Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and the Rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914-1950 0198824556, 9780198824558

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Empires of Antiquities

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Empires of Antiquities Modernity and the Rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950 BILLIE MELMAN

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Billie Melman 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955823 ISBN 978–0–19–882455–8 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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For my mother Glila Aloni Rosenzweig a child of empires

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Acknowledgements Antiquities have been a part of my biography for a long time. The first letter addressed to me was penned in an archaeological dig, by two budding Bronze Age specialists and a Late Iron Age expert, colleagues of my mother. I was four months old. For a few decades archaeology and antiquities remained unobtrusive presences in my life: they were outside my areas of study, but hard to avoid in my neighbourhood and in media coverage of national and international politics. My scholarly interest in the relationship between antiquity and modernity began in the early 2000s. It was stirred in a visit to the Mesopotamian galleries at the British Museum on a murky December afternoon. Drifting at the museum’s archaeological galleries has long been a familiar cliché, reiterated in prose, poetry, and painting, but it does demonstrate the sustained appeal of ancient objects. I  turned from the museum’s Nineveh and Nimrud Rooms to the less crowded Room 56, where artefacts of “Mesopotamia 6000–1500 B.C.” are displayed. The exhibits were, still are, the spoils of Ur, Tell al-Muqayyar, in southern Iraq, excavated by a joint Anglo-American expedition between 1922 and 1934. The sheer materiality and palpability of the objects, whose scale is much smaller than that of the colossi at the adjacent displays from Nineveh and Nimrud, was striking. Despite their remoteness in time they conveyed senses of the everyday and the mundane. They triggered a number of tentative and inarticulate questions about the construction and display of antiquity in late modernity, about the extraction of material remains from their places of origin, their imperial itineraries, the relationship between antiquities, their meanings, ownership, and consumption, and about empires—ancient empires and the newly defined interwar empires that took shape at the same time that the spectacular material civilizations of the Near East burst upon British imperial historical culture. The book that slowly evolved over more than a decade is not an archaeologist’s book, but the work of a historian of cultures of history, and of the ways in which moderns made sense of ancient pasts in an age of imperial expansion and crises. My long route to it took me to many archives in a few countries, and compelled me to acquire knowledge in some fields of study that had not been mine. I could not have done so without the generosity of colleagues across many disciplines: historians of the British Empire, students of internationalism, Ottomanists and specialists on the interwar Mashriq, archaeologists, Egyptologists and Assyriologists, classicists, geographers, art historians, and historians of photography. At Tel Aviv University I owe special thanks to Yoav Alon, Ami Ayalon, Yoram Cohen, Margalit Finkelberg, Irad Malkin, Nadav Na’aman, Shulamit Volkov, and

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Acknowledgements

to Aviad Kleinberg, Head of the School of History, and the school itself for its generous support. More thanks are due to Mustafa Kabha and Yuval Goren. I am indebted to two generations of my graduates, especially to Elia Etkin, Oded Feuerstein, Hadas Fischer-Rosenberg, Shira Pinhas, and Zohar Sapir-Dvir. Dotan Halevi translated texts from the Arabic press and exchanged information with me. The “IASH Young Forum 2017–18” on “Empires” was an intellectually rewarding forum and its members deserve mention: Wael Abu ‘Uksa, Menashe Anzi, Dotan Arad, Yael Barda, Bashir Bashir, Yuval Ben-Bassat, Rotem Geva, Itamar Mann, Oded Rabinovitch, Ori Sela, Atalia Shragai, and Lior Sternfeld. My term as Remarque Fellow at New York University gave me the peace of mind needed to putting the finishing touches to the manuscript. My heartfelt thanks go to Larry Wolff, for his intellectual hospitality and the panache with which he leads the Remarque Institute. Thanks are due to Remarque’s administrator and face, Samantha Dawn Paul, whose efficiency and sense of humour helped make my months at the Institute a pleasure. I benefitted from talking to Fred Cooper and Zvi Bendor about a variety of empires and their paths to and away from power, and from the insights of Edhem Eldem, Leila Fawaz, David Henkin, Krishan Kumar, Derek Penslar, Eugene Rogan, Debora Silberman, Pat Thane, David Trotter, and Martha Vicinus. At the Visual Studies Research Institute (VSRI), University of Southern California, I owe special thanks to Vanessa Schwartz, Daniela Bleichmar, and fellow participants at the Mellon–Sawyer Seminar on “Visualizing History” for their thoughts and expertise. Chapters 1–3 evolved from talks at Harvard’s Center for European Studies and the Pears Institute at Birkbeck University, and Chapter 5 from a paper delivered at the VSRI. Parts of it are an incarnation of “Ur: Empires, Modernity and the Visualization of Antiquity between the Two World Wars” (Representations, 145, Winter 2019, 129–51). I have relied on the help of curators, archivists, and librarians, who responded with equanimity to my forays into their archives and volleys of queries. I have incurred innumerable debts—to Jacques Oberson at the archives of the League of Nations in Geneva; Adele Torrance at the Office international des musées (OIM) archive at the UNESCO Archives and Records section in Paris; Rachel Sparks, Keeper of Museum Collections at University College London; Carl Graves at the Egypt Exploration Society; Felicity Cobbing and John MacDermot at the Palestine Exploration Fund; Debbie Usher at the Middle East Centre Archive at St Antony’s College, Oxford; Elizabeth Fleming and Cat Warsi at the Oxford archives of the Griffith Institute; Philip Grover at the Pitt-Rivers Museum; Molly Seegers at the Brooklyn Museum Archives; Alessandro Pezzati at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology; the staff at the Wellcome Library; and Joe Keogh at the Agatha Christie Archive in Wales. Sir Mathew and Lucy Prichard welcomed me at the archive and their home, fed me, and patiently answered my many questions. Silvia Karpiwko, formerly at the

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Archives Branch of Israel Antiquities Authority, an aficionado of the mandate era, has been a model archivist. At Oxford University Press I am indebted to Stephanie Ireland for her faith in my project and to the indispensable Cathryn Steele for her unwavering patience, generous help, and good counsel. Daria and Yotam Melman have expanded my digital education, despite their doubts about my educability. They and Tamar Menashe-Melman unstintingly helped and patiently put up with my ramble about my research when it seemed that it was going nowhere. Yossi, my companion on our long journey together, listened—sometimes rather sceptically but always unfailingly—to half-baked ideas and incomplete drafts. My mother Glila, a child of three empires, has derived a special pleasure from her academically prodigal daughter’s belated turn to the ancient past. This book is my homage and gift to her. New York and Tel Aviv, Winter 2019

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Contents List of Figures Note on Transliteration

Introduction

xiii xv

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I . A N T IQ U I T Y A N D T H E N EW P O S T- WA R I M P E R IA L  O R D E R 1. Mandated Pasts: War, Peace, and the New Regime of Antiquities

29

I I . B I B L IC A L PA S T S I N M A N DAT E D PA L E S T I N E 2. Illustrating the Bible: Travel, Archaeology, and Modernity in Mandated Biblical Lands

63

3. Cities of David: Planning and Excavating Jerusalem

93

4. Lachish: Excavation, Land, and Violence—Tell ed-Duweir, c.1932–1945

125

I I I . “ T H E M O S T A N C I E N T PA S T ” : M E S O P O TA M IA N A N T IQ U I T I E S A N D M O D E R N I T Y 5. Ur: Modernity and the Matter of Antiquity between Two World Wars

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6. Murder in Mesopotamia: Antiquity, Genres of Modernity, and Gender in the Popular Crime Novel

191

7. Prehistories for Modernity: Stone Age Humans and Others in Palestine and Mesopotamia

216

I V. E G Y P T ’ S A N C I E N T PA S T S : E M P I R E , A N T IQ U I T Y, A N D  T E C H N O L O G Y 8. Egyptian Antiquity, Imperial Politics, and Modernity: Tutankhamun and After

249

9. “Nefertiti Lived Here”: Amarna, Imperial Crises, and Domestic Modernity, 1920–1939

281

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10. The Road to Alexandria, the Paths to Siwa: Hellenism, the Modern World, and the End of Empires, 1915–1956 Conclusion: Gerald Lankester Harding’s Second Funeral Bibliography Index

311 343 357 381

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List of Figures 0.1 Eye Idol, Late Uruk (3300–3000 bc), Tell Brak, excavated by Mallowan, 1938

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2.1 Laying the foundation stone for the Archaeological Museum of Palestine by High Commissioner John Chancellor, 1931

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2.2 Rockefeller Museum’s courtyard, “The Tower from the Fountain’s Alcove”

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2.3 Palestine Archaeological Museum, South Gallery

89

3.1 Jerusalem Town Planning Scheme, No. 1 McLean, 1918

102

3.2 C. R. Ashbee, Wall Rampart, Jerusalem

104

3.3 Ashbee, “Rampart Walk Showing the Gradual Destruction of the Wall”

105

3.4 Ashbee, Jerusalem Park System (1920)

106

3.5 Parcel-owners and their lots on Mount Ophel, a plan, showing forms of ownership of excavated land

122

4.1 Zvi Orushkes, James Leslie funeral procession 1, Bishop of Jerusalem

126

4.2 Zvi Orushkes, funeral procession, 2, wreathes

126

4.3 Zvi Orushkes, funeral procession, 3, officials and palm carriers

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4.4 Lachish ostraca. The obverse (top and bottom left) and reverse (bottom right) of Lachish Letter 3

136

5.1 Ur from the air, 1927, taken by 84 RAF Squadron

164

5.2 “A Street scene at Ur at the Level of the Abrahamic Period”, a postcard, with workers standing for scale

173

5.3 “The Golden Head-dress of Queen Shub-Ad: A Remarkable Reconstruction of a 5000-year-old Coiffure Found at Ur”

177

5.4 Antique modern: A Sumerian hair ornament reminiscent of a Spanish hair-comb (centre) popular in Victorian England and a Sumerian prototype of the modern motor-car mascot (bottom right)

179

5.5 Father Léon Legrain reconstructing Puabi’s (Queen Shub-ad’s) headdress, 1929

180

5.6 The Death-Pit, PG 1237, Royal Cemeteries Ur

181

7.1 Charles Lambert, “section of Mugharat al-Wad Cave of the Wadi al-Mugharah”, showing the layers of Stone Age tool cultures, 1928

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7.2a Palaeolithic tools, Mount Carmel

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7.2b An early Natufian bone handle resembling a deer, Wadi al-Mugharah, Mount Carmel

228

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List of Figures

7.3 Palestinian labourers removing finds from Mugharat al-Sukhul, Wadi al-Mugharah

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7.4 Yusra, a Palestinian villager and expert excavator, and child, with Dorothy Annie Garrod

238

8.1 “All Roads Lead to Egypt”. An advertisement showing a map of Egyptian antiquities

253

9.1 “Come to Egypt”. Amarna as a showcase of Egypt’s antiquities and tourism

282

9.2 Winifred Brunton, Kings and Queens of Egypt, Queen Tiye (consort of Amenhotep III and mother of Akhenaten)

297

9.3 Winifred Brunton, Kings and Queens of Egypt, Akhenaten

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9.4 Winifred Brunton, Kings and Queens of Egypt, Nefertiti

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10.1 Siwa, uninhabited centre

337

10.2 A Siwan maid with the virginity disk

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10.3 Siwa, Ruin of the Temple of Jupiter Ammon

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Note on Transliteration For names and terms that have a standard transliteration in English, I have kept this spelling. Whenever citing archives in the footnotes, I keep to the original spelling (which is usually phonetical) and its errors, for the convenience of researchers. In the text, diactrical marks in Arabic are excluded, except for the ayn (ʿayn) and hamza (ʾ). I thank Ami Ayalon, Liat Kozma, and Israel Shrenzel for their generous advice and help in the matter.

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Introduction Tell Brak, 1937–1938 In the archaeological seasons of 1937 and 1938, 34-year-old Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan excavated on Tell Brak in north-eastern Syria. Apprenticed at the lucrative archaeological expeditions to Ur and Nineveh, Mallowan was beginning to make a name for himself as an expert on Mesopotamia’s prehistory and as an efficient organizer. “The mighty mound” of Brak took a hold of his imagination and excited him.1 It loomed over the plain surrounding it, protruding some forty metres above its level and exceeding by some ten metres the huge mound of Nineveh in Mosul, across the Iraqi border. It dominated the triangle between the upper Khabur River, a tributary of the Euphrates, and its offshoot, the little river Jaghjagh, that was strewn with ancient mounds.2 The Tell, one of the earliest human settlements to have reached urban scale and development, and occupied from at least 6000 bc to the late second millennium bc, lies 300 miles east of the Mediterranean and 130 miles west of the Euphrates.3 In the late 1930s its immediate surroundings were a perturbed national and international crossroads situated between the newly independent Kingdom of Iraq, the French mandate territory of Syria and Lebanon, and Turkey. The activity of a British archaeologist, sponsored by the British Museum and backed by the British School of Archaeology in Baghdad, on French governed territory, under the protection of its military and a  supportive Department of Antiquities for Syria and Lebanon that licenced the excavation, demonstrates twentieth-century interwar conflicts over access to antiquities between national governments and imperial powers, as well as collaborations between empires. Like other British excavators in Iraq, Mallowan crossed the border to Syria, where French rule extended to them aid and privileges that no longer existed elsewhere in the Middle East. He received a good share of the finds that were divided at the end of the excavation, including numerous diminutive alabaster figurines: conical bodies topped with disproportionally large circles shaped like a pair of eyes (sometimes pairs of eyes) and known since as “eye idols” 1 Max Mallowan, Mallowan’s Memoirs: Agatha and the Archaeologist (London, 1977), 126–7. 2 Mallowan, “Khabur Survey and Sounding 1934–1935”, British Museum Archives (BMA), Middle East Department (MED), Mallowan Records, 197.1, 26. 3 Joan Oates, “Tell Brak. Albert Reckitt Archaeological Lecture 2004”, http://www.tellbrak.mcdonald. cam.ac.uk/balecture.html, last accessed 20 October 2016; David Oates, Joan Oates, and Helen McDonald, Excavations at Tell Brak I: The Mitanni and Old Babylonian Period (Cambridge, 1998). Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and the Rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950. Billie Melman, Oxford University Press (2020). © Billie Melman. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198824558.001.0001

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and “idols with spectacles”. The “idols”, plastered on the walls of the richly decorated “Eye Temple” were thought to have been prehistoric votive objects. They seemed quite abstract, defying conventions of figurative art, mysterious and curiously modern (Figure 0.1).4 Mallowan was fully aware of the imperial politics of archaeology. He recognized the geo-political importance of Tell Brak in antiquity and the significance of its location in the present. “From the top of the Tell,” he has noted, “one looked out into the far distance at the purple hills of the Jebel Sinjar, a part of which lies in Syria and a part in Iraq, and this situation too made it obvious that Brak lay on an international thoroughfare.”5 And a national and religious one as well, positioned in a borderline territory where official borders were porous and the fragile regions they were unsuccessfully set to contain were populated by Muslims,

Figure 0.1 Eye Idol, Late Uruk (3300–3000 bc), Tell Brak, excavated by Mallowan, 1938 (courtesy of the British Museum) 4 Mallowan, Memoirs, 135–9. For other interpretations, see Catherine Bréniquet, “Du Fil à retordre: réflexions sur les idoles aux yeux et les fileuses de l’époque d’Uruk”, in Collectanea Orientalia, 1996; Annie Caubet, “L’Idole aux yeux du IVe millénaire”, La Revue du Louvre, February 1991, 6–9. 5 Mallowan, Memoirs, 127.

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Introduction

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Armenians, Kurds—constantly commuting across the border with Turkey— Yezidis, and Assyrian refugees, arriving after the massacre wrought on them immediately after Iraq’s elevation to an apparently independent state and its entry into the League of Nations in 1932. Religious and sectional tensions were rife and erupted with predictable regularity amidst the multi-ethnic labour force that Mallowan hired for the series of excavations he conducted in Syria from 1933. The historical and national landscape that Mallowan has described has now become too painfully familiar to millions who are far removed from the topic of the history of archaeology in the Near East and from the region’s disturbed interwar history. Recently, Tell Brak has changed hands a few times and was taken over first by the cohorts of ISIS and then by Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). The territory surrounding it has witnessed plunder, murderous violence, mass migration of refugees, and the collapse of the Syrian and Iraqi states. As this manuscript is being proofread, the border area between Syria and Turkey which he and his co-excavator and wife, Agatha Christie, depict in loving detail, experiences attempts at ethnic cleansing and carving by regional powers. The savage destruction of Syrian and Iraqi antiquities by the Islamic State has shocked individuals and groups the world over. It was not only people that suffered, but also artefacts and monuments; the terrain, too, was transformed from the lush place Mallowan and Agatha Christie evoke in their writings, to an arid and uncultivated territory. Mallowan’s description and his impressions of Syria in his memoirs, the archaeological survey he conducted before picking Tell Brak, and in his vast correspondence with British Museum officials and French officials in Syria/ Lebanon, are not intended to provide here a genealogy of the present regional and global political and humanitarian crisis: writing a history of the tragic present would be simplifying long-term historical processes and narrating history backwards.6 Rather his bird’s-eye view from the top of Tell Brak, as well as the view from underground that cuts through stratified layers of occupation, settlement, and destruction in the distant past, serve to elucidate the place that antiquity occupied and filled after the First World War in British historical culture and politics, Britain’s post-war empire in the Near East, and the new imperial world order that evolved after the war. This book is about the rediscovery of the imperial civilizations of the ancient Near East in a late-modern imperial order and culture in the world’s biggest, most expansive modern empire during its heyday.7 Imperial prime was also a time of

6 Henri Seyrig, Director of Antiquities Syria and the Lebanon to Mallowan, 20 February, 1937, Mallowan to Seyrig, 23 February 1937 and 12 October, 1938, BMA, MED, Max Mallowan Archive, 197.1, 187–9. 7 “Near East” is applied throughout the book to the ancient civilizations that developed in the expanses of land from Egypt to Iran, as well as to the territories of the Ottoman Empire in western Asia. For the interwar era it is sometimes used interchangeably with Middle East (a term probably put in use in 1902) and with “Mashriq”—referring to the lands east of Egypt (and including it).

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imperial crises in which new forms of rule, power, and legitimation, under international oversight, conflicted and often clashed with local and national agendas. Between the outbreak of the First World War and the aftermath of the Second World War, I argue, antiquity was reconceived, redefined, and experienced in myriad new ways. Clearly it never had a single and uniform meaning: quite the contrary. As Gábor Klaniczay, Michael Werner, and Otto Gecser have noted, from about the end of the eighteenth century there arose and thrived “multiple antiquities”, that is, perceptions and images of the ancient past, or rather of parts of it, whose range and variety matched the multiplicity of forms of modernity which developed in Europe.8 Notions and uses of antiquity mushroomed throughout the nineteenth century and were increasingly mobilized for national and imperial ideologies and states. But after the Great War, definitions of antiquity and ancientness changed, both in substance and in temporal terms. Antiquity expanded. To be sure, already in the Victorian era, it had stretched backward to include prehistoric people and other creatures, but now it extended forward and touched and even included eras previously considered “modern”.9 Its plural, “antiquities”, acquired new legal definitions that were articulated in international treaties and in colonial and metropolitan legislation. Antiquities now carried new international and imperial meanings, alongside their national ones. More was to change in regard to the concepts, definitions, and feelings about the ancient world. Access to antiquities and the ownership of this world and its heritage altered too. Antiquities were now managed by a mechanism which operated through colonial administrations that regulated the study of the ancient past, the circulation of knowledge about it, and the exposure and preservation of its physical remains. They became the subject of international talk and monitoring emanating from international bodies. Practices of experiencing the ancient past such as modern tourism, evolving as a result of the second, late- modern, transport revolution that globalized imperial travel, had a dramatic effect on access to, and experiences of, the ancient world. The introduction of this revolution throughout the Middle East had a far broader context, to do with technologies of imperial modernity. Technologies also impacted new forms of telling about the past and representing it that were circulated in modern forms of communications such as the mass circulation press, radio, and film, as well as in expert writing directed towards a mass reading and viewing public. Aerial photography, which emerged as a military technology during the war, was another form of surveying antiquity.10 Usually operated by the Royal Air Force, it served to survey archaeological sites, was routinely used by excavators, 8 Gábor Klaniczay, Michael Werner, and Otto Gescer (eds), Multiple Antiquities-Multiple Modernities: Ancient Histories in Nineteenth-Century European Cultures (Frankfurt and New York, 2011). 9 See Chapter 1, 39. 10 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London, 1989), 15–40.

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Introduction

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reproduced in newspapers, and displayed in exhibitions. Last, but by no means least of the changes outlined here, was the ubiquity of antiquity’s material substance. The physical stuff of the past was massively dug up, recorded, classified, and displayed, as never before, to the gazes of diverse mass publics in Britain and across the empire. Britons’ sense of the ancient past (like the French or Germans’ sense of it) altered because they could have a sense of ancient things. Monuments and myriad objects of much smaller scale, utensils and containers, tablets, papyri and ostraca, bones, skulls, and skeletons—both human and animal—barley and wheat grains, beads, textiles and sandals, cosmetics, arms and games, and stupendous quantities of potsherds, poured from excavations that took place across the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. Increasing quantities of antique objects were curated and displayed in national and regional museums in Egypt, Syria and the Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine. But enough flowed westward to metropolitan museums and to colonial museums in the dominions, to universities and public schools and private collectors, via smugglers and dealers. The antiquity of the Near East, more than any other ancient civilization in the Americas, or in India, became a reverberating issue, negotiated, debated, and contested over, on national, colonial, and international platforms. This complex or compound of attitudes to, talk about and senses and uses of, the ancient past and the technologies implemented to discover it, developed in a new imperial world order, an order formulated in the peace treaties and agreements with the Ottoman Empire and the political entities and regimes instituted in its place. They were also cultivated by the League of Nations’ Covenant, and in the organizations which the League fostered to guard antiquity and its heritages, such as the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (Commission internationale de coopération intellectuelle) (ICIC), International Institute on Intellectual Cooperation (Institut international de coopération intellectuelle) (IIIC), and the International Museums Office (Office international des musées) (IMO). All the foundational texts of the mandates—that new form of imperial rule evolving after the war—included special clauses on antiquities and their monitoring. Clearly the new antiquities complex, or order, emerged together with a new imperial regime based upon the mandates system. Studying the new complex of antiquities is important in itself, but it also teaches us about how an empire worked. And grasping the history of the post-war discovery of Near Eastern antiquity is a good way of comprehending the new political British imperial and world order. The crucible of the new defining, categorizing and mechanism, or apparatus that managed and circulated antiquities was their implementation in the Near Eastern empire in the territories of the Ottoman Empire—classified as A mandates, which Britain came to rule directly and were under the League’s oversight, or indirectly, by continuing to exercise influence in them, as well as in Egypt. By the time that Mallowan and Christie had to leave Syria, on the eve of the Second World War, the culture and politics of antiquity and the imperial

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Empires of Antiquities

regime seemed to have reached the brink of collapse, together with the new international order contrived after the Great War. This book explores the modern empire of antiquities and the complex of new modes of rediscovering ancient imperial civilizations. It tells how they became the objects of interest, scholarship, passion, and politics in a modern imperial structure. The book sets to recoup and explore this rediscovery, its practices and meanings in contexts that are at one and the same time British, Near Eastern, and global. It aims to offer a history of the pursuit of antiquity that is entangled and in which Britain, its Near Eastern territories, other Western powers, and some international organizations play relational parts. It is also a history that ties imperial senses of the ancient past to experiences and senses of modernity: the modern technologies of empire, mass consumption, the role of the media, the rise of modern fields of knowledge, and changes in moderns’ senses of temporality and of place.

Taking Stock of the Historiographies: A Note Of course, the discovery, study, and fascination with ancient imperial civilizations were not post-war phenomena, but had been long in the making. As a sprawling body of scholarship has demonstrated, the attraction of antiquity had preceded modernity by a long shot. The religion, power, cults, and mysteries of the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamian history had been discovered by the Greeks.11 The ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians had steered interest in the Hellenic Aegean world and in the Roman Empire.12 Classical texts and the Scriptures kept alive an interest in Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures that spread to the literary and visual arts and to material culture in later periods.13 The increase of Britain’s hold on the Near East, during the long nineteenth century, roughly from Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt to the outbreak of the First World War, brought its ancient history within the orbit of British popular religion and culture, and interest in them was boosted by the scramble for antiquities and left its mark on British 11 Roger Matthews and Cornelia Roemer, Ancient Perspectives on Egypt (London, 2003). 12 E. S. Gruen (ed.), The Cultural Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean (Los Angeles, CA, 2011); Anne Roullet, The Egyptian and Egyptianizing Monuments of Imperial Rome (Leiden, 1972); Laurent. Bricault, M.  J.  Versluys and P.  G.  P.  Meyboom (eds), Nile into Tiber: Egypt in the Roman World, Proceedings of the IIIrd International Conference of Isis Studies (Leiden, 2015); M. Swetnam-Berland, “Egyptian Objects, Roman Contexts: A Taste for Aegyptiaca”, in Nile into Tiber, 113–36; and Ian Moyer, Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism (Cambridge, 2015). 13 Peter Ucko and Timothy Champion (eds), The Wisdom of Egypt: Changing Visions through the Ages (London, 2003); Stephanie Dalley, A.  T.  Reyes, David Pingree, Alison Salvesen, and Henrietta McCall (eds), The Legacy of Mesopotamia (Oxford, 1998), especially McCall, “Rediscovery and Aftermath”, 183–214; Steven W. Holloway, Orientalism, Assyriology and the Bible (Sheffield, 2006); and Michael John Seymour, “The Idea of Babylon: Archaeology and Representation in Mesopotamia”, PhD Diss. (UCL, 2006).

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domestic spaces, urban landscapes, and the applied arts.14 The materialization of  these civilizations, due to the flow of material remains to public museums, expositions, and private collections, and the intensive coverage of archaeological discoveries by the mass circulation press, fuelled the periodic “manias” for the ancient Near Eastern empires. Nineteenth-century Egyptomania surpassed Roman and eighteenth-century Egyptianizing vogues.15 The uphill progress of deciphering and mastering cuneiform, hieroglyphs, and the ancient Hebrew alphabet augmented knowledge about material cultures and civilizations. These multiple and related developments in the discovery of Near Eastern ancient pasts, have been amply studied by historians of British culture, art historians, archaeologists, classicists, and philologists. Their works include cultural histories of the role of the Holy Land in a vast vernacular biblical culture from the seventeenth century until the outbreak of the First World War and of the role of Egypt in high and low culture.16 Art historians, literary historians, and historians of the theatre, as well as historians of design, museums and collecting, and museologists, have probed the presences of Assyria and Egypt in visual culture.17 Their studies have mapped the multiple presences of parts of the Near East in British material life, thought, and science—not least in religious debates and debates on human and inorganic evolution, in literary genres and life styles, painting and design, and in the venues of the “exhibitionary complex”,18 such as museums and international expositions that displayed these ancient civilizations to varied audiences. Estates and middleclass homes, cemeteries and cinema halls, film and fashion, have all been scoured in search of imitations and adaptations of ancient cultures in them.19 The bulk of these studies concentrate on the nineteenth century with a distinct emphasis on 14 Sally Macdonald and Michael Rice (eds), Consuming Ancient Egypt (London, 2003); Jean- Marcel Humbert and Clifford Price (eds), Imhotep Today, Egyptianizing Architecture (London, 2003). 15 James Stevens Curl, Egyptomaia: The Egyptian Revival-A Recurring Theme in the History of Taste (Manchester, 1994). 16 On the Bible in British culture, see Naomi Tadmor, The Social Universe of the English Bible: Scripture, Society and Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010); Eitan Bar- Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (Oxford, 2005); Leslie Howsam, Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Bibles and the British and Foreign Bible Society (Cambridge, 1991).On archaeology and the Bible, see David Gange and Michael Ledger-Lomas (eds), Cities of God: The Bible and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2013). On Egypt in British culture, see David Gange, Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion 1822–1922 (Oxford, 2013). 17 Lynn Parramore, Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture (London, 2008); Frederick  N.  Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2003); Stephanie Moser, Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum (Chicago, IL, 2006); Shawn Malley, From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian Britain: The Case of Assyria, 1845–1854 (Farnham, 2012); Jeffrey Richards, The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage (London, 2009); Jack Green and Emily Teeter (eds), Picturing the Past: Imagining and Imaging the Ancient Near East (Chicago, IL, 2012). 18 Tony Bennett’s term. See Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London and New York, repr. 1999). 19 Stephanie Moser, Designing Antiquity: Owen Jones, Ancient Egypt and the Crystal Palace (New Haven, CT, 2012).

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the Victorians and antiquity. Over the last decade or so, there has been growing interest in the fields of knowledge and expertise connected to the imperial and national interest in the Near East. Biographies of heroic “great archaeologists” and explorers have been considerably supplemented by studies of archaeology and Egyptology as fields of knowledge.20 Scholars across disciplines have surveyed their institutional and disciplinary growth in Britain and the Middle East, their professionalization, organization, networks, economy, and practices.21 An expanding body of studies has begun to recover the histories of Ottoman and Egyptian archaeology and the search in the late Ottoman Empire and in the territories ruled by its successors, for histories, heritages, and archaeologies of the Near East by states, intellectuals, local elites, archaeologists, museologists, and nationalists.22 These studies have illustrated the relationship between Near Eastern pursuits of antiquity and Western scholarship and power, thus refining notions of Western and other forms of knowledge and their practice in colonial contexts. Scholars have expanded on the “conflicted antiquities” (Elliott Colla’s term) and “competing histories” of Egypt, Transjordan, and Mesopotamia/Iraq, probing the claims to their pasts by national elites, historians, and archaeologists.23 Yet this dauntingly massive body of studies with its multiple foci of specialty is departmentalized, characteristically concentrating on sections in the complex of the discovery of antiquity. More significantly, in the prodigious historiography, the intricate relations between discovery and empire, particularly the rise of the 20 Examples of the biographical approach include Mogens Trolle Larsen, The Conquest of Assyria: Excavations in an Antique Land, 1840–60 (London, 1996); Margaret S. Drower, Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology (Madison, WI, 1995); T.  G.  H.  James, Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun (London, 2008); H. V. F. Winstone, Woolley of Ur: The Life of Leonard Woolley (London, 1990). 21 Shimon Gibson, “British Archaeological Institutions in Mandatory Palestine, 1917–1948”, Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 131 (1999), 115–43; Nadia Abu El-Haj, “Producing (Arti)Facts: Archaeology and Power During the British Mandate of Palestine”, Israel Studies, 7:2 (Summer, 2002), 33–61; Joshua Ben Arieh, “The Foreign Archaeological Institutions During the British Mandate I”, Cathedra, 92, 1999, 135–72; II, Cathedra, 93, 1999, 111–42 (Hebrew); William Carruthers (ed.), Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures (London, 2015). For networking in Levantine archaeology, see Amara Thornton, “British Archaeologists, Social Networks and the Emergence of a Profession: The Social History of British Archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East 1870–1939”, PhD Diss. (UCL, 2011); Amara Thornton, “Archaeologists in Training: Students of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem 1920–1936”, Journal of Open Archaeology Data, https://openarchaeologydata.metajnl.com/articles/10.5334/4f293686e4d62/. For the local labor force, see Stephen Quirke, Hidden Hands: Egyptian Workforces in Petrie Excavation Archives, 1880–1924 (London, 2010). 22 Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik, and Edhem Eldem (eds), Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire 1753–1914 (Istanbul, 2011); Zeynep Çelik, About Antiquities: Politics of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire (Austin, TX, 2016). 23 Elliott Colla, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham and London, 2007); Magnus  T.  Bernhardsson, Reclaiming a Plundered Past: Archaeology and Nation Building in Modern Iraq (Austin, TX, 2005); Israel Gershoni and James  P.  Janowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, 1995) and Egypt, Islam and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930 (Oxford, New York, 1987); Donald Reid, “Nationalizing the Pharaonic Past: Egyptology, Imperialism and Egyptian Nationalism, 1922–1952”, in James P. Janowski and Israel Gershoni (eds), Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York, 1997), 127–50 and Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley, CA, 2001); Elena D. Corbett, Competitive Archaeology in Jordan: Narrating Identity from the Ottomans to the Hashemites (Austin, TX, 2014).

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new post-war imperial order, is still an understudied subject. To be sure, recent scholarship repeatedly acknowledges the imperial or colonial character of British interest in, and passion for, the ancient Near East. But there is little study of the new regime of antiquities on the ground. And notwithstanding recurrent reference to empire, it is the national paradigm that still looms large in studies of this discovery. Quite a few studies have pointed at the role of antiquity and its appropriation by nationalist movements to stake claims for places, borders, and territories. Some define archaeology as an ersatz nationalism and a nation-building form of knowledge and practice.24 Characteristically, studies of the British role in the discovery of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Palestine are conducted separately—looking at the respective histories of their exploration and unearthing discretely, rather as isolated chapters in the conflict between emerging national movements or nation-states and imperial rule. They were indeed, but it may be more useful to look outside national units and examine them together and as parts of empires and regions. Moreover, the national framework ignores the impact and scope of the internationalization of the discovery of the ancient past as a result of the First World War. This book aims to recoup the history of the British recovery of ancient Near Eastern imperial civilizations not only in the metropolitan centre, nor solely in Britain’s new imperial and increasingly nationalizing territories, but at integrating both and bringing in the international aspect of the preoccupation with antiquity.25 It suggests that we direct our gaze not just to London, Oxford, Cambridge, or to Liverpool, but to Paris and Geneva, two centres of the international organizations and activities founded by the League to oversee and unify the exploration, discovery, and preservation of antiquities, and access to them, and that we shift our look farther to the imperial Near East: to Jerusalem, Amman, Cairo and Alexandria, Baghdad and Mosul, and their surroundings.

The New Order of Antiquities: An Entangled History and Its Agents The book thus offers a bird’s-eye look at the new regime of antiquities as it was constituted in international activity, organizations, and institutions, a view from 24 See Margarita Diaz-Andreu, “Introduction”, Nations and Nationalism, 7:4 (2001), 429–40, Anthony D. Smith, “Authenticity, Antiquity and Archaeology”, 441–9, and Neil Asher Silberman, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem: Archaeology, Religious Commemoration and Nationalism in a Disputed City, 1801–2001”, 487–504, all in a special issue on “Nationalism and Archaeology”. 25 Exceptions include Paul Betts and Corey Ross “Modern Historical Preservation Towards a Global Perspective”, Past & Present, 226 (Supplement 10), 7–26; Paul Basu and Vinita Damodaran, “Colonial Histories of Heritage Legislative Migrations and the Politics of Preservation”, Past & Present, 226 (Supplement 10), 240–71; Melanie Hall (ed.), Towards World Heritage: International Origins of the Preservation Movement (Aldershot, 2011); Astrid Swenson and Peter Mandler (eds), From Plunder to Preservation: Britain and the Heritage of Empire, c.1800–1940 (Oxford, 2013); Michael Falser and Monica Juneja (eds), Archaeologizing Heritage? Transcultural Entanglements Between Local Social Practices and Global Virtual Realities (Heidelberg, 2013) and Çelik, About Antiquities.

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the metropolis, Britain, and its culture of antiquity, and a view from the ground that may be gleaned from the records of colonial administrations managing the new regime in mandatory areas and in Egypt, and of scholars. Interwoven with these views and at times quite dominant in the book, is another, fourth view, from underground as it were: the recovery of the history of excavation works that unearthed treasures of the ancient empires. For it was the archaeological discoveries of the 1920s and 1930s that made antiquity so accessible to varied publics and so dominant in interwar culture. The multiple views and positions considered here help write the entangled history of the rediscovery of Near Eastern antiquity. And the shifts in the focus of our attention and gaze expand the view that is revealed to us and help grasp the history of the new imperial order that emerged between the two world wars. However, this history is not only about imperial structures, policies, and fields of knowledge in a culture, but also about modern people: individuals and groups and their penchant for, experiences and uses of, and comprehension and feelings about antiquity. The book introduces a host of agents, a few of them exposed here for the first time. They include the obvious cultural entrepreneurs who mediated between the material ancient past and modern people: archaeologists with a growing expertise in Biblical Archaeology, or in Egyptology, or in Mesopotamian archaeology, or in prehistory, surveyors, architects, epigraphists, and archaeological painters and copyists, together with a host of experts from disciplines that were especially connected to research on antiquity such as anthropology (notably physical anthropology), biometrics, and geology. Their activity was publicized by journalists and popular writers and drew on, and was made possible by, a web of sponsoring academic institutions, civic societies, and organizations for the support of scholarship on the Near East and by a cohort of philanthropists—from modest subscribers to biblical and Egyptological learned societies, to heavyweight sponsors heading transnational charity conglomerates. Notable among these sponsors are the Bible billionaire-philanthropists, whose capital came from corporate industries that stood for a modern lifestyle and corporate management, and was heavily invested in charity funds. One case in point is motorcycle and car producer magnate, and avid biblical archaeologist, Charles Marston (discussed in Chapters 3, 4, and 5), who rescued from bankruptcy archaeological projects that he saw as fit to corroborate the Bible. Pharmaceutical billionaire cum philanthropist Henry Wellcome is another. Thus, imperial discovery is enmeshed not only in nets of learning, but also in a special sort of global capital. Sometimes overlapping these knotted groups are colonial administrators (unlike the cadres of archaeologists and Egyptologists these officials were almost all men) who were quite often expert archaeologists, architects, or urban planners and who moved through the Near East, between Egypt, Palestine, and Iraq, and manned the elaborate imperial administrations of antiquities. Their routines of monitoring antiquities touched on the experiences of local agents: students of

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archaeology, epigraphists or linguists—such as Harry (Naftali) Torczyner (Tur-Sinai), decipherer of the Lachish (Tell ed-Duweir) Letters in Palestine, or local inspectors of antiquities like Naʿim Makhuli of Palestine’s Department of Antiquities.26 The routines of excavators and administrators intersected with the lives of local landowners and landholders, whose plots of land were expropriated to enable excavation, cultivators, and of countless labourers hired to manage, or participate, in the gigantic crews that made up the workforce of archaeological expeditions to the Tells (man-made mounds) unearthed across the Near East. Sheikh Hamoudi Ibn Ibrahim and his sons, employed by Woolley in Ur and by the Mallowans in Tells across northern Iraq and Syria; the able diggers who accompanied prehistorian Gertrude Caton Thompson across the Fayum desert and in the Kharja Oasis on the borders of the Libyan desert; the Palestinian village women trained by Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod to dig the prehistoric Carmel Caves, have all left traces and their voices are sounded here when possible. Some of these experienced excavators, like the archaeologists and explorers, moved across borders and hired out their expertise: relocating from Egypt to Palestine, or from Syria to Iraq. Villagers and town dwellers voiced protest and grievances about expropriation for the purpose of excavation, of fields and orchards listed as sites of “historical monuments”, thus negotiating the value of ancient places and of antiquities. Even though British men and women are at the centre of this book, the multi-focal look offered here and the introduction of nonBritish actors—Americans, French, Greeks, Egyptians, and Palestinians—add to our comprehension of how the discovery of antiquity worked on both an international and local level. Discovery was unmistakably and indisputably hierarchical. It could only with difficulty contain tensions and conflicts which occasionally erupted violently, and terminated collaboration. But it also fostered degrees of cooperation. In fact, discovery could not function without local labour, expertise, knowledge, and curiosity about the past.

The Complex of Antiquity: Some Features The culture, politics, and uses of antiquities may be described as a complex (defined here as a whole comprising connected and interacting parts, rather than as a deliberately structured whole), which features some recurring characteristics. These recurrences cut across variety and diversity. The first such feature concerns the scope of the rediscovery of antiquity and its regional and global spread, and shapes the approach of the book. The ancient civilizations of the Near East continued to be appropriated by and mobilized for, national movements and states

26 Tall al-Duwayr. Henceforth Tell ed-Duweir, the spelling which appears in the archives’ records.

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and for the new kind of empire that emerged after the First World War, but at the same time the ancient past and its remains were internationalized. As a plethora of studies on internationalism has demonstrated, internationalization preceded the war and the “international turn” took place at the turn of the twentieth century. It was emphatically pragmatic and regarded as “objective” and based on what Glenda Sluga has described as “sociological facts” rather than on utopian visions, was liberal, or liberal democratic rather than socialist, and middle- rather than working-class in the composition of its adherents, and imperialist.27 At the same time its agendas, rhetoric, and organizations appealed to marginal groups including colonial subjects, racial minorities, feminist activists, and pacifists.28 Importantly, the new internationalism and nationalism were neither antagonistic “nor even analytically separable principles” but were mutually entailed aspects of wider processes of thought and action and of the path to modernity.29 The war precipitated the expansion of internationalist associationism and campaigning that aimed at achieving a world peace and resulted in the experiment in a world government based on the widely accepted percepts of national self-determination. The associations between internationalism and nationalism are apparent in movements for the preservation of national heritage and national pasts studied by Swenson and others and may be dated back to the middle of the nineteenth century.30 But these movements, their campaigns for the regulation of preservation, and espousal of transnational exchange of preservationist ideas and practices, did not bring about an institutionalized international oversight which evolved only after the First World War and was a part of post-war internationalization and the evolving imperial world order. The new ilk of a liberal internationalist, who was also an imperialist, is embodied in Alfred Zimmern, a classicist (and author of the widely read The Greek Commonwealth, 1911) with a penchant for the past, who worked for the IICI and became the world’s first Professor of International Relations. His The Third British Empire (1927) considers the empire as a “British Entente”, and a stage in progress towards the higher embodiment of the empire state: the League of Nations and its guardianship.31 By “internationalized” I mean that talk and debates about antiquities (rather than “heritage” generally), their ownership, and the regulation of access to them, 27 Akira Iriye, “The Internationalization of History”, American Historical Review, 94:1 (1988), 1–10; Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia, PA, 2013), 4–9, 11–45; Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (eds), Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge, 2017), 3–17. See also Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York, 2012). 28 Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism. 29 Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, 7 and Liisa Malkki, “Citizens of Humanity: Internationalism and the Imagined Community of Nations”, Diaspora 3:1 (1994), 62. 30 Astrid Swenson, “The First Heritage International(s): Conceptulaizing Global Networks before UNESCO”, Future Anterior, 13:1 (Summer 2016), 1–15. 31 Krishan Kumar, Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World (Princeton, NJ, 2017), 360–7; Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ, 2013), 66–103.

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took place on newly created international platforms. These were the same platforms that legitimated the new mandates system: the League and its constituent organizations that fostered international intellectual cooperation, the reorganization of fields of knowledge such as history and archaeology, and the recruiting of a transnational bureaucracy to manage them (in the ICIC, IIIC, and IMO). These organizations arranged and stage-managed conferences which devised internationally sanctioned legislation and a repertoire of procedures, concerning conservation, preservation and, most significantly, archaeological excavation and traffic in monuments and antiquities. Some of these gatherings took place outside the obvious centres of imperial rule: in Athens (1931), or in colonial territories— in Algiers and Cairo (1937), the last conference producing the first international technical manual of excavations adopted as a League Resolution.32 The new institutions were also the very sites where the new forms and practices of imperialism were debated. They bred a new crew of international experts on antiquities. No  one who pored over the prodigious paperwork of the IMO, the body most concerned with overseeing archaeology, historical monuments, and museums, will ever forget Euripide Foundoukidis, a Greek national (who served as General Secretary of the International Museums Office between 1929 and 1941), navigating attempts at international handling of illicit traffic in antiquities, preparing international gatherings and conventions on historical monuments and excavations, and maneuvering between nationalist politicians in the Near East, scholars, the League’s officials, and no few prickly British Museum office holders. Leaving a long paper trail both in Paris and in the League’s archives in Geneva, is also Princess Gabrielle Radziwill, a Lithuanian aristocrat by birth, internationalist and feminist, and one of the few women members of the League’s Secretariat, who penned a report on the state of antiquities in mandate A territories that were the yardstick of international handling of monuments and antiquities. “Internationalization” in this book applies not only to organizations, people, ideas, and debates about antiquities and rules, and repertoires concerning their uses. It has a very material aspect. Ancient objects, the yield of the exponentially increasing excavations in the Near East, travelled far and wide. They were exchanged between Near Eastern departments of antiquities and excavators, between archaeologists and their sponsoring museums in Britain, Europe, the USA, and the empire, and among museums that traded in them. Antiquities were offered as gifts to sponsors and sold to collectors, big and small. Ancient objects, from sculptures to shreds of ancient textiles, from tablets to arrows, from scarabs to figurines, were mobile. They carried afar their multiple values—an aesthetic value, their age value, and their emotive value to collectors and nationalists, and  became a part of cultural (and actual) capital in the transnational culture

32 League of Nations, Manual on the Technique of Archaeological Excavation (Paris, 1940).

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of  antiquity. Antiquities were accommodated in museums and displayed in exhibitions and were endlessly duplicated—in three-dimensional replicas, visual representations, in drawings and photographs, and in words.33 Thus, related to the imperial and international mutability of ancient objects is the second characteristic of the complex of antiquities. It concerns the matter of antiquity, in the most literal sense of this term: the materiality of ancient Near Eastern civilizations (and, more broadly, the ancient past) and its realness—not just for finders and excavators, but for men, women, and children of all walks of life in many places. The sheer quantity of finds and the spectacular riches brought out from sites like the Tomb of Tutankhamun or the Royal Cemeteries of Ur, discovered between 1922 and 1932 and 1922 and 1934, respectively, made ancient Egypt, Sumer, and other Mesopotamian civilizations concrete and tactile. Ancient Near Eastern objects became a go-between of a kind, connecting moderns to the civilizations that had produced these objects. Ancient things were mediating agents. Their “thingness” mattered—literally. They acquired biographies, social lives, and political meanings. They were massively imitated and adapted in a vast variety of objects, many of them mass-manufactured, for display as well as for different everyday uses. “Egyptian” cigarette and match boxes, dresses and accessories, were the vogue during the decade following the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. Imitation of “antiquities” or ancient motifs—notably Egyptian, but also Mesopotamian—spread to architecture, design, dress, and gadgets. Reproduction expanded to periods and places that were less lucrative than the 18th Dynasty in Egypt. In the 1930s the Crown Agents for the Colonies negotiated the manufacture of replicas of prehistoric bone artefacts, such as a “young crevine animal fashioned partly in the round and partly in relief ”34 and casts of skeletons found in the prehistoric caves at the Wadi al-Mugharah (“Wadi of the Caves”) Near the port of Haifa in Palestine.35 Ancient objects and their reproductions were touched, handled, and interpreted by specialists, purchased by collectors or ordinary consumers with a hankering after the ancient, and gazed upon by visitors to museums. They were appropriated by urbanites passing by, working in, or inhabiting buildings that displayed styles and motifs which were transported from ancient Egypt and Assyria to venues that embodied modern lifestyle, work, and leisure—such as factories, cafes, hotels, and giant cinema halls with Egyptianizing motifs.36 And they were appropriated by the buyers and users of

33 See Chapters  1 and Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1988), “Introduction”. 34 Dorothy L. Garrod, “Note on Three Objects from the Mesolithic Age from a Cave in Palestine”, Man, 30, May 1930, 77–8. 35 Crown Agents for the Colonies to Director of Antiquities, 14 July 1931 and 14 July 1932, Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), ATQ_30/8 (17/17). 36 David A. Hayes, “Carreras: Family, Firm and Factory”, Camden History Review, 27 (2003), 30–4.

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everyday goods like cigarette packs and lighters, customized jewellery, cosmetics, and popular music scores that circulated archaeological motifs.37 A third feature of the post-war discovery complex has to do with the relationship between the encounter with ancient civilizations and imperial modernity. Antiquity served to define the boundaries and characteristics of what was considered “modern”. The age of civilizations, their oldness or remoteness in time, provided definitions of the borderlines between the past and the present of peoples, places, and races. Debates on the ancientness and the beginnings of non-European civilizations were welded to narratives and debates on progress, particularly from the mid nineteenth century. Different remote antiquities were employed to buttress a variety of agendas in a rapidly modernizing and materially changing society: from a buttressing of the Scriptures and their defence against science, to a belief in progress, to a vindication of the sciences.38 During the interwar period all these uses of antiquity persisted and were linked to features of modernity. But they co-existed with, and were challenged by, new definitions and meanings. The host of new experts, mostly archaeologists, together with imperial administrators, articulated the antiquity–modernity bond most explicitly. They connected the agenda of the discovery of the remote past to the main project of the mandates system: the modernization of the territories entrusted to the imperial guardians.39 The discovery, preservation, and excavations of the treasures of antiquity were reconfigured and represented as both a rescue and a development project: they salvaged the remnants of antiquity for the benefit of the native populations of the mandated territories, thus cultivating native consciousness of their value, ameliorating their present, and guaranteeing their future. The modernization idiom pervades numerous texts on antiquity produced by British women and men in Palestine and Iraq—from excavations’ logs and records, to private letters documenting the relationship between British archaeologists and their local labour force. And there is no lack of similar vocabulary in texts on Egypt—notwithstanding the different kind of imperial relationship it presented. Take, for example, James Leslie Starkey, Flinders Petrie’s disciple, director of the six-year expedition to Tell ed-Duweir in Palestine, who established its identification with biblical Lachish, the Judaic fortress-town known to British Bible readers and spectators from the famous reliefs of Sennacherib’s siege of it in 701 bc at the British Museum. Starkey and his co-excavators regarded themselves as archaeologists and as imperial modernizers of the Palestinian villagers who they employed, supervised, doctored, and healed. When Starkey was murdered on his way to the 37 Bob Brier, Egyptomania: Our Three Thousand Year Obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs (London, 2012). 38 Glyn Daniel. The Idea of Prehistory (Harmondsworth, 1962, 1964 edn), 9–108; Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Oxford, repr. 2006). 39 British Empire Exhibition 1924: Palestine Pavilion Handbook and Tourist Guide (London, 1924), 21, 25.

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opening of Palestine’s new museum of antiquities (the Rockefeller Museum) in Jerusalem in January 1938, he was instantaneously elevated to a martyred mandatory. His writings and writing about him abound with the associations between the discovery of the ancient past and Palestine’s modernization. Put differently, and as shown throughout this book, antiquity served as an overarching modality for thinking about, understanding, and explaining the modernizing empire and its experience. And antiquity endowed this empire with meanings. But the nexus of modernity and antiquity is not just about a mode of thinking, a common idiom and representation, and about materiality. It is also, and considerably, about technologies of modernity, mainly what I describe as “speed technologies”, precisely because they accelerated movement and speed (itself an icon of interwar modernity), condensed distances, and had a considerable effect on access to, and the immediate, physical experience of, the ancient world. Speed technologies, as I point out below, dramatically changed modern British and Near Eastern people’s sense of time and place. Technologies were used and appropriated in the post-war British imperial state and its vast overseas territories. Imported to the Near East before the First World War, and deployed during it, speed technologies were “tools of empire” utilized to govern, monitor, and develop the area by the military, civil administrations, and experts.40 Britain was far from being alone in mobilizing technology for military purposes and colonial expansion and governing: technological tools had been developed and employed by the Ottoman Empire and, after the war, by some of the imperial gainers, including the French, Italian, and Japanese empires. During the war large-gauge railways were laid or broadened by the British and imperial Expeditionary Force to Egypt and Palestine and, after it, roads and means of transport like the car, bus, and airplane changed the pace and rhythm of movement to and through Egypt and the Mashriq, and shrank space and time.41 The late, or second, transport revolution, traceable in Britain from about the 1860s and culminating during the interwar period when it was exported to imperial territories, revolutionized discovery in making antiquities more easily reachable and contact with them more direct. The Middle East became considerably closer to British, North American, and Continental ports and aviation depots, and travel to it became cheaper and more widely available to package tourists, winter holiday makers, and to soldiers of the imperial and Allied Forces who moved across it during the Second World War and visited historical sites. The train, combustion engine vehicles, and the airplane became instruments of movement that made the remotest Tells and monuments reachable. The eponymous “Ur Junction”, a branch of the Baghdad

40 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno- Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, CA, 2002). 41 On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley, CA, 2013) and Murat Özyüksel, The Hejaz Railway and the Ottoman Empire: Modernity, Industrialism and Ottoman Decline (London, 2014).

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Railway located a few kilometres from the massive Tell al-Muqayyar in southern Iraq, became a popular icon in post-war travel culture, so near was it to Abraham’s alleged birthplace and the ancient Sumerian treasures. The transport revolution and advance in technologies of documentation and recording that they enabled, such as aerial photography, sometimes literally exposed ancient sites. We should be wary of ascribing the spread of transport and changes in patterns of mobility solely to military imperial techniques of ruling. They pertained to a wider shift (which was not a linear development) towards different uses of energy resources and signalled change in energy regimes—from one drawing on fossil energy rich in carbon to an economy based on petroleum.42 Oil power did not supersede usages of coal and animal energy throughout the Mashriq. Trains consumed carbon well into the 1930s, and camel caravans carried goods and people across otherwise impassable desert terrain, as shown in Chapter 10. Rather, the interwar moment of oil supplemented uses of carbon energy.43 But the new speed technologies were associated with forms of a culture of connectivity that have been described as “auto-mobility”.44 The automobile, particularly the desert car or bus, adapted to crossing unexplored routes, and the airplane that served both as a vehicle and a photographic device, played a major role in the mapping of unexplored and unseen archaeological remains and the discovery of antiquities, mainly in Egypt and Iraq. They evolved from the needs of imperial defence but expanded in directions that served a variety of purposes, not least the discovery and documentation of ancient sites. Modern imperial technologies also altered forms of seeing antiquity and their representations in a grid of new genres and forms of writing that developed together with the new mandatory empires and the growing interest in their ancient past: the popular technical manuals modernizing amateurs’ search for antiquities, the expert technical manual, whose prime exemplar is the manual authored collectively by the experts participating in the Cairo Conference and released in 1940 by the IMO, as well as the personal account of encounters with antiquity which I call archaeobiography (archaeological autobiography)—the latter an exploration account, combining narratives of mechanized travel and archaeological discovery. Last, but not least, and most popular of the new forms of writing, is the archaeological mystery and detective novel, reaching its heyday exactly during the interwar excavations bonanza and analysed in Chapter  6. Technological modernity came to be presented as an instrument of discovery, a

42 Liat Kozma, Cyrus Schayegh, and Avner Wishnitzer (eds), The Global Middle East: Mobility, Materiality and Culture in the Modern Age, 1880–1948 (London, 2015). 43 For a critique on the substitution interpretation, distinguishing between different energy regimes in the Middle East, see On Barak, Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (Oakland, CA, 2020). 44 For a definition, see Mike Featherstone, Nigel Thrift, and John Urry (eds), Automobilities (Thousand Oaks, CA, 2005), 1.

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boost to it, and a democratizing agent, putting the ancient past within easier reach of the masses. But at the same time, it entailed risks: mechanized discovery, development, and urbanization endangered the remains of the past and its monuments. In some of the new genres, modernity came to be described as lethal and was identified with deadly danger. Christie’s archaeological whodunnits, set on the Nile, at Ur, in Petra in Transjordan, in Syria, and in the surroundings of Baghdad, are, as we shall see, cases in point. A fourth feature of the preoccupation with the ancient Near Eastern civilizations, their representation and imagining, concerns their urban character and essence. These civilizations are depicted as quintessentially urban, as the birthplace of cities and the origin of modern cities, and as imperial and even global. Ur, Amarna, Jerusalem, and Megiddo, whose excavations were constantly covered by the international press, but also smaller Tells such as Tell ed-Duweir—Lachish and Mallowan’s Tell Brak—were represented as urban centres in a language brimming with analogues to urban modernity. The ancient city state and its cycle of settlement and destruction—embodied in the Tell (see Chapters 3–5 and 7–8)— became a loaded image and a symbol of urban living, its characteristics and dangers, as well as of imperial rise, overstretch, decline, and fall. The city and city life are central to the experience of modernity and their prominence in modern historical discourse was not unique to the preoccupation with antiquity: they figured prominently in the modern culture of history that emerged in Britain at the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and survived through to the second half of the twentieth. As some historians have noted, this culture was distinctly urban in that it perceived, imagined, and represented the past as an urban place.45 It was produced in cities such as London, associated the past with the empire, and flourished in a grid of urban genres, both literary and visual.46 But the metropolises of antiquity occupied a special role in this culture: their rise, fall, and disappearance (until their discovery in the mid nineteenth century—as was the case with numerous Mesopotamian cities), made it possible to regard them as historical models and object lessons. Moreover, cities occupied a central place in the Scriptures and in the vernacular biblical culture mentioned above. And some cities rose to being overarching symbols of human and civilizational cycles.47

45 Billie Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800–1953 (Oxford, 2006); Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT, 2000); David L. Pike, Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London 1800–1945 (Ithaca, NY, 2005). 46 Melman, The Culture of History and Billie Melman, “That Which We Learn with the Eye: Popular Histories, Modernity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century London and Paris”, in Stefan Berger, Chris Lorenz, and Billie Melman (eds), Popularizing National Pasts: 1800 to the Present (London and New York, 2012), 75–102. 47 Gange and Ledger-Lomas, Cities of God; Billie Melman, “The Power of the Past: History and Modernity in the Victorian World”, in Martine Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World (London, 2012), 466–84.

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Enough to mention here the relative and supplementing roles of Rome and Jerusalem in Victorian culture and Athens’s many roles in middle- and upperclass British scholarship and learning, and in civic and municipal symbolism.48 From the second half of the nineteenth century and, increasingly, during the first half of the twentieth, antiquity became more remote in time than classical civilizations and farther in place, focusing on the Near East, India, and Africa rather than on Greece and Rome.

Materials, Exclusions, and Structure Writing the entangled histories of the British and imperial rediscovery of antiquity that offers a multi-focal view (from the metropolis, the supra national imperial view, and the view on the ground and underground in the Near Eastern territories) required some choices and necessarily omissions and exclusions. Whereas biblical and scriptural antiquity, Egyptian civilizations, and the civilizations of Mesopotamia, as well as prehistoric civilizations, receive special attention, the Hellenic and Roman worlds are only selectively considered here. This is by choice and not by default. As Klaniczay, Werner, and Gecser have rightly noted, the bulk of scholarly work on the role of antiquity in British and European modernities has focused on “classical presences” and the many roles of the classics and of Greece and Rome in shaping these modernities.49 Interest in the classics did not die down with the First World War; quite the contrary.50 And it was connected to post-war neo-colonialism in North Africa, and the Levant—notably in Italian and French territories.51 The geographical scope of the present book and the focus on British mandate territories and Egypt directed the choice of antiquities discussed here. Greek associations of Amarna and Graeco-Roman Egypt—notably Alexandrine and Ptolemaic Egypt—stirred considerable interest 48 Gange and Ledger-Lomas, Cities of God. 49 Klaniczay, Werner, and Gecser, Multiple Antiquities, 9–10. “Classical Presences” also refers to OUP’s multi-volume series. For examples of studies of the legacies of Rome and Greece, see Simon Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction and the Proclamation of Modernity (Princeton, NJ, 2011) and Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism (Cambridge, 2002); Kate Nichols, Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace: Classical Sculpture and Modern Britain, 1854–1936 (Oxford, 2015); Norman Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford, 1997); Dunstan Lowe and Kim Shahabudin, Classes for All: Reworking Antiquity in Mass Culture (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2009). There is less on the interwar period. See Stephen L. Dyson, In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts: A History of Classical Archaeology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New Haven, CT, 2006); Miriam Leonard and Joshua Billings (eds), Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity (Oxford, 2015). 50 See Elizabeth Vandiver, Stand in the Trench Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War (Oxford, 2010). 51 Antonio De Francesco, The Antiquity of the Italian Nation: The Cultural Origins of a Political Myth in Modern Italy, 1796–1943 (Oxford, 2013); Daniela Helbig, “La Trace de Rome? Aerial Photography and Archaeology in Mandate Syria and Lebanon”, History of Photography, 40 (2016), 283–300.

