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.
