Agnes and Margaret Smith

A plaque commemorating the Smith Sisters in Westminster College, Cambridge

The grave of James Young Gibson and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh

Agnes and Margaret Smith, twins, were born on 11 January to Margaret Dunlop and John Smith, a solicitor and amateur linguist. Their mother died two weeks after their birth, and they were brought up by nannies, a governess, and their father.[8][1][2] They were educated in private schools in Birkenhead, Cheshire and Kensington, London (1853–62),[1][2] interspersed with travels in Europe guided by their father.[9]

After their father's death, they settled in London and joined the Presbyterian church in Clapham Road.[10] Already conversationally fluent in German, French and Italian,[11] they continued to learn languages and travelled in Europe and the Middle East, including travelling up the Nile and visiting Palestine in 1868.[12] In 1870, Agnes wrote Eastern Pilgrims, an account of their experiences in Egypt and Palestine.[13]

In 1883, the twins, by then also quite fluent in Greek, travelled to Athens and other parts of Greece.[14] beginning a lifelong affectionate relationship with Greek Orthodoxy, whose monks occupied Saint Catherine's Monastery at Sinai. On 11 September 1883, Margaret married James Young Gibson, a scholar trained for the ministry, but then working on translations;[15] and in 1887, Agnes married Samuel Savage Lewis, librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.[16][17] Samuel had also trained as a clergyman. Each marriage was soon ended with the death of the husband.[18] Margaret's marriage only lasted slightly over three years.[19]

She is buried with her husband in Dean Cemetery in western Edinburgh. The grave lies on the north wall of the first northern extension to the main cemetery.

Plaque in Saint Columba's Church, Cambridge, commemorating Agnes and Margaret Smith.

By 1890, the sisters settled in Cambridge. Agnes began to study Syriac (Margaret took it up later, in 1893,[20]) and improve their Arabic, which Agnes had begun to learn in 1883.[15] Enthused by Quaker and Orientalist J. Rendel Harris's account of his discovery at Saint Catherine's Monastery of a Syriac text of the Apology of Aristides they travelled to the monastery in 1892, and discovered one of earliest Syriac version of the Old Syriac Gospels next to the earlier known Curetonian Gospels. The year after (1883), they returned with three Cambridge scholars that included Professor Robert L. Bensly and Francis C. Burkitt, and their wifes, as well as J. Rendel Harris, to copy the whole of the manuscript, known as the Syriac Sinaiticus or the Sinaitic Manuscript (Lewis),[21] which enlightened the Syriac transmission and added valuable variants to New Testament studies.[22] The palimpsest manuscript was found to have been overwritten by the Lives of Holy Women in Syriac dated to 779 CE by John the Recluse as well as also having four 6th century folios with a Syriac witness of the Departure of Mary (Transitus Mariae) underneath.[23][24] During this expedition, both sisters also catalogued the monastery's valuable collection of Syriac and Arabic manuscripts.[1][2][25]

In their travels to Egypt, Agnes S. Lewis and Margaret D. Gibson were also able to buy among other unique manuscripts in Christian Palestinian Aramaic as e.g. an hagiographic palimpsest manuscript The Forty Martyrs of Sinai, and Eulogios the stone-cutter from the 6th–7th century (1906) overwritten by a Christian Arabic text (8th century);[26][27] a nearly complete eleventh-century lectionary (1895)[28] of Christian Palestinian Aramaic with noteworthy biblical pericopes in 1895 and later 1905 some of the missing folios from a German collector (Westminster College, Cambridge);[29][30] several leaves under Syriac Christian homilies where Agnes S. Lewis detected separate 7th and 8th century Qu'ranic manuscripts, which she and Alphonse Mingana dated as possibly pre-Uthmanic.[31][32][33] These palimpsest folios were lent to the exhibition “Internationale Ausstellung für Buchgewerbe und Graphik" in Leipzig 1914, and due to the outbreak of the First World War they were only returned in 1936 after the successful intervention by Paul Kahle.[34] They collected about 1,700 manuscript fragments, now known as the Lewis-Gibson collection, including some formerly of the Genizah of the Bin Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo.[35] The sisters continued to travel and write until the First World War, and were behind other discoveries through acquisition, including that of an early Hebrew manuscript of Ecclesiasticus in the Cairo Genizah, identified by Solomon Schechter.[36][37][38]

J. Rendel Harris's Cambridge course in palaeography allowed Agnes S. Lewis to step onto the academic stage as a Syriac scholar "of international repute",[39] 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 the two scholarly twins with degrees (it did not admit women to degrees until 1948), they received honorary degrees[nb 1] from the universities of Halle, Heidelberg,[1][2][40] Dublin, and St Andrews,[1][2][41] and both were honoured in addition with the Triennial gold medal of the Royal Asiatic Society, the blue riband of oriental research in 1915.[1]

At Cambridge, they attended St Columba's Church.[42] They were generous hostesses at their home, Castlebrae, which became the centre of a lively intellectual and religious circle.[43]

St Columba's United Reformed Church, established as the Presbyterian chaplaincy to the University of Oxford, with the help of the Smith sisters.

The sisters used their inheritance to endow the grounds and part of the buildings of Westminster College in Cambridge.[1] This was long after Nonconformists were allowed to become full members of the Oxbridge universities by the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts; and that Presbyterian college moved from Queen Square, London to a site acquired from St John's College, Cambridge in 1899. They also helped the establishment of the Presbyterian chaplaincy to the University of Oxford, now at St Columba's United Reformed Church, Oxford.

A collection of scrapbooks of press cuttings relating to Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson can be found at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham.[44]

• Müller-Kessler, Christa (2004), Dunlop Gibson, née Smith (1843–1920), in Oxford Dictionary of the National Biography, vol. 22. Oxford: Oxford Press, pp. 89–90. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/55585.
• Müller-Kessler, Christa (2004), Lewis, Agnes Smith (1843–1926), in Oxford Dictionary of the National Biography, vol. 33. Oxford: Oxford Press, pp. 579–580. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/34510.

• Whigham Price, Alan (1964), The Ladies of Castlebrae. The Life of Dr. Agnes Smith Lewis and Dr. Margaret Dunlop Gibson (Annual Lecture to the Presbyterian Historical Society, October 1964; University of Durham. Durham.
• Whigham Price, Alan (1985), The Ladies of Castlebrae. London: Headline Book Publishing. ISBN 0-86299-228-1
• United Reformed Church (2004), A Gift Box ISBN 0-85346-222-4.
• Cornick, D. and C. Binfield (editors) (2006) From Cambridge To Sinai United Reformed Church. ISBN 978-0-85346-251-4
• Jefferson, Rebecca J. W. (2009) "Sisters of Semitics: A Fresh Appreciation of the Scholarship of Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson" in Medieval Feminist Forum 45/1, 23–49
• Soskice, Janet (2009), Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Found the Hidden Gospels London: Vintage ISBN 978-1-4000-3474-1
• Brock, Sebastian P. (2014), Agnes Lewis (1843–1926) and Margaret Gibson (1843–1920), in Predrag Bukovec (ed.), Christlicher Orient im Protrait – Wissenschaftsgeschichte des Christlichen Orients. Religionen im Vorderen Orient (RVO) 2. Hamburg: Dr. Kovač, pp. 267–280. ISBN 978-3-8300-7812-8

• Agnes Smith Lewis, mss. in Catalogue of the Syriac the Convent of S. Catharine on Mount Sinai (1894)
• Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson
• Digitised lantern slides of the sisters' travels from Westminster College, on Cambridge Digital Library