Reuniting The Gang: Georgiana Aitken and Emma Benson at UCL

Reuniting The Gang

The contribution of women to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century archaeology is widely underestimated. Often in ancillary positions, their careers were overlooked in contemporary sources and further ‘obscured by married names and non-professional status’ (Carter 2021, 272; Harloe et al. 2021–4). The work of projects like Beyond Notability, Trowelblazers, among others, have in recent years sought to change this position (Harloe et al. 2021–4).

Museum archives hold vast quantities of material that can reveal the breadth and depth of women’s contributions to these fields, but many remain inaccessible – uncatalogued or undigitised. At the time of writing, the UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology is compiling a digital archive catalogue to allow researchers to search records remotely for the first time. This includes material relating to early teaching within UCL’s Egyptology department from its establishment in 1892,¹ and notably the 1911 College Certificate in Egyptology (Sheppard 2014, 118).

The first six students to join the Certificate were known as ‘The Gang’ (Murray 1949, 95). Until now, the names of five have been identified, and of these the lives of only four are known in any depth (Guy and Winifred Brunton, Myrtle Broome and Reginald Engelbach), ultimately due to traditional systems of estimating professional visibility (Sheppard 2014, 114; Stevenson 2015, 102; Thornton 2018, 7). Fragmentary references in archives at UCL and elsewhere have provided the key to fleshing out the life of the fifth member of The Gang, Georgiana Aitken, and to identify the sixth and final member, Emma Benson.

Sources

The research presented in this article draws on primary sources in the Petrie Museum, UCL Special Collections, The McManus: Dundee’s Museum and Art Gallery, the Egypt Exploration Society and the Griffith Institute, Oxford. Cross-referencing addresses in these archives allowed for the secure location of both women in UK censuses and from there, details of birthplaces, ages and family members using birth, marriage and death records, newspaper articles and international passenger lists. By following family history, it proved possible to locate and contact descendants of Georgiana Aitken who still hold photographs, archives and objects relating to her life. The same data allowed confirmation that objects in The McManus, Dundee, accessioned under the donor ‘A. P. Aitken’ were in fact donated by Georgiana Aitken and associated with archives transferred to UCL in 2005. Identifying early Egyptology students in UCL calendars and their associated student records has also made it possible to identify students of the College Certificate of Egyptology, and to confirm Georgiana and Emma as members of The Gang, following Margaret Murray’s definition.

Who were The Gang?

Margaret Murray (1949, 95) defined The Gang as the six students who joined the Egyptology Certificate in its inaugural year, naming four:

[The Bruntons] came to England in the year that the authorities of University College had arranged to grant a certificate in Egyptology, and they joined the little group of students who had entered the course. That group, known as The Gang, consisted of six students, of whom four – Myrtle Broome, Guy and Winifred Brunton, and Reginald Engelbach – have each made an enduring name in Egyptology.

Georgiana Aitken (recorded previously as Georgina) has been identified as the fifth member of this group (Janssen 1992, 14; Sheppard 2013, 146). UCL records confirm that another student, Emma Benson, passed the Egyptology Certificate at the same time as Georgiana Aitken, Guy and Winifred Brunton and Myrtle Broome.² This, along with Emma’s archaeological fieldwork and long association with Flinders Petrie, makes her the most likely candidate for the sixth member of The Gang.

Georgiana Burnett Aitken, ‘patient stringer of beads’

Georgiana was born in Broughty Ferry in Scotland, an affluent suburb of Dundee, on 17 April 1855, the third child of shipbuilder John Brown and Catherine Taylor. Catherine died when Georgiana was five, leaving her father with three young daughters. Unsurprisingly, he remarried in 1865 to Helen Mary Emslie, daughter of surgeon and physician Alexander Leith Emslie.³ Georgiana’s father became increasingly wealthy throughout her childhood; as his shipbuilding business grew, so their home addresses improved.⁴ However, the business suffered drastically as the shipbuilding industry fell away, and John Brown died with virtually nothing to his name.

