Mary Brodrick

Mary (May) Brodrick FRGS (5 April 1858 – 13 July 1933) was a British archaeologist and Egyptologist who was one of the first female excavators in Egypt.

Thomas Brodrick was a solicitor,[4] and the 1861 census shows the family living within the Liberty of the Close, in the grounds of Salisbury Cathedral, Wiltshire.

[6] Brodrick was the first woman to study Egyptology under Gaston Maspero at the Sorbonne,[7] and Hebrew and Semitic archaeology under Ernest Renan at the Collège de France.

According to Brodrick, Maspero warned her that she would "probably have a very bad time" and indeed when she first attended she found the students to be rough, rude, and smelly.

[8] Back in England, Brodrick entered College Hall, London in 1888 where she studied at University College London under Stuart Poole (co-founder with Amelia Edwards of the Egypt Exploration Society) and the British Museum's Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities Peter le Page Renouf.

[4] She was a member of the Committee of Philology and Literary Archaeology of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago 1893 and did work in America for the Egyptian Exploration Fund, later being named their American Branch Honorary Secretary.

[13] Alongside her friend and fellow Egyptologist Anna Anderson Morton she began leading paid tours for parties of women in Egypt.

[4] In 1892 she translated and edited Auguste Mariette's Aperçu de l'histoire ancienne d'Egypte which was published by Scribner's in New York, 1892, as Outlines of Ancient Egyptian History.

After some minor legacies of chattels and possessions, the residue of her estate was left two-thirds on trust to her brother and one-third to Mrs (later Dame) Eversley Chaning Robinson, her friend and executrix,[3] and then on to College Hall.

[18][19] It was that, not inconsiderable, residue that provided the funds necessary to allow the completion of the long-planned extension to College Hall in 1934 which was named The Mary Brodrick Wing in her honour.