Lina Eckenstein

Lina Dorina Johanna Eckenstein (23 September 1857 – 4 May 1931) was a British polymath and historian who was acknowledged as a philosopher and scholar in the women's movement.

Life Eckenstein's father was a Jewish socialist from Bonn who had fled Germany following the failed revolution of 1848. Eckenstein was born in Islington, London, in 1857; the highly independent mountaineer Oscar Eckenstein was her younger brother. Eckenstein had a large range of languages which she is thought to have obtained at some educational facility in Switzerland or Germany.

She came to notice after joining a club started by the mathematician (and in time eugenicist) Karl Pearson which allowed middle-class radicals to talk about sex. The club, called the Men and Women's Club, operated during the late 1880s. Eckenstein was seen as a "new woman" and she presented studies she had made of the sexual relations of the Romans and of Swiss men and women during the Reformation. Eckenstein's family were German, but she also knew French and Italian, Middle High German, Middle English, and classical and medieval Latin and European history. This scholarly achievement made her overqualified to be a governess, but she became the governess to Margery Corbett. Eckenstein's work is credited with recovering Caritas Pirckheimer from historic obscurity. This work is thought to be the most scholarly of her publications despite the inclusion of some doubtful or mythical German history.

Traveller In 1902 she walked through the upper Arno valley and published an account of her travels. The following year she began a new escapade, working with the archaeologists Hilda and Flinders Petrie in Egypt. She took on the administrative role of running the excavations camp and ensuring that finds were catalogued correctly. She worked at excavations at Abydos, Saqqara, Serabit el-Khadim, and El Shatt. In the Osireion at Abydos, she copied the art on the wall. At the temple of King Seti, made a connection between some Egyptian art and a child's nursery rhyme. Eckenstein was well-qualified to publish books on the Sinai, as she had trekked across it by camel with Hilda Petrie (c.1905) and a single guide. She published several other books that mixed fact with imagination. One of her books published in 1924, Tutankh-aten, was about the imagined childhood of Moses. A History of Sinai, 1921 Tutankh-aten, 1924 A Spell of Words: Studies in Language Bearing on Custom, 1932 The Women of Early Christianity, 1935