Georgiana married Andrew Peebles Aitken, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh’s veterinary college, in 1880 at St Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in Dundee – a towering Gilbert Scott Gothic revival edifice. Georgiana and Andrew then moved to Edinburgh where they welcomed three daughters, each named for family members following the Scottish tradition: Katherine Brown in 1882; Helen Emslie in 1884; and Alice Jessie in 1888. Andrew Aitken’s obituary in the Botanical Society of Edinburgh in 1904 gives a window into what life might have been like for the couple. He had a ‘merry, happy and genial manner’, and was evidently musical, holding the position of Minstrel in the Botanical Society, composing plant-themed songs to sing during Society events (Boyd 1908, 49–51).

Georgiana became a member of several learned societies, including the Society of Biblical Archaeology, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (joining in 1901, the first year that women were accepted as members) and the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF). A subscriber to the EEF Archaeological Survey Fund from 1894, Georgiana went on to become local Honorary Secretary in Edinburgh for eight years from 1896, with fundraising as a core duty.⁵ This ended in 1904, presumably due to her husband’s death and her subsequent move to London. In 1890, Georgiana and Andrew joined the Scottish Lodge of the Theosophical Society (TS).⁶ Georgiana’s archive at the Petrie Museum includes pamphlets for two meetings of this Society in 1895 at which ‘W. M.’⁷ gave a two-part paper on the subject of ‘the mythology of the ancient Egyptians’, evidently of such significance to Georgiana that she kept hold of the pamphlets for nearly 40 years.⁸

Georgiana and her husband went on to become founder members of Edinburgh’s Amen-Ra Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (GD) in 1893, both progressing to inner orders, indicating substantial participation in GD rituals (Gilbert 2021, 147). GD mottos were selected to indicate the personal belief system of each member (Bogdan 2008, 254); Georgiana took the motto sola cruce salus – ‘the only salvation is through the cross’ (Gilbert 2021, 147). Although not required to reflect any particular religion, Georgiana’s motto suggests that she was a practising Christian alongside her more esoteric interests.

The GD was unusual in the context of other masonic-styled societies in that it welcomed women into its ranks, including leadership, so that women could hold authority over men (Bogdan 2008, 262). The Amen-Ra Temple in Edinburgh had close to equal numbers of female and male members (Gilbert 2021, 47); female public figures, including Annie Horniman, Moina Mathers and Florence Farr, all attained senior organisational roles in the GD (Bogdan 2008, 252).

The intersection between GD and Egyptology is well established (Mosleth King 2024; Tully 2010, 2024; Vinson and Gunn 2019). Rooted in ‘Egyptosophy’, heavily interpreted ancient Egyptian texts were woven into GD rituals, creating a fantastical idea of Egypt that at times deliberately ignored scientific truth to adopt more favourable meanings (Tully 2024, 27–8). Ancient Egypt and museum collections became ‘a source and an endorsement of magical power’ through which esotericists legitimised their belief systems (McLaren 2016, iv; Tully 2024, 26).

Numerous early-twentieth-century Egyptologists were GD or TS members, many passing through UCL, including Reginald Engelbach who joined GD in 1909 and Marcus Worsley Blackden who was a participant in EEF Archaeological Surveys (Gilbert 2021, 191; Stevenson 2019, 52). Similarly, Anna Anderson Morton, UCL Egyptology student and collaborator with Mary Brodrick, was an active member of the TS.⁹ Lina Eckenstein and Battiscombe Gunn each had more than passing acquaintances with renowned occultist Aleister Crowley, and Gunn may have supplied Crowley with a translation of a stela¹⁰ in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo (Stevenson 2019, 52; Vinson and Gunn 2019, 103).

It is uncertain what drew Georgiana to UCL to study Egyptology at UCL, though there are many interconnected avenues for this to have occurred. Perhaps it was her involvement with pseudo-Egyptian ritual that sparked a desire to read hieroglyphs for herself, or to study the ancient Egyptian material culture that was so central to GD ceremonies, following the example of other esotericists (Tully 2024, 26). Georgiana might have heard Margaret Murray or Flinders Petrie speak at the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (both were Honorary Members), and she would certainly have heard about their work, as well as Amelia Edwards during her stint as Secretary of the EEF. Whatever the prompt, Georgiana’s husband died on 17 April 1904, on her 49th birthday (Boyd 1908, 53). Just five months later, she had relocated to London and was enrolled at UCL.

