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1831–1892

AMELIA EDWARDS

THE NILE#8217;S Grand Dame

Sailing on the Nile, Amelia Edwards described her travels in a rented dahabeeyah (boathouse) as a “Noah’s Ark life.” It was a journey where the “sacred hawk” circling overhead uttered the “same sweet, piercing, melancholy note that the Pharaohs listened to of old,” and it was to this accompaniment that her thoughts were swept up by the grandeur of bygone times. Other dahabeeyahs passed by hers, garlanded with crocodile skins and tourists, but Edwards remained aloof to other travelers and kept to her boat and crew, a team that exhibited “every shade of complexion from fair to dark, from tawny to copper-colour, from deepest bronze to bluest black.”¹

Her journeys through Egypt were mingled with history’s ghosts and crowded with ancient ruins and temples, with the hieroglyphics inscribed on crushed potsherds and a quality of light that made the pyramids look like “piles of massy gold” at sunset. Drifting along the Nile, Edwards was in search of travel’s pleasure as well as historical understanding. Yet what she ultimately found was to become her life’s consuming passion: archaeology. This is the woman who would one day be heralded as the godmother of Egyptology.

Edwards was independent and financially secure from her career as a journalist and novelist. In her thirties, she packed her bags, left her English home, and let her sails fill with the breath of wandering. When she departed there was no one left in her life to advise against it; her parents had both recently died, and her only constant companion was a woman she referred to merely as “L.”

By her own account, her later arrival in Egypt was almost by accident: “. . . without definite plans, outfit or any kind of Oriental experience, behold us arrive in Cairo on the 29th of November 1873, literally and most prosaically in search of fine weather.”² Whether this is pure truth or a stylized start to her tale of discovery, the Egyptian Delta made its way firmly into her heart.

In all of her expeditions, Amelia was there to write. Tiptoeing on slopes “strewn with . . . fragments of mummy, shreds of mummy cloth, and human bones all whitening and withering in the sun,”³ she recorded what she found and sketched the people she met. She was a travel writer, a tourist, a grand dame of the Nile, and she longed to make her own archaeological discovery.

One baking-hot afternoon a servant ran in with a penciled note, interrupting her lunch. It read: “Pray come immediately—I have found the entrance to a tomb.” Breathless, Edwards ran to the scene of action. Dropping to her hands and knees, pushing her big skirts over her knees, shoveling sand with her bare hands, “heedless of possible sunstroke, unconscious of fatigue,” she worked to excavate her first archaeological find. Pausing in her fast digging for just a moment, the Victorian lady pushed her hat back, sat on her heels, and turning to her companions asked, “If those at home could see us, what would they say!”⁴

BORN IN LONDON ON JUNE 7, 1831, Amelia Edwards—Amy to family and friends—was the only child in a family with modest means. Her mother, Alicia, was a “brilliant-complexioned, bright-eyed, large featured little Irish woman”⁵ who home-schooled her daughter until the age of six and deliberately taught her nothing of domestic duty. Her mother must have thought lace patterns and buttons were a bore, and so she raised a daughter more comfortable in the library than near her mother’s skirts. Edwards was one of the few girls in her day busy reading a book instead of learning to thread a needle. Mother and daughter were an active duo, as Alicia took her little girl out to cultural events and on boat trips. They spent a summer abroad in Ireland when Edwards was ten (Dad stayed home). It was during that trip that young Edwards first became fascinated with finding some “old round tower or ruined castle” and writing stories from the old-fashioned days when all was “love & fighting.”⁶

Her father, Thomas Edwards, was a retired army officer and later a bank employee who, by the accounts available, seems to have been a little gloomy. A mildly depressed or absent figure— a slumpy silhouette reading in his study—he was quiet and removed in contrast to his vivacious wife and his daughter, who was already in possession of a fantastic imagination. Edwards’s cousin Matilda described Mr. Edwards as a man whose “fireside influence was not inspiring” and a creature of “quiet, almost pensive habits.”⁷ As for Edwards, she only made a note when recalling childhood memories that her father’s health was indifferent.⁸

