DNF @ 43% - I have a degree in Anthropology with a huge interest in Egyptology so I was really excited to read this one. Unfortunately this book reads like a very dry textbook and not written in a linear order, which made it difficult to follow at times.

I absolutely enjoyed this book. Having a natural curiosity of Egyptian times, I was drawn to the book title. Understanding women who have been overlooked in history is another area I like. Both come together perfectly in this book. So little was documented during this time of exploration do to men not caring or thinking it was important beyond the artifacts found. This text teaches us writings from women who were there for health issues or relaxation jumped started an area of exploration and eventually education/careers for other women in Egyptology. For me the real excitement of the book was learning that the first woman to earn an Egyptology degree was from my hometown and yet I knew nothing of her. This was disappointing at first but gave me inspiration to share her story and recommend this book to others. The book is written in a format that is by person so some stories have overlapping pieces as these women crossed paths and became friends, supporters and colleagues. I love that casual observations made by these women have become a bedrock of what happened, who was involved and snapshots into life during these times. I highly recommend this informative and easy read.

Thank you for the opportunity to read an ARC of this book.
I am an armchair Archaeologist and this book was outstanding!!!

Finally , the women get their story.

Sheppard takes the best cues from narrative nonfiction for her collective biography and rewards us with a dense but wonderfully readable spotlight on women Egyptologists in the 19th and 20th centuries. Several women each get her time in the sun, but the overarching story shines light on the immense uncredited contributions of European women, local laborers, and native experts in the rapidly formalizing field. Give this one a well-deserved display nudge and it will fly out of academic and public libraries with a healthy history fandom. I received an eARC from the publisher, but later purchased a hard copy because it's that good.

There's a reason workers are called that. They do the many practical tasks that make discoveries whose credit is assigned to some colonial "master" for the purpose of making "history"; never have I typed his story with more bilious growling.

Kathleen Sheppard does a lot for my mood by not focusing on the colonial "mistresses" shall we say without some acknowledgment of the role of the normally so unacknowledged as to be invisible workers. There is a kind of grim humor in these men and women vanishing into the role of shabtis. I don't know that this term, or even this concept, had made it into Egyptology by the time Author Sheppard writes about (c.1880–1930). I found it...ironic.

Now, to be clear, none of the women under discussion were free of colonial mentality, some more than others. As people experiencing a pretty dramatic regime of prejudice themselves, with belittlement, credit-grabbing, and harassment their daily lot, one would like to imagine they would be sensitized to the issue of discounting another's labor based on irrelevant externalities. Alas, real life seldom shows a smooth face to the future.

One thing I was surprised to learn was that not all the men working in Egyptology were abusive in the various ways it was possible for them to be. Few of them hurdled even that low bar, but it was positive that a few did. I myownself wonder if the utter novelty of learning about the ancient culture and its rules, its people, and its existence in relation to its peers for the very first time in thousands of years didn't have some damping effect on them...can't lord it over others when you yourself know so very little. I know it will surprise no one that many tried the tack anyway.

Author Sheppard took time to delve into lives of some women more than others, which is down to survival of records...look at the notes. I'm also unsurprised at the presence of many of my lesbian siblings in these ranks. If there's a place people can be found doing hard, intellectually rigorous work, my siblings will be there and in the forefront as often as not. In dealing with these women's personal lives Author Sheppard is without period-appropriate coyness or reticence, thank goodness. The world has changed for the better in so many ways since the time we're discussing. This is a huge one: Being queer is fairly unremarkable now. It's this reality that makes the hate-filled control freaks so damn mad.

