The Tragic Death of James Starkey
Archaeology has many mysteries - and not a few bogus mysteries which are no mystery at all - but among the genuine mysteries is the question of what happened to James Starkey.
Starkey was born in London in 1895 and as a boy fell under the spell of Layard's "Nineveh and Its Remains". Although, due to ill-health, he received little formal education, he read voraciously anything to do with history and archaeology. When he left school he got a job working for an antiques dealer and spent many hours in the British Museum, learning all he could about the objects on display there.
He was 19 when the First World War broke out and, like many another young man, he hastened to join up and in 1916 he became a member of the young Royal Naval Air Force, where his endeavours earned him a service medal. At some point in his military career he found himself appointed to a lighthouse, not as a keeper but for coastal reconnaissance. This gave him plenty of time for reading and his favourite books were about archaeology.
After the war he enrolled in evening classes in archaelogy at University College London, where he met and studied under the famous Egyptologists Flinders Petrie and Margaret Murray. He sufficiently impressed them that he was invited to work with Petrie in Egypt, excavating at Qau in Upper Egypt. By careful excavation he was able to distinguish the pre-historic period now known as the Badarian.
In 1924 James Starkey married Marjorie Rice, who subsequently accompanied him on many of his expeditions. Their marriage was blessed with three children, John, Mary and Jane.
Owing to the increasing restrictions placed on excavators by the Egyptian government, in 1926 Petrie abandoned Egypt and moved to Palestine, where he excavated Tel Jemmeh, near Gaza. Later he moved his operations to the nearby Tel Farah, where he was able to establish the sequence of Palestinian pottery types and, as importantly, link them to pottery types in Egypt, thus making chronological links between Egypt - where the chronology was known - and Palestine, where the chronology was not known. In both places Starkey worked with Petrie and in the last season at Tel Farah, he was the dig director.
In 1932 Starkey struck out on his own. Sir Henry Wellcome, an American entrepreneur with a flair for salesmanship, wanted to sponsor archaeology in the Holy Land and he, together with Sir Charles Marston and Sir Robert Mond, engaged Starkey to excavate on their behalf. Starkey chose the large mound of Tel ed-Duweir, which had already been identified in 1929 by Albright as the Biblical city of Lachish. I cannot help but wonder whether it was the Assyrian reliefs, discovered by his childhood hero Layard and seen so often in the British Museum, which prompted his choice.
The finds at Lachish were interesting rather than spectacular - walls, gates, palaces, a temple or two and a water shaft and system - until February 1935 when the pieces of a broken pot were discovered amid the ashes of the city gate. When they were cleaned, Starkey realised that the sherds bore writing and these Lachish Letters have intrigued scholars ever since.
They were translated and published in 1938 by Harry Torczyner (he later changed his name to Naftali Herz Tur-Sinai), who claimed that they were from a man called Hoshaiah, who may have been the commander in Maresha, to the military commander of Lachish, a man called Jaosh. In Torczyner's translation there are references to a prophet extradited from Egypt and killed (the same event is mentioned in the Bible) and the ominous words, "We are watching for the fire signals of Lachish ... because we cannot see Azeqah." Torczyner interpreted this to mean that Azeqah had been captured by the Babylonians and was no longer giving fire signals.
Needless to say, these Letters, with their links to Biblical history, created a sensation and they are still one of the prize exhibits in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. (There are also some in the British Museum.)
At this time the Palestinian Troubles, the skirmishing between Jews and Arabs, was just beginning. Europeans were, on the whole, immune, so no one thought anything of it when, in January 1938, Starkey set off for Jerusalem to attend the opening of the new Rockerfeller Museum and to withdraw the money to to pay his workmen. To the shock and consternation of all, he was ambushed on his way to Jerusalem and murdered.
And therein lies the mystery. Had he been killed on his way back from Jerusalem when he was loaded down with money, the murder could have been put down to a robbery gone wrong. Various motives for the murder have been suggested, but there is no unanimity, either on the motive or even on the method!
Wikipedia, that source of all wisdom, simply states:
Starkey was robbed and killed by Arab bandits near Bayt Jibrin on a track leading from Bayt Jibrin to Hebron.