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between the wars and are considered here; so are, briefly, Hellenistic remains in Transjordan. The latter did not engender the popular outbursts of excitement brought on by the discoveries of the Pharaonic, Sumerian, and biblical pasts. But the Hellenic past had a particular imperial edge: its focus was not necessarily on Athens and its heritages, but on Alexander’s, empire, an unrealized and shortlived world domain and its offshoots. Its resurrection by desert explorers, inventors of vehicles designed for desert crossing, classicist-military men, and modernist writers, offers a new angle on the interwar classical turn in Egyptology and Near Eastern archaeology. Another omission is Islamic antiquities which are referred to only briefly; the book, however, emphasizes their marginalization which was imbedded in mandate temporal definitions of antiquities and in policies in regard to them. The varied body of materials I draw on and that determined the structure and method of the book incorporates kinds of sources which usually are not studied together: archival materials of various kinds, published texts, visual images, and objects. To attain the multi-focal view I have researched in some twenty archives. My archival travels revealed much more than new information. As a number of studies of archives and historians’ experience in them tell us, archives are not just repositories of “facts” marshalled by historians, nor are they temples of historical truth, nor inanimate containers of documents. They evolve.52 They store information that may conceal as well as reveal, or they exclude information. This certainly applies to the mammoth imperial and supra-national archives I researched. They developed higgledy-piggledy. And the sheer amount of materials in them sometimes contrasts gaps and omissions. Abundance marks the archives of the League, its committees, and the array of its organizations labouring for the internationalization of a regime of antiquities. The archives of mandatory Departments of Antiquities are colonial archives of governmental departments, whose sprawling correspondence itself constituted a form of governing, and they teach us a great deal about both the new antiquities regime and the new imperial order and its fragility. Alongside these I have examined metropolitan government archives. A variety of civic organizations including academic institutions, museums, and learned societies produced and diffused knowledge about the ancient Near East like the London-based Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF), the Wellcome Institute, the Institute of Archaeology (IOA), and university archives. They all store records of the cohort of experts on antiquities, some of whom are studied here for the first time. To the records of individuals such as Caton-Thomspon, Garrod, Mallowan, and the celebrated Woolley, Egyptologists like Winifred Brunton and Myrtle Florence Broome, and Palestine 52 Arlette Farge, Le goût de L’archive (Paris, 1989), Carolyn Stedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ, 2002); Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ, 2009).

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archaeologists such as Olga Tufnell, may be added the archive of Agatha Christie which provides insights into popular and scholarly notions of the intricate relationship between antiquity and modernity. These prodigious records are augmented by the massive newspaper material. The press, metropolitan and colonial, national and local and vernacular, written and illustrated, did not just percolate knowledge about the remote past: it was an active agent in the process of democratizing access to antiquity and relating it to modern experiences and lifestyle. Written materials, published and unpublished, are examined together with visual and material ones. This is done not to “cover” different kinds of sources, or merely to gesture towards the (most welcome) material turn in historical studies.53 Visual images and objects are essential to our grasp of the hold of ancient histories on modern men and women between the wars, on their imagination and uses of antiquities. As already noted, the materiality of the past was key to its understanding, to individuals’ empathy with it and to anxieties about the present that drew on the trajectory, decline, and destruction of ancient civilizations. Antiquities were, literally, the object matter and the mediators of a sense of the past and of what it had been. And they played a major role in the making of the subject of ancient history and in engendering feelings about it. The book introduces the agency of ancient things not as fetishes or mere images, but as objects attached to people and that provoked curiosity, the urge for discovery and activity. Examples multiply across groups of actors, class, and gender. Henry Rider Haggard’s ownership of, and attachment to the rings allegedly belonging to Queens Nefertiti and Tiye, chief consort and mother of Pharaoh Akhenaten, which he had acquired in a deal brokered by traveller and minor writer W. J. Loftie, was documented by Rider Haggard who was regarded as and considered himself an expert on ancient Egypt.54 But consider, for example, the much less known Mary Chubb, assistant secretary at the Egypt Exploration Society (EES), at the time she first formed an attachment to Egypt’s material culture and its past. As she polished a luminous fragment of a polychrome tile from Amarna in 1931, she became enraptured by its beauty.55 She captured the touch and sight of Amarna objects in her classic Nefertiti Lived Here (1953).56 Olga Tuffnel was thrilled when she acquired a Hellenistic piece of sapphire with the head of a man engraved on it.57 The presence and matter of ancient objects impacted her sense and experience of antiquity and stirred her feelings. The mandibles, fractured skull, and incomplete skeleton of a Neanderthal female of the Carmel Tabun cave moved prehistorian Jacquetta Hawkes to a sympathy which she reiterated in prose 53 Dan Hicks and Mary  C.  Beaudry (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (Oxford, 2010); AHR Conversation, “Historians and the Study of Material Culture”, American Historical Review, 112:5 (December 2009), 1354–404. 54 Letter to the Editor, The Times, 19 December 1922. 55 Mary Chubb, Nefertiti Lived Here (repr. London, 2011), 4. 56 Ibid., 11–14. 57 Olga Tufnell to her mother, 5 March 1937, Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), PEF-DA-TUF.

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and verse.58 The material sense of the past is interwoven throughout the book and the emotional aspect of it is discussed in some detail. Part I sets the terms for the new definitions of “antiquity” and relates them to the new post-war imperial order. Beginning with the First World War, it tracks the shift from the notion of ancient objects and monuments as the loot of victors, to their handling within the framework of laws of war, to their treatment in the post-war peace treaties and the new mandates system. It follows the internationalization of the discourse on antiquity and the formation of a new “regime of antiquities”, a term put in circulation by Foundoukidis and referring to international and local mandatory legislation on antiquities and their monitoring. Chapter 1, “Mandated Pasts”, thus offers a view from above of the new regime and its development and seeks to show that, like mandate administrations and the administrations of the newly born national states in the Near East, the League of Nations had a special stake in the regime of antiquities and the formation of international oversight over their discovery, research, and access to them. The League’s permanent bodies and its organizations for intellectual cooperation enunciated public talk about antiquities, even seeking a new standardized and uniform terminology to describe them.59 However the internationalizing pull conflicted with imperial sovereignty and the power of the mandatories to implement policies on the ground. Although the internationalization of antiquity is threaded throughout the rest of the book, Parts II–IV provide a look from the ground, as well as from under the ground, at the discovery complex and move between Britain and its Near Eastern empire. Each of these three parts focuses on the discovery of an imperial past which it sets in a different imperial territory. Part II (Chapters 2–4) is devoted to the rediscovery of biblical pasts in Palestine, including Transjordan which formed a part of the Palestine mandate. In British culture, the Bible was the oldest and remained the longest surviving framework for interpreting and experiencing the Holy Land and the territories bordering Palestine that were connectable to scriptural narratives. The Bible did not lose its vitality during the long nineteenth century and gained new leases of life during the First World War and the further development of Biblical Archaeology, epigraphy, and linguistics. As Chapters 2–5 show, it remained dominant in discussions of the ancient past and the discovery of material culture served to illustrate and corroborate scriptural texts. But the texts and, more broadly, biblical culture—including research, literature, and travel—were modernized: uses of the Scriptures were adapted to modern technologies of transport. Although dominant, the scriptural framework was by no means hegemonic. The Bible—both as an interpretative framework for change 58 Jacquetta Hawkes, Man on Earth (London, 1954), 12–13. 59 “Note on Archaeological Terminology by A.  Childe”, 16 July 1925, CICI League of Nations Archive, UN Geneva, 13C/45237/45237.

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and as a temporality—was challenged and contested not just by its modernization, but also by the discovery of Palestinian and Levantine prehistory (that undermined biblical chronologies and a belief in the Creation), and the strong association between archaeology and anthropology. The discovery and study of human and animal remains and writings and debates about them, centred race as a key instrument for interpretations of history and the origins and course of civilizations, occasionally substituting it for salvation. Chapter 2, “Illustrating the Bible”, examines the modernization of the biblical framework and narratives, and focuses on new genres which revitalized both and grafted new notions of speed and temporality onto previous narratives. Chapters 3–4 focus on two sites of discovery in the mandated territory of Palestine and Transjordan, thus introducing a method and an approach that allows me to write the combined and entangled histories of the antiquity complex and that I follow in the remaining parts of the book. The chapters each deal with a manmade mound or “Tell” (the word is the same in Arabic and Hebrew), the site of excavation and antiquity most common across much of the Near East. Tells presented sequences of human settlement, destruction, and resettlement, and their stratification configured antiquity and shaped contemporaries’ notions about it and their notions of civilizational development. Tells and their excavations became overarching images of, and metaphors for, the past and modernity. The chapters which zoom in on Tells offer a section of the layers that made up the complex of antiquity. In each chapter I consider the international and metropolitan interest in, and initiative for, exploration and digging—including scholarly interest, the economy of exploration, preservation and display of antiquities, and  discovery on the ground and underground. Chapter  3, “Cities of David”, recovers the international, metropolitan, and local initiatives for verifying the location of Jerusalem’s oldest part, Mount Ophel, the locus, as it was widely believed, of its origins. The chapter relates the search for the city’s origins to mandatory urban planning and visions of a modernized and ancient Jerusalem, and examines the complex negotiation over access to Ophel and other historical monuments, between the mandate authority and local landholders who cultivated the excavation sites. The negotiation and disputes about who owned land were also clashes over the worth and value of antiquity. Chapter 4, “Lachish”, is located in Tell ed-Duweir/Lachish, in the Shephela (or lowland) region of Palestine, in the vicinity of Hebron, and moves between London, the Tell, and its neighbouring villages. The chapter recovers a history of the excavation, analysed as a mandatory modernization project, and recoups the relationship between fields of knowledge like Biblical Archaeology, epigraphy, physical anthropology, and anthropometrics, that mediated between antiquity, scholars, and scientists, and consumers of antiquity. It also examines the webs of relations that evolved on the Tell between British experts and local labourers, and landowners and their negotiation over land.

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Part III is about the rediscovery of Mesopotamia after the war and its imperial contexts. It is attuned to the tensions between the role of antiquities in the idea and practices of the mandate of Iraq, Iraqi national investment in ancient Mesopotamia, and the activities of British searchers of this past. Here, too, I anchor the discussion in Tells. My choice was directed by their impact on, and presence in, the expert and public debates on antiquity. Ur (discussed in Chapter  5) was excavated for twelve years by an Anglo-American expedition directed by Woolley, probably the most dominant figure in interwar Near Eastern archaeology. His records, massive popular publications, and public presence in Britain and the USA, based on his masterly use of the new popular media, elevated Ur and Sumerian culture to spectacles and icons of antiquity that competed with the contemporary exposure of the tomb of Tutankhamun. The chapter considers the use of the biblical paradigm and its modernization in interpreting Ur as the metropolitan place of origin of an urban and cosmopolitan Abraham, alongside a worldwide fascination with the riches of its material culture and evidence of live burials. Chapter 6, “Murder in Mesopotamia”, offers an examination of the diffusion of ancient history and its archaeological discovery to popular culture. It draws on the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie, Britain’s top-selling popular writer and a popular modernist. Christie, as is well known, was an amateur archaeologist who took an active part in excavations in Iraq for near to three decades. Her archaeological/historical novels and two autobiographies are examined together with her archive. In Christie’s abundant writings the Tell is a central image and metaphor, and the search for ancient civilizations, and practice of excavation are interpreted as a modernizing activity comparable to detective work. Chapter 7, “Prehistories for Modernity”, is about “the most ancient east” (prehistoric archaeologist and popular writer Vere Gordon Childe’s phrase). Its geographic foci are the Middle- and Lower-Stone Age hangouts of the Wadi al-Mugharah on Mount Carmel in Palestine, and the late Neolithic Tell Arphachiyah, bordering Mosul and the remains of the considerably richer Nineveh. Much less sensational than Ur and the Egyptian sites examined in Part IV, and less emotive than the City of David and Lachish, the two sites engendered considerable interest. They showcase the encounters with prehistory in western Asia and their ramifications for a prehistory of the West, for notions of human origins and of temporality. They also demonstrate how mobile and varied “prehistory” was and how elastic and immense its stretch, covering at least 500,000 years, thus relativizing senses of ancient history. Prehistory enormously expanded antiquity and contested head-on the biblical narratives and temporality examined in previous chapters. In the Carmel caves the discoveries of rich Palaeolithic “industries” galvanized a scholarly and popular-scientific debate on the place of origins of “modern” humans and the mobility of civilizations. At the same time the unearthing of stupendous quantities of Stone Age tools provoked analogues between humans and hominins. Analogies between prehistoric and

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“proto-historic” people, settlements, and tools characterize attitudes to the tiny Tell Arpachyiah and are reiterated in work on mounds excavated in northern Syria. The chapter connects excavations to mandates modernization projects and the politics of archaeology. Part IV focuses on the multi-faceted relationship between Egypt’s antiquity, empire, and modernity between the outbreak of the First World War and decolonization. Clearly Britain’s presence in Egypt before and after the war does not fit in the new mode of imperial rule. Nonetheless, the new imperial order and regime of antiquities recast the web of relations between British discoverers and the British public on the one hand, and Egyptians on the other hand; it also internationalized the regulation of access to antiquity and a worldwide debate on it that raged from the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 to the mid 1930s. While Part IV considers the work of Egyptologists, it does not propose a history of Egyptology as a field of knowledge, or as a distinct form of popular culture (studied by others).60 Rather it considers the scale and spread of the interwar preoccupation with Egypt, Egypt’s multiple presences in material culture in Britain, and the web of relations between its rediscovery, empire, and politics. Chapter 8, “Egyptian Antiquity”, maps this expansion, in relation to, and beyond Tutmania, and points at connections between imperial and national politics in Egypt on the one hand and internationalization on the other. It links both to Egypt’s imperial antiquities administration and to modernization, specifically to the development of technologies of speed that precipitated the emergence of new forms of exploration and research. The chapter highlights the relationship between military wartime technologies, archaeological excavation, and exploration, thus concretely delineating connections between empire, technology, and discovery. Chapter 9, “Nefertiti Lived Here”, zooms in on Amarna (Tall al-ʿAmarnah) in Middle Egypt, the site of the 18th Dynasty city Akhetaten, built by Pharaoh Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV), and abandoned after his death, together with his religion and cult of the Sun Disc. Amarna, and its post-war excavations were quite visible in twentieth-century culture: in design and architecture, politics and, of course, in psychoanalysis. In interwar British culture the city and its ruler were associated with modernity and seen as forerunners of modern urban and suburban life, including modern family life. And the Pharaoh and his capital’s short and ephemeral histories were interpreted as a moment of imperial crisis, analogous, comparable even, to the interwar imperial crisis. Chapter  10, “The Road to Alexandria”, examines the rediscovery, between the early 1920s and 1950s, of Hellenistic presences in the Near East. The chapter considers the writings of archaeologists, explorers, and modernist writers and journalists, who explored, probed, and represented Near Eastern remnants and legacies of a classical world

60 Gange, Dialogues; Carruthers, Histories; Reid, Whose Pharaohs?; Colla, Conflicted Antiquities.

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that was deemed distinctly imperial. At its centre are writings on sites that were associated with the world empire of Alexander the Great, such as Alexandria and the desert oasis of Siwa on the Libyan border, reputed place of his deification as Zeus Ammon. The chapter focuses on re-enactment as a form of discovery and appropriation by repetition and interpretation of Graeco-Roman itineraries, both in cities and in the desert, and their modernization. Re-enactment characterizes the travelogues and guidebooks of modernist writers like E. M. Forster and Mary Butts, and journalists such as Henry Vollam Morton, as well as desert explorers/ scientists and machinists like Ralph Alger Bagnold. Some of the writings examined here expand beyond the formal end of British rule in the Near East, thus indicating the persistence of British imperial presences in the region immediately before and after the formal end of empire. The intersecting histories of the modern and ancient empires of antiquities that I seek to recover and relate here are not exhaustive or comprehensive, nor can they be. But this incomplete attempt may help us follow the relationship between forms of modernity, the rediscovery of the ancient past and at times of imperial growth and crises, and the ways in which the encounters with remote times made sense of modernity, development, and empire.

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I

AN T IQU IT Y A ND T H E NEW POST- WA R IMPE R IA L OR DE R

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Mandated Pasts War, Peace, and the New Regime of Antiquities

Loot: The First World War and the Spoils of Antiquity In late March or early April 1921, HM Transport Huntsend moored at the port of  Southampton with an unusual cargo: eighty-three boxes of antiquities from Samarra, Iraq, containing wall decorations, frescoes, plaster reliefs, and a collection of porcelains imported to the ninth-century capital of the Abbasid Caliphate from China.1 Added to the Muslim and Chinese antiquities were Assyrian reliefs dated to the Neo-Assyrian Empire of the tenth to seventh centuries bc, found at the site of the famous capital Assur (Qal’at Sherqat).2 The antiquities were war trophies. Packed by eminent German archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld and ready to be sent to Berlin in 1914, they were stranded on site and captured by the British Expeditionary Force to Mesopotamia.3 The boxes’ itinerary from Samarra to Basra thence to the Persian Gulf and, by sea, to southern England, and eventual dispersion to museums in Britain, Canada, the USA, Sweden and Denmark, France, Egypt and India, may be read as a chapter in a biography of rare objects, and as a tale of the “social life of things”.4 New meanings and values were accorded to them in their host museums and collections, and were added to older connotations that they had acquired over two millennia in their places of origin. The itinerary of the Samarra antiquities may also be approached and analysed as a political history. This is the story of the First World War as an imperial war and of the precarious imperial peace that followed it. It also teaches us about the emergence of the post-war international order and its impact on the development of new ways of dealing with antiquities, defining them, and owning them. From their capture until their division among European states and their colonial territories, the Samarra antiquities were the subject of a contest that produced an outpouring of imperial documentation. Memos and assessments, letters, reports and

1 John Evelyn Shuckburgh to Sir Frederic Kenyon, 15 March 1921, BMA, CE 32/56/1, 6 April 1921, 32/56/2, and 16 April 1921, 32/56/3. 2 R. L. Hobson to Kenyon, 26 July 1921, BMA, CE 32/56/5. 3 On Herzfeld, see Filiz Çakir Phillip, “Ernst Herzfeld and the Excavations at Samarra”, in Bahrani, Çelik, and Eldem, Scramble, 383–93. 4 Appadurai, The Social Life of Things.

Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and the Rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950. Billie Melman, Oxford University Press (2020). © Billie Melman. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198824558.001.0001

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cablegrams, were exchanged between the military and the India Office (IO) (initially responsible for controlling occupied Mesopotamia), between the IO and the War Office (WO), and between the WO and other governmental departments and museum directors.5 Writing under the auspices of the newly formed Joint Archaeological Committee which represented a network of academic organizations and museums dealing with the archaeology of the ancient Near East, or on their own initiative, custodians of cultural heritage argued about the benefits and damage of the removal of the boxes from their place of storage in Iraq. The Samarra affair was not brought to a closure in 1921–2. In 1935, the government of Iraq, by then a member of the League of Nations and three years into independence, approached the Foreign Office (FO) and claimed the restitution of the antiquities to the Baghdad Museum, where they belonged by right. The Standing Committee of the Trustees of the British Museum made a note that “the Iraqi Government could have no legal claim on the antiquities but on moral grounds their desire to have some of them could not be reasonably gainsaid”, and remnants of Herzfeld’s cargo were returned to Iraq.6

A Post-War Order: General Characteristics The requisition, transport, dispersal, and partial restitution of the trophies, and the documentation of their circulation, may serve to highlight some characteristics of the alignment of the new regime of antiquities that developed in the wake of the war, and the emergence of a new definition of “antiquity”. First is the reorganization of access to antiquities, their excavation, exhibition, and publicizing that involved changes in the law regarding antiquities and the formation of a machinery to handle these changes: colonial administrations manned by experts appointed to monitor the new antiquities regime. In one sense this new regime was national in that it aligned antiquities to the new territorial units created in the Middle East as a result of the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire. But these new entities and the fledging and conflicting nationalities that evolved in them were ruled, under international oversight, by the two victorious empires emerging from the war, Britain and France. From the Treaties of Versailles onward, the mandate governments and apparatuses made responsible for the immense store of ancient monuments, artefacts, and written records in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, were at variance with the new international apparatus created to regularize and unify access to antiquities, their ownership, circulation, and trade in them. 5 For a description of intra governmental negotiations, see Bernhardsson, Reclaiming a Plundered Past, 75–84. 6 British Museum Central Archives (BMCA), Minutes of the Trustees, Standing Committee, 12 October 1935, 5213. Ana Filipa Vrdoljak, International Law, Museums and the Return of Cultural Objects (Cambridge, 2008), 87.

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The second characteristic of the post-war order then is the internationalization of discussion about heritage and antiquities, and of perceptions of their protection and uses. The basis for mandatory policies and procedures on the ground was the new antiquities ordinances and laws that were, themselves, based on the peace treaties. International discussion and oversight were spearheaded by organizations initiated by the League of Nations. The ICIC and IMO promoted cooperation among states and between them and colonial territories, and sought to formulate protective legislation in regard to historical heritage, works of arts, conservation and restoration, monuments, and archaeological excavations. Based in Paris and instituted there in 1926 at the behest of the French government, the IMO amassed information on museum collections all over the world, codified the restoration of damaged artefacts, and drafted uniform ground-rules regarding archaeological procedures and trade. Third, and related to internationalization, was the attempt at collaboration, across nations, in research, excavations, and conservation. Evidently collaboration and its underlying idea—that treasures of past civilizations and their histories were to benefit science, knowledge, and humanity, clashed, sometimes head-on, with the rationale of the post-war empires and the mandates. This rationale was that historical monuments and antiquities formed a part of a national patrimony (even when this was temporarily guarded by the mandating powers), and thus were national property. Fourth, and already implied above, is the rise of a new form of argumentation about antiquity and the remote past that was formal, institutional, bureaucratic, and that served to control access to, and ownership of, this past. It thrived in new forms of recording knowledge about the ancient past, mainly archaeological knowledge, and in the massive documentation of the procedures of the control of antiquities in colonial administrations. These new forms were pivotal to what Ann Laura Stoler has described as “lettered governance . . . the commitments to paper, and the political and personal work that such inscriptions perform”.7 To take stock of the characteristics of the emerging regime of antiquities, I shall begin by briefly assessing the role of the Great War, or rather “the greater great war” in changing attitudes and policies towards heritage and cultural-historical property in warring zones and occupied territories.8 I shall follow changes and some continuities in the control of antiquities in imperial territories transferred 7 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 1. 8 The term is applied to the war in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In Ottoman territories war ended in 1923 and the years between 1908 and 1923, or alternately, 1911 and 1923, are described as “the greater great war”. See Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela (eds), Empires at War: 1911–1923 (Oxford, 2014); Abigail Jacobson, From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem Between Ottoman and British Rule (Syracuse, NY, 2011); Cyrus Schayegh and Andrew Arsan (eds), The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates (London and New York, 2015); Dotan Halevi, “Gaza and Its People: Exile and Destruction”, special issue, The First World War in Palestine, Zmanim, 162 (Spring 2014), 40–51 (Hebrew).

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from Ottoman to British rule: the three British mandate territories examined in this book—Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan (part of the mandate for Palestine), and in Egypt. The first three entities were organized under the principal of tutelage colonialism and the post-war mandates system. Iraq became the only mandate territory to shed its formal tutelary status and be granted independence via collective agreement: on 3 October 1932, the League of Nations voted its independence and admittance as a League member. The end of international oversight effectively meant Britain’s neo-imperial rule in a client state with local collaboration reconciled imperial interests and solvency to the principles of formal international approbation. British military presence in Iraq, British (and other powers’) interests in Iraq’s oil resources, and the presence of British judges guaranteed just this.9 In Palestine the mandate lingered until 1948 and guaranteed less economic and military gains to the mandatory power. The Hashemite Emirate of Transjordan, east of the Jordan River, officially a part of the Palestine mandate (but not included in the mandatory pledge to a national home for the Jewish people) had a legislative body, but was run with the massive aid of a British-manned administration and a British-commanded Arab Legion. Gradually transformed to a state, it was a British cost-effective colonial stronghold “run on the cheap” until granted independence in 1946. As has already been stressed, Egypt apparently represents an altogether different form of imperial rule. Before the war a suzerain power, technically subject to the Ottoman Sultan and, from 1882, put under British rule, it represented an older form of imperialism. It was made a protectorate during the war and in 1922 became formally independent by a unilateral British move, but was under British control. In the other three territories archaeology was mandated, that is to say subject to the mandates system and controlled by mandate agents on behalf of the League of Nations and, theoretically, for the indigenous populations inhabiting them. Egypt, though evidently outside the mandatory framework came under the orbit of the new imperial and international complex of antiquities developed during and after the war. Recouping the variety of these archaeological regimes is important not only as a chapter in the history of archaeology and attitudes to antiquity, but also for the study of late modern imperial governing. Put differently, considering the history of archaeology is a good way to think about the British Empire during the first half of the twentieth century. To grasp the double bind of archaeology—and more broadly antiquity—and the modern empire, it is necessary not only to consider its 9 Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country (London, 2007), 2nd edn; Daniel Silverfarb, Britain’s Informal Empire in the Middle East: A Case Study of Iraq, 1929–1941, (New York, 1986); Susan Pedersen, “Getting out of Iraq in 1932: The League of Nations and the Road to Normative Statehood”, American Historical Review, 115 (October 2012), 975–1000; Yoav Alon, The Making of Jordan: Tribes, Colonialism and the Modern State (London, 2007), “Tribal Shaykhs and the Limits of British Imperial Rule in Transjordan, 1920–1946”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 32:1 (January 2004), 69–92, and The Shaykh of Shaykhs: Mithqal al-Fayiz and Tribal Leadership in Modern Jordan (Stanford, CA, 2017).

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overall international and imperial aspects, but also local colonial variants and agency, as well as its relationship to a British and imperial culture of antiquity. At the heart of the new legislation and system is a legal and declaratory redefinition of what antiquity meant that is manifest in the ordinances and laws of antiquity and the institutionalization and networking of archaeology and archaeological practices. After examining them I shall consider the international aspects of the mandatory apparatus and the international platforms. Organizations and platforms had faces and, when possible, the bureaucrats and experts who navigated their policies will be recovered and be given voices.

The War on the Past: Re-Defining Heritage in the Greater Great War The appropriation of an enemy’s cultural patrimony in times of war is an old practice. The rule that “to the victor belong the spoils” persisted in wars among nations and in civil wars.10 Spoliation and outright plunder had been systematically practised and documented by the very rulers of Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt, whose own commemorations of victories and looting on monuments, in temples, and on reliefs and stellae, were coveted, acquired, and avidly collected in museums in the metropolises of the emerging Western empires from the late eighteenth century. The accumulation and ceremonial display of war trophies was practised in the Roman Empire and through the Early Modern era, culminating in Napoleon’s empire, when looting art and archaeological treasures reached a peak: Laocoon, the Apollo Belvedere, Venus de Milo, and the Horses of Saint Marc being the most celebrated examples.11 In addition to war loot, archaeological treasures and monuments, hoards and graves, had been plundered for millennia, and the possession and collection of antiquities and their display had had cultural capital and manifested the power and sovereignty of victors. During the nineteenth century the ownership and public exhibition of ancient artefacts were inseparable from imperial competition, national awakenings, and the economics of collecting and display by individuals, states, and cultural institutions in European and Asian empires.12 By the outbreak of the First World War, 10 Carol A. Roehrenbeck, “Repatriation of Cultural Property: Who Owns the Past? An Introduction to Approaches and to Selected Statutory Instruments”, International Journal of Legal Information, 38:2 (2010), 191. 11 Astrid Swenson, The Rise of Heritage: Preserving the Past in France, Germany and England, 1789–1914 (Oxford, 2013). 12 Moser, Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum; Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Race, Religion and Scholarship (Cambridge, 2002); Wendy M. K. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology and the Visualization of History in the Ottoman Empire (Berkeley, CA, 2003); Reid, Whose Pharaohs?; Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism”, American Historical Review, 107:3 (2002), 768–96.

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the collection and distribution of trophies and war prizes (the latter term applied mainly to such trophies captured in naval war), both military (weapons) and cultural, was engrained in practices of war. So much so, that a War Trophy Committee was instituted at the British War Office. Unsurprisingly, the Committee considered the Samarra antiquities German—that is, enemy—property, hence proper trophies, “of great value” and destined for the British Museum.13 This notion of cultural property as war trophy reverberates in wartime and post-war correspondence. It  is particularly vocal and unashamed in a note from Percy Cox, High Commissioner for Iraq, representative of the policy that regarded Iraq as a part of the Indian Empire—rather than a new mandate state—to the exasperated John Evelyn Shuckburgh of the Colonial Office (CO), in 1922. Cox responded to the proposal that the Samarra antiquities displayed at the British Museum carry the label “presented by the government of Iraq”. He repeated his well-known view that the “antiquities must be regarded as spoils of war[; this] is the only possible one”, and opined that there was great objection to describing them thus: The government of Iraq has not presented them. If asked to do so it might conceivably feel itself bound to protest. The presence of the antiquities in the Museum is due to an incident of war with which the government of Iraq is not concerned . . . The Museum authorities should enter the Samarra collection in their registers as ‘presented by his Majesty’s Government’.14

He thought it better to display them unlabelled. Cox’s view, as well as his stand on Iraq as an extension of the Indian Empire and his policy at the time of the Iraqi rebellion of 1920–1, gradually became unacceptable and he was ousted from his post. But rather than being a minority of one view, the notion that antiquities found in an enemy’s territory and had belonged to an enemy were rightfully the victor’s, proved persistent, as is apparent in the British Museum’s response in 1935 cited above (see note 6). Yet alongside the normalization of loot, there occurred a gradual, albeit not linear, shift away from what Carol Roehrenbeck has termed “the philosophy of spoils of war”.15 This shift may be summarized as the recognition of the need for protection of cultural property in times of war and peace, and the regulation of such a protection in international legislation. The accumulating body of legislation was part of the trend, developing from the eighteenth century (in such works as Emmerish (Emer) de Vattel’s) to humanize war in the sense of regulating and normalizing practices of warfare involving civilians.16 Significantly, regulation 13 Bernhardsson, Reclaiming the Plundered Past, 76. 14 Percy Cox to Shukburgh, 11 August 1922, BMCA, CE 32/56/21/2. 15 Roehrenbeck, “Repatriation of Cultural Property”, 193. 16 Emer de Vattel, Le droit des gens, ou principes de la lois naturelle, appliqués à la conduite et aux affaires des nations et des souverains (London, 1758).

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sprouted in the wake of wars that targeted civilians and experimented in the use of weapons and means of destruction in ways that are rightly regarded as preparation for the First World War: the Civil War in the USA, and the Franco-Prussian War and civil war in France evolving from it. The so-called Lieber Code of 1863 was an instruction to the Union army during the US Civil War: it contained the codification of directions regarding the protection of cultural property during an armed conflict, and touched on the ownership of cultural property. It was followed by the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.17 The former forbade pillage (Articles 23, 28 and 47) and the latter’s Article 56 was particularly specific: “All seizure of, destruction or willful damage done to . . . historical monuments, works of art and science, is forbidden and should be made the subject of legal procedure.”18 The international drive towards regulation did not translate into practice—far from it. The radicalization of violence during the First World War involved systematic assaults on cultural patrimony and historical monuments and works of art by the belligerents. As Alan Kramer has pointed out, the destruction of culture went hand in hand with mass killing and was part and parcel of the “dynamic of destruction” of total war.19 Yet the war and the protracted peace process after it engendered significant changes in the legal and professional discourse on heritage and antiquity, and in the rationale of the regulation of cultural property. Even as the war raged in Europe and the Middle East, the international attempt to regulate the protection swung from the laws of warfare towards the arrangement of the peace and a new order. Cultural property, access to it, and its ownership were not accounted for in Laws of War on land and sea, but in a grid of covenants, settlements, and treaties, as well as international institutions, aimed at safeguarding a colonial peace. Related to this change is the repositioning of antiquities and archaeology and, more broadly, of ancient civilizations, in the new rationale and order. As we shall see, “antiquities” were now singled out, treated, and administered specifically and, on quite a few occasions, separately from works of art and architecture, and were increasingly associated with excavation. Moreover, although this special status 17 The Lieber Code was issued as “Instruction for the Government Armies of the United States in the Field (General Order No. 100)”. See Carol A. Roehrenbeck, “Repartition and Cultural Property”, Roger O’Keefe, “Protection of Cultural Property Under International Criminal Law”, Melbourne Journal of International Law, 11 (2010), 339–92 and Roger O’Keefe, The Protection of Cultural Property in Armed Conflict (Cambridge, 2006), 36–7. 18 Article 56 included damage to institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences, “Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War and Land (Hague IV)”, 18 October 1907. For the 1899 convention, see “Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague II)”, 29 July 1899, particularly Articles 23, 28 and 46–7. Yale Law School Lilian Goldman Library, The Avalon Project: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/hague02.asp and http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/ hague04.asp, last accessed 1 July 2018. 19 Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford, repr. 2008). Examples of destruction include the burning of the library in Louvain, the demolition of Clothiers’ Hall in Ypres, and assaults on the cathedrals of Reims, Saint Gervais, Paris, and Ancona, and Whitby Abbey.

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applied to antiquities everywhere and in most colonial territories, it was particularly evident in the formation of the new imperialism in the Middle East. The transfer of imperial rule from the Ottoman Empire to the Allied Powers’ empires made these changes possible. As the plethora of new mandates studies has convincingly shown, mandates were a political idea as well as a form of governing, a mechanism for rule, a set of procedures and practices of colonial management and last, but not least, they offered new platforms and a new language for publicly arguing about colonial rule.20 What was truly new about mandates was the international talk and new argumentation about them: talk about governing and its legitimacy. The new form of governance and arguing emanated from the notion of rule as a trust or guardianship under international oversight. Guardianship was embedded in a deeply hierarchical view of colonial subjects, as well as of civilizational development and history. As stated in Article 22 of the League of Nation’s Covenant, the mandates were aimed for those territories that “are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, [where] there should be applied the principle [of] the well-being and development of such peoples”.21 Grade “A” mandates, “formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire” were deemed to “have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone”.22 This was a category far more advanced than those of territories in Africa and Australasia classed “B” and “C”. From its inception, the new form of imperial rule was a project of modernization seeking to bring territories and peoples to the level of a modern life. Modernization and guardianship included responsibility for the legacies and material remains of ancient cultures. In other words, the mandatory role as revealed in mandatory idiom, texts, and practices, involved not just responsibility for the present and future of colonial subjects but also for their past. “Antiquities” became a central issue of guardianship and the new modern kind of rule. And they also became the subject of imperial international talk. So much so, that they were allocated two Articles (421, 422) and a lengthy Annex in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) between the Allies and the Turkish Empire. The treaty stipulated that the Turkish government would abrogate its own considerable antiquities legislation and replace it with a new law based on a definition of antiquities—including rules 20 Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford, 2015) and “The Meaning of the Mandate System: An Argument”, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 32:4 (October– December 2006), 560–82. See also Natasha Wheatley, “Mandatory Interpretation: Legal Hermeneutics and the New International Order in Arab and Jewish Petitions to the League of Nations”, Past & Present, 227:1 (May 2015), 205–48. 21 http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20ht_century/leagcov.asp. For a very recent reassessment of the mandates see “AHR Reflections: One Hundred Years of Mandates”, American Historical Review, 124:5 (2019), 1673–1731. 22 http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20ht_century/leagcov.asp.

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for excavation, their monitoring, and trade in antiquities. Never ratified or accepted by Turkey and substituted by the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, the Treaty of Sèvres served as a template for the massive regulation and monitoring of archaeological excavations and the new mandatory and post-war administering of antiquities.23 Initially, the idea and language of guardianship did not replace the concept of antiquities as loot but evolved alongside it: the mandatory powers would protect ancient heritage which they “rescued” from Ottoman ill use, while at the same time they would exercise their privilege as victors and occupiers of its territory. The mixed narratives of rescue and conquest reverberate in documents issued by wartime military authorities and military administrations after the war, to which notions of guardianship, rather than replacing the logic of spoils of war, were added. Even before the Sèvres Treaty, the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA) revoked the Ottoman Antiquities Law and reorganized the regime of antiquities. Major General Sir Arthur Wigram Money’s Antiquities Proclamation of December 1918 already redefines antiquities and their treatment.24 This accretion is even more pronounced in the copious writing of experts on the cultures of the ancient Near East who manned museums and universities. It is enough to look at the correspondence of the Joint Archaeological Committee that is summarized in Sir Frederic Kenyon’s memo on a proposed international control of antiquities in countries formerly under Turkish rule, forwarded by him to the High Commissioner of Egypt. Kenyon, president of the British Academy and director of the British Museum, sought to apply the principle of the mandate even beyond its assigned territories and onto the unoccupied Turkish core: The . . . Associated Powers will surely not be going beyond their objects of which they have waged the war, if they take measures to protect from further destruction not only the native populations of the lands that have suffered from Turkish oppression, but also the records of their past history . . . It remains therefore to place the administration of Antiquities in Turkish lands in the hands of a commission, and it is difficult to see how this can be composed except on international lines.25

Or perhaps the control of antiquities could come under the auspices of a nonEuropean power: the USA. Kenyon seizes the idea of guardianship and draws on the language of the new internationalism. Evidently, he could not foresee the US rejection of the idea of international oversight and the Wilsonian solution. 23 https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Section_II,_Annex_II,_and_Articles_261_-_433, last accessed 20 December 2016. 24 See Charles Robert Ashbee, Jerusalem 1918–1920, Being the Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council during the Period of the British Military Administration (London, 1921), Appendix VI. 25 Kenyon, “Memorandum to the High Commissioner of Egypt”, 11 January, 1919. The National Archives (TNA), FO141, 8703/1.

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Central to his thinking is the premise that even a reformed Turkey would not be able to “modernize” its past. The failure of his grand programme did not prevent Kenyon from future interventions in the protracted negotiations over the administration of antiquities in mandate territories such as Iraq, well before a mandatory regulation was in place.26 And he implicitly tied the activity of the Committee and its role as a guardian of antiquities to the new principle of guardianship and the rationale of the League of Nations.27

Legislating and Defining Antiquity The idea of a guardianship of the past as part of the modernization of mandates’ territories is manifest in the attention paid to antiquities in the different texts in which the League of Nations constituted the new system. Again, it is not heritage generally, or works of art, that are specifically put under the mandatory’s control (and international oversight), but “antiquities”. Article 21 of the Mandate of Palestine, stipulating their control by the mandatory power, is by far the longest of the twenty-eight articles of the mandate and almost equals its preamble: it not just requires the enactment and execution of a Law of Antiquities, free and equal access for all League members to archaeological excavations but, crucially, defines “antiquities”. The Palestine Antiquity Ordinances (thence Law) would eventually be regarded by colonial administrators as the model and template for British mandatory legislation and administration. It had been proposed and discussed before the mandate was written, let alone approved, and it lasted in its original form longer than any other mandate A legislation on antiquities.28 The Law and the ordinances preceding it provide the first exemplar of mandate antiquities legislation. The League laid down the ground for what I have described as the new archaeological regime which, from the start, was riddled with unsolved tensions between the mandatory duty to international collaboration and its duty to the very idea of guardianship of the mandated territories and peoples. The concept of internationality was apparently limited to members of the League of Nations; in effect and, as we shall see in some of the following chapters, it was extended outside it, to international powers such as the USA and to American cultural institutions and organizations that had been hubs of archaeological research and display. The Antiquities Ordinances set up an imperial administration that defined and authorized excavations and the conservation and protection of antiquities by the Department of Antiquities. It set ground rules for the division of archaeological finds, for traffic in them, and for the distribution of knowledge about them in excavations’ reports and their display to colonial and metropolitan audiences. 26 Kenyon to Woolley, 25 September, 1922. BMA, MED, Woolley Papers, WY1 1/100–127. 27 Ibid. 28 TNA, FO687/6.

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Last, but not least, the ordinances served as the basis for the expropriation—for the purpose of digging—of land declared to have historical value, which was private property.29 Clearly the legislation articulated explosive issues about the ownership of the past: did archaeological finds belong to the mandated peoples of the Middle East or to “humanity”, hence, by implication, to Western museums that would display them publicly? It also touched on the issue of the ownership of the land in which antiquities were found. But first and foremost, the legislation defined antiquity and the value of ancient historical artefacts, indeed of temporality itself, formally and by international law. The new legislation of the Palestine mandate interpreted antiquity and a hierarchy of what was considered a historical monument in temporal terms, designating the antique or ancient as “any construction or any product of human activity earlier than the year 1700 A.D.”.30 This definition is expanded in Antiquities Ordinances issued in 1929 and 1934 that make for a far more inclusive notion of “antiquity” and stretch it to accommodate not solely human activity and agency but also organic matter, thus recognizing prehistory: “Antiquity” includes an historical monument and means— any object, whether movable or immovable or a part of the soil, which has been constructed, shaped, inscribed, erected, excavated or otherwise produced or modified by human agency earlier than the year 1700 A.D., together with any part thereof which has at a later date been added, reconstructed or restored; human or animal remains of a date earlier than the year 600 A.D., which the Director [of antiquities] by order declares to be antiquity;31

In temporal terms the definition is quite conservative in that even in its expanded form it may be interpreted as conforming to biblical and creationist definitions of history (drawing on Archbishop James Ussher’s famous chronology of 1650 that had set the creation at 4,004 bc). But it does acknowledge prehistoric archaeology which flourished in the Levant after the war and that, to paraphrase Bowdoin Van Riper, admits “mammoths” into the past of men, thus blurring the line between human and natural history.32 The new chronology of antiquity excludes at least a part of the Ottoman era, not only in Palestine but in other mandate territories. The draft law proposed for Iraq, authored by Gertrude Bell who served as Iraq’s first Honorary Director of Antiquities, and signed by King 29 Anna Filipa Vrdoljak, “The Enforcement of Restitution through Peace Agreements”, in Francesco Francioni and James Gordley (eds), Enforcing International Cultural Heritage Law (Oxford, 2008), 30–7. 30 “League of Nations Mandate for Palestine”, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/palmanda. asp, last accessed 15 February 2015. 31 Government of Palestine, Antiquities Ordinance, 1934, GPP.7464-1000-10.2.1939. 32 A. Bowdoin van Ripper, Men among the Mammoths (Chicago, IL, 1993).

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Faisal, excludes the Ottoman era altogether while, at the same time, specifying the relationship of antiquities to science and high art and separating them from nature. It stipulates that “antiquities” include “all buildings, monuments, remains and objects of whatever age and people which are illustrative of art, science, industry, religion, literature or custom and were made in Iraq or brought there . . . before the year 1500”. These stringent definitions and temporality were eventually expanded to include objects created before 1700.33 The 1700 divide was applied to Transjordan, where it was published in the Official Gazette in September 1925.34 The periodization of antiquity and its hemming between chronological borders, with a moving and rather flexible start date and a fixed cut-off date set at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was quite novel. British preservation legislation, which clearly influenced the new mandate laws, did not locate “ancient”, hence protectable, monuments, buildings, and remains, as subjects for preservation on a timeline. The Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882, introduced by reformer, prehistorian and natural scientist John Lubbock, author of Prehistoric Times (1865), did not define antiquities temporally but in a general and rather circular manner, as the “monuments described in the Schedule hitherto (predominantly prehistoric)” “and any other monuments of a like character of which the Commissioners of Works at the request of the owners thereof may consent to become guardians”. Ownership, not necessarily age-value, played a chief role, although the initial legislation listed mainly prehistoric sites.35 The considerably more compulsory Ancient Monuments Consolidation and Amendment Act of 1913 also did not put a premium on the age of monuments or fixed the chronological borders of antiquity. Rather, it defined monuments by the schedule, adding to them remains or groups of remains of monuments which the monuments’ commission deemed to be “of a like character, or of which the presence is . . . a matter of public interest by reason of historic, architectural, traditional, artistic or archaeological interest attaching thereto”. The same criteria are reiterated in the Ancient Monuments Act of 1931.36 We should be wary of juxtaposing a metropolitan and a colonial legislation as a binary: India’s antiquities regime, which predated the law of 1913 by almost a decade, did not impose timelines. The temporal criterion introduced by the mandatory regime is even more dramatically different from that of the elaborate Ottoman definition and classification of 33 “Law for Excavation of Antiquities” (n.d.), BMCA, Woolley Archive, WR1/2/20. 34 Antiquities Ordinance, Official Gazette, 113, 15 September 1925, IAA, ATQ/2/186 (Box 48, un-catalogued). 35 Ancient Monuments Protection Act (45&46 Victoria), available at http://www.legislation.gov. uk/ukpga/1882/73/pdfs/ukpga_18820073_en.pdf, last accessed 25 December 2019. 36 English Heritage Research Report Series no. 48–2014: Sebastian Fry, A History of the National Heritage Collection, 4: 1913–1931, 7. See also Keith Emerick, Conserving and Managing Ancient Monuments: Heritage, Democracy and Inclusion (Woodbridge, 2014), chapter  3; http://www.unesco. org/culture/natlaws/media/pdf/gb/uk_act_chap16_1931_orof.pdf, last accessed 25 March 2016.

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antiquities which the new imperial legislation was set to replace. For in the Ottoman Regulations of Antiquities, enacted in the same period as the British protection acts, classification was not temporal but taxonomic. In the most elaborate version of the law, dated 1906, it was not the time or period in which an ancient object was made, but its matter, historic use and territorial inclusion in the empire that counted most and defined it as “ancient”, protected it, and made it the subject of central state supervision. In contrast to the laconic definition of antiquity in mandatory laws and its implicit mention in the Ancient Monuments Acts, Ottoman and Egyptian laws since 1884 are copious. Their definition of “antiquities” is astounding in its rich material detail. It refers to the materiality and types of ancient artefacts and monuments, their use, and the culture in which they were made: Considered monuments and ancient objects are all the manifestations and all the products, without exception, of arts, sciences, of literatures, of the religions, the industries of all the ancient people (peuples anciens) who lived on the soil occupied by the Ottoman Empire such as: mosques, foundations of pious buildings, abandoned pagan temples, synagogues, basilicas, churches, unused monasteries, kumbeds, hans, fortresses, bourdjs and walls of a city, houses, theatres, bridges, hippodromes, circuses, stadiums, amphitheatres, baths, embankments, wells (built and unbuilt), cisterns, pavements, obelisks, water conduits, tumuli, underground burials with or without visible structure above ground, sarcophagi, coffins in materials, columns, portraits and painted or gilded masques, bas reliefs, stele, statues, statuettes and figurines, inscriptions and bas reliefs on rocks, manuscripts on hide, cloth and on papyrus, parchments, papers, polished flints, arms, instruments, utensil and vases of all matter, ceramic objects, glasses, jewels, rings, . . . scarabs, weights, coins, medals, printing blocks, engravers stones, wood engraving and ivory objects.37

And to eliminate all doubt, the remains of murals as well as fragments and broken stones, glass and all other materials are “equally considered antiquities”.38 Moreover, taxonomy was buttressed by the inclusiveness of “works of antiquity” that extended to a variety of peoples and ethnicities. As Osman Hamdi Bey, archaeologist, artist, administrator, reformer, and founder of the imperial museum (Müze-i Hümayun) in Istanbul, who had authored the Ottoman law, was to note, they included the creations of the succession of peoples and cultures that had inhabited the territories of the Ottoman Empire—Babylonians, Assyrians, Carians, Phrygians, Ionians, and others who had left their traces on the empire’s soil.39 Undoubtedly both the inclusiveness and taxonomic characteristic were 37 Règlement sur les Antiquités (Constantinople, 1907). My translation. 39 Çelik, About Antiquities, 24.

38 Ibid.

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instrumental. Protection of antiquities from plunder, illegal commerce, and piratical excavation had been a major concern of the Ottoman Empire which legislated against their removal by Westerners. The earliest legislation and the most concerted effort to stop the haemorrhage of monuments and archaeological treasures were the Laws of 1869 and 1874. At the same time the laws “Ottomanized” archaeology. The latter legislation and that of 1884, gradually adopted the principal of state ownership of antiquities, first the ownership of undiscovered antiquities that allowed landowners a third of the spoils (1874), thence sole ownership by the state. All legally found state-owned antiquities belonged to the Imperial Museum in Istanbul and their exportation was prohibited. Finally, the 1906 regulations stated that all antiquities, whether on public or private land, were state property, were not exportable and that ipso jure no acquisition of them was called for after discovery.40 The mandatory and Ottoman classifications represent not only two approaches to antiquities but also two imperial epistemologies: one—the Ottoman— that is more comprehensive and territorial and obviously includes Muslim antiquities and accommodates religious remains, as well as all ancient artefacts made in Ottoman lands; the other—mandatory—suggesting a civilizational hierarchy and excluding religious sites in use. This last difference is due to the need to allow freedom of religious practice in mandated territories, mainly in Palestine, where the religious sites were sacred to all monotheistic religions. The legal definition of what made an antiquity and which historical, or prehistoric periods qualified as “ancient past” were not the sole definitions. Contemporaries, including experts and administrators, were fully aware that the term “antiquity” itself was mobile and that its meanings were changeable. They were also aware that “antiquity”—both in its sense as an antique artefact and in the temporal sense—signified different values: a historic value, an economic value (set by demand and supply in the international market for antiquities), values defined as “universal” and national, or local values. The ancient Near Eastern past held a different “value” for different cultures and peoples. This complexity was articulated in 1933 by George Hill, Director and Principal Librarian of the British Museum, in response to Iraq’s newly proposed Law of Antiquities: Much play is made with the terms valuable, treasure, unique and similar terms. The value to which reference is most often intended is historical and scientific value. Cash value antiquities understandably possess because museums in certain countries possess them, but this is generally an artificial value, with no certain

40 “Loi sur les antiquités promulguée. le 29 Sefer 1324 (10 Avril 1322). Levant Herald 8, 9, 10, 11 et 13 Juin 1906”, Pera 1906; Shaw, Possessors; Sibel Özel, “Under the Turkish Blanket Legislation: The Recovery of Cultural Property Removed from Turkey”, International Journal of Legal Information, 38:2 (2010), 177–80; Bahrani, Çelik, and Eldem, Scramble.

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commercial significance, as general experience and the recent slumps have decisively proved.41

There are antiquities valued not for their intrinsic value—but as objets d’art with little historical value, or because of their material (gold).42 To the new definitions of “antiquities” were added administrative mandatory mechanisms, created for their control and management: a British-run government Department of Antiquities, headed by a British or (in Egypt and Syria and the Lebanon) French Director of Antiquities and staffed by experts/administrators who were at one and the same time archaeologists, or architects, and colonial servants, and a lower echelon of local administrators, including Inspectors of Antiquities and, occasionally, Chief Inspectors. As already noted, this imperial mechanism was advocated even before the ratification of the mandates, and thus within the framework of a temporary military administration. On the ground, in London and throughout the Middle East, it was the network of learned societies with a special interest in antiquity that pushed and lobbied the military. The political officers of the Egypt Expedition Force (EEF) and the military administration of Palestine were plied with memoranda canvassing a law and the establishment of a Department of Antiquities in Jerusalem. A few of these were penned by John Garstang, Professor of Archaeological Methods at the University of Liverpool, newly appointed director of the recently instituted British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. Garstang would direct the School and the department, the first of its kind, until 1926. His memoranda drill down to the smallest structural and financial detail of such a department. Styled “Honorary Archaeological Advisor”, Garstang was granted facilities “only available to officials and troops”.43 This unusual concession is reported to be due to his role in the administration of Palestine. He was regarded and saw himself as “the advance guard of what will be a Civil Administration in Palestine as soon as the Peace Treaty with Turkey is signed”.44 This preferential treatment, the volume of correspondence devoted to the administration and its role within the institutional framework of mandate rule, all indicate the centrality of the antiquities regime to the new imperial system. It is no coincidence that in mandate territories, as well as in Egypt, guardianship of the past and the managing access to it were attached to or placed in, the branch of colonial administration most associated with modernization: the Board of Works (BOW) or Communications and Works in Iraq, and not to the Education Board. This affiliation probably derived from the administration of the 41 Hill to Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 25 September 1933, BMA MED, Mallowan Archive, Correspondence and Varia, 196.2. 42 Ibid. 43 First Secretary to the Residency in Cairo, delivered to Garstang, 20 April 1920, TNA, FO141 8703/10. 44 Ibid.

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preservation of historical and ancient monuments in Britain, where their protection and conservation were the responsibility of the Office of Works and Public Monuments created in 1852.45 The tutelage of the Board was not entirely unusual in an international context—and was somewhat accidental and linked to the strong interest of particular Commissioners of Work in antiquities. However, the logic behind it was precisely that which associated the preservation of the past with modernization. From its inception, the BOW played a major role in the modernization of Britain and the empire. From the middle of the nineteenth century it had developed in Britain, notably in London, infrastructures for transport, water supply, the disposal of waste, and the supply of energy.46 It was associated with the rationalization of governing, of the usage of space and movement and circulation within the city—of people, goods, and matter. Significantly, antiquities remained within its orbit until the post-war years, and their care was very strongly linked to broader modernizing programmes in the 1930s and 1940s. The Board was replicated in the empire, where it engineered colonial development, including the construction of buildings, roads, railways and bridges, and ports, thus functioning as one of the mandates’ modernizing arms.47 Middle Eastern nationalists, such as Sati al-Husri, Assistant Minister of Education during the 1920s and Iraq’s first non-Western Director of Antiquities between 1934 and 1940, deemed the administrative affiliation between development and antiquity arbitrary. These nationalists associated heritage with national education and regarded the retrieval and discovery of antiquity as an instrument for teaching history and inculcating a sense of a native and pre-colonial past.48 Mandatory rhetoric and the new language of internationalism drew on an idiom of modernity that distinguished the new archaeological regime from archaeology under Ottoman rule in the same way that the mandatories based their legitimacy on a distinction between their rule and the empires which they replaced. Moreover, the new administrations constructed themselves as rescuers and mandatory archaeology as a rescue, or deliverance archaeology, whose trajectory was the liberation of the past and its remains from neglect, inefficiency, or downright destruction. Thus, the story of the new, imperial, liberation of the ancient past reiterated that of the post-war imperial order based on international law and transparency and represented by the League of Nations. The new archaeology’s beneficiaries were supposed to be researchers belonging to all the League’s member states and the peoples of the mandated, modernly governed territories. The rational, efficient, imperial international administration of antiquities, it was argued, protected them from deliberate or inadvertent damage and instilled 45 J. S. Richardson, “La Protection des Monuments”, Musieon, 37, 1937, 125. 46 Nead, Victorian Babylon. 47 Bernhardsson, Reclaiming a Plundered Past, 112–30. 48 Ibid. See also James F. Goode, Negotiating for the Past: Archaeology, Nationalism and Diplomacy in the Middle East, 1919–1941 (Austin, TX, 2007), 203–23, and D. T. Potts (ed.), A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (Chichester, 2012), I, 76–7.

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appreciation for the value of the remains of the past. Notwithstanding the rescue narrative, the new legislation and institution-building presents some remarkable continuities with the Ottoman system. Both systems present degrees of centralization and state-ism (apparent in the Egyptian law of 1913 as well). Both instituted a colonial apparatus for the control of antiquities. Ottoman legalization was randomly enforced and was not always effectively applied.49 But the machinery itself signalled the shift of the control of antiquities and monuments to the state or the colonial government. In other words, the new legalization of antiquities did not draw on the succession of independent states that replaced empires, but on imperial cessation whereby one empire ceded its properties to another colonial power. Custodianship defined the new power, but it may well be and was argued by contemporaries, that the internationally sanctioned new laws of antiquities disguised Anglo-American direct control in all but name. As we shall see, this was quite apparent in the rules of division of the finds applied by the administrations of antiquities. Nationalists in Iraq, for example, hankered after, and campaigned for a retrieval of the Ottoman Law.50 The rhetoric and narrative of rescue and the rationale of guardianship were not limited to the letter and spirit of the constituting mandate texts and legislation but shaped idiom and action on the ground—in the most literal sense of this word. Experts/administrators serving in the new departments of antiquities saw their own role and Britain’s as an obligation and a custodian’s duty, thus projecting the ideas of international guardianship onto their notion of the ownership of antiquity. The correspondence between the Departments of Antiquities of Palestine and Transjordan resounds with voices which reiterate yet inflect the master themes of guardianship and international oversight. One such distinct voice is Ernest Tatham Richmond’s, between 1927 and 1937 Director of Antiquities in Palestine. By expertise an architect, Richmond was recruited by the straggling mandatory authorities in Palestine after a colonial career in Egypt, where he had served in the Royal Engineers, then as Director of the Department of Towns and State Buildings. His war career culminated in his role as architect to the War Graves Service. In 1920 he was summoned to Palestine and found his place as both an administrator—serving as Civil Secretary (Political Secretary) to the government and consulting architect and restorer of the Dome of the Rock (al-Haram alSharif) and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Resigning in 1924, in protest against British policies that he regarded as overtly pro-Zionist, he was to return to Jerusalem as Director of Antiquities, implementing a centralist policy that sought to control antiquities in Palestine as well as Transjordan. In a series of letters penned in the 1930s he considered the basis for the guardianship of historical and 49 La Nouvelle Loi sur les antiquités de l’Egypt et ses annexes. Service des antiquités. Institut d’archéologie orientale, Cairo, 1913; Colla, Conflicted Antiquities; Reid, “Nationalizing the Pharaonic Past”. 50 Bernhardsson, Reclaiming a Plundered Past.