As she grew up, Edwards made comic strips and books, combining her sketching skills with storytelling, and shared her work with family and friends, who encouraged her. Her first poem, “The Knights of Old,” was composed when she was only seven and published in a local paper. By twelve she had a full story to her name. She continued writing stories and poems, later noting that “I was always writing or drawing, when other children were playing with dolls or dolls’ houses.” She thought herself a little lonely but was nevertheless content and absorbed by the world of words and history on which she thrived. As she entered her teens she began achieving recognition as both an accomplished artist (pencil sketching and watercolor were her fortés) and a performing musician who composed organ music. By the time she was in her mid-teens she was already determined to find and pursue her career, which she thought would be music.

Edwards had real talent and sang at concerts to ringing applause and flowers tossed to her feet. She wrote compositions that received flattering “testimonials” from the critics. She was even employed as an organist for a spell, and her career was seemingly launched. But she eventually realized that her musical abilities were good but not sublime. She knew that her genius lay elsewhere and suspected it might be lurking in the inkbottle. She got to writing and received her first payment, at age twenty-two, for the publication of her story “Annette” in 1853. Once she realized she could earn a living by words, her path forward was lit as if by blaze.

Writing became her life’s purpose; it was her very nature. When interviewed about how she came to writing as a profession, Edwards explained her lifelong passion for it and even went so far as to take credit for having “anticipated the typewriter.” Not for inventing it, just for having a hunch that a writing machine was coming. She had a gut feeling that technology would someday have to catch up with her prolific output.

Edwards’s childhood hobby of creating poems and little stories steadily transformed itself into a life of journalism, literary essays, romantic tales, ghost stories, magazine articles, and surprisingly, for such an atypical Victorian woman, who some said couldn’t even make a cup of tea, books on social etiquette and a ballroom guide. Her novels were widely recommended as great “railway reading,” the equivalent of today’s “good book for the plane,” and they went through numerous editions and translations. She was finding success in print and, for a woman of twenty-four years, significant financial independence to boot.

IN 1860, EDWARDS’S MOTHER AND FATHER died within a week of each other. They were hardly lovebirds, and it was odd as well as tragic that both parents should drop out of Edwards’s life at the same time. She was only thirty when they died.

Edwards was without any real attachments at that point. She had a cousin she didn’t get along with very well (also a writer, whom Edwards did not like to be confused with), and she was, technically, now a spinster. She had been briefly engaged nine years earlier but had found her suitor, Mr. Bacon, to be wanting. She noted that the engagement was not a happy one; they were ill suited and though Mr. Bacon proclaimed his love for Amelia, she could not genuinely reciprocate the feeling. She had accepted him out of esteem and a sense of duty and found these reasons insufficient to rationalize an entire life spent together. At least she was clear. She broke off their wedding plans with relief.

Being a free agent, perhaps much more so than she ever wished, Edwards went to live with old family friends, Mr. and Mrs. Braysher, in Kensington. The arrangement lasted the rest of her life until, almost ironically, thirty-two years later, Edwards and Mrs. Braysher died within weeks of each other.

After Mr. Bacon, Edwards never engaged a suitor again and never married. She didn’t want to. She never felt romantic love for a man, though she did feel love, very much, for some of her women friends. Three women occupied her heart over the years: Marianne North, the famed botanical artist; Lucy Renshaw; and Kate Bradbury. One can only speculate whether or not Edwards was a lesbian (it does seem likely), but to be sure, she held her lady friends in very deep affection, loved them with devotion, and attributed much of her life’s happiness to their companionship. To one, she gifted a gold ring. To another, she sent sketches addressed to her dear “poo Owl” and sometimes just to “Baby.” A great sweetness in Amelia’s life, perhaps the very greatest, was the women in her life.

