It was no more than a silvered glass bottle, 11cm long, but should it be uncorked, a villager warned, ‘they do say there is a witch in it and if you let ’un out there’ll be a peck o’ trouble.’ Such was Margaret Murray’s bequest to the Pitt Rivers Museum.
Born in 1863 in Calcutta, capital of British India, Murray was educated at home by her mother and a vicar uncle convinced of the inferiority of women – the combination of which may explain the independent cast of mind she showed throughout her adult life.
She only enrolled in the new Egyptology department at University College London in 1894, but rapidly showed considerable ability with hieroglyphs and published her first academic treatise the following year. Murray was by now a friend of Flinders Petrie, her teacher and an eminent Egyptologist; he would make her the UK’s first female archaeology lecturer in 1899. (Another half century elapsed before UCL appointed their first female professor.)