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archaeological remains and “mandatory responsibility in regard to antiquities in Trans-Jordan”. Noting the lack of local expertise, reliance on Western knowledge of the past, and lack of “native” interest, he concluded: the Home Government’s technical, administrative and financial obligation would of course cease as soon as the financial position and the education of opinion made possible the transference of responsibility to the people of the country itself. It need not be doubted that in due time the Trans-Jordan Government will have learnt to appreciate the financial and educational value of an adequate antiquities service.51

This is the language of the mandate itself: ruling is “an obligation” and “responsibility” that may not be abandoned until natives discover the value of their own past and are mature enough to care for it. Maturity is political maturity. Richmond’s observations are timid compared to the prose of the 1931 report submitted by the government of Iraq to the League of Nations on the country’s progress. The report unabashedly distinguishes between the value of antiquities for Westerners, the international community (that is Western states) and locals: Public interest in the Museum and in antiquities is uninstructed. Antiquities in fact are still regarded as a source of wealth which should be realized . . . Naturally there is a tendency to measure the value of the work of any archaeological expedition by the cash value of the work that it finds, and by no other standard. The popular idea of the value of these objects is subject to fantastic exaggeration and this leads to much illicit digging which, in a country so rich in sites, is almost impossible to prevent . . . There is always a danger that ignorant suspicion of foreign exploitation may result in shutting out competent archaeologists, but every year this danger grows less.52

Condemnation of native greed and the assumption that native Iraqis had no sense of their own past were common enough. They were vehemently resented by nationalists in the press and in the fledging national administration of antiquities which took shape after the transfer of formal power. Resentment was voiced in articles published by the reformist newspaper al- Ahali in 1933 and 1934, in which the colonial stereotypes are reversed and directed at the British mandatory and the British archaeological apparatus at the metropolitan centre. One article refers to the disgraced R.  S.  Cooke, Director of Antiquities between 1926 and 51 Ernest T. Richmond to Chief Secretary, Government of Palestine, 1 January 1934, uncatalogued document, IAA Archive. 52 Special 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 Progress of Iraq During the Period 1920–31, HMSO (London, 1931), 248.

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1929, who was summarily sacked after his collaboration in an attempt to smuggle valuables out of the country,53 then embarks on a narrative of the history of the mandate as a history of theft and looting which had begun during the First World War. Elsewhere it is noted that the assumption that Iraqis valued antiquities only for their “material value” was preposterous. “They have a material value which is dearer and more appreciated; this is the heritage of the past, the register of the progress of peoples and the book of their civilization.”54 More mildly, yet no less poignantly, an editorial in Sawt-al-ʿ Iraq wondered about the comparative share of the country’s treasures in foreign museums and the impoverished museum in Baghdad.55 Even before independence, the Antiquities Ordinances and the prospective law became a battleground where colonial experts, administrators, archaeologists, and institutions in Britain, nationalists (including intellectuals and educationalists), representatives of local religious interests, and local land holders and users, negotiated and haggled over access to the remains of the past and its ownership. Already in the 1920s, Sati al-Husri and nationalists like Yasin al-Hashimi effectively, albeit temporarily, contested the law and delayed its passage.56 For them, the familiarity of Iraqis with their past was a prime means to foster national identities. Colonial control and a perception of archaeology as a means for development were buttressed by a government licensing system and procedure. An obligatory procedure imposed on excavators the publication of scientific results and, most importantly, the law of division of antiquities aimed to allow local museums, instituted by the mandatories, the best of the pick and divided the rest between them and the excavator. This potentially explosive article touched the crux of the question of ownership of the remains of the past, and of the future. Woolley noted that the end of the mandate would be the end of Iraqi archaeology, indeed the end for a future for the ancient past. In later correspondence with the Baghdad museum’s authorities, he defended excavators’ entitlements not only to their share of the finds (recognized in the original law and in the law that was to be revised), but also to future rights for first publication, which he suspected the Baghdad Museum revoked.57 To make his point, he invoked international law, contractual law, and universal consent; in other words, the authority of the new system of governing. As in the mandated territories, so in Egypt, the division of finds stirred nationalist feelings. The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun and the spectacular

53 In collaboration with American archaeologist and excavator of Nuzi, R. F. S. Starr. 54 Al- Ahali, Baghdad, 14 May 1934, BMA MED, Mallowan Correspondence and Varia, 196.2, 62; 10 March 1934, 196.2, 54. 55 Potts, A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, I, 77. 56 Kenyon to Woolley, BMA MED, Woolley Papers, WY1, 1/100–127. 57 Woolley, response to memo from Baghdad, 14 March 1935, BMA, MED, Woolley Papers, WG1/24/70.

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finds that poured out of it spurred a dispute about their value, the share of Western archaeologists in antiquities, Western science and knowledge, and colonial control of antiquities. The rescue narrative was adopted, at varying degrees, by British archaeologists, the Anglo-American media, and some Egyptologists. It is to be found in its most abrasive version in the conduct and writing of Howard Carter, excavator of the tomb, probably the most sensational interwar archaeological find. But there were other attitudes to the issue of ownership. Egyptian nationalists and the Egyptian (British controlled) government regarded the finds as rightfully Egyptian. So did Pierre Lacau, one of a series of French directors of Egypt’s Service des  antiquités  who were continuously accused of an anti-British bias. The treasures of the Pharaohs and their legacy were deemed by the Egyptian press and intellectuals as a national legacy and a building block of Egyptian modern national identity (see Chapter 8).58 Ownership was not only temporal and material. It had a spatial aspect which is considered in all the antiquities ordinances and laws of mandate territories (as well as in preservation legislation in non-mandated territories such as India).59 The law endowed colonial governments with the right to declare remainders of the past “antiquities” and “historical monuments” and to access to and ownership of, the land containing them. As Article 18 of the Palestine Ordinance states, once the borders of a historical site were demarcated no person could “excavate, build, plant trees, quarry, irrigate, burn lime or do similar work to despoil earth or refuse, on or in the immediate neighbourhood of an historical monument or site, or establish a cemetery on the historical site, without the permission of the Director [of antiquities]”.60 As Chapters  3 and  4 show, the ownership of land—whether land that was private property or land that, from Ottoman times, was state land (Miri), and its use, quickly became the subject of incessant conflict between local, primarily Muslim, owners and cultivators, archaeologists, and the colonial administrators, who each endowed the uses of an antiquity with different meanings.

A Regime of Excavations: Visions of Intellectual Cooperation and Internationalist Rhetoric On balance, the changes in the system and practices of the control of antiquities outweigh continuities with Ottoman idiom, organization, and practices. The centrepiece of the new mandatory order is the new form of internationalization of antiquity. Internationalization meant not only a new formulation of unified

58 See Chapter 8, 268–9, James, Howard Carter and the Path to Tutankhamun; Gershoni and Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation. 59 Basu and Damodaran, “Colonial Histories of Heritage”. 60 Article 18(b), Government of Palestine, Antiquities Ordinance, 6.

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definitions of ancient artefacts and monuments, nor just the attempt to make uniform rules for their protection and preservation, traffic in them, and their display, but setting an international network of institutions and organizations. The new institutional network, for the first time, formally entrusted national heritages, monuments, and archaeology to the imperial powers, to international imperial cooperation and, potentially, to international oversight by the League of Nations. Talk about antiquity was imbued in internationalist parlance and rhetoric. In addition to the incorporation of the antiquity laws in the specific mandates and their monitoring, the League’s organizations for international intellectual collaboration paid special attention to archaeology in the Middle East. In the endeavour to internationalize antiquity, Mandate A territories were allocated a special place: because of their particular role in the international order, they became the lynchpin of a planned new archaeological order, a regularized system for handling remains of the past and a proposed new standardized language for researching antiquities and talking about them. The ambitious idea of creating a unified international regime of antiquities emanated from the grand International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) and was first articulated by one of its most august members: Henri Bergson. His initial proposal, adopted as one of the Commission’s first Resolutions, diagnosed the lack of “international regulations . . . with a view to a fair distribution” of their registering, research, and for “establishing international regulations concerning the preservation and legal transfer of archaeological monuments”. “Regulation” was a modification of the phrase “body of rule” in the original draft, and the Resolution was titled “International Understanding for the Discovery of Archaeological Monuments”, the word “understanding” replacing the more rigorous and binding “Agreement”.61 Considerable elbow work and time were required to transform the rather general outline of an international and uniform regulation to a scheme for a working regime. The initial recommendations were submitted to the scrutiny of Senator M. F. Ruffini, a member of the ICIC, Professor of Ecclesiastical Law, formerly Italy’s Minister of Education and President of the League’s Associations in that country.62 His hefty report was forwarded to the League’s International Academic Union (Union académique internationale (UAI)) which elaborated it and attached the idea of the regulation of antiquities to the mandates system and, more specifically, to Mandate A territories, hence to the Near East. It was endorsed by the Council of the League of Nations which forwarded it to the Permanent Mandate Committee (PMC)—the League (and the

61 “International Understanding for the Discovery of Archaeological Monuments and the Publication of the Results”, 5 August 1922, League of Nations Archives (LON), Geneva, R1041, 13, 22, 384. 62 LON, Records of the 3rd Assembly Plenary Meetings, II (1922), 109.

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world’s) main platform for discussing the new form of imperial peace.63 The PMC dithered for about two years then effectively put the initiative on ice for almost a decade. Fragile and suffering from attempts to trespass on what it had considered “their” territory, its members resented the interference of the Council and the UAI, and resolved to be minded of its recommendation after considering the questionnaires sent to individual mandate governments in regard to their administration and operation.64 Three years after Bergson’s initial proposal, the Commission ruled “not to lose sight” of the UAI’s report and to take account of it upon considering the responses of the authorities in mandate territories, classified A, to the questionnaires.65 But it did: the bulky correspondence of the early 1920s was “lost to sight”, in the most literal sense of the phrase. When the idea of unifying and regulating the discovery and research of historical monuments and antiquities was resuscitated, it took some persistence and a serious paper chase to track the work already done.66 This time it was the new Museums office, founded in Paris in 1926 and located in the IIIC, which propelled the League’s cumbersome commissions and the “regime of antiquities” into action. A new addition to the cluster of bodies responsible for international cooperation and subject to the ICIC, the Office’s initial goals seem too wide-ranging and vague for it to be in any way effective. It was to facilitate by a collective action and study, the “life of museums and public collections [of art]” in all countries, and be concerned with monuments of arts, “as well as questions of history, archaeology and popular arts”. 67 Its location within the Institute hampered its internationalist vent and the League’s: it had been founded by the French government, funded by it (with a handsome budget of 2.5 million francs) and situated in Paris and not in Geneva. Indeed, during its first years, before an administrative overhauling which put it and the IMO under the auspices of the ICIC, the Institute was deemed to be a French enclave and a nationalist rather than internationalist body. As an irritated Gilbert Murray put it: there was “a French atmosphere instead of a League of Nation’s atmosphere” in it.68 And for French and “nationalist” read “anti-British”. The organizational infra63 League of Nations Official Journal. Special Supplement, 18, Records of the Fifth Committee, 1923, Annex 6, 89–90, Appendix 2, 101: “Rapport sur l’entente international pour les recherches archéologiques  et la publication de leur resultats”, delivered to the PMC 25 July 1925. LON, 13C/228926. 64 “Regime archéologique  dans les territoires sous mandate”, 29 June 1925, LON, 314/22384, 46; M. D. Haller, Acting Director of Mandate Section LON, “Résponse à Mademoiselle Radziwill”, R4031 5B/23467/7897. Undated, probably May 1936. 65 “Note Concernant le régime international des fouilles”, n.d. UNESCO Archives (UNESCO), Paris May 1929, O.I.M. VI/29. 66 Foundoukidis to Princess Gabrielle Radziwill, 21 April 1936, and Radziwill to Foundoukidis, 6 May 1936, both UNESCO, O.I.M. XIV 71, BOX 378. 67 “Institut International de cooperation intellectuelle”, Rapport 1, March 1931, Bodleian Library, Oxford (BOD), Weston Library, MS Gilbert Murray 282. 68 “Memorandum on the Paris Institute of Intellectual Cooperation Given to the Foreign Office”, BOD, Weston Library, MS Gilbert Murray 274, 1–6.

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structure of intellectual international cooperation was seething with national imperial tension, notably between the war’s big victors, Britain and France. That tension, as we shall see, impacted the operation of the regime of antiquities. Notwithstanding the cumbersome atmosphere of its parent organization and its own rather unclear license for action, the IMO developed to be an active initiator of cooperation that cut across national and imperial borders and expanded outside Europe. And it had a leeway of action that the League and Committee lacked. Unlike the former’s Mandates Commission, it did not oversee the mandate rule itself, though it did occasionally liaise with the mandatory powers. Its representatives shared the imperial outlook of the Commission and the organizations for collaboration, but it was more explicitly internationalist and its functionaries, most notably its Secretary General, Euripide Foundoukidis, took very seriously the idea of creating a unified system of historical and archaeological discovery and research, and of their accessing across nations. They sought to normalize archaeology and internationalize it. Foundoukidis, now completely forgotten, was the soul and engine of the Office. His professional progress is characteristic of the routes taken by other functionaries in international organizations between the wars. Like many of them, he hailed from a state that was neither a great power, nor an empire. Born in Greece in 1894, he was educated at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and Institut des hautes études internationales in Paris. He began his career in 1929, as a public servant in Greece and editor at the journal Phos, then became cultural advisor to the Greek Embassy in Paris. He joined the IIIC as an attaché at the Section of Artistic Relations in January 1929, before becoming Secretary of the IMO in April 1929. In 1931 he was promoted to Secretary General of the IMO, remaining in this role until September 1941, when the organization stopped functioning. During his decade as Secretary General, Foundoukidis coordinated and orchestrated large-scale collaborations across states and institutions that included cooperation with regard to protection of works of arts, heritage and, most significant here, archaeological work. His vast correspondence shows him to be more than a central actor in an international network of preservationists, conservators, and archaeologists. He was a nodal focus in it. The IMO embraced the assumption “concerning the archaeological regime in countries under mandate A or assimilated countries”, that the connection between this regime and the new imperial system was irreducible.69 Its correspondence reiterates the familiar logic of the mandate system as rule by guardianship based on a civilizational hierarchy. The proposed regime, now specifically applied to archaeological discovery and its regulation, as well as the regulation of the “alienation of monuments” (a euphemism for illegal traffic, or theft), were envisaged 69 Mercier to Director of ICIC, 17 April 1929; Director to G. Oprescu, Secretary to the ICIC, 17 May 1929; Mercier to Director, 18 May 1929, “Note”; all UNESCO, O.I.M. VI/29.

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according to power, imperial status, and level of culture. Countries of “high culture” enjoying sovereignty were one thing, countries with “less developed civilizations” were quite another. It was much more difficult to impose an international accord on the former (which in any case pursued scientific research) than on the less developed places. However, “only states possessing a great influence in the political as well as the scientific domain will be capable of elaborating and applying an international regulation”.70 The circular logic here stipulated that a regime of antiquities may not be imposed on the imperial powers which themselves would impose it on others. Mandate A territories became the lynchpin of the new system. They were archaeological storehouses and occupied an intermediate place between advanced and non-developed civilizations.71 Yet the actual operation of the system was not as hierarchical as it seems and allowed leeway to the less powerful states and to colonial subjects inside and outside the League of Nations and the orbit of the mandate governments. Following the 1931 Athens Charter on the Restoration of Historical Monuments, the League resolved to institute an International Commission of Historical Monuments, composed of representatives of the territories and states themselves and to be operated by the IMO.72 The new Commission, formed two years later, would morph into the first International Conference on Excavations (conférence international des fouilles) held in Cairo in May 1937 and its resultant technical manual published in 1940, close to the Nazi occupation of Paris, is the first significant body of international legislation on archaeological excavations and a basis for an antiquities regime. The historical commission’s members were not picked by the Office or the League, but were nominated by their respective governments and this in itself manifests the awareness that an international venture depended on imperial goodwill or on that of states. This nationally nominated body would become the nucleus of the later conference. Britain’s representatives in the lists of the members of the Commission are few. Its settler empire (South Africa, itself a mandatory power, and Australia, another mandates holder), was fairly well represented, as were France’s North African territories, Syria and the Lebanon, and Egypt’s Department of Antiquities, manned by French administrators. To the members of the colonial services was added an expansive body of representatives of the Scandinavian states and the Low Countries, the new Central and East European states created at Versailles, and Central and South America.73 Britain’s minor role at the conference and its non-cooperation are conspicuous, not least because its mandated territories and areas of influence present examples of the most elaborate imperial antiquities legislation. As already noted, Palestine’s 70 “Note Concernant la Régime Internationale des Fouilles”, n.d. UNESCO, O.I.M. VI/29, May 1929. 71 Ibid. 72 “Commission Internationale des Monuments Historiques”, UNESCO, O.I.M. XIV I. 73 “Constitution de la Commission Internationale des Monuments Historiques”, UNESCO, O.I.M. XIV 70.

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regime of antiquities became the model for post-war regulation, at least in mandate territories. Moreover, as Pedersen has shown, Britain performed at the PMC better than mandatories such as France and South Africa.74 And clearly, Britain remained the most prominent imperial presence in the eastern Mediterranean and worldwide. British resistance to cooperation manifested itself both on the ground, in its colonial territories, at the League’s organizations, and within metropolitan institutions such as museums, and had different shades. Arthur Wauchope, High Commissioner of Palestine, refused to nominate a representative to the Commission on the pretext that there was no official institution in the country entrusted with the preservation of historical monuments, adding that the government’s own regulation of antiquities was in total compliance with international standards. Nor did “the government consider that any useful purpose would be served” by nominating a delegate.75 The government consented to assist the historical commission’s work “from time to time”.76 The indirect manner of the rejection—via Britain’s ambassador to France—added insult to injury. Undoubtedly non-cooperation reflected rivalries with France on the ground—in Egypt itself, and on the international scene of intellectual cooperation. Even after the “cleanup” of the International Institute and the substitution of its Frenchdominated personnel by a truly international board, Britain continued to refuse to subscribe to it and to the Museums’ office. Murray was enraged: refusal meant reneging on intellectual and cultural cooperation—his very creed. In a letter to Arthur Henderson, then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in Ramsay MacDonald’s government, he strongly advocated that “Great Britain should join in with other nations, and cease to stand aloof from the work of intellectual cooperation. Practically all nations subscribe.” Yet it still refused to contribute a penny to the expenses and “enable[d] people to say that the English notoriously are indifferent to artistic and intellectual things”.77 The figures in the organizations’ budgets are eloquent: Britain’s subvention was nil to France’s 2.5 million francs, Italy’s 152,000 and Egypt’s own 64,000!78 At the Cairo Conference Britain was underrepresented partly, as I show in Chapter  8, by political choice. Reluctance to participate in the international scheme led by the Museums office and the Egyptian government is even more glaring in the responses in the British Museum, Britain’s leading museum of antiquities and probably the world’s biggest storehouse of ancient Near Eastern collections. This reluctance may be attributed to the museum’s high profile as an advisory body to British imperial interests and its long history of intervening in 74 Pederson, The Guardians. 75 British Ambassador in Paris to Director IIIC, 25 September 1934, UNESCO, O.I.M. XIV 46. 76 Richmond to Foundoukidis, 19 December 1936, UNESCO, O.I.M. M.XIX.46. 77 Murray to Henderson, 24 February 1931, BOD, MS. Murray 281, 24. Copied to Trevelyan, BOD, MS. Murray 281, 25. 78 “Verification de la compatibilité de l’isntitut”, 26 June 1931, BOD, MS. Murray, 1931.

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archaeological policies in mandate territories, which I have already noted and will discuss in more detail throughout the book. Edgar  J.  Forsdyke, Director and Principal Librarian of the museum, responded to the suggestion that he would represent it at the Cairo Conference with a volley of petulant questions that reveal lack of knowledge about the League of Nation’s activities and, more pertinently, of the existing understandings on subjects such as preservation and conservation: “What is the international commission of historic monument? Who are its members and how are they appointed? Why was it decided to summon this conference?” and so on. Foundoukidis responded at length and quite patiently.79 The rapporteur eventually appointed by the museum, Harold Plenderleith, Assistant Keeper of the Research Laboratory, who joined eminent Cambridge Classical archaeologist Alan Wace (from 1944 Professor at Farouk I University), was not an archaeologist but a chemistry lecturer. Experienced in scientific methods of preservation,80 Plenderleith took part in the excavations of the Tomb of Tutankhamun and at Ur and was to pursue a distinguished international career in preservation for many years to come. At the time, the choice of a relatively junior representative who was not an archaeologist may have reflected an offhand attitude to the idea of the conference. Plenderleith himself was quite bemused to find out that the museum claimed to have kept no records of the proceedings of the Archaeological Joint Committee, a body set immediately after the war in cooperation with the Colonial Office to craft the mandatory antiquities policies. Their only trace was notes in an exercise book belonging to C. J. Gadd who could not see how they could be of interest.81 The Cairo Conference was convened and co-organized by the Museums Office and the Egyptian government under the auspices of the latter. Its venue signalled shifts in attitudes to the regulation of excavations, their ownership, and traffic in them. This shift is also apparent in the conference’s composition which was far more heterogeneous than previous comparable gatherings and the Historical Monuments commission. Its fifty-three participants included administrators of antiquities from the newly independent European and Middle Eastern states, notably Egyptian and Iraqi experts and administrators.82 For the nationalists who stepped into the offices formerly held by British or other European mandate officials the international gathering was an opportunity that was not to be missed. Sati al-Husri overcame hitches like slow communications and changes in Iraq’s government, travelled to Egypt, kept his correspondence with the IMO after the conference, and went on an extended study tour in North Africa to acquaint 79 Richardson to Forsdyke, 15 September 1936; Forsdyke to Richardson, 29 December 1936; Foundoukidis to Forsdyke, 5 January 1937; all BOD, MS. Murray, MXIV, 71. 80 Rapporteurs were nominated by the governments represented at the conference to deliver summaries and policy papers to be discussed by the delegates. 81 Plenderleith to Foundoukidis, 15 February 1937, BOD, MS. Murray, MXIV, 71. 82 Manual on the Technique of Archaeological Excavation, 227.

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himself with the antiquities services of Morocco, Tunis, and Algiers.83 In Cairo the British representatives were outnumbered by the representatives of the French A mandate in the Middle East and French administrators of the North African colonies and Egypt’s antiquities authority. The visibility of dependent and smaller states may seem to reflect a reversal of power relations in the League and outside it, but it did not. The conference convened at one of the League’s lowest points, when it had lost its status and influence, and the idea of an international democratic and peaceful order crashed quite noisily. In a sense, the conference and its “Final Act” gave a public platform to the League’s weaker members, thus preserving the organization’s role in making the new imperial order and its legitimation discussable and debatable. The international functionaries attempted to tone down political conflicts and describe the conference as a gathering of “experts” on the “techniques”, practicalities, and legalities of excavations and discoveries. Foundoukidis’s own correspondence abounds with references to expertise and technologies. This approach is apparent in the very title of the text he managed to have produced at a low point of the war in 1940: Manual on the Technique of Archaeological Excavation. But politics, both imperial and national, permeated the deliberations before and during the event and the language and substance of the manual. It presented the first general and unified body of recommendations for an international regime of antiquities based on the assumption that regulation was a guarantee to a world order; moreover, that the ordered preservation and discovery of the ancient past safeguarded a peaceful future. Recommendation is the keyword here: the Final Act, embodying the experts’ and specialists’ conclusions, was confined to suggestions and, notwithstanding the embrace of the Assembly, lacked actual power. But as already noted, the power of the proposed regime lay not in the authority to impose, but in the language and vocabulary of accord and uniformity and these would percolate even throughout the Second World War. To start with, the Act sought to formulate “as uniform as possible” a definition of antiquity that suggested a departure from the mandate definition of it: It is desirable to abandon the rule according to which any object of prior to a given date is considered an object of antiquity. It is preferable to adopt the criterion which regards as antiquities in the legal sense, all objects belonging to a given period, or having the minimum number of years of existence fixed by law. Thus all objects to be protected will automatically be covered by the relevant law as soon as they reach the age fixed by law.84

83 Foundoukidis to Director of Antiquities Iraq, 3 October 1936; Saty [sic] to Foundoukidis, 7 January 1937; Foundoukidis to Saty, 11 January 1937; Naji-al-Asli Director General at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Iraq [and from 1944 Director of Antiquities] to Foundoukidis, 25 January 1937; Saty to Foundoukidis, 6 January 1939; all UNESCO, O.I.M. XIV.33-Iraq. 84 UNESCO, O.I.M. XIV.33-Iraq, 215.

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This is a change in the temporal criteria of the post-war definition of antiquity. Paradoxically, it is closer in letter and spirit to the Ottoman and pre-mandates one. Building on previous resolutions of the League (in 1931 and 1932), the Cairo Conference and the Act ruled for the establishment of an equitable access guaranteeing, without distinction of nationality, the possibility of competing for the license to excavate remnants of the past.85 It advocated free access to the remains of ancient civilizations and an “open door” policy that would allow equal opportunities to researchers of all nationalities, “equitable conditions” to excavate anywhere, fair competition for the license to dig86 and an international accessing of antiquities. And it set the ground for a wide scheme of exchange and cooperation between public collections of antiquities, to give them “an increasing universal character” and enhance their educational value for all people, ruling for the principle of transfer of objects by governments when these were of no interest to their national museums.87 But as the conference’s delegates, League functionaries, and the Assembly were well aware, cooperation was in effect subject to the concerns and the authority of sovereign national or imperial rule. Here lies the insolvable tension that is inherent in the Final Act. This is the tension between national or proxy, imperial (mandate), legislation and uses of the past and the drive for cooperation and internationalization. For all along, the Act recognizes the authority of national systems for the protection of heritage and culture and vouches not to compromise them. Yet it sanctions voluntary international collaboration. This unresolved tension is even clearer in the Assembly’s Resolution of September 1937 that bowed to the national and local imperial pull which it described as “domestic” interests. “The regime of excavations”, the Resolution notes, was essentially the concern of the country in whose territory they took place; thus any regime of antiquities was bound to national legislation. And yet it was highly important that the domestic and national be reconciled to a “largely conceived and freely accepted international cooperation”.88 In the autumn of 1937, “domestic” was a loaded, two-pronged epithet: it could spell out, and for most contemporaries did, internal ambitions that drove some of the most powerful members of the international community—Italy, Japan, and Germany—to exit it. At the same time, “domestic” indicated the tensions within mandate territories and the needs of rising Middle Eastern national communities. Either way, the idiom of internationalism could seem hollow and the fragile international definition of antiquity appeared to have lost ground. And yet the idea and mechanisms of an international regime of antiquities, together with the ground rules set in Cairo, did not die down during the war—far from it. Wartime concerns about the conditions of national heritage, including antiquities, at a time of total and unprecedentedly destructive war were not 85 Ibid., 219. 86 Ibid., 219. 87 Ibid., 219. 88 “Resolution of the League of Nation Assembly”, September 1937, ibid., 225.

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confined to their protection from violent destruction, but expanded to the future: the formation of a post-war international order of antiquities in a reconstructed world order. This was to be an imperial world—in other words, the promoters of ideas about the new regime did not think “outside of empire”. They continued to envision the British state as an imperial state and its Near Eastern territories as mandated territories. But the post-war state and empire were to be democratized and usages of the ancient past made available to wider audiences of different classes. It was to be built on national, regional, and international cooperation. As with the Cairo Conference, wartime discussion in Britain about the new order emanated from specialists: archaeologists, epigraphists, and prehistorian, and from institutions, including British universities, metropolitan and regional museums, and learned societies and imperial administrators. But the international scaffolding was absent, not least because the League and its satellite organizations for cooperation no longer functioned. A “Conference on the Future of Archaeology” was convened at the Institute of Archaeological Research in London between the 6th and 8th of August 1943 and attracted some 292 attendants and sixty organizations.89 Organized by Kathleen Kenyon, daughter of Sir Frederic Kenyon, apprenticed by Gertrude Caton-Thompson in the Great Zimbabwe and in the excavations of Samaria (Transjordan), and acting as Director of the Institute of Archaeology, the conference hosted Britain’s stellar archaeologists with experts on Near Eastern antiquities playing centre stage. In addition to professionals, the conference hosted public archaeologists, teachers, educationalists, and administrators. Its tone was set by Charles Reed Peers, archaeologist, preservationist, and architect, Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments between 1913 and 1933 and a major influence on the 1913 law, in his inaugural lecture: Man does not live by guns alone . . . We are chiefly concerned at present with the survival of those things that make life worth living, and we are here to discuss the future of archaeology. Do not look at archaeology as merely digging in the past; it is a science of how to manage the future.90

The association, made by Peers, between a consciousness of the past, more specifically the ancient past, and well-being, between “digging” for ancient remains and wartime planning, between past and future, resonates with the redefinition, during the war, of British democracy as a welfare democracy. Britain’s incomplete democracy was to be extended beyond political rights, to a social democracy that

89 Gabriel Moshenska, “Reflections on the 1943 ‘Conference on the Future of Archaeology’ ”, Archaeology International, 16, 2013, 128–39; CEA Conference on the Future of Archaeology held at the University of London [6–8 August 1943], Institute of Archaeology Occasional Paper No. 5, London. 90 CEA Conference on the Future of Archaeology, 5.

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would follow the “People’s War”.91 The “People’s Peace” necessitated the application of the idea of welfare to culture, a culture accessible across classes. One central theme of the conference was the need for a democratized archaeology “for all classes”, meaning particularly “the working classes”, reachable by an equitable education that would introduce the ancient past into their modern lives. Notwithstanding its patronizing tones, the plea for a democratic, public archaeology for the working classes is different from the League’s repeated calls for the benevolent education of native populations in Mandate A territories which, it was emphasized, lacked an appreciation of the past. As public archaeologist and educator W. J. Varley noted, “Men, women and children of all shapes, sorts and sizes do possess an almost instinctive curiosity about the history of humankind, which is killed by the way in which history is taught.”92 About the same time that the London conference was organized, preparations for an archaeological regional conference were in full gear in Jerusalem. In fact, the Jerusalem conference anticipated London’s and took place earlier. Apparently marginal to the metropolitan conference and certainly smaller, the convening in Jerusalem was more internationalist, not least because its organizers were inspired by the work of the Cairo conference. Importantly, although it did consider national aspects of a future research and discovery of antiquity, its concept was regional rather than national. The vision of cooperation its participants articulated fitted in the experience and perception of the Middle East as a geographic and cultural entity known as the Mashriq (comprising the mandate area of Syria and the Lebanon, the mandate area of Palestine and Transjordan) and also Egypt.93 Initiated at the American School of Oriental Research (ASOR), the conference’s initial steering committee included two of Palestine’s immanent biblical archaeologists affiliated to the international network of archaeological institutions based in  Jerusalem: Father Roland de Vaux of the Ecole biblique and Nelson Glueck, archaeologist of Transjordan and Palestine, of ASOR. It penned its desire “to look forward to archaeological conditions after the war”, expecting the resumption of scientific interest in the ancient past after the great upheaval. As the committee members noted: “It is hoped that more order shall prevail in this field of research in the future than has been the rule in the past.”94 Affiliating themselves to the cairo legacy (hence, by implication, to the legacy of the League’s idea of cooperation), they set an agenda for the preservation of antiquities, the prevention of illicit trade in them, the drafting of a master plan for a regional historical research, 91 Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998); Angus Calder, The People’s War Britain 1939–1945 (London, repr. 2000) and The Myth of the Blitz (London, repr. 2002); Sonya O. Rose, Whose People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in 1939–1945 (Oxford, 2003); Brandon Taylor, Art for the Nation: Exhibition and the London Public 1747–2001 (Manchester, 1999); Melman, The Culture of History, 282–4. 92 CEA Conference on the Future of Archaeology, 91–3. 93 Schayegh and Arsan, Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates, “Introduction”. 94 “Invitation issued by ASOR Jerusalem”, 2 June 1943, UNESCO, O.I.M. XII 6.

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and the foundation of a permanent council for Near Eastern archaeology, as well as a common pull of resources. The larger Committee included representatives from across the British and French Mandate A territories, Egypt and Cyprus, in addition to members of the Western institutions for the study of the Near East, and local scholars—Egyptian, Syrian and Lebanese, Jews, and Arab Palestinians. The participants’ repertoire of research spanned biblical studies, prehistory, Egyptology, classical archaeology, and Muslim archaeology and architecture.95 Although employees of the mandate governments were included, the event was not a government affair but a grass-roots gathering. The few high echelon British and French mandatory officials present were there ex officio. The internationalist strand is apparent in the abundance of statements stressing that “antiquities found within a state are of international and not only the national interest and subject to international and not national laws”.96 However, sceptics such as Elazar Lipa Sukenik, a member of the initial committee and Professor of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, thought this approach too broad and suitable to a time “when world conditions will be utopian”, for “until then no one can oblige countries to recognize that their antiquities belong not only to them but to all humanity”.97 Zaki Hassan noted the role of states, particularly the Egyptian state, in initiating the discovery of antiquities. Internationalism combined with regionalism is also apparent in the consideration of a shared Near Eastern archaeological archive, a common terminology and a standard periodization,98 and the inauguration of a “Near Eastern Council” including representatives of all permanent learned institutions in the region.99 Implicit in the idea behind the conference and in the opinions aired by the participants—hopefuls and sceptics alike, is the acceptance of the ideas advocated by the defunct League of Nations. Also implicit in their internationalist language, is criticism of the existing mandatory regime of antiquities. Notwithstanding its elaborate apparatus, of which all of them were a part, they did not spare the system and noted the lack of a common grand strategy for handling antiquities. The conference also demonstrates another feature of the internationalist talk about antiquities, its spatial aspect: it dealt not only with temporalities—of the ancient past, the present, and the post-war future, but also with broadened geographical horizons. It offered a pulling together of resources and cooperation across Middle Eastern borders that had been artificially fixed in wartime and post-war treaties and agreements, and ratified by the League. It advocated a collaboration that was transnational in the sense that it emphasized regional patterns of archaeological work and research, alongside internationalism. At the same time the rhetoric in 95 Ibid. 96 Frank Brown, “Minutes of the Archaeological Conference held at ASOR” [10–11 July 1943], UNESCO, O.I.M. XII 6. 97 Elazar Lipa Sukenik, UNESCO, O.I.M. XII 6. 98 [Benjamin] Maisler, “Minutes”, UNESCO, O.I.M. XII 6. 99 Ibid.

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Jerusalem did not envision the rediscovery of the ancient past outside the imperial order. The imaginary of its participants remained imperial. And it circumvented nationalist revivals in the area and the investment of national movements in the discovery of the ancient past. The war which was more terrible than the Greater Great War and that halted archaeological research and excavations, may have slowed down these revivals. But even before it broke out, the tensions explored here, between the internationalist vision, imperial rivalries, and local aspirations, threatened the fragility of the new empire of antiquities and erupted, again and again.

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BIBL IC A L PAST S I N MA N DAT E D PA LE ST I NE

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Illustrating the Bible Travel, Archaeology, and Modernity in Mandated Biblical Lands

“Those of us who go to Palestine and Transjordan to seek the past,” wrote Henry Vollam Morton in 1934, “are . . . not disappointed.”1 Morton was not. His In the Steps of the Master, an account of his itineraries “with the New Testament in his hands”,2 became an international best seller. It ran to nine editions in less than three years and sold 500,000 copies. Encouraged by its success, Morton churned out travelogues that re-enacted the itineraries of Christ, the apostles, and of biblical figures in mandated territories, Egypt and Turkey. In the Steps of Saint Paul (1936) is set in Ataturk’s modern and secular Turkey, and The Lands of the Bible (1938) mostly in Palestine. So popular did these scriptural odysseys prove that Morton combined excerpts from them in Middle East (1941), which catered for readers in wartime Britain and its overseas forces stationed in Egypt and Palestine.3 Mandate Palestine, with the territory across the River Jordan attached to it, was, indeed, a place for seekers of antiquity. Notwithstanding the presence in it of Western powers before the war, it was not under their direct rule. Its occupation between the winter of 1917 and the epochal Battle of Megiddo in September 1918, was succeeded by a term of military administration (OETA) that ended with the beginning of a civil administration in July 1920. The mandate was officially obtained in June 1922. The new form of political governance under international oversight provided exceptionally favourable conditions for the development of the new regime of antiquities that emerged after the Great War. The terms of the mandate, particularly the commitment to the idea of a national home for its Jewish inhabitants in the Balfour Declaration that was included in the Mandate text (but not extended to Transjordan), were contested from its very beginning, and from the late 1920s, if not earlier, many British administrators on the ground and in London were disillusioned about the possibilities of a coexistence of the 1 H. V. Morton, In the Steps of the Master, 9th edn (London, 1937), “Introduction”, n.p. 2 Ibid. 3 H. V. Morton, Middle East: A Record of Travel in the Countries of Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Turkey and Greece (London, 1941).

Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and the Rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950. Billie Melman, Oxford University Press (2020). © Billie Melman. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198824558.001.0001

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two national movements in its territory.4 Notwithstanding the national tensions that erupted violently—in 1921, 1928–9 and 1936–9—the Palestine mandate survived longer than any other A mandate.5 It was this longevity, and the lack of local legislative institutions and representation, that gave leeway to the mandatory power to develop, apparently undisturbed, the new system of monitoring and controlling access to Palestine’s ancient past. Already during the First World War and immediately following it, and throughout its troubled existence, mandate Palestine became the locus of the new imperial order of antiquities examined in Chapter 1. It was in Palestine that the imperial redefinition of antiquities was first elaborated and legalized and the new administrative machinery that operated it was established. And it was there that new procedures and practices of excavation and rules about the distribution of material remnants of the past, information about them, and their display, were set.

Biblical Lands: A Map and Networks The new political and legal conditions facilitated the remarkable expansion of interest in Palestine’s material past. Expansion is apparent on both sides of the Jordan River. A map produced in 1932 by the veteran Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF, established in 1865), the first British organization to engage in the systematic enquiry of the Holy Land, of “principal excavated sites” in Palestine and Transjordan, was reproduced in the sixth edition of Thomas Cook’s Handbook to Palestine, Syria and Iraq issued in 1934, and marks some sixty-two archaeological sites and no less than forty-two European and US scientific organizations pursuing these excavations. Of these, six only are exclusively British. This probably is a rather conservative inventory: ten years earlier John Garstang, the author of the new Antiquities Ordinances and director of the Department of Antiquities, inspected seventy-three sites in Transjordan alone.6 The actual lists of sites for 1923–4 compiled by Naʿim Makhuli, Inspector of Antiquities (later Chief Inspector of Antiquities) in Jerusalem, on his tours across the Jordan River, reveal a rich heritage which, Garstang protested, was neglected by the emir’s

4 Michael Cohen, Palestine, Retreat from the Mandate: The Making of British Policy, 1936–45 (New York, 1978); Rory Miller (ed.), Britain, Palestine, and Empire: The Mandate Years (London, 2010); Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate (New York, NY, 2000); Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab–Jewish Conflict 1917–1929 (Oxford, 1991); Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York, NY, 1997); Penny Sinanoglou, “British Plans for the Partition of Palestine, 1929–1938”, The Historical Journal, 52: 1 (2009), 131–52; Pedersen, The Guardians; Alon, The Making of Jordan. 5 Hillel Cohen, 1929. Year Zero of the Jewish–Arab Conflict (Waltham, MA, 2015). 6 Garstang to Chief Secretary Government of Palestine, 9 August 1924, “Antiquities of Trans Jordan”, IAA, ATQ Trans-Jordan, un-catalogued.

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government but, more grievously in his opinion, by the mandatory power: “In view of our mandatory obligations I feel that the attention of H. E. Government should be drawn to the total absence of any means or organized effort to fulfil those obligations; and to the international feeling on the matter already apparent.”7 In urgent tones he “submit(s) that his Majesty’s Government ought to be involved in the protection of the antiquities which these sites contain”.8 Garstang went beyond rhetoric, recommending “urgent”, “immediate”, and longer-term protection and conservation, and called for the effective abolition of a Transjordanian Department of Antiquities (nominally headed by Rida Tawfiq, secretary to Jordan’s prime minister) and its subordination to the department in Jerusalem. His interpretation of his role as guardian of the local past reiterates the logic of the mandates’ system. “Obligation” and “responsibility” for antiquity are embedded in Britain’s responsibility for the present of its governed territories. Shortly after his plea, the inspection and preservation of Transjordan’s antiquities and their display were diverted to Jerusalem, and a director in Amman was appointed only in 1936. Yet centralization continued until 1946. Internationalization, too, was not merely rhetorical. Cook’s map marks out not only historical and archaeological sites, but also collaboration between various national research organizations: religious and secular, academic and amateur. This collaboration, apparently demonstrating the spirit of the League of Nations and the commitment of its institutions to intellectual cooperation, somewhat abrogates the letter of the mandate agreements: it allows free and equal access to antiquities not only to member states, but also to American organizations such as learned societies, museums, universities, and research institutes. American prominence in single or collaborative searches for antiquities no doubt reflects the economic resources of US organizations which far exceeded the meagre financial sources of most European institutions. North American corporate capital carried the weight of the long-term excavation at Tel Megiddo, run by the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, headed by John Henry Breasted and sponsored by John Rockefeller Jr. and excavations conducted by American universities and museums such as Penn Museum (digging at Beisan), the University of Michigan, Haverford College, and the Metropolitan Museum, dotted Palestine’s archaeological map. British institutions headed only six archaeological expeditions, but this should not blur Britain’s predominant role as controller and broker of access to archaeological sites and antique landscapes and objects. The roster of archaeological and antiquary activity highlights the breadth of the grid of colonial institutions spread over the eastern Mediterranean devoted to the discovery, classification, and study of its material past and the cross-national brokerage of antiquities. The networking of institutions and archaeologists in

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

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Palestine and, more broadly, the Levant has been usefully mapped by Shimon Gibson, Joshua Ben Arieh, and Amara Thornton.9 It suffices to point here at those institutions most relevant to the framework of biblical enquiry which I shall discuss shortly and is the focus of this chapter. Of these, quite a few, like the PEF, the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF, 1882), the Deutsches evangelisches institut für altertumswissenschaft des heiligen landes (1877), the American School of Oriental Research (ASOR, 1900), and the British School of Archaeology in Egypt (BSAE, 1894), were established during the heyday of pre-war imperialism and most of them founded branches in Jerusalem. Catholic organizations such as the Dominican École pratique d’études bibliques (1890), renamed in 1920 École biblique et archéologique française, the Pontifical Biblical Institute (1913), and the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum (1901), engaged in Scripture-oriented research as well as in excavations. The British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, founded in 1920, was a newcomer and was buttressed by the Palestine Oriental Society, an intrafaith and interdenominational local body encouraged by the government of Palestine, and the Hebrew Palestine Exploration Fund founded in 1913, launching its own excavations in 1921. This dense grid of institutions, with its nodes of activity in European and North American metropolises and colonial locales, activated a dynamic discourse about a scriptural antiquity that fitted in a biblical temporality and narrative of the Creation and human progress. Schools apprenticing experts (archaeologists and epigraphists), libraries, boards, and committees, publicized research and finds catering to subscribers, as well as to a broader public, and displayed them periodically to metropolitan audiences, thus engendering a whirl of publicity aided by the metropolitan press.

Biblical Idioms The thick web of institutions generated a flow of texts about antiquity, an idiom, and a framework for interpreting the biblical past, making sense of, and experiencing it, and connecting it to the present. This idiom is easy to identify in Morton’s writings and was already familiar to his readers. It is this familiarity that made his travelogues so popular. Like many writers and travellers before him, Morton was beholden to the biblical interpretation and outlook on the Holy Land and its surrounding area. He positioned the Scriptures at the centre of an imagined Palestine, which he represented as a scriptural territory and as the focus of the ancient Near East and the cradle of Judeo-Christian civilization. In the

9 Gibson, “British Archeological Institutions”; Ben Arieh, “The Foreign Archaeological Institutions During the British Mandate”; Amara Thornton, “British Archaeologists, Social Networks and the Emergence of a Profession: The Social History of British Archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East 1870–1939”, PhD Diss. (University of London, 2011).

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biblical framework of thinking about and actually looking at Palestine (Simon Goldhill’s apt term “the biblical gaze” comes to mind10), the Bible and New Testament serve not only as sources of knowledge about the past, but also as a scaffold for narratives of the remote history of Palestine and its neighbouring areas and, more broadly, human history, and for interpreting civilizational progress. Of course, antiquity and its physical remnants included periods and remains that could not be easily accommodated in the biblical story and interpretation of history. Muslim monuments and sites such as Ajloun in Transjordan, or the traces of prehistoric settlement on Mount Carmel and in the Galilee, could hardly fit into scriptural cosmogony, the story of Creation, and Archbishop Ussher’s famous and widely accepted 1650 chronology that set the beginning of human history in 4004 bc.11 Antiquities that fitted in scriptural chronology, but presented histories that diverted from the central narratives concerning ancient Israel, became marginal to them. As Corbett has shown, archaeology in Transjordan, from the Ottoman era through to 1946, evolved around a “Holy Land core” that centred the history of ancient Israel and relegated competing narratives to the periphery.12 These narratives included the material pasts and civilizations of the non-Israelite peoples that inhabited the land across the Jordan River: the Moabites, Ammonites, and Edomites, and the Nabataeans and their culture. This last did figure in archaeological and travel writing and gradually came to attract tourists, but was marginalized in historical and archaeological interpretations.13 The biblical framework for dealing with the past remained predominant. It was, of course, part of the rich culture that Bar-Yosef has called “vernacular Biblism” and that had emerged in the seventeenth century, flourished from the late eighteenth century, and boomed during the second half of the nineteenth century.14 Popular, cross-class Bible culture has been amply studied, across disciplines, by historians of the book, of religion,15 historical geographers, and archaeologists. They charted its diffusion to biblical topography and ethnography, Biblical Archaeology and travel writing, and surveyed its development in Britain and its imperial margins in Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East (notably in Egypt).16 The encounter with a physical, material, Palestine served the effort to corroborate the veracity and authenticity of biblical texts. The actual, physical condition of biblical lands and the gap

10 Simon Goldhill, The Buried Life of Things: How Objects Made History in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2014). 11 Annals of the Ancient Old Testament (1650). 12 Corbett, Competitive Archaeology, chapters 2, 4, and 5. 13 Ibid., 111–18. 14 Bar- Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture; Tadmor, The Social Universe of the English Bible. 15 Gange and Ledger-Lomas, “Introduction”, 1–39; Goldhill, “Jerusalem”, 71–111; Swenson, “Sodom”, 197–228; and Bar Yosef, “Bethlehem”, 228–54: all in Gange and Ledger-Lomas, Cities of God. 16 Neil Asher Silberman, Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Archaeology and the Secret Struggles for the Holy Land (1799–1917) (New York, NY, 1982); Joshua Ben Arieh, The Rediscovery of the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century (Jerusalem, 1979) (Hebrew); Thomas Davis, Shifting Sands: The Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology (Oxford, 2003).

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between their glorified past and dismal present, were utilized to buttress biblical narratives of decline and salvation, usually via Western agency and Western development of the Orient generally and Palestine in particular.17 Challenges to the biblical framework, such as the emergence of Higher Criticism, the rise of Evolution as a scientific paradigm, and the emergence of new human and natural sciences like anthropology and palaeontology, did not oust it. To the contrary: the Bible and the search for its corroboration via material finds and experiences of the real Palestine proved quite robust throughout the nineteenth century. During the First World War, the tendency to read territories, their landscapes, places, and people, to approve and confirm the Book, proving and illustrating the veracity of scriptural narrative, gained even greater popularity. The Allies’ military campaign and occupation of Palestine and its neighbouring areas were imagined, described, and controversially used for propaganda as a crusade—“the last crusade”—and British and imperial forces were depicted as crusaders.18 Occupation and the transfer of imperial power were seen and represented as liberation from the Ottoman yoke and Ottoman neglect of the land and its people. In what follows I focus on the persistence and changes in use of the biblical mode of discussing and experiencing antiquity. Its geographic focus is mandatory Palestine and Transjordan, but it moves between them and London. It looks at how biblical narratives and the Scriptures endured in late modernity, particularly in modern genres that developed in relation to modern technologies of travel, transport, and tourism, and the evolving professional archaeological research. The centering of the Bible in travel and archaeology fitted well the mandatory development and rescue narrative. But while biblical predominance prevailed, its illustrative role was increasingly contested and adapted to changing practices of travel and senses of space, as well as via archaeological practices. I consider the modernization of the biblical idiom and interpretation in travel genres, as well as in popular writing on archaeology. But to put these in context, it is first necessary to chart the sea-changes in the accessibility of historical and archaeological sites brought about by the spread, across the Near East, of speed technologies and its resultant socio-technical revolution in patterns of mobility and tourism. I shall then look at the ways in which this revolution transformed ways of looking at, and making use of, biblical antiquities and texts in travel genres, some of them apparently technical, and in popular writing by archaeologists.

17 Neil Asher Silberman, “Desolation and Restoration: The Impact of a Biblical Concept on Near Eastern Archaeology”, The Biblical Archaeologist, 54:2 (1991), 76–87. 18 Eitan Bar- Yosef, “The Last Crusade? British Propaganda and the Palestine Campaign, 1917–18”, Journal of Contemporary History, 36:1 (2001): 87–109.

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Biblical Travel and Its Modernization The continuities and changes in metropolitan and colonial biblical cultures are attributable, albeit not causally, to the post-war transformation in imperial and international transport and tourism, most notably their diffusion and democratization. Of course, as students of tourism in the eastern Mediterranean have noted, travel to the areas ruled by the Ottoman Empire became mechanized during the second part of the nineteenth century with the use of steam and the subsequent increase in maritime travel from Europe and the piecemeal introduction of railway travel to the Middle East. Begun as early as 1854 in Egypt, railway travel across Ottoman lands was inaugurated in 1900 when the Hejaz Railway (Hicaz Demiryolu), connecting Istanbul to the Hejaz thence to Damascus and Haifa, was constructed. A Jaffa–Jerusalem line opened in 1892 and a branch connecting the Jezreel Valley to the Hejaz main line operated from 1905. The first through lines connecting the province of Mesopotamia to Istanbul were inaugurated on the eve of the war. But it was during the First World War that the use of speed technologies began to truly accelerate. The war and military needs propelled the expansion of railway networks in the Middle East and their standardization (to standard gauge railroads), with both the Ottoman and British forces building railways and acquiring locomotives and trains. The Sinai Military Railway (SMR), built by the British army and the imperial Egyptian Expeditionary Force connected al-qantara (Kantara), on the Suez Canal to Lydda (in Palestine), branching south to Beersheba and north, converting in places the Ottoman rails to standard gauge and networking the country. Passed on from military control to the mandate governments in Palestine and Iraq in 1922, the railway brought tourists very near and sometimes to, biblical cities and to the very sites of excavations of ancient mounds in Egypt, Iraq, and Palestine. Ur railway junction (“Ur Junction”) was between 1.5 and 2 miles from the legendary mound of “Ur of the Chaldees”. Thomas Cook offered combined railway and motor car tours to Ur, a part of their repertoire of “ruins” excursions that included Babylon, Kish, and Nineveh.19 In Palestine the biblical Armageddon (Megiddo), site of a major archaeological excavation, was brought close to the rail, and Jerusalem was within easy reach by rail. Road travel by motor car and by bus gradually became a standard way of tourists moving across rough country, between urban centres in Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Transjordan. Most innovative and potentially revolutionary as a way of transport and offering new forms of survey and observation was air travel, operated by local and British companies such as Imperial Airlines and Misr Air. Airplanes became

19 The Times, 27 June 1925, 8.

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part of civil imperial travel from Europe via the eastern Mediterranean en route to India and, of course, of military strategies and monitoring.20 Even more than the railway, the car and the civil airplane (the latter introduced to the Mashriq after the war), were much more than means of quick transport and imperial control: they were iconic symbols of modernity and of a culture of speed, condensing time and space. Their uses and cultural role did not end here: they were means of exploring terrain that was not traversable by rail. The airplane was instrumental for gathering information, enabled the deployment of other technologies, such as aerial photography, and became a means to controlling unruly imperial territories in Palestine, Iraq and Syria, and the Lebanon, in times of civil and political unrest. Thus, notwithstanding the undoubted development in transport during the late Ottoman era, the opening up of the Middle East to foreign travel, and its accompanying increase of Western influence within the empire, as well as the gradual introduction of organized mass tourism, Western uses of transport technologies in the eastern Mediterranean remained limited. It increased, quite dramatically, in the post-war empire. The following estimates partially demonstrate this increase. Although the series of figures are incomplete, and are usually drawn from official mandate authorities, they manifest the trends indicated above: the diffusion of imperial travel in Palestine and its democratization. The annual figure of travellers in the country (mostly pilgrims) increased from 10,000–20,000 before the war to 50,000 in 1925, climbing to 63,319 entries in 1927 and (following a temporary decline due to recession between 1929 and 1932) 85,894 in 1932, soaring to a peak of 98,949 entries in 1935. Travel was by no means a Western activity: as the extant figures indicate, it was largely Middle Eastern. Tourism and immigration reflected politics and its lows coincided with the periods of Palestinian upheaval, notably in 1929 and the late 1930s and the years of the Arab Revolt (when the number of entries slumped almost by half). Travel increased spectacularly during the Second World War when Palestine became a base for the imperial forces, swelling to 153,665 tourists, mostly military ones, in 1945.21 An archaeological holiday proved an attractive way of spending servicemen’s leaves. J.  H.  Nottage of the Chief Paymaster AIP Headquarters Base Area intended to visit Petra in Transjordan in the New Year of 1942 and invested 50 mils in stamps to prepare himself for the trip. And J. Allan Williams and company, of the Australian forces, were quite attracted by Petra and Jerash and travelled as far as Baalbek and 20 Yossi Malki, “Modernity, Nationality and Society: The Beginning of Hebrew Aviation in Palestine, 1932–1940”, MA Diss. (Tel Aviv University, 2007); Gordon Pirie, “Incidental Tourism: British Imperial Air Travel in the 1930s”, Journal of Tourism History, 1:1 (2009), 49–66. 21 For figures, see Kobi Cohen-Hattab, Tour the Land: Tourism in Palestine During the British Mandate Period (1917–1948) (Jerusalem, 2006) (Hebrew); Cohen-Hattab, “The Attraction of Palestine: Tourism in the Years 1850–1948”, Journal of Historical Geography, 27:2 (2001), 178–95; Cohen-Hattab, “Zionism, Tourism, and the Battle for Palestine: Tourism as a Political Propaganda Tool”, Israel Studies, 9:1 (Spring 2004), 61–6.

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Palmyra in the Lebanon and Syria. They invested more in stamps to purchase three guidebooks to prepare themselves for the excursion.22 Modernized and mechanized travel made the sites of antiquities more accessible than ever before; it facilitated travel from Palestine to neighbouring mandate and colonial territories such as Transjordan, French mandated Syria, and Egypt, all rich in antiquities. A railway journey from Cairo to Jerusalem took sixteen hours: departing at 18:00 it reached Qantara on the Suez Canal at 21:25, Lydda in Palestine at 06:40 the following morning, and took an additional two hours and six minutes to reach Jerusalem’s station. Second-class fares from Cairo to Jerusalem were £2 15s. 4d. or £E2.695 (Egyptian pounds), and to Haifa £3 3s. 2d. or £E3.080. A first-class ticket to Jerusalem was £4 7s. 2d. or £E4.245.23 The modernization of travel not only condensed space and time, but also impacted repertoires and practices of looking at landscapes and at antiquities and their representations. Viewing the landscape from the window of a railway compartment, not to mention from above—flying over it—was different from travel on horse, camel, or by carriage. Modern transport deeply affected the rhetoric of Bible culture and the idiom of the verification of the Old and New Testaments. Of course, pilgrimage and travel to Palestine and to parts of Egypt had long utilized the sacred landscape, its flora, fauna, and inhabitants, to confirm the veracity and often literalism of biblical texts.24 But the post-war repertoires of looking at biblical sites and studying and experiencing them were adapted to modern travel and through this adaptation were changed. These repertoires are articulated in, and were circulated by the burgeoning practical literature on biblical and archaeological travel that emerged in the early 1920s and boomed in the 1930s. They self-consciously impose colonial development discourses (quintessentially modernization discourses), which are typical of the language of the mandate system, on older Bible-illustrating travel narratives. Two prominent sub-genres in practical Biblical and archaeological travel writing, the annotated schedule of trains with its description of railway routes, and the set tourist-package itinerary, may serve as indices to changes in approaches to time and place. The two genres may appear technical and deprived of narrative. They seem to provide only place names and information on routes, and occasionally on travel fares, and draw on the syncopated and fragmented rhythm of railway travel to construct a history that records change and progress. But there is more to them. Writings in both genres routinely include inventories of antiquities and archaeological sites, arranged in accordance with the movement of trains and cars, and reset references to the Bible and the New Testament in modern registers of time, speed, and 22 Williams to Hamilton, 6 December 1941, and J. H. Nottgate to Hamilton, 18 December 1941, both IAA, ATQ_7/186, 1st Jacket, Transjordan Antiquities, un-catalogued. 23 Cook’s Nile Service and Palestine Tours, Season 1929–30, 71. 24 Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East: Sexuality, Religion and Work 1718–1918, 2nd edn (London, 1995), 191–209.

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place. Contemporary (mostly Arabic) place-names and the names of archaeological mounds (Tells) are cited together with their alleged biblical origins and are “matched” to timetables and route signs. The approach by rail to sites of pilgrimage, archaeological sites, and modern settlements, introduces a form of spectatorship that is mediated by the pace of the train and motor car. Notes to Travellers by Road and Rail in Palestine and Syria by the Right Reverend Rennie MacInnes, Anglican bishop of Jerusalem between 1914 and 1931, issued in a posthumous revised edition in 1934, highlights the paradox of modernized and mechanized travel in the Holy Land. Speed and an increasing access to biblical places, he argues, hinder knowledge about them and sever the physical place from the biblical or New Testament text. MacInnes proposes, in addition to listing biblical references to towns, villages, and ancient sites passed en route, their marking and positioning by kilometre stones on roads and railways. The map of mechanized travel is superimposed on the biblical topography, and to the mix of both is added a narrative of conquest and occupation. MacInnes notes the places of biblical campaigns and battles passed by the train and adds to them the battles fought in Palestine by its various invaders—culminating in the British occupation in 1917 and 1918. The tone of his booklet is set in the very first entry in his description of “Route I Kantara to Jerusalem by Railway, 367 kilometres, 9 hours”: K. 412 1/2. Kantara (dep. 11.35 p.m.) means in Arabic “Bridge” i.e., the ancient crossing of the caravan route between two lakes by means of the rather higher limestone ridge which divided them, and now 5,000 years a “bridge” again, over the Suez Canal. It was the crossing by which Abraham, Joseph, and Jacob travelled from Palestine into Egypt, and was doubtless the track by which the Holy Family went to and from the Valley of the Nile. . . . When our armies, with the magnificent assistance of the Egyptian Labour Corps, began to make this railway, they called it the “Milk and Honey Railway”. Later, finding nothing but sand all the way, they called it the “Desert Railway”.25

Deir al-Balah, nicknamed by the forces “dear old Bella”, on the 189 1/2 kilometre, is reached by 4.15 the following morning, after the train passes through the cemetery where the bodies of “our men from all the scattered battlefields, have been gathered together in main centres (It should never be forgotten that the building of the railway . . . in the campaigns of 1915–1917, was at the cost of more than 10,000 British soldiers’ lives—an average of twenty-seven lives every kilometer)” (original italics).26 25 Rev. Rennie MacInnes, Notes for Travellers by Road and Rail in Palestine and Syria (London, 1934), 9. 26 Ibid., 10.