Her friendship with Marianne North began shortly after the death of Edwards’s parents and in mutual admiration—both women were independent, adventurous, clever, and accomplished. Yet over the course of a decade the relationship grew somewhat tortured for Edwards. The extent of her affection for North was not mutual, and it came to be seen by North as too much, too intense. Letters between the two women gathered in emotion and heat, revealing Edwards’s desire to keep her friend close and the pullback from North as she gently dodged Edwards’s reach and made plans to travel the world in search of exotic flowers to paint. Although the two did remain friends for life, stoking each other’s fame and careers (almost politely), the intimacy of their friendship was diminished and Edwards was gutted by it. A phase of deep melancholy followed, and several illnesses slowed Edwards down. She entered a depression, one where in her darkest hours she lamented, “My heart no longer beats faster at the sight of a new or kindly & beautiful face. I hope nothing from it.”⁹ Melancholia haunted Edwards for much of her life. The arrival of her new friend “L” was, however, about to blow a giant new gale of happiness into things.

LUCY RENSHAW WAS the famous “L” mentioned in Edwards’s travel accounts and books. Together, the two ladies embarked on some big adventures, beginning with Italy’s famous Dolomites, a section of steep peaks in the Alps, and culminating in Egyptian sands. Edwards describes how they had “done some difficult walking in their time, over ice and snow, on lave cold and hot, up cinder-slopes and beds of mountain torrents . . .”¹⁰and they clearly shared an appetite for robust expeditions. Yet, in spite of all the frequent mention made of “L,” Miss Renshaw is an unknowable figure. Details of her story are scant, some photographs of her are uncertain (in one—if it is indeed her— she’s sporting short-cropped hair, a cravat, shadow-brushed sideburns, and a man’s jacket!¹¹), and the things that can be said about her add up to simple summations. We know, for example, that Lucy was two years younger than Edwards; she sometimes wore a crimson shawl and according to Edwards was “given to vanities in the way of dress”¹² ; she had a nurse’s instinct; and she was very practical, capable, and certainly up for an adventure or two. She also liked to pet and feed the caged rabbits on board the dahabeeyah, all of which were awaiting their day in the kitchen pot. The details are slight; there’s not much more to be had. Yet one thing does come into sharp focus thanks to Edwards’s literary flair: Lucy and Amelia were the two women who had arrived fresh from Alexandria in 1873, after forty-eight hours of quarantine, to Shepherd’s Hotel in Cairo:

Where every fresh arrival has the honour of contributing, for at least a few minutes, to the general entertainment, the first appearance of L. and the Writer [Amelia Edwards], tired, dusty, and considerably sun-burned, may well have given rise to some comments in usual circulation at those crowded tables. People asked each other, most likely, where these two wandering Englishwomen had come from; why they had not dressed for dinner; what brought them to Egypt; and if they were going up the Nile . . .¹³

The two disheveled ladies caused a stir, especially with sunburned faces in the age of creamy complexions. Famously, these lady travelers were in Egypt simply to find fair weather and cloudless skies. Edwards, however, was smart and knew how to shape her own tale. She was out to explore matters of archaeological interest too.

Under pale, hot skies, with a sketch pad in one hand, a parasol in the other, Edwards directed her crew and boat-bound companions to tour every archaeological site situated on the banks of the Nile. True to her Victorian sensibilities, she kept house in her dahabeeyah, the Philae—flowers always on the table, fresh brown bread to eat, tea in the afternoon, and a chaise longue on the deck; she rarely roughed it. Camelback rides were a thing designed, in her opinion, to kill a person; she had identified the four paces of a camel as: “a short walk, like the rolling of a small boat in a chopping sea; a long walk which dislocates every bone in your body; a trot that reduces you to imbecility; and a gallop that is sudden death.”¹⁴

Edwards’s appreciation of the Egyptian landscape is woven throughout the book that resulted from her travels up and down that glorious river, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile. Her account was a wild bestseller in the nineteenth century, and it’s still in print today. She knew it was her best. In it she chronicles her days on the floating dahabeeyah, the open markets that smelled of cardamom and clove where a stall of bright red shoes was tucked beside withered old ladies in black robes. The women could tell you your fortune and sell you dates and oranges or perhaps sell you an entirely different fruit born of Egyptian soil: artifacts like fragments of pottery or pieces of bone.

