Agnes and Margaret Smith

Agnes Smith Lewis ( * January 1843 in Irvine, Ayrshire, † 1926) and her twin sister Margaret Dunlop Gibson ( Gibson and Smith, † January 1920 ) were English theologians, Orientalistinnen and travelers. When her father died, she received an inheritance from a quarter of a million pounds, traveled in 1866 to Greece and Egypt. They learned Greek, later Syriac, Arabic and Hebrew, and visited in 1890 with a letter from James Rendel Harris St Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai, where they received access to the library and a Syriac translation of the New Testament discovered that they write together with Rendel Harris were allowed.

On other expeditions they acquired a Hebrew manuscript of Ecclesiasticus, which led to the discovery of the manuscripts of the Cairo Geniza later.

They received doctorates from the universities of Halle (1899), (1901 ) St. Andrews, Heidelberg ( 1904) and Trinity College Dublin (1911 ); only Cambridge, where they lived and had some in the scientific discourse, they were denied the scientific recognition.