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The crossing over from Sinai to Palestine reiterates, yet reverses, the journey of the Patriarchs from Canaan to Egypt, as well as the Flight of the Holy Family. The excited Morton views from the train window camels plodding along the track and knows that it was this road: for the railway to Jerusalem, which was made by Allenby’s troops during the War, follows the ancient route . . . and it was along this road that Joseph was led into captivity. It was the road over which the first great Jewish financier Solomon, sent his sandalwood and his spices to the markets of Memphis. It was the road that led everywhere.

And the muffled road travellers he watches from the window of his compartment make him remember “that this was the way Joseph and Mary flew with the Child into Egypt”.27 The mechanized pilgrimage is also rendered into a story of the military and technological British conquest of Palestine during the First World War. MacInnes evokes the story of conquest and development as a story of the sacrifice made by the British and other imperial soldier-builders of the railways who had given their lives for the rescue of Palestine. Here and elsewhere, he connects the British occupation of Palestine and the Sinai to the sequence of earlier conquests. Gezer, on the 36th kilometre en route from Jerusalem to Jaffa, an archaeological site dug by the PEF and a major fortified city state mentioned in the Amarna Letters, was captured by Pharaoh Merneptah and listed on his thirteenth-century bc stele. Tell al-Mutesellim, or Megiddo, is the scene of the battles between Thutmose III of Egypt and the league of Canaanite kings in the fifteenth century bc, between Pharaoh Necho II and King Josiah of Judah in 609 bc, and between the Ottoman armies and the EEF in September 1918.28 MacInnes’s description of the route from Bethlehem to Hebron literally swarms with citations from the Old and New Testaments and is juxtaposed with comments on the modernizing projects of the mandate. The pools constructed by the Royal Engineers and miles of pipes they laid down provide water to the needy population, and a few kilometres from them are the road of ancient pilgrims and the location of the Canaanite city of Beth Zur, identified by MacInnes with Beit Sur (and probably Khirbet Burj-as Sur). It was visited by Joshua, inhabited by King Rehoboam and was a stronghold of the Maccabees in their defence of the land from Syrian invasions.29 Clearly MacInnes’s agenda is religious and his geography of Palestine biblical. But as Morton’s description demonstrates, this rhetoric is not particular to travel guides issued or initiated by Anglican or other missionary institutions. Nor is it confined to travel accounts. It is reiterated in publications by secular and commercial organizations for the promotion of tourism and by the

27 Morton, In the Steps of the Master, 3.

28 Ibid., 19, 41.

29 Ibid., 24–5.

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mandate government itself. Cook’s Nile Services and Palestine Tours for the 1929–30 season, issued together with Wagons-Lits Co. and offering packages to Egypt, the Nile, Sudan, Palestine, and Syria, includes the routes of steamer lines, railways, air and motoring services, and comprehensive schedules and fares, alongside sections on archaeological and biblical tourism inserted between timetables. An excerpt reads: The line winds and doubles along the very remarkable and torturous valley of Bittir, an ancient Canaanite city conquered by Joshua and famous during the insurrection of the Jews under the impostor Barchochebas [sic] . . . Leaving Bittir, the line soon enters the large and fertile valley of Rephaim or the “Giants” where David twice defeated the Philistines, and in half an hour after leaving Bittir the train reaches Jerusalem station.30

The pace and regularity of the new, modernized biblical tourism remodels the sense of the past and relates the latter to the present and to modernity. The speed of travel condenses time and lumps together the anecdotal history of biblical and Christian sites and a celebration of imperial projects of development like the construction of irrigation and water supply systems, and new roads, rail lines and aerodromes in Palestine (and Iraq) during the rule of the mandate. Thus, the antiquity of biblical lands is juxtaposed to their present modernization, and imperial development is instrumental to the discovery of the past. Archaeologist Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister, PEF Director of Excavations from 1901, who conducted the expedition to Tell Gezer—the first large-scale scientific excavation in Palestine—saw the advance of railway transport and facilities as the embodiment and symbol of mandatory development. Despite himself and his usual disdain for his contemporary Palestine and its inhabitants, he admired the advance of transport symbolized by railway junctions such as Lydda’s, which he found altered from a “shanty” to an important junction with platforms, underground passages and—the epitome of modern communications—a bookstall selling British newspapers and magazines.31 Modernized travel compressed not only the biblical landscape but also the modern space of the Mandate A territories, sometimes condensing it into a supranational, regional unit, in which tourists and researchers could move, protected by the British and French mandatory authorities. Cooperation between the mandate governments was represented as a transnational collaboration, in the Geneva spirit of internationalism and cooperation. But it was pursued without the mediation of the League of Nations. The “International Archaeological Congress in Syria 30 Shimon Bar Kokhba, leader of the revolt in the province of Judea against the Roman Empire in ad 132–6; Cook’s Nile Services and Palestine Tours, Season 1929–1930, 70. 31 R. A. S. Macalister, “The City of David, Site—New Excavations”, Daily Telegraph, 1 November 1923.

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and Palestine”, held in spring 1926, was a local mandatory initiative, co-sponsored by the British Government of Palestine and the French Republic’s Government of Syria and the Lebanon, with their High Commissioners as patrons and the Departments of Antiquities and their directors as co-organizers, and with the aid of the respective Colonial Offices. The congress presents the acme of archaeological expert travel but also displays some of the characteristics of interwar packagetourism. From the moment the idea of organizing an itinerant conference was aired (in 1921) until its beginning, the congress was promoted as an imperial yet, at the same time, an international, collaborative, democratic, and pacific venture. It solicited the participation of individuals and organizations from states that were not League members and hosted numerous American representatives of archaeological and oriental studies institutes, and German and Russian scholars (treated as “private” individuals). It was run as a roving congress, a scientific gathering “on the road”. Its participants crossed international borders and travelled between the three Mandate A territories of Syria and the Lebanon, Iraq (marginally), and Palestine, diverting to the Emirate of Transjordan. They followed an archaeological route of sites of excavation in progress in Byblos, Sidon, Baalbek, Palmyra (Damascus was deemed unsafe), Tiberias, Beisan, Megiddo, a variety of prehistoric sites, Jerash, Petra, and Jerusalem, thus observing not only places defined as “antiquities” and viewing the results of the mandate system of monitoring their protection and preservation, but also archaeological practice on the ground.32 “Never before,” noted The Times, “have so many archaeological expeditions, replete with all the modern requirements of equipment and expert staff, concentrated so much organized effort on so small a tract of Land.”33 As the programme demonstrates, the Palestine leg of the itinerary was dominated by biblical sites, and sites outside Palestine, such as Sidon, also carried scriptural associations. Of all forms of modern transport and its technologies, aviation reshaped the experience of travel the most. Obviously it enhanced speed and travellers’ senses of place, risk, and pleasure, but it also altered notions of temporality by shortening the span of journeying and condensing time. Flying above Palestine and Transjordan, or, for that matter, Egypt, made historical time shrink and offered air travellers a panoramic view of biblical places and times. The experience of flying reduced the land of the Scriptures to a living map that unfolded under a bird’s-eye view and made it possible for air passengers to control it by sight. As noted in the Introduction, in the early 1920s air photography by the RAF was used in archaeological surveys and by the early 1930s it became standard archaeological routine. In addition to survey and documentation, it was used for educational purposes and entertainment. The Human Adventure, a full-length 32 “Circular number 1: International Archaeological Congress in Syria and Palestine 1926, Programme Palestine Section, Department of Antiquities for Palestine”, IAA, ATQ_19. 33 “Biblical Sites, New Epoch of Discovery”, The Times, 13 March 1926, 13.

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film produced for Chicago’s Oriental Institute by Henry Breasted, condensed the history of civilization in Egypt, Palestine, and Mesopotamia to just over an hour and two minutes and collapsed the present and the past, historical and archaeological monuments, and the modern age. Breasted was the first academic Egyptologist in the USA and, unlike some of his British peers, held a doctoral degree (from Berlin), and was the first to hold a US teaching position in Egyptian Studies, first US Chair in Egyptology and Oriental History, and the founder of the Oriental Institute. He became an authority on Egyptian civilizations and made his name as a public Egyptologist well before the outbreak of the war. He expanded his interests far beyond Egypt to Palestine and Mesopotamia. Indeed, it was he who coined the term “fertile crescent” to describe the massive arc of land stretching from the border of Palestine and Egypt to the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates and the Persian Gulf. His panoramic regional and transnational outlook on the ancient Near East and on civilizational development is writ large in the film. It takes viewers from Egypt to the crescent. Its panorama of Palestine is presented as a map and focuses on the Oriental Institute’s excavations at Megiddo. Archaeological flying with its effect on the sense of space, and on the consciousness of time, was eagerly embraced by the press. The Times Weekly of 29 March 1934 carried a panoramic photograph of Palestine titled “Flying East: Palestine Photographed from the Air”. Its extra-long caption, spread across the width of a double page, is worth quoting: To see Palestine from an aeroplane [sic] flying at a great height is one of the remarkable features of a journey to the East by air, as may be realized from this infra-red panorama. It was taken from an Imperial Airways machine and shows almost the whole of the Jordan Valley. In the distance on the extreme right is the Lake of Galilee, nearly 70 miles away. To the left of the lake and beyond the plain of Esdraelon lies Nazareth, and farther left is mount Carmel. Beyond the Lake are the mountains of Galilee, on which stands Safed “the city which is set upon a hill”. This picture is of unusual interest, for it indicates at a glance the dominating influence that the Jordan River has had on the country throughout history.

An inserted diagram indicated the positions of the features “of the panorama”. A cutting of the photograph was attached by Myrtle Broome to her letter to her mother written in Jerusalem on 2 May 1935 describing her own flight from Cairo Airport to Kalandia aerodrome, west of Jerusalem. Broome, an Egyptologist and copyist, trained by Flinders Petrie for a certificate in Egyptology in University College London, was well known and respected for her copies (with painter Amice Calverley) of the paintings and epigraphy at the Temple of Seti I at Abydos. She also recorded a previous flight in Egypt, as well as the flights of famous aviators above excavation sites. But it is the flight over the Sinai to Palestine that

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registers her sense of accelerated, modern time and its comparison to the biblical register of time: In three hours instead of 15 hours by train, it was a marvellous experience. We passed over the Suez Canal. It looked like a thin blue ribbon laid out in the desert sands. Then we passed over Sinai, we were 4 thousand feet up & I could see the sea on our left. The mountains of Sinai on the right horizons. It is a pretty big wilderness. But even the Israelites must have taken 40 years to cross it.34

The biblical framework is located in a modernization narrative, which is the meta-narrative of pre-war imperial development (culminating in the building of the Suez Canal), the British mandate, and the new post-war imperialism. The Israelites’ voyage in the Sinai and arrival at their appointed land is condensed (e.g. modernized) twice over: first in a fifteen-hour railway journey, then in a short flight. This is also a narrative of the rescue of the ancient lands, their peoples and landscapes. In the same way that mechanized travel transports the traveller in biblical lands into a modern sightseer, Palestine has been delivered after centuries of desolation, sloth, and corruption under Ottoman rule. Furthermore, Eastern places are not only rescued and developed, but are also globalized and connected to an international network of transport and new technologies. More specifically, the discovery of antiquity is connected to modernity via archaeology: new forms of excavation and research apply new technologies and help weld together the ancient past and the present. The language of deliverance and development is the same in the tourism genres discussed above, in straightforwardly commercial publications, and in official publications. This overlap is immediately apparent in that guidebooks were quite often initiated or published with the aid of colonial administrations or by them, and in that their authors were quite often government officials. Cook’s 1922 Travellers’ Handbook to Palestine and Syria was written by Harry Luke and Edward Keith-Roach, both central figures in the government of Palestine, who had experienced service in a variety of British colonial territories before landing in a new mandatory territory and a nationally turbulent Jerusalem. Luke (born Lukács), of a Roman Catholic–Jewish Austro-Hungarian family, educated at Eton and Cambridge, had served in the full gamut of British colonial regimes: in Barbados, Cyprus, and Sierra Leone, thence—after his service in Palestine—in Malta and Fiji. When his Handbook first came out, he was assistant to the Governor of Jerusalem and had been a member of the Haycraft Commission appointed to investigate the disturbances in 1921. We shall meet him again, as First Secretary and Acting High Commissioner, standing in for John Chancellor 34 Myrtle Broome to her mother, 2 May 1935, Myrtle Florence Broome Correspondence, Griffith Institute Archive (GIA).

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in 1928. Edward Keith-Roach, apprenticed in Sudan, long-serving Governor of Jerusalem and self-styled “Pasha of Jerusalem”, was to be blamed for his clumsy and erroneous handling of the Western Wall events in 1928 and criticized all round for contributing to the ensuing flare of violence in 1929. Both were openly critical of the Zionist movement, its leaders, and functionaries. Both perceived antiquity within the biblical framework and biblical gaze. To cap the administrative– expert nexus, the Handbook’s appendix on the “Historical Interest of the Sites and Monuments of Palestine” was authored by the ubiquitous John Garstang. Other guidebooks to particular sites were authored by experts/administrators and circulated by the Department of Antiquities in Jerusalem. The bonds between mandate governance and mandatory travel are also apparent in the exhibition culture of the post-war empire. One of the most spectacular displays of this culture was the Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924 and 1925, visited by some 27,102,498 paying visitors. The exhibition is a late example of the international colonial culture of display which flourished between the inauguration in 1851 of the Great Exhibition of the Works and Industries of All Nations and the outbreak of the Second World War. Modelled on the Great Exhibition, and quickly exceeding it in scope, impact, and the amplification of technologies of the visual, the distinctly imperial exhibitions literally brought empires “home”. The Wembley exhibition enabled visitors to see the empire without travelling in it and purported to “cover” the globe; Winston Churchill wished that it would represent a model of “what we hope the whole world will one day become”.35 Unlike previous British, French, and American international expositions that had been built mostly of iron and glass—the materials of the First Industrial Revolution—the edifices in the Empire Exhibition were made of concrete, the ultimate material of late modernity. The Palestine Pavilion was located to the left of Wembley’s Stadium, a giant edifice of “ferro concrete” (reinforced concrete) that was to become an icon of modernity. Wembley Park itself was integrated in the metropolitan network of transport and became part of interwar suburban “Metroland”. The pavilion was designed by Austen St Barbe Harrison, Chief Architect of Palestine’s Department of Public Works and future designer of government buildings that literally made the newly defined power of the mandate present across Palestine and Transjordan. It displayed Harrison’s orientalist modernism that combined his perceptions of a regional style and modernist abstraction.36 The pavilion’s main hall terminated at each end in a domed

35 Alexander Geppert, Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin de Siècle Europe (London, 2010), 134–79, 194; Nicholas E. Roberts, “Palestine on Display: The Palestine Pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition of 1924”, The Arab Studies Journal, 15:1 (Spring 2007), 70–89. 36 These included the Chief British Representative’s residence in Amman, the High Commissioner’s residence in Jerusalem, and the Palestine Museum of Archaeology. See Ron Fuchs and Gilbert Herbert, “Representing Mandatory Palestine: Austen St. Barbe Harrison and the Representational Buildings of the British Mandate in Palestine, 1922–37”, Architectural History, 43 (2000), 281–333.

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vestibule; its whitewashed external walls with their horizontal dark strips reminiscent of Syrian ablaq work were “oriental”; its metal and glass roof and the simplicity of the building’s geometric lines represented the beginning of the modernist international style that gradually spread to urban building in Europe and Palestine. Herbert Samuel, first High Commissioner, introduced the Palestine Pavilion Handbook and Tourist Guide, which comprised a section with information for tourists and a plan of the pavilion that included a catalogue of the exhibition. Samuel’s “Introduction” embraces the narrative of modernization, travel, and conquest with unabashed gusto and makes abundant use of a vocabulary of development. Palestine, which was held in trust by the British Empire, was evolving from a derelict, “quite undeveloped”, non-industrialized country lacking “almost all the requirements of a civilized state”, to a dawn of greatness thanks to imperial service.37 The new safe and facile travel embodied the excellence of service and technology: “To travel Palestine by motorcar [or rail] is, in fact, almost as comfortable as a journey in any Western country.”38 The modernization narrative is inextricable from the history of empires that is, at one and the same time, a story of distinction and contiguity: distinction, because the new post-war British Empire is marked off from its Ottoman predecessor, and contiguity because the victory of the Allies and the British occupation of the Sinai, Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia is represented as a chapter in a sequence of imperial contests over the territories of the eastern Mediterranean. These lands were successively subjugated by past Eastern empires: the Hittite, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Assyrian; the empires of the Caliphates, Mamluks, and Ottomans; and by Western conquerors-the Romans and the Crusaders. In this history local peoples are cast as passive recipients of outside influences and the land itself as unchanging. The ancient Israelite kingdoms are represented as exceptions and the history of ancient Israel is located in the sequence of conquest, decline, and survival. The sections titled “History” in popular travel guides on the region emphasize the repetitive character of its history and its monotony and changelessness despite the frequent wars and conflicts. Take, for example, the beginning of Luke’s rewrite of the initial text of the Handbook: The history of Palestine and Syria is little more than a monotonous chronicle of invasion and conquest; and the territory with which it is concerned has, until recently, failed to show any substantial evidence of political or national unity . . . it has been either tributary to empires centred beyond its borders, or else merely a collection of city-states dominating for a time the adjacent hill and border tribes and coveted by any rising empire of the moment. Throughout its history it has 37 British Empire Exhibition 1924, Palestine Pavilion Handbook and Tourist Guide (London, 1924), 21. 38 Ibid., 25.

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Samuel’s more benign and more explicit development narrative connects advanced forms and technologies of travel to historical consciousness and a comprehension of Palestine’s past: You may learn this [the history of decay] from the window of your railway carriage, for every few miles along the track you pass one celebrated site and can follow, if you will, the very road by which the great monarchs of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria and Persia and after them in long and orderly succession Alexander, Pompey, Richard Coeur de Lion, Napoleon, Allenby, marched their battalions to conquest or defeat. Gaza, Majdal, Askalon [sic], Ashdod, Jamnia [Yavneh, Rabbinical centre after the destruction of the Temple], these flourished when Abraham entered the Holy Land; they were great when the Roman Empire ruled; what are they today?40

The historical sequence of rise and prolonged decline is brought to its successful end, and possibly closure, by the Allies’ victory in the last Battle of Megiddo under the command of Field Marshal Allenby who appropriately became first Viscount of Megiddo and of Felixstowe, and a benevolent British mandate. The Allies’ conquest is thus streamlined into a history of epic proportions that stretches from the Battle of Megiddo (probably 1457 bc) that determined Egypt’s dominance in the area, and the mythical battle to end history and time: Armageddon. This final epic clash, envisioned in The Book of Revelation 21:2–9, is crucial to apocalyptic Western visions and to evangelical biblical literalism, and it loomed large in the military and historical imagination of the Great War in the Near East. The series of fights known as the Battle of Megiddo (Megiddo Muharebesi), “Rout of Nablus” (Nablus Hezimeti), or the “Breakthrough at Nablus” (Nablus Yarması), between the British and Ottoman armies, completed the Allied conquest of Palestine. In the histories narrated in the guidebooks it is represented as an act of Palestine’s redemption from Ottoman rule. In these renditions, the clash of the Canaanite and Egyptian empires collapses into the story of the end of the Ottoman Empire and both ends slide into the final battle of Armageddon, thus integrating the memory of modern imperial warfare into the scriptural framework. The blurring of sequence is apparent in Allenby’s own thought. He was familiar with Breasted’s 1906 translation of Thutmose III’s annals, published in 39 Harry Ch. Luke and Edward Keith-Roach (eds), The Handbook of Palestine (London, 1922), 23. 40 British Empire Exhibition 1924, 50.

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Ancient Records of Egypt and was probably inspired by the tactics of the Pharaoh of the fifteenth century bc.41 Completely absent from Samuel’s rote of conquerors and mentioned briefly and derogatorily in guidebooks, is the long Ottoman rule of Palestine that lasted four centuries. For all their antipathy to a modern Jewish restoration of the Land, Luke and Keith-Roach’s Palestine Handbook deems Muslim rulers as “on the whole unimportant” and their territories populated by “obscure multitudes of Pashas and Beys”.42 The Crusaders, on the other hand, get serious and detailed treatment. Analogues between the British campaign and the Crusades, between the EEF and the Crusaders, Allenby and Richard Coeur de Lion, were widespread both amongst the troops and in the press and in popular writing, and amounted to a “Crusading mania”.43 The self-sacrifice of British soldiers, too, is associated with that of their crusading forefathers. Their remembrance and the commemoration of those who fell in the campaigns in Sinai, Palestine, and Mesopotamia (see Chapter 5) are related to antiquity and fitted in the tradition of the pilgrimage in a modernized form. By setting of the First World War and its memory and the mandate rule in the Middle East in a history of the rise, decline, and fall of empires, missionaries, colonial administrators, and travel entrepreneurs, connected the present to a Judeo-Christian and biblical past. The apparently linear progress narrative has some gaps in it—most notably the absence of centuries of Ottoman rule. Its implied optimism was particularly apparent during the 1920s, before a sense of the failure of the mandate spread among its agents and increased during the late 1930s.

Biblical Materiality: Archaeology, Display, and Scriptural Antiquity The resilience of the biblical framework in post-war modernized travel experience and writing is apparently more easily explainable than its robust survival in archaeology. Until quite recently, studies of the history of archaeology regarded its development as linear and have emphasized archaeology’s progress to a discipline and a “science” with a set of practices and an evolving relationship with a cluster of new human sciences. But current histories have stressed the co-existence, during the long nineteenth century, of science and religion and the persistence of an overarching biblical paradigm in the modernizing archaeological studies. The post-war period, it has been noted, marked the end of the predominance of

41 Eric H. Cline, The Battles of Armageddon: Megiddo and the Jezreel Valley from the Bronze Age to the Nuclear Age (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002), 25. 42 Luke and Keith-Roach, The Handbook of Palestine, 21. 43 Bar Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture, 247–95.

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Biblical Archaeology: the Bible’s “meaning became less capacious, less permissive” and archaeology in biblical lands—more professionalized and controlled—was limited to Palestinian archaeology and lacking a wide popular appeal.44 In Palestine and Transjordan, the biblical framework not just survived but prospered, well into the mid twentieth century and beyond, even when the facts on the ground could not be submerged in a grand illustrative narrative or failed, sometimes spectacularly, to illustrate biblical texts. The scriptural vision was not confined to the writings of archaeologists who are easily classifiable as biblical archaeologists, or to archaeological work in Palestine. The straggling post-war metropolitan archaeological establishment itself affirmed the central role and place of the Bible as a measure for the value of antiquities and their use. Advice to biblical and archaeological tourists that was aimed at apprenticing amateur archaeologists purported to distinguish the modern traveller and amateur archaeologist from their predecessors: the naïve biblical tourist and the treasure-hunter who had vandalized the past. But distinction did not demote the Scriptures from their role as a constitutive text and authority. How to Observe in Archaeology, published in 1920 by the Archaeological Joint Committee and the Trustees of the British Museum, and reissued nine years later, exemplifies this. The book, written in a sparse and concise language by leading archaeologists, and generally devoid of biblical allusions, spells out the perceived difference between the older attitude to antiquities and the new one: Before the era of scientific excavation, which began in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Holy Land had long attracted pilgrims and travellers, who described such ancient remains as were visible above ground. There are consequently fewer chances of making new discoveries in Palestine than in some other countries. The identification of places mentioned in the Bible was frequently attempted, but by no means always with success, and much is to be done in this direction.45

The volume’s claim to substitute a modern appreciation of material culture for simpleminded Bible reading is belied by the use of the chronological scheme proposed by G.  M.  Fitzgerald, the compiler of the Palestine section. His scheme draws heavily on William Foxwell Albright’s—one of the doyens of Palestine’s Biblical Archaeology—tripartite division of artefacts and cultures into Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages (adapted from Danish prehistoric archaeologist C. J. Thomsen and subdivided), and on an older and visibly Bible-oriented division into Canaanite and Israelite periods. 44 Gange and Ledger-Lomas, Cities of God, 35. 45 How to Observe in Archaeology: Suggestions for Travellers in the Near and Middle East, 2nd edn (London, 1929), 79.

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The uses of the Bible as a source, an authority, and a measure for collecting and interpreting material remains and the past, reverberated in scientific and technical publications on excavations and sometimes in academic debate. The sacred text was publicized by professional archaeologists and by the press, by viewers of collections, and in a booming global market for antiquities. The popularization and commodification of the biblical framework are all the more intriguing precisely because they were carried on by some of the greatest modernizers of archaeology in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Palestine. Foremost amongst these were Leonard Woolley and William Matthew Flinders Petrie. Petrie’s allegiance to, and uses of the biblical framework and texts are complex. He is considered to have “fathered” modern Egyptian and Palestinian archaeology as field archaeology, and generations of practising archaeologists who he trained and mentored, collectively known as “Petrie’s Pups”, first in Egypt, thence, after his move to Palestine and institution of the BSAE in Jerusalem in 1926, in Palestine. Petrie’s world view did not draw on the Bible alone. Far from it: as I indicate in Chapter 4, he substituted race for divine will in his grand interpretation of civilizational progress. His use of race as a measure for the interpretation of the progress of civilization, and collaboration with physical anthropologists and Eugenicists may not be overstated. Yet even for Petrie there was no foregoing the biblical texts. The yearly summaries of the excavating seasons of the BSAE between 1926 and 1938 swarm with the referential language of illustration and harmonization between the biblical text and a material culture that is used to corroborate it. To be sure, such language is easily traceable back to 1889–90, and Petrie’s excavation at Tell al-Hasi for the PEF is still considered to be the foundational excavation that inaugurated a “modern” scientific archaeology of Palestine and the Levant. It firmly fixed the triple assumption that objects, particularly pottery, were the bearers of cultural meanings, that their seriation and typology determined chronology, and that stratigraphy contextualized finds.46 And yet it was the biblical text that continued to determine both the selection of sites for excavation and their identification with biblical loci. This is famously apparent in the sequence of Petrie’s own mistaken identifications of Tell al-Hasi as biblical Lachish; Tell Jemmeh as Gerar of the Patriarchs; Tell el- Far‘ah as Beth Pelet (Joshua 15:27), the city of asylum identified as David’s base of power; and Tell al-Ajjul as biblical Gaza. At the same time that Petrie propounded his meta-narrative of racial development, his geography of Palestine bore more than remnants of biblical geography. 46 Drower, Flinders Petrie, 364–77; Peter J. Ucko, “The Biography of a Collection: The Sir Flinders Petrie Palestinian Collection and the Role of University Museums”, Museum Management and Curatorship, 17:4 (1998), 351–99; Rachel T. Sparks, “Publicizing Petrie: Financing Fieldwork in British Mandate Palestine (1926–1938)”, Present Pasts, 5:1 (2013), http://doi.org/10.5334/pp.56; Rachel T. Sparks, “Flinders Petrie through Word and Deed: Re-Evaluating Petrie’s Field Techniques and their Impact on Object Recovery in British Mandate Palestine”, Palestine Exploration Quarterly 145:2 (2013), 1–17; Peter J. Ucko, Rachel Sparks, and Stuart Laidlaw, A Future for the Past: Petrie’s Palestinian Collection: Essays and Exhibition Catalogue, 2007.

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The role and significance of places and artefacts as verifications of the Bible persisted. The BSAE 1933 report on his third season at Tell al-Ajjul states that the unearthing of new finds sheds new light on its remote history and at the same time affirms the veracity of the text: “the confirmation of the scriptural record often met, give[s] a special value to the work of excavation on a site such as Gaza. The consolidation of the stray facts recovered into a coherent whole, and the many objects of many centuries . . . render this place important in determining the history of the Near East.”47 Clearly the report had a frankly commercial trajectory: soliciting special donations for Petrie’s eightieth-birthday fund. However, the presence of references to the Bible and its use as a measure for the development of contemporary life and manners in Palestine are too persistent to be written away solely as commercial. Tell Jemmeh is scoured for Egyptian remains (to justify the continuity of the BSAE); it serves to demonstrate the importance of objects that surpass inscriptions (texts), but the flint utensils found on it confirm the biblical text: “all agree with this. Here was settled Abimelech, a Philistine resident for the corn exports. He saw from his window into the tent of Isaac and Rebekah, and now Bedawy [sic] tents are still pitched facing the end of the city.”48 The rhetoric of verification and confirmation is all the more resounding in the sprawling corpus of popular publications produced on Petrie’s behalf by his wife and long-time collaborator Hilda Petrie, whose role and dominance in the organization of the Palestine excavations, their publicity, and the redistribution of finds to collectors, is quite evident in published materials, correspondence, and the reports themselves. Her Side Notes on the Bible from Flinders Petrie’s Discoveries, which most probably appeared in 1934, was marketed with a book-marker advertising the new light “thrown on the Bible record”, and catered for “all Bible lovers and everyone interested in old civilizations”. The booklet itself offers a series of interpretations of quotes, each “proven” by an artefact and set at a different part of the land and “scientifically” discovered, demonstrating biblical life and practices.49 Her articles for the popular press, too, are full of allusions to Petrie’s own biblical agenda, not to mention snippets like “The Bible as a Guide to Buried Treasures”.50 Nor was Bible advertising limited to the printed word. Biblical mementos, objects, and images were routinely used to raise funds for excavations: stereoscopic images of Petrie’s excavations in Tell el-Far‘ah were sold in packages of thirty-six for 14s.; mementos were advertised by the British School of Archaeology and biblical scholarships for trainees in archaeology were regularly solicited. Additionally the selling of archaeological finds to museums in Britain and the dominions included 47 British School of Archaeology in Egypt, Report, XXXIX Year, Reporting the 3rd season at Tell el-Ajull [sic], 3. 48 BSAE and Egyptian Research Account 1927, Report of the 33rd Year (London, 1927). The paragraph cited here was written by Petrie. 49 Hilda Petrie, Side Notes on the Bible from Flinders Petrie’s Discoveries (n.d.). 50 Hilda Petrie, Daily Mail, 30 September 1930; Sparks, “Publicizing Petrie”.

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utensils and potsherds bracketed “biblical”.51 The selling power of the Bible is witnessed by the size and distribution of donations from big sponsors such as Charles Marston (£3,808), Robert Mond (£733) and the World Evangelical Alliance (a mere £223).52 But the materiality of the “truth” of the Bible went far beyond the economics of Biblical Archaeology, indeed archaeology as such. It shaped the biblical outlook on Palestine and narratives of its history. These narratives took on visual and material forms and were, literally, re-presented to spectators. Seeing the history of Palestine exhibited in a serial order, as a sequence of civilizations whose acme was the biblical and Christian eras, was experiencing it. Petrie was among the first to grasp the potential of the exhibition culture to “materialize” the past and exploit the potential of seasonal and repetitive display of archaeological artefacts to mobilize active participation among Biblical Archaeology enthusiasts of an ilk that was much smaller than that of the mega philanthropists. In the late nineteenth century, he developed the annual end-of-season displays of archaeological discoveries for publicity purposes. His later and considerably more modest exhibitions of finds from Palestine, organized between the late 1920s and mid 1930s, could not compete with the lavish displays of wealthier expeditions sponsored by the big archaeological philanthropists or by American donors, and were nowhere near the exhibitions of the treasures of Ur. But he did persist and they were usually hosted by an academic institution, typically University College London (UCL). Their audiences were solicited with the aid of the Bible. An exhibition of recent discoveries at Tell el-Far‘ah is advertised as “recent discoveries from Beth Peleth”, evoking the mistakenly used biblical name instead of using the Tell’s Arabic name.53 It took place at UCL, in late May and early June 1927, and admission to it was free. Petrie’s fiftieth anniversary as archaeologist, celebrated at UCL, was grander and graced by a lecture from Woolley that required admission fees.54 By 1934 Petrie ceased exhibiting on the (unconvincing and unsubstantiated) pretext that mandate legislation left most archaeological finds to local museums and did not leave much material to be displayed in Britain. His competitors, who vied for the attention of metropolitan audiences, enhanced their efforts to exhibit, publish, and even reproduce copies and replicas of artefacts discovered in Palestine and elsewhere.55 It was, however, not in the metropolitan exhibitionary complex but in Palestine that biblical exhibition culture reached its most articulate and modernized form. And it was in Palestine (rather than in any other mandatory territory, or, for that 51 Lady Petrie to Beasly, 5 March 1937 and Beasly to Lady Petrie, 5 May 1936, Institute of Archaeology (IOA), WJB/NFB 3150. 52 Ibid. 53 Exhibition card, Egypt Exploration Society’s Archive (EES). 54 Half-Century Celebration of Flinders Petrie. Exhibition card, 1930, EES. 55 See Chapters 4 and 7.

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matter, a number of metropolitan museums) that the idea of an antiquities’ museum devoted solely to the display of archaeological objects materialized, thus acknowledging the mandate principles of their exposure. Palestine’s first public museum, Jerusalem’s municipal museum, a quintessentially archaeological one, was an Ottoman initiative dating back to 1911. As Zeynep Çelik has demonstrated, Ottoman museology, particularly archaeological museology, had been a part of Ottoman modernization and, as noted by Salim Tamari, public display had been integral to late Ottoman urban planning.56 Under the British military administration, the museum was taken over by the Pro-Jerusalem Society that will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3. After the institution of a civil government, it was transferred to the Department of Antiquities and accommodated in a cramped building that housed the administration and a study centre, and did not allow the display even of its modest collections. On the British side, the idea of exhibiting the country’s past in a big way and integrating this display in a modernized urban space was first aired by urban planner and thinker Patrick Geddes in his plan for a “Proposed Museum Group” which he located outside the northeast corner of Jerusalem, the actual site of what would later become the Rockefeller Museum. Geddes’s interpretation of Palestine’s past was distinctly scriptural and sometimes biblical in the narrowest sense of the term. For to him, ancient Hebrew civilization was key to the development of Western civilization and modern local and regional civilization. Outspoken in his support of the Zionist movement and a Zionist restitution in post-war Palestine, he regarded the display of the material culture of ancient Israel as instrumental to popular education in the past and future modernization. His vision of a series of museums in Palestine blended this view with English and Scottish historical traditions of exhibition, notably the display of weapons and ordnance exemplified in the armoury museums at the Tower of London and Edinburgh Castle. His plan included a War Museum, a Jerusalem Museum, and a Palestinian Museum, which he saw as a treasure trove of the Hebrew past: “In fact, the Long history of Israel from the Patriarchs to the present”.57 Geddes’s exclusion of cultures which, in his view, had little role in the scriptural overview brought on criticism that “The museum should be Palestinian in the fullest sense of the term . . . to show a range and a distinct development of Jewish antiquities culminating in Zionism without doing the same for other peoples would not only be scientifically a serious mistake but it would be wholly unacceptable.”58 What made possible the building of Palestine’s grand museum of antiquities were not Geddes’s visions, or mandatory 56 Çelik, About Antiquities; Salim Tamari, The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine (Oakland, CA, 2017), introduction and chapter 1. 57 Patrick Geddes, “Jerusalem Actual and Possible: A Preliminary Report of the Chief Administration of Palestine and the Military Governor of Jerusalem”, November 1919, Central Zionist Archive (CZA), C. R. Ashbee Archive (copy). 58 A. T. Clay, “Note on Mr. Geddes Museum Plan”, 1919, IAA, ATQ_78.

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Figure 2.1 Laying the foundation stone for the Archaeological Museum of Palestine by High Commissioner John Chancellor, 1931 (Austen St. Barbe Harrison’s album, courtesy of the IAA, ATQ, SRF_104, mandate archive)

finance, but US global capital in the form of Rockefeller Jr.’s donation, negotiated by Breasted. The new museum’s foundation stone was laid in July 1930, its building completed in 1935, and it opened to the viewing public in 1938 (Figure 2.1). As well as displaying Palestine’s material pasts, it housed the mandatory machinery geared to preserve it and monitor access to it—the Antiquities Department. The museum’s imposing building, dominating Jerusalem’s skyline at the time and overlooking the walls of the Old City, could not be identified with a particular era or architectural influence. As Figure 2.2 demonstrates, it embodied Harrison’s appropriation of a mixture of historical local and regional traditions of design and

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Figure 2.2 Rockefeller Museum’s courtyard, “The Tower from the Fountain’s Alcove”. Note Harrison’s historicist eclecticism and his use of the cubic vault, bridging together Muslim, Crusader, and modernist architecture (Harrison’s album, courtesy of the IAA, ATQ, SRF_104, mandate archive)

emphasized his version of Muslim architecture—Moorish, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern. His imprint is apparent in his signature architectural component, the cubic dome that is repeated throughout the building. Regional eclecticism was enhanced by Harrison’s borrowing from Christian Levantine building in the Romanesque style and his representational buildings in Palestine and Transjordan were often compared to modern Crusaders’ castles. At the same time that he informedly plundered the architectural past, Harrison was, and became seen as, a modernist who adopted modernist “cleanliness” and purity of style, functionalism and an avoidance of ornamentation that was deemed “Eastern”. The amalgam of heritages appears to be present in the museum’s interior and the arrangement of its galleries. Organized piecemeal and exhibiting local and some regional archaeological finds, the galleries were meant to create a sequence of material civilizations that progressed linearly from the Stone Age to the Ottoman era. Their organization and, with it, the array of practices that characterized modern archaeology and museology—from discovery through classification

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Figure 2.3 Palestine Archaeological Museum, South Gallery. The arrangement of the sequences of civilizations and their display were considered state-of-art in museology (Harrison’s album, courtesy of the IAA, ATQ, SRF_104, mandate archive)

to display—were considered by contemporaries as up to the newest international standards, and unsurpassed by any other Near Eastern museum (Figure 2.3). The author of a long review enthused in the Palestine Post on 25 August 1939: “There is no archaeological collection anywhere which surpasses that of the Palestine Archaeological Museum from the point of view of museum technique and arrangement. Under the glass showcases every object is displayed to the best effect.”59 The Post, which represented the stand of the Zionist establishment in Palestine, targeted and was routinely read by its English-speaking community: mandatory administrators, members of their households, and the considerable unofficial community outside the official sector, including bankers, merchants, missionaries, and travellers. It also reached English-speaking Arab elites. The newspaper’s exhaustive coverage of the development of the museum marked it

59 “Sleeping Beauty’s Museum: Rockefeller’s Gift to Palestine”, Palestine Post, 25 August 1939, 15.

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out as a symbolic venue of the combination of modernity and antiquity.60 The museum proved to be photogenic copy material in the metropolitan press as well,61 particularly in such newspapers as the Illustrated London News (ILN) which, from the 1840s, had reported and illustrated, in the most literal sense of this term, archaeological exploits in the Near East.62 Notwithstanding the historical and temporal variety of the displays, the museum’s scriptural emphasis was apparent from the start and was, as the press insisted, what the general public most expected to see and know. The opening of an “Israelite Department, covering settlement in Canaan during the First and Second Iron Ages (circa 1200 to 586)” was applauded and the exhibits were dubbed “primitive modern” and as demonstrating modern aesthetics and functionality.63 The new wing with the Israelite gallery not just filled in a lacuna in time but was A running commentary on the Bible story . . . Future illuminators of the Bible will be better off than their colleagues in the Nineteenth Century whose imagination had to feed on the sparse reports furnished by the Bible. The archaeologists have not merely brought to light jewellery and objects of daily use, pottery, tools, weapons, weights and innumerable lamps, children’s toys showing the simple furniture in use at the time—we know from votive offerings what Solomon’s war chariot looked like and the way his horses were harnessed . . . From the ivory treasures of Megiddo and Samaria we can reconstruct with some degree of certainty the Cherubim of the Ark of the Covenant and the ornamental architecture of the First Temple.64

The power of material serial representation of scriptural texts was in that they materialized into a full and convincing display of objects. Moreover, the displays were an amalgam of pottery for daily use (tools, jewellery, children’s games) that demonstrated biblical history as quotidian and ordinary, and extremely symbolic “highlights” demonstrating the riches of a united monotheistic kingdom and culminating in evidence from Solomon’s days (probably a mistaken identification)— including his chariots and ornaments from the First Temple. Sensational finds like the ivories found at Samaria-Sebaste, capital of the Kingdom of Israel until its destruction and exile by the Assyrians in 722, “explained” and verified the descriptions in Kings 1:22, 39 of King Ahab’s “house of ivory”. They transformed the biblical text from image and metaphor (for ivory was considered to have been 60 “Dressing Up Antiquities”, Palestine Post, 27 April 1941. 61 “Museum Opening”, The Times, 13 January 1938. 62 ILN, 22 January 1938. 63 “The Opening of the Israelite Department at the Rockefeller Museum Jerusalem. The Settlement of the Sons of Israel in Canaan in the Iron Age”, Haaretz, n.d., IAA, ATQ_O (89/89). 64 Palestine Post, 9 October 1940.

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a hyperbole aimed at describing the whiteness of the walls of the king’s palace) to the “real” thing: actual ivory artefacts.65 Biblical, indeed scriptural, narratives and a biblical vision of the past persisted well into the twentieth century and remained a predominant interpretative framework of the history of Palestine and its antiquity, as well as that of its neighbouring territories. Physical encounter with, and experience of, the land may have widened the gap between the British biblical imagination on the one hand and the materiality of the land on the other, but it did not weaken the influence of the Bible and New Testament. Moreover, although the balance between text and matter changed, in that the post-war era witnessed an explosion of archaeological projects, Biblical Archaeology served not just to interpret material civilizations, but to corroborate texts and canons, sometimes subordinating the former to the illustrative purpose. The impact of the biblical framework is apparent in its percolation to a thick grid of textual, visual, and material forms of representing antiquity, (literally) looking at it and experiencing it: travelogues and tourist guidebooks, archaeological reports and popular manuals, aerial photography, documentary archaeological films, metropolitan colonial exhibitions, and local museums. This rich range of forms is inextricable from the development of a repertoire of modes of experiencing biblical history that were themselves related to new technologies of mobility that came to be agents of imperial modernity like railway travel across the Mashriq and flying. Biblical narratives were modernized in the sense that they were mediated by modern imperial technologies. Moreover, they were appropriated and integrated in the agenda and narrative of the mandate itself. The conquest of Palestine during the First World War was written into a history of a sequence of imperial conflicts, conquests, and occupations that allocated a special place to Judeo-Christian history and marginalized the Muslim and Ottoman occupation and presence and Ottoman modernization that preceded the war. The biblical interpretation thus set well with the modernizing trajectory of the mandate and its representation as a rescue or delivery operation. Notwithstanding their remarkable predominance, the Bible and the New Testament were far from exclusively setting the scaffolding and agenda for configuring and experiencing the antiquity of Palestine. Nor did they remain unchallenged—quite the contrary. Biblical Archaeology itself, as we shall see in Chapter 4, drew on practices that developed in related fields of knowledge such as anthropology, most distinctly physical anthropology. Narratives that had formerly adopted the Bible and a distinctly prophetic “desolation and restoration” narrative of the history of the Holy Land, now absorbed anthropological and even Eugenic interpretations of ancient material culture as stages in civilizational and racial evolution.66 Newer excavation techniques and the new empirical disciplines 65 “The Opening of the Israelite Department”, IAA, ATQ_O (89/89). 66 Silberman, “Desolation and Restoration”.

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dedicated to the study of material culture did not demote Biblical Archaeology, but they extended the definition of Holy Land and Levantine antiquity and contested the premises of illustrative archaeology. Biblical temporalities persisted but, as Part III of this book seeks to demonstrate, were stretched beyond their confines and powerfully challenged by the discovery of “the most ancient time” in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and in Palestine itself.

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Cities of David Planning and Excavating Jerusalem

Earthquake On 11 July 1927, at about 16:00, Jerusalem shook—violently. The Jericho earthquake, of a magnitude of 6.25, brought havoc to the city and to towns and villages across Palestine and Transjordan, killing and wounding many and erasing hundreds of buildings and monuments. It devastated the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest place in Islam, which had just undergone (an incomplete) restoration taken on by the Waqf and financed by the Egyptian government, and hit Augusta Victoria, until then the official residence of the High Commissioner to Palestine— located on the slopes of Mount Scopus and touching the Mount of Olives. At the time of the eruption, John Winter Crowfoot, archaeologist and administrator, director of the excavations on Mount Ophel, internationally known at the time as “The City of David”, was thirty feet underground. Although “there was a terrific rambling and a violent wrenching of the ground to and fro not a stone near was dislodged from its place”. Crowfoot and his fellow excavators escaped the upheaval unscathed and carried on digging for the remnants of Canaanite, Judaic, and post-exilic Jerusalem, in a field bordering the precincts of the damaged mosque and not far from Jerusalem’s Western Wall that, a little over a year later, in September 1928, would become the scene of acrimonious clashes between Arabs and Jews that erupted into a major national conflict and would mesmerize international attention.1 Crowfoot’s experience left an indelible impression on him.2 His recollection of the earthquake in an official report, mentions of it in contemporaries’ accounts, and its summary by historians of archaeology,3 recap some images and apparent contrasts between underground Jerusalem and the city over ground: between the sturdiness of the remains of the city that had existed before David and the

1 Ronny Reich, Excavating the City of David: Where Jerusalem’s History Began (Jerusalem, 2011), 54, Cohen, 1929. 2 John Winter Crowfoot and G. M. Fitzgerald, Excavations in the Tyropoeon Valley, Jerusalem, 1927 (PEF,V), (London, 1927), 5. The excavation took place in Plot 10 of the promontory of Ophel on its west slope descending to the valley of Tyropoeon. 3 H.  R.  Hall, “Preface”, in Crowfoot and Fitzgerald, Excavations in the Tyropoeon Valley, v–vi; Reich, Excavating the City of David, 54). Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and the Rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950. Billie Melman, Oxford University Press (2020). © Billie Melman. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198824558.001.0001

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instability and vulnerability of latter-day colonial Jerusalem embodied in the anglicized Augusta Victoria (a German edifice and the headquarters of the Ottoman army during the First World War), between the solidity of antiquity and the precariousness of the present. These contrasting images showcase the emergence of the new modes and practices of recovering the ancient past in the post-war mandatory empire, its archaeological regime, and administrative apparatuses and agents. Crowfoot’s own itinerary to Jerusalem and his archaeological work in the city highlight the ties between the circulation of experts around the empire, archaeological knowledge, and the imperial administration of antiquities. Educated at Brasenose College in Oxford and apprenticed in classical archaeology at the British School of Archaeology in Athens, he embarked on a colonial career at the Egyptian Civil Service in the Department of Education. His twenty-five years of service in Egypt and the Sudan culminated in his term as principal of Gordon Memorial College in Khartoum (later Khartoum University). After retirement from service he accepted the directorship of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, succeeding the influential Garstang. Crowfoot’s directorship began when the shrivelled school was disconnected from the Department of Antiquities, its UK Treasury funding (the first government-grant to any school of archaeology abroad) was stopped, and the role of director was separated from that of director of the department. With a shoestring budget he embarked on collaboration with the more affluent ASOR and local and international sponsors and co-excavators.4 Crowfoot’s expedition and accompanying recollections in his report also demonstrate the persistence of biblical culture during the mandate outlined in Chapter 2. This persistence is particularly apparent in Jerusalem—both the imagined Jerusalem that lived on in British popular culture, and the physical city that was occupied in December 1917 and was actually experienced by Britons. The search for its past coincided with the mandatory development of the cityscape and perceptions of urban planning. Moreover, archaeology became both internationalized and nationalized in that it aroused concerns in Europe and the USA, as well as local concerns, mostly amongst Arab inhabitants. It is this triad of the mandate experience—imperial urban developmental visions, urban planning, and the recovery of the city’s antiquity—that is the primary focus of this chapter. Of course, Jerusalem had been and was imagined as a capital of antiquity well before the onset of the new mandated empire. From at least the seventh century ad, it occupied a unique and hallowed place in the three revealed religions and, even before that, had been a site of pilgrimage. Nor did its privileged status in Western cultures diminish with the processes of secularization and the apparent decline of the actual, physical pilgrimage in Protestantism. Far from it—travel,

4 K. M. K., “John Winter Crowfoot Obituary”, Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 92:2 (1960), 161–6.

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imagined or real, to the Holy City and its role in British popular religion and culture were key to vernacular biblical culture and thrived during the long nineteenth century. In travellers’ reports, Jerusalem’s illustrious past had been routinely contrasted with its deplorable present. On the one hand, Jerusalem was represented in a popular cross-class imagination and longings as a celestial city, the locus of redemption, and a religious and national restoration. The city served as a metaphor for England itself. On the other hand, and as has been abundantly shown, the physical, material city had been conventionally depicted by travellers, pilgrims, and ethnographers as unimpressive and as the hive of religious discord. By the beginning of the twentieth century this clash between past and a prescribed future and the present became commonplace.5 Juxtapositions of rise and decline had a distinct orientalist hue and Ottoman Jerusalem was routinely characterized as an impoverished and dilapidated oriental city.6 And, as already noted, its British occupation was represented as a deliverance from oriental neglect and misrule.7 The tension between the imagined and physical Jerusalem survived, as we shall see, long after the Great War. But the city’s role and definition as an ancient place and as a locus of “antiquity” altered and became inextricable from the changes in the new regime of archaeology and antiquities, and the new form of imperial governing. Jerusalem became the hub of historical and archaeological activity that included the renovation and repair of religious historical monuments—Christian, Muslim (such as the Dome of the Rock), and Jewish, and of the restoration and even invention of historical architectural features, like the city’s wall ramparts and the Citadel. Jerusalem developed as a vital node in the grid of Western national archaeological institutions discussed earlier and, particularly relevant here, of an Anglo-American network of entrepreneurs engaged in discovering and mediating between Palestine’s antiquity and a varied public in Britain and throughout Palestine. These entrepreneurs included archaeologists, epigraphists and linguists, architects, historians, antiquaries and anthropologists as well as town planners, the latter seeking to merge the Old City into a new modernized Jerusalem. Some experts were also administrators who manned the government departments controlling antiquities. Similar networks existed in other imperial cities considerably bigger than Jerusalem, such as Cairo and Baghdad, and in Mediterranean sites of antiquities like Athens. But Athens was not under British rule; in Cairo the administration of antiquities was predominantly French and

5 Simon Goldhill, “Jerusalem”, in Gange and Ledger-Lomas, Cities of God, 71–111; Goldhill, Jerusalem, City of Longing (Cambridge, MA, 2008); and Goldhill, Buried Life. See alsoYehoshua Ben Arieh and Moshe Davis (eds), Jerusalem in the Mind of the Western World, 1800–1948 (Westport, CT, 1997). On the city in British biblical culture, see Bar Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture. 6 Melman, Women’s Orients. 7 Nicholas E. Roberts, “Dividing Jerusalem: British Urban Planning in the Holy City”, Journal of Palestine Studies, 42:2 (Summer 2013), 7–21.

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the government was Egyptian, and Baghdad was the centre of a kingdom with a government, albeit one that until 1932 was subordinate to the mandate. Amman was urbanized slowly and, as already noted, what administration of antiquities that existed in it was subject to control from Jerusalem. Jerusalem became the hub and exemplar of a colonial centralist administration of antiquities. It was also the place where heritage, monuments, and antiquity were internationalized. Internationalization is apparent not just in the presence of the numerous archaeological and antiquary societies and entrepreneurs from many states, or in the logic of the mandate under the League of Nations' oversight that acknowledged the international status of the city’s heritage. It is also manifest in the international attention paid to the city’s past, its coverage in the media and the use of the new international idiom to mobilize support for the preservation and discovery of its antiquities. Each of these post-war features may be attributed to the geo-political change in Jerusalem’s status, due to the war, and its increasing politicization. It became the centre of the newly created mandate of Palestine and Transjordan, a colonial capital as it were, and the official site of its government, positions that it did not have under Ottoman rule.8 The interconnectedness and proximity of governmental and archaeological institutions and the administrative machinery for the preservation and discovery of antiquities is telling and will be examined in detail later. Last but not least, in Jerusalem, more than in any other site of antiquity examined in this book, the ancient past became politicized and was endowed with contradicting national and religious meanings and claims. British notions about the city’s past and about the new empire’s role as its custodian clashed with the intrareligious and national meanings with which this past was endowed. The search for, and rediscovery of, the past became embroiled in violent nationalist upheavals that erupted in the city in 1920 and 1921, 1928 (in the so-called Wailing Wall riots), and 1929, and started off the disturbances of this year then periodically, until the outbreak of the Second World War. Negotiations and clashes over antiquities and the past were not solely national. They also had to do with the colonial development of the city, its planning and modernization, and with differing notions concerning its economy. Between 1918 and 1948, the care of historical monuments and antiquities was linked to a vision and projects of a modernist nature. Mandate planning in Jerusalem drew on new attitudes to urbanism, suburbanization, and city life which had developed from the late nineteenth century. The careers and ideas of town planners and administrators who drew its masterplans were embedded in Victorian, Edwardian, and post-war movements for urban revival and the amelioration of life in Britain’s overcrowded cities and transplanted to a colonial setting. Jerusalem’s Old City, within the walls and its environs, and the antiquities in them became pivotal to modernization. They 8 Tamari, Remaking of Palestine; Corbett, Competitive Archaeology.

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were juxtaposed to the modern city, but were integrated into a modern urban imagination and planning. In the following I will first examine the ways in which the new notions, vocabularies, and regime of antiquities were defined and related to Jerusalem, temporally and in spatial terms. I will proceed to consider how they and the city’s past were thought about, interpreted, and represented in terms of urban modernity and planning. I will then focus on a single locale within Jerusalem—the layered City of David, located on a small promontory south of the city walls and excavated between 1923 and 1925, and 1927 and 1928. It is here, on the ground and underground, that archaeological remains were tested alongside biblical texts and foundational stories on the rise of the kingdom of Judah and the pre-Judaic settlement. And it was here that international, imperial, and local interests, and interpretations and meanings of antiquity and its uses, collided. Archaeologists, who at times served as colonial administrators, learned societies, and an array of the holders and proprietors of the excavated land, most notably the villagers of Silwan and their representatives, negotiated access to the excavated land, compensation claims, and the ownership of the City of David in a socially and politically charged atmosphere.

Antiquities: Preservation, Discovery, and Renewal Jerusalem’s privileged status as a city of antiquities had been bolstered before the mandate began. General Allenby’s proclamation of 9 December, made upon his triumphant albeit low-key entry into the city, vouched for the maintenance and protection of every sacred building, monument, shrine, “traditional site”, religious endowment, or customary place of prayer of “whatsoever form” of all faiths according to custom, thus committing Britain to the Ottoman status quo of these places.9 The continuity of status, based upon the agreement between the Great Powers following the Crimean War, was ratified in article 13 of the Palestine Mandate. The list of protected places—which was not definitive10—included those already defined as “holy” and historical and topped the list of “musts” on travellers’ itineraries and commercial tourists’ packages: the Church of Holy Sepulchre and the Monastery of Dayr al-Sultan on its roof, the Church of the Assumption, and the Tomb of Miriam. The fact that these were historical places in public religious use impinged on, and was in contrast to their historical value as antiquities. Although subject to maintenance, hence reparation and, by implication, conservation, they could be seen as immune to alteration by way of

9 General Allenby’s Proclamation, https://www.firstworldwar.com/source/jerusalem_allenbyprocl.htm, last accessed 9 September 2018. 10 Doron Bar, “The Debate over the Designation of the Holy Places and Historical Sites in the State of Israel 1948–1967”, Cathedra, 154 (December 2014), 137–62 (Hebrew).

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archaeological excavations, and were exempt from government ownership, thus impossible to expropriate. Moreover, their existence and ownership (the latter applying to numerous archaeological remains as well) in a lived-in, crowded city, with a diverse multi-faith population, sometimes contrasted with the new definition of antiquities. This definition, we may recall, extended to a wide range of moveable and immoveable artefacts and to human and animal remains, and their classification as “antiquities” meant not only discovery by initiated excavations, but also the mandatory power to expropriate land where these sites were located. Thus, questions about access to, and ownership of, the past touched on issues of property and attachment to land and place, and ignited tensions between the agenda of archaeological discovery on the one hand, and the conservation and preservation of historical places on the other. Tension erupted early on, during the period of military administration, before the scaffolding of an antiquities’ administration was set. It is particularly manifest in the civic voluntary, multi-denominational, and cross-religious body founded under the auspices of the new imperial rulers and their great involvement in the organization: The Pro-Jerusalem Society (PJS) (and its Council). A chartered body, drawing on subscription that allowed membership to Jerusalemites of all faiths—Christians of a number of national churches, Muslims, and Jews—the Society had conflicting aims. According to its Charter, it sought “the protection and advancement of the interests of Jerusalem, its district and inhabitants”, based on their needs and consent, and “protecting and adding to the city”. At the same time, the charter stressed “preservation with the consent of the government of the Antiquities in the district of Jerusalem”, as well as the encouragement of local arts.11 The pulls of local civic and religious needs and “government” are built into the history and operation of the Society. No less crucial is the friction between “protection” and preservation on the one hand and “advancement” and development on the other. There was further tension in the different senses of temporality that were embedded in the definitions of antiquities, historical monuments, and religious buildings in the city. This tension is captured in the report by E.  T.  Richmond (architectural advisor to the Supreme Muslim Council in the late 1920s and Director of Antiquities in Palestine from 1928), on the restoration project of the Dome of the Rock, whose early Ottoman Armenian tiles were disintegrating. The point here is not Richmond’s political sympathies that were avowedly pro-Arab, but his awareness of the slippage in the very definition of antiquities in the Holy City, where ancient sites were in use and alive, and the two registers of time—the one involving restoration and the other discovery—were inseparable: The Dome of the Rock is not merely a building of archaeological interest, but also a symbol of something very much alive, we must . . . allow that there is 11 Ashbee, Jerusalem 1918–1920, vi–vii.

