In 1894, Margaret “Maggie” Benson went to Egypt, hoping to lighten his rheumatism, which affected his joints and his lungs. Like many other Egyptologists, the 28 -year -old fell in love with the country, said Sheppard. “They go home and continue to want to go back.”
During her first trip, she went with one of the popular Thomas Cook & his Tours, who took thousands of tourists to the Nile every year, according to the BBC. They have traveled in comfort and style, with daily excursions to see tombs on the cliffs of Saqqara or Beni Hasan.
Benson decided that she wanted to launch her own excavation. There were granite statues coming out of the earth in the dilapidated temple of Mut à Louxor.
Although Benson had no formal formation in archeology, many of the men who excited the tombs and the temples. It was not yet the prudent scientific discipline that it would become in the next century.
Money was the bypass solution. “If these women had enough money and if they had enough time, they could also be archaeologists, because that’s all men had at that time,” said Sheppard.
Using her links and providing his own funding, Benson obtained permission to excavate the temple, making her the first woman who was officially authorized to do so. Nearly two dozen Egyptian men and boys have excavated and transporting and sieving dirt. Benson’s brother Fred lent his expertise, after working on excavations in Athens before.
At the end of the first season in 1895, the excavators had unearthed dozens of statues, coins and other artefacts. The following year, they found more than a dozen statues with a lion head and countless fragments of others.
One of Benson’s most important employees on the site was Janet “Nettie” Gourlay, with whom she had an intense and lasting relationship. Together, they published “The Temple of Mut in Asher” in 1899 “, which became a revolutionary relationship, revealing the temple as it had never been seen before”, according to “Women in the Valley of the Kings”.
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