What that leads me to is, in fact, the source of my missing star on the book's rating. It's a terrific breeze of openness and transparency to have the lives, not just the work, of figures from the past openly discussed. It's inevitable that some deeply uncomfortable details emerge, like one woman's husband getting physical with her when she was twelve and he twenty-three, tolerated by her mother in full knowledge of it because she fancied the man herself. *ew* But these are all presented in a way that I found more than a bit irksome. Nothing like an internal chronology of a woman's life is followed, only the general structure of chapters being about one woman in the main, and other women's entries and exits from her story are handled as they arise not placed aside as references to that other woman's chapter (eg, "See chapter 77, page 666"). The narrative thrust of following one story is thus squandered in Wikipedia searches and/or note-taking. It does leave me a bit bumfuzzled as to who in the publishing house signed off on such an organizational idea.

It's a genuine complaint, but the truth is most of these women were unknown to me at all, even as names, so honestly I'd've been doing that searching anyway. In a few hundred pages about one of the most explosive developmental regimes in the entire course of historiography and archaeology as disciplines, and the birth and exponential growth of Egyptology, this was going to be the case.

So don't take this as code for "avoid this read" but as an urging to do the opposite. Get this book and start appreciating that, when our parents, grands, and greats were kids, Humanity was first learning about the people of the distant past in their own fragmentary words, and from their own uncovered material possessions. Author Sheppard has brought the palpable excitement of the women who were there, whose presence and guidance made much of the progress we now stand in top of to look still deeper into the past from the mountains their work made.

It was a flawed, slightly disorganized book, but so was the story its subjects were busy living. A strong recommendation for a self-gift to enjoy on #Booksgiving.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Egypt is not a topic I read a lot about, so I learned a lot from this book, but most importantly, I loved seeing that women were as influential as they could for the times.

The history of Egyptology often focuses on rich white men doing their rich white men things. But what often gets overlooked is the presence of women during the Golden Age of Egyptian archaeology (in relation to Western antiquarians). The author discusses some of the earliest European women who travelled to Egypt and became involved in excavations.

This work was wonderful, because many of these women played a massive role in twentieth century Egyptology but were rarely recognized the way they would have been if they were male. The author pointed out that much of what they did was deemed boring or tedious, certainly not the news-worthy opening or raiding of tombs, but that without their documentation and background work, much of the context and important information would have been lost. I also loved the fact that the women’s field journals and paintings/drawings of the tombs were much more detailed and useful than the men’s generally were (something I find especially relatable as an archaeologist) or even the photographs.

The author uses the women’s travelogues, diaries, drawings, and maps to inform her research for this work. I do think the scope of this work was a bit too broad, though. Rather than simply focusing on the women’s time in Egypt, there is an almost overwhelming amount of information included about their general lives, romance, loves, and other information that wasn’t necessarily relevant. With the number of women included in this work, there were many times when the information was more overwhelming than informative. The work also wasn’t set up in the most accessible manner, with chapters following a woman’s entire life but then the same woman being mentioned in new ways in following chapters due to overlapping timelines.

Overall this was an informative and well-intentioned work, but I do think the execution was lacking. Some additional editing and reworking probably would have gone a long way to helping this. My thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for allowing me to read this work. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own.

Great look at the first female Egyptologists and archaeologists. Wonderful detailed looks at each of the women mentioned and their contributions to the field. Only wish the ARC contained the pictures it kept mentioning!

There are so many areas of history that women played a vital role in and either their stories weren't recorded or they've been forgotten. Of course every child has heard about Egypt and the pyramids, King Tut and Howard Carter, and so many other fascinating tales of ancient Egypt. However, prior to Women in the Valley of the Kings, I had never really heard much about the women who were in Egypt doing work to excavate and preserve Egyptian history, as well as those who supported efforts from afar.

Before I start a review of the book, I do want to acknowledge that the history of Brits and Americans and other colonial powers excavating and removing ancient antiquities has a problematic future, and still sees issues today. Much of the removal of ancient artifacts was done due to colonial beliefs that the countries they were occupying were backward and incapable of appreciating their history. There were also a lot of destructive actions that resulted as part of these excavations, as who can forget the fact that at one point there was a Victorian craze of ingesting ground up mummies.