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something to be said for maintaining the outward and visible sign of vitality. All skin decays, but so long as there is life in the body which it covers, its tissues are continually renewed. So long as the Dome of the Rock remains a live building— a building that is to say, which is an integral part in the life that surrounds it—so long as it fulfils the functions it has fulfilled for 1,200 years, so long must its skin be continuously renewed in some measure or others, by marble or by mosaic, by tiles or by cement.12

To these unsolved tensions were added conflicting notions concerning urbanism and cities and their relationship to modernity and progress. Charles Robert Ashbee was particularly aware of these pulls. Ashbee, a social city reformer and member of the settlement movement in the East End of London, and a designer and member of the Arts and Crafts movement, was from 1918 Civic Adviser to the government of Palestine and secretary to the Society. He was a “restorationist” and at the same time a developer of Jerusalem’s traditional arts and crafts, as well as being a modernizer and the author of one of Jerusalem’s zoning plans.13 In his chronicle of the Society’s activities he juxtaposed archaeology to city life and argued that the archaeologist was not interested in Jerusalem or, for that matter, in any city: the deader an artefact or a building, and the deeper their provenance, the better. For the archaeologist “digs, records, and goes his way”, leaving dirt behind and the job of cleaning after him to others. Ashbee warned that the greater the ambition to discover antiquities and, indeed, the past, the greater the hazard to urban space and life: the archaeological site turns into a dump, the source of waste and filth that are distributed by humans and animals and a danger to hygiene.14 The preservation of past civilizations, of what’s left of them and their aesthetics, was in particular danger in Jerusalem, precisely because of its turbulent history that constituted a succession of occupations and clashes between religions and administrations. The reverse of this approach and view is manifested by Flinders Petrie who, after the British occupation, typically suggested bluntly and with some relish that Jerusalem be vacated of its inhabitants and dug up, this being the only way to discover its past.15 The implication of this excavation zeal is Ashbee’s nightmare in which the living city is demolished and taken over by the dead one. In temporal terms, Petrie’s radical demolition vision would have meant the destruction of the Ottoman and Muslim city, as well as some of the sacred Christian sites, for the exhumation of Iron- and Bronze-age strata. Notwithstanding the explicit tensions between preservation and excavation, which became apparent during the dissolution of the Pro-Jerusalem Society and the emergence of a fully fledged and centralist Department of Antiquities, the two 12 Ibid., 14. 13 Ashbee, Jerusalem Zoning Plan, in Ashbee, Jerusalem 1918–1920. 14 Charles Robert Ashbee, Jerusalem 1920–1922, Being the Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council During the first Two Years of the Civil Administration (London, 1924), 37–8. 15 Ben Arieh, in Hagit Lavsky and Roni Aaronson (eds), A Land in the Mirror of its Past: Studies in the Historical Geography of Eretz-Israel (Jerusalem, 2001), 377–501 (Hebrew).

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pulls seem to have been reconciled in the perception that the city within the walls, the walls themselves, and their surrounding area, constituted a historical (even ancient) place, and the extension of the term “antiquities” to its entirety. This inclusivity reflected awareness that Jerusalem was the only city in Palestine whose walls were entirely preserved. The section in the Department’s prospectus on the 1926 international Archaeological Congress in Syria and Palestine reads: The old city of Jerusalem is cared for as a group of antiquities by the Department. Particular attention is paid while maintaining the fabric of the walls and citadel, to maintain the old world aspect of the interior, and to protect the walls from encroachment and effacement of the outside. No new buildings or repairs are now permitted unless approved by the Department.16

There follows a list of antiquities that jumbles together the status quo religious sites, additional churches, mosques, and bazaars, and “buildings of historical interest”, the city’s walls, and Citadel. The eclectic and inclusive inventory, sometimes flying in the face of the demarcation of 1700 as the divide between the antique and the modern, is a mixture of orientalism, nostalgia (“old world aspect”), antiquarianism, and the language of preservation. Like the rhetoric of the PJS and Ashbee, it draws on a strong belief in the revival of local arts and crafts, organized in native guilds, and the conservation of a “medieval” city. The historicist aesthetics and attitude, apparent in the tendency to “medievalize” Jerusalem and project onto it visions of a preserved walled European medieval city, was by no means confined to rhetoric and is key to the policy of the Society. It is amply manifest in its development and planning of the city’s walls, the wall’s rampart and Citadel, and their surrounding area. This tendency is also apparent in the project of reviving local arts and crafts like Armenian potterymaking, Hebron glass-blowing, and weaving. The revival of crafts no doubt reflects the trajectory of the Arts and Crafts Movement and Ashbee’s own Guild and School of Handicraft, founded by him in 1888, initially based at Toynbee Hall in London’s East End and in 1902 relocated to Chipping Camden in the Cotswolds.17 Ashbee’s aesthetic-making and his urban visions had been formed in the 1890s and by the time they were implemented in Jerusalem were no longer fashionable in their place of origin. But it would be wrong, as Simon Goldhill notes, to regard his vision as simple anti-urbanism: this would be ignoring Ashbee’s blend of deep-rootedness in English tradition and in modernism, as manifest in his strong identification with, and support of, the Garden City

16 Department of Antiquities, International Archaeological Congress in Syria and Palestine, 1926 ( Jerusalem, 1926). 17 Alan Crawford, C. R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer and Romantic Socialist, 2nd edn (New Haven, CT, 2005).

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movement.18 The transportation to Jerusalem of urban reformism that sought to rescue working-class slum inhabitants and educate them in a social aesthetics19 was advanced by the Society’s founder, Ronald Storrs, first military governor of Jerusalem (the first “since Pontius Pilate” as he quaintly put it) thence first civil governor of Jerusalem and Judea. With even stronger colonial ties than Ashbee, Storrs regarded the Society as “the Military Governor civically and aesthetically in council”.20 For him, too, the encouragement and revival of artisanal labour and crafts was a means to preserve traditional labour and improve the condition of local labourers.21 The “medieval” walled city was to be the epicentre of Jerusalem as a whole and it would, enthused Ashbee, “when completed, be the largest, and, perhaps, the most perfect medieval enceinte in existence. Carcassonne, Chester, Nuremberg, are parallel cases, but none of them comes up to Jerusalem in romantic beauty and grandeur.”22 The analogue between the Old City and European cities is as revealing as the projection of ideas on urban planning and the implementation of planning policies that separated Jerusalem’s Old City from the modern and “developed” one. The aftermath of the First World War saw the heyday of colonial urban planning, a policy which was regulated by legislation and was applied in the “older” empire (in Indian cities) and the new mandated areas. Its new feature in Palestine was zoning and planning in Jerusalem, one of the earliest examples of zoning an urban area (defined as “archaeological” and sometimes as “sacred”) as a whole for preservation.23 William McLean’s plan for the zoning and development of Jerusalem, the first of five master-plans formulated and partly implemented during the mandate, set the terms for perceiving the city’s historical parts and juxtaposing them to the “modern” city (Figure 3.1).24 Despite being approved, his plan was criticized by local mandate subjects and in the metropole. Yet criticism was directed mainly at his proposed development of the “modern” city, outside the walls, particularly to its west and south. As far as the preserved zone is 18 Goldhill, Buried Life, 114–16 and 134–7; see also Noah Hysler-Rubin, “Arts and Crafts and the Great City: Charles Robert Ashbee in Jerusalem”, Planning Perspectives, 21:4 (2006), 347–68 and “Planning the Artistic City: Charles Robert Ashbee in Jerusalem 1918–1922”, Cathedra, 117 (2005), 81–102 (Hebrew); Raquel Rapaport, “The City of the Great Singer: C.  R.  Ashbee’s Jerusalem”, Architectural History, 50 (2007), 171–210 and “Conflicting Visions: Architecture in Palestine during the British Mandate”, PhD Diss. (Cardiff University, 2005). 19 Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: 2004), 264–9, 278–9. 20 Ronald Storrs, “Introduction”, in Ashbee, Jerusalem 1918–1920, v. 21 Ronald Storrs, Orientations (London, 1939) and The Memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs (New York, 1972). 22 Ashbee, Jerusalem 1918–1920; see also Crawford, C.  R.  Ashbee, Architect, Designer and Noah Hysler-Rubin, “Ashbee’s Urban Thinking and its Expression in Jerusalem 1918–1922”, MA Diss. (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2000) (Hebrew). 23 Wendy Pullan and Maximillian Sternberg, “The Making of Jerusalem’s Sacred Basin”, Planning Perspectives, 27:2 (April 2012), 225–48. 24 William McLean, City of Jerusalem: Time Planning General Map of the Scheme for the Restoration and Preservation of the Ancient City (1918).

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Figure 3.1 Jerusalem Town Planning Scheme, No. 1 McLean, 1918. The eastern “ancient city” is the subject of “Restoration and Preservation”; the western “Future City” is to be the subject of “Improvement” (C. R. Ashbee, Jerusalem 1918–1920 Being the Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (London, 1921))

concerned, it seems that McLean’s plan and those of his successors present a remarkable continuity in the official vision of the Old City. According to McLean, its zone was to be preserved unchanged; building in it and its surrounding perimeter was strictly forbidden; modern building materials (such as concrete and corrugated iron) were outlawed, and building designs out of character with local style, such as tiled roofs, were banned.25 Moreover, additions to the walls and their surroundings built during the nineteenth century were subject to demolition. Later master zoning plans, by Patrick Geddes (1919), Geddes and Ashbee, and Clifford Holliday (1930), and Henry Kendall (1944), notwithstanding considerable changes to McLean’s ideas, confirmed the initial spatial juxtaposition between the old and predominantly Arab city and new (though by no means predominantly Jewish) city, a juxtaposition that also rang with orientalist binary notions about East and West. The city outside the walls 25 Roberts, “Dividing Jerusalem”; Wendy Pullan, Maximilian Sternberg et al., The Struggle for Jerusalem’s Holy Places (London, 2013); Tamari, Remaking of Palestine.

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developed to its west, and the walled city was described as medieval, Eastern, or Oriental. The Old City was associated with conservation, and the new with demographic growth and the development of techno-social spaces and systems such as paved streets and electricity (Figure 3.2).26 Notwithstanding this divide, city planners and administrators sought to incorporate archaeological sites and historical landmarks in a large-scale plan of Jerusalem and its surroundings. They tended to allocate more and more space to sites of archaeological excavations and these reached almost 14 per cent of the city’s area in Holliday’s plan and nearly 20 per cent in Kendall’s.27 In the master plans the wall and ramparts (the enceinte), came to be a dividing line. Built by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and presenting a fine exemplar of Ottoman architecture at the peak of the Ottoman Empire, by the end of the Great War the wall had become dilapidated. The Citadel tower adjoining it, to be known as David’s Tower, was at risk of collapse. Ashbee’s projects included their restoration and the subsequent opening of a Rampart Walk around the Old City that allowed panoramic views of its environs (Figure 3.3). Furthermore, he and planners after him, located monuments and excavation sites within a planned green belt encircling the city. The belt was to include historical and even agricultural areas, “naturally” green or cultivated in places that were relatively thinly populated. The colour green dominated the maps of Jerusalem’s planners and their imagination. The maps offer more than landscaping that positions antiquities in a green setting: they project a vision of an urban reform that includes a healthy and “clean” living. “Cleansing” is a keyword in the PJS’s vocabulary of preservation and restitution, and it is closely tied to restoration: “Perhaps the greatest need of Jerusalem, after the preservation of its history and the cleaning of its streets, is gardens, shade and afforestation.”28 The “greening” of the city is central in a “green” narrative of history and antiquities that stresses the need to remedy the destruction of nature by the succession of Palestine’s conquerors and occupiers. Titus irredeemably demolished all trees and timber during his siege in ad 70. The Crusaders carried on the destruction of Jerusalem’s greenery and the Turks, renowned for their art of gardening in the Ottoman hinterland of their empire, continued the wreckage of its periphery.29 The green vision of the modernized city was further advanced in Geddes’s map of Jerusalem and in his writing. He envisioned a giant historical green park that would be a symbolic centre of a syncretic new civilization, welding together the West and the East. Although he excluded from his plan most of the Mount of Olives with its ancient sites and burial places, and its position that offered 26 Billie Melman, “I the Bull of Nineveh: Antiquity and Modernity in the Mega-City, London 1800–1900”, Zmanim 119, 2012, 74–88 (Hebrew). 27 Henry Kendall, Jerusalem the City Plan: Preservation and Development during the British Mandate (London, 1948). 28 Ashbee, Jerusalem 1918–1920, 19. 29 Ibid.

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Figure 3.2 C. R. Ashbee, Wall Rampart, Jerusalem (courtesy CMA)

panoramic views of the city, he expanded the park to include historic burial places and the valley of Kidron that carried numerous biblical associations. Revealingly Geddes described the proposed park as “the most sacred park in the world”, accommodating the sacred tombs, temples, and collective memories of the three revealed religions.30 But even before him, Ashbee envisioned the entire built area 30 Joshua Ben Arieh, “The Preservation and Planning of Jerusalem”, in Ben Arieh, The New Jewish City of Jerusalem during the British Mandate Period: Neighborhoods, Houses, People, III, 1753–1757 (Jerusalem, 2011), 473.

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Figure 3.3 Ashbee, “Rampart Walk Showing the Gradual Destruction of the Wall” (C. R. Ashbee, Jerusalem 1918–1920 Being the Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (London, 1921))

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Figure 3.4 Ashbee, Jerusalem Park System (1920). The green belt incorporates historical burial places and sites of antiquities (C. R. Ashbee, Jerusalem 1918–1920 Being the Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (London, 1921))

of Jerusalem as a “park system” with the Citadel garden and rampart walk as its core; the “spinal cord” on which would be “built the whole series of parks” (Figure  3.4).31 The planners’ idea of a historical green belt was shared by some archaeologists/administrators like John Garstang who, during his term as director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (BSAJ) and the Department of Antiquities, campaigned for pushing the preserved belt outside the city walls to a width of twenty-four metres and designating it “the antique belt” or, alternatively, “the archaeological belt”, even though only fragments of it contained archaeological sites and diggings.32 Historical, modernist, or preservationist, the visions and mapping of a green belt and giant parks resonate with the idea of the Garden City and its implementation by Ebenezer Howard and Geddes himself.33 The concepts of the Garden City and the garden suburb, propagated during the fin-de-siècle but which hardly 31 Ashbee, Jerusalem, 1918–1920. 32 Ben Arieh, The New Jewish City, 1754. 33 Standish Meacham, Regaining Paradise: Englishness and the Early Garden City Movement (New Haven, CT, 1999); Anthony Alexander, Britain’s New Towns: Garden Cities to Sustainable Communities (London and New York, 2001).

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materialized and were out of vogue during the interwar period, were exported to colonial settings even before the Great War. In Palestine, socially oriented city planning with an emphasis on public green areas gained popularity by the 1910s.34 Howard’s ideas about the need for planning, the value to city-dwellers of contact with nature, and the need to balance agriculture, industry, and residential areas to bolster a social community, were embraced by Zionist entrepreneur modernizers, unsurprisingly in Jerusalem’s new neighbourhoods, and by Arab entrepreneurs.35 The grafting of ideas about the revival (planning and rationalization) of the British industrial city onto the non-industrialized and “ancient” area surrounding the walled city is more complex. It exemplifies how the Old City and, most specifically, archaeological sites in its vicinity, were associated with urban modernity and how restoration and preservation were absorbed in concepts of planning. Notwithstanding the planners’ recognition of the variety in Jerusalem, their vision was dominated by the biblical past—their Jerusalem was the City of David. To Ashbee, “the old Psalmist hit off that moral and human element in the modern movement”, in the expression of his educational ideal. His 1903 edition of the Book of Common Psalter, bearing the Star of David, and a cross and a small crescent (and containing the Psalms) was given by him to mandatory colleagues, such as Harry Luke, with a dedication referring to times spent in “the City of the Great Singer”.36 Storrs, too, revered and was inspired by the Book of Psalms which he could cite, and described in his autobiography the restoration of the “medieval Ramparts” as a Davidic act of restoration. By citing the famous Psalm 48:12–13, he attached the mandatory restoration project to David’s golden kingdom (and thus to Jesus, scion of David’s house of Yishai): The Psalms of David and a cloud of unseen witnesses seemed to inspire our work. ‘Build ye the walls of Jerusalem’. We put back the fallen stones, the finials, the pinnacles and the battlements, and we restored and freed from numberless encroachments the medieval Ramparts, so that it was possible to ‘Walk about Zion and go round about her: and tell the towers thereof: mark well the bulwarks, set up her houses’.37

34 Robert K. Home, Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities (London, 1997); Ruth Kark and Michal Oren-Nordheim, Jerusalem and Its Environs: Quarters, Neighborhoods, Villages 1800–1948 (Detroit, MI, 2001), 176–9; Liora Bigon and Yossef Katz (eds), Colonial Planning: Transnationality and Urban Ideas in Africa and Palestine (Manchester, 2014), “Introduction”, 1–35. 35 Yossef Katz and Liora Bigon, “Urban Development and the Garden City: Making Examples from Late Ottoman Era Palestine”, in Bigon and Katz, Colonial Planning, 144–67. 36 Rapaport, The City of the Great Singer, 204; Tamari, Remaking of Palestine. 37 Storrs, Orientations, 366.

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Mount Ophel: From Underground Jerusalem to the City of David—a Genealogy of Excavations The association between the remains of the Old City and the modernized city in the map-maker and planner’s bird’s-eye view of Jerusalem, and in restorers’ projects, also dominates the subterranean look of excavators—the archaeologists digging underground Jerusalem. This look is key to the main practice of modern archaeology in Palestine and elsewhere: excavation and the exposure of a vertical city in search of its material development in the past. The image of the dug-up city was by no means confined to archaeology. As David Pike, Lynda Nead, and others have noted, excavations in the modernized mega city were part and parcel of urban modernization from the mid nineteenth century.38 Excavations underground were means for the creation of subterranean techno-social spaces that installed the technological systems most identified with modernization, such as underground transport, communication systems, the supply and purification of water, and the recycling of waste.39 The vertical city that developed underground and above ground, came to constitute a metaphor of modern urbanization and, between the two world wars, of suburbanization. In Jerusalem the practice of digging shafts and tunnels under the surface of the city began with the first archaeological excavations in it, conducted in 1867 by Charles Warren at the behest of the PEF. His finds, which included the Warren Pier, part of the water system of the Davidic City, were dramatized in Underground Jerusalem: An Account of Some of the Principal Difficulties Encountered in the Exploration and the Results Obtained, published in 1876. As the title overstates, Warren’s narrative of exploration is a tale of trials and perseverance that positions the archaeologist as a hero. A key scene in his story of the exposure of the city beneath Jerusalem is Warren’s tracking of the subterranean Siloam Tunnel (discovered earlier), built, probably at the end of the eighth century bc, to draw water from a spot lower than the walled city (the Gihon Spring), underneath the City of David, and regarded as an engineering feat. Warren’s subterranean progress along the track of the builders of the Kingdom of Judah during the reign of Hezekiah and around the time of the Assyrian invasion of Palestine at about 701 bc, is reminiscent of comparable descriptions of trips in the underground rivers of London, though Warren trudged through fresh water and not rivers of sewage. His excavating technique— sinking shafts and hewing underground tunnels—was followed by excavators who succeeded him like Frederick Bliss and Archibald Dickie, representing the PEF in 1894–5, and by amateur twentieth-century treasure-hunters such as

38 Pike, Subterranean Cities; Nead, Victorian Babylon; Melman, “I the Bull of Nineveh”. 39 Pike, Subterranean Cities; Nead, Victorian Babylon; Patrick  S.  Soppelsa, “The Fragility of Modernity: Infrastructure and Everyday Life in Paris 1870–1914”, PhD Diss. (University of Michigan, 2009).

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Montague Parker and V. H. Juvelius. The title of Warren’s classic was reworked in accounts on Jerusalem as different as Dominican archaeologist and biblical scholar père  Louis-Hugues Vincent’s Underground Jerusalem: Discoveries on the Hill of Ophel/Jerusalem sous terre (1911) and spiritualist Adela Goodrich-Freer’s ethnographic Inner Jerusalem (1904), which barely deals with the subterranean city.40 There were, however, substantial differences between archaeologists’ and travellers’ experiences of underground Jerusalem and its role in the modern biblical imagination, and the real and imagined vertical city in Western European metropolises. Subterranean Jerusalem was distinguished from the contemporary Jerusalem; it symbolized the glory of the biblical Judean kingdom and the heritages of Roman and Christian Jerusalem, and presented continuities and breaks in material culture and life throughout these periods and, so the pre-war excavations indicated, before them. The renewal of excavations after the war had the potential of adding antiquities to the inventory of archaeological monuments which the town planners cherished and integrated in their park system and vision of the Garden City. Of these monuments, the mausoleums on the slopes of the Kidron, known as the tombs of Absalom, Jehoshaphat, and Zechariah (and dating to the Second Temple era), and the Tombs of the Kings, were regularly described in detail in tourist guidebooks, and were on the itineraries of package tours.41 The same books and itineraries also recommended the Hill of Ophel and the ongoing digging on it as a worthwhile visit.42 The renewed interest in Jerusalem’s archaeology seems to have been focused on the hill, located to the south-east of the walls and also known as the City of David. The precincts of Ophel, including its surface and slopes, have been dug up at least eighteen times so far. Between Warren’s expedition and the end of the mandate, it was one of the most intensely excavated spots in Palestine. Though modest in size compared to other excavation sites and scanty in the scale of the material remains discovered on it, it was Palestine’s most politically loaded archaeological site. It still is. Although the period after the 1948 Arab–Israeli war is beyond the scope of this chapter and the remainder of the book touches on it only briefly, it is important to acknowledge the public history, as well as the controversies, surrounding the site, particularly after the 1967 Arab–Israeli war.43 During the early excavations it seemed to be wholly lacking “treasures” of the kind exposed in 40 Louis-Hugues Vincent, Underground Jerusalem: Discoveries on the Hill of Ophel, 1909–1911 (London 1911); Adela Goodrich-Freer, Inner Jerusalem (London, 1904). 41 Eustace Reynolds-Ball, Jerusalem: A Practical Guide to Jerusalem and its Environs with Excursions to Bethlehem, Hebron, Jericho and the Jordan, Nablus, Nazareth, Beyrout, Baalbek, Damascus etc . . . ., 3rd edn (London, 1924), 40–2. 42 Ibid., 54–5. 43 Raphael Greenberg, “Towards an Inclusive Archaeology in Jerusalem: The Case of Silwan/the City of David”, Public Archaeology, 8:1 (2009), 35–50; Wendy Pullan and Maximilian Gwiazda, “‘City of David’: Urban Design and Frontier Heritage”, Jerusalem Quarterly, 39 (2009), 29–38; Yonathan Mizrachi, “Archaeology in the Shadow of Conflict: The Mound of Ancient Jerusalem (City of David) in Shilwan”, available at Emek Shaveh, http://alt-arch.org/en/booklet_online/, last accessed 8 May 2018.

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Egypt, Mesopotamia and, for that matter, in some other man-made mounds in Palestine and Transjordan. But Mount Ophel had been considered the site of the oldest remains in all of the city’s mounts. It dates back to the late Epipaleolithic period in the Stone Age, bridging gatherers’ and hunters’ civilizations and foodproducing Neolithic civilizations in Levantine archaeology. Already before the war, Ophel had acquired the reputation of being Jerusalem’s most ancient part and the hallowed biblical City of David: the place where David took over the Jebusite citadel and which became the centre of the newly founded monotheistic religion. The identification of place with text, of the physical with the biblical City of David, was made in 1911, by père Vincent of the École biblique, in his bilingual Underground Jerusalem which summarized the cavalier and largely unplanned excavations conducted by Montague Parker and Henrik Juvelius in search of King Solomon’s treasures.44

Internationalizing Jerusalem: Publicity, the Media, and the City of David Renewed interest in David’s city after the First World War took a pronounced international turn. Initially this was an interest in the location of the biblical city as described in Deuteronomy: the centre of a strong, monotheistic kingdom and the place of origin of the first revealed religions. Contemporary commentators described the excavations on Mount Ophel as a cross-national and intra-religious venture, worthy of scientific collaboration between the member states of the League of Nations. Collaboration was regarded as the appropriate approach to a common heritage with an appeal to all humanity. The rhetoric of collaboration that is worth analysing in detail, emanated from a few sources which, together, hyped an international buzz around the excavations: the government of Palestine, the PEF, and the press, led by the Daily Telegraph—which not only covered and publicized these excavations but also financed them—syndicating news about the discoveries and building up a drama of discovery. The PEF, which had initiated the excavations, collaborated with the Telegraph, and the expeditions’ directors, particularly Robert Stewart Macalister, regularly reported on the progress (or regress) of work, offering the dailies’ reading public summaries of the history of Jerusalem through antiquity. The renewal of excavations was publicized by Palestine’s Department of Antiquities as an international project accessible to qualified explorers of all nations. From the start, the Department advertised Mount Ophel as the original site of David’s kingdom, hence as the locus of the origins of Judaism and Christianity. The Ophel Circular, penned by Garstang and authorized by the High 44 Reich, Excavating the City of David, 38–40.

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Commissioner, affiliates the forthcoming excavations to a succession of pre-war archaeological efforts not only to verify the biblical text on David’s unified kingdom and its capital, for this had tentatively been done already, but to expose its material civilization. From the beginning, the excavation was set in a genealogy of Biblical Archaeology that included such luminaries as père Vincent and archaeologist and Egyptologist Raymond Weil (the pre-war excavator), who verified its location but had “hardly proceeded” beyond touching its surface. It remained for the wellordered mandate government and regime of antiquities to expose it to the view of the world: “The hill—the site of the original stronghold of Jebus, the palace and Citadel of David, with all its traditional associations and eventful history—still preserves its buried secrets and calls for final illumination at the explorer’s hand.”45 The Circular connected cross-national collaboration to the universality of the place that made it imperative to “lay open to the world the historic City of David”. Furthermore: It is considered that a work of such importance, on a site whose memories are sacred to any nation, should not be entrusted to the resources, however ample, or the labours however devoted of a single scientific Institution or nation. It is a work in which all should share, and we are already aware that many are anxious to take their part.46

Not just that: the exceptional responsibilities involved in the task at hand necessitated following the rules of scientific excavation, planning, and regulation. The Circular, endorsed by the highest echelons of the government of Palestine of which the Department was a part, was distributed among international organizations for the exploration of Palestine and the Bible, their Palestine branches, the entire consular corps in Jerusalem, and to selected learned societies in Britain, the USA, and France. The idiom of collaboration was seized upon by the AngloAmerican press—with a twist: it occasionally attributed the cross-national venture to an association between the British archaeological establishment and world Jewry. Encouraged by the spectacular success of the discovery of the treasures of Tutankhamun, American Jews rallied their considerable powers to move the project forward. The New York World, paragon of the new, sensational yellow journalism and addressing immigrants to the USA, as well as US-born readers, was less polite than the Telegraph: Jewry the world over, with the leading participation of the Jews of America, is rallying to a task which has received a powerful impetus from the marvelous 45 “Circular”, Department of Antiquities, 21 August 1922, and Chief Secretary to the Editor, Observer, April 1923, both IAA, ATQ 65/65, or ATQ 1789/a. 46 “Circular”, and Chief Secretary to the Editor, IAA, ATQ 65/65, or ATQ 1789/a.

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results achieved by the excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamen [sic]—the discovery of the true site of the “city of David,” with all its buried memorials of the dim past, which may include the tombs of King Solomon and his wife in Jerusalem . . . beneath the debris of the Southestern [sic] part of the Holy City, on Ophel Hill . . . in the mature opinion of leading archaeologists, both Jewish and gentile, is the actual site of Mount Zion.47

More interesting than the gesture towards sensationalism (apparent in the unsubstantiated reference to the tombs of Solomon and his wives) is the association between Anglo-French and Jewish power, alleged to be led by American Jewry.48 This association, generously peppered with reference to the Jewish race, brings to mind the attribution of the Balfour Declaration, included in the Mandate for Palestine, to the role and the global power of Jewry and the reasoning of the thought behind it, given by some of its supporters.49 The mediation of the press proved crucial to the idea of collaboration and the international appeal of the excavations, not to mention their publicizing. The expedition was a joint venture of the PEF and the Telegraph, which already had a history of sponsoring near eastern archaeology. In 1873 it subsidized George Smith’s first ground-breaking journey to Nineveh, in search of the missing tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh and additional inscriptions.50 Finance, which guaranteed the Fund’s participation, was bartered for exclusive coverage for the Telegraph by Macalister and his aid, then substitute, the Reverend Duncan Garrow of the Church of Scotland. Macalister was committed to write a series of articles, providing a running commentary on the excavations, with notes on the history of ancient Jerusalem, as well as news, and started filing copy even before he set to work. In April 1923 he filed one column, in June 1923 three columns, in July one, in October one, in November three, and in December one, and a few more followed after he left Jerusalem for a post at Dublin University. Exclusive to the Telegraph, all his reports and other coverage of the Ophel venture were syndicated and published in newspapers before they were issued in the PEF Annual, thus reaching the general newspaper readership quite early and presenting a common enough pattern of early popular publication of archaeological finds that anticipated their reporting on scientific platforms.51 Syndication brought news of Ophel Hill to readers of the Graphic, Jewish newspapers like The Jewish

47 “Leading Jews of America in Search for True Site. Great Britain and France Cooperating”, New York World, 25 February 1923. 48 Note the list of the members of the American Committee to promote the excavations, New York World, 25 February 1923, and references to the “Jewish race”. 49 Tom Segev, Palestine under the British (Jerusalem, 1999), 35–54. 50 Vybarr Gregan-Reid, Discovering Gilgamesh (Manchester, 2013). 51 R. A. S. Macalister and J. Garrow Duncan, Excavations on the Hill of Ophel 1923–1925 [Palestine Exploration Fund, 4 (1926)] (London, 1926).

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Guardian,52 and to Scottish and Irish newspapers including the Irish Times, Edinburgh Dispatch, and Glasgow Herald,53 no doubt because of the Scottish angle—represented by Duncan Garrow. The Telegraph positioned itself as the mediator between Biblical Archaeology and internationalism on the one hand and the public on the other, as well as an agent of the free circulation of information. It vouched not to charge other newspapers for its exclusive coverage and claimed to guarantee “free of charge, full facilities for the general public to benefit by these articles”.54 The Telegraph’s stand for the freedom of archaeological information undoubtedly was meant to juxtapose it to The Times which held exclusive rights to cover the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb from 1922 and did charge for copy. The Times’s agreement with the Earl of Carnarvon, chief financier of the excavations, a very early example of monopolistic cheque-book journalism, was the object of international condemnation by the popular British dailies and almost the entire Egyptian press (see Chapter  8). For the Telegraph to morally outshine The Times was to gain both copy and respectability.55 Yet collaboration and the idea of international free access to research and excavations floundered even before hitting the ground. The open-door principle celebrated in the rhetoric of the Ophel Circular was compromised by the mandatory economy of archaeology. It was British and French organizations and individuals, representing the interests of the two Middle East mandatory powers that could successfully compete for the right to excavate. Only the PEF (together with the Telegraph) and Baron Rothschild, whose capital supported excavations on Ophel before the war, could scrap the prohibitive down payment of £5,000 required of all participants to secure the concession to excavate. The Jewish Palestine Exploration Fund deposited an initial sum and was allowed to participate. The effective exclusion of excavators by the financial requirements of the mandate government caused international concern and tensions that threatened to explode when the rumour spread that Ophel was sacred to Christianity and a place in religious use, and therefore subject to the religious status quo (thus, by implication, not an antiquity). The source of the rumour was in Rome and it was drummed up by the Italian press, thence by British newspapers. The government of Palestine and British archaeological organizations were alleged to have taken over and damaged the so-called Tomb of David and the adjacent Coenaculum, the supposed site of the Last Supper, located on Mount Zion, which drew many 52 “Digging into the Ancient Underworld: New Light on Old Civilizations”, The Graphic, 12 January 1924; “Palestine Exploration: Prof. Macalister’s Report”, The Jewish Guardian, 25 January 1925. 53 “The City of David: Ancient Pottery from the Daily Telegraph”, Irish Times, 3 January 1924; “Remarkable Discoveries in Palestine”, Edinburgh Dispatch, 5 January 1924; “Recent Discoveries in Palestine”, Glasgow Herald, 25 January 1924. 54 “Meeting of the Executive Committee”, 18 April 1923, PEF Minutes Book, September 1922–July 1935, PEF Archives, PEF/EC/8, 31. 55 “Meeting of the Executive Committee”, 23 May 1923, and meetings on 11 June 1923 and 17 October 1923, all PEF, PEF/EC/8, 35, 40–1, 71, respectively.

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pilgrims. The claim that it was violated was based on confusion between Ophel, “the ancient Zion”, and the Tomb, and was staunchly denied by the mandate authorities. The Department of Antiquities stressed that “the real Zion” was on Mount Ophel.56 The Coenaculum scandal demonstrates the religious volatility of Mount Ophel and highlights the controversy about the location of David’s city, as well as about the age of Jerusalem and the city’s origins. Soon enough “the original Jebusite city” was advertised as the real City of David. It was familiarly dubbed “Davidsburgh”, an epithet invented by Sir George Adam Smith, eminent theologian, former Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland, future Chaplain in Ordinary of three kings, biblical geographer of the Holy Land, and an authority on the sacred topography of Jerusalem and Palestine.57 The intensity of the debate about the City of David proved to be out of proportion to the initial yield of material evidence found on Mount Ophel. The poor results of the excavations had to do with broader problems, not least the gap between the government of Palestine’s authority to monitor and control archaeological discovery and its limited resources. Poor resources were also the plague of the PEF and the BSAJ. The two expeditions to Ophel, conducted in 1923–4 and 1927–8, by Macalister and Garrow, and Crowfoot and Gerald Fitzgerald, respectively, were chronically short of funds and skimped. The second expedition was rescued by archaeological philanthropists such as Sir Charles Marston, whose penchant for proving the truth of the Bible is discussed in detail in Chapter 4.58 Another problem was the disparity between an apparent commitment to scientific archaeology and the traditionalist methods and practices that some of the excavators employed. Some of the main characters in the Ophel drama were beholden to the biblical framework of thought about Jerusalem’s past and Palestine’s. They set to corroborate assumptions about the oldness of the City of David and its antiquity value as the “oldest site in Jerusalem”. Raymond Weil, who had directed the expedition financed by Rothschild before the war and acquired a concession to continue excavating, identified some structures (on the southwestern precipice overlooking the valley of Kidron) as the stairs descending from the City of David in the Book of Nehemiah (3:15).59 Macalister identified the upper part of a small tower attached to the wall—“a buttressing tower”, as the repair of Jerusalem’s fortifications described in Kings 1 (11:27), an identification that would be refuted by eminent archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon.60 Macalister, who headed the PEF expedition for a short and frustrated season and documented it excessively before abruptly abandoning the excavations and Palestinian 56 Secretary to the Editor, PEF, PEF/EC/8. 57 The Times, 21 June 1923; “The Tomb of David, New Discoveries at Jerusalem”, The Times, 27 July 1926. 58 Crowfoot and Fitzgerald, Excavations in the Tyropoeon Valley, vi. 59 Raymond Weil, La Cité de David. . . Campagne de 1923–1924 (Paris, 1947). 60 Reich, Excavating the City of David, 52.

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archaeology for a professorship in Celtic Archaeology at University College, Dublin, looms large in early Ophel archaeology and Palestine’s earlier twentieth-century archaeology. He played a prominent role at the PEF and directed Palestine’s first large-scale dig at Gezer (Jazar, 1902–9). During his time in Jerusalem he served both as an expert and a popular publicist of archaeology. His methods on Mount Ophel were partly ineffective, neglecting to consider the provenance of the pottery and disregarding levels in his plans, thus making it difficult to assess the connections between parts of structures.61 In the two versions of his story of the discovery Macalister merges together an expert report on the material finds and a discovery drama that states his affiliation to the British tradition of exploration in Palestine and to the succession of explorers of Ophel yet, at the same time, distinguishes him from his predecessors, both in narrative and in deed. His self-portraiture in the report is far removed from Warren’s heroic autobiography underground: Macalister is a victim of the circumstances and economies of digging and of the present state of Jerusalem and the mount. The life and economy of the city interfere in his quest for the preDavidic and Davidic city, not least because he mines a piece of land that is intensively cultivated and inhabited by the living. In righteous indignation he casts himself as the aggrieved sufferer at the hands of the villagers and landowners of Silwan, whose property (or leased land) he excavated. The report to the PEF on the finds is preceded by his Jeremiad, titled “Narrative”, which had appeared in an earlier version in the Telegraph. To start with the hill is Singularly barren in external evidences of occupation. It differs in this respect from the vast majority of the Palestinian Tells, which bear potsherds and other relics scattered in profusion over their surfaces. The reason for the peculiarity displayed by the Jerusalem site is simply the fact that it has been intensely cultivated by its owners, the people of the village of Silwan, as a series of vegetable gardens. Streams of Jerusalem sewage have been poured over it; manure has been spread on its surface; the face of the ground is a recent accumulation of earth, completely covering the ancient debris. It was, therefore impossible to find external signs rendering any one field more attractive archaeologically than any other.62

Elsewhere Macalister is even more disparaging about that surface: “The most careful search of the surface failed to reveal a single ancient potsherd—bits of old sardine tins, horseshoes nails, scraps of cheap glass vessels made in Germany . . . the

61 “Palestine Exploration Fund Annual, IV, 1923–25, Excavations on the Hill of Ophel, Jerusalem, by Professor  R.  A.  S.  Macalister and the Reverend  J.  Duncan Garrow”, Review, Times Literary Supplement, 7 April 1927. 62 Ibid., 1.

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first ‘Antika’ to come to light was a ‘matalik’—a coin, worth about a halfpenny, bearing the sign-manual of the late-lamented Sultan Abd-el Hamid.”63 The implication being that late Ottoman artefacts are not antiquities. The difficulty of finding “signs” of the past is directly connected to the living present. The familiar juxtaposition of the glorious past and the present which, as we have seen, is a prominent feature in both pre- and early mandate writings on Jerusalem, is aggressively overstated here. Jerusalem’s antiquity is, literally, covered by the backward present. What hides from Macalister the pre-Davidic and Davidic cities and Solomon’s Jerusalem is Palestinian Arab life, most particularly the local tillage and usage of the land itself and its very matter—soil. Its intensive (and probably environment-friendly) cultivation and irrigation is strongly resented by him, even condemned. And the villagers of Silwan are referred to as “notoriously the scum of Palestine”, cheats, idlers, and swindlers, out to extort money from the archaeologists.64 In point of fact, the economy of the village which in 1922 numbered some 1,699 Muslims, 153 Jews, and 49 Christians (and included lands belonging to several monasteries) depended on its market gardens. It was one of a number of such villages which grew vegetables and traded them within the walls of the city, and with the new neighbourhoods outside them.65 The “living” present of the site and its uses as a source of livelihood were acknowledged and at times even respected by some of Macalister’s successors, notably by Crowfoot who could understand and occasionally sympathize with the needs of the cultivators and make ethnographic observations on their work. He noticed how the village women traded in the markets and the men hired themselves to the expedition as labourers.66 Clearly, and as I will show in some detail, there’s more to Macalister’s tirade than blunt orientalism and ignorance about his contemporary Jerusalem. He is a benighted orientalist, but the crux of his attitude lies in the clash between differing forms and meanings of access to land, different interpretations of its ownership, and different senses of the past and antiquity. Macalister could not grasp the fact that for the users and owners of the plots of land comprising the surface of the City of David, their debris and dumps, held a complex set of values and uses: they had an economic and political use value which, as we shall see, continuously contrasted with the agenda of archaeologists and administrators. For Macalister and his successors during the mandate years, the finds on Mount Ophel had little artistic or aesthetic value. They could hardly be compared

63 “The City of David II—First Results”, filed to the Telegraph on 13 October 1923, Daily Telegraph, 2 November 1923. 64 Ibid. 65 A. J. Baron, Palestine Report and General Abstracts of the Census of 1922, Government of Palestine, Table VII; Eric Miles, Census of Palestine 1931: Population of Villages, Towns and Administrative Areas [Government of Palestine] (Jerusalem, 1932), 43. 66 Crowfoot and Fitzgerald, Excavations in the Tyropoeon Valley, 2.

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with the spectacular riches of Egypt and Mesopotamia. And they did not fare well in the competition with other sites in Palestine and Transjordan, such as Megiddo, or Samaria-Sebaste, which Crowfoot excavated between 1931 and 1935 and that produced the stunning Samaria ivories and other finds. The value of the Mount was antiquity value, its old age compared to that of other places in Jerusalem, and its biblical associations. Oldness was attributed to the structures exposed by Macalister’s successors as well. A tower and a part of a wall of the City of David, reported the Department of Antiquities in April 1925, “are now the oldest visible pieces of masonry in Jerusalem and have been declared a ‘national monument of historic interest’”.67 Oldness associated the City of David with continuity of settlement on the hill, a continuity that was seen as an index to the antiquity of Jerusalem itself. Macalister and Duncan Garrow exposed an array of objects covering the Middle Bronze Age B, the Iron Age, the old and late Roman era, the Byzantine occupation of Jerusalem, and its early Muslim and Mamluk occupations. In Macalister’s own terms, the potsherds and utensils found covered the “Jebusite and pre-Jebusite period”, the Hebrew, Persian, Herodian, Byzantine, and Arab eras. The inventory of artefacts that the expedition exhumed included potsherds, cylinders, cult utensils and weighs, tiles, and a significant ostracon. The “structures” found included a wall with two towers, mistakenly thought to be “A Solominic Tower” and a “Jebustie Ramp”. Their dating proved to be mistaken and considerably later, as was that of a substantial number of other artefacts.68 Crowfoot’s team found a Byzantine layer and about twenty metres from it a structure thought to have been Maccabean but suspected of being considerably older.69 In addition to the closeness of the remnants of the hallowed past to the quotidian life of peasants and traders, Ophel seemed exceptional in the Near East in terms of the development of forms of human settlement and of the cycle of growth and destruction. Its morphology was unique. The testimony to ancient cities in the area were mounds or “Tells” which, according to Crowfoot, “have been described again and again and the way in which they have grown, rising higher and higher as each generation builds up upon the debris from the building of its predecessor. In Jerusalem there is no tell, and wholly different conditions have determined the stratification of archaeological material.”70 Whereas Mesopotamian and Palestinian Tells had grown from the bottom up and their newer layers were erected on top of older ones, in Jerusalem stone was used as building material and recycled over and over again. Excavators on Ophel noted that it was hardly stratified and that buildings constructed centuries apart, were found on it next to, rather than on top of, each other, unless a violent occurrence 67 Garstang to Chief Secretary, 17 April 1925, Jerusalem Ophel Land (4266/ATQ 1789), IAA, ATQ 22/22. 68 Reich, Excavating the City of David, note 58. 69 Crowfoot and Fitzgerald, Excavations in the Tyropoeon Valley, 8–20. 70 Ibid., 7.

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like war or deliberate destruction interrupted the series of occupations. Crowfoot compared this layout to something closer to home: the Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman remains in old English towns: In old English towns, for example, the Roman stratum lies buried some 10 feet under the ground, but its burial was due to circumstances of the Anglo-Saxon conquest, and since the recovery after that conquest the changes in level have been insignificant: we can walk into Norman churches on the level of our present streets, and the buildings which line our pavements may belong to any intervening centuries or only to the last one. In Jerusalem two thousand years ago, as in Europe to-day, all traces of an earlier series of building might be, and often was, completely obliterated, and in times of continued prosperity there was generally no rise whatever in ground from one generation to another.71

The analogy between Jerusalem and Anglo-Saxon and Norman Britain echoes the medievalization of the Old City by the urban planners and their tendency to measure it, as well as the modern city, by European standards.

Cauliflowers Sprout on the City of David: The Value of Antiquity But the antiquity of the hill, and the age value the archaeologists endowed it with, were not compatible with its uses by multiple owners and occupants. The diversity of forms of landholding, as well as the variety of occupants’ claims and ties to the land, may be glimpsed from nearly a decade of negotiation between them and officials in the departments and organizations that managed antiquities in Palestine: the Antiquities Department, the Department of Lands, the Department of Surveys, the District Commissioners of Jerusalem, and their assistants (who usually were the first address to direct grievances and complaints to), not to mention the excavators and their institutions such as the PEF and the BSAJ. It is in the administrative files of the government of Palestine that the holders and tillers of the land on Mount Ophel, which was declared a “national monument” and taken over by the government, assume names and identities that fly in the face of their namelessness in Macalister’s autobiographical narrative. Their interests are far more complex than the avarice he notices. So is the relationship between land, antiquity, property, and imperial governing. The mandate administrators became increasingly aware of this complexity and of the limits of their own power to expropriate land declared by law a territory of antiquity or of historical value, even before the excavations started.

71 Ibid., 8.

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The rectangular stretch of land that made up the City of David included plots that the concessions divided between the excavators. The first two British plots, known as Plots 5 and 7, alone were a maze of private lots, registered before the British occupation of Jerusalem. A list of owners compiled on the initiative of the Antiquities Department in 1922 and forwarded to the government’s legal secretary includes twenty-one such owners.72 Their plots, which were “registered as private property prior to the British occupation”, were about to be declared “historical site” and this necessitated negotiation of their value and entitled the Department “to take or lease compulsorily any site for excavation . . . in any case in which negotiations for the lease on possible terms have broken down”.73 Owners and users of the plots ceaselessly petitioned the Department of Antiquities. They claimed overdue compensation for usage when this was in arrears, bargained about the total sum of leases, reclaimed property that they regarded as their own (such as stones left on the ground by the excavators) and complained about dumps of soil that had been cleared from the excavation site and not returned to their place. Unreturned dumps, which excavators would have valued as repositories of antique objects (or carelessly have thrown away), were to peasants unused and damaged land and a source of livelihood.74 The petitions and legal bickering bring to the story of the discovery another angle that so far has not been considered, and agents who have been excluded from narratives of mandate archaeology: their view-point, from below, represents groups and institutions—such as the Palestine Education Department of the Muslim Higher Council—but also individuals, whose voices in the discourse about antiquity have so far been lost. Petitioning, as recent research on mandatory Palestine and the mandate system as such has shown, was a well-established practice utilized by the governed both in the mandated territories themselves and on the international platform of the PMC in Geneva, which received and handled them. Palestine issued the largest number of petitions submitted to the League of Nations, penned by Arab Palestinians and Jews.75 In contradistinction to the deluge of petitions to Geneva, which did not seek justice and were essentially political, petitions submitted to the Palestine government did aim to get justice done. And they reflect Ottoman procedures of petitioning and the hierarchies between ruler and the ruled: petitions, in all cultures, are directed “upward”, usually by those who are governed, weaker and marginal, to those who hold power.76 Here their form itself and the procedures of handling them represent a hierarchy that conserved earlier customs 72 Secretariat, Government House to Director of Antiquities, 26 June 1922, IAA, ATQ_105/105. 73 Garstang to Legal Secretary, 9 June 1922, and Secretariat to Director of Antiquities [Garstang], 26 June 1922 and attached list, both IAA, ATQ_1789 105/105. 74 It is doubtful whether the soil dumps from Ophel were properly sifted at the time. 75 Pedersen, The Guardians, 86–95. 76 See Yuval Ben-Bassat, “In Search of Justice: Petitions Sent from Palestine to Istanbul from the 1870s Onwards”, Turcica, 41 (2009), 89–114 and Petitioning the Sultan: Justice and Protest in Late Ottoman Palestine (London, 2019).

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in the modernized late Ottoman Empire. To make matters even more complicated, the privately held plots of land declared “historical” included one stretch of land, known as Asludha or Solada, occupied by the Education Department of the Supreme Muslim Council (SMC). The Council, established by the British in 1921, was endowed with supreme authority over all Muslim endowments and the Sharia courts.77 Already in the early 1920s the SMC was alert to the significance of a site declared an “antiquity” and located on Waqf land. This was, noted the Ma’mur of Waqfs in Jerusalem, “illegal”. As he pointed out to the District Governor: “Your Excellency knows the illegality of the expropriation of Waqf Lands, without having any connection in a legal matter. I beg that an amendment of this registration be made, requesting the Department of Antiquities not to interfere in the question of this land.”78 Three years on, the Education Department was still petitioning the Department of Antiquities for adequate compensation and repeatedly asking that its representative be sent to them to discuss the sum.79 As the slowly responding Department noted to a reluctant Department of Lands, “The matter has been hanging for a long period and has now become pressing”, and “the Waqf are making repeated requests for a settlement”.80 It probably required some patience on the part of the petitioners to read the reply of P.  L.  O.  Guy, Acting Director of Antiquities, some six weeks later and after negotiations with Waqf representatives about the rent and compensation, that “The matter cannot be yet dealt with”.81 Clearly, for the petitioners, the city of David was a source of livelihood. They owned the land, letting it for rent as vegetable gardens, or used it themselves for this purpose. Rather removed from Macalister’s unnamed village bullies, some of them were reputable owners and some belonged to prominent families. Jawdat Sa’id al Dajani, together with two other unpaid lessors of Plot 5, ‘Abdallah ‘Abdal-Jawad and Muhammad Ghuzlan Jawad of Silwan, petitioned to receive £E40 (Egyptian pounds) owed by the Antiquities Department for the remaining lease, requesting the government to settle the bill.82 Rent for about a year was due to them, as well as to owners of the other plot and the Waqf.83 We meet al-Dajani 77 The two forms of spelling appear in the records. On the council, see Uri M. Kupferschmidt, The Supreme Muslim Council: Islam Under the British Mandate in Palestine (Leiden, 1989); Nicholas Roberts, Islam Under the Palestine Mandate Colonialism and the Supreme Muslim Council (London, 2017). 78 Ma’mur of Waqfs, Jerusalem, to District Commissioner Jerusalem, 28 August 1923, IAA, ATQ_ 39/40. 79 Department of National Education to Department of Antiquities, 12 May 1926, and Department of Antiquities to Department of Lands, 19 May 1926, both IAA, ATQ_39/40. 80 IAA, ATQ_39/40. 81 P. L. O Guy, “Memorandum on Plot of Waqf Ground on East Slope of Ophel”, 29 August 1924, IAA ATQ_1/1. 82 Possibly a member of the Dajani family, since early Ottoman times custodians of the Tower of David and known as the Daoudi, members of Jerusalem’s Chamber of Commerce. Petition to the District Commissioner, Jerusalem, 12 May 1926, IAA, ATQ_39/40. 83 To Director of Lands, 19 May 1926, IAA, ATQ_39/40.

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again, three and a half years and some metres of correspondence later, pleading his case: he let to the Department a plot of land; it was expropriated and only part of its value was paid to him. His petitions were acknowledged but “up till today the amount is still unpaid”.84 Again the Deputy District Commissioner of the Jerusalem Division forwarded his letter to the Department of Lands which replied that since “this concerns lease not purchase”, the matter should be referred to the Department of Antiquities which, having received the letter, shuffled it to the PEF.85 After months of circumlocution, the Deputy Commissioner had had it and cited the Department’s own letter to the claimants dated February 1924, that guaranteed a monthly rate of the compulsory rent at £E10, its debt making altogether £E40 which the Department of Antiquities conceded in May 1930 that it should pay.86 On 30 September 1930, not a minute too soon, authority to pay al- Dajani his £E40 was granted.87 Meanwhile, Hamad [sic] Khalil Hussain, owner of Plot 9, excavated by Crowfoot, made, with some unlucky co-owners, an appeal to the justice and kindness of the Deputy District Commissioner on 21 January 1928, to receive the balance of 41 Palestine pounds and have his land levelled after excavations, and be returned to him for cultivation. His petition was shuffled, a year and five days later, by the Director of Antiquities, Richmond, to the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem.88 These exchanges over access to Mount Ophel and its uses represent, at one and the same time, different perceptions of the City of David and its value to archaeologists, administrators, and landowners and holders, and negotiations over antiquities on the ground, sometimes in the latter’s most literal meaning. The exchanges also demonstrate the workings of a colonial administration, with its excessively detailed paperwork that showcases the amount of red-tape involved in the new antiquities’ regime. Obviously, the negotiating parties were unequal. The administration of antiquities and, more generally, the government of Palestine, were equipped with the authority to expropriate sites, property, and land declared “antiquity” or designated “a historical monument”. Failing to achieve a private agreement with their holders, it could enforce compulsory leasing and proceed to arbitrated compensated confiscation (Figure 3.5). However, the users or owners of land did have some autonomy when it came to negotiating compensation for land and income lost. The margins left for negotiation expose the weaknesses of

84 “A Petition by Jawdaet [sic] Said Al Dajani to the Deputy District Commissioner”, 18 December 1929, IAA, ATQ_101/100. 85 Deputy District Commissioner to Department of Lands, 21 December 1929; Deputy District Commissioner to Director of Antiquities, 27 December 1929; E.  T.  Richmond to Deputy District Commissioner, December 31, 1929, all IAA, ATQ_101/100. 86 Richmond to Chief Secretary, 22 July 1930, IAA, ATQ_101/100. 87 Deputy to Department of Antiquities, 4 January 1930 and 17 May 1930, both IAA, ATQ_101/100. 88 “Copy of the Petition made on 21 January 1928 to the Deputy District Commissioner, Jerusalem, by Hamad Khaleel Hussain of the Village of Silwan”, IAA, ATQ_32/32.

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Figure 3.5 Parcel-owners and their lots on Mount Ophel, a plan, showing forms of ownership of excavated land (courtesy of IAA, mandate archive)

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mandated archaeology and the new administrative machinery. On the one hand, there were legal terms sanctioned by international consent and a legal rhetoric resonating with the new international language that normalized and attempted to unify the discovery, preservation, and control of historical heritages in the new colonial contexts. On the other hand, mandate law was tied down by Ottoman law which seems to have protected owners to an extent, by custom and the status quo that vouchsafed for religious property in use and complicated Waqf holdings.89 More importantly, the long and intricate itineraries of owners’ and users’ petitions posited use value through the cultivation of land alongside its archaeological usage. The former was measured by the worth of crops: the vegetables grown in the market gardens in Silwan. In the predominantly agricultural and rural Palestinian society of the early mandate, land, far from being the “empty” excavatable “space” of Macalister’s historic imagination, or the imagination of town planners, was sparse and hard to cultivate due to overuse and lack of mechanization. Moreover, land was acquiring a prime political role and the land issue was growing to become one of the two central topics of vehement contention between Arab Palestinians and Zionists, the other being Jewish immigration.90 Landowning, and buying and selling land to Jews, caused Palestinian suspicion and anxieties about the entire mandate project. The selling by Palestinian landowners and organized Jewish purchase of lands were seen as a threat to Palestine’s non-Jewish population. True, the private petitions (distinct from those of the Education Department), do not speak in an explicit national language: they address the antiquities administration and the district authorities, platforms that are not felt by them, as far as the petitions can tell, to be overtly political and international. But we can hardly ignore the intra-religious and cross-national tensions in Jerusalem during the 1920s in which the petitions were circulated and treated, certainly not the tensions that erupted in 1928 around the Wailing Wall. The petitions reveal the detailed negotiation over matter that those who dictated, wrote, or signed them, valued differently from the diggers: crops, soil dumps, refuse, and stones, had usufruct value traded for the antiquities’ value. Stones that the Antiquities Department defined as having historical and display value are regarded by the previous owners of the land as usable stones and as their property. As government land surveyor Richard Hughes noted on 11 May 1927 in a valuation of Ophel Plot 10, submitted to the Director of Public Works, the plot needed measuring and paying for. It was

89 Kupferschmidt, The Supreme Muslim Council, 117–19. 90 Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 87–117; see also Kenneth Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1984).

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of exceptional fertility, planted with a great variety of vegetables. With 209 beds of small vegetables which I estimate at the following evaluation: 209 beds of small vegetables & seedings PT. 6 per bed = L.E.  52.2 [Egyptian Pounds in use until 1927] Area planted with cauliflowers at PT. 6 per sq. m. = L.E. 101.28 Rent due to owner of the land for a period of 10 months = 50.00 -------203.5391

The cauliflowers sprouting on the surface of the City of David, their evaluation and the extensive negotiations over them, represent how fraught the discovery of Jerusalem’s “oldest stone buildings” was. Already during the mandate’s first years, the narrow strip of land just outside the city’s walls was the subject of permanent contention and controversy—and it would continue to be. The modest work on the ground, and underneath it, received attention in Britain and internationally that was engendered by religious sentiment and kept and drummed up by the continental and Anglo-American press. Interest in David’s city also demonstrates the relationship between biblical texts and their role in shaping archaeology and their mediation by the media that was so instrumental in bringing antiquity to British audiences. Last, but by no means least, the little history of Ophel reveals the dynamics of the relationships at different, albeit related, levels of the regime of antiquities that let on to broader issues: the relationship between the international regime of antiquities and its actual operation by its administration; the role of archaeological societies, organizations, and archaeologists in the discovery project; the relation between imperial urban planning, zoning, and preservation; and, finally, the role of local agents who usually are muted in discussions of mandatory archaeology. The junctures of the apparently local and broader issues teach us about the mandate on the ground, as well as about the existence of cities of David, in the plural, variously searched for, used, and interpreted.

91 Richard Hughes, Surveyor, to Director of Public Works, 11 May 1927, IAA, ATQ_48/49.

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Lachish Excavation, Land, and Violence—Tell ed-Duweir, c.1932–1945

A Funeral in Jerusalem James Leslie Starkey was buried at the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion in Jerusalem on 12 January 1938. His burial procession and service, “simple and impressive”,1 and his internment are captured in a series of twenty photographs taken on the occasion by Zvi Oron-Orushkes, from 1929 official provider of photographic services to the mandate government and the military in Palestine and a syndicated photojournalist.2 The black and white sequence of shots unfolds the progress of the procession, as it comes out of St George’s College (near Nablus Road) on its way to the cemetery, splitting the file of mourners into sections that represent different social, national, and religious groups in mandate Palestine. Clearly Orushkes was aware of the socio-religious mix of the attendants and attuned to imperial ritual and ceremony. The procession is led by a formally attired kavas and headed by the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, the Right Reverend George Francis Graham Brown, and church functionaries. They are followed by the coffin draped in the Union Jack, covered in wreathes and carried by six constables in the Palestine Police (Figure 4.1). Marching after them are ghaffirs (special local, Jewish and Arab, policemen) in their distinctive fur headgear, carrying additional official wreaths (Figure 4.2) and followed, in that order, by the High Commissioner, Sir Arthur Wauchope, almost the entire government of Palestine, District Commissioners, police officials and some military, palm bearers, and a varied crowd of representatives of virtually all the archaeological organizations and institutions in Palestine and members of archaeological expeditions excavating in the country at the time (Figure 4.3). An incomplete list of the mourners covers two solid columns in the Palestine Post.

