Agnes and Margaret Smith - Academic Work

Academic Work

By 1890, the sisters settled in Cambridge. Agnes began to study Syriac (Margaret took it up later, in 1893,) and improve their Arabic, which Agnes had begun to learn in 1883. Enthused by Quaker Orientalist James Rendel Harris's account of his discovery at Saint Catherine's Monastery of a Syriac text of the Apology of Aristides, and by news of Constantin von Tischendorf's rediscovery there of Codex Sinaiticus, they travelled to the monastery in 1892, and discovered the earliest Syriac version of the Gospels known thus far. The next year, they returned as part of a larger party that included Professor Robert Bensly and Francis Crawford Burkitt, as well as J. Rendel Harris, to transcribe the whole of the manuscript, known as the Sinaitic Palimpsest or the Sinaitic Manuscript (Lewis), which provided fresh stimulus to New Testament studies. The palimpsest was found to have previously contained a Syriac Lives of the Saints by John the Recluse. During the expedition, Agnes and Margaret also catalogued the monastery's extensive collection of Syriac and Arabic manuscripts. Janet Soskice's account of the expedition describes it as 'slightly disjointed', and recounts it as subject to increasing mutual suspicion and resentment.

The sisters continued to travel and write until the First World War, and were instrumental in other discoveries, including that by Solomon Schechter of an early Hebrew manuscript of Ecclesiasticus.

Harris's Cambridge course in palaeography allowed Agnes to step onto the academic stage as a Syriac scholar 'of international repute', as author of the introduction to the expedition team's 1894 publication of a translation of the palimpsest. Though the University of Cambridge never honoured them with degrees (it did not admit women to degrees until 1948), they received honorary degrees from the universities of Halle, Heidelberg Dublin, and St Andrews including the first theological doctorates awarded to women.

At Cambridge, they attended St Columba's Church. They were generous hostesses at their home, Castlebrae, which became the centre of a lively intellectual and religious circle.