One of my favorite books as a child was C.W. Ceram’s Gods’ Graves and Scholars. His aim, described in his foreword, was “to portray the dramatic qualities of archaeology, its human side.” And at some level he succeeded admirably. Ceram is largely responsible for my lifelong fascination with archaeology. It was only when Kathleen Sheppard’s Women in the Valley of the Kings landed on my desk that I realized just how narrow his definition of “human” was.

Subtitled The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age, Sheppard’s book tells the stories of women who worked in the field at the same time as, and sometimes alongside, well-known pioneers of Egyptology like Flinders Petrie and Howard Carter. I will admit, this book would not have hooked 8-year-old Pamela the way Ceram’s did. There is less adventure and more of what Ceram describes as “bookish toil.”* Sheppard’s archaeologists fight not only the hardships of working in the desert, but social expectations about what women could/should do. While some of them did discover important sites and artifacts, much of their most important work happened off-site. where they built and maintained the infrastructure that made the study of ancient Egypt possible. As Sheppard sums it up, “…women recorded, organized, catalogued, and corresponded. Men got dirty, had adventures, and excavated artifacts. Women, in fact, founded the institutions that would received these artifacts and allow the rest of the world to see them.”  No less important, but definitely less flashy.

*Sheppard also acknowledges the inherent role of colonialism in the development of Egyptology, something missing from Ceram’s account, which was originally published in 1943.