Would That We Had One Like Her

There died in Egypt the famous archaeologist Madame Devonshire. She devoted herself to antiquities for half a century, lecturing on them in Egypt and Europe, organizing tours of the monuments in Egypt, and producing a collection of valuable works in English and French, among them "Rambles in Cairo," "Eighty Mosques," "The Builders of Islamic Cairo," and others. She then published the journey of Sultan Qaytbay and set about translating the history of Ibn Iyas, completing a portion of it — this apart from her studies scattered through the newspapers of Egypt and Europe, until her name became inseparable from the Islamic antiquities of Egypt, so that the old journalist said: "Egypt is a robe of splendor, and Devonshire is the one who knows it." She reached the age of eighty in 1944, and His Majesty Farouk bestowed on her the Order of Kamal of the third class. She left a choice library counted among

the finest libraries in Islamic arts and antiquities. The lady was French, married to an Englishman.