The beginning of this month was entirely taken up with preparations for a workshop held in the Museum of English Rural Life and the Ure Museum. "Collectors, Curators, and Cataloguers: Hidden Women in Archaeology in the 19th and 20th centuries" was held on 12 June. Along with it we opened a new temporary display, "Hidden Women in the Archive: Collectors, Curators and Cataloguers", which will be up until 10 September.
By Amara Thornton The beginning of this month was entirely taken up with preparations for a workshop held in the Museum of English Rural Life and the Ure Museum. "Collectors, Curators, and Cataloguers: Hidden Women in Archaeology in the 19th and 20th centuries" was held on 12 June. Along with it we opened a new temporary display, "Hidden Women in the Archive: Collectors, Curators and Cataloguers", which will be up until 10 September. More on these delights here!
By Amara Thornton This month's post is on Ure Routes again. Part of my Role as Research Officer at the Ure Museum has been to start digging into the Museum's history. Annie Ure's fascinating lecture (recorded in the 1960s) and University College Reading's Annual Reports have given me insights into some of the early displays of archaeological material at Reading. A few weeks ago I had a great tour of Reading's old campus at London Road; my guides, current and former University staff, took me to many places of interest but chief among them were "The Acasias", Portland Place and the old University Gymnasium. Each location is associated with the Ure Museum's history. "The Acasias" was a former home of the Palmer family; George Palmer was co-founder of Huntley & Palmers biscuit empire. When University College Reading was given the building, its first floor (now used as the Staff Common Room) became its Library, where a case of Egyptian antiquities given by Hilda Petrie was first displayed. These antiquities are now part of the Ure Museum's collections, and include a pendant of the ancient Egyptian goddess Hathor.
During the First World War, local Reading resident Gertrude Louisa (Hill) Hurry donated an Etruscan artefact to University College Reading, also now held and displayed in the Ure Museum. A few years earlier Gertrude Hurry and her husband Jamieson, a physician and the College's Medical Officer, donated money for the construction of a purpose-built Gymnasium. My guides pointed out the carving of Discobolus (pictured here, in searing sunlight) incorporated into the Gymnasium wall. By 1919, University College Reading's archaeological collections were gathered together more formally in a museum room, housed at Portland Place, an 1830s Grade II* listed building on London Road. You can read "On Museum Beginnings" here and hear Annie discussing the Museum's history here.
References/Further Reading Childs, W. C. 1933. Making a University. London: Dent. University College Reading Gazettes Calendars and Annual Reports 1909, 1912/13, 1913/14, 1919/20. Thanks to Nicola Pickering, John Grainger and Ian Burn. By Amara Thornton
This month's post, in honour of Women's History Month (in the UK), I've written a guest post on the University of Reading Classics Department blog. As my research into University College Reading's Annual Reports continued, I dug deeper into the history of women in the Classics Department. My wonderful grandmother was a classicist, and I'd like to think she would've have loved this post. So this is for you, Grandma! You can read "Women and Classics at University College Reading" here. By Amara Thornton
This month's post will be over on a new blog site, Ure Routes, created as part of my new role as Research Officer at the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology at the University of Reading. In the first month I've been at Reading I've been exploring the early history of the Museum and the University, and finding unexpected connections to my own history of archaeology research. You can read "Reports from Reading" here. By Amara Thornton 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". 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: So many of the royal women who shared the throne of the Pharaohs have left no traces on the land of their inheritance, that this attempt to tell their story results at best in only a brief outline of the prominent figures…" 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: This heiress of the kingdom claimed the crown of the Pharaohs as her birthright… a dominating princess who claims the right to active government; an elder brother who wrenches the sceptre from her grasp; his speedy exit by fair means or foul; the queen's restoration, and a joint rule with a second brother lasting only a few years, when they are both superseded by a fourth claimant." 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. |
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