ABOVE : The Pyramids of Giza, circa 1890

Edwards portrays the pyramids in every shift of awe, wonder, and appreciation: “. . . the Great Pyramid in all its unexpected bulk and majesty towers close above one’s head, the effect is as sudden as it is overwhelming. It shuts out the sky and the horizon.”¹⁵ Her words are painterly, luxuriant, sensuous, exemplified here by a description of sand wherein “the beauty of sand more than repays the fatigue of climbing it. Smooth, sheeny, satiny; fine as diamond-dust; supple, undulating, luminous, it lies in the most exquisite curves and wreaths, like a snowdrift turned to gold.”¹⁶ Elsewhere, “the towers we had first seen as we sailed by in the morning rose straight before us, magnificent in ruin, glittering to the sun, and relieved in creamy light against blue depths of sky. One was nearly perfect; the other shattered as if by the shock of an earthquake, was still so lofty that an Arab clambering from block to block midway of its vast height looked no bigger than a squirrel.”¹⁷

Enchanted by the silks and spices of the bazaars, Edwards was equally repelled by the poorer villages and their “filthy, sickly, stunted and stolid”¹⁸ residents, for whom she had genuine sympathy (comparing their circumstances to a situation “not worse . . . than in many an Irish village”) but from whom she also wished to keep a “pleasant distance.” As a British traveler she was more interested in Egypt’s magnificent past (and the glorified imagination of it) than its relatively bedraggled present, where poverty was often extreme. Her observations of people and places were in accord with the times: Britain was civilized; other places, not so much. But unlike many who judged human civilization from the comfort of their armchairs, she was at least there to have a look. To form her own opinions. To see for herself. To learn and gauge what she could.

Edwards’s comparison of a local man to a small “squirrel” reveals not just the size of the ruins, but also her attitude toward the locals, whom she was quick to dismiss and held in low esteem. They were not as “civilized” as she thought herself to be. Edwards’s attitude wasn’t confined to the local people, though. Throughout her tour, Edwards condescends to pretty much everyone on board the houseboat. Lucy is never referred to as more than “L.” Edwards calls one of her fellow travelers the Little Lady, her new husband is the Idle Man, and another is known as the Painter. She never acknowledges the others’ names or quite grants them status as real people in her book. At the same time, she refers to herself as the Writer and in crafting the travelogue was out to entertain as well as educate her reader.

All of the unnamed passengers have hobbies. One plans to hunt crocodiles for a parlor trophy, another to paint a “Great picture.” Edwards’s aim was to cultivate a keen knowledge of the ancient landscape around her. She became an expert on local archaeology while striding across lost ruins and crushing unseen potsherds underfoot. Starting in the North, the journey encompassed a remarkable one thousand miles of sailing. Edwards and her travel companions ventured to the very edge of terra incognita. They turned their giant riverboat around—a vessel approximately one hundred feet long by thirty feet wide—only upon reaching a vast section of unmapped country. Although Edwards was set on making new discoveries underfoot, she was less eager to get lost.

To start any Nile journey by heading south was an unusual choice. Because it was winter, most sailing would have to be done without the benefit of a strong tailwind or favorable currents. But traveling south gave Edwards more time to devour the books in her library, to become well versed in the landscape’s antiquity, and to stop at each archaeological site on her northern return.

She carried Murray’s Handbook to Lower and Upper Egypt like a Bible, and she meditated on how we look at the past. “It must be understood that we did not go to see the Pyramids,“ she muses. “We only went to look at them.”¹⁹ One involves active understanding, the other a more passive gaze, and Edwards ensured that she was knowledgeable about all historical relics that came before her. She would always “see” what was before her.

Much to the chagrin of her crew and companions, her wish for this voyage, based on historical sequence and personal preference, created long delays and extra sweat for everyone.