Wikipedia: art "James Leslie Starkey"
As it references the "Report by His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of Palestine and Trans-Jordan for the year 1938" we may take it that that is the official story.
The website of the Palestine Exploration Fund blames militants, not bandits:
In January 1938, at the age of 43, Starkey’s career was tragically cut short. His good relations with the workmen and people from the surrounding villages were well known, so it came as a great shock when he was murdered by a group of Arab militants en route to the opening of the new Palestine Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion, Jerusalem, his funeral attended by hundreds of mourners.
http://www.pef.org.uk/profiles/james-leslie-starkey-1895-1938
Another source is more specific and says:
While on his way to Jerusalem in January 1938, for the opening of the new Palestine Archaeological (Rockefeller) Museum, Starkey was shot in an ambush.
http://ferrelljenkins.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/james-leslie-starkey-excavator-of-lachish/
Keller, in his survey of Biblical archaeology, The Bible as History gives a different story:
It was the last success that was to crown the career of James Lesley Starkey, the famous excavator of Lachish. During the Palestinian troubles which had broken out he was shot by Arabs at the age of forty-three in the neighbourhood of Hebron on the road from Lachish to Jerusalem. His death was a tragic case of mistaken identity. In the course of the protected excavations he had grown a beard and the Arabs took him for a Jew.
The Bible as History p. 283
Just recently I have been reading the book, The Road to el-Aguzein by Veronica Seton-Williams. She was a young archaeological enthusiast who worked with many of the great names of early archaeology and in her book she gleefully dishes the dirt on the lot of them. Her views are, of course, personal and possibly even idiosyncratic, but she has the advantage over the websites mentioned above of having known and worked with these people.
She worked with Starkey at Lachish and, as she spoke Arabic, got on well with the local people. She records:
Most of my time was spent with my workmen, which was very good for my Arabic. ... In the evening my men used to tell various local stories and tales from the Arabian Nights. I could never remember these complicated stories in detail, but I could oblige with the Tales of Baron Munchausen and a certain number of Hoca stories that I had learned in Turkey. At that time there was no wireless or radio to distract people and story tellers were in great demand among the tribesmen.
They also told me the local village or tribal news and talked about their camels, their lives and their work. One man was unlucky: first his wife died, then his camel; there was no doubt about which he missed most.
The Road to el-Aguzein p. 76
She is somewhat scathing about Starkey himself.
Tell el-Duweir(sic) had a curious atmosphere and was not a happy camp. Starkey lacked the greatness of Petrie and the humanity of Garstang. Only at Christmas, when Gerald Harding, who had been appointed Director of Antiquities, came over from TransJordan, was there any attempt to get together; otherwise we all seemed to lead separate and isolated lives.
The Road to el-Aguzein p. 77
It is when she recounts the tragic death of James Starkey that I find her particularly interesting.
At the beginning of January our quiet routine of work was destroyed by the murder of John(sic) Starkey on his way from the camp to Jerusalem. He was going up to collect the men's pay and to attend the opening of the new Jerusalem Museum. He always travelled with just an Arab driver. The car was stopped before they reached Hebron and he was hacked to pieces by an axeman. His murderer was a gaol escapee who had already committed a similar murder. This man was caught again but never came to trial as he was killed trying to escape.
The cause of Starkey's murder was never satisfactorily cleared up. With his short thick-set figure and beard he certainly could have been mistaken for a Jew, but this is unlikely as he spoke fluent Arabic and, according to his driver, had had quite a long conversation with his murderer before his death; nor was robbery the cause, as he was not robbed and anyway the return journey would have been the time for that, for then he would have had the men's pay.
His Arab driver was unharmed and allowed to go with the car. The men on the work certainly knew something had happened to him before we received official notification, for news travels fast in an Arab country. The murder was certainly committed by someone who knew of his movements and the local Arab landowners claimed to have had a grievance as he had expropriated some of their land.
