In 1894, Margaret “Maggie” Benson went to Egypt, hoping to ease her rheumatism, which affected her joints and lungs. Like many of the other women Egyptologists, the 28-year-old fell in love with the country, Sheppard said.”They go home, and they keep wanting to go back.”
During her first trip, she went with one of the popular Thomas Cook & Son tours, which took thousands of tourists up the Nile each year, per The BBC. They traveled in comfort and style, with daily excursions to see tombs at Saqqara or Beni Hasan’s cliffs.
Benson decided she wanted to kickstart her own excavation. There were granite statues sticking out of the earth at the dilapidated Temple of Mut in Luxor.
Though Benson had no formal training in archaeology, neither did many of the men who were excavating tombs and temples. It wasn’t yet the careful, scientific discipline it would become in the next century.
Money was the workaround. “If these women had enough money and if they had enough time, they could go be archeologists too, because that’s all that the men had at that point,” Sheppard said.
Using her connections and supplying her own funding, Benson got permission to excavate the temple, making her the first woman who was officially allowed to do so. Nearly two dozen Egyptian men and boys did the digging and the hauling and sifting of dirt. Benson’s brother Fred lent his expertise, having worked on excavations in Athens before.
By the end of the first season in 1895, the excavators had dug up dozens of statues, coins, and other artifacts. The next year, they found over a dozen lion-headed statues and countless fragments of others.
One of Benson’s most important collaborators at the site was Janet “Nettie” Gourlay, with whom she had an intense, long-lasting relationship. Together, they published “The Temple of Mut in Asher” in 1899, “which became a groundbreaking report, revealing the temple as it had never been seen before,” according to “Women in the Valley of the Kings.”
