Women in the Valley of Kings review

4/5 stars
Recommended if you like: archaeology, Egyptology, ancient Egypt, women’s history

Big thanks to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

This book offers an interesting overview of the women who shaped Egyptology and helped ensure its continuation as a discipline. All but one of the women was British, and the one who wasn’t was American, so Sheppard does note that even when women stepped into the field it remained very Euro-centric. Initially, a lot of the women who joined Egyptology did so because they had the money to go on a European tour or a change-of-air health tour and found what was going on in Egypt interesting. This means that the field skewed definitively toward wealthier people.

I enjoyed learning about the women and how their contributions often weren’t as obvious as men’s (i.e., they weren’t the ones doing the digging) but were as important and arguably more so. Many of the women here were integral for ensuring the proper recording, sorting, and preservation of artifacts, not to mention were often involved in processes like getting money for the projects to continue.

It was interesting to see how the field changed and how for a period of time it was relatively normal to see women on Egyptian archaeological sites before a misogynistic turn in the 1920s/30s. I also found it interesting to see just how interconnected the field was. Everybody seemed to know everybody. Flinders Petrie and James Breasted were very involved and knew a lot of the women mentioned in this book. Likewise, a lot of the women in this book knew each other, and some of them were even partway responsible for introducing each other to the field.

My main issue with this book is that I think the chapters are too long for how little they say. I think a lot of them could have been shorter or with editing could have cut down on some of the fluff to increase the amount of information provided on the women and still be the same length.

Overall this was a pretty interesting overview on women in the field of Egyptology. I enjoyed seeing how the field changed over time and how the women engaged in different activities that nonetheless were integral to the survival of the field and to artifacts.