Mary Chubb was a United Kingdom archaeologist and author, whose writing was focused on the human aspect of the ancient world. She was known in archaeological circles for her memoirs Nefertiti Lived Here and City in the Sand, recounting her experiences on archaeological excavations.
Background
Mary Alford Chubb was born on March 22, 1903, in London, United Kingdom. She was the daughter of John Burland Chubb, a surveyor, and Bertha Isabel Neild. Her family believed in keeping records, and family papers of all sorts which she inherited not only fired her interest in the past but snagged the fringes of history.
Education
Mary Chubb studied sculpture at the Central School of Art (now the Central School of Art and Design).
Career
To pay for a sculpture course, Mary Chubb became an assistant secretary at the Egypt Exploration Society, 1929-1932, and taught Latin in boys' preparatory school. Chubb describes in her book, Nefertiti Lived Here, how one rainy morning in London, while searching for an artifact in the basement, she came across a beautiful turquoise fragment of tile, still with desert sands on it. In her words: "Suddenly I was invaded by a great longing; I wanted to know all I could about the place where the tile had come from." And so it was that Mary Chubb became the first professional excavation administrator. Mary Chubb worked on-site, a key part of the excavation team. In 1930-1932, she excavated at Amarna for two seasons. She then joined the excavations of the University of Chicago in Iraq. She went to Chicago in 1938 to help write up the excavations and returned to the United Kingdom in 1939. Mary Chubb was seriously injured in an accident, losing a leg. After the accident, she decided to become a broadcaster and writer. She was a contributor to magazines, including Hunch, and to BBC radio.
The excavations took place in the 1930s, but Chubb did not write them until the 1950s. Her book Nefertiti Lived Here deals with an excavation of the site of the ancient city Tell el Amarna in Egypt. This was the city from which King Akhenaten ruled with his beautiful and apparently influential wife, Nefertiti, in the fourteenth century B.C. Akhenaten was considered a heretic because he had rejected traditional Egyptian pantheistic religion and set up a new belief system that recognized only one god, the sun god Aten, with Akhenaten being the god's emissary. Tell el Amarna endured only for about a decade and a half, as Akhenaten's successor, young Tutankhamun, moved the capital back to Karnak. Official records of Egyptian history did not begin to even acknowledge Tell el Amarna's existence until about 1900. The dig in which Chubb participated took place about thirty years later.
In City in the Sand, Chubb recounts the discovery and exploration of Eshnunna, an ancient city in what is now Iraq. Eshnunna was an important city during the second millennium B.C.; it was ruled for a time by the neighboring city of Ur, then was the seat of a small, independent kingdom before being conquered by Hammurabi. Its contributions to civilization include the Laws of Eshnunna, a written set of codes developed several years before Hammurabi formulated his. Chubb's story of the finds at Eshnunna is not just of great historical interest but an imaginative re-telling of a human one. Chubb provides detailed descriptions not only of the site and the artifacts uncovered but also of her colleagues and the hardships and joys they shared so that the book seems almost like a novel in personality and pace, combine scholarship and fun, the personal and the intelligently treated distance.
In the 1960s, Mary Chubb began publishing a series of archaeology works for children with Geoffrey Bles, a London-based publisher who had brought out five of C. S. Lewis's Narnia books. Chubb used the alphabet to give her books an accessible structure. Her first children's book, An Alphabet of Ancient Egypt, drew on the experiences she had in Egypt at Amarna. Each letter of the alphabet represented a piece of the archaeological puzzle, covering archaeological methods, finds, historical figures (both ancient and modern), and activities. The striking design of the book, a page of text opposite a full-page illustration, some based on ancient paintings, helped to cement these concepts in readers' minds. Chubb's text in Cartouches demystified that word for Mitford, defining the oval framing for hieroglyphics that was graphically interpreted in Jill Watts's accompanying artwork. Meanwhile Excavating enabled Chubb to describe the processes of work on-site - recording, subsequent destruction of layers, and publication - as well as the workforce carrying out most of the physical labor. In Flinders Petrie, Chubb continued her discussion of archaeological activity, describing Petrie's careful conservation of a painted pavement at Amarna with tapioca and water in the 1890s, while the final destination of excavated artifacts was revealed in Museums.
Chubb's subsequent Alphabets also represented a marriage of aspects of ancient life and legend and modern archaeological techniques and contexts - effectively scripting spadework for her readers (both young and old). In An Alphabet of Assyria and Babylonia, she drew on her experience of working in the late 1930s at the Oriental Institute's excavations at the ancient city of Eshnunna in Iraq, something which she had already chronicled for adults in her 1957 memoir City in the Sand. Digs in this Alphabet explores how and where archaeologists excavate sites to discover ancient people and their history. In An Alphabet of Ancient Greece (part 1), several of Jill Watts's illustrations show the intersection of tourism and archaeology. Tourists are depicted viewing the ancient remains of Corinth, Knossos on Crete, where Chubb's text highlights Arthur Evans's work on the excavation and restoration of the site, and Mycenae. The German excavator Heinrich Schliemann's dreams of Troy and (with his Greek wife Sophia at his side) discoveries of unique gold and ivory objects there and at Mycenae are revealed through Schliemann and Treasure Hunter.