American Egyptologist Barbara Mertz is best known for her numerous archaeologically-related novels, including a long-running series on the fictional Egyptologist family of Amelia Peabody and Radcliffe Emerson. Educated at the Oriental Institute in Chicago during the 1950s, Mertz found that there weren't a lot of openings for women Egyptologists with small children. Fortunately for us, she began writing.
Mertz's first published books, "Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs" and "Red Land, Black Land" were popular introductions to Egyptology and are still in press today. Mertz, under the pseudonyms of Barbara Michaels and Elizabeth Peters, has done more for the popularization of scientific archaeology than all the rest of us public archaeologists together.
Summaries of each of the Mertz's novels about that delightful Egyptologist Amelia Peabody have been collected here.