1 Olga Tufnell to her mother, 12 January 1938, PEF, PEF-DA-TUF. 2 In the Service of the High Commissioner Zvi Oron-Orushkes, Photographer (Tel Aviv, 2013). His work was published in the Daily Mail, Illustrated London News, and in the Dutch, French, and American press. Orushkes aspired to a “photographic objectivity”, refraining from a commitment to ideologies, and did not conform to stereotypes in contemporary institutional Zionist photography (pp. 12–17). Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and the Rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950. Billie Melman, Oxford University Press (2020). © Billie Melman. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198824558.001.0001

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Figure 4.1 Zvi Orushkes, James Leslie Starkey’s funeral procession, 1 Bishop of Jerusalem and coffin carriers (January 1938), 1 (Orushkes Collection, courtesy of the CZI)

Figure 4.2 Zvi Orushkes, funeral procession, 2, wreathes (Orushkes Collection, courtesy of the CZI)

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Figure 4.3 Zvi Orushkes, funeral procession, 3, officials and palm carriers (Orushkes Collection, courtesy of the CZI)

Starkey’s funeral took place two days after his intensely reported murder, by unidentified gang members, near Bayt Jibrin, two or three kilometres from the Hebron–Jerusalem road, en route from the archaeological excavations at Tell ed-Duweir, which he had directed since 1932, to the grand opening of the Palestine Archaeological Museum. His violent death rendered the funeral a special aura and effect as an imperial and political event. The fact that, notwithstanding the reported trial and hanging of two of the alleged murderers, the gang was not publicly identified, intensified public interest in the murder that was never brought to a closure. The death of the archaeologist was covered in detail in the British press and in the English, Hebrew, and Arabic press in Palestine and Egypt, not to mention the spate of obituaries in the archaeological press. The conflicting reports on the murder which occurred at the height of the Arab Palestinian anticolonial rebellion of 1936–9, the funeral and Starkey’s various commemorations, his career and, particularly, his association with the excavations at Tell ed-Duweir (identified as the biblical Lachish), all mesh together and amplify some strands that characterize British and a worldwide fascination with the material scriptural past (discussed in Chapters 2 and 3), and its relationship to empire, modernity, and nationalist politics. One strand, already discussed in those chapters, is the pivotal role of archaeology as mediator between a material past and modernity. Related to it are the multiple roles of the archaeologist in interwar historical culture as an

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authoritative interpreter of ancient history, and a variety of roles attached to his or her professional work. These included, in addition to the distribution of knowledge about the past and the circulation and display of antiquities in museums, popular exhibitions, and via the press, coordination between the net of organizations and bodies dealing with the gathering and classification of knowledge about the biblical past and ancient civilizations in Palestine. The dominance of the biblical framework has also been discussed in detail; in the present chapter, it will become apparent how archaeological work drew on collaborations with disciplines and fields of knowledge that evolved outside this framework and with branches of science devoted to measuring, quantifying, and grading human racial evolution, particularly physical anthropology, anthropometrics, and Eugenics. Collaboration was not only Western and scientific; it also included a practical, on the ground cooperation with a local labour force and local expert knowledge, in such fields as epigraphy, on the excavation site and in interpreting the finds. A second strand is the interplay and occasional tension between illustrative Biblical Archaeology seeking to corroborate the Bible and the growth of a repertoire of professional methods and practices in archaeological fieldwork and writing. Added to these are the complex relationships, quite apparent during the digging at Tell ed-Duweir, between the search for a material past and modernity, detectable not only in representations of the place in a variety of media—both literal and visual—but also in applying modern technologies to excavating. The fourth and last, but not least, strand is an acute tension between imperial, local, and national trajectories, sometimes related to conflicting uses of the land and the land question, that fatally burst during the excavations and lingered after their termination and well into the Second World War. Starkey’s life, work on Tell ed-Duweir, and death are therefore inseparable from the discovery, excavation, representations, and uses, both in the colonial periphery and at the imperial centre, of the objects exhumed from the site’s layers. In the following I shall first map the site of the excavation, then discuss the discourse relating to its identification as Lachish and as the juncture of tensions between textual, visual, and material authority that played a significant role in the surge of interest in it. I shall then discuss the interplay of textual biblical authority and newer disciplines, and the nets of relationships and transfer of knowledge related to it. The chapter’s final section considers the layers of hierarchical collaborations, and tensions, between excavation and modernization in daily life on the Tell.

Lachish: Identifications, Texts, and Sherds In the early 1930s, Tell ed-Duweir loomed large amongst the many ancient manmade mounds that were discovered and excavated throughout Palestine and the Mashriq. It dominated its surroundings in the Shephelah (lowlands), between

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Mount Hebron and the coastal road and this prominence, together with the Tell’s size impressed observers, travellers and would-be diggers. Stretching along 18 acres (some 73,000 square metres) at its upper scarp, its base covering 37 acres, it was Palestine’s largest mound, equalled only by Tell Jazar (Gezer), larger than Megiddo (at 13 acres), and Jerusalem’s Mount Ophel (11.5 acres). “Upon looking at the site,” wrote Starkey in 1932, “I was greatly impressed by both its size and strong position and in particular considerable remains of long stone structures”— a tower, masses of stone, and battlements.3 Tell ed-Duweir’s physical eminence continued to impress even those who travelled to and from it regularly and worked on it. Barely visible when approached by the motor road from Gaza to Jerusalem or by the older way following the line of the Roman road, “its full height . . . is only exposed to view from the escarpment of the surrounding plain: founded on a natural promontory, it rises from the middle of a green well-tilled basin, and stands nearly forty metres above the valley, as a result of man’s occupation through the centuries”, controlling the whole breadth of the countryside on the east towards Hebron and to the west right up to the seashore.4 The Tell’s position, isolated from the adjoining hill and with three of its sides steeply scarped, made it “almost an island site”.5 H. H. MacWilliams recounts his first impressions in an account of travel in 1933 by car (nicknamed “the Diabolical”) from the Tell to London (via the Lebanon, Asia Minor, and the Balkans): “The first sight I had of the Tell was a scarred flank standing out of a stony valley, glowing a hot red in the sunset. The excavated walls [were] throwing long indigo shadows across the steep slope.”6 Like Olga Tufnell, a member of Starkey’s expedition and compiler of the monumental four-volume series Lachish (1942–53), he was struck by the place’s sheer size and the implied contrast between its rural present and its urban past. He observed “a huge mound indicating a buried city. For some reason the Tell had hitherto been practically neglected by archaeologists”, previously a “large flat-topped hill, the steep sides of which were partly tilled by the Arabs . . . and partly scoured by sudden rains”, its plateau was covered in a riot of flowers and displayed traces of walls and ramparts, “showing that the city which once stood on the Tell was strongly fortified against attack on all sides”.7 Its choice as an excavation site was “a vast undertaking”.8 3 Starkey to père Vincent, 18 August 1932, Lachish Identification, BMA, MED, Middle East Study Room (MESR). 4 Olga Tufnell, C. H. Inge, and Lankester Harding, Lachish III: The Iron Age by Olga Tufnell with Contributions by Margaret Murray and David Diringer (London, 1935), Text Volume, 34. 5 “Tell ed-Duweir”, Department of Antiquities in Palestine Quarterly, 3:4, Wellcome Institute Archives (WIA), WA/MSW/AR/Lac/D-1-D.12. 6 H. H. McWilliams, The Diabolical: An Account of the Adventures of Five People Who Set Out in a Converted Ford Lorry to Make a Journey from Palestine to England Across Asia Minor and the Balkans (London, 1934), 15. 7 Ibid., 14. 8 Gerald Lankester Harding, unpublished biography. IOA, GLH Archive, un-catalogued. It was suggested that the biography was dictated to Islamic art expert John Carswell: author’s correspondence

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The Tell’s exceptional weight derived from its identification with the biblical fortress city Lachish. Its layered material history may be traced back to the Neolithic period and Lachish became a fairly large settlement by the Early Bronze Age, growing into a major city in southern Canaan by Middle Bronze 2 (to be destroyed, abandoned, then resettled during the Late Bronze Age). But to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British Bible readers and to frequenters of the British Museum, Lachish was known for and associated with, its role in the pre-exilic Judean monarchy and its sieges and destruction by Assyria and Babylon.9 Lachish had neither a specific topographical identity nor a material presence but, from about the middle of the nineteenth century, it was associated with popular biblical images of a monotheistic ancient Israel, and its destruction and exiles, at the hand of the late Assyrian empire. By the time excavations at Tell ed-Duweir began in 1932, popular and scholarly knowledge about the fortress city drew chiefly on the authority of the Bible and was corroborated by Assyrian textual and material sources. Mentions of the city, which during the late Judean monarchy had been second in importance only to Jerusalem, were to be found in Joshua (10, 12, 15), 2 Kings (14, 18, 19), 2 Chronicles (11, 25, 32), Nehemiah (11), Jeremiah (34), and Micah (1). Familiarity with the name and history of Lachish was augmented by the discovery by Austen Henry Layard, between 1845 and 1849, of the reliefs in Sennacherib’s south-west palace at Nineveh (Kouyunjik). The reliefs, depicting in phenomenally realistic detail Lachish’s siege and destruction by Sennacherib in 701 bc, were exhibited at the British Museum and immediately publicized in the popular press, most notably by such publications as the Illustrated London News (ILN). The reliefs played a considerable role in the materializing of ancient Assyria and its role in mid-Victorian popular imagination. That the reliefs were key in grafting Lachish on the imagination of British archaeologists is apparent in Starkey’s own search for the material Lachish. His study of the reliefs determined his selection of Tell ed- Duweir as the site of excavation. The reliefs, previously “unglazed in their remote corner of the British Museum” with “the dust and grime of many centuries” removed from them, could now be appreciated for their “grand conception and fidelity of detail”. Starkey explicitly appreciated their “evidential value” and, in contrast to the wisdom of Assyriologists such as epigraphist Sidney Smith who regarded them as set, conventional representations of Assyrian warfare,

with Dr Michael Macdonald, 30 October 2016. I am grateful to Dr. Rachel Sparks for allowing me to make use of the archive. 9 David Ussishkin, Biblical Lachish: A Tale of Construction, Destruction, Excavation and Restoration (Tel Aviv, 2013).

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felt confident that they can be absolutely relied upon to tell their own story, and that the battle scene is not of the same order as those imaginary battle scenes which we used to get in the newspapers some years ago. Our composition is certainly from the hands of an astute observer, attached to Sennacherib’s G.H.Q. at Lachish.10

The reference to the reliefs as realistic descriptions of the siege and as faithful war reportage (from the Assyrian king’s general headquarters) is worth noting. Starkey makes an allusion to “imaginary battle scenes”11 in press reports during the First World War which were partial and suffused with propaganda. The squeezes made of the casts and Layard’s own illustrations of them served Starkey not merely as a source of information, but as archaeological, ethnographic and, most significantly, topographic evidence, a map as it were, by which archaeologists identified the layout and finds on the spot. Archaeology fulfilled an illustrative purpose, though not necessarily to corroborate the biblical text, but external evidence in the Assyrian records on reliefs. Their role, as well as the relationship between biblical and material proofs becomes even clearer in an exchange of views and information between Starkey and père Vincent,12 one of the doyens of Palestine Biblical Archaeology. Starkey presents his “independent identification” of the terrain of the Tell as Lachish that is “based upon the carefully detailed relief in the British Museum, as I do not think it has yet been used in this way”. Vincent remained unconvinced.13 The drive to identify a place with a biblical name and test textual authority with the aid of physical remains was characteristic and persisted in the archaeology of Palestine. As shown in Chapter 2, the unresolved tension between the modernization of methods and practices in archaeology and its illustrative function characterized Biblical Archaeology after Flinders Petrie and may be amply demonstrated in his own notions of place, chronologies, and understanding of historical sequence. Petrie’s failure regarding Lachish is all the more telling precisely because it occurred during the first modern Palestinian excavation that inaugurated stratification and seriation as means to bolster archaeology’s scientificity. The surge of interest after the First World War in Lachish involved a repudiation of Petrie’s misidentification of it with Tell al-Hesi (Tall al-Hasi). As with other sites, so with Lachish, place identification was unstable and debatable. Petrie’s error (repeated by his successor Frederick J. Bliss as PEF excavator of Tell

10 Starkey to Kraemer, 10 October 1932, copy, file titled “Jar Stamps”; Sidney Smith to Starkey, 8 August 1932; Starkey to Smith, 10 October 1932, all BMA, MED, MESR. 11 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London, 1990). 12 John M. Barton, “père Louis-Hugues Vincent”, Scripture, The Quarterly of the Catholic Biblical Association, XIII: 22, April 1961; Davis, Shifting Sands. 13 Starkey to Vincent, 18 August 1932, file: Lachish, Identification of, and père Vincent to Starkey, 4 September 1932, both BMA, MED, MESR.

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al-Hesi) was rejected by William  F.  Albright in 1929 when he proposed Tell ed-Duweir instead, followed by John Garstang and John Adam Smith (1931).14 Starkey’s own attempt at identification even before digging at Tell ed-Duweir reveals an ambition to establish a history of biblical and archaeological discovery that is scientific and detached from the literal Biblism of some of his predecessors. As he writes to Vincent: “I am afraid I am not so familiar with the bibliology [sic] of the topographical work that has been done in the past to be quite clear on this point [whether Albright or a non-American first identified Duweir with Lachish]”.15 Biblical authority and texts dominated not only the search for Lachish, but also the net of patronage that supported discovery, as well as the circulation of popular knowledge about it. The Bible and faith in its authenticity and veracity, wedded to science and technology, fed the financial engine of what may be described as the biblical economy of Lachish and, for that matter, excavations in other sites with biblical associations. The excavations at Tell ed-Duweir, launched in 1932 as the Colt-Wellcome Archaeological Research Expedition to the Near East (continued from 1933 as the Wellcome Research Expedition, thence, following Henry Wellcome’s death, as the Wellcome–Marston Expedition), manifest the pulls of faith and applied science in an imperial setting.16 Both Sir Henry Wellcome (1853–1936) and Sir Charles Marston (1867–1946) were inspired and motivated by deep religious beliefs and literal Biblism, Wellcome as an Adventist and Marston as a lifelong defender of Christianity as a revealed religion against Higher Biblical Criticism, which he tied to rabid modernization and the assault on belief by science.17 His firmly held opinions on the literal veracity of biblical texts and his harnessing of archaeology to prove it, are manifest in his books and in articles in the daily and periodical press. The stream of publications started off in 1927 with Christian Faith and Industry and was followed in rapid succession by New Knowledge about the Old Testament (1933), New Bible Evidence (1934), The Bible is True: the Lessons of the 1925–1934 Excavations in Palestine (1934), and The Bible Comes Alive (1937 and 1944). Marston regularly visited the excavations and interpreted the Lachish discoveries in the press. Both Wellcome and Marston made their mammoth fortunes in industries that drew on applied science and on technologies that were equated with, and came to symbolize, modernity: Wellcome in modern pharmaceutics and pharmaceutical entrepreneurship, and Marston as the owner and manufacturer of motorcycles and motorcars under the famous “Sunbeam” trademark. Wellcome developed the medical pill (substituting 14 For a survey of the identifications, see Tufnell, Inge, and Harding, Lachish III, 38–40. 15 Starkey to Vincent, 14 June 1932, BMA, MED, MESR. 16 Colt to Richmond, 28 July 1932; Henry Wellcome to Department of Antiquities, 31 August 1932; Starkey to Director, 5 December 1932 and 30 September 1933, all IAA, ATQ_54/6, Tell ed-Duweir, First Jacket. 17 Marjorie Von Harten, Melissa Marston, Louis Coatalen, Man of Wolverhampton: The Life and Times of Sir Charles Marston (Daglingworth, 1976); Felicity Cobbing, “John Garstang’s Excavations at Jericho: A Cautionary Tale”, Strata: Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society, 27 (2009), 63–77.

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patent medicines in the form of liquids and potions). Marston, Wolverhampton owner of Villiers Engineering from 1898, oversaw the development of the pioneering two-stroke engine. Both harnessed technology to corporate capital, most notably Wellcome, whose giant trust combined investment and philanthropy, engendering Britain’s biggest charity. And both attached their interest in archaeology to empire and became archaeological entrepreneurs and sponsors on a transnational scale. Wellcome conducted his own excavations at Jebel Moya in the Sudan, supervising a giant labour force and unearthing huge cemeteries. Later he contributed to excavations in Palestine. Marston, who nourished an interest in antiquity in Britain, was a life member of the PEF and became an active sponsor and advertiser of excavations in Jerusalem, Jericho, and Lachish. A third patron of the Tell ed-Duweir/Lachish excavations was Sir Robert Mond, chemist and industrialist (member of the Mond family of scientific industrialists), the developer of nickel, and supporter of the arts and sciences who, lacking his colleagues’ religious zeal, was passionately interested and personally involved in excavations in Palestine. The impact of biblical heritage and culture is also apparent in their significance to contemporaries. Although Tell ed-Duweir yielded masses of finds from different periods, it was those remains that were associable with the Babylonian destruction of the Judean monarchy that received most public attention. In contradistinction to their patrons and other contemporary archaeologists in Palestine, Starkey and a few of his fellow archaeologists at Tell ed-Duweir, notably Olga Tufnell and Charles Inge, did not regard archaeology merely as an illustrative or corroborative body of knowledge. Starkey for one firmly resisted Marston’s Biblism and sought to separate archaeology from it. But more significant than individual stands on the Bible, the chronological scope of the material culture discovered on the Tell and in its surroundings—although reconcilable with Judeo-Christian creationism—had the potential of challenging the Bible. As some of the field reports and Tufnell’s Lachish volumes show, human and animal remains, pottery, and remains of buildings, firmly proved the existence of a sequence of settlement, stretching from the Neolithic to the post-exilic era. Tell ed-Duweir exhibited pre-Israelite settlement and an affluence of remains of Egyptian material culture. But it was the discovery of Hebrew epigraphy that took over professional and popular images of Lachish. In 1935, eighteen ostraca (pot sherds with writing on them) were discovered at the guardroom of the eastern tower of the gateway of the Lachish stratum II, forming an archive, as it were, belonging to Ya’osh, commander of the city and a senior official in southern Judah.18 Three more were discovered later. The ostraca, 18 Harry Torczyner, Lachish I: The Lachish Letters (London, 1938) and N.  H.  Torczyner, Teudot Lachish (Jerusalem, 1940) (Hebrew). For information on the ostraca I rely on Nadav Na’aman, “The Distribution of Messages in the Kingdom of Judah in Light of the Lachish Ostraca”, Vetus Testamentum,

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which came to be known as “the Lachish Letters”, clinched the authoritative identification of the biblical city and placed it within the narrative of its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 bc, the deportation of its inhabitants and the first Jewish exile.19 Moreover, the Letters were considered to have formed the first body of written pre-exilic Hebrew found in Palestine and augmented considerably the sparse body of written materials in Hebrew, so sparse that “the poverty of [written] matter is testified by the fact that the Hebrew Alphabet was not found in its entirety in these epigraphs”.20 Literacy and written records were taken to be testimonies to the power of a developed state administration and imperial power. An abundance of epigraphic material—monumental and quotidian—characterized the material culture of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian empires that had surrounded and ruled the Israelite kingdoms. Their presumed absence in Palestine was widely interpreted as proof of the Israelite, hence Jewish, lack of aptitude and “genius for imperial conquest”.21 The discovery of Hebrew written documents of a military and administrative nature seemed to have proved the Deuteronomic narrative on a strong and religiously unified kingdom upholding monotheistic beliefs and practices. Furthermore, the discoverers of the ostraca and their decipherers, including such Hebrew scholars and linguists as Harry (Naftali Herz) Torczyner (later Tur-Sinai); philologist and Bible and Semitic languages scholar, Bialik Professor of Hebrew at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and Alkin Lewis, enhanced the image of Judah as a literate society, the centre of the people of the book. For the writing was neither monumental nor fragmentary. The ninety readable lines of the text on potsherds showed the Paleo–Hebrew alphabet to have been written between the late seventh and early sixth centuries bc in iron-carbon ink on an “ordinary” (and economic) material, more ordinary than papyrus and parchment: “recycled” pottery (Figure 4.4). This apparent ordinariness indicated the spread of literacy and writing that had not been a secret art, but the practice of soldiers and clerks. The association of writing to individuals, known by their names, and to the everyday of wartime, is highlighted in the Prospectus of the first published compendium of the Letters that publicized them as the very opposite of monumental writing and as “the first really personal documents in pre-exilic Hebrew” to be found in Palestine.22 The find was hyped by Marston and 53:2 (2003), 169–80, and “The Contribution of the Lachish Ostraca for the Study of the Distribution of Messages in the Kingdom of Judah in the Late Monarchial Period”, in Yehoshua Ben-Arieh and Elchanan Reiner (eds), Studies in the History of Eretz Israel Presented to Yehuda Ben Porat (Jerusalem, 2001), 5–13 (Hebrew). 19 For a recent analysis of the corpus of the Letters, see Abigail Zammit. “The Lachish Letters: A Reappraisal of the Ostraca Discovered in 1935 and 1938 at Tell ed-Duweir”, PhD Diss. (University of Oxford, 2016). 20 Reuven Silman, “Letters Written in Hebrew from the days of the Prophet Jeremiah”, Jerusalem Radio, 13 September 1940 (Hebrew). 21 Tufnell, Inge, and Harding, Lachish III, 67. 22 “The Lachish Letters Prospectus”, WIA, WA/HSW/AR/LAC/F-11.

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reported in the Anglo-American press. It was set in a biblical framework not only by the evangelically minded. As Tufnell noted in her reports to her parents on the Letters, they were written At the time of Jeremiah, just before the invasion of Palestine by Nebuchaddnezzar [sic]. Some passages are word for word the same as the Book, so you can imagine the thrill it is to have something so close to the original document. So far we have twelve letters but hope to get more. Nothing has ever been found like them, as other ostraca (as these written sherds are called) just contained receipts of oil and wine sold and that sort of thing.23

The archive of Letters illustrated the biblical narrative and testified to degrees of literacy in pre-exilic Judah. They were regarded as examples of individual and personalized writing. The Letters’ discovery was quickly dubbed “the most valuable discovery ever in Biblical Archaeology”.24 And interest in the alphabet coupled with repeated affirmation of the authority of the Bible “as the original”, was kept alive by the finding of additional ostraca dating from earlier periods and taken as proof of an Israelite mastering of literacy acquired at the time of their wandering before the occupation of Canaan. The Letters and additional epigraphic evidence made news in Britain, both in theological and pastoral publications such as The Expository Times and in the general press. As an enthusiastic Marston put it in the ILN, drawing on the authority of Assyriologist Stephen Langdon, an inscribed “Lachish bowl” suggested the existence of Hebrew books ascribed to Moses “as early as the thirteenth century bc”, echoing the view that a red bowl with white letters found at Tell ed-Duweir too was “ ‘the most important discovery of modern times in respect to Biblical criticism”.25 As for the Letters, he opined, their authenticity equalled that of the prophetic texts whose letter and spirit they breathed: “. . . in style, in composition, in phraseology, and in spelling. They read almost like the passages from the book of Kings or from Jeremiah.”26 The Letters and the evidence of literacy had a remarkable public appeal: remarkable because, as this book demonstrates, the post-war culture of antiquity is characterized by the central place of objects and remnants of material culture in it. The Lachish Letters drew attention not only because of their textual and epigraphic value, but because of their apparent ordinariness and the materiality of the written word: they were messages in ink on fragments of vessels and materially manifested the individuality of their writers and addressees, revealed in their 23 Tufnell to her father, 21 and 29 March 1935, PEF, PEF-DA-TUF. 24 Charles Marston, “The Lachish Letters”, The Expository Times, August 1953, xlvi: ii, 504. 25 Charles Marston, “Evidence that a Pentateuch Existed in Alphabetical Script?”, ILN, 29 February 1935, WIA, WA/HSW/AR/LAC/D-7. 26 Marston, “The Lachish Letters”.

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Figure 4.4 Lachish ostraca. The obverse (top and bottom left) and reverse (bottom right) of Lachish Letter 3 (courtesy of the IAA, mandate archive)

names. The feel of the robust materiality of the ancient text is accompanied by detailed descriptions of the difficulty in recovering the inscriptions, deciphering their letters and meanings, and the danger of their disintegration or disappearance. Lankester Harding, a member of the expedition until 1936, related in detail a reconstruction of the recovery of the ostraca in his forty-page dictated biography:

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As the piece was turned over it was seen to be completely covered with writing. He (Starkey) was surprised as to how on earth he had not noticed it before. It was 10 cm by 7 cm in size and had writing on both sides. It seemed to be a bit of a broken pot. They looked and found quite a few more pieces. They took them down to the workshop to clean them a bit. But when dipped in water, the writing disappeared. What happened now they thought. Gerald took it and shook it and put it in the sun, and the writing appeared. These are now known as the “Lachish Letters”. What was the great value to the excavation, was that the name Lakish [sic] was actually in the letters. And this confirmed then what had been a great argument in the past, that this was really and truly the city of Lakish [sic].27

The transcription of the Letters in modern Hebrew and translation into English, as well as their publication, targeted varied audiences: the Oxford edition in 1,000 copies addressed an audience of experts. A more popular edition published in  Palestine by the Azriel Printing Works and financed by the Antiquities Department was issued in 2,150 copies in 1940.28 It included facsimiles in the original Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, a Hebrew transcription, and an English translation. The different productions of the Letters emphasized their visualization and material aspects: they formed unique texts to be deciphered and interpreted, as well as being displayable artefacts. The Letters starred in the annual Lachish exhibitions organized in London between 1933 and 1938. Initially hosted by the PEF, they later moved to the lavish state-of-the-(Deco)art Wellcome Research Institution on Euston Road. Free entrance and late opening hours were meant to draw in more visitors. The exhibitions were further boosted by lectures with lantern slides on the Lachish Letters, delivered by Harry Torczyner on 9 July 1935 and Starkey earlier that year.29 By August Starkey was able to report that the exhibition had attracted well over 2,000 visitors and that the Letters were the centre of attraction “from the public point of view and from that of Hebrew Scholars” and they were further publicized in Starkey’s articles in the ILN.30 A year later he reported further success with the annual exhibition and a greatly increased attendance.31 Revealingly Starkey made an association between current politics in Palestine and archaeological discovery: viewers who appreciated the displays of an ancient 27 Harding, unpublished biography, IOA, GLH Archive. 28 Printing and Stationery Department to Director of Antiquities, 4 September 1940, IAA, ATQ_ 11/9(17/17). 29 “Invitation to Annual Exhibition of Antiquities from Tell Duweir, Palestine, Season 1933–34”; “Wellcome Archaeological Research Expedition to the Near East: A Lantern Lecture on Recent Discoveries at Tell Duweir (Lachish) by J. L. Starkey”, 19 June 1935; and “A Lantern Lecture on the Lachish Letters Found at Tell Duweir . . . by Dr Harry Torczyner . . . the University, Jerusalem”, 9 July 1935, all in WIA, WA/HMM/PB/Sam/5. 30 Starkey to Reverend Hugh G. Bevenot, “Lachish III”, un-catalogued file, Lachish Archive, BMA, MED, MESR. 31 Starkey to Richmond, 30 September 1935, IAA, ATQ_54/6, Tell ed-Duweir, 2nd Jacket.

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culture were able to realize “the root” of the mandate project in Palestine. In addition, the exhibitions and publications cultivated procedures of viewing the Lachish finds that were associated with the new mandatory museological culture and practices of looking at antiquity. Mandatory Antiquities Law required the display of the most significant finds of any excavation to local audiences. The Letters were first exhibited in London, then in the Palestine Archaeological Museum in 1940, at the newly opened Iron Age Hall that displayed and “illuminated” the Bible. They were hailed as the most dramatic exhibit at the galleries and as the stuff of historical wartime drama: “writers of historical novels must gloat over the Lachish Letters”, produced during the last days of the Jewish Kingdom and containing the famous sentence “We have to look out for signals of Lakkish [sic] because Azekah station no longer replies.”32 The Second World War did not halt efforts to further publicize Lachish and it was introduced into the repertoire of biblical and archaeological travel and excursions. In 1943 the Antiquities Department commissioned Lankester Harding, by now Director of Antiquities in Transjordan, to write a compact Guide to Lachish–Tell ed-Duweir.33 The publication at the height of the war, of a first edition of 2,000 copies, testifies to the boom in wartime military archaeological tourism which, as we have seen, increased from 1940.

Archaeology and Physical Anthropology: Collaborations and Interpretations Yet the power and hold of biblical Lachish, indeed of the Bible, on AngloAmerican and local (and mainly) Jewish imagination was persistently challenged by a mode of thinking about and imagining antiquity and human history that evolved in the cluster of natural and human sciences and disciplines that challenged and clashed with, Biblical studies. The surge and appeal of physical anthropology after the war challenged the relationship between the biblical text and archaeology, not to mention biblical, historical, and world views. From the beginning of the twentieth century anthropology had become increasingly connected to the archaeology of the Near East, most notably the archaeology of Egypt (and to Egyptology). As David Gange and others have begun to show, this relationship was institutional and social. Archaeologists and anthropologists cooperated on committees, and archaeologists published in anthropological periodicals and nurtured personal, financial, and work-ties with anthropologists.34 The connections 32 “Antiquities of the Jewish Kingdom”, Palestine Post, 9 October 1940; “Lachish Letters on View”, Palestine Post, 1 October 1940; and “Opening of the Israelite Wing”, Ha’aretz (n.d.), IAA, ATQ-0 (89/89). 33 Printing and Stationary Office to Hamilton, 8 May 1943, IAA, ATQ_19/9 (43/4). 34 Gange, Dialogues, 298–9, 279–280.

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between the evolving Eugenic studies and organizations, and archaeologists and Egyptologists like Petrie, have been discussed at some length. Physical anthropology, Eugenics, and biometrics provided archaeologists with scientific tools and methods, a “disciplinary ideology” and a new explanatory framework for material and cultural change and progress.35 Petrie worked in tandem with the Galton Laboratories at UCL for decades, supplying them with enormous quantities of human remains from cemeteries from all over Egypt and, from the late 1920s, from Palestine. But archaeology was far more than the provider of raw materials for large-scale statistical studies of human races: methods of recording and measuring humans, too, were exchanged across the disciplines. Petrie’s own quantitative methods informed Galton’s Eugenics at the same time that he (Petrie) made use of anthropometrics. But more importantly perhaps, Eugenics, physical anthropology, and the study of the evolving of races, provided Petrie and other contemporary archaeologists and Egyptologists with an interpretative tool for understanding human progress. In a number of writings, race and race characteristics substituted divine law and the notion that this law determined discreet national histories and was the prime engine of societal and political progress and of the rise, development, and destruction of civilizations.36 In Petrie’s interpretation, drummed up in pre-war popular publications like The Janus Face of Modernity (1907) and The Revolutions of Civilization, originally published in 1911 and reissued in 1922, the template of the analysis of the development of ancient (and modern) civilizations was not divine selection, retribution and revival, but racial competition, superiority, and selection. By the mid 1930s the sciences of race in Britain, which had reached their apogee in the early 1920s, arrived at a dead-end and, to use Elazar Barkan’s expression, were “on the retreat”. Following Carl Pearson’s retirement from one of their bastions, the Department of Applied Statistics at UCL, physical anthropology became fragmented and its methods increasingly delegitimized.37 When the Second World War broke out, race as a scientific category lost its legitimacy. However, the exchanges between archaeology and quantitative and racial anthropology continued through most of the 1930s and later. During the interwar years collaboration with anthropometric laboratories was carried on by Petrie himself who continued to supply the Galton Laboratory with deliveries of skeletons and mandibles from Palestinian sites such as Tell al- Far‘ah. 35 Ibid. See also Kathleen Sheppard, “Flinders Petrie and Eugenics at UCL”, Bulletin of the History of Archaeology, 20:1 (2010), 16–29. 36 Gange, Dialogues, 276–8. See also Neil Asher Silberman, “Petrie’s Head: Eugenics and Near Eastern Archaeology”, in A. B. Kehoe and M. B. Emmerichs (eds), Assembling the Past: Studies in the Professionalization of Archaeology (Albuquerque, NM, 1999), 69–79; Sheppard, “Flinders Petrie and Eugenics”. 37 Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge, 1993).

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Considerably bigger than any of Petrie’s Palestine excavations, Tell ed-Duweir yielded quantities of human remains that were archaeological material but also provided materials for large-scale measurements and anthropometric study of humans. Starkey’s correspondence with a number of laboratories in Britain and the USA about the survey of human remains presents continuity with former collaboration and locates Lachish in a network of interwar Anglo-American institutions for racial study. Hundreds of crania were the subject matter of an anthropological report on “The Human Remains from Tell ed-Duweir”, financed by the Wellcome Trust and carried on at the Galton Labs by D. L. Risdon under the supervision of Geoffrey Miles Morant, Pearson’s disciple, who continued to practise craniometry, which a generation earlier was at the very heart of physical anthropology, well into the 1930s, using it in large-scale comparative surveys of skulls. Between 1936 and 1937 he cleaned, restored, registered, and measured 737 crania, consisting of 62 juvenile skulls, 391 skulls of adult males, and 294 skulls of adult females. The series was “the first well-preserved one of any length which has hitherto been available for study, and it is obvious that it is of great value for anthropological purposes”. There were few longer adult series anywhere “from any part of the world”. Note the reference to “anthropological purposes”. Risdon was aware of the pathologies of some skulls, like the artificial deformations evidenced in trepanned skulls and other deformations.38 The series generated interest among such eminent anthropologists as Sir Arthur Keith (another correspondent of Starkey), Hunterian Professor and Conservator of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, an evolutionist, advocate of Eugenics, and promoter of theories on the environmental and mental development of races as late as 1948.39 Though declining to work on the series himself, Keith noted its “great value, especially as to the kind of people in Palestine in Israelitish times”,40 a view endorsed by Pearson.41 Correspondence about the skulls went beyond the London-based centre of British physical anthropology and reached the Duckworth Laboratory at the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Cambridge. It targeted the renowned American anthropologist and archaeologist Henry Field, at that time Head and Curator of Physical Anthropology at the Fields Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and a student of racial variety who was responsible for the “Hall of Human Races” at the Chicago World Fair of 1933. Field applied the methods of physical anthropology and biometrics across disciplines and, during his career in Mesopotamian archaeology, conducted the measuring of contemporary “indigenous” Iraqis. 38 “Interim report to the Trustees of the Late Sir Henry Wellcome and the Director of the Wellcome Archaeological Research Expedition to the Near East by D. L. Risdon”, file name “Crania” (n.d.), and Risdon to Charles Inge, 6 February 1938, both BMA, MED, MESR. 39 Risdon to Inge, 3 April 1938, BMA, MED, MESR. 40 Arthur Keith to Starkey, 19 February 1933, BMA, MED, MESR. 41 Pearson to Starkey, 16 February 1933, BMA, MED, MESR.

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In addition to the transnational and cross-disciplinary interest in archaeological human remains, the correspondence amply demonstrates the blurring of borderlines between physical anthropology and its satellite sciences, such as biometrics, on the one hand, and archaeology, on the other. This is apparent in the publicity given to the Lachish skulls in the two flagship publications of biometrics and anthropology, Biometrika and Man, subtitled A Monthly Record of Anthropological Science. Risdon’s comparative quantitative study of Lachish and ancient Egyptian skulls was to appear in Biometrika in 1939.42 Man’s 1936 October issue celebrated the discovery of apparently trepanned skulls, running articles by Starkey and J. Wilson Parry. Both articles were not overt on the racial characteristics of the skulls but on the sameness of “primitive” surgical techniques in Palestine, and Inca and pre-Inca Peru. Parry noted that not migration but “a spontaneous instinct separately conceived by the Inca and the Canaanite Civilizations”, indicated primitive strands of development in different cultures.43 Scientific inquiry that focused on human remains strove not only to cut across borders and continents, but to also cross over from the study of the past to living people, studied as human fossils and as material for surveying and researching a hierarchy of civilizations and races. Petrie’s own collection of skulls from Palestine, shipped to British laboratories and scattered during and after the Second World War, included series categorized as “Modern”, or “Modern Arabs” (and marked AR) that were added to the ancient skulls collected at Tell al- Far‘ah in 1928–9.44 Starkey invited Field to perform measurements of local fellahin at the Hebron area “who may quite well be descendants of those whose skulls we have brought to London”.45 The web of relationships tracked here does not suggest that Starkey shared Petrie’s and other archaeologists’ views on race and history. Nor does it indicate in any way that he adopted a holistic and wholesale race-based view on the development and advance of civilization. Such grand-scale views drawing on archaeological evidence were rampant in Egyptology and stressed Egypt’s role as the cradle of all civilizations. They veered between Petrie’s own racial view of a dynastic Egyptian race and racial mixture and Grafton Elliot Smith’s hyper-diffusionist notions.46 However the Lachish correspondence at least indicates the extent to which archaeological establishments and excavations during the interwar period were enmeshed in networks informed by and devoted to, the study of racial progress. And the practices and assumptions of physical anthropology died hard. They persisted after the Second World War, when race lost its appeal as a grand interpretation of civilizational progress and history. Risdon’s Lachish project was 42 D.  L.  Risdon, “Comparisons of the Lachish and Ancient Egyptian Series for Characters Considered Singly”, Biometrika, 31:1–2, 143–5. 43 Man, October 1936, xxxvi: 233–50, 233–4. 44 Ian G. Gunnison to Olga Tufnell, 27 August 1941, BMA, MED, MESR. 45 Starkey to Field, 20 August 1936, “Crania”, BMA, MED, MESR. 46 Flinders Petrie, The Revolutions of Civilisation (London and New York, 1912), 135.

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followed by further studies and reports on the Lachish crania by a D.  Trevor, assisted by M. Giles. Their proposed publication in Lachish III caused concern to the Trustees of the Wellcome Trust that was expressed by Henry Hallett Dale, 1936 Nobel laureate in physiology and archaeology fan, who developed a special interest in Lachish. He and the Trustees proposed editing out Trevor’s comparisons between the Lachish skulls and skulls from other places in Palestine and suggested that most of his study be offered to “technical” publications, such as Biometrika. They firmly rejected Giles’s reference to the “pathological peculiarities” of Iron Age skulls, which they thought unsuitable for publication in an array of venues and doubted whether these “ought to be given special[ist] or wider currency”.47

Colonial Collaborations Collaboration, however, was by no means limited to Western centres of research and fields of knowledge devoted to the study of Near Eastern antiquity. Archaeological practice and knowledge hinged on, and was inseparable from, local colonial labour, economies, vernacular knowledge, and academic expertise. Archaeology in Palestine in general and at Tell ed-Duweir/Lachish in particular, presents a multiplicity of forms of collaboration that were hierarchical and flourished under the mandate system. Like practically all Middle Eastern excavations, the Lachish expedition depended on massive recruitment of seasonal Arab ganglabour, unskilled and skilled, from the vicinity of the Tell, the Beersheba district, the Sinai, and Upper Egypt (mainly from Qift). The latter had been trained by Petrie and were formally defined as highly skilled workers. Sultan and Hamid Bakhit and Sadiq ‘Abdin of Ballas [sic] in Upper Egypt, were issued entry visas to Palestine as experienced “archaeological labourers” and “skilled workmen”.48 Their arrival at Cairo was followed by a third-class railway journey at reduced fares to Qantara, thence to Tel Aviv, before they embarked on the final leg to Tell ed-Duweir, testifying to the mobility of a skilled archaeological labour force with expertise and its itineration through Egypt and the Mashriq. As we shall see, demand for imported skilled labour became a source of complaints by local cultivators who, with some good reason, harboured anger and frustration on other accounts. Digging entailed the control and regulation of access to the land and more often than not necessitated land expropriation and compensation to property owners. As shown in Chapter  3, notwithstanding mandate legislation on antiquities and their ownership, and the bureaucratic

47 Henry Hallett Dale to Olga Tufnell, 5 October 1950, PEF, PEF-DA-TUF-0364; Olga Tufnell to Dale, 11 October 1950, PEF, PEF-DA-TUF-365. 48 Starkey to Director of Antiquities, L.A.  Mayer, Acting Director to Director, Department of Immigration, 14 October 1932, IAA, ATQ_54/6. “Ballas” is possibly Dayr al-Ballas.

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machine that imposed them, the uses of archaeological sites and their possession also involved ad hoc collaboration and negotiation between excavators, the authorities, and land owners and holders. Collaboration was also essential in the processes of sorting, classifying, and interpreting the finds themselves, which depended heavily on local material and technical knowledge and on professional knowledge of local archaeologists and linguists. The deciphering of the Lachish ostraca relied on the expertise of Hebrew epigraphists and scholars at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Hebraists in London and Oxford, and on the cooperation of the Jewish Palestine Exploration Fund. The identification of Lachish and its periodization, too, involved constant exchange of knowledge with senior figures in Palestine’s net of foreign (mainly American and French) biblical and archaeological schools. Knowledge acquired by experience in field work is of course essential in archaeology and quite often Bedouin and Fellahin excavators acquired expertise, and a sense of antiquity and of the value of finds that competed with that of their British patrons. According to Lankester Harding the Lachish Letters were spotted by Hasan ‘Awad al-Qatshan, who, while working at the gateway room found a piece of pottery “missed” by the archaeologists.49 Hasan ‘Awad was Lankester Harding’s lover and partner for near to two decades, shared a household with him, and became a fine archaeologist. He lacked formal education and was apprenticed in Petrie’s expeditions and, later on, Tell ed-Duweir. The majority of “Petrie’s Pups”, too, including Harding and Starkey himself, had a piecemeal and largely non-academic education and learned their craft on the ground. Hasan ‘Awad was to play a considerable role in the development of the Department of Antiquities in Transjordan and in the discovery of Arabic pre-Islamic inscriptions and reliefs and the Dead Sea Scrolls. The point about Lankester Harding’s version is not its “authenticity”—or the lack of it (relatable to his relationship with Hasan ‘Awad)—but the inclusion of local cooperation and agency in the story of discovery. To be sure, British or, for that matter, Western uses of forms of local knowledge and collaboration characterized most excavations in Palestine during the interwar period and was crucial to the development and modernization of archaeology. But collaboration at Tell ed-Duweir, its tenacity or breakup, acquired distinct geo-political meanings, to do with territoriality, access to land, and the economics of excavations, as well as with the specific political context of the late 1930s and the meanings that archaeology acquired during an era of national, religious, and ethnic tensions. The second half of this decade witnessed the surge of an intense Arab Palestinian anti-colonial and distinctly anti-British protest that culminated in the eruption of the Arab rebellion in 1936 and its climax in 1938. The rebellion probably was the largest scale armed anti-British revolt in the interwar overseas

49 Harding, unpublished biography, IOA, GLH Archive.

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empire. The mound and the roads leading from it to Jerusalem were located in the Hebron area that was less easily controlled than Palestine’s major urban centres and remained a hub of rural protest and violence under local leaderships. But beyond these obvious political connections and the repercussions that violence may have had for the British expedition, the routines and practices on the excavation site demonstrate how its members saw their roles as British men and women, and as harbingers of imperial modernity in Palestine. In other words, they defined their relations to Palestine’s antiquity in terms of its present and the prospects for the country’s future within the mandated empire. The rediscovery of Lachish was not merely a means to augment knowledge about biblical and pre-biblical antiquity, but an instrument for modernizing rural Palestine and developing it. The relationship between past and present is manifest in archaeological and interpretative practices and in everyday life on the Tell, as well as in their representations, in professional and private records, and in public ones, not least in the posthumous representations of Starkey and his construction as a mandatory martyr. The local inhabitants participated in the modernization project but, at the same time, negotiated it and protested against its critical impact on their livelihoods. The tensions characterizing these collaborations and that between the discovery of the past and the drive for modernization loom large in the discourse on land and on the issue of who owned Tell ed-Duweir. The prominent Tell bordered the relatively modern village of Qubayba ibn ‘Awad commonly known as el Qubayba, whose landowners were the proprietors of the Tell itself, its surface and its surrounding terrain. Harding’s photograph albums and Pathé-Baby short films (developed by Pathé for home-made short movies and in use on many an excavation) show just how close the village and its fields were to the mound. In one such film, the camera moves between them and proximity is demonstrated by the moving figure of a Bedouin in a white robe (possibly ‘Awad ), climbing the road leading to the Tell then posing near an exposed wall.50 Licensed to the expedition, as required by the Antiquities Ordinance, on 21 October1932 and excavated from early 1933, the land was effectively expropriated by the government of Palestine on 12 April 1934 and its “possession was entered upon” by the Department of Antiquities in October of that year.51 The intricate and prolonged process of expropriation points at its translation from the letter and spirit of antiquities ordinances to actual and definitive transfer of property from individuals to the mandate government. It was initiated by Starkey, who appealed for the requisitioning of the land after negotiations between the Wellcome–Marston expedition

50 Duweir films, LH 26, IOA, GLH Photographic Archive. 51 W. R. Kennedy Shaw, Acting Director of the Department of Antiquities Jerusalem, to Director of Land Registration, 21 July 1939; Richard Hamilton, Director of Antiquities to the Chief Secretary, Government of Palestine, 21 May 1943, both IAA, ATQ_/54/6, Tell ed-Duweir, 4th Jacket.

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and the landholders to purchase the surface of the Tell had failed.52 Some of the surface, not to mention the bordering terrain, was the property of a number of owners and holders, some unregistered, possessing the lands in varying forms, who withdrew an initial agreement to sell. Starkey marked the boundaries of the area required for excavation on the surface of the Tell and added to it another on its slopes. The expropriation of land declared a historical monument, or of public historical value, was a state action of the mandate government, but it required the initiative and preliminary action of an expert—an archaeologist—and Starkey was active and persistent, penning letters and reminders to officials in a variety of departments until instructed to liaise with them only through the Antiquities Department. The state was cautious and required proof that expropriation was of public value and minimal. As the Chief Secretary’s office put it: “a certificate [was requested] that the undertaking was of public nature” and applied “only to such lands as may be required for the excavation in one season”.53 Only in May 1943, some four years after the expedition wound up and the site had long been abandoned, was the expropriation made de jure and the Tell became one of the few archaeological sites in the country to have become government property. The land, its ownership, borderlines, and uses were contested ground: literally so. Obituaries of Starkey and the archaeologists’ own representations of the treatment of the Tell highlight their self-envisaged role as just occupiers, protectors, and conservers of antiquities, and as benefactors of the inhabitants of Palestine. This notion is particularly pronounced in posthumous representations of Starkey, such as Lankester Harding’s obituary, broadcast on the morning after the murder, that dwelt on Starkey’s clearance of soil for the excavation and the subsequent creation of huge dumps of it: “In excavations he always bore in mind the owners of the land and the soil was carefully terraced and eventually provided a greater area of cultivable land than before.”54 Starkey himself drew on the narrative of land development. In official correspondence in 1934 he emphasized that expropriation was guided not solely by the dictates of the excavations but also by consideration of “our local land owners . . . with whom we try our best to work”.55 Note the use of the proprietary “our”. Later, commenting on the levelling of the ground and on large-scale dumping of “waste” soil, he noted that both in 1935 and 1936–7 a lower terrace was excavated So as to enable the landowners to resume their normal seasonal cultivation and they seem very pleased with the improved condition of the soil. I am glad to say 52 Memorandum by Richmond, 26 February 1934 and Starkey to Richmond, 27 February 1934, both IAA, ATQ_54/6. 53 J. Jacobs, Chief Secretary Office to Director of Antiquities, 21 March 1934, IAA, ATQ_54/6. 54 “An Appreciation”, Gerald Lankester Harding, Palestine Broadcasting Services, 11 January 1938, Palestine Post, 12 January 1938, 1. 55 Starkey to Richmond, 24 March 1934, IAA, ATQ_54/6.

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that we now seem to have definitely removed all signs of the old prejudices against working cultivated ground; in fact they all seem most anxious for us to use their land, and see the obvious improvement.56

Alongside negotiation over access and ownership, members of the expedition regularly recorded and reported on life on the Tell and on practices of work and daily routine. These reports were instrumental in shaping a discourse of modernity in which the archaeologists played the role of developers and benefactors and the Palestinian workers were cast as the recipients of the benefits of progress. Life on the Tell was familial and domestic: most of the “pups” were young and unmarried, but Starkey was, and lived with his family on the dig. Lankester Harding’s films show Starkey’s wife on her walks with the children carried by Bedouins.57 Elsewhere the children are photographed playing. Olga Tufnell cultivated a garden around her cabin, thus domesticating its surroundings. Anemones, tulips, narcissi, and stock “evoked the brief but brilliant illusion of an English garden”.58 She set up a clinic for the workforce and local villagers and established her reputation and position as a healer and benefactor. Her work is commended in the same expedition’s report of December 1936, alongside the survey of the progress of the archaeological work itself: “[the] Camp Clinic, run by Tufnell, attracts patients from as far as Beer-Sheba”. Indeed “The reputation of the expedition stands in the native mind for health as well as for regular employment.”59 The development project was gendered: Tufnell, who underwent training as a nurse, offered in her clinic medical and nursing services, caring particularly for women and children. Although a fine and extremely competent archaeologist, with special expertise on scarabs who would be the driving force behind the compilation of the massive Lachish, Tufnell is ascribed by her roles as a healer and the provider of health care, a representation that fits in a colonial feminine role. Following Starkey’s murder, the development narrative became key in the story of his life and labour in Palestine. His achievements as excavator and as a visionary and organizer of Palestinian archaeology are depicted as inseparable from his work as a benevolent developer and modernizer. The discovery of ancient Lachish, culminating in the finding and deciphering of the Letters that were evidence of literacy—is set in an amelioration narrative central to the rationale and notion of the mandate itself. In this narrative the workforce and local inhabitants are occasionally, though not always, devoid of history, and the Tell and its surrounding countryside are depicted as changeless since biblical times. Examples

56 “Field Report (to the Wellcome–Marston Trust) for the Season 1936–37”, Wellcome–Marston Archaeological Research Expedition in the Near East, BMA, MED, MESR. 57 Duweir films, LH 27, IOA, GLH Photographic Archive. 58 Tufnell, Inge, and Harding, Lachish III, 2. 59 “Field Report for the Season 1936–37”, BMA, MED, MESR.

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multiply and the following, taken from The Times of 18 January 1938, a week after Starkey’s murder, is characteristic. It is an obituary in the disguise of a travel narrative by popular historian and travel writer Mrs Steuart Erskine, already known for her succession of books on the Middle East including Palestine of the Arabs (1935), Trans Jordan, Some Impressions (1929), The Vanished Cities of Arabia (1925 and 1927), and an authorized study of King Faisal of Iraq. The obituary includes a written-in interview with Starkey, conducted at his “bungalow study” on the mound that at that time still “hid the secrets of the hidden city of Lachish” which he was about to unveil. The views from the mound revealed to the archaeologists are those that “must have occurred when great armies marched on that desolated road”. The workforce of semi-settled Bedouins is devoted to their fair and just employer who is described squatting at a Bedouin tent in “a happy evening with a patriarchal atmosphere about it”.60 He is a modernized version of the Patriarchs, but not quite. The locals are exonerated from the murder of a benefactor and a paternalist friend. Here and elsewhere, the story of the discovery of Lachish and Starkey’s own biography are reconstructed as an imperial tragedy, whose calamity lay in the fact that Starkey “had always been on the best of terms with the Arab peasantry in the district”, employing them and “thus pouring thousands of pounds into the district in the form of wages”.61 The use of technologies on the dig helped enhance the progress of the excavation and, at the same time, configured the archaeological project as one of land development and improvement. Starkey had two chutes installed on the Tell that were used to get rid of the masses of cleared cultivatable soil, and added a 650-metre 500-gauge railway track and a train with tipping wagons for the clearing of stones. Heavy machinery did not, however, replace manual labour—in fact, mechanization increased the need for working hands. Their complementary roles are assiduously represented in the archaeological documentary films produced by members of the expedition. One film shows shots of a file of labourers unloading sacks from the wagons, and of other labourers—women, children and men—filing alongside the camp railway. They are watched from on high by Starkey, who surveys their work standing on a promontory. The camera moves to the chute and through it we get a view of the village’s cultivated fields.62 Whether premeditated or not, Starkey’s presence is well within the conventions of visual representations of Near Eastern archaeological discovery and labour. Characteristically, visual images juxtapose imperial supervision of a native labour force. Such illustrations as Austen Henry Layard’s inspection of the work in Nimrud in the 1840s, and of Leonard Woolley at the top of the Great Pit at Ur come to mind. 60 Mrs Steuart Erskine, “Mr. J. L. Starkey: A Visit to the Camp of Lachish”, The Times, 18 January 1938, 14. 61 Palestine Post, 12 January 1938, 1. 62 Tell ed-Duweir films, LH 21, IOA, GLH Photographic Archive.

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The linear modernization and development narrative that juxtaposes developers and undeveloped indigents is more complicated in its handling of the sequence of time and history. For, as already implied, ancient Lachish prior to the Babylonian exile is represented as possessing a rich and syncretic material civilization and as the site of state administration and literacy, but its landscape and people in the present are depicted as changeless since biblical times. Tell ed-Duweir of the present, like rural Palestine, is de-historicized and depicted as passively accepting modernity. Such juxtapositions of past glories and present decline are familiar to all students of orientalist ethnography and travel writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What marks off the conventions noted here is the role allocated to archaeology as a technological means for, and a form of, negotiating modernity and the usage of the excavation of the man-made mound as a metaphor for modernity.63 The filmic image of archaeology as modernizing force, apparent in Harding’s visual documentation of daily life and work, was recognized by expeditions and archaeological institutions. The Wellcome–Marston Trustees financed a series of films, proposed and partly shot by R.  Richard Brown, which visualized the relationship between discovery and progress. Their scripts’ drafts and lists of captions combine documentation of the material remains of ancient Lachish, especially the prize finds, references to the history of Lachish, particularly its Babylonian destruction, and a detailed recording of the archaeological work and practices on the Tell. Work is divided into manual labour and mechanized tasks that are described side by side to enhance the difference between them and illustrate their different temporal registers. Heavy machinery and the modernization of roads and transport are positioned next to traditional manual native labour. The Lachish films of 1935–6 and 1936–7 include sequences of buildings like “The Palace”, “The Temple”, and “Cemeteries” (known as Cemeteries 500 and 1500), the “Ostracon Room”, and sequences of shots of modern constructions such as “the Bridge”, “Chute”, and “the Railway”.64 Contemporary manners are represented in sequences on “Ramadan” that include “praying” and the festival of “Nabi Musa”. Typical captions celebrating technology read: “Constructing a Bridge over our car road, so that light railway trucks can dump previously excavated area beyond”, juxtaposed with another: “using buckets to light soil”. Order is imposed on the perturbed and lawless neighbourhood and represented in a shot of “Hunting out a culprit of crime committed in the neighbouring village [Qubayba]. Using one of the famous Palestine Police Dogs”.65 The motifs and imagery of the entire series are recaptured in the suggested sequence whose proposed title announces that “The lifetime

63 On some conventions, see Billie Melman, “The Middle East/Arabia: ‘The Cradle of Islam’”, in Peter Hulme and TimYoungs (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge, 2002), 105–22. 64 “Lachish Film Division into Groups”, Cinematographic Film 1935–6, BMA, MED, MESR. 65 “Captions for Cinema 1935–6”, BMA, MED, MESR.

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of man is short . . . This film shows the beginning of the excavation of the City of Lachish—the first page of a new chapter in history.” The deliberate blurring of distinction between Lachish’s history and that of the excavation, and their setting in time sequences (both are interpreted as opening new chapters in human life) are dramatized in a fade-out followed by a shot of Palestine’s map and a pointer that designates the location of the Tell, immediately followed by shots of Arabs living the “Primitive Life” and performing manual labour contrasted to “the archaeologists [who] are mechanised”.66 The language and narratives of modernization and development through the recovery of the past were in tune with the mandatory project, but they were constantly challenged from below. The casting of local agents in the roles of acquiescing objects of improvement, and of the archaeologists and the administration of antiquities (hence the mandate itself) as harbingers of progress, is contested and occasionally contradicted in the hefty administrative records of the excavations. As with the excavations on Ophel so with Tell ed-Duweir; government records meticulously preserve the repeated disputes over the ownership of the compound of the Tell and its slopes, the assessment of the value of land, and the right to use the land and its material components: soil, man-made and organic debris, and archaeological dump. The planting of trees, tilling of the land, usage of waste, access to the road and trenches encircling the perimeter of the excavations, the use and wear and tear of added constructions such as roadways, stairs, and a bridge erected by the excavators, all became the subject of surveillance by the inspectorate of the Department of Antiquities and the correspondence and continuous negotiation between villagers, archaeologists, and the government. There is, however, a difference between the Ophel correspondence of the 1920s and that on Tell ed-Duweir: by the early 1930s there had developed a body of antiquities ordinances that formalized the take-over of land for archaeological excavations. The Duweir correspondence contains numerous letters that are marked “Expropriation”, or “Land Expropriation”. They flow from the Department of Antiquities to the Department of Lands and back, from the Valuation (of land) Board at the Office of Public Works to these departments, from the District of Hebron and its Police to the Director of Antiquities, from the Director to the Attorney General and back, between the expeditions’ financiers and government departments and, following Starkey’s murder, between these offices and the Colonial Office and Prime Minister’s Office. This prodigious documentation unravels the degree to which Lachish and, more broadly, imperial archaeological discovery, were entangled with colonial administration and control of land. And as with the Ophel administrative corpus, this correspondence also gives voices and names to locals: to Mukhtars (heads of village) and occasionally to the claimants themselves

66 “Suggested Continuity for Lakish [sic] Film”, Cinematographic Film 1935–6, BMA, MED, MESR.

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who either owned the land or held and tilled it, who let it to the expedition for compensation money and rendered it services. Here, too, their voices are sounded in petitions that dispute the actions of archaeologists and government policies concerning ownership and land use. The disputes boil down to the same question that had persisted during the Mount Ophel excavations: who owned the land of antiquity and, indirectly, who owned Palestine’s past and how was its value assessed? During the mid and late 1930s the land question became even more combustible than during the late 1920s. The transfer of land from Palestinian Arabs was politically inflammable. Moreover, although Lachish/Tell ed-Duweir had nothing of the weight and visibility of Jerusalem, it was located in a rural area, where land was the source and means of livelihood and a vehicle for defining belonging. Its locale, next to Bayt Jibrin, at the heart of the tumultuous Hebron district—one of the foci of the rural rebellion—had the potential of making the ownership of land an even more fraught issue. Symptomatically, the disputes were left unsettled after the excavations ended and dawdled until the end of the Second World War. As already noted, negotiations between the landowners and the expedition for purchase reached a dead end. A lease proved impossible because the area had no definite borders and massive digging meant that it would not be returned to its previous cultivable condition. An agreement to sell the land was rejected after half the sum was advanced to the owners.67 By law, expropriation by the mandatory state entailed compensation (by the excavator) for lost value of cultivation and prospective crops. And it necessitated public and visible procedures of what would manifest the state’s “taking possession” of the archaeological site. When Inspector of Antiquities J. Ory arrived at the Tell and summoned the owners to announce the expropriation to them, some of them, backed by the Mukhtar and the village elders, refused to let the authorities “enter into possession”, declaring: “We do not hand over the land to you. We agree to lease the land on condition favourable to the excavators, but we do not mean to part with the land.”68 A few months and some further legal procedures later, inspector S. H. S. Hussein got luckier because, we may assume, he could converse with the elders in Arabic.69 When he reached the Tell he met its thirty owners and formally repeated the announcement: “I had come to take possession of the tall [sic] on behalf of the government.” When they enquired whether expropriation would be temporary or permanent, he could not answer. He clarified that the Tell would “pass out of their possession and they were not allowed to till or use it in any way”, but some owners demanded that their lands be returned to their former state. The owners’ main 67 Starkey to Director of Antiquities, 2 February 1934, and A. T. Richmond, “Memorandum of a Meeting with Starkey”, 27 February 1934, IAA, ATQ_54/6, Tell ed-Duweir, 1st Jacket. 68 J. Ory to Hamilton, Acting Inspector of Antiquities, 20 July 1934, IAA, ATQ_54/6. 69 General Attorney to Department of Antiquities, 23 and 26 July 1934, IAA, ATQ_54/6.

