Name: Agnes
Surname: Smith Lewis
Name: Margaret
Surname: Dunlop Gibson
Known as The Giblews and The Westminster Sisters
Birth: Irvine (Ayrshire, Scotland), 16 aprile 1843
Profession: semiticists, arabists, philologists, paleographers and translators.
Their father, John Smith, a lawyer with a passion for linguistics, provided the twins with an education that, at the time, was reserved exclusively for boys. As a result, Agnes and Margaret accompanied him on his numerous travels. They began studying foreign languages—German, French, Italian, Spanish, Modern Greek, Latin, and ancient Semitic languages—motivated by their father’s promise to take them to every country whose language they had learned.
After their father’s death, now adults, they returned to the Middle East. Later, after both became widows within a few years of marriage—Agnes of Samuel Savage Lewis, librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and Margaret of James Young Gibson, a Protestant minister, writer, and translator—they dedicated themselves to extensive travel, primarily aimed at studying and researching ancient manuscripts.
In 1868, they left London with Murray’s Hand-Book of Egypt under their arms and the protective guidance of Grace Blyth, their tutor and necessary chaperone. They traveled through Paris, Vienna, and Budapest, then sailed along the Danube to the Black Sea, eventually reaching Constantinople. From there, they continued to Jaffa, Alexandria, and Cairo. They set out again in 1883, and in 1886, Agnes traveled alone with Grace. The sisters reunited only for their two most famous journeys in 1892 and 1893, both to St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai.
In 1892, Agnes discovered what would become known as the Codex Sinaiticus Syriacus—also referred to as the Codex Lewis in her honor, the Sinai Palimpsest, or Sinai Syr. 30. This palimpsest parchment manuscript, beneath an eighth-century collection of saints’ lives, contained a Syriac translation of the Four Gospels that was older than the Peshitta, having been copied in the late fourth century from a second-century original. This discovery, which Agnes herself published, is considered the most significant after Constantin von Tischendorf’s 1859 discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus.
The following year, the Lewis sisters returned to the monastery with three Cambridge scholars—Robert L. Bensly, Francis C. Burkitt, and J. Rendel Harris—to transcribe the manuscript. Following this discovery, Agnes and Margaret took advantage of their numerous trips across Europe and the Middle East to acquire biblical, liturgical, and patristic manuscripts, particularly palimpsests (including the Codex Climaci Rescriptus). Over time, they amassed a personal collection of about 1,700 pieces, which they donated to Cambridge University upon their deaths, having also published many of the texts.
The twins were the only ones to travel short distances by modern automobile. They used all the major means of transport of their time, from the most innovative and fast—such as cars, trains, and steamships—to the most ancient and traditional, such as horses and other pack animals commonly used in different regions. For river journeys, especially along the Nile, they often preferred to rent private dahabeeyahs.
They were known for their expensive clothing, which, despite its cost, gave them a rather unkempt appearance, as well as for their signature white stockings and a new type of bag called a “Gladstone,” which could easily be fastened to a mule’s back. They also carried small pistols for self-defense.
Women’s Rights Issue: As women, Agnes and Margaret were denied access to English universities and could not travel alone. For this reason, even on their first journey to the Middle East, they were accompanied by Grace Blyth. Due to their gender, the Lewis sisters received no formal recognition from the University of Cambridge, unlike in other European cities such as Halle and Heidelberg, as well as in Dublin, their native Scotland (at St. Andrews), and from the Royal Asiatic Society.