked at in UCL's Session Fees books).  Rather, it appears, she studied Greek and French, obtaining certificates in both. By 1902 she had been awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of London.  

That wasn't the end of her student days though, because over the next few years she took classes at  UCL in Botany, Geology, Zoology and Calculus, garnering awards and certificates along the way.  She ended up with an Honours B.Sc. in Zoology by 1909.  In 1912 she married archaeologist Ernest Mackay, who had been working as an assistant of Flinders Petrie's (perhaps they met on UCL's campus!). Thereafter, she began working in archaeology alongside Ernest in Egypt, Iraq and India.
 
She returned to UCL to research Archaeology in the 1940s, decades after embarking on her first archaeological excavation.  Among the records at UCL for Dorothy Mackay was an indication that she was also a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.  So, off I went to the Antiquaries to discover more.  What I saw there was very interesting.
 
The Society of Antiquaries Library has a copy of a short tourist guide-pamphlet Dorothy Mackay had written about the excavations at the ancient city of Mohenjo-daro*, in the Sindh province of what is now Pakistan but was then India (under British rule), in the late 1920s.  I'd seen this pamphlet while writing Archaeologists in Print and it is duly referenced there.  But the Society also had a copy of another guide-book by Dorothy Mackay which revealed that in the late 1940s and early 1950s she was working in Beirut, Lebanon as Curator of the American University of Beirut Museum, and that during World War II she had been an assistant Curator at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
 
Her short history of the American University of Beirut Museum highlights among other details the role of women in its development and in researching its collection.  These included Florence Day  (daughter of geologist and former Museum Curator Alfred Day) who published studies of pilgrim bottles and lamps in the Museum's collection in its journal Berytus; an unnamed woman from Syria whose financial endowment enabled a Chair of Archaeology to be established at the University; and "Mrs Bayard Dodge" (formerly Mary Bliss, niece of Palestine Exploration Fund excavator Frederick J. Bliss), whose organisational acumen enabled the Museum's collections to be safely packed and stored when the Museum turned into a wartime food supply centre.
 
Dorothy Mackay's death was recorded briefly in the Antiquaries Journal for 1953, and I've now found a short obituary of her in The Times (which I had missed when writing!). Despite these finds, the lack of published record of her life is an (unsurprising) tragedy, for a woman who worked to obtain two degrees, was a professional archaeologist for her entire working life, as well as a published author and museum curator.  But as I uncover more about her, that will definitely be rectified.

Many thanks to Robert Winckworth (Archives Assistant, UCL Records Office) for finding and sending me records relating to Dorothy Simmons' student days at UCL. Thanks are also due to Alice Dowhyj at the Society of Antiquaries for finding the notice of Dorothy Mackay's death in the Antiquaries Journal.
 
References/Further Reading
 
Mackay, D. M. 1951. American University of Beirut Lebanon: A Guide to the Archaeological Collections in the University Museum. American University of Beirut: Beirut.
 
The Times, 1953. Mrs D. M. Mackay. The Times Digital Archive, 13 Feb: 8.
 
*Also the setting of a 2016 Bollywood film Mohenjo-Daro, set in 2016 BC.  There are amazing birds-eye views of the reconstructed city in the beginning of the film, which has as its first dance sequence a very catchy tune with a cheerful chant: "Mohen-JO, Mohen-JO, Mohen-JO, Mohenjo-Daro!"

By Amara Thornton
 
I seem to have a very informal research strand developing this year uncovering archaeologists suffrage activities – see my post on Jessie Mothersole at the 1911 Christmas Bazaar, and my short piece for the Imperial War Museum's WomensWork100 project on Agnes Conway's interests in suffrage. The British Newspaper Archive has come up trumps again. This time, it's Margaret Murray.
 
Just weeks before war would be declared, suffrage newspaper The Vote noted that Margaret Murray would be one of a number of women participating in a "Costume Dinner and Pageant" to be held in the Hotel Cecil on 29 June 1914. 
 
The event was co-organised by the Women Writers' Suffrage League and the Actresses' Franchise League.  Now, unless Murray had a stage career that I'm unaware of (unlikely), it seems highly probable that she was affiliated with the Women Writers' Suffrage League. By this point, she had published several archaeological articles and books, including her popular volume of (translated) Ancient Egyptian Legends in the intriguing "Wisdom of the East" series. That April, Ella Hapworth Dixon's article "The Woman's Progress" in the Ladies Supplement to the Illustrated London News had named Murray as "An Antiquary of Note", partly on the strength of her published work.
 