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grievance was that the expedition did not employ them, but preferred labour imported from the Sinai. In vain did Hussein explain that work in Lachish was of a highly technical nature and that the villagers demanded higher wages than the Gaza recruits. But they insisted they were as capable as the Bedouins, that they accepted the same wages and: “it was only fair and just that a man who had been rendered landless and without work by the expropriation should be given some means of earning his livelihood”.70 The complaints cited by Hussein hardly synchronize with the archaeologists’/modernizers’ claims that they had been motivated not only by archaeological dictates, but had considered the good of local owners with whom they had worked. Nor does the dialogue fit with the argument that the expedition provided steady employment and invested weekly up to £50 in the village.71 But two days after the event, E. T. Richmond, Director of Antiquities, telegraphed Starkey in London: “Expropriation Concluded. Antique”.72 According to the License and Antiquity Ordinance, the estimated value of the land (210 Palestine pounds, later to be raised to about 300) was deposited for future compensation. But all was not well around Tell ed-Duweir, and at Qubayba the sense of grievance lingered. Delay in compensation was protested against in petitions in colloquial Arabic such as that of Sultan, dated 4 March 1935 and stamped 6 March, forwarded over fifteen months later by the Director of Land Registration to the Director of Antiquities: The man in charge of the excavation there, have [sic] taken possession of the said land long time ago without notifying the owners of the price. As you know, the owners live on cultivation and is it possible therefore to arrange for them to cultivate any patches which are not required for immediate excavation?73

Complaints against non-payments, or arrears in paying for land and services rendered, persisted. Salih al-Hajj Hamad Abu ‘Awad from Qubayba’s grievance was double. He was not paid for the use of forty-eight donkeys he put at the service of the expedition and was owed four years’ payment for the lease of his land: “now that he [the director] left to his country without paying me the compensation for my land which he hired for four years for his excavations, and on which I live being a poor man. I should be glad if I might be granted the said compensation in

70 S. H. S. Hussein to Director, Department of Antiquities, 8 October 1934, IAA, ATQ_54/6, Tell ed-Duweir, 2nd Jacket. 71 Starkey to Richmond, 24 March 1933, IAA, ATQ_54/6, Tell ed-Duweir, 2nd Jacket. 72 Department of Antiquities to Starkey, 10 October 1934, IAA, ATQ_54/6, Tell ed-Duweir, 2nd Jacket. 73 Director of Land Registration to Department of Antiquities, “Assessment of Value of land at Tell ed-Duweir for the compensation of owners”, 12 August 1936, IAA, ATQ_54/6, 3, Tell ed-Duwier, 2nd Jacket.

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accordance with the condition made between me and the said Director.”74 Complaints were not limited to the financial value of land or labour but touched on a variety of grievances, from the ban on access to land and its uses for cultivation, through infringement of villagers’ freedom of passage, to the prevention of villagers’ license to recycle archaeological debris.75 On or about 20 January 1939, the Hebron Police Division reported on four Qubayba villagers who, despite warning, planted trees on the Tell without permission, on ground apparently protected under section 18 of the Antiquities Ordinance: ‘Awda Ahmad (spelt Achmmmed) Ibrahim planted 24 olive and fig trees and one Subr (Sabar) plant; his co-villager Ahmad al- Darbaliyah planted eight fig and olive trees and three grape vines, and ‘ Abd al-Khaliq (spelt Hallaq) Muhammad Ibrahim a mere subr plant, all on the northern base of the Tell.” The local character of the plants (olive and fig) which were sources of livelihood or served as hedges (the subr, most probably the sabra or prickly pear), and the attempt to usufruct the land both testify to how different were local notions of access to the Tell from the logic of ownership in the Antiquities Ordinances, the Antiquities Department’s policies, and Starkey’s own initiatives. The three planters pleaded that their trees were planted “outside the protected ground” and implied that planting itself indicated use. Similar disputes accompanied usages of dumps, rocks, and timber.76 At the same time that the relationships on and around the Tell preserved hierarchies, they shifted and became tense and violent. During the Arab Revolt, the excavation site was targeted by armed groups in the Bayt Jibrin area and the expedition camp was raided at least twice in 1936. The attacks and arson resumed in 1938. When Starkey was asked to finance armed guards, he specifically required that they not be recruited from Qubayba, the village of which he and the expedition were self-appointed patrons, thus revealing a degree of distrust.77 There seems to be no proof of a causal relation between his murder and the sense of economic grievance demonstrated in the reports and in owners’ petitions cited above. And it is quite difficult to connect the revolt’s anti-British stance to these local grievances.78 Rural violence in the Hebron area climaxed in Starkey’s murder by armed men, described in the British press, the Jewish press in Britain, 74 Saleh al Haj Hamad Abu Awad from al Qubeibe [sic] Village to Director of Antiquities, 4 May 1937, IAA, ATQ_54/6, Tell ed-Duwier, 2nd Jacket. 75 Hussein, Inspector of Antiquities to Director of Antiquities, 22 January 1941, IAA, ATQ_54/6, Tell ed-Duweir, 4th Jacket. 76 Police Division at Hebron to Assistant District Commissioner Hebron, 25 January 1940, IAA, ATQ_54/6, Tell ed-Duweir, 4th Jacket. On 12 March 1940, ‘Awda Ahmad Ibrahim undertook to uproot his trees. 77 Telegram, Richmond to Starkey, 8 October 1936; “Report of the Hebron Police”, 7 October 1936; Telegram, Starkey to Richmond, 9 October 1936; Purcell Gilpin, Assistant Superintendent of Police, Hebron Division, to Hamilton, 20 September 1938, all IAA, ATQ. 78 For an interesting attempt to solve the case, see Yosef Garfinkel, “The Murder of James Leslie Starkey near Lachish”, Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 148:2 (2016), 84–109.

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and the Hebrew press, as well as in some Arab newspapers, as “bandits” and “gangs”, “culprits” and “murderers”.79 They were most probably commanded by Issa al-Hajj Sulayman Battat, also known as ‘Isa al-Battat, of the town of adDhahiriya (al-Dahiriya) in the Hebron district, who controlled a local, ad hoc armed group.80 He was not captured during the extensive and publicized police and army searches conducted on the ground, door to door, and from the air, but was probably turned in later, captured, and killed during an escape attempt. What the murder exposed most was the sense of confusion, amongst the excavators and throughout the community of archaeologists in Palestine, and disbelief in the face of the failure of the development project and, by implication, of the mandate itself. The fact that at the time the murder was not publicly solved, and thus had no closure, made it even more bewildering. It proved difficult to narrate because from the moment it was reported to the Hebron police, there sprouted an abundance of “conflicting stories” about it which offered different interpretations of Starkey’s end and martyrdom.81 The term “conflicting stories” appears in an “Extra-Ordinary Report” to the Wellcome–Marston Fund signed by Tufnell and Charles Inge, who was to succeed Starkey as director of the expedition, on 31 January 1931. They give short shrift to the numerous press reports in Palestine and abroad and describe them as “grossly inaccurate”. Indeed, their role as narrators of the murder story is analogous to their work as archaeologists, a “process of sifting the various accounts” that produces a reconstruction of “the truth”.82 The high-profile search for the truth of the murder was also, indirectly, an inquiry into the truth of the mandate. Condemnation of the deed itself was almost universal and it was the incongruity between Starkey’s activity and image as a developer and modernizer on the one hand, and his violent end on the other hand, that drew most attention and comes across forcibly. He is repeatedly described as “harmless” and selfless, and as a “friend to the Arabs” and their welfare. Newspapers in different languages and of varied political hues, referred to earlier in the chapter, tended to depoliticize his work. However, in some newspapers (like al-Jami‘a al-Islamiyya), which repeatedly stressed that “all Arabs, in Palestine or abroad, have deplored [his] murder” and “no grudge was felt by anyone against Mr. Starkey who had never done any harm”, responsibility for the murder was laid on the mandate itself and on the colonial situation that claimed victims among the “innocent and sinful” alike. Al-Jami’a al-Islamiyya pinpointed the empire as responsible: “All Arabs 79 ‘Al Jami’a al islamiyya, 13 January 1938. 80 I am indebted to Ami Ayalon and Mustafa Kabha for their help in tracking the organization. For Arabic press coverage on the murder, see also Al-Ahram, 11 January 1938, 6; 12 January 1938, 4; and 14 January 1938, 4. Translations by Dotan Halevy. 81 On the contradicting reports on the murder, see “Extra Ordinary Report II”, 31 January 1931, WIA, WA/HSW/AR/LAC/B.13. 82 “Extra Ordinary Report II”, WIA, WA/HSW/AR/LAC/B.13.

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realise how powerful Great Britain is, but they realise too, that to annihilate nations is impossible.”83 The competing and indefinite versions and analyses of Starkey’s murder, as well as his work and life on Tell ed-Duweir that have been recovered here, let on the complex relationships and tensions between the interwar project of mandate archaeology, the discovery of antiquity, and mandate notions of modernity and politics. At the level of discovery, Tell ed-Duweir reaffirmed the illustrative scriptural framework of antiquity. Although its layered material history presented a rich sequence of cultures stretching from Neolithic to Hellenistic times, to contemporaries its culmination was the discovery of proofs of the rise and fall of a literate kingdom of Judah between the late eighth and the sixth centuries bc. The Lachish Letters made texts material and real. They also highlighted an antiquity in which the moment of cultural flourishing was also that of destruction and ruin. But the archaeological corroboration of the biblical story and the evidence from Assyrian sources clashed with some searches and usages of race as an interpretative tool of civilizational development. Work and research on the Tell demonstrate convergences of archaeology and fields of knowledge that were quantitative and apparently empirical—most notably anthropometrics and statistics, physical anthropology and Eugenics, but were suffused with theorizing about racial diffusion and conquest. Starkey himself does not seem to have shared such interpretations, but he was networked to the web of research that propounded them. Degrees of collaboration and tension characterize the triad of excavation and archaeology, the development of Palestine, and modernization as a main feature of the mandate. These are apparent on the ground in the excavators’ efforts at improving the life of villagers around the Tell and in their self- and projected image in writings and visual images. They embraced the mandate development project and cast themselves as agents of progress. They utilized modern machinery and drew on an array of visual technologies such as photography and film to record the excavation and life on the Tell. But they continued to depend on intensive gang labour which they juxtaposed to technological progress. Local collaboration was essential not only on the excavation and underground, but also in the bureaucratic machinery that regulated and operated the regime of antiquities: local inspectors and administrators mediated between the Antiquities Department and landowners. And expert knowledge, particularly epigraphic and philological knowledge that was only partly available at the time at British universities was offered by local Hebrew scholars and archaeologists, and the press. Relationships between the archaeologists, the government of Palestine, and the imperial administration in London were chequered. Starkey and his co-excavators fully identified with the idea and practices of the mandate as a development project and regarded

83 Starkey to Richmond, 24 March 1933, IAA, ATQ_54/6, Tell ed-Duweir, 2nd Jacket.

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themselves as its active agents, but did not officially represent it. They were temporary members of the community of mandatories in Palestine and did not belong to the apex of the heterogeneous and layered group of Britons in it: the “official community”.84 Nor did the imperial administration in London directly support the discovery project or finance it: it was sponsored throughout by private corporate capital and hyped by some of its holders and by the network of academic institutions and organizations with a particular interest in Palestine’s biblical past. Starkey may have been given a spectacular official funeral and made an imperial martyr, but the Colonial Office curtly refused to grant his widow a pension. When it was discovered that his bank account was overdrawn and his house was mortgaged, an icily polite William Ormsby-Gore, at that time Colonial Secretary, declined Marston’s pleas that the office and government of Palestine offer support to Starkey’s widow and children, stressing that “no assistance may be provided . . . as he was a private person”, despite the fact that Starkey “was approved under mandatory ordinances”.85 Succour was negotiated and found informally, thanks to the help of Neville Chamberlain (via Marston’s mediation) in the form of a civil pension to be paid to her during her children’s minority.86 The reference to Starkey as “private person” is curious. It was not as a private individual that he was shot, but as a symbol of British rule. The contrast between mandate rituals and the empire’s formal stand on the regime of antiquities and its economy, seems to reflect the imperial state’s broader role that is apparent in the regulation and control of antiquities: it became the owner of sites and lands declared historical and antique, but expropriated them on behalf of individuals and organizations who initiated the process and who also compensated owners. The set of hierarchical collaborations described here may not be reduced to a linear narrative of progress (and regress, to a breaking point terminating the excavations), nor can it be narrowed down to one of an anti-colonial conflict. It does illustrate the layers of the discovery of Tell ed-Duweir as Lachish, its reconstruction as a historical and material site, and the local, national, and imperial interpretations of its meanings.

84 Hagit Krik, “Colonial Lives: A Social and Cultural History in ‘Mandate A’ Territory Palestine 1920–1948”, PhD Diss. (Tel Aviv University, 2018) (Hebrew). 85 W. Ormsby-Gore to Charles Marston, 28 January1938, WIA, WA/HSW/LAC/B.13. 86 Marston to Neville Chamberlain, 31 January 1938 and C. G. L. Dyers (signed) to Marston(?), 8 March 1938, both WIA, WA/HSW/LAC/B.13.

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III

“ T HE MO ST A NC I E NT PAST ” : MESOP OTA MIA N A NT IQU I T I E S A N D MODE R NI T Y

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5

Ur Modernity and the Matter of Antiquity between Two World Wars

“Entomb’d Chaldean Kish and Ur” In 1929 Robert Seymour Bridges, Poet Laureate and aesthete, celebrated in his Testament of Beauty the “holocaust of treasure” found at the royal cemeteries discovered at Ur in southern Iraq and eulogized their excavator and publicist, Leonard Woolley, Who yesteryear sat down in Mesopotamy to dig out Abraham’s birthplace in the lorn grave-yard of Asian monarchies;—and low hummocks of dust betray where legendary cities lie entomb’d, Chaldaean Kish and Ur.1

Why should Bridges wax lyrical over Ur, reverting to archaisms (note his use of “lorn” and “yesteryear”)? At the time he lauded Woolley’s Mesopotamian finds. Mesopotamia’s ancientness and its archaeological treasures were at the centre of international attention. The mandated territory of Iraq was a hive of archaeological activity. A constant stream of Mesopotamian objects flowed from multiple excavation sites westward to be exhibited, studied, traded, and collected. The British and internationalist stances of this antiquities’ bonanza were celebrated by The Times on 29 August 1928 in an article on “Excavations in Iraq—Programme for the Autumn” announcing that “Never before have so many digging parties been engaged at one time there”. The list of archaeological collaborations includes a joint Anglo-American expedition at Kish, headed by Stephen Herbert Langdon, Professor of Assyriology at Oxford; the joint expedition of the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Penn Museum) to Ur, headed by Woolley; a joint Harvard University and ASOR expedition at Yorgan Tepe (Nuzi), near Kirkuk; a University of Michigan expedition near Ctesiphon; two German expeditions, at Ctesiphon and Warka (Erech/ Uruk); a joint Louvre and University of Pennsylvania expedition to Tell al-‘Ubaid 1 Cited in Winstone, Woolley of Ur, 175. Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and the Rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950. Billie Melman, Oxford University Press (2020). © Billie Melman. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198824558.001.0001

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and a planned expedition to Nineveh.2 Cross-national collaboration under mandate oversight is praised in “The Government of Iraq’s Report to the League of Nations on the ‘Progress of Iraq’ ”, penned in the midst of the British campaign to terminate the mandate and admit Iraq to the League as an independent state. The idiom of imperial progress is writ large in the entire report. The part on Iraq’s Department of Antiquities combines a paternalistic language with a commitment to internationalism, stating that notwithstanding local attitudes to antiquities that prize them according to their “cash value”, the government of Iraq had begun “to see that the uncovering and conserving of its archaeological treasures is a duty which it owes not only to its own people, but also to the world at large”.3 In addition to Anglo-American cooperation, the report cites thirteen archaeological expeditions, of which eight involve American collaboration, one is French, and one German.4 The report sidesteps the mounting interest among Iraqis—intellectuals, administrators, and educators—in the country’s past and its national and educative value.5 And it camouflages the negotiation between Iraqi elites and the mandatory power over access to, and the ownership of the past, and the eventual and gradual shift of the control of antiquities to the former.6 A year after independence, Al-Ahali, counting fifteen expeditions, noted that no country attracted as many archaeologists as Iraq but discarded the narrative of imperial cooperation. Iraq was always the scene of imperial conflicts, not of an international accord, between its successive occupying civilizations—from the Sumerian (considered as native to Mesopotamia nowadays) to the Arab. It was the seat of various mighty civilizations—Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman and that of the Arabs who are still here. Mongols and Tartars overrun it, then the Turks conquered it, and now the English occupy it . . . Our land being the cradle of civilization, archaeological missions, English, French, German and American made their way here while the Turks were still in power . . .

. . . “Now the English occupy it”. And since their arrival in the First World War, they had taken possession of national objects “to enrich their museums”.7 Similar to narratives of the history of Palestine discussed in Chapter  2, the nationalist narrative in Iraq as represented in Al-Ahali located the mandate in a long history of successive occupations, quite different from the mandate rhetoric of rescue,

2 “Excavations in Iraq—Programme for the Autumn”, The Times, 29 August 1928, 8. 3 Special 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 Progress of Iraq During the Period 1920–31, 248. 4 Ibid., 248–9. 5 James F. Goode, Negotiating for the Past: Archaeology, Nationalism, and Diplomacy in the Middle East 1919–1941 (Austin, TX, 2007), 185–223. 6 Ibid. 7 Al-Ahali, 13 May 1933. See also Max Mallowan Correspondence and Varia, 196.2, 62, BMA, MED.

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and cast the Ottoman Empire as a venerable and tolerant sovereign and the Ottoman past as a desired period to be cherished and preserved. The renewed post-war local, British, and international interest in Mesopotamia reverberated with older imaginings and representations of it.8 Ur had a special role in these imaginings. And it is this role and Ur’s spectacular discovery that so thrilled Bridges and his contemporaries. Ur had been envisioned long before it was dug up and acquired a material life. It had long been closely associated with Abraham’s genealogy in Genesis and with the biblical geography of his travels from the land of the Chaldees to Canaan. Ur’s materializing to a physical place took long and was intermittent. It was identified with Tell al-Muqayyar (“mount of pitch” in Arabic), in southern Mesopotamia in 1854 when, following a random visit to it by naturalist W. Kenneth Loftus, Britain’s consul to Basra, John G. Taylor, was appointed to excavate it for the British Museum.9 Taylor’s unearthing of cuneiform cylinders confirmed the identity of the mound as the site of Ur. Brief spells of excavation, by Reginald Campbell Thompson and H. R. Hall followed the First World War, but it was only after the joint expedition of the British Museum/ Penn Museum started work on the mound in 1922 that Ur burst on the expert archaeological and popular imagination and retained its hold on both. By the time that Bridges issued his 1929 celebration of the “holocaust of treasure”, Ur had been excavated for seven seasons. The excavations in its neighbouring mounds revealed the existence of even older settlements (notably Tell al-‘Ubaid ). Ur gained a physical, material life and came to be a privileged site of antiquity, a sensation, and a spectacle. It fascinated large audiences across the world, most notably Anglo-American audiences. Ur, the profusion of objects excavated in it during the expedition’s twelve seasons which ended in 1934, their distribution, display and discussion about them, all these demonstrate a familiar strand characterizing the culture of antiquity examined in earlier chapters but represent some additions to it. The discovery of Ur preserved and even enhanced the clout of Biblical Archaeology and the role of the Bible as a main point of reference in the post-war discussion on antiquity. Ur was consistently dubbed “the city of Abraham”, his birthplace, and thus the place of origin of the Israelites, despite the fact that there was no evidence that it had been, or that, indeed, the story of the patriarch could be associated with archaeological proof. But the preoccupation with Ur and with ancient Mesopotamian cultures acquired some distinct new features.

8 On Mesopotamia in British popular and elite imagination and British historical culture, see Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture; Malley, From Archaeology to Spectacle; Henrietta MacCall, “Rediscovery and Aftermath”, in Stephanie Dalley et al. (eds), The Legacy of Mesopotamia, 83–215; Michael John Seymour, “The Idea of Babylon: Archaeology and Representation in Mesopotamia”, PhD Diss. (University of London, 2006); Michael Seymour, Babylon: Legend, History and the Ancient City (London, 2014); and Melman, “The Power of the Past”, especially 479–80. 9 E. Taylor, “Notes on the Ruins of Muqeyer”, and “Notes on Abu Shahrein and Tel-el-Lahm”, both in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 15 (1855), 260–76 and 404–15, respectively. In the relevant publications he is erroneously listed as J. E. Taylor.

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First is the fascination with the material wealth of these cultures. Materiality was enhanced by the actual presence of an abundance of objects from Ur in Britain and the USA. This immediate presence drew attention, prestige, and cultural (and real) capital. Ur’s weight is also apparent in its setting in a context that expanded beyond its local and regional position and connected it and southern Mesopotamia to a network of Asian, African-Mediterranean, and Indian civilizations. The material culture of south Mesopotamia was now compared not only to Egypt’s but also to that of the Indus Valley. During the 1920s and early 1930s the riches exhumed at Ur were routinely described as equal to the treasures of the tomb of Tutankhamun. Furthermore, Mesopotamia was now deemed the most ancient Eastern civilization and the cradle of Egyptian and European civilizations. The prioritization of Mesopotamia in the age of sensational archaeological discoveries no doubt arose from the drive to make its archaeology competitive with Egyptian archaeology. However, Ur’s rise to the spotlight was much more than just a publicity strategy. A second feature of the preoccupation with, and uses of, Mesopotamian antiquity is the association between civilization and urban life, an association that impinged on the biblical narrative. As will be seen below, the pastoral and nomadic aspects of Abraham’s life were “urbanized” and Ur and, indeed, south Mesopotamia—regarded and represented as a civilization of cities, comparable to post-war Western civilization. Third, the de-pastoralization of biblical characters and places and of the biblical narrative went hand in hand with the relationship between antiquity and modernity: the material lives of the Sumerians and of Akkad were compared and likened to aspects in modern life. Last, but by no means least, the intense interest in Ur and uses of the Mesopotamian past were distinctly imperial and were inflected by Britain’s role in the invention and construction of a mandated Iraqi state after the Great War, thence in the foundation of an independent Iraq. The excavations in Ur roughly coincided with the mandate which came to an end in 1932. As students of both the mandate system and Iraqi nationalisms have noted, the archaeological–political nexus was particularly pronounced between 1921 and 1941, when British presence was quite visible.10 Before expanding on these four strands, it is necessary to situate Ur on a historical and geo-political map.

Ur: A Map In 1922, Ur lay half-way between Baghdad and the head of the Persian Gulf, about ten miles west of the ever-changing course of the Euphrates, north-east of the mound of Eridu and nearby the site of Tell al-’Ubaid. Changes in the course of rivers, and periods of droughts and climate changes, removed it from its initial 10 Goode, Negotiating for the Past, 185–223; see also Bernhardsson, Reclaiming a Plundered Past.

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waterfront position when the river flowed underneath its western walls. Aerial photographs of the Tell shot by the Royal Air Force represent a bird’s-eye view that reveal its size and prominence to a degree that was not detectable at ground level. The photographs, part of the RAF project of recording archaeological sites in the Mashriq and Egypt, drew on a variety of techniques to register the minute features of the terrain and the exposed built area. Figure 5.1, showing an aerial photograph of Ur, taken in 1927 by 84 Squadron, demonstrates the use of light and shadow to expose the layout of archaeological sites. At first glance the shot may appear to be a relief, reminiscent of ancient Mesopotamian ones. It shows Ur’s giant Ziggurat and the grid of the built city—including streets, public buildings, cemeteries, waterways, and the surrounding desert. Using the photographic technique of “shadow-sites”, developed in the 1920s, also reveals layers of settlement and disturbances (such as destruction or excavation) to the soil, as well as details that were invisible in broad daylight. These details seem to have been exposed to the aerial camera when shadows were cast by a “low” sun. The photograph, and quite a few others in the collection of Air Survey Photographs of archaeological remains, amassed by O. G. S. Crawford, Britain’s doyen of archaeological aerial photography, demonstrates the implementation of imperial aviation in the survey and recording of antiquities. It presents the aesthetics of the modern antique that associated ancient sites and objects to technologies of looking and recording which were distinctly modern, as well as to contemporary aesthetics. Ur’s air photographs also point at the inextricable relationship between military development and aerial survey—a major form of strategic control in Iraq in the 1920s, and the project of surveying and discovering antiquity. Ur’s prominence was apparent from ground level as well. Its eminence in the alluvial plain and arid landscape of southern Mesopotamia was noted by practically all travellers who reached it by car. But unlike the pilots, approaching it from above, they added a temporal dimension to their records and explicitly referred to the physical contrast between the Tell and the desert as analogous to the change from Mesopotamia’s glorious past to Iraq’s present. These juxtapositions are apparent in Woolley’s own panoramic description of the landscape which he recycled in his popular and professional writings on Ur. Ur’s surroundings are a “desolation” with a “melancholy prospect” “shrouded in dust and sand”11 in which only the Tells relieve the monotony of the vast plain over which the shimmering heat-waves dance and the mirage spreads its mockery of placid waters. It seems incredible that such a wilderness should have been habitable by man, and yet the weathered hillocks at one’s feet cover the temples and houses of a very great city.12 11 Leonard Woolley, “Introduction”, in Shirley Glubok (ed.), Discovering the Royal Tombs at Ur: Abridged and Adapted from Ur Excavations: The Royal Cemetery by C. Leonard Woolley (London, 1969), 11. 12 Leonard Woolley, Excavations at Ur: A Record of Twelve Years’ Work (London, 1954, repr. 1963), 11, and Ur of the Chaldees: A Record of Seven Years of Excavation (London, 1929, repr. 1938), xi.

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Figure 5.1 Ur from the air, 1927, taken by 84 RAF Squadron (common domain)

Desolation in the present is sharply contrasted with the fertility of the historic city: “It was a very different outlook in the old days about 2000 B.C.”13 And more explicitly: Only to those who have seen the Mesopotamian desert will this evocation of the ancient world seem well-nigh incredible. So complete is the contrast between 13 Glubok, Discovering the Royal Tombs, 15.

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the past and the present. The transformation of a great city into a tangle of shapeless mounds shrouded in drift-sand or littered with broken pottery and brick is not easy to understand, but it is yet more difficult to realize that the blank waste ever blossomed and bore fruit and sustenance of a busy world of men.14

Less dramatic, though in similar vein, are descriptions of the mound at first sight by visitors such as C. F. Clayton, Master of Clifton College,15 or long-time members of the archaeological team such as Max Mallowan, whose arrival in October 1925 to work as Woolley’s assistant launched his own career as an archaeologist: Not long before sunrise on the following morning we caught our first sight of the great mound of Ur. The Tell, as the Arabs called it, rose to a height of more than sixty feet above the plain, and consisted of a mixture of sand, mud and grit; we could see at a glance that this great monster was teeming with antiquities, and swollen with subterranean buildings of which a number had been exposed in the three seasons which preceded my arrival.16

To be sure, juxtaposition of the present and the past had been a characteristic of writing on Mesopotamia from at least the middle of the nineteenth century. Explorers, archaeologists, and antiquaries consistently posited the glories and power of Assyria and Babylon against the desolation surrounding their remnants and the stagnation and decline of Ottoman Mesopotamia.17 The land of the two rivers was imagined as a site of plenty, the locus of the biblical Eden, the granary of the ancient world, and the centre of a civilization that drew its power from a developed system of irrigation.18 Following the Mesopotamia campaign during the First World War, the land became a site of imperial visions and development programmes. And development was envisioned as reclamation and the restoration of its primacy in the “fertile crescent” as an agricultural economy, based on the harnessing of the rivers and desert to man’s needs.19 Biblical and classical images of plenty were augmented by archaeological discovery. But until the beginning of the twentieth century Mesopotamian archaeology focused on the later civilizations 14 Leonard Woolley, Abraham: Recent Discoveries and Hebrew Origins (London, 1936), 67. 15 Winstone, Woolley of Ur, 158–9. 16 Mallowan, Memoirs, 34. 17 Billie Melman, “The Bull of Nineveh: Antiquity and Modernity in Nineteenth Century Britain”, in Barbara Korte and Sylvia Paletschek (eds), Popular History Now and Then (Bielefeld, 2012), 31–55. 18 See Sir William Willcocks, From the Garden of Eden to the Crossing of the Jordan, 3rd edn (London, 1929). 19 Pryia Satia, “Developing Iraq: Britain, India and the Redemption of Empire and Technology in the First World War”, Past & Present, 197:1 (2007), 211–55. See also Edwyn Bevan, The Land of the Two Rivers (London, 1918); Valentine Chirol, ‘The Rewakening of the Orient’, in The Reawakening of the Orient and Other Addresses by Sir Valentine Chirol, Yusuke Tsuremi, Sir James Arthur Slater (New Haven, CT, 1925). The term “fertile crescent” was circulated by Henry Breasted. See Albert  J.  Clay, “The So-Called Fertile Crescent and Desert Bay”, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 44 (1924), 186–201.

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of Assyria and Babylon (mainly the later Assyrian and Babylonian empires),20 whose course of history and fate had been often depicted as a lesson to modern empires, and their demise—as the result of imperial stretch and overgrowth.21 Post-war archaeological and historical enterprises continued to display an interest in these civilizations, but are characterized by a surge of curiosity about older ones.22 The race for older, or the oldest, civilizations is apparent in Woolley’s digging at Ur, Stephen Langdon’s work at Jemdet Nasr, German Julius Jordan’s and Adam Falkenstein’s search for the oldest Mesopotamian civilization at Warka, and Mallowan’s work in northern Iraq and Syria at Tell Arpachiyah and Chagar Bazar, respectively. Ur presented to contemporaries a continuity of settlement from the Early (and unknown) Dynasty and an earlier human occupation, through the non-Semitic Sumerian civilization unearthed by Woolley, via Akkad and on to the Neo-Babylonian kingdom. Woolley’s periodization had already been seriously challenged during the 1920s and he was publicly and quite consistently blamed for pushing his chronology far too back in time. Notwithstanding the lack of accuracy, the overall scramble for the most distant past is notable and worth considering. At Ur the wealth of archaeological evidence proved a remarkable continuity of habitation, whose earliest remains were discovered at the bottom of the excavated “big shaft”, some fifty feet below the surface. The levels of stratified occupation discovered reached earlier than the 3rd Dynasty of Ur (now dated 2112–2004 bc), to the Early Dynastic era (c.2900–2300 bc), and 1st Dynasty of Ur (c.2500 bc), and earlier, to remnants including sequences of the Uruk IV (c.4000–3000 bc) and Jemdet Nasr/Uruk III (c.3100–c.2900 bc) periods.23 The sequence’s latest point in time reached the age of the last king of Babylon, Nabonidus (555–538 bc), himself a builder, an excavator, and the restorer of the city’s archaeological remains. The longevity of Sumerian material culture, the abundance of the finds, and the wealth they indicated, helped make it distinct and “exceptional” in an era of spectacular archaeological discoveries. Sumer and Babylon were now deemed comparable to Egypt, not only in the magnificence of the finds, but also in their antiquity. “Ancient Babylonia,” noted The Times on 13 March 1928, “now proves to have been as rich a home of the ornamental arts as Egypt, and to have 20 On the archaeological discovery of Mesopotamia, see Brian Fagan, Return to Babylon: Travellers, Archaeologists and Monuments in Mesopotamia (Boulder, CO, revised edn, 2007). See also Bernhardsson, Reclaiming a Plundered Past. 21 For the analogue see Melman, “The Power of the Past”. 22 For surveys of the development of Western archaeological work in Mesopotamia and later Iraq, see Potts, A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, vol. 1, 48–70, 87–106; Stefan Hauser, “German Research on the Ancient Near East and the Relation to Political and Economic Interests from the Kaisereich to WWI”, in Wolfgang G. Schwanitz (ed.), Germany and the Middle East 1870–1914 (Princeton, NJ, 2004), 155–81. 23 For currently acceptable periodization, see Amélie Kuhrt, The Ancient Near East c.3000–330 BC (London, 1995); Marc Van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, CA 3000–323 BC, 3rd edn (Malden, MA, 2016). I thank Yoram Cohen for his advice on the periodization.

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developed those arts much earlier.” Moreover, “Old as these newly found objects are, they imply yet an older period of artistic efflorescence.”24 And even earlier: the unearthing of the Royal Cemeteries at Ur “illustrated further the extraordinary degree of material civilization which Mesopotamia enjoyed in the fourth millennium B.C. showing how much in advance this country was of contemporary Egypt.” Furthermore, “the art of that day was already old and stereotyped” and reproduced originals already hundreds of years old by the time of their reproduction.25 Woolley repeatedly noted Ur’s superiority to Egypt in both age and civilization. This view, which was largely based on his controversial chronology, enabled him to reconstruct a hierarchy of antiquity that relativized Egypt and other ancient civilizations such as archaic (not to mention classical) Greek civilization. As he noted in his 1929 best-seller Ur of the Chaldees: Until recently it was thought that Egyptian civilization was the oldest in the world and that it was the fountain-head wherefrom the later civilizations of other western countries drew at any rate the inspiration which informed them. But in 3500 B.C. Egypt was still barbarous, divided into petty kingdoms not yet united by ‘Menes’ the founder of the First Dynasty into a single state. When Egypt does make a start, the beginnings of the new age are marked by the introduction of models and ideas which derive from that older civilization which, as we know now, had long been developing and flourishing in the Euphrates valley, and to the Sumerians we can trace much that is at the root not only of Egyptian, but also of Babylonian, Assyrian, Hebrew and Phoenician art and thought, and so see that the Greeks also were in debt to this ancient and for long forgotten people, the pioneers of the progress of Western man.26

His ideas about the place and role of Mesopotamia in a chain of civilizations were further drummed up on such platforms as the Illustrated London News (ILN) which, like The Times, regularly publicized the excavations at Ur and visualized, often in colour, its treasures. The ILN had, since its launch, documented archaeological discovery in Mesopotamia and propagated the Victorian cult of Assyria and Babylon. It covered Layard’s discoveries, followed their flow to the British Museum and recorded the construction of the Museum’s Assyrian collection, becoming a popular encyclopaedia of Mesopotamian antiquities, literally “illustrating” them and mediating between high- and low-brow representations of Assyrian monuments and artefacts. Throughout its history it was also the mouthpiece of modern technologies and material culture.27

24 “Sumerian Secrets”, The Times, 13 March 1928, 17. 25 The Times, 12 January 1928, 11. 26 Woolley, Ur of the Chaldees, 63–4. 27 On the ILN and the rediscovery of Mesopotamia, see Malley, From Archaeology to Spectacle; Melman, “The Bull of Nineveh”; and Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture. On the ILN and urban

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The attempt to contest the longevity of Egypt’s antiquity and its place in a hierarchy of ancient civilizations is noteworthy precisely because of its prominence in historical culture from at least the 1880s. By the 1920s the culture of antiquity became Egyptocentric. The 1920s and early 1930s witnessed one of the most intense phases of popular Egyptomania, during the spread of the Tutankhamun craze in popular fiction, the cinema, style, fashion, design, and architecture. Ancient Egypt also occupied centre stage in a world view and analyses of human history that developed in the social and human sciences, particularly in anthropology and archaeology, and offered a meta-narrative and interpretation of human progress—or its reversal—in time and place. Conveniently described as diffusionism, the apparently scientific interpretation set out to examine the dynamics of cultural development and prominence by tracing the transfer or diffusion of culture, mainly material culture, across continents and time. Unlike the idea of an independent and multifocal development of artefacts and technologies, the British school of diffusionism, known as Hyperdiffusionism, upheld the notion that cultures diffused from one centre and regarded Egypt as the origin of ancient Mediterranean civilization and, via it, modern European civilization. Archaeological finds in Egypt served anthropologists such as W. H. R. Rivers and Grafton Elliot Smith to sustain their grand theories on diffusion.28 The attempt to reposition Ur as, literally, an ur-civilization, the cradle of all future cultures and the origin of Western civilization and humanity, challenged some currents in archaeological and anthropological discourses. The challenge to Egypt-centrism and the attempt to shift the focus to Mesopotamia thus manifest broader preoccupations, to do with the boundaries of antiquity, its temporality, and impact on modern culture. As the ILN noted, the excavation at Ur “compels us to revise our ideas of the antiquity of civilization, and therefore throws more light on history and prehistory than even the great discoveries of Lord Carnarvon in Egypt”.29 Comparison between ancient cultures and a relativist view of their origins and histories extended beyond Egypt, across the Persian Gulf, to the Indus Valley civilizations that were first exposed and dug up after the war, at the same time as Ur. The excavations at Ur’s Royal Cemeteries produced abundant evidence of the importation to it of metals, including gold and silver, semi-precious stones such as carnelian and lapis lazuli, from western India and parts of Afghanistan, as well as utensils originating in Indian prehistoric civilizations. Ur’s connections thus

modernity, see Nead, Victorian Babylon; Billie Melman, London: Place, People and Empire 1800–1960, 2nd edn (Tel Aviv, 2014) (Hebrew). 28 Daniel, The Idea of Prehistory, particularly “Diffusion and Distraction”, 88–108; Gange, Dialogues, 277–80; and David Paul Crook, Grafton Elliot Smith, Egyptology and the Diffusion of Culture: A Biographical Perspective (Eastburn, 2012). More on diffusion in Chapters 4 and 8. 29 C.K.A., “The Cradle of Civilization: Being an Appreciation of ‘Ur Excavations: The Royal Cemetery’ by C. Leonard Woolley”, ILN, 24 February 1932, 274.

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expanded not just temporally—farther back in time, but also spatially—further to the East. It was represented not only as the well-developed granary of the ancient world, but also as a thriving maritime and commercial power, the hub of trade between continents and between technologically developed cultures. Ur’s material culture was directly connected to the civilizations of Mohenjo-Daro (literally the Mound of the Dead) at Sind and Harappa in the Punjab, also known as the Harappan civilizations, that prospered between the twenty-seventh and nineteenth centuries bc, first excavated by Sir John Marshall during the 1920s and early 1930s. The two mounds were characterized as well-organized and planned urban centres sharing with Sumer an array of technologies from the wheel to the canalization of rivers. Woolley himself kept the commercial and cosmopolitan image of Ur alive by repeatedly referring to “Fresh link[s] between Ur and Mohenjo-Daro [sic] discovered time and again” in the excavations in the former.30 Marshall, too, hailed “A New Chapter in archaeology” in the discovery of the prehistoric civilization of the Indus and the parallel development of the cities across the Indian Ocean, the forms of habitation in them, and their material cultures.31 Woolley, like Marshall and others among their contemporaries, presents a notion of Mesopotamian antiquity that is expansive, global, and imperial, and that fits well in post-war imperial visions of Iraq’s past and future within the British Empire. Each belonged to a different imperial archaeological regime: John Hubert Marshall was a part of the administration of India and served as Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India—effectively Director General of its archaeology, between 1902 and 1928. His term and role in modernizing the excavation and conservation of Indian antiquities covered a period of Anglo-Indian collaboration during the war, the post-war reforms in government, and the rise of Indian nationalism. Woolley had no part in the government of Iraq, but his career in intelligence had been enmeshed with his work as an archaeologist, like T.  E.  Lawrence’s. Before the war he directed excavations at Carchemish for the British Museum—with T.  E.  Lawrence as his aide—and in early 1914 they embarked on a survey of the so-called Wilderness of Zin in the Negev desert in Palestine, purportedly to map archaeological sites for the PEF, but actually mapping Ottoman military infrastructures. During the war he served as an intelligence officer in the Royal Navy and after the war he rendered occasional services to the Colonial Office. Marshall and Woolley’s notion of interconnectivity between the cultures of Mesopotamia and India, across a common sea, in many ways manifests the vision of an economic development of Mesopotamia harboured in the aftermath of the 30 Leonard Woolley, “A Fresh Link between Ur and Mohenjo-Daro”, ILN, 13 February 1932, 274. 31 John Marshall (ed.), Mohenjo Daro and the Indus Civilization: being an Official Report of Archaeological Excavations Carried out by the Government of India between the Years 1922 and 1927 (London, 1931), vols. 1–2; Marshall, “A New Chapter in Archaeology: The Prehistoric Civilization of the Indus”, ILN, 7 January 1928.

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British failure in the battle of Kut al-Amara (1915–16) and during the early 1920s. Central to this vision was a concept of the development of Iraq by the imperial periphery in India, acting as proxy for the metropole, and it cast India and Indians as proxy imperialists, the producers of transport technologies fitting the physical conditions of Mesopotamia and its rivers. Indian capital and technologies were regarded as suitable instruments for Iraq’s restoration and the new vision could be accommodated in the policy that located it in the Indian Empire. By the time the Ur excavations began, British Mesopotamian policies had taken a decisive turn: “Arab”-oriented policies and separation from the government of India were put to work and a modern state of Iraq was invented.32 Lawrence was amongst its chief advocates. The discoveries of Sumerian culture bolstered notions of Ur as the centre of a Mesopotamian–Indian area. Woolley, with typical panache, recorded the evidence of figures, seals and inscriptions, beads, and other utensils manufactured at Mohenjo-Daro and found at Ur’s Royal Cemeteries and, also typically, rendered the description contemporary by using a recognizable vocabulary applicable to modern initiative and colonial trade: “By Sargon (of Akkad) trade between Sumer and the Indus Valley had attained such proportions that Indian business firms at Mohenjo-Daro or other towns there found it worthwhile to have their Indian agents in residence in the towns of the Euphrates Valley.”33

Cities of Abraham: Rewriting Biblical Histories of Ur At first sight, the discovery of Ur’s commercial overseas connection, particularly its connection with the Indus Valley civilizations, may seem at odds with the biblical narratives and foundational myths. In these narratives Ur was represented as the birthplace of the first patriarch and the history of ancient Israel—as a family story of migration from Mesopotamia and resettlement in Canaan. The familial story was connected to the story of the rise of a god-elected people, monotheism, and the advent of the three revealed religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Another constitutive biblical narrative, the story of the Flood, was further cemented during the 1870s when the Sumerian origins of the story in Genesis were confirmed. George Smith’s translation of Tablet 11 of the Epic of Gilgamesh that contained the story of the Flood, was first publicized when it was read by him to the Society of Biblical Archaeology (founded in 1870), one of Britain’s foremost platforms for biblical studies, and an audience that included William Gladstone. Both the occasion and platform served to boost the biblical framework of 32 Charles Townshend, When God Made Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia and the Creation of Iraq, 1914–1921 (London, 2010); Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied (New York, NY, 2003); Zaki Saleh, Britain and Mesopotamia (Iraq) to 1914: A Study of British Foreign Affairs (Baghdad, 1966). 33 Woolley, Excavations at Ur, 113.

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interpretations of the history and archaeology of Mesopotamia. The biblical narratives retained their appeal during the war and its aftermath. They did not just coexist with the new imperial conception of ancient Mesopotamia as a maritime trading centre that fitted the image of the British mandate in Iraq; they remained a template of representations of Ur, the publicity surrounding its excavation, and Ur’s hold on the popular imagination. As Woolley’s contemporaries, such as Mallowan, noted, Woolley’s own ecclesiastical background and training, comparable to that of a number of archaeologists, made it possible for him to utilize a thriving vernacular Bible culture.34 Notwithstanding its persistence, the biblical template was revised and modernized. Before assessing its revision, let us survey its manifestations. The association, identification even, of the rediscovered Ur with Abraham was ubiquitous and manifested Biblical Archaeology’s central feature: the use of material remains to illustrate the textual veracity of the Bible. The biblical story of Abraham’s migration and conversion was appropriated by archaeologists, other experts, and the media, and was appended to the actual finds. His figure was constantly evoked to designate the uniqueness of a variety of Mesopotamian cultures—Semitic and non-Semitic. He became a composite figure, representing an assemblage of personal, religious, and racial features, as well as a tag for commercializing and “selling” Mesopotamian antiquity, at the same time that he and Ur were represented as “modern”. The mobilizing power of the biblical narrative was first realized by the archaeologists themselves and by epigraphists, not least by Woolley and the Assyriologist and cuneiform specialist Reverend Father Eric Burrows. Woolley drove hard the identification of Ur with Abraham, stretching the relationship between “scientific” archaeological proof and the biblical text, and using conjecture to make connections between them. His popular writing and radio talks, and even his writing for experts, ooze with such conjectures and a tension between textual—that is biblical—Mesopotamia and the material one. This tension is apparent in the eponymously titled Abraham: Recent Discoveries and Hebrew Origins, published in 1935 and popularizing some of the Ur finds and relating them to the Pentateuch. On the one hand, Woolley explicitly noted that the Mesopotamian excavations produced neither material nor written record on Abraham and raised questions about the patriarch’s historicity. He even pointed at the paucity of biblical reference to his Mesopotamian roots. On the other hand, he maintained that the aim of excavation was to illustrate and expand on literary records of the past even when they did not “meet them on definite statements”. Expansion transpired to be rather elastic, for throughout the book, which surveys

34 Mallowan, Memoirs, 34–5. On the connection between education and training for the Church and approaches to the story of Abraham, see Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origins of Its Sacred Texts (Tel Aviv, 2003) (Hebrew).

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Ur’s geography, layout and remains, economy, and government, it is the “bearing” of its characteristics on Abraham’s alleged life in Palestine (Woolley’s term) that is discussed. Thus, Woolley presents a personalized, historical, and Mesopotamian patriarch whose origins shape his beliefs and subsequently Judeo-Christian beliefs. As we shall see shortly, at the same time this ur-father-figure of Western monotheism is also a prototype of the modern urban man. The run for evidence on a historical Abraham of Ur is apparent from Woolley’s secret correspondence in 1928 with such prominent figures in the archaeological establishment as Sir Frederic Kenyon. Woolley divulged to him Eric Burrows’s search for the patriarch’s name on a tablet “of the right period and in Semitic”, that “might be a reference to the patriarch”, urging for secrecy and concluding that “A generally accepted document of Abraham would be an asset indeed.”35 Later the secret was apparently leaked by Mallowan who allegedly reported the hopeful find to his mother.36 Burrows, a Jesuit, a member of the famous post-war Campion College, and a prominent disciple of S. H. Langdon, had already established a reputation as an authority on the early religious and legendary literature of Mesopotamia by the time he joined the excavations at Ur. He undoubtedly lent respectability to the moot attempt to prove Abraham’s authenticity. Effective distribution of the biblical narrative and the illustration of the Bible depended on the Anglo-American press and the radio. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Ur’s antiquity was identified, temporally and thematically, with “The Times of Abraham” and their culture (Figure 5.2). A Times article, dated 4 January1927, on tablets discovered in the remains of houses at Ur, referred to their dating “from just about the time when Abraham was living at Ur”. On 26 January, a photograph of a street dug up at Ur was captioned “A Street that Abraham knew”.37 On 5 January 1931, a group of residential houses was thought to “give a consistent picture of Ur of the Abrahamic age”. The Republican of Springfield, Massachusetts, propounded that “Abraham the Prophet is believed to have lived at Ur”.38 But the biblical story was effectively revised. And the archaeological evidence made this revision and its circulation possible. The Abrahamic story, both as the narrative of an individual household and its migration from Mesopotamia via Harran (Şanlıurfa) and Palestine (referred to in popular renditions including Woolley’s as Canaan), and as the story of the development of monotheism and modern civilizations, was now rewritten as an urban and even a metropolitan story. As already noted, and as Woolley himself conceded, the bulk of the biblical narrative was set in Palestine and almost all of the patriarch’s life and, for that 35 Woolley to Kenyon, 5 December 1928, BMA, MED, WY1 13/58–71. 36 Woolley to Kenyon, 9 January1929, BMA, MED, WY1/13/64. For Kenyon’s repost, see 22 December 1928, BMA, MED, WY1/13/69. 37 Leonard Woolley, “Discoveries at Ur People’s Homes in the Time of Abraham”, The Times, 4 January 1927, 9; and “The Street that Abraham Knew”, The Times, 26 January 1927, 16. 38 “Original Home of Abraham”, The Republican, 18 May 1930.

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Figure 5.2 “A Street scene at Ur at the Level of the Abrahamic Period”, a postcard, with workers standing for scale (courtesy of Penn Museum)

matter, the lives of all the patriarchs, were depicted as nomadic lives, marked out by their itinerant and pastoral lifestyle as shepherds and minders of livestock, rather than the settled life of peasants. In the imagination of travellers and other contemporaries they were comparable to Bedouin life. Woolley revised the lifestory of Abraham and transformed him into a city-dweller, the civilized and sophisticated resident of a populous metropolis. He was the “citizen” of a world city.39 Abraham, Woolley argued, Now emerges a very different person from the Arab Sheik of the Old Testament, and beneath the Bedouin cloak it is possible to see the civilized offspring of a great city; instead of being an unexplained phenomenon, the begetter of a nation but himself without roots in the past, he takes his place in the rational process evolution, and in estimating his character and his achievement we must make due allowance for his debt to Ur.40

At the same time that Abraham is de-pastoralized, he is de-orientalized. His image is detached from that of the Sheik which was quite potent in popular literature and film during the 1920s, and is rendered urban in two senses: he is both civilized and metropolitan.41

39 Woolley, Abraham, 143. 40 Ibid., 18. 41 On the image of the Sheik, see Billie Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs (London, 1988), 89–105.

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The image of the patriarch as a citizen of the (Western) world gained immediate success in the Anglo-American press which abounds with references to Abraham’s connections to Ur. This connection, The Enquirer has pointed out, would intrigue every intelligent reader and have a special value to the Bible student.42 As the Public Ledger of Philadelphia noted, “If Woolley’s version is correct, Abraham is revised: he is not a nomadic sheep trader with the background of a Bedouin Sheik but the citizen of a great city and inherited the traditions of an ancient and highly organized civilization.”43 Archaeology testified to Ur’s urban characteristics which matched those of Mesopotamian civilizations at large. Indeed, from the beginning of the archaeological discovery of these lost civilizations throughout the long nineteenth century, the sites of Mesopotamia’s city states served as intersections where authoritative texts, mainly the Scriptures but also classical texts, Bible studies, and notions about modern urbanization—met. The widespread interest, fascination even, with Babylon and Nineveh, resonate with the preoccupation with urbanization and its relationship to imperial growth. Ancient empire cities were connectable to modern mega cities that were also the capitals of outsize empires. Moreover, from the early nineteenth century urbanization was recognized as a main feature of modernity. The unprecedented growth and development of cities in Britain was associated with other features of modernity, mostly with the use of new technologies, the rise of industrial capitalism and, as already indicated, imperialism. The expansion of mega cities, often perceived as an overstretch and as dangerous overdevelopment, stood for both a sense of the benefits of progress and a deep anxiety about it.44 Here, too, the rise to power of Mesopotamian cities and their collapse and disappearance served as an analogue to the modern empires centred in Western metropolises. As I have shown elsewhere, the culture of history that developed in Britain from about 1800 until the mid twentieth century was urban in the sense that it was steeped in urban events and settings, and represented the past in a rich variety of urban genres and spectacles. The past was “imagined as a city”.45 As a number of studies have recently shown, the Bible offered an unusual variety of cities which preoccupied nineteenth-century scholarship and the popular imagination. The study of their archaeology and material culture helped bolster the authority of texts—not least the scriptural texts.46 Ur differed from some Mesopotamian urban civilizations discovered during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unlike the capitals of the neo-Assyrian 42 The Enquirer, 25 January 1931, BMA, MED, WY1/16/8/2, Woolley Archive, Box 6. 43 “New Discoveries on the City of Abraham”, BMA, MED, Public Ledger (n.d.), WY1/16/41/6. 44 Pike, Subterranean Cities; Nead, Victorian Babylon; David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (London and New York, 2003). 45 Melman, The Culture of History; Billie Melman, “Horror and pleasure: History Culture and Modernity in the Long Nineteenth Century”, Proceedings of the Israeli Academy of Sciences, 9:8 (2013), 177–205. 46 Gange and Ledger-Lomas, Cities of God.

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empire, Nimrud (Kalhu), Khorsabad (Assyrian Dur-Sharrukin), and Nineveh (“modern” Kouyunjik) that had been first excavated in the 1840s, and Babylon, it did not necessarily stand for military might and expansion. And it could be detached from the biblical narratives of conquest, destruction, subjugation, and exile. Of course, excavations exposed Ur’s neo-Babylonian history, but the turn to the older, Sumerian past had the potential of removing it from the familiar narratives of devastation, corrupt power, and sin. This also allowed for the stress, particularly in popular culture, on its economy, commercial characteristics, law, organization, and lifestyle. Ur was continuously depicted as a thriving metropolis with imperial ties, a “great manufacturing city”, a trading maritime centre “with extensive connections all over the East, and perhaps all over the known world”.47 It was occasionally described as a planned and regulated—that is, rationally— run, city. This image, in short, coalesced with visions of modern urban planners. Ur’s (grossly overrated) population was sometimes estimated at a quarter of a million citizens within its walled precincts and “far spreading suburbs”. And it could not be maintained on agriculture alone but depended on manufacture and overseas (including Indian) commerce.48

Queen Puabi’s Headdress: Splendour, Death, and Modernity Alongside the interest in biblical Ur, and sometimes intermingled with it, there evolved popular curiosity about the spectacular riches which the excavations exposed. The excavation of cemeteries, including about 2,000 common burials and some sixteen “royal graves” or pits, released a flow of artefacts that were widely discussed and publicized. The abundance of artefacts, their craftsmanship, and the technologies of production they testified to, turned Ur into a spectacle comparable to that of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Moreover, this abundance created a world of objects that conjured up images of ancient Mesopotamian culture as artistic and tasteful, and made this culture tangible and relatable to modern arts and taste. At the same time, however, the splendours discovered at the Royal Cemeteries revealed unusual burial customs that proved the existence of human sacrifice in the interment of Sumerian royals and dignitaries. The combination of splendour and barbarity, of material riches and ritual killing, not evidenced in Sumerian civilization of other periods, enhanced the appeal of Ur to varied and vast audiences. And it definitely sensationalized antiquity. What struck contemporaries most was the “degree of wealth and comfort” unearthed in the graves. Most fascinating was the abundance of precious metals, like silver and gold, and quantities of precious or semi-precious stones found 47 C.K.A., “The Cradle of Civilization”, 304. 48 Woolley, Abraham, particularly “Ur in the Time of Abraham: Social Conditions”, 118–42.

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strewn around the crumbling remains of humans buried alive. Gold, used as thin leaf over copper, or solid, had the greatest effect. On 31 January 1927, Woolley wrote to George Byron Gordon, director of Penn Museum, with satisfaction: “we are turning up gold objects literally every day, and good ones at that.” Gold turned up “even before breakfast”.49 The excavators were dazzled by “the carpet” of gold leaf of the ornamented headdresses of the court women buried in the shafts and a profusion of lapis lazuli and carnelian stones. Golden or ornamented objects dating from between 2400 and 2200 bc, sifted from the profusion, immediately acquired the status of icons of wealth and taste: a golden dagger intact in a latticework sheath, lyres and their sound-boxes, the so-called Standard of Ur (now at the British Museum), and objects for daily use such as cups, amulets, jewellery, toiletry items, and gaming boards.50 The most widely appealing and most publicized objects were the headdress of Puabi, a female grandee, whose name was incorrectly read as Queen Shub ad, and a gold helmet belonging to Meskalamdug, identified as a king.51 Puabi’s elaborate reconstructed headdress became international headline material. It was described and displayed not just as an antiquity—a Sumerian object whose value lay in its age—but also as a living artefact, associated with the woman who had been buried wearing it. The headdress and the buried Sumerian noblewoman literally materialized as readers and viewers followed the assembling and restoration of their fragments—they were reproduced in photographic images in newspapers and exhibited at the British Museum and at Penn Museum. Once reconstructed and transformed from in situ remains to an assembled (and whole) artefact, the headdress was, like numerous other archaeological objects, related to modern taste, style, and fashion. The reconstruction earned a frontpage spot in the ILN in a full-page, black and white photograph with the caption: “The Golden Head-dress of Queen Shub-Ad (later read as Puabi): A Remarkable Reconstruction of a 5000-year-old Coiffure Found at Ur, on a Head Modelled from a Nearly Contemporary Sumerian Female Skull.” The same photograph and caption appeared in colour two months later.52 It showed Puabi’s reconstructed head, modelled in wax over a plaster cast made from a female skull of the period assumed to have been hers, and fitted with an outsize black wig, topped with three wreathes of gold leaves. The “ancient” golden comb fixed to the back of the construction seemed reminiscent of a modern “Spanish comb”, “popular in Victorian England” (Figure 5.3).53 Notwithstanding the rarity and remoteness of 49 Woolley to Gordon, 31 January 1927, BMA, MED, WY1/7/7. 50 The Times, 15 February 1927, 11. For a summary of the finds in her grave, see Letter by Woolley, name of addressee not clear, 30 January 1928, BMA, MED, WY1/4/72b. 51 Initially referred to as “Queen Shub-ad”, Puabi was identified subsequently by a cylinder seal attached to her right arm. More recently, the “queen” has been assumed to have been “a lady” or a priestess to the moon god. See https://www.penn.museum/collections/highlights/neareast/puabi.php and http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?object Id=368239&partId=1&matcult=9036&sortBy=imageName&page=1, last accessed 8 September 2018. 52 ILN, 30 June 1928; 11 August 1928. 53 ILN, 24 February 1928.