As they drifted south, Edwards drew the sites she saw. With a parasol in her gloved hand she even ventured into dark vaulted chambers and tombs to explore, following her local guide, who was carrying a lantern to light the way:

ABOVE : Map of Cairo and surrounding area, 1882

So we went on, going every moment deeper into the solid rock, and farther from the open air and sunshine. Thinking it would be cold underground, we brought warm wraps in plenty; but the heat, on the contrary, was intense, and the atmosphere stifling . . . here for incalculable ages—for thousands of years probably before the Nile had even cut its path through Silsilis—a cloudless African sun had been pouring its daily floods of light and heat upon the dewless desert over head. The place might well be unendurable. It was like a great oven stored with the slowly accumulated heat of cycles so remote and so many that the earliest periods of Egyptian history seem, when compared with them, to belong to yesterday.²⁰

For a lady of Victorian times, Edwards had no qualms about dark places and the unknown; it is not surprising that she wrote ghost stories for a living early in her career. Even dangerous river crossings held a thrill for her. The upper stretches of the Nile were, at that time, difficult to access because of the Aswan Cataract. Only the most skilled and brazen river captains would give it a go, and only the best of boats could hope to make it. A series of whirlpools and fast rapids, the cataract could take anywhere between twelve hours and four days to cross, and that was if the boat didn’t smash into splinters. Although Murray’s Handbook recommended that ladies watch the proceedings from the safety of the shore, Edwards took the helm. She wanted a front row seat and would have stayed there if she hadn’t been lurched around so ferociously that she was obliged to move to the back. Because most tourists did not attempt the crossing, Edwards and group had the Nile more or less to themselves from there on out.

The silence they gained cast a new spell on Edwards. For her, the weight of history could now be felt more palpably in the sultry air. The imagination could fly a little more freely, soaring, as Edwards would often record, like the falcons of old did overhead. They were also moving toward the most anticipated archaeological site of all: Abu Simbel. Consisting of two massive stone temples built in the thirteenth century BC by the Pharaoh Rameses II as a monument to both his military might and his love for his wife, the queen Nefertari, the site was originally situated on the shores of Lake Nasser.²¹ It was also physically elusive. Giant sand drifts would sometimes bury the site, leaving it only partially visible to those who had trekked so far to see it. At other times, the sands would blow away to reveal majestic rock carvings and hallowed entrances to painted rooms. Not knowing whether they would encounter the ancient monument exposed or hidden, Edwards was in appreciable suspense.²²

Then, almost as if fate had played a hand in brushing aside the dunes and drifts, Edwards found a wonder. It was evening, and her first sighting of Abu Simbel arrived as a twilight dream:

As the moon climbed higher, a light more mysterious and unreal than the light of day filled and overflowed the wide expanse of river and desert. We could see the mountains of Abou Simbel standing as it seemed across our path, in the far distance—a lower one first; then a larger; then a series of receding heights, all close together, yet all distinctly separate. That large one—the mountain of the Great Temple—held us like a spell. For a long time it looked like a mere mountain like the rest. By and by, however, we fancied we detected a something—a shadow—such a shadow as might be cast by a gigantic buttress. Next appeared a black speck no bigger than a porthole. We knew that this black speck must be the doorway. We knew that the great statues were there, though not yet visible; and that we must see them soon. At length the last corner was rounded, and the Great Temple stood straight before us. The facade, sunk in the mountain side like a huge picture in a mighty frame, was now quite plain to see. The black speck was no longer a porthole, but a lofty doorway. Last of all, though it was night and they were still not much less than a mile away, the four colossi came out, ghostlike, vague, and shadowy, in the enchanted moonlight. Even as we watched them, they seemed to grow—to dilate— to be moving towards us out of the silvery distance.²³

Edwards spent over a week investigating the site from morning to night and only agreed to depart as the complaints and impatience of her travel companions mounted. She made them promise that they could stop once again on the return home, and they did. Edwards’s enchantment with Abu Simbel was profound; it was also the site of her own archaeological discovery. This was the place where she dropped to her knees in excavation.