Emma Benson, ‘a charming and much-travelled woman’

Emma¹¹ was born in June 1866 in a small town in County Armagh in Ireland, not far from Belfast. Her parents were Charles Richardson, son of a Dublin merchant, and Mary Reeves, daughter of antiquarian and Protestant Bishop William Reeves.¹² Charles and Mary had five children, including Emma, most likely named for her maternal grandmother who had passed away shortly after childbirth (Ferguson 1893, 39–40).

In October 1892, Emma married William John Benson¹³ of Cape Town, South Africa, at Newcastle, County Down, in a church overlooking the Irish sea coastline; Emma’s grandfather led the ceremony.¹⁴ Originally from Edgbaston in Warwickshire, William worked as a financier for the Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Company and the South African Gold Mining Company, and was awarded an OBE in the 1918 Birthday Honours List for his role as wartime Section Director in the Ministry of Munitions.¹⁵ Emma and William’s only child, Daphne Ione Viola Benson,¹⁶ was born in March 1894 at Britstown in South Africa.³ Until joining the EEF in the 1930s, and a reported attendance at the 1929 British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Johannesburg (Caton-Thompson 1983, 130), Emma seems not to have participated substantially in academic organisations, unlike Georgiana, perhaps due to her more remote location or the duties of her married life while living in South Africa.

Other than a familial tendency to study the past, it is even harder to be sure what prompted Emma Benson to study Egyptology. Perhaps it was simply happenstance: in 1909, the Bensons moved to London after William was appointed Manager of the London branch of the Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Company. In the same year, Emma Benson joined UCL’s Egyptology department along with another new student, Myrtle Broome. Reginald Engelbach came to UCL in 1910, encouraged by his family friend, Georgiana Aitken (Brunton 1948, 1), and Guy and Winifred Brunton joined the following year. All six students signed up for the Egyptology Certificate at UCL in 1911 and The Gang was formed.

Training at UCL

Following a diploma programme headed by Petrie, but skilfully designed and nearly entirely delivered by Margaret Murray, modules for that first class of six covered a ‘complete and systematic training in archaeology’ (Janssen 1992, 12). Students were required to pass 11 exams to qualify for the Certificate (Drower 1985, 331) and seem to have had some freedom to select some of the modules based on personal interests. Georgiana and Emma both passed modules in Egyptian religion, architecture, history, coptic and hieroglyphs; after this they diverged with comparative sculpture and mineralogy for Emma, and dating of objects for Georgiana.¹⁷

Petrie (1915, 170) placed great importance on understanding and identifying pottery as a key to understanding past material culture, particularly the dates of archaeological layers. Georgiana’s notebooks in the Petrie Museum attest to this and include a notebook of diligently copied chronological pottery styles, all individually hand-painted and labelled in her cursive hand, clearly drawn from examples within the collection (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Georgiana’s notebook (Aitken Notebook 2) and three pots (UC18607, UC18248, UC18177) on display in the Petrie Museum’s display ‘Seeing and Unseeing the Pyramids: Lee Miller in Egypt’, November 2024–July 2025 (Source: © C. Wilson 2025)

Alongside their studies, students like Georgiana and Emma were expected to support general departmental activities, including unpacking collections on return from Egypt, helping to arrange collections for Petrie’s annual exhibitions and preparing photographic plates for publications (Drower 1985, 331). A letter from Robert Baden-Powell¹⁸ confirms that Emma facilitated a tour of the collection in 1910, suggesting that students also coordinated museum visits.¹⁹ Tours of this kind were ‘valuable in spreading appreciation of the subject and demonstrating College facilities’.²⁰

Already firmly embedded in the department just a year after she joined UCL, Georgiana helped to establish the Egyptian Research Students Association (ERSA) in 1905, forming a committee alongside Hilda Petrie, Margaret Murray, Flinders Petrie and others. The ERSA held monthly meetings during the academic year at which members studied new publications, gave papers, heard news from excavations and listened to lectures from ‘qualified lecturers’.²¹ The London branch met occasionally at UCL to listen to Flinders Petrie, but typically gathered in the Bedford Square home of the Secretary, Margaret Sefton-Jones.²²