For the dinner, women (and some men) of the day who supported women's suffrage campaigns were asked to don fancy dress to represent famous celebrities from history, stationed at various tables throughout the event space. Each figure was introduced by Cicely Hamilton, founder of the Women Writers' Suffrage League.  
 
These historical celebrities weren't just British, though British historical celebrities far outnumbered those of other nations and regions.  Egypt, "Asia" (including China, Japan and the Middle East), France, Italy, Finland, the United States were all represented. Murray was the person in charge of the Ancient Egypt table. A review of the event published days afterwards in Vote noted that "Queen Ta-usert" (Twosret), who ruled Egypt in the 12th century BC (and whose jewellery had been discovered in 1908) made an appearance. Whether Murray was actually in costume as Ta-usert/Twosret is unfortunately not stated. But I'd like to think so.
 
In reviewing the event the "Special Costume Diner" of Votes for Women described the memorable fancy dress dinner, which attracted hundreds of attendees, as a "sensation" of mingling with "people who mattered in bygone days impersonated by people who matter today." Of which Margaret Murray was one.
 
References/Further Reading
 
Dixon, E. 1914. "The Woman's Progress". Ladies Supplement to the Illustrated London News[British Newspaper Archive] 18 April.
 
Park, S. 1997. The First Professional: The Women Writers' Suffrage League. Modern Language Quarterly 57 (2): 185-200.
 
Sheppard, K. 2012. The Life of Margaret Alice Murray: A Woman's Work in Archaeology. Plymouth: Lexington Books.
 
Thornton, A. 2018. Archaeologists in Print: Publishing for the People. London: UCL Press.
 
The Vote. 1914. "Costume Dinner and Pageant" [British Newspaper Archive] 12 June: 121. 
 
The Vote. 1914. "Women of All the Ages" [British Newspaper Archive] 3 July: 181-2.
 
Votes for Women. 1914. "A Pageant of Famous Men and Women" [British Newspaper Archive] 3 July: 618.
​

By Amara Thornton

I've been working over the past few months on a new programme for HistoryHit.TV, "Archaeologist Spies of World War One".  It is an intriguing and complicated history, covering an international sphere of operations and several different wartime fronts.  
 
The programme concentrates on a network of archaeologists who had (mainly) travelled and excavated in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East before the war; when many of them volunteered for military service at or soon after the outbreak of war, their skills were valued, and they were swept into "special service".
 
I've been researching archaeologists' public visibility before, during and after this period over the past few years – you can see the results of this in my new book Archaeologists in Print (UCL Press). So it was interesting to discover, when doing some preliminary research for the programme, that before entering the war officially (though he had already been involved in war related activity), David George Hogarth gave a series of public lectures on Ottoman Turkey in relation to the ongoing conflict in the UK in early 1915. One of them, in Sheffield, was organised by the "War Lectures Committee" of Sheffield University. 
 
Archaeologists' popular books were also referenced in newspapers as the areas in which they had travelled became more militarily important.  At the end of 1914, Hogarth's 1902 popular geography book The Nearer East, a volume of Heinemann's "Regions of the World" series, was referenced in an article in The Sphere for its relevance to understanding the most likely routes Ottoman forces (only recently allied to the Central Powers) would take to get to Egypt via the Sinai Peninsula.
 
Reginald Campbell Thompson's unusual memoir A Pilgrim's Scrip was published by John Lane The Bodley Head in early 1915. Thompson's evocative description of Port Said, at the head of the Suez Canal and an important naval base and steamship alighting point, was reprinted in an article in The Globe: "a place of passage, a khan at one of the world's toll gates, to pass the night and change the order of a journey."  
 
Shortly afterwards, Thompson's archaeological colleague Leonard Woolley arrived in Port Said to head up a small intelligence headquarters there.  Woolley recorded his wartime exploits in his own post-war memoirs, injecting at the end of his life light-hearted and humourous notes into an otherwise extremely serious subject. Woolley's wartime raid in a Port Said flat, recounted by Stephen Smith in "Archaeologist Spies of World War One", was posthumously published in 1962 in his memoir As I Seem to Remember. (Unlike many of his archaeological contemporaries who were more involved in processing information, mapping, and breaking codes, Woolley was actively running agents and arranging drops.  Those who worked with him put their lives on the line more than once.) 
 