The unexpected find was a small, square chamber where sand had gathered in a steep slope angled from the ceiling to the floor, lit by a lone sun shaft, and on every wall were painted friezes in bright unfaded color and bas-relief sculptures. She and the other travelers who excavated by her side correctly surmised that the place had never been discovered. Edwards quickly had the ship crew working like “tigers” and sent someone to the nearest village to hire another fifty hands to help. The excavation was underway and “. . . the sand poured off in a steady stream like water.” When all had been cleared away, Edwards, the Painter, and even the Idle Man gathered in the chamber and got busy copying inscriptions, measuring and surveying the find, sketching the walls, and sniffing around for any further surprises. It was at that moment that the Idle Man lifted a human skull from the sand.

ABOVE : A Victorian lady traveler assisted by local men

Could a tomb be underfoot? Were mummies and papyri and jewels only a shovel scoop away? A smaller skull appeared next, one as “pure and fragile in texture as the cup of a water-lily.”²⁴Everyone must have been holding their breath, hearts racing with the thought of a spectacular, gold-covered, ruby-lit, hieroglyphics-laden find.

Unfortunately, the new room proved to be only an empty basement. All archaeological hopes were dashed. What they had found in the decorated room, however, was apparently a lost library. Even if the discovery wasn’t as grand as the group had hoped, Edwards took special pride in it. It was a turning point for her, the moment when archaeology became not just a subject of study but a personal experience.

Lifting fragile old bones from the earth and brushing sand away from ancient objects were no longer activities that belonged to someone else, no longer the remote and exciting discoveries one read about in a book or newspaper article, actions that seemed exciting yet inaccessible. Edwards could now experience the thrill of unearthing a small piece of history with her own two hands. Archaeology was no longer a dream or a distant desire: it had become real.

With that feeling came a heightened awareness of archaeology’s value and its vulnerability. Shoveling sand, she was dismayed to see that workmen “wet with perspiration” were leaning against the paintings, marring their brilliance and smearing the color. She felt conflicted when the Painter scratched their names and the date of the chamber’s discovery into the ancient walls. That was a normal practice back then, but it nonetheless soiled the purity of the place. As Edwards thought about all the artifacts for sale at roadside stalls, the museum collections where prized objects had been stolen from their place, the common looting, and the slow deterioration and loss of some of the world’s greatest historic sites, she was struck by the unshakable desire to do something about it. A bolt of passion. A call to arms. She would appeal to her readers with a question:

I am told that the wall paintings which we had the happiness of admiring in all their beauty and freshness are already much injured. Such is the fate of every Egyptian monument, great or small. The tourist carves it over with names and dates, and in some instances with caricatures. The student of Egyptology, by taking wet paper “squeezes” sponges away every vestige of the original colour. The “Collector” buys and carries everything off of value that he can, and the Arab steals it for him. The work of destruction meanwhile goes on apace . . . The Museums of Berlin, of Turin, of Florence are rich in spoils which tell their lamentable tale. When science leads the way, is it wonderful that ignorance should follow?²⁵

JUMPING AHEAD eight years, Edwards is a woman out of the field and at her desk. Returned to her life in England, she sits in her personal library, which contains over three thousand books. Littered on the shelves and lined up in tall cases are specimens of Greek and Etruscan pottery, Egyptian antiquities, antique glass, engravings, and watercolor sketches. She’s a matronly woman, robust and smart looking, silver hair swept up and braided on top of her head, eyes dark and intelligent, her features rather beautiful. Outside the wild birds are in a tizzy, and “thrushes drop fearlessly into the library to be fed,” while the robins perch on the tops of high books and at Edwards’s feet as she lies “reading or writing in a long Indian chair under a shady tree” on a summer day.²⁶ She has since her travels along the Nile become a reputable Egyptologist in her own right. Edwards has taught herself to read hieroglyphics—a mighty task. She has also redirected her passion for Egypt’s archaeology into something of a savior’s work.