Georgiana spoke to ERSA members on several occasions, notably on ‘The Development of Egyptian Art’ in both London and in Edinburgh (Petrie 1914, 94). By 1907, the ERSA numbered some 300 members in branches around the country and had even gathered a small collection as a travelling museum. Along with Hilda Petrie, Margaret Murray and others, Georgiana supplied objects, including examples of ‘Coptic weaving’ in 1909.²³ After passing the Certificate, Emma seems to have been drawn away from the department for a time – in 1913 she was studying Celtic studies (primarily a literature course centred around language, including Old Irish) alongside Egyptology, perhaps pursuing similar interests to her grandfather.²⁴ Given her later involvement in fieldwork, however, Emma might have gone to Egypt sooner had events in Europe not unfolded in 1914.

First World War

The First World War called a temporary halt to fieldwork in Egypt and vastly reduced teaching at home for those students who remained. Although Margaret Murray (1963, 104) recalled that she had ‘practically no students’, teaching did not entirely cease during the war, and Petrie was certainly lecturing.²⁵ International visitors and those students not occupied with active duty were able to continue to learn. For example, from 1914–17, Kosaku Hamada²⁶ joined the department to study European approaches to archaeology, and the ERSA likewise continued to meet. Groups like the ERSA, dominated as they were by women students, provided a welcome sense of normality through maintained intellectual connections – ‘these quiet meetings with lectures and social intercourse are neither frivolous nor tending to expense, and we must encourage the constructive side of life in this time of war’ (Petrie 1914, 191).

Margaret Murray seems to have been rejected for more than light wartime duties, noting with understandable disgruntlement that ‘women over forty were considered by the authorities as completely beyond the age of any kind of usefulness’. Instead, based temporarily in Glastonbury, she found herself drawn to Grail stories and forming her initial thesis on witchcraft (Murray 1963, 104; Stevenson 2015, 16). Georgiana’s membership of the GD, ‘ground zero for British occultism from 1888 until the end of the century’ (Vinson and Gunn 2019, 100), made her an ideal interlocutor for Murray at this time.²⁷

While age did not prevent Emma from volunteering with the Police Missing and Wounded Department as well as coordinating linen provisions at the Princess Club VAD Hospital in Bermondsey throughout the war,²⁸ it does suggest one possible explanation as to why Georgiana has no service record during those years. Instead, she remained at UCL, spending considerable time in the department and continuing to volunteer with the ERSA.

For somewhat unclear reasons, Petrie (Petrie 1932, 236) too was denied active service during the First World War (see also Drower 1985, 333). This, alongside fieldwork cessation, afforded him time to arrange the collections into their showcases and to develop his artefact typologies (Janssen 1992, 19). The resultant publications such as Objects of Daily Use²⁹ became cornerstone reference works for ancient Egyptian artefacts, the majority completed during the First World War.³⁰ As one of a small number of students remaining in London at leisure to continue research and studies, it is highly probable that Georgiana was not only present at the time but could also have taken an active role in preparatory work for the typologies, including photographing, taking impressions of scarab inscriptions and measuring weights. The large volume of material to process in a short space of time,³¹ even with Petrie’s renowned work ethic, suggests that assistance would have been beneficial.

What makes this especially compelling is that Georgiana had already proven herself capable in object-based work. Her archive includes pages torn from the Illustrated London News featuring the remarkable finds from the tomb of Princess Sithathoriunet at Lahun,³² famously sold to the Metropolitan Museum in New York when Petrie was unable to convince British institutions to acquire it at a suitable price (Drower 1985, 333; Petrie 1932, 233–5). Above photographs of the bracelets and anklets, Georgiana has written, ‘string by me GBA’. Petrie’s day diary confirms this: Georgiana was ‘up threading’ just a few weeks before the Lahun exhibition opened in June 1914.³³

The difficult sale negotiations and high-profile nature of the discovery will have created pressure to ensure that the objects from this tomb were exceptionally well presented. Georgiana must have undertaken similar curatorial work in the department before 1914 to prove her skill, continuing to assist collections work in the museum at least to the late 1920s (Drower 1985, 394).

