Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson

As the twin daughters of John Smith of Irvine, Ayrshire, Scotland, they learned more than 12 languages between them, specialising in Arabic, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, and Syriac, and became acclaimed scholars in their academic fields, and benefactors to the Presbyterian Church of England, especially to Westminster College, Cambridge.

[10] On 11 September 1883, Margaret married James Young Gibson, a scholar trained for the ministry of the United Presbyterian Church, but later working on Spanish translations.

In 1887, Agnes married Samuel Savage Lewis, a classicist, librarian, and fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

The year after (1883), they returned with three Cambridge scholars that included Professor Robert L. Bensly and Francis C. Burkitt, and their wives, as well as J. Rendel Harris, to copy the whole of the manuscript[12] The palimpsest manuscript was found to have been overwritten by the Lives of Holy Women in Syriac dated to 779 CE by John the Recluse as well as also having four 6th century folios with a Syriac witness of the Departure of Mary (Transitus Mariae) underneath.

[13][14] Her second most valuable attribution to the field of Aramaic (Christian Palestinian Aramaic, Syriac) studies and New and Old Testament text critique was the purchase of another unique palimpsest manuscript, the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, in Egypt (Cairo 1895; Port Tewfik 1906), and the largest batch from an anonymous Berlin (Germany) scholar (1905), containing underneath several individual manuscripts in Christian Palestinian Aramaic of various lectionaries with Gospels, Epistles, and Old Testament pericopes, an early apocryphal text Dormition of Mary with the hagiographic story of Peter and Paul (5th–7th century),[15][16] and Greek with Gospels (7th/8th centuries),[17] overwritten by the Syriac translation of Scala paradisi and Liber ad pastorem by the monk John Climacus of Sinai (8th–9th century), of which now surfaced the missing quire at Saint Catherine’s Monastery.

[30][31][32] These palimpsest folios were lent to the exhibition “Internationale Ausstellung für Buchgewerbe und Graphik" in Leipzig 1914, and due to the outbreak of the First World War they were only returned in 1936 after the successful intervention by Paul Kahle.

[33] They collected about 1,700 manuscript fragments and books including the acquisition of Eberhard Nestle library with rare editions,[1] now known as the Lewis-Gibson collection, including some formerly of the Cairo Genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo, the earliest Hebrew fragments of a Ecclesiasticus manuscript, identified by Solomon Schechter.

[34][35][36] The sisters continued to travel and write until the First World War when they slowly withdrew from their activity as scholars due to ill health.