The Life of Margaret Alice Murray by Sheppard Kathleen L. ;

Author:Sheppard, Kathleen L.,;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Most of the tombs in the area where Petrie dug with his crew had been plundered anciently, but they had found a few unopened and undisturbed tombs.[29] There was no question that the “greatest prize of the season” that year was the tomb of “Nekhtankh son of Aa-khnumu,” found by Mackay.[30] The burial had been untouched and contained many fine examples of Middle Kingdom funeral furniture and decorations.[31] Petrie recognized the importance of this find to Egyptology and wished for the whole group to remain together and go to England; Gaston Maspero, head of the Department of Antiquities in Cairo, acquiesced.[32] Petrie then wrote a letter to the Museum Committee in Manchester asking the museum to “contribute the sum of £500 to the coming excavations at Memphis,” and if they did so, Petrie “would allot to it this group, and give it a first claim on the results of the excavation” from the next season.[33] Although Manchester was short on space for the Egyptian collections, it was not short on public interest. The Committee came up with the money in short order and received the group happily, according it “pride of place in the collection,” which it still holds today.[34] Although Petrie worked hard to keep the group together, all he had to say in his autobiography about the final location of the contents was: “The whole group is in Manchester.”[35]

In 1907 Petrie may have asked Murray to go to the Manchester Museum in order to help organize and catalogue the tomb group and the Egyptian collection there. This may have been because A. S. Griffith, the museum assistant, had not been able to give more time to the work.[36] If this was indeed the case, she would have been Petrie’s clear first choice because she had done an excellent job organizing the collections at UCL and he trusted her to do as good a job at another museum. She had also helped organize and catalog a number of other collections such as those in Edinburgh, Dublin, Cambridge, and Oxford.[37] She worked primarily with Winifred Crompton, who catalogued the Egyptian collection “in her own time” as well as fulfilling her paid position as the Museum’s printer.[38] A few years Murray’s junior, Crompton was Murray’s Mancunian counterpart and the two became close friends. Like Murray had done at UCL, Crompton had taken Egyptology classes at Manchester and had gotten a paid position at the Museum, but with even more unpaid responsibilities on the side. As in university departments, so it was in museums, where the “volunteers were often female, as women worked with museum collections in a voluntary capacity in order to circumvent the male dominance of paid positions.”[39] This situation was endured for so long by a number of women because “museum work in Egyptology was separate from ‘academic’ work, and in terms of professional status university teaching positions rapidly surpassed the museums that had helped establish them.”[40] In 1909 Crompton was appointed the Honorary Assistant Secretary of the then

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