Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope (12 March 1776 – 23 June 1839) was a British adventurer, writer, antiquarian, and one of the most famous travellers of her age.

Her excavation of Ascalon in 1815 is considered the first to use modern archaeological principles, and her use of a medieval Italian document is described as "one of the earliest uses of textual sources by field archaeologists".

After living for some time at Montagu Square in London, she moved to Wales and then left Great Britain for good in February 1810 after the death of her brother.

It is claimed that when the party arrived in Athens, the poet, Lord Byron, a university friend of Bruce's, dived into the sea to greet them.

Byron later described Stanhope as "that dangerous thing, a female wit", and remarked that she had "a great disregard of received notion in her conversation as well as conduct".

When a British frigate took them to Cairo, she continued to wear clothing which was extremely unorthodox for an English woman: she bought a purple velvet robe, embroidered trousers, waistcoat, jacket, saddle and sabre.

From Cairo she continued her travels, and over a period of two years she visited Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionian Islands, the Peloponnese, Athens, Constantinople, Rhodes, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria.

Learning from fortune-tellers that her destiny was to become the bride of a new messiah, she made matrimonial overtures to Ibn Saud, chief of the Wahhabi Arabs and leader of the First Saudi State.

[1] In 1815, on the strength of this map, she travelled to the ruins of Ashkelon on the Mediterranean coast north of Gaza,[11] and persuaded the Ottoman authorities to allow her to excavate the site.

[1] She did this as a gesture of goodwill to the Ottoman government, in order to show that her excavation was intended to recover valuable treasures for them, and not to loot cultural relics for shipment back to Europe, as so many of her countrymen were doing at this time.

She feared that if she paid too much attention to it, "malicious people might say I came to look for statues for my countrymen, and not for treasures for the [Sublime] Porte", the customary phrase to describe the palace of the Sultan himself.Stanhope was not digging the ruins in Ashkelon for her own personal greed and gain.

[4] When Meryon left for England, Lady Hester moved to a remote abandoned monastery at Joun, a village eight miles from Sidon, where she lived until her death.

At first she was greeted by emir Bashir Shihab II, but over the years she gave sanctuary to hundreds of refugees of Druze inter-clan and inter-religious squabbles and earned his enmity.

She died destitute; Andrew Bonar and Robert Murray M'Cheyne, who visited the region a few weeks' later, reported that after her death, "not a para of money was found in the house.