Gerald Harding came over from Jordan to try and clear things up and Charles Inge took over the direction of the excavations. For protection we were given a posse of six Palestinian police and a truck, and all of us laid in small-arms for our defence. So the season passed uneasily to its close and without Starkey's drive, energy and enthusiasm all hope of continuing the clearing of the great mound vanished. It was the last season at Tell el-Duweir: all that equipment, all that money and all those hopes had been destroyed in a few moments on the Hebron road. And next year the war would be upon us.
The Road to el-Aguzein p. 78
Her pessimistic words proved prescient, for Lachish remained untouched for thirty years. It was not until 1966 that Yohanan Aharoni conducted a limited excavation sponsored by Tel Aviv University. There have been several small scale excavations since then and we have before reported on the plan to rebuild the great gate, which is thought to be the one depicted in the Assyrian reliefs.
By her account Starkey was not as well liked as the PEF website claims, either by his workforce or by the local Arabs. (I must emphasise, however, that this is Ms Seton-Williams' personal view.) There is no question that any of the excavation workers played a role in his death but it is all too possible in that violent part of the world that his otherwise inexplicable murder came as the result of a grievance on the part of an Arab landowner.
salesmanship This was demonstrated at the age of 16 when he made a certain amount of money selling "invisible ink" - which was neither more nor less than plain lemon juice! By putting it in a bottle and adding a nice label, together with some impressive advertising, he was able to charge far more than the worth of the lemon juice! Return
Lachish Letters You can read all about these Lachish Letters elsewhere. Wikipedia even quotes the Torczyna translation of a number of them. I was interested to note, however, that as part of his argument for a reduction in dating, Peter James in his Centuries of Darkness offers a persuasive - if not compelling - case for a reinterpretation of the Letters.
It has long been known that scholars disagree as to the date of the letters. Some place them in the time of Hezekiah and blame the Assyrians for the destruction of the gate in which they were found. Others place them two centuries later in the time of the Babylonians. Starkey himself, noting the similarity in the pottery before and after the destruction of the gate with which the letters are associated, attributed the two destructions to the Babylonians, one in 597 BC and the final one in 586 BC.
The Letters naturally attracted the attention of the finest Semitic scholars of the day, who re-examined the ostraca and in a series of articles published over the next decade completely eroded Torczyner's case. Names were reread and events reinterpreted; indeed, many readings were shown to be merely products of his fertile imagination. For example, Torczyner's "Yikhbaryahu" was corrected to "Coniah". Where he read the name of a prophet as "Uriah", only the last three characters are actually visible: "-iah". It could just as easily be any one of the dozens of other Hebrew names with this ending. ...
Our examination of the names known from the ostraca shows that Toczyner's conclusions were completely misleading. According to his analysis, 68.1% of the names are known from the period of Jeremiah and only 40.9% from afterwards. The true situation is that while 50% match Jeremiah's time, 55% reflect the period after the return from Babylon. Thus, contrary to Torzyner's claim, this method of analysis favours a date after the time of Jeremiah, in the Persian period.
Moreover, particular individuals in the Lachish Letters appear to be identifiable in the sources covering the mid-5th century BC. One case is outstanding. Letter III concludes with the following passage:
And as for the letter of Tobiah servant of the king, which came to Shallum son of Jaddua through the prophet, saying, "Beware!" thy servant hath sent it to my lord.
An extraordinary parallel to the letter-writer described here is found in the Bible. The principal enemy of governor Nehmiah was the half-Jew Tobiah, governor of Ammon (across the Jordan), whose status is reflected in his title, "the servant", universally agreed to be an abbreviation of "servant of the king". Just as the Tobiah of the ostraca wrote to Judean nobleman conveying the warning message, "Beware!" so the folowing is recorded by Nehemiah (6:17-19) of his enemy:
Centuries of Darkness p. 172-174Moreover in those days the nobles of Judah sent many letters unto Tobiah and the letters of Tobiah came unto them ... Also they reported his good deeds before me and uttered my words to him. And Tobiah sent letters to put me in fear."
Other evidences quoted in James' book add to the strength of his argument that the Lachish Letters are, in fact, from the time of Nehemiah. Unfortunately he can only suggest a possible "incursion from nearby Philistia" for the destruction of the gateway and the distress shown by the letter writer. This lack of a plausible attacker tends to weaken his case. Return
© Kendall K. Down 2014
