Agatha's Digs
Even if we have not actually read them, the names "Death on the Nile" and "Murder on the Orient Express" are familiar to us. Detective novels featuring the urbane Frenchman Hercule Poirot, the two books are by Agatha Christie, the queen of crime fiction. What most people don't realise is that in these two books Ms Christie was writing about scenes that she knew and perhaps even loved.
After the breakup of her first marriage, Agatha Christie decided that she needed a holiday, well away from the places where she and her former husband were known. Having recently read an article in the "Illustrated London News" about the discoveries in the Royal Cemetery of Ur, she decided on a whim to go out to Iraq and see these wonders for herself.
The year was 1929 and Iraq was a British protectorate, so there were no tiresome worries about terrorists or Muslim extremists. Ms Christie boarded a train in London, crossed the Channel by ferry and in Paris transferred to the Orient Express, the standard means of travel for those headed to the mysterious orient. Smoke billowing from its funnel, the huge locomotive pulled out on time and rolled smoothly across France, over the Alps, through the wild and turbulent Balkans and on to her first glimpse of the East in the city known then as Constantinople. From there part of the train continued on over the newly completed track to Baghdad, city of the Arabian Nights and gateway to adventure.
A local train carried her down to Ur Junction where she was met by Leonard Woolley, the man who was excavating Ur, and his wife Katherine. Katherine had just finished reading one of Agatha Christie's early novels - "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" - and was delighted to meet in the flesh a writer whose work had helped to ease the tedium of life in the desert of southern Mesopotamia. They guided her around the dig and introduced her to their staff - though they were unable to introduce her to Woolley's assistant, a young man by the name of Max Mallowan, as he was ill and was recovering somewhere off in more civilised parts.
The two women got on so well together that Agatha was warmly invited to return the following year - and did so, in time to see the latest finds before Woolley closed down the dig at the end of the 1930 season. While Woolley paid off his workmen and packed up the finds, he instructed Max Mallowan to take Ms Christie on a tour of some of the other famous sites in Mesopotamia. Whether this was an innocent attempt to keep an honoured guest from ennui or a less innocent attempt at playing cupid, I do not know. Suffice it to say that Agatha and Max got on so well that they returned to Britain together on the Orient Express and a short time later Max, flowers in hand and diamond ring in pocket, popped the question and received an affirmative answer. They were married in September, 1930.
That, however, posed a problem. Katherine Woolley had welcomed Ms Christie as a guest, but to have her on the staff was another matter entirely. As Max wrote in his Memoirs, "There was only room for one woman at Ur". It was made very clear to the new Mrs Mallowan that her presence was not desirable and Max had to travel out to Ur alone. Left at home, Agatha got her revenge by basing the attention-seeking hypochondriac Louise Leidner, in her novel "Murder in Mesopotamia", on Katherine Woolley.
Clearly the situation was unsatisfactory and in 1932 Mallowan sought his own dig. He worked alongside Campbell Thompson at Nineveh, excavating a huge pit 90 feet down to virgin soil. Like Woolley's "Flood Pit" at Ur, the purpose of this pit was to establish a pottery chronology for the area and in this Mallowan was successful, showing that Nineveh was first settled in the Halaf period.
Agatha Christie accompanied Max to Nineveh and while he worked down his pit, she wrote another novel, "Lord Edgware Dies". The Mallowans lived in the expedition house with Campbell Thompson and his wife Barbara, but Agatha horrified Thompson, who was parsimonious to a degree, by splashing out the enormous sum of £10 on a table for her typewriter. Every time he saw the table, he reminded her that all his writing was done on an upturned orange box!
From 1933 onwards Mallowan worked on his own, usually sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. He excavated a place called Arpachiyah near Nineveh, surveyed the Khabur basin in north-east Syria and then spend three seasons excavating at Chagar Bazaar, where they found 100 cuneiform tablets written in the time of Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria.
On all these digs he was accompanied by Agatha, who spent most of her time writing but would, when required, help out with recording the finds, mending broken pots and, most important of all, photography (which meant not only taking the pictures, but also developing and printing them, a not inconsiderable chore in the primitive conditions of 1930s Syria!) For her own amusement, Agatha also made a short movie film, though to the disappointment of historians, it tends to concentrate on flowers and cute animals with just the occasional, almost incidental, glimpse of workmen on the dig.
This idyllic period came to a close with the outbreak of the second World War, following which Mallowan turned his attention towards Nimrud, the site of Layard's pioneering excavations and an important Assyrian city. They worked there from 1949 to 1958, when David Oates took over as field director. Many important and interesting finds were made, including the famous ivories, some of which may well have come from Ahab's "Ivory Palace" in Samaria. Agatha volunteered for the task of cleaning the fragile ivory plaques and developed an unusual technique for softening and removing the dirt which had become caked in the crevices of the carvings - face cream! As she herself described it, "there was such a run on my face cream that there was nothing left for my poor old face afer a couple of weeks!"
She did not, however, neglect her writing and had an extra room added on to the expedition house at her own expense, where she could retreat when the muse came upon her and forget the dirt and dust of the excavation as she developed her latest complicated plot.
In celebration of her contribution to archaeology, the British Museum mounted an exhibition, Mystery in Mesopotamia - Agatha Christie and Archaeology, which ran from early November 2001 until March 2002. Included in the exhibition were letters and papers relating to Ms Christie's time in Mesopotamia, as well as a selection of the objects on which she is known to have worked, among them the famous ivory depicting a lion mauling a man to death.