The fact that Georgiana was given the task of stringing this group of thousands of extraordinary gold, carnelian and turquoise beads indicates that she was not only very skilled, but that she was also highly trusted by Petrie. Georgiana, ‘the patient stringer of beads’,³⁴ was rightly proud of this impressive piece of work. It is telling that she kept two strings of what appear to be ancient Egyptian beads (probably acquired when she was in Egypt in 1923) rather than donating them with her other material to The McManus.³⁵

Fieldwork – Qau and Badari

As well as work to keep the museum and collections in order, Egyptology students were able to apply for field experience in Egypt ‘for studying monuments or practical excavation’.³⁶ Flinders Petrie held famously stringent requirements to join his fieldwork, giving preference to those Margaret Murray hand-selected in the classroom and students who were not overly scholarly: ‘Indeed academic knowledge was a definite bar to employment with this great pioneer, who preferred people who came to him without preconceived ideas or training’ (Tufnell 1982, 81). Often, students would also be required to pass subtle tests relating to character traits such as frugality: Petrie would take potential candidates to lunch and those who refused rich food and ate sparingly, or who were able to dash up the 82 steps to the department without arriving breathless, were more likely to receive approbation than those who did not (Tufnell 1982, 85).

Evidently, Emma and Georgiana passed muster with both Margaret Murray and Flinders Petrie, joining the ranks of ‘Petrie Pups’ selected to join Petrie in the field (Janssen 1992, 12; Sheppard 2014, 117; Tufnell 1982, 81): Emma was at Abydos and Oxyrhynchus in 1921–2, and both women travelled to join Petrie, the Bruntons and others at Qau and Badari³⁷ in 1923.

There were two camps in this season, one under Guy Brunton and one under Flinders Petrie. Georgiana joined the Brunton camp, situated in rock-cut tombs and ‘huts on the desert edge under the cliffs some five miles north of the Qau camp … some Graeco-Roman rock-cut tombs were made use of’, alongside Winifred Brunton, Irene Donne, James Leslie Starkey and Henri Bach. The Petrie camp included Emma Benson, Shemuel Yeivin, Noel Wheeler, T. R. Duncan Greenlees and Gertrude Caton-Thompson and was situated in the Qau camp of the previous season, ‘in and around the largest of the terraced rock tombs in the Qau cliffs, some 100ft up, with a fine southward outlook over all the desert bay’ (Brunton 1927, 1).

Along with other specialists at the site, Petrie’s head workman Ali Suefi was present, responsible for detecting excavation sites, but Hilda Petrie is notably absent (Drower 1985, 359). Emma Benson was invited to fulfil Hilda’s typical duties for the Petrie camp:

Mrs Petrie for some forgotten reason was absent that year, and her place as camp organiser was filled by Mrs Benson, a charming and much-travelled woman, interested in Egyptology and master of hieroglyphics but not professionally. I was with the Petrie party and we all rejoiced at eating our tinned food in various appetising ways instead of cold and slimy straight out of the tin in the Mrs Petrie fashion. The Bruntons camped separately for just that reason! (Caton-Thompson 1983, 92)

As well as excelling in food provisions, Emma must have been successful in this role; she was invited to do much the same at Tel el Ajjul in 1932. Otherwise, Emma and Georgiana seem to have carried out similar activities in the field at Qau and Badari: ‘Mrs Benson and Mrs Aitken helped with the multitudinous jobs which fall to the lot of all excavators’ (Brunton 1927, 2). Caton-Thompson’s photograph album in the Petrie Museum³⁸ gives some clues as to the kinds of tasks undertaken. One photograph showing Emma Benson holding aloft a fossilised animal bone indicates that in some way she supported research into the vast quantities of these bones that were to become the focus of Caton-Thompson’s work in this region (Figure 2). It seems that the two women got on well and experienced a lasting friendship; Caton-Thompson (1983, 130) later described Emma as ‘my dear Mrs Benson’. Meanwhile, Georgiana ‘gave great help in the preservation of antiquities’ (Brunton and Caton-Thompson 1928, 1); another photograph in the album shows her working alongside Henri Bach, among tents and burial pots, and holding a measuring stick (Figure 3).

