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Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson were twin sisters born in 1843. Between them they knew more than a dozen languages. Agnes's discovery of the Syriac Sinaiticus, on one of her many journeys to Sinai, was the most important manuscript find since that of the Codex Sinaiticus in 1859 and they made a significant contribution to Syriac and Arabic studies in their cataloguing of the Arabic and Syriac manuscripts at Saint Catherine's Monastery. They travelled much in Europe and in the Middle East until the start of the First World War and they collected about 1700 manuscript fragments, now known as the Lewis-Gibson collection. Margaret died in 1920 and Agnes in 1926.

Gertrude Caton-Thompson was born in London in 1888 and was educated at Eastbourne and in Paris. Her first experience in archaeology came in 1915 working as a bottle washer in an excavation in France. During World War I she worked for the British Ministry of Shipping as part of which she attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. In 1921 Caton-Thompson embarked on studies at University College, London. The following year she began attending courses at Newnham College, Cambridge, before joining further excavations in Egypt in 1924. While much of her archaeological work was in Egypt, she also went on expeditions in other countries, for example, Zimbabwe and South Arabia. Her many contributions to the field of archaeology include a technique for excavating archaeological sites, and information on Paleolithic to Predynastic civilizations in Zimbabwe and Egypt. Caton-Thompson held many official positions in organizations such as the Prehistoric Society and the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Caton-Thompson retired from fieldwork after the Second World War. A long time friend of Dorothy Hoare, a colleague from Cambridge, Caton-Thompson bought and shared a house with Hoare. After Hoare married Jose "Toty" M. de Navarro, another Cambridge lecturer in archaeology, the Navarros continued to share the house with Caton-Thompson. When she and the Navarros retired from academic life in 1956, Caton-Thompson moved with them to Broadway, Worcestershire. She resided with them and their son, Michael, for the rest of her life. She died in 1985, in her 97th year at Broadway.