Agnes Smith Lewis (1843–1926)

Agnes Smith Lewis and her identical twin sister Margaret Smith Gibson were both remarkable scholars and linguists who travelled and worked together. Agnes attended the Irvine Academy and in 1887, she married Samuel Savage Lewis, a clergyman. With his early death in 1891, Agnes lived and worked with the widowed Margaret.
They became the center of a lively intellectual and religious circle. In 1892, they travelled to the library of Saint Catherine's Monastery in the Egyptian Sinai, where they discovered and translated the Sinai Palimpsest manuscripts, some of the oldest surviving New Testament manuscripts. Margaret photographed and exhibited some of them at the International Congress of Orientalists. Using Agnes's diaries, Margaret wrote and published How the Codex was Found in 1898.