Margaret Murray
Margaret Alice Murray was an Anglo-Indian Egyptologist, archaeologist, anthropologist, historian, and folklorist. The first woman to be appointed as a lecturer in archaeology in the United Kingdom, she worked at University College London from 1898 to 1935. She was president of the Folklore Society from 1953 to 1955, and published widely.
Born to a wealthy middle-class English family in Calcutta, British India, Murray divided her youth between India, Britain, and Germany, training as both a nurse and a social worker. Moving to London, in 1894 she began studying Egyptology at UCL, developing a friendship with department head Flinders Petrie, who encouraged her early academic publications and appointed her junior lecturer in 1898. In 1902–1903, she took part in Petrie's excavations at Abydos, Egypt, there discovering the Osireion temple, and the following season investigated the Saqqara cemetery, both of which established her reputation in Egyptology. Supplementing her UCL wage by giving public classes and lectures at the British Museum and Manchester Museum, it was at the latter in 1908 that she led the unwrapping of Khnum-nakht, one of the mummies recovered from the Tomb of two Brothersthe first time that a woman had publicly unwrapped a mummy. Recognising that British Egyptomania reflected the existence of widespread public interest in Ancient Egypt, Murray wrote several books on Egyptology targeted at a general audience.
Murray became closely involved in the first-wave feminist movement, joining the Women's Social and Political Union and devoting much time to improving women's status at UCL. Unable to return to Egypt due to the First World War, she focused her research on the witch-cult hypothesis, the theory that the witch trials of Early Modern Christendom were an attempt to extinguish a surviving pre-Christian, pagan religion devoted to a Horned God. Although later academically discredited, the theory gained widespread attention and proved a significant influence on the emerging new religious movement of Wicca. From 1921 to 1931, she undertook excavations of prehistoric sites on Malta and Menorca and developed her interest in folkloristics. Awarded an honorary doctorate in 1927, she was appointed assistant professor in 1928 and retired from UCL in 1935. That year she visited Palestine to aid Petrie's excavation of Tall al-Ajjul and in 1937 she led a small excavation at Petra, Jordan. Taking on the presidency of the Folklore Society in later life, she lectured at such institutions as the University of Cambridge and City Literary Institute, and continued to publish until her death.
Murray's work in Egyptology and archaeology was widely acclaimed and earned her the nickname of "The Grand Old Woman of Egyptology", although after her death many of her contributions to the field were overshadowed by those of Petrie. Conversely, Murray's work in folkloristics and the history of witchcraft has been academically discredited and her methods in these areas heavily criticised. The influence of her witch-cult theory in both religion and literature has been examined by scholars, and she herself has been dubbed the "Grandmother of Wicca".
Early life
Youth: 1863–1893
Margaret Murray was born on 13 July 1863 in Calcutta, then a major military city and the capital of British India. She lived in the city with her parents James and Margaret Murray, an older sister named Mary, and her paternal grandmother and great-grandmother. James Murray, born in India of Anglo-Irish descent, was a businessman and manager of the Serampore paper mills who was thrice elected President of the Calcutta Chamber of Commerce. Margaret had moved to India from Britain in 1857 to work as a missionary, preaching Christianity and educating Indian women. She continued with this work after marrying James and giving birth to her two daughters.Although most of their lives were spent in the European area of Calcutta, which was walled off from the Indian sectors of the city, Murray encountered members of Indian society through her family's employment of ten Indian servants and through childhood holidays to Mussoorie. The historian Amara Thornton has suggested that Murray's Indian childhood exerted an influence over her throughout her life, expressing the view that Murray could be seen as having a hybrid transnational identity that was both British and Indian. During her childhood, Murray received no formal education, and in later life expressed pride that she had never had to sit an exam before entering university.
In 1870, Margaret and her sister Mary were sent to Britain, moving in with their uncle John, a vicar, and his wife Harriet at their home in Lambourn, Berkshire. Although John provided them with a strongly Christian education and a belief in the inferiority of women, both of which she would reject, he awakened Murray's interest in archaeology through taking her to see local monuments. In 1873, the girls' mother arrived in Europe and took them with her to Bonn in Germany, where they both became fluent in German. In 1875 they returned to Calcutta, staying there until 1877. They then moved with their parents back to England, where they settled in Sydenham, London. There, they spent much time visiting The Crystal Palace, while their father worked at his firm's London office.
