Annie Abernethie Pirie Quibell


Annie Abernathie Pirie Quibell was a Scottish artist and archaeologist.

Life

Annie Abernathie Pirie Quibell was born in 1862 in Scotland. Her father was minister and Principal at the University of Aberdeen. As a young woman, she originally trained as an artist and her work was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy. She was a student of Flinders Petrie at University College London in the 1890s, which at the time was the only university in the UK to allow women to take degrees. She travelled to Egypt in 1895 to work as a copyist with another artist Rosalind Frances Emily Paget at Saqqara and the Ramesseum, Thebes. She was a part of the excavation team at El Kab in 1897, and Hierakonpolis the following year and continued working in excavations in Egypt with her husband, James Edward Quibell, whom she married in 1900. They first fell in love while both suffering from a bout of food poisoning while on excavation, and ultimately worked together at Saqqara for eight years from 1905 to 1914
Her illustrations of archaeological finds were featured in archaeological reports on Saqqara, the Ramesseum and Hierakonpolis. Annie Quibell was also an author in her own right. Her first publication was an English translation of the Guide to the Cairo Museum in 1906, done in conjunction with her husband. She produced short guides to the Pyramids at Giza and the Saqqara tombs which were originally published in Cairo. In the 1920s, she published two further books, Egyptian History and Art, and A Wayfarer in Egypt. After her return to Britain, she worked on arranging the Egyptian gallery at the Marischal Museum at Aberdeen University. Annie Pirie Quibell died in England in 1927 of leukaemia. Her archaeological drawings are still used by researchers and students, and can be viewed at the Ancient Egypt Rediscovered Gallery of the National Museum of Scotland.