Editing Margaret Murray (section)

===Petra, Cambridge, and London: 1935–1953===
[[File:Margaret Murray 1938.jpg|thumb|upright|Murray in 1938]]
During Murray's 1935 trip to Palestine, she visited [[Petra]] in neighbouring Jordan. Intrigued by the site, in March and April 1937 she returned in order to carry out a small excavation in several cave dwellings at the site, subsequently writing both an excavation report and a guidebook on Petra.{{sfn|Drower|2004|pp=128–129}} Back in England, from 1934 to 1940, Murray aided the cataloguing of Egyptian antiquities at [[Girton College, Cambridge]], and also gave lectures in Egyptology at the university until 1942.{{sfn|Sheppard|2013|pp=226–227}} Her interest in folklore more broadly continued and she wrote the introduction to ''Lincolshire Folklore'' by [[Ethel Rudkin]], in which she discussed how superior women were as folklorists to men.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Brown|first=Theo|date=1 January 1986|title=Obituary: Ethel H. Rudkin, 1893–1985|url=https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.1986.9716384|journal=Folklore|volume=97|issue=2|pages=222–223|doi=10.1080/0015587X.1986.9716384|issn=0015-587X|access-date=16 November 2020|archive-date=20 July 2023|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230720033137/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0015587X.1986.9716384|url-status=live}}</ref>

During the [[Second World War]], Murray evaded [[the Blitz]] of London by moving to Cambridge, where she volunteered for a group (probably the [[Army Bureau of Current Affairs]] or [[Royal Army Educational Corps|The British Way and Purpose]]) who educated military personnel to prepare them for post-war life.{{sfnm|1a1=Drower|1y=2004|1pp=130–131|2a1=Sheppard|2y=2013|2p=228}} Based in the city, she embarked on research into the town's Early Modern history, examining documents stored in local parish churches, [[Downing College]], and [[Ely Cathedral]]; she never published her findings.{{sfn|Drower|2004|p=131}} In 1945, she briefly became involved in the "[[Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?]]" murder case.<ref name=":4">{{Cite news|url=https://strangeremains.com/2015/04/24/who-put-bella-down-the-wych-elm/|title=Who put Bella down the Wych Elm?|date=24 April 2015|work=Strange Remains|access-date=17 January 2018|language=en-US|archive-date=2 December 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201202135946/https://strangeremains.com/2015/04/24/who-put-bella-down-the-wych-elm/|url-status=live}}</ref>

After the war ended she returned to London, settling into a [[bedsit]] room in Endsleigh Street, which was close to University College London (UCL) and the [[UCL Institute of Archaeology|Institute of Archaeology]] (then an independent institution, now part of UCL); she continued her involvement with the former and made use of the latter's library.{{sfn|Drower|2004|p=131}} On most days, she visited the British Museum in order to consult their library, and twice a week she taught adult education classes on Ancient Egyptian history and religion at the [[City Literary Institute]]; upon her retirement from this position she nominated her former pupil, [[Veronica Seton-Williams]], to replace her.{{sfn|Drower|2004|pp=131–132}}

Murray's interest in popularising Egyptology among the wider public continued; in 1949 she published ''Ancient Egyptian Religious Poetry'', her second work for John Murray's "The Wisdom of the East" series.{{sfn|Sheppard|2013|p=140}} That year she also published ''The Splendour That Was Egypt'', in which she collated many of her UCL lectures. The book adopted a [[Trans-cultural diffusion|diffusionist perspective]] that argued that Egypt influenced Greco-Roman society and thus modern Western society. This was seen as a compromise between Petrie's belief that other societies influenced the emergence of Egyptian civilisation and [[Grafton Elliot Smith]]'s highly unorthodox and heavily criticised [[Hyperdiffusionism in archaeology|hyperdiffusionist]] view that Egypt was the source of all global civilisation. The book received a mixed reception from the archaeological community.{{sfn|Sheppard|2013|pp=178–188}}