In 1880, they returned to Calcutta, where Margaret remained for the next seven years. She became a nurse at the Calcutta General Hospital, which was run by the Sisters of the Anglican Sisterhood of Clower, and there was involved with the hospital's attempts to deal with a cholera outbreak. In 1881, at age 18, Margaret heard about James Murray and his "general appeal to English speakers around the world to read their local books and send him words and quotations" for entry into the OED. She had a routine of taking a book onto the roof in the cool early-morning air. She began with William L'Isle's edition of Aelfric's Saxon Treatise concerning the Old and New Testament, from which she submitted 300 entries to Murray. She continued as a volunteer until 1888, submitting a total of 5,000 entries.
In 1887, she returned to England, moving to Rugby, Warwickshire, where her uncle John, now widowed, had moved. She took up employment as a social worker dealing with local underprivileged people. When her father retired to England, she moved into his house in Bushey Heath, Hertfordshire, living with him until his death in 1891. In 1893 she travelled to Madras, Tamil Nadu, where her sister had moved to with her new husband.
Later in 1893, Murray received her first introduction to Egyptology when her elder sister, Mary, alerted her to an advertisement in The Times for classes in Egyptian hieroglyphs taught by Flinders Petrie, Murray's future mentor. Reflecting upon this in her autobiography, Murray notes it was her sister's insistence on attending these classes, largely spurred on by her own inability to do so, which set her down the path of her Egyptological career.
Early years at University College London: 1894–1905
Encouraged by her mother and sister, Murray decided to enrol at the newly opened department of Egyptology at University College London. At the time of Murray's enrolment, Egyptology was not a formally trained degree, with the exception of the University of Oxford, which offered Middle Egyptian amongst a trio of "Oriental languages". Having been founded by an endowment from Amelia Edwards, one of the co-founders of the Egypt Exploration Fund, the department was run by the pioneering early archaeologist Sir William Flinders Petrie, and based in the Edwards Library of UCL's South Cloisters. Murray began her studies at UCL at age 30 in January 1894, as part of a class composed largely of other women and older men. She took courses in the Ancient Egyptian and Coptic languages which were taught by Francis Llewellyn Griffith and Walter Ewing Crum respectively.Murray soon got to know Petrie, becoming his copyist and illustrator and producing the drawings for the published report on his excavations at Qift, Koptos. In turn, he aided and encouraged her to write her first research paper, "The Descent of Property in the Early Periods of Egyptian History", which was published in the Proceedings of the Society for Biblical Archaeology in 1895. Becoming Petrie's de facto though unofficial assistant, Murray began to give some of the linguistic lessons in Griffith's absence. In 1898 she was appointed to the position of junior lecturer, responsible for teaching the linguistic courses at the Egyptology department; this made her the first female lecturer in archaeology in the United Kingdom. In this capacity, she spent two days a week at UCL, devoting the other days to caring for her ailing mother. As time went on, she came to teach courses on Ancient Egyptian history, religion, and language.
Among Murray's students – to whom she referred as "the Gang" – were several who went on to produce noted contributions to Egyptology, including Reginald Engelbach, Georgina Aitken, Guy Brunton, and Myrtle Broome. She supplemented her UCL salary by teaching evening classes in Egyptology at the British Museum.
At this point, Murray had no experience in field archaeology, and so during the 1902–1903 field season, she travelled to Egypt to join Petrie's excavations at Abydos. Petrie and his wife, Hilda Petrie, had been excavating at the site since 1899, having taken over the archaeological investigation from French Coptic scholar Émile Amélineau. Murray at first joined as site nurse, but was subsequently taught how to excavate by Petrie and given a senior position.
This led to issues with some of the male excavators, who disliked the idea of taking orders from a woman. This experience, coupled with discussions with other female excavators, led Murray to adopt openly feminist viewpoints. While excavating at Abydos, Murray uncovered the Osireion, a temple devoted to the god Osiris which had been constructed by order of Pharaoh Seti I during the period of the New Kingdom. She published her site report as The Osireion at Abydos in 1904; in the report, she examined the inscriptions that had been discovered at the site to discern the purpose and use of the building.
During the 1903–1904 field season, Murray returned to Egypt, and at Petrie's instruction began her investigations at the Saqqara cemetery near Cairo, which dated from the period of the Old Kingdom. Murray did not have legal permission to excavate the site, and instead spent her time transcribing the inscriptions from ten of the tombs that had been excavated in the 1860s by Auguste Mariette. She published her findings in 1905 as Saqqara Mastabas I, although would not publish translations of the inscriptions until 1937 as Saqqara Mastabas II. Both The Osireion at Abydos and Saqqara Mastabas I proved to be very influential in the Egyptological community, with Petrie recognising Murray's contribution to his own career.