Now on to the book. Kathleen Sheppard explores a part of history that has long fascinated audiences but takes a new twist in prioritizing and centering the role women played. She acknowledges that many of the men who were excavating and adventuring in Egypt were supported at home by women who kept things running and kept their lives in order so they could be off in the desert. Sheppard examines the life of several women who I had never heard of but should be taught alongside the stories of people like Howard Carter, as the reason we have any documentation and standardization in this area is due to the fact that women played a central role in establishing Egyptology as a field. The book is set up with each woman she's writing about having their own chapter. The reader will note that so many of these women overlapped and intertwined in their journeys throughout Egypt. Many of the women came from wealthy backgrounds, and that did play a major role in who had the ability to be an archaeologist. My book review would have to be very long to retrace each woman's story, and I am grateful the author poured so much into these women's stories. I really enjoyed the book, and for me this was a very readable book for the general audience.

Please be advised I received an Advance Readers Copy (ARC) from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Women seem to be showing up in all sorts of historical places: NASA control rooms, European spycraft, and now Gilded Age Egypt. They were always there, but their contributions were largely overshadowed by those of their male counterparts. Even if the male counterparts took credit for their work. Kathleen Sheppard follows a group of women who came to North Africa as travelers and left as seasoned Egyptologists- some even being credited for the excavation of the Temple of Mut. Perhaps not surprisingly, the social discrimination and gender norms that hampered the Egyptologists is an echo of the discrimination that haunted the Egyptian women laid to rest in the tombs they hoped to locate. Sheppard’s book is an excellent addition to the growing social history scholarship that puts women back in the historical narrative. I recommend reading this in tandem with Lynne Olson’s Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt’s Ancient Temples from Destruction. Both emphasize a fundamental truth: Women were present, women contributed, women made history.

Really interesting book. Loved learning more about women explorers, travelers and archeologists. It was fun to learn more about the time period and Egypt too.

In the last few years, there have been dozens of cases of historians uncovering the stories of heroic women that would have otherwise been lost to time. Many were contemporaries of famous male inventors and explorers whose exploits have been told and retold. Yet the stories of these women and their accomplishments remained hidden. This book turns the traditional wealthy European tomb raider stories on their heads. The women that are the subject of the book have interesting and complex lives, which are told beautifully. Let's hope that these stories become as well-known as those of their male counterparts.

This book was clearly well reseacrhed, and had an interesting premise, but I found it really dragged and was weighed down by too many details. I'd only recommend for people seriously interested in the subject matter.

The subject of this book fascinated me, but the writing was a bit textbook for what I was hoping. Nonetheless, it is an important book to highlight women in history, especially in this fascinating time.

Wonderful, and very enlightening of what was taking place during this time period. This a great read for young women looking for stories about them!

Great read! I had absolutely no knowledge of these women and their contributions to Egypt exploration. The story form of writing really engages the reader. I've always had a fascination with archeology and this just adds another dimension to that interest.

This here was an interesting read but a good book on women’s history involving Egyptologists! It was a good listen. I felt like it was more of an Amelia story because she set the blueprint for other women to follow in her footsteps! Set in the 1800’s where, of course, women couldn’t do a lot of things for themselves! Also, it felt chunky at times of unnecessary story but other than that a decent read!

This was an educational book that tried to be a biographical prose book. While I learned a lot, it was not what I had hoped it would be.

A look into the women archeologists who excavated ancient Egypt. I was expecting this to be more of a synthesized history, but it was more biographies. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I had gone into it known it was more in biography style. It also was not laid out in the most logical sense. I don't mind a history so it wasn't an academic problem like I know some people disliked. For me, it was the layout that let down what could have been a really interesting history.

Highly researched, I thought this book would be a little more accessible to the average reader. It definitely has interesting stories about the women there, but it was a little dry for me. Recommend highly to those really interested in the history of Egyptology archaeology. For the casual reader, it might be too much.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC. #sponsored