Figure 2

Emma Benson holding fossilised bones during fieldwork at Qau and Badari, 1923–4 (PMA/WFP1 115/15/2) (Source: Petrie Museum, UCL)

Figure 3

Georgiana Aitken with Henri Bach during fieldwork at Qau and Badari, 1923–4 (PMA/WFP1 115/15/2) (Source: Petrie Museum, UCL)

While in Egypt, Georgiana took the opportunity to visit some of the key tourist sites, including the Egyptian Museum in Cairo with Reginald Engelbach and others,³⁹ and was one of the first people in the world to see Tutankhamun’s tomb (Figure 4), visiting just days after it had been first opened to tourists (Riggs 2021, 100). She seems not to have travelled to Egypt again for fieldwork after this season, instead returning to teaching and museum duties at UCL, and was made Honorary Assistant in 1919 (Janssen 1992, 22).

Figure 4

Georgiana’s ticket for entry to Tutankhamun’s Tomb, 11 March 1924 (Petrie Museum, Aitken 05: 1 of 3) (Source: Petrie Museum, UCL)

Emma was substantially more experienced in fieldwork than Georgiana, travelling to Egypt and then Palestine several times through to the mid-1930s. As well as Qau, Emma had previously joined the Petries at Abydos and Oxyrhynchus in 1921 and 1922 (Petrie et al. 1925, 1), at the Faiyum in 1925–6, then later at Beth Pelet in 1928 and Tell el Ajjul in 1932–3 where she was called to help with drawing ‘as in former excavations’ as well as run the site clinic for minor injuries and illnesses (Drower 1985, 395; Petrie 1933, 1). Emma visited Getrude Caton-Thompson and Elinor Gardner in 1925 at Soknopaiou Nesos in the Faiyum, assisting in some way (‘[her] love of camp life was a real asset to us’, Caton-Thompson 1983, 102), and travelled to the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Johannesburg in 1929. Emma arrived at the conference with Margaret Murray to join a tour of Kimberley and took time to pass on news and encouragement from Petrie to Caton-Thompson, there presenting her groundbreaking work on Great Zimbabwe (Caton-Thompson 1983, 129–30).

For both Georgiana and Emma, travel was also socially motivated. Around fieldwork in 1924, Georgiana spent time with her friend Reginald Engelbach and his young family, photographing his children and wife in their Cairo garden.⁴⁰ In 1928, Emma joined Flinders Petrie and another student, Lady Agnew, on the Orient Express towards Baghdad, visiting Olga Tufnell and others at Tell Fara (Drower 1985, 372; Green and Henry 2021, 86). This social relationship extended to a substantial amount of personal trust in Emma, who accompanied Flinders Petrie’s 19-year-old daughter Ann by boat to Port Said before joining the excavation at Tell el Ajjul.⁴¹ Emma had rejoined UCL as a student of Petrie in that year,⁴² perhaps as a prerequisite to attending the Palestinian field season, at the same time becoming a member of the EEF.⁴³

It seems very likely that both Emma and Georgiana would have attended the occasion of Margaret Murray’s honorary doctoral award at UCL in 1930, particularly as Murray’s students had funded the purchase of her robes (Whitehouse 2013, 121). Georgiana was instrumental in coordinating the fundraising effort, utilising her experience as Honorary Secretary of the EEF⁴⁴ and testifying to the strength of her friendship and admiration for her former teacher.

The last time that both women were certainly together in London was to attend Flinders Petrie’s ‘half-century’ celebrations in 1930. All but one member of The Gang⁴⁵ were reunited, perhaps for the final time, on an unseasonably cool June day when close to 200 people gathered for dinner at the Savoy Hotel to celebrate 50 years of Petrie’s research. Seated at separate tables, Georgiana and Emma both appear on the guest list headed ‘student of B[ritish] School Egypt Archaeology, committee and helpers’.⁴⁶

In the early 1940s, most likely to avoid the worst of wartime London, Georgiana moved back to Scotland to live with two of her daughters and their families in Fife, while maintaining her London address (perhaps for similar reasons, Emma had also moved away from London – to the Croft Farm in Stofold, Somerset, and, like Georgiana, retained a London residence).³ Possibly around this time,⁴⁷ Georgiana donated a small collection, including her student notes, shabti, beads and a glazed scarab to The McManus, Dundee.⁴⁸ The gift was registered under ‘Mrs A. P. Aitken’ in her husband’s initials, which had the inadvertent result of occluding her contribution: because of this, past curators at Dundee did not associate these objects with archival materials inscribed ‘G. B. Aitken’ and transferred the latter to UCL in 2005. Georgiana Burnett Aitken died in a private nursing home in Dundee, just a few days after her 88th birthday in April 1943. Emma Benson died in London in April the following year.⁴⁹

Concluding remarks

The identification of professional contribution in the middle of the twentieth century was often that which archaeological site directors recorded within official publications (Horn 2024, 3) or through the act of publication itself (Thornton 2018). Even today there is a tendency to view published fieldwork as the pinnacle of archaeological achievement, and museum or classroom work as secondary (Sheppard 2014, 113–14).