Woolley's intelligence activity ended in August 1916, when the yacht he used for operations hit a mine and he was picked up by Ottoman forces.  His time as a prisoner of war began. In 1921 Oxford-based publisher Basil Blackwell issued From Kastamuni to Kedos, a volume of reminiscences, poems and drawings edited by Woolley of life as prisoners of war at three different camps in Ottoman Turkey. 
 
Archaeological interest was not abandoned during this time. Kastamuni records Woolley providing lectures on archaeological topics ("The Hittites", "Roman Frontier Problems" and "The Evolution of Religion in the Old Testament") as well as modern languages ("Hindustani and Arabic") to his fellow POWs. Dramatic productions also took place, with "Woolley & Co" highlighted for admirable work in costumes and props.
 
When they died, many of the archaeologists in "Archaeologist Spies of World War One" were commemorated in part for the roles they played in intelligence during the war.  This intense experience in their lives has been for the most part superceded by their archaeological and (for T. E. Lawrence & Gertrude Bell particularly) their political work in the post-war period. But in the early 1980s journalist H. V. F. Winstone's book Illicit Adventure provided the first broad history of this wartime network.
 
Perhaps the best acknowledgement-summary of the work of archaeologists in intelligence comes from Leonard Woolley himself.  He wrote the Preface to his 1920 memoir Dead Towns and Living Men in 1918, while still a prisoner in Turkey: 
 

Watch "Archaeologist Spies of World War One" on HistoryHit.TV (subscription needed)
 
Read Archaeologists in Print online (free) via UCL Press.
 
References/Further Reading
 
"Turkey and the War" Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 20 Feb 1915.
 
"Books Worth Reading" The Globe, 20 Feb 1915.
 
"The Situation in Egypt" The Sphere, 14 Dec 1914.
 
Hogarth, David George. 1902. The Nearer East. London: William Heinemann.
 
Thompson, R. Campbell. 1915. A Pilgrim's Scrip. London: John Lane Bodley Head.
 
Thornton, Amara. 2018. Archaeologists in Print: Publishing for the People. London: UCL Press.
 
Winstone, H. V. F. 1982. The Illicit Adventure: The Story of Political and Military Intelligence in the Middle East from 1898 to 1926. London: Jonathan Cape.
 
Woolley, C. Leonard. 1920. Dead Towns and Living Men. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 
Woolley, C. Leonard (Ed). 1921. From Kastamuni to Kedos: Being a Record of Experiences of Prisoners of War in Turkey. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Woolley, C. Leonard. 1962. As I Seem to Remember. London: George Allen & Unwin.  

By Amara Thornton

My first book, Archaeologists in Print: Publishing for the People, has been published today by UCL Press.  It's available to read for free, open access, via UCL Press's website.  You can also purchase a paperback or hardback copy, should you want one, from the same link.

The book is the culmination of a research project on the history of popular publishing in archaeology, which was funded through a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, which I held from 2013 to 2016.  Focusing on the late 19th and early-mid 20th centuries, I explore the varied ways in which British archaeologists (men and women, many working primarily overseas) wrote about archaeology for a non-scholarly audience.  Along the way, Archaeologists in Print reveals the personal histories of many archaeologist-authors during this time period, drawing on extensive research in archives, as well as lots and lots of newspapers. It connects this archaeological publishing history to wider cultural, social, political and economic contexts, including travel and tourism, education, gender, professional development, communication technologies and imperialism.  

I've encountered many fascinating texts and authors through researching and writing this book.  You can find more discussion of some of them by going through the entries on this blog, which I began when I started the postdoc in 2013.  

Happy reading!

By Amara Thornton
 
I've been busy adding to my collection of tourism ephemera lately with issues of a publicity periodical called Egypt and the Sudan, which was issued by the Tourist Development Association of Egypt in the 1920s and 1930s.  Tourism one of the topics that I've been researching for my forthcoming book Archaeologists in Print (coming very soon with UCL Press).
 
Archaeologists were well aware of the value of tourism for attracting public attention to their work, and the archaeologists who excavated in Egypt were particularly well placed to feed into and exploit this attention.  
 