Passions still simmering, Amelia Edwards was the woman responsible for thinking of, advocating for, and ultimately assembling the Egypt Exploration Fund, which was later renamed the Egypt Exploration Society.²⁷ A powerful organizer, she led the way in promoting research and excavation in the Nile Delta. As the society notes in its own organizational history, “Amelia Edwards, together with Reginald Stuart Poole of the Department of Coins and Medals at the British Museum, founded the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1882 in order, as announced at the time in several daily newspapers, ‘to raise a fund for the purpose of conducting excavations in the Delta, which up to this time has been very rarely visited by travellers.’” In asking the public for financial contribution, she enabled a host of new investigations and played a critical role in the whole enterprise of Egyptology. Most notably, she was instrumental in recruiting a young archaeologist named Sir Flinders Petrie to her cause.

Petrie would come to be known as the father of modern archaeology. Why? Because he kept the small stuff. Whereas most archaeologists of the day pursued trophy finds, destroying valuable evidence in their hunt to obtain friezes and sculptures for European museums, Petrie recognized the inherent worth of the potsherds, fragmentary inscriptions, and broken utilitarian wares from the past. This was the stuff of everyday life, which could provide a sequential understanding of historic events. Petrie developed a dating method still used by archaeologists today called seriation, which relies on relative comparison. A style of pottery is associated with a particular time period. Once that is established, chronologies can be determined for sites and for all the different artifacts types found within. Petrie’s method constituted the best of scientific field archaeology available until the advent of radiocarbon dating in the mid-twentieth century.

At her desk, Edwards rewrote Petrie’s field journals into popular articles so that the public could understand and appreciate the significance of his findings. It was this unique collaboration that helped give the London-based Egypt Exploration Fund an international reputation. As honorary secretary and the tireless recruiter of new subscribers, Edwards was the force behind one of archaeology’s great men and most productive societies.

She saw her work with the fund as absolutely worthwhile, worthy of her talents, and most of all, necessary. It not only guaranteed new excavations and research but also helped safeguard antiquities and raise public awareness of the threats faced by fragile cultural relics. Edwards handwrote thousands of letters every year, imploring (she would say “begging”) people to support the effort. She oversaw the publication of all archaeological reports and news. Over time her duties grew bigger and more administrative, and she was stretched thinner. Exhausted by the work involved, and by some of the brackish personalities she had to reckon with to get anything accomplished, she began to tire. She was no longer writing novels, and her finances took a nosedive. When Petrie complained about the incompetence of the fund and threatened to leave, she let him have it:

I have given the best part of 7 years to it. My time, I admit, is not scientifically so valuable as yours . . . But in the market my time is worth a great deal more than yours. [Her novels paid handsomely, and she had turned down two offers to write new ones.] It is madness perhaps on my part to desire to preserve my chains unbroken—& yet I wd fain see the work go on; that work wh. is glory to you & Mr. Naville—& poverty & obscurity for me.²⁸

She felt as though she had disappeared behind a mountain of letters, publications, and messages, her own success as a best-selling author eclipsed by the everyday needs of supporting archaeology. She couldn’t even take comfort in the fact that her own skills in reading hieroglyphics were so highly regarded that experts sent samples of potsherds and papyrus to her for translation. Edwards’s fingers were cramped from composing too many letters, and her bank account was circling the drain.

In spite of this hardship, Edwards was the voice for Egyptology. Her knowledge of the field was vast and expert, and she was about to emerge from whatever obscurity she felt to face the world in an unprecedented manner. She had a plan, a big one.

But first there was Kate. Kate Bradbury was the energetic thirty-four-year-old woman who doted on Edwards and looked after her. It was because of this trusted bond (and the need for some money) that Edwards embarked on an ambitious lecture series in America in 1889. With Kate there to help her, she put her strong understanding of current archaeology in Egypt into motion and claimed a piece of the fame that was deservedly hers.