Within Egyptology, this bias so often excluded the expertise and contribution of Egyptian workforces and extends to those considered not to have been ‘professionals’ (Horn 2024, 1–2; Quirke 2010). Getrude Caton-Thompson considered Emma Benson to be of great help in the field, holding ancient language expertise, but ‘not professionally’. Yet Emma had not only passed the UCL Egyptology Certificate, but described herself in a 1932 passenger list to Port Said as an Egyptologist and in the 1939 UK census return as an ‘archaeologist, retired’.⁵⁰ Emma Benson defined herself as a professional archaeologist even if others did not.

Meanwhile, Georgiana Aitken was present during some of the most critical moments in the fledgling field of British Egyptology, first as a student then a teacher – working alongside Margaret Murray to train numerous Egyptologists ‘whose collective impact on the discipline is immeasurable’ (Sheppard 2024, 141). One of a vanishingly small number ever to have handled Princess Sithathoriunet’s golden jewellery, and one of the first to have seen Tutankhamun’s tomb, Georgiana plausibly contributed materially to Flinders Petrie’s typologies, which have shaped the study of Egyptian material culture for a century.

Married women in many university settings (but not all, for example, Liverpool University) did not experience the legal block of the marriage bar⁵¹ in the same way as women in teaching and the civil services. A number of married women in early-twentieth-century Western Egyptology were considered to be ‘professionals’, receiving credit during their lifetimes in the form of named publications and paid work; for example, Hilda Petrie, Winifred Brunton and Elise Baumgartel (Friedmann n.d.). Georgiana Aitken (married, albeit widowed) falls within this group, given that she held a recognised teaching position at UCL. However, despite no official marriage bar for women working in universities like UCL, specific prejudice directed towards married women could act as a de facto marriage bar (Baldwin 2009, 89; Carter 2021, 269), making it difficult for them to claim professionality and hold equal status to their male counterparts.

Neither Georgiana nor Emma published, and their names were absent for decades – left out, misspelled and recorded under their husbands’ initials. Yet their input made the work of people like Flinders Petrie, Margaret Murray, Gertrude Caton-Thompson and many others possible, contributing profoundly to key moments of archaeological discovery and shaping Western Egyptology in the twentieth century.

Acknowledgements

This research was prompted by the work of others, primarily Rosalind Janssen, Kate Sheppard, Maarten Horn, Georgina Brewis, Alice Williams, Anna Garnett and Lisa Randisi, each of whom have provided generous support and insight. I am especially grateful to Christina Donald at The McManus, Dundee, for constantly matching my joy at finding any small mention of Georgiana Aitken, and to Rachael Sparks at the UCL Institute of Archaeology who helped me to locate traces of Emma Benson. Robert Winckworth of UCL Special Collections supplied me with student records and professors’ fee entries, and both Sally Davis and Claire Jackson assisted very kindly in locating details relating to Georgiana’s association with GD and TS. Grateful thanks are due to two groups of UCL students: Amna Ahmad and Charlotte Yan, education studies students who with Anna Garnett curated the 2022 Petrie Museum display ‘Women and Hieroglyphs, Teaching Ancient Languages at UCL’, and Archives and Records Management students who spent a term with Georgiana’s archives at the Petrie Museum in 2023, unearthing many new pieces of information incorporated here: Charlie Jenkins, Maria Morris, Emily O’Connor, Rohwana Ogunbiyi, Esme Samsworth, Georgina Townsend and Eleanor Young. This article is dedicated to the memory of Sir Andrew Ogilvy-Wedderburn, Georgiana Burnett Aitken’s great grandson, who passed away in April 2025.

Declarations and conflicts of interest