Bertha Porter (1852–1941)

Bertha Porter was born in London, England, to Frederick William Porter, an Irish-born architect and surveyor, and his wife Sarah Moyle.
She wrote for the Dictionary of National Biography, completing 156 biographies by the time she left. She was then engaged by F. (Francis) Llewellyn Griffith of Oxford University and the British Museum to lead the compilation of a mammoth reference work, Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Reliefs, and Paintings. This work established the location and content of all known texts on ancient monuments in Egypt and later Sudan. The task occupied Bertha for nearly 30 years, until her retirement from the project in 1929. To prepare for the job, she studied the ancient Egyptian language and hieroglyphs with Prof. Griffith and Prof. Kurt Sethe at the University of Göttingen. She used as her sources documents, photographs, and drawings, as she never traveled to Egypt. Instead, from 1924, she relied on Rosalind L.B. Moss, a trained anthropologist, who inspected the monuments and verified their contents. Moss took over the project on Bertha Porter's retirement and supervised the publication of seven volumes. The bibliography is commonly referred to as Porter & Moss. It continues to be produced in updated second editions and is one of the vital tools of Egyptology and Egyptian archaeology.