With jittery nerves and a streak of genuine panic, Edwards still proved to be a public-speaking phenomenon. Her lectures weren’t attended by just a handful of spectacle-wearing, gray-haired men; thousands came, both because of Edwards’s reputation as a scholar and because of the public’s fascination with the subject. Over two thousand people attended her first lecture, titled “The buried cities of ancient Egypt.”²⁹ Reporters rushed to greet her; newspapers announced her arrival in each city; ladies’ societies and other organizations welcomed her to their luncheons as a celebrity. A collection of her lectures makes up the book Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers (1891), published posthumously.

Just as her writing combined scholarship with wit and an easy narrative, Edwards’s lectures simultaneously entertained and educated. This was always the beauty of her work. Probably her greatest contribution to archaeology was that of “bridge.” She was the mechanism that connected field experience and the solid understanding of a science and its achievements with the enviable twist of popular appeal. What made her books sell is the same thing that made people subscribe in droves to the Egypt Exploration Fund. Edwards had the rare gift of making archaeology not only accessible to the general public, but also absolutely fascinating.

THE AMERICAN LECTURE tour schedule was demanding. Even by today’s travel standards, she was on a circuit that would exhaust anyone: 120 lectures in less than a year. Kate was beat, and Edwards seemed to be running on the fumes of glory alone. Things began to slow down for her when she fell and broke her arm and soon afterwards began a battle with breast cancer. She underwent a successful operation to remove the malignant tumor, but her health declined anyway. Edwards continued to lecture even as her health dwindled. Each new lecture offered a chance to spark renewed vigor, but Edwards couldn’t keep it up. She died in April 1892.

By the time of her death Edwards had been awarded three honorary degrees, from Columbia University, Smith College, and the College of the Sisters of Bethany in Topeka, Kansas. Her will stipulated that her entire library and all of her artifacts, engravings, sketches, and more should go to support the Edwards Chair of Egyptology. To this end she also gave £5,000 (a fortune then) to fund the Chair at University College London and made clear whom she wanted to be appointed. The recipient had to be under the age of forty, and so no one working at the British Museum could be considered for the role. In this way, Edwards cleverly guaranteed that only Flinders Petrie could get the job.³⁰ Meanwhile, her cherished Kate, her “poo Owl,” went on to marry a professor of Egyptology at Oxford University, Francis Llewellyn Griffith. With Edwards as her mentor, one has to wonder who had the better conversation: the professor or his very learned wife.

WHAT WAS IT about archaeology, and more specifically Egyptology, that attracted Edwards so strongly? She had a successful career and, had she desired it, could have written romance novels until she was old and gray, made loads of money, traveled widely, seen it all. With her appetite for adventure, Edwards might have made a whole life out of simply traveling the world, observing first-class digs, checking off a list of archaeological sites to visit like groceries to buy. Instead, she decided to get involved. She fought for archaeology, for its development, expansion, and cause. Her instinct for archaeology can be traced back to her girlhood desire to write about bygone times when all was “love & fighting.” Amelia Edwards was a romantic. For her, the past was a great canvas and archaeology her palette. Her imagination could move all over that canvas—spanning thousands of years—filling it in with detail and antiqued color, sketching people, events, and monuments of wondrous, sacred quality. As a writer, Edwards approached archaeology through a highly emotional lens. In the beginning she chose archaeology as a way of life because the ancient world provided a backdrop to the stories she loved most. Ancient Egypt was home to pharaohs and kings. A lost time. A day of golden tombs and falcons. She reveled in it.

Later that love grew into something more concrete, a little less fanciful. Edwards’s fascination with archaeology moved towards a concerted effort to preserve the past. To lose evidence of Egypt’s history—that beauty she both saw and imagined—or to leave pieces of it buried and poorly excavated, was a crime she could not condone. Amelia Edwards, grand dame of the Nile, uniquely embodied romance and practicality in her approach to history’s ruins. Without her, archaeology might have remained as dry as the very bones it unearths.

ABOVE : Dieulafoy, famous for her cross-dressing, easily and often mistaken for a young man