As far as I can work out, the Tourist Development Association of Egypt (TDAE) was created in the mid 1920s.  The Association had an international membership, comprised chiefly of hoteliers, representatives from shipping lines and railway companies and business people. There were TDAE offices (eventually) in Cairo, London, and Paris.  Its patron was Egypt's king, Fuad I.
 
From 1926 (according to my searches in the British Newspaper Archive), illustrated newspapers began carrying quarter page TDAE advertisements promoting six key areas of attraction to Egypt – "HISTORY", "MYSTERY", "ROMANCE", "HEALTH", "SUNLIGHT" and "LUXURY".  At this stage, those interested in finding out more could pick up an illustrated pamphlet entitled The Valley of the Nile from the TDAE's offices.  
 
Eventually in 1927, the TDAE began issuing what I suspect was a more substantial periodical with enhanced content, Egypt and the Sudan, which offered readers specially written insights from noted  (Western) authorities and seasoned tourists and residents on a diverse range of topics – music, theatre, sport, internal travel, social life, and, of course, archaeology.  
 
Various archaeological contributors, both men and women, used their detailed knowledge of Egypt's past to lure tourists towards Egypt's ancient sites.  Alongside these articles were pages and pages of advertisements for shipping lines, airways, railways, hotels and tourist services, as well as images of sites, artefacts and people supplied by photographers and artists.
 
Egypt and the Sudan's Editor (and secretary to the TDAE) was a man named R. A. Bartholomew – apparently a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.  He wrote frequently for the magazine, and commissioned pieces on Egypt from different perspectives.  Some of the authors wrote under pseudonyms; for example in 1928 "Cleopatra" wrote about "Winter in Aswan". 
 
The Ocean Liners: Speed and Style exhibition at the V&A (closing soon!) celebrates this age of international travel, and includes amongst the material on display posters for travel to Egypt. British Museum curator Neal Spencer has also been posting some fantastic interwar era tourism posters in the Department of Egypt and Sudan archive – see here, here, here, here, here and here. And the Museum has also opened this month a new temporary Room 3 exhibition to showcase its growing collection of objects representing modern Egypt, ​The Past is Present. I'm very much looking forward to checking this out.
 
As I go through the issues I've now acquired of Egypt and the Sudan more thoroughly, I'll have a better idea of how these notable contributors framed Egypt for the Western tourists of the inter-war period, and how their own experience of Egypt is represented in its pages.  More to come, I suspect!

Further Reading

Reid, D. M. 2015. Contesting Antiquity in Egypt: Archaeologies, Museums & The Struggle for Identities from World War 1 to Nasser.  Cairo/New York: American University in Cairo Press.

By Amara Thornton

The humble postcard is, I'm happy to say, becoming something of a 'heritage' research field.  My colleague Jamie Larkin has explored the history of postcard sales at museums and heritage sites in the UK while Elizabeth Edwards has been researching photography, postcards and heritage sites. 
 
I've blogged about the history behind the production of postcards relating to specific excavations – namely, the postcard produced in the 1920s by the Palestine Museum (now Rockefeller Museum), showing the Galilee Skull, discovered in 1925 during an excavation near the Sea of Galilee by students at the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. In the same period, the Transjordan Department of Antiquities produced a postcard showing part of one of the key sites in the country – the remains of a Roman city at Jerash.  One of these postcards (hand annotated) is found in the Horsfield collection at UCL.
 
The British Museum from the early part of the 20th century produced a series of postcards of objects in their collection, collaborating in the production of these with Oxford University Press.
 
But the British Museum's collection also incorporates relevant externally produced postcards.  In the Middle East Department's ephemera collection are a series of five postcards showing images of inscribed ostraca known collectively as the Lachish Letters (EPH-ME.1562, EPH-ME.1563, EPH-ME.1564, EPH-ME.1565, EPH-ME.1566).* 
 
According to the information provided in the BM's collection metadata, these postcards were created around 1935.  The production date is significant because the Letters were discovered during the 1934-35 season at Tell Duweir, so the postcards would have been made in quick-time – probably, I suspect, so that they could be sold at the end-of-season exhibition in July 1935.
 
I hope more of these ephemeral artefacts will come to light – they are a potent reminder that discoveries made did not always go straight onto the shelves of museum storage or display case and that the ubiquitous postcard is also part of the history of archaeology.
 
* A selection of the artefact Letters is on display in Room 57 in the British Museum.