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Figure 5.3 “The Golden Head-dress of Queen Shub-Ad: A Remarkable Reconstruction of a 5000-year-old Coiffure Found at Ur”. Puabi’s reconstructed head, Illustrated London News, 11 August 1928 (courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Gallery)

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the ancient Sumerian artefacts, they were rendered familiar and contemporary by repeated analogues to modern materials and objects. Bricks were compared to their modern equivalents, jewels and toiletry items to contemporary ornaments and cosmetic items, and sculptured figures, like an electrum figure of an ass, was the “Sumerian prototype of the modern motor car mascot” (Figure 5.4)54 Puabi’s reconstructed head, made by Katharine Woolley, the archaeologist’s wife, projected modernity. At the same time, it was endowed with authenticity by Sir Arthur Keith who described it as a faithful rendition reproducing the characteristics of the early Sumerians.55 But scientific approval did not settle the question of how Puabi really looked: less than a year after the display of Katherine Woolley’s reconstruction at the British Museum, Father Léon Legrain, the eminent expedition’s epigraphist and a curator at Penn, constructed a new mannequin and rearranged the queen’s accoutrements (Figure 5.5).56 Nor was this the last lookalike of Puabi: further findings and controversies about her identity reproduced more versions of the headdress. Its visual biography and public displays since the discovery clearly demonstrate how an archaeological object was reconstructed and transformed from a thing characterized by its age to a physical artefact, thence to a visual image, one that derived its iconic status not only from its antiquity but also from an aesthetics which was regarded as compatible with modern aesthetics and its display potential. Puabi’s afterlife indicates that archaeological objects, indeed antiquities, are not absolute, completed things or facts, but things in the making, whose power derives from their translation into images. Puabi was revealed to spectators, endowed with a biography, and named. She was also gendered and given a face that was coiffured and made up, unlike Meskalamdug, whose gold helmet, dated 2600 bc, was not attached to a mannequin and who remained faceless. The appeal of Ur’s material riches was augmented by their ineradicable association with mass death: Puabi, like other Sumerian grandees, was buried with supplies and personal objects to sustain her in the afterlife and with her female retinue, guards, and livestock. The remnants of human mass sacrifice that had no corroboration in written Mesopotamian myth or other written evidence engendered a mixture of responses: on the one hand the source and origin of all civilizations, the ur culture was cast as barbaric; on the other hand, Ur’s early culture of death was represented as exotic and the horror its rituals evinced as sensational and even titillating. Horror was reproduced in the obsessive coverage of the excavations

54 Ibid. 55 For detailed descriptions of the head and headdress, see also Woolley, Ur of the Chaldees, 41–2; and Woolley, Excavations at Ur, 3rd edn, 66–7. 56 For a discussion of Puabi as an aesthetic object, see Kim Benzel, “What Does Puabi Want (Today): The Status of Puabi as Image”, in Jennifer  Y.  Chi and Pedro Azara (eds), From Ancient to Modern: Archaeology and Aesthetics. The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University and Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ, 2015), 132–60.

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Figure 5.4 Antique modern: A Sumerian hair ornament reminiscent of a Spanish hair-comb (centre) popular in Victorian England and a Sumerian prototype of the modern motor-car mascot (bottom right), Illustrated London News, 3 February 1934 (courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Gallery)

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Figure 5.5 Father Léon Legrain reconstructing Puabi’s (Queen Shub-ad’s) headdress, 1929 (courtesy of Penn Museum)

in the royal pits and the reconstruction of the process of the death of the victims and the burial of their bodies. Sensationalism was cultivated by Woolley himself and was worked up in the popular press which returned again and again to the subject of human sacrifice and circulated explanations of its rationale. Illustrations, photographs of the process of the excavation of the death pits, reconstructions of the dying processions and killings, and drawings of the ground plans of the burial chambers abounded. Excess is also apparent in the details of descriptions, the headlines of articles and captions of the visuals that harp on the combination of a gory death and riches. Woolley’s report for the ILN, published on 26 January 1926, captures this combination in the title “Sumerian Art and Human Sacrifice: Archaeological Riches of the Ur ‘Death-Pit’ containing 74 Skeletons.” The entire report is arranged around the pit’s ground plan which reconstructs the positions of the skeletons and resurrects them, making them “alive” (Figure 5.6). The caption reads: “An appalling Record of Human Sacrifice at the Mass [Grave]: A Ground Plan of the Death-Pit at Ur.” The photograph below the plan shows the removal of the gold objects from the soil by the excavators.57 The same combination 57 ILN, 26 January 1929, 134.

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Figure 5.6 The Death-Pit, PG 1237, Royal Cemeteries Ur. Woolley’s drawing of the position of bodies (courtesy of Penn Museum)

and the themes of horror and sensationalism are recycled: “Wholesale Human Murder at Ur: A Revelation of Unrecorded Barbarities Published at Royal Burials 5000 Years Ago”; “Art Treasures of the Death-Pit at Ur: Sacrificed Women’s Adornments: Harps and Daggers” (harping on the gender of victims); and so on and so forth.58 Death was made alive in reconstructions, by archaeologists and artists, of the scenes preceding it which recovered the death procession and sometimes the drinking of poison by the future victims. The reconstructions rendered

58 ILN, 23 June 1928, 1171; 26 January 1929, 136.

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the finds and death itself “authentic”, veritable and identifiable. The ILN included Amédée Forestier’s pictorial restoration of the burial “as faithful as may be” of the scene in the shaft of the grave just before the sacrifice took place, “based on the ground plan”.59 It brought to life “The scene a few moments before the ritual murder was performed and the victims were stretched out where we found their mouldering skeletons more than 5000 years later.”60 Fascination with death ceremonials in antiquity was hardly new. A long-term interest in ancient cultures of death and mourning had shaped Western attitudes to burial and the afterlife, new practices and trends in forms of burial, and the design and layout of cemeteries and funerary architecture.61 Moreover, Mediterranean and Eastern death cults informed and were represented in fiction, poetry, and thought. As a number of literary, cultural, and art historians have amply demonstrated, ancient death cults, mourning, and repertoires of beliefs in the afterlife spread far beyond circles of aesthetes and experts like Egyptologists, students of Mesopotamia, and Indologists, and ignited considerable popular interest. Note, for example, the mummy mania that developed from the early Victorian era, the huge interest in burials in al-Amarna and the curiosity about Egyptian death cults and burial practices reignited by the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun.62 His tomb bore no evidence of the sacrificial death attested to at Ur, but it revived interest in the occult and started an upsurge of rumours regarding the “curse of the pharaohs” on modern living people. Unlike the Egyptian graves, the mass graves in the pits at Ur were relatable to new cults of death and burial that evolved after the Great War. Unprecedented mass killing during the war, particularly on the Western Front, but also on the Eastern Front (in Gallipoli for example) took place in trenches, associable to underground digs, or in arid places (in Mesopotamia most notably during the Campaign at Kut al-Amara). The war made death a part of everyday life and experience; it created a new language of death and bereavement and a new culture of memory, commemoration, and mourning that has been thoroughly investigated.63 Furthermore, as Jay Winter, Annette Becker, and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau have shown, the bereavement caused by the war enhanced popular belief in the afterlife, the supernatural, and the psychic, apparent in the rise of spiritualism and the

59 ILN, 23 June 1928, 1171. 60 ILN, 23 June 1928, 1172–3. 61 See, for example, Gange, Dialogues; Curl, Egyptomania. On Egyptian death culture in popular culture, see Carter Lupton, “Mummymania for the Masses: Is Egyptology Cursed by the Mummy’s Curse?”, in Sally MacDonald and Michael Rice (eds), Consuming Ancient Egypt (London, 2003), 1–25, 25; Sally MacDonald and Michael Rice, “Tea with a Mummy: The Consumers’ View of Egypt’s Immortal Appeal”, ibid., 1–22; Jasmine Day, The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the EnglishSpeaking World (London, 2006). 62 Day, The Mummy’s Curse. 63 See, for example, Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War and European Culture (Cambridge, 1998); George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford, 1990); Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975).

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occult that occasionally drew on an eclectic assemblage of “eastern” beliefs in the world after death.64 In addition, although post-war commemorative architecture abounded with traditional Christian motifs, monumental, public architecture and war cemeteries elaborated and displayed classical and Eastern concepts and models of commemoration and their configurations.65 War monuments and cemeteries that displayed the dead in trenches or in ossuaries, exposing masses of bones, became sites of pilgrimage. But mass burial was neither the typical nor the desired form of interment of the war dead. Indeed, the war revolutionized burial and the military cemetery by democratizing and personalizing them.66 In military cemeteries built after the war, for the first time, dead soldiers were buried in individual graves regardless of rank, class, and religion. Individuality in the Ur cemeteries is apparent only in dignitaries’ graves and these are marked in Woolley’s records by the prefix PG—“Private Grave”—before their number. These dead are named and their naming manifests not only forms of commemoration, but also personalization; elsewhere in the cemeteries human remains were unidentified and unnamed. Notwithstanding the democratization of burial and the individuation of the war-dead, their heroism was imagined as a sacrifice. And the war sacrifice of millions of young men was connectible to forms of death in antiquity that were passive and sacrificial. The connection is apparent in package tourism to Mesopotamia that combined journeys to archaeological sites and pilgrimages to battlefields and prison camps around Kut and elsewhere. They were initiated and organized by the Barnabas Society, founded in 1919 to aid the hundreds of thousands of bereaved families, whose members were buried on the battlefields, to reach their graves. Grave visiting was intensely ritualized with a repeatable repertoire of commemoration, including wreath-laying, the photography of graves, and so on. As Winter and George L. Mosse have noted, the memory of the Great War and its commemoration were dominated by traditional and distinctly Christian forms and representations of grief and remembrance that characterized even modernist images of the dead.67 Traditional rituals were easily transplantable to the original sites of pilgrimage and biblical and Christian travel in Palestine and other “biblical lands”, where war tourism could be easily fitted in to pilgrimage itineraries to holy places and sites of antiquity. Most elaborate were official tours of war cemeteries and biblical antiquities. The St Barnabas pilgrimage to Iraq in the spring of 1930 was led by the Reverend M.  Mullineux and offered official visits to the battlefields and cemeteries at

64 Winter, Sites of Memory, 54–78. On death and remembrance, see also Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 1914–1918: Understanding the Great War, trans. Catherine Temerson (London, 2002). 65 Winter, Sites of Memory, 78–117. 66 Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ, 2015), 447–89. 67 Winter, Sites of Memory; Mosse, Fallen Soldiers.

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Ctesiphon and Kut, on the route of a river journey from Baghdad to Basra, “Babylon and Ur of the Chaldees”. The package included the fare for wreathes and photography.68 Wreath-laying connected the newly ritualized commemoration of the war-dead to wreathes as a motif in both Mesopotamian and Egyptian burials and funerary arts. Thus, the preoccupation with the death pits at Ur pointed at a broader preoccupation with death and a growing popular curiosity about ancient forms of mourning and burial.

Publicizing Ur: Display, Capital, and the Consumption of Antiquity The flurry surrounding the discovery of the Royal Cemetery may have been less manic than the frenzy around King Tut: Sumerian motifs and themes made a lesser impact on Western design, architecture, dress, everyday consumables and art, than the Egyptian motifs. But Ur’s immediate visibility in Anglo-American metropolitan culture is unmistakable and the interest that the excavations aroused in readers, spectators, and radio listeners, across class and gender, was considerable. Archaeology not only made Mesopotamia’s past material and tangible, but also turned it into a subject of display. Moreover, the excavations at Ur served to make antiquity accessible and “modern”. The extensive coverage and visualization of the excavations at Ur in the British and American press was part and parcel of an imperial culture of display that consisted of museums, such as the British Museum and the University Museum of Pennsylvania, and an array of public performances like talks and lecture tours, slide shows, and radio broadcasts, performances that, themselves, were advertised and reported in the press. Ur’s entry into the exhibitionary complex went hand in hand with its commercialization. Ur’s appeal made it easily marketable, by museums, the archaeologists themselves, collectors, and the press, and it was eminently saleable to fans of archaeology the world over.69 Ur was a commodity and its publicizing enhanced its value and further commodification. This is apparent in the economy of the excavations that drew on a net of national and academic museums and other institutions, “big capital”, and the small capital of donors who were Bible or antiquity enthusiasts. The Ur expedition was supported and financed by the two collaborative museums (with Penn Museum bearing the greater share of the burden), smaller museums overseas, philanthropic corporate capital (such as from the Carnegie Corporation of New York), patrons with a special interest in archaeology, and small individual donations, solicited when institutional support dried up. The latter two kinds of support testify to a widespread interest in the 68 The Times, 1 January 1930, 14; 3 January 1930, 13. 69 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum.

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excavations, mostly in their biblical associations. The Bible’s selling power is noted by archaeologist and surveyor O. G. S. Crawford in a letter to Woolley on Charles Marston’s donation of £100 to the expedition. As already shown in Chapter  4, Marston’s interest lay in the Biblical Archaeology of Palestine, where he invested very substantial amounts of cash, and not in Mesopotamia. Crawford rather tartly notes: “I may say that the credit for extracting this donation should be placed to father Abraham; you will understand what I mean when I say that Sir Charles is particularly interested in Biblical sites—‘the Bible right again’—He has supported the Palestine Exploration Fund very generously and is paying for the present season’s excavations at Ophel [the ‘City of David’ in Jerusalem].” Crawford advises sending him a souvenir, “a pot, or some beads, that you may reserve”.70 The origins and nature of the capital of Sir Joseph Duveen, who in 1927 donated a handsome £1,000 to help prevent an early wind-up of the excavation season, were different and present an interest outside the Bible and Biblical Archaeology. Duveen, who during the 1920s and 1930s was one of Britain’s leading art dealers, ran the Duveen Brothers firm from his native Hull. Although he specialized in transatlantic dealing in paintings, provisioning a number of US museums and private collections, he traded in antiquities and built the Duveen Gallery at the British Museum to house the Elgin Marbles.71 A huge donation from the Carnegie Foundation was earmarked to subsidize the mammoth series of books on Ur authored by Woolley. But alongside big institutional and philanthropic money, the roll of donors is dominated by the names of men and women with much smaller means, who subscribed to the Ur Fund and made modest donations to support the dig. During the 1929–30 excavation season, Miss  E.  C.  Bell of Warwick Road, London, and Malcolm Bell Esquire, of the same address, each made a contribution of £1, like Mrs  N.  D.  Cotton of Windsor Mansions on Northumberland Street and Miss  E.  G.  Jeffcourt of Staple Inn, W1, and other female and male donors. The Misses Ffolliott of 82 Campden Hill Court donated a substantial £5.72 And Mrs Martely, at the Little Bonnington Hotel on 27 Bloomsbury Square, quite expected to get in return for her guinea a personal letter from Woolley.73 The addresses are solidly middle class, with some over-representation of London and the Home Counties, augmented by occasional donations from overseas and Scotland. Enthusiasts engaged in collecting money on their own as they publicized the excavations. Charles Ogden, of James Ogden and Sons Ltd, Diamonds and Pearls Merchants, himself a collector and amateur archaeologist, raised money for the expedition in his own lectures that focused on the gold finds.74 He became 70 71 72 73 74

O. G. S. Crawford to Woolley, 22 September 1927, BMA, MED, WY1/9/15. On his life and art-dealing, see S. N. Behrman, Duveen (London, repr. 1972). “Ur Excavation Fund”, BMA, MED, Woolley Papers, Box5, WY1/13/52. Kenyon to Woolley, 17 December 1925, BMA, MED, Box 3, WY1/6/16. Ogden to Woolley, 3 January 1928, BMA, MED, Box 3, WY1/12/37.

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one of the excavation’s chief promoters and was instrumental in cultivating Ur’s high-powered public profile.75 Small contributions kept flowing in between 1927 and 1930. In the summer of 1928 they amounted to £1,928, 17s. 7d., actually financing part of the British Museum’s share in the sponsorship and leaving the trustees with a balance of £663, and in late 1929, due to the “greatly increased contributions to the Ur Excavation Fund”, the trustees sought Treasury approval to spend only a small part of their grant. The structure of donations and indeed the economy of popular archaeology testify to an active popular interest in biblical Mesopotamia, as well as to an active participation in the dense fabric of the culture of antiquity.76 What triggered the interest of donors, readers, and viewers was the constant presence of material evidence on display. The whirl of exhibitions, aimed at publicizing the expedition, was part of a repertoire of popular education in archaeology and was dominated by the competition among archaeologists of the Mediterranean and the Levant, who displayed their finds to the London public, US publics, and publics in the British dominions. As already implied, the flow of objects from Ur put it at an advantage over locations that yielded poorer harvests, or were put under stricter laws of antiquity that did not allow a division of the spoils and kept the bulk or all of the discoveries in local, national museums. The riches of Tutankhamun’s tomb were largely confined to exhibition at the Cairo Museum of Archaeology; Mesopotamian antiquities became subject to national legislation and regulation only after the end of the mandate and then only gradually. They were divided between the Baghdad Antiquities Museum and co-sponsors of the excavations even after the withdrawal of the mandate. Their display in metropolitan venues further augmented their prestige. Already, before the sensational discoveries at the Royal Cemetery, the Ur exhibits had drawn publicity and a varied audience. The exhibition held at the British Museum in July 1925 was reinforced by Woolley’s lecture and a collection of donations at the museum and, later, at King’s Hall.77 The 1928 Ur exhibition, visited by the Queen, Princess Beatrice, and European royalty like King Alfonso XIII of Spain, attracted about 1,500 visitors daily. A year later, a Miss  M.  Adamson of Priory Close, Combe Down, Bath, declared the exhibition a tourist attraction of the highest interest.78 Crowds grew bigger thanks to Woolley’s charismatic lectures. In 1929, 10,000 copies of the pamphlet on the “Antiquities on Ur” sold out before the exhibition was closed.79 Notwithstanding the essentially metropolitan character of the 75 Alison Millerman, “The Spinning of Ur”, PhD diss. (University of Manchester, 2015). 76 Trustees of the BM. Standing Committee C1714, July 1928, 9 November 1929, BMCA, 4479; 4605. 77 The Times, 25 June 1925, 5; 25 September 1925, 14. 78 The Times, 9 July 1928, 14; 27 March 1929, 10. 79 Trustees of the BM. Standing Committee, 9 November 1929, BMCA, 4605; Minutes of the Trustees, BMCA, 4605.

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emerging archaeological culture, Ur was brought to the provinces, the USA and the empire, to museums in the dominions, which purchased, rather on the cheap, series of items from Ur. These were not spectacular finds, but their presence in collections was considered necessary for local and imperial prestige and to present a narrative of the progress of civilizations. The presence and material circulation of Ur is apparent in the collection at the Nicholson Museum in Sydney.80 Woolley was Ur’s chief advertiser. His exhausting schedule for the last days of September and first half of October 1930 included sixteen lectures in England and Wales. From Shrewsbury he went to Marlborough, to Wokingham, to Hailebury, then to Harrogate and Newcastle upon Tyne. On 7 October, he was at Folkestone and a day later at Wellington Own. On the 12th, the peripatetic Woolley was busy in Bristol, on the 13th in Cardiff, with Walsall, Harrogate, and Morely to cover by the 16th. His American tours were even more tightly packed, including lectures in museums, halls, and hotels along the East Coast.81 The popular lectures, together with Woolley’s radio talks, made antiquity not only present and imminently visible, but also comprehensible and “simple”. The discovery of Ur represents how accessible antiquity was becoming. His radio series on archaeology, later published in book form, was repeatedly characterized as modern and suitable for ordinary folks. He had the gift, noted the Daily Telegraph, “of discussing [antiquity] on seemingly level terms with the ordinary man” and making archaeology fascinating to all.82 He mastered the new media and embodied the newly developed status of the archaeologist as a modern celebrity. Contemporary forms of mediation between expert knowledge and public interest drew on dialogue and solicited exchange between Ur fans and experts. Listeners, viewers, and spectators responded to the popular talks in a variety of ways that included archaeological travel, donations, correspondence, and a variety of creative interpretations of the discoveries that occasionally indulged in extravagant readings of the Scriptures. Some of these interpretations make it clear that the materiality of Ur was incorporated in the correspondents’ religious beliefs, Bible reading, and in their everyday lives. Mrs  E.  E.  Jackson of “The Brambles”, Burgess Hill in Sussex, pondered upon, and kept to herself her interpretation of the story of the sacrifice of Isaac four or five years after reading Ur of the Chaldees and Abraham. She related the biblical text to the statuette of the Ram in the Thicket at the British Museum that threw light on the sacrifice narrative

80 For two donations of £15 and £5 to the BM excavation funds, the Nicholson Museum received two consignments of finds in 1933 and 1935, altogether some 150 items. 81 BMA. See also itinerary for the spring of 1929, BMA, MED, Woolley Archive, WY1/ 27/118/1 and WY1/281. 82 Daily Telegraph, 12 December 1930; Bristol Times, 22 December 1930(?).

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and attached to her letter to Woolley a long poem appropriately titled Jehovah Jireh. The predictable concluding stanza reads: The prayer is scarcely breathed, when Abraham’s eyes Fall on the ram God sent to sacrifice. ‘Jehovah Jireh!’ God Himself [sic] has given. His answer: clear as if he spoke from heaven. This not my will that human blood be shed. Take thou the ram and offer it instead.83

The (appropriately named) Evangeline Metheny did not hesitate to release her poem on the ram, a satiric description of goats and the havoc they cause to agriculture and in woodlands: Tip-hoofs on hind legs to reach the most succulent twigs, as the Artist of Ur millenniums ago observed and Caught at his lapis and gold for the British Museum . . . Warning our mountain of ‘doom to come’; But none heeds it, for Goats we must have and after us the deluge.84

Literal Biblism and its parody were applied to travel. As discussed in Chapter 2, the post-war period saw the extension and development of transport throughout the Middle East and its promotion by both mandate authorities and commercial ventures. Mesopotamia entered travellers’ real and imaginary maps of the Orient and tourism which, before the war, had been confined to coasts and their vicinity now spread to the hinterland. Railway travel, via the Venice–Simplon Orient Express and Taurus Express brought not only Beirut, but also Damascus, within reach of travellers, and motorized desert transport took off with the establishment in 1923 of the Nairn Transport Company (known from 1926 as the Nairn Eastern Transport Company Ltd), a motor company operating the route from Beirut and Damascus to Baghdad. Founded by the New Zealand family firm of Nairn, the service thrived on the collaboration of the two mandate governments in Syria and Iraq and served as a trans-desert postal service and a means of travel. Travel in Nairn’s specially made buses, accommodating about forty passengers each, became a symbol of modern transport, replacing traditional travel that drew on local knowledge and tribal protection.85 Overland travel brought Baghdad and the archaeological sites of southern Iraq within the reach of

83 BMA, MED, 4 August 1936, Woolley Archive, Box 10, WY1/31/1/1. 84 BMA, MED, n.d., Woolley Archive, Box 10, WY1/31/5. 85 See, for example, Christina Phelps Grant, The Syrian Desert: Caravans, Travel, and Exploration (London, 1937, repr. 2005), 270–89.

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travellers. Ur in particular became relatively reachable via the extension of the railway to Ur Junction. Travel to Mesopotamia soon branched to specialty tourism, targeting the market for a Christian leisure that combined travel, safe adventure, exoticism, and serious pursuit of the Scriptures. It catered not solely to Protestant Biblicists but also to Anglo-Catholics. Agatha Christie who, between 1928 and the outbreak of the Second World War travelled yearly to archaeological sites in Iraq (Ur and Nineveh) and in Syria, describes in her autobiography an all-women Anglo-Catholic group on a Nairn cross-desert trip to Iraq to “make tours of various Biblical places”.86 Her hilarious dialogue recorded between a female travel companion and the group-leader and her aide, satirizes the Bible enthusiasts. The leader, the 70-year-old, “excessively fierce-looking”, topee-wearing, Miss Wilbraham (obviously a pun on and rhyming with, Abraham) boasts: “Forty women I have with me,” said Miss Wilbraham, “and I really must congratulate myself. Every one of them is a Sahib except one. So important don’t you agree?” “No,” said Sybil Burnett, “I think to have them all sahibs is very dull.”87

Clearly Christie sets biblical culture in an imperial gendered context: it is the women pilgrims’ identity as memsahibs that protects them. Her choice to associate this kind of travel with elderly females, too, indicates a sense of its safety and popularity. Stereotyping aside, archaeological travellers were a varied lot and Ur, more than any other site, a favourite destination. The expedition hosted, in addition to celebrities, organized tours and excursions from Baghdad and Basra, tours for members of the RAF, oil companies’ personnel, and Iraqi students of vocational and technical schools. Excursionists were not only guided through the ruins, but treated to exhibitions of Sumerian objects and lectures.88 Hospitality to the famous, the curious, and to tourists, was largely utilitarian: it hyped the expedition and indeed most interwar expeditions in the Middle East. But the size of the excavation at Ur, its expanse and transport to it, made it more accessible than other sites. It provided a sense of an actual antique place and its materiality, experienced individually or collectively. Ur’s appeal lay in the opportunity for an immediate and physical experience of its materiality. It stood for an ancient past, pushed back in time, which could be integrated in a variety of experiences of modern life and death: from the consumption of style and an aesthetics, to the experience of mass death. To paraphrase Marsha Bryant and May Ann Averly, Ur and, more broadly, Sumerian culture and

86 Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, paperback edn (London, 1993), 401–2. 87 Ibid. 88 Woolley to Kenyon, 7 March 1926, BMA, MED, Woolley Archive, Box 3, WY1/7/26/1.

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archaic Mesopotamia, engendered a “Mesopotamian modernity”:89 they presented a past that was new. Its newness was not only a matter of aesthetics or style. It had a distinct political edge that collapsed the ancient imperial past and a modern connective empire embodied in the modern form of British presence in Mesopotamia/Iraq as a mandated power. Connectivity was hierarchical. Gordon Childe was at ease in describing the relationship and conflicts between Sumer and Elam, and Sumer and Assyria, as “economic imperialism” and making analogues between it and modern imperialism in Africa and elsewhere.90 The ancient world revealed at Ur and its many presences in Britain was a world with layers of material culture, imperial power, and modern pasts.

89 Marsha Bryant and May Ann Everley, “Egypto-Modernism: James Henry Breasted, H. D. and the New Past”, Modernism/modernity, 14 (September 2007), 435–53. 90 V. Gordon Childe, New Light on the Most Ancient Near East (London, 1935), 163.

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Murder in Mesopotamia Antiquity, Genres of Modernity, and Gender in the Popular Crime Novel

Detection and Excavation: Crime Literature and the Discovery of the Past The popular appeal of ancient Mesopotamian cultures, indeed of Near Eastern antiquity, corresponded with the spectacular rise and popularity of literary forms that were considered to be generically modern: crime fiction and fiction on  espionage. Neither genre was new: both emerged around the middle of the nineteenth century and both came to their own before the First World War, but their peak, particularly the heyday of “whodunnit” crime fiction, in its classical form, coincided with the intensification and professionalization of the study of antiquity and the growing popularity of archaeology.1 A reviewer of R. D. V. Magoffin and Emily Davis’s Romance of Archaeology and Leonard Woolley’s Digging Up the Past remarked on the “unexampled boom in archaeology”, adding that the sixth sense, the historical sense “in all and sundry is thrilled almost every week with something new from the old world of 2,000 or 4,000 years ago”. What novel, quizzed the reviewer, “is thicker-set with romance than archaeology?”2 The formative decades of public archaeology and of archaeologists as celebrities were the “golden age” of crime literature: they witnessed the formulation of its conventions, the expansion of a literary canon of crime fiction, the development of its apparatuses of publicity and distribution, and its consumption by mass audiences. The concurrence of the rise of the literary corpus and form, and a field of knowledge, each with its set of practices and modes of circulation in a culture, was not merely one of time, but was substantive. Described in literary sociological terms, crime fiction in its new form of a fully fledged novel (that distinguished it

1 Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (London, 1972); Martin Priestman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge, 2003), especially Stephen Knight, “The Golden Age”, 77–95. On the emergence of espionage fiction, see Jon Thompson, Fiction, Crime and Empire Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism (Urbana, IL, 1993); and Pryia Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford, 2008). 2 “Review of R. V. D. Magoffin and Emily Davis, The Romance of Archaeology and Leonard Woolley, Digging Up the Past”, Week End Review, 3 January 1931, 19–20. Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and the Rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950. Billie Melman, Oxford University Press (2020). © Billie Melman. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198824558.001.0001

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from a dominant pre-war form—the crime novella or short story) was manufactured by middle-class male and female writers for a growing audience that was predominantly middle class, and encapsulated its specific senses and experiences of post-war modernity. The new detective novels captured and drew on experiences of modernity that were manifest in new ways of living in a changing environment— especially in the new Anglo-American suburbs—new applications and uses of technology, both domestic technologies and technologies of travel, and new forms of consumption. The new literary corpus transmitted to readers the interwar changes in notions of place that had to do with the expansion and democratization of tourism and the late-modern transport revolution in automobile, railway, and air travel which condensed distance, place, and time. In Agatha Christie’s works discussed in this chapter, cars, trains, liners, and airplanes are means of connectivity and icons of speed, comfort, and luxury; at the same time they are lethal instruments of violence and murder. Even her most typical English scenes, set in a rustic and apparently organic England of villages and country houses and presenting the ideology of Country and Little Englandism, are invaded by the new means of transport and, more broadly, new forms of life that threaten a “traditional” English way of life. During its so-called “golden age”, crime fiction embodied a plethora of other representations of British modernity which researchers like Alison Light have described as conservative modernity.3 It also encapsulated some tags of literary modernism, including the fragility and unstableness of the identity of characters, not least the blurring of borderlines between English identities and non-Englishness. Morals, too, were destabilized and the gathering of empiric knowledge and rationalism became hallmarks of the new genre that was quite often perceived as a “riddle” or a “puzzle”. Most relevant here, the investigation of crime, indeed “detection”, came to be widely regarded as analogous to archaeological investigation: the detective was likened to an archaeologist and vice versa. Both were presumed to follow clues. Both sought to collect and patch together fragments of evidence that was material and circumstantial, to stitch a feasible version of a comprehensible past, either the past of a civilization, or the history of crime and the sequence of events that had preceded its occurrence. This analogy between excavating and the construction of a history of murder is spelt out by Dr Leidner, the murderer who is an archaeologist, in the penultimate chapter of Christie’s Murder in Mesopotamia, published in 1936: “You would have made a good archaeologist, Mr. Poirot. You have the gift of re-creating the past.”4 Moreover, both detection and excavation were associated with mystery but also with logic, and deemed to be “rational”. The moment of discovery of a piece of the past was thrilling, noted an anonymous author in The 3 Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London and New York, 1991), 1–20, 61–113. 4 Agatha Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia (1936; London, 2001), 348.

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Sheffield Telegraph, but the logic that preceded the actual digging and followed it mattered, as did the scene of the remains of the past.5 The association between archaeology and detection, between the narrative of a crime, particularly a murder, and the material history of a community, expanded beyond analogue and metaphor: it was at the core of an eclectic genre of mystery and crime fiction, set in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, most typically in the Mashriq and in Egypt, either in the present, or in antiquity, and sometimes coalesced both. The sprouting corpus of historical and archaeological mystery fiction accommodated adjacent genres like the travel book, the guidebook, romance, literature on the occult that had thrived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and works on popular archaeology, Egyptology, and Assyriology. In this hybrid form of writing the work of Christie looms large. It accommodates most of these genres and epitomizes at least one of them—the story of an imperial murder and its detection—and practically formulates the archaeological detective story set in the Near East. Unlike a number of previous and some of her contemporary crime authors, Christie combined a lifetime interest and a long career—albeit an amateur one—in Middle Eastern archaeology. Her work as crime writer and excavator spans the peak of the two fields and both were represented and self-documented in her novels, in adaptations to the stage and film, and in her autobiographical writing. The corpus in its entirety includes seven novels, a few short stories, two stage adaptations, and two autobiographical oeuvres, Come Tell Me How You Live, written during the Second World War and published in 1945, and An Autobiography, published posthumously in 1977. Read together with her notebooks and some correspondence, as well as the revealingly titled autobiography of her husband and co-excavator, Max Mallowan, Mallowan’s Memoirs: Agatha and the Archaeologist, published in the same year as An Autobiography, the novels provide insights into the popularization of the pursuit of Near Eastern antiquity and the circulation of popular knowledge on Near Eastern archaeology and archaeological travel. To be sure, Christie’s oeuvre has been amply discussed by her biographers, by archaeologists and museologists, by students of literature, and a very few historians separately and, occasionally, collaboratively.6 However, literary studies have, until the 1990s, trivialized her work and placed it outside the imperial context, and the useful interest of museologists and archaeologists that has done a great deal to

5 The Sheffield Telegraph, 22 December 1930, BMA, MED, WY1/16/17.2. 6 Janet Morgan, Agatha Christie: A Biography (London, 1984); Charles Osborne, The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie (1982, London, repr. 1999); Light, Forever England; Symons, Bloody Murder, 101–32; W. D. Rubinstein, “A Very British Crime Wave”, History Today, 60:12 (2010), 43–8; K. D. Snell, “A Drop of Water from a Stagnant Pool? Inter-war Detective Fiction and the Rural Community”, Social History, 35:1 (2010), 21–59.

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popularize both archaeology and Christie has been somewhat fragmented.7 Her writings, as will be shown here, are emblematic not only in the way in which they combine genres and conventions, but also in that they domesticate antiquity and the methods of its investigation—mainly archaeology—by tying both to detection. At the same time that they helped propagate new fields of knowledge, they brought home the empire and modernized it: they depicted modern travel by land, sea, and air, and imperial settings. The domestication of empire has distinct gender characteristics and is conceived and represented in the novels in gendered terms. As some literary critics have noted, Christie’s novels, far from perpetuating traditional and conservative notions of femininity, presented readers with a broad range of femininities, new models of womanly modernity and action, and a gamut of notions about gender and power.8 And, I would add, empire. This range is quite evident in the novels located in the fringes of the empire and it is the imperial angle that this chapter will stress. Moreover, their conventional escapism notwithstanding, the novels discussed here constantly reference the mandates empire in the Middle East and politics, and these multiple references were certainly decipherable by contemporaries. While they confirm imperial agendas and hierarchies, the novels respond to, and resonate with, the political tensions and uncertainties characteristic of the interwar empire and its aftermath in the Cold War era. In addition to blurring borders and politics, Christie’s archaeological-historical mystery novels collapse notions of temporality. Death Comes as the End and her play Akhnaton are set in Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom Egypt, respectively, and the latter will be briefly treated in Chapter 9. Here I will focus mainly on the novels and autobiographical work that are set in mandate territories and strongly evoke modernity at the same time as recovering the experience of archaeology and digging in order to unsettle notions about linearity, progress, and temporality.

Crime, Travel, and Modernity: A Map of a Connective Empire The Christie novels appearing between late 1934 and 1951 were published and distributed in Britain by Collins Crime Club, an imprint of William Collins and

7 Charlotte Trumpler (ed.), Agatha Christie and Archaeology (London, 2001) is a companion volume to the 2001–2 exhibition at the British Museum, “Agatha Christie and Archaeology—A Mystery in Mesopotamia”, previously exhibited as “Agatha Christie und der Orient. Kriminalistik und Archäologie”, in Basel (2000) and the Ruhrlandmuseum in Essen (October 1999–March 2000). 8 For the reception and study of Christie’s work and life, see Merja Makinen, Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity (London 2006), 9–24 and Cora Kaplan, “An Unsuitable Genre for a Feminist”, Women’s Review, 8:6 (1986), 18–19. For nuanced analyses of Christie and gender, see Mary Anne Ackershoek, “The Daughters of his Manhood: Christie and the Golden Age of Detection Fiction”, in Jerome Delamater and Ruth Prigozy (eds), Theory and Practice of Classical Detective Fiction (Westport, CT, 1997), 119–28; Gill Gilliam, Agatha Christie: The Woman and her Mysteries (London, 1990); and Marion Shaw and Sabine Vanacker, Reflecting on Miss Marple (London, 1991).

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Co., Christie’s publishers since 1926. There are no overall estimates of sales figures, but the advance on the novels indicates her market value to Collins: £1,000 for An Appointment with Death and for each of the two succeeding books.9 Advertising in the Club’s newsletter which had about 25,000 subscribers is indicative of the bulk of Christie’s audience. A US edition by Dodd and Mead followed close on the heels of the British edition. At $2 and 7s. 6d., respectively, a copy—the usual price of a middle-brow novel in hard cover—the novel was within the reach of middle-class readers. Further indicating Christie’s reading public, Murder in Mesopotamia was serialized and abridged in Britain in the Amalgamated Press’s Women’s Pictorial Magazine, in eight instalments, before its publication in book form in July 1936. Serialization cut down costs at the same time that it targeted a gender-specific audience. A change of title to No Other Love and other alterations, carried out by the Press without Christie’s consent, made for a diluted and tamed version. Edmund Gosh of Hughes, Massie and Co., her copyright agents, “was horrified when I heard of the new title”, but by the time he protested to the Press, two re-titled instalments had already appeared.10 No less than the infringement of copyright, the botched magazine version, illustrated by painter and magazine artist Clive Upton, demonstrates the overall trend to domesticate and feminize the twin themes of murder and the search for antiquity. Death on the Nile (1937) and Appointment with Death (1938) were circulated by the same publishers in Britain and the USA, and in 1937 Dodd advanced Christie £5,000 per book.11 In 1951 the same publishers issued They Came to Baghdad. Later purchase of the rights by Penguin made the novels more widely affordable and further augmented circulation; Christie’s titles complemented Penguin’s expanding series of books on archaeology that peaked with the “Pelican Archaeologies”.12 Fragmented figures compiled from Penguin Authors’ dossiers and staff estimates indicate that Murder in Mesopotamia sold about 3,000 books per month long after its initial publication.13 Appointment with Death was adapted for the stage in 1945 in a way that completely changed its rationale and characterization. In chronological terms, the novels and Come Tell Me span the apogee of the realignment of the new empires following the First World War, the establishment of the mandate system in Turkey’s occupied territories and its demise, Britain’s withdrawal from territories in the Middle East and the beginning of the Cold War. They touch on subjects like anti-colonial unrest, the rise of national movements, and the failure of international politics and the League of Nations. Murder on the Orient Express (1934) is marginally set in Syria and Turkey, but should be read together with the other works. Murder in Mesopotamia, set in Tell Yarimjah 9 10 11 12 13

Hughes, Massie & Co. to Christie, 12 October 1937, Agatha Christie Archive (ACA). Edmund Gosh at Hughes, Massie & Co. to Agatha Christie, 20 February 1936, ACA. Hughes and Massie to Agatha Christie, 12 October 1937, ACA. Amara Thornton, Archeologists in Print: Publishing for the People (London, 2018), 175–87. Ibid., note 92, 263.

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in southern Iraq near Hassanieh (a thin disguise of Tell al-Muqayyar), or Ur, and Nasiriyah (the city closest to the ruins of Ur and Larsa) of the early 1930s, at the time of Woolley’s expedition, is the most archaeological of the novels. Death on the Nile is set on a tourists’ steamship with occasional evocations of archaeological sites in Upper Egypt. And Appointment with Death, published in 1938, moves between Palestine and Transjordan and focuses on Jerusalem and the Nabataean site of Petra—the scene of murder—on the slopes of Jebel al-Madhbah. The centrality of the site to the murder plot is apparent in Christie’s initial reference to it in her notebooks as “The Petra Murder”.14 It is vaguely located in the late 1930s, during the anti-colonial Arab rebellion of 1936–9 in Palestine, at the time of a severe clash between Arab and Jewish nationalisms and the international crises that peaked in the failure of the League as arbitrator of conflicts, and the collapse of ideas of world peace. Finally, They Came to Baghdad, the only thriller among the archaeological-historical novels, relates a scheme to topple an international summit meeting of the world’s Cold War superpowers in Baghdad, concocted by an anti-Communist secret network headed by a British renegade appropriately nicknamed Lucifer. It is set in a post-war Iraq with a strong British presence, thus enhancing the feel of an imperial presence after the actual demise of Britain’s Middle Eastern empire. The chronology of the novels matches Christie’s own travel and archaeological work in Iraq and Syria from 1928, when she embarked on her first voyage to Iraq travelling on the Simplon Orient Express and Taurus Express, the desert bus to Baghdad, then by railway to Ur. Her first spell as an archaeological tourist was to be followed by a succession of annual journeys and prolonged stays at excavation sites, as Mallowan’s wife and companion, sometimes his sponsor, and a rather useful worker—sorting, cleaning, and restoring finds and, later on, photographing them. She took part in a succession of major excavations in Iraq, at Nimrud with Campbell Thompson and at Tell Arpachiyah, where Mallowan conducted his first expedition, in the north of the country in 1933, then in northern Syria in Chagar Bazar and the substantially bigger Tell Brak, in the Khabur Valley bordering Turkey. The move to Syria was the result of the changes in Iraqi archaeological policy and the shift in Iraq from a mandatory to a national control of antiquity (discussed in Chapter 7), manifest in the toughening of the Antiquities Laws. The Second World War temporarily stopped her travel to, and work in, the area for almost a decade, but these were resumed after Mallowan’s nomination as director of the British School of Archaeology in Baghdad and the renewal of his excavations at Nimrud. With the exception of Death Comes as the End, the novels are quite contemporary, set at the time in which they were written and published.

14 Notebook 61, ACA.

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The archaeological-historical whodunnits are registers of interwar modernity as well as imperial politics. They resonate with references to the modern pace of life, speed, modern travel across the empire, and modern technologies of communication. To paraphrase David Trotter’s analysis of interwar British literature—both canonic and less canonic—they record and represent a “technological mediation of experience”15 that emerged with the revolution in media technology after the Great War and culminated in the long 1930s, the thirteen years between the General Strike of 1926 and the outbreak of the Second World War. During this short and hectic span, innovations in “connective media” altered writers’ visions of life and their world, invaded texts, shaped them and, in turn, mediated experience.16 Moreover, media and transport technology were not only about machines, but involved sets of practices and attitudes towards modernity. Christie’s whodunnits of the 1930s make repeated gestures towards modern communication and transport technologies: telegraphs and telephones are the receptacles of communications; modern means of transport, like transcontinental trains, cruises, desert automobiles and buses, and airplanes are means of travel, as well as being ideal sites for murder. These means of transportation are transit, extra-territorial locations, outside national borders. Modern objects, substances, and materials make brief and significant appearances: zips “gone nasty”, nonfunctioning pens and stylographs, watches and gramophones—all become metaphors for out of control modern objects and gadgets.17 The abundance of connective technologies in the corpus of novels discussed here contributes to the image of the post-war empire as a modern entity that the characters experience when they are on the move or at excavation sites and that the readers of popular novels and newspapers could visit vicariously. Yet at the same time that the novels communicate movement across imperial borders, they take place in specific locations and, as already implied, rather than being escapist, refer to contemporary politics, both to international politics and the imperial crises of the 1930s, represented mostly as local and particular. It is easy to see why the overwhelming majority of Christie scholars have tended to ignore these references and cast her work as apolitical albeit inherently conservative in outlook, or as modernist-conservative.18 The manner of her reference to current politics is usually oblique and roundabout. Political tensions, unrest, and clashes are dealt with indirectly and purposefully vaguely. There are clues scattered in the novels to current colonial politics in the Middle East, or to international politics, but they are inconclusive and, at one and the same time, reveal facts and 15 David Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 1–5, 276–9. 16 Ibid. 17 Agatha Christie, Come Tell Me How You Live: An Archaeological Memoir (1946, repr. London, 1999), 20–2. 18 Light, Forever England; Makinen, Investigating Femininity.

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blur them. Murder on the Orient Express may seem to have little of the Middle East in it. And the bulk of it oozes with an extra-territorial and international aura. It takes place on a railway journey westward, in a Simplon Orient Express train carriage and its cast of characters present an international omnibus. The murder itself and its solving occur in Yugoslavia. However, the novel’s opening scene is set in Syria, on the platform of the Taurus Express, where Hercule Poirot is seen off by a French military officer, a representative of France’s heavy presence in the mandate Syrian Republic. Poirot himself functions as a mandatory troubleshooter, scurrying from one mandate territory to another to solve murder cases and straighten up disorder that threatens the community of English and French people abroad. In Orient Express he unravels an entanglement in the French army, involving suicide and the discredited reputation of the army and the nation that had already been jeopardized during the Great War.19 In Murder in Mesopotamia, which is implicitly and obliquely located in the same year as Orient Express—1932— he solves the archaeological murder mysteries on Tell Yarimjah [sic] after helping to handle local disorder in southern Iraq, then returns to Syria.20 His arrival on the scene of crime in Appointment with Death, too, is not purely coincidental and he is consulted by, and liaises with, the military and possibly intelligence officers, like Colonel Carbury, the unobtrusive colonial, not in the least disciplinarian, “Yet in Transjordania he was a power”.21 The Belgian detective follows the routes of the empire. Indeed, the empire “enables” him and his activities. Unlike some of his predecessors and contemporary male and female sleuths, both his nationality and gender shift and are undefined, and he is continuously bracketed as non-English and a foreigner, not least by a number of the characters in the novels. As has been noted by Christie scholars, he is rendered feminine in appearance, manner, and action, rather different from some fictional models of empire builders and heroes represented by writers like Henry Rider Haggard, G.  A.  Henty, John Buchan, and others. His physique, demeanour, signature accent and resort to French idiom, entirely intellectual and non-physical methods of sleuthing and investigation and, last but not least, lack of overt or committed national feelings, set him apart from travelling spies—warriers like Buchan’s Sir Richard Hannay and his Sandy Arbuthnot in Greenmantle produced and set in the war.22 Poirot’s doubtful class affiliation, too, sets him apart from them or, for that matter, from Sherlock Holmes: unlike the wartime heroic paragons of chivalry and the nation (modelled on orientalists like Aubrey Herbert), he is not even middle class, but a Belgian bourgeois—and therefore easy to identify with Belgium’s war-image as a victimized woman, and a Catholic, 19 Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express (1934, repr. London, 2001), 12. 20 Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia, 350. 21 Christie, Appointment with Death (1938, repr. London, 2001), 130. 22 On the cultural world of Edwardian agents see Satia, Spies 59-99; Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (New York, 1979).

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albeit a non-religious one—to boot.23 Yet he is not an “other”. And it is precisely his blurred gender identity, asexuality, international tags, suavity, modern way of living, and modern habitat (while in London), that make him a new imperial character. His cosmopolitanism is tolerated and was admired by readers because as in all of Christie’s whodunnits, a strong national identity is not presented as a value or praised. And he grows on even the most narrow-minded English characters in the novels. In Murder in Mesopotamia, nurse Leatheran, the narrator, is initially shocked by his appearance—odd, plump like “a hairdresser in a comic play”, foreign-looking, and the very reverse of Holmes.24 But eventually she is rid of her insularity and cooperates with him, and is appreciative of his role as sleuth and pacifier of unrest. At the same time that mandate careers and politics are endorsed, internationalist politics, particularly as represented by the League of Nations, are ridiculed. Revealingly the League’s peace policies are ignored and it is its humanitarian ventures that are personified in the politician Lady Westholme in Appointment with Death. In Christie’s earliest preparatory notes for the novel she is listed as “(a possible future prime minister)”,25 but is eventually cast as a famous Conservative MP, an American married to a nondescript aristocrat, an upholder of country life, an advocate of “Slum clearance and Welfare for women”, and a staunch believer in, and activist for, the League.26 It is suggested that she has been modelled on Nancy Astor, and is a supplementary character to the factional Mrs Wilbraham, the evangelist archaeological tour organizer memorably described in An Autobiography.27 The description of her politics and, via them, domestic and international British policies in the late 1930s, probably provide one of Christie’s most detailed references to current affairs. Ridicule of Lady Westholme and the League is at its most biting in the written-in dialogue between her and Dr Gerard, one of her co-travellers on a journey to Petra, a sceptic French psychiatrist who represents expert modern knowledge: Lady Westholme and Dr. Gerard had a somewhat irritable argument over the League of Nations. Lady Westholme was a fervent supporter of the League. The Frenchman, on the other hand, chose to be witty at the League’s expense. From the attitude of the League concerning Abyssinia and Spain they passed to the

23 On Belgium’s feminization, see Nicolleta F. Gullace, “Sexual Violence and Family Honor: British Propaganda and International Law during the First World War”, American Historical Review, 102:3 (1997), 714–47; Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War (London, 1986), 182–92; John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT, 2001). 24 Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia, 125. 25 James Curran, Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making (London, 2011), 275; Christie, Notebook 61, ACA. 26 Christie, Appointment with Death, 92–3. 27 On her identity, see Osborne, The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie, 162 and Morgan, Agatha Christie: A Biography, 214, based on Christie’s notebooks.

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Litvania boundary dispute . . . and from there to the activism of the League in suppressing dope gangs. ‘You must admit they have done wonderful work. Wonderful!’ snapped Lady Westholme. Dr. Gerard shrugged his shoulders. ‘Perhaps. And a wonderful expense too!’ ‘The matter is a very serious one. Under the Dangerous Drugs Act’, and the argument waged on.28

The take on Lady Westholme becomes apparent when she is assigned the role of the actual murderer of the other hyper-stereotyped female character in the novel— the monstrous Mrs Boynton. Revealingly, in the stage version of Appointment she commits suicide; her acolyte, the apolitical and dependent Miss Pierce who serves as a foil to the other strong and independent female characters, “moves” the plot and denouement by providing an explanation for the murder, and Poirot himself is dropped—thus on stage the entire text is de-politicized.29

The Tell: Archaeology, Prehistory, and Modernity in Agatha Christie’s Writing It is, however, in the generically modern whodunnit that modernity itself and technological progress are questioned and challenged, and that senses of temporality and linearity are subverted. In the modernized connective empire represented in the writings discussed here, antiquity is ubiquitous and the remote past incessantly interferes with the present: it shapes the landscapes of Iraq, Syria, and Palestine and is apparent in forms of settlement and habitation and in the everyday life of both locals and Westerners—travellers, archaeologists, and administrators. The past relativizes notions about civilization and progress. And as much as modern technologies mediate access to imperial territories in the Middle East and Western experiences of them, so does archaeology mediate perceptions of the past, the present, and human and civilizational development. On the face of it, Christie and her characters voice binary orientalist ideas about the West and the East and the hierarchy between them. Hierarchies are described in spatial terms: the farther a place is from the coastline of Syria and the Lebanon, the farther it is from civilization. In Come Tell Me, the borderline of the civilized and recognizable world is Beirut and travel from it to northern Syria is a journey away from civilization: “Yesterday we were travelling within the confines of civilization. Today,

28 Christie, Appointment with Death, 99–100. 29 Curran, Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, 278–9; Christie, Notebook 61, ACA.

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abruptly we leave civilization behind.”30 Yet the discovery of the traces of ancient Mesopotamian cultures challenges notions about progress and civilization. Christie’s interest in, and practising of, archaeology puncture the idea that recent civilizations are more complex than ancient ones and a progressivist perception of material history. Moreover, archaeological excavation was, for her, not merely a means used for exposing past material cultures, or a set of practices, but a way of living and an experience, as well as a metaphor for enquiry and detection. Christie’s notions of archaeology and her representations of her archaeological experiences cluster around the term “Tell”, or mound. The Tell is not just a site of excavation, antiquity, and murder, but also the organizing metaphor of her archaeological memoir, parts of An Autobiography, and of some of her novels. As I have noted in detail in Chapters 1, 3, and 4, from the 1890s, the word “Tell” came to serve as a central metaphor in archaeological writing, biblical studies, anthropology, and travel literature. The man-made mound signified human development, most notably urban development. The importance of Tells in Palestine, and in Mesopotamia, was crucial. It indicated successive settlement in cities built directly on top of each other that formed, in the most literal and material sense, sequences of material civilizations whose remains testified to cycles of settlement, habitation, and destruction. For Mallowan and Christie, as for German archaeologist Baron Max Oppenheimer, the deeper or lower layers of habitation in periods that lacked written records were the pinnacle of Mesopotamian civilization, sometimes valued more than the treasures of the later Assyrian Empire. The preference for prehistory over history became crucial in their evaluation of the age value of archaeological objects, as well as the aesthetic value of finds. Christie’s informed and self-conscious usage of the Tell as a multilayered metaphor for archaeology, detection, culture, and writing is abundantly manifest in the very title of her archaeological memoir Come Tell Me How You Live that refers to the stratified archaeological mound and to the practices of narrating and writing. It is even more evident in the book’s epigraph, the poem A- Sitting on a Tell, dedicated “with apologies to Lewis Carroll”, and that paraphrases the White Knight’s recitation of the “Haddock’s Eyes”, really named “The Aged Aged Man” and “really” being “A Sitting on A Gate”, in chapter 8 in Alice Through the Looking Glass. There it is sung to a tune Alice recognizes as Thomas Moore’s “I give thee all, I can No More”, itself parodying William Wordsworth.31 In Christie’s rendition, Carroll’s mock dialogue is turned into a dialogue between the young archaeologist, Mallowan, and the crime writer herself, searching prehistoric objects and for evidence of a crime, respectively. Carroll’s aged man’s processing of butterflies into

30 Christie, Come Tell Me, 38. 31 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (1865; 1871, repr. New York, 1960), 212.

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mutton pies and their sale on the streets32 is converted into Mallowan’s search for prehistoric pots. He said: “I look for aged pots Of prehistoric days, And then I measure them in lots And lots of different ways. And then (like you) I start to write, My words are twice as long As yours, and far more erudite They prove my colleagues wrong!”33

His evident choice is prehistory: His accents mild were full of wit: “Five thousand years ago Is really, when I think of it, The choicest age I know. And once you learn to scorn A.D. And you have got the knack, Then you could come and dig with me And never wander back.”34

The preferred preoccupation with prehistory, rather than the historical era identified here with the age of Christianity, clearly makes for a new cultural hierarchy which deviates from the biblical framework of history and culture. And it clearly privileges objects over texts and words. The Aged Man’s revelation of his murderous occupation35 is “converted” from a description of destruction to one of conservation and guarding of antiques, their cataloguing and display at museums.36 Apparently a pastiche, the poem is a commentary on prehistory, the hierarchy of civilizations, and archaeology. At the same time, it is a comment on writing and literary tradition. Christie’s pastiche is itself archaeological, like a stratified mound, and reads like an excavation through layers of texts. Carroll’s is a comment on the meaning, or rather meaninglessness, of words and the uncertainty of their designations, evident in the naming of the song (which has at least four titles, all proving to be illusionary). The “Haddock’s Eyes” is a travesty of earlier texts, among them Wordsworth’s, and even the tune purports to be what it is not. The

32 Ibid., 213. 33 Christie, Come Tell Me, 9. 34 Ibid. 35 “I hunt for haddock’s eyes / Among the heather bright, And work them into waistcoat-buttons”: Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 214. 36 Christie, Come Tell Me, 10.

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deliberate wordplay on Carroll, indeed the choice of Through the Looking Glass, is revealing because like Christie’s whodunnits, they, too, may be interpreted as riddles, to be solved with the aid of clues.37 The wordplay and the genealogy of the Tell extend beyond pastiche, fantasy, and the history of archaeological research. Tells were etched on the landscape of Iraq and Syria and were central to archaeologists’ and travellers’ experiences of the antiquity of both countries. Christie’s own Middle Eastern landscapes are densely marked by numerous mounds that she came to know at first hand, during Mallowan’s archaeological surveys for the British Museum in 1934 and 1935, in which she participated, and at excavations. His survey of the Khabur Valley in Northern Syria included some fifty-nine mounds, some of them sounded to determine the choice of excavation sites, of which two, Chagar Bazar and Tell Brak, were selected for digging.38 The survey and trip—and most probably the reports too—became raw material for at least two chapters in Come Tell Me and Christie’s post-war thriller They Came to Baghdad. Her use, in different forms of writing, of the technical surveys further demonstrates the ties between expert archaeological writing, autobiography, and popular interwar genres. She acknowledges the ubiquity of Tells, as well as their elusive and misleading appearance. “Mounds rise everywhere—one can see perhaps sixty if one counts. Sixty ancient settlements, that is to say. Here where only the tribesmen move with their brown tents, was once a busy part of the world”, notes Christie in a chapter on “The Habur and the Jaghjagha”.39 She conventionally rehearses the contrasting of the glorious past to the present: “Here some five thousand years ago, was the busy part of the world. Here were the beginnings of civilization.”40 The Tells seem to be monuments to the past and the decline of civilizations, but appearances are misleading: the size and bulk of the mounds are hard to estimate and they confuse the sense of sight and distance of those who approach them. Occasionally they have the effect of a mirage and their protruding from the soil disorients explorers and would-be archaeologists. The difficulty of identifying and measuring them at first sight is apparent in the constant analogue between Tells and blemishes on the human skin. Some surveyors call them “bumps”. In They Came to Baghdad, the factional Tell Aswad seems to the heroine Victoria Jones, “a kind of a pimple on the far horizon”, distanced miles away from her. But “the pimple developed with astonishing rapidity into first a lob and then a hill and finally into a large and impressive Tell. On one side of it was a long sprawling building of mud-brick.”41 But unlike the Mesopotamian landscape and that of Arabia discussed by Pryia Satia, that 37 The writer’s part in the dialogue evokes clues to murder plots: “a plan to kill a millionaire / And hid the body in a van . . . how to thrust some arsenic into tea”: Christie, Come Tell Me, 9, 10. 38 Mallowan to Director, BM, 19 December 1934, BMCA, CE32/42/61; Mallowan, “Khabur Survey and Sounding”, 1934–5, Mallowan Archive, BMA, MED, 197.1, 1–72. 39 Christie, Come Tell Me, 55. Christie’s spelling. 40 Ibid. 41 Agatha Christie, They Came to Baghdad (1951, repr. London, 2006), 104.

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defy an empirical study and comprehension and may be experienced only by intuition and the Western expert’s “immersion” in the desert,42 the archaeological sites described by Christie and Mallowan are subjected to a rigorous, empirical, and rational investigation, precisely like the crimes and murders that occur in them: their mystery is solved by painstaking detective work. Moreover, the “bumps” empirically challenge percepts about historical time and change. Evidently Christie’s treatment of time and antiquity resonates with the changes in Mesopotamian archaeology which had begun to take place before the outbreak of the First World War, but became enhanced during the interwar era. As I have noted in Chapter 5 and will further demonstrate in Chapter 7, interest in antiquity moved towards the discovery of earlier civilizations that evolved before the evolution of writing. Prehistory extended antiquity temporally, contested notions of it, and made the term itself relative. For what previously had been considered “ancient”, now became “new” and even “modern”, and the age value of physical remnants of the past was occasionally elevated over what had been deemed aesthetic value: the older a civilization, the more it was cherished among some archaeologists and enthusiasts. Classical antiquity, which had been the traditional standard of aesthetics, beauty, and culture, was considered “new” and therefore of lesser value than Assyrian material culture, which itself was young compared to the much older Sumerian or earlier cultures. The new value accorded to age confuted linearity and ideas about progress and occasionally notions about aestheticism and art: Roman and classical antiquity generally were demoted from their prime place in a hierarchy of antiquity, but so too were “historical” societies, defined as literate societies and “history”, repeatedly equated by Christie with written records. The archaeological and historical value of prehistoric civilizations dug in southern Iraq and northern Iraq and Syria was the subject of a prolonged debate between “materialists” such as Woolley and materialist prehistorians like Mallowan and Oppenheim on the one hand, and “textualists” like Reginald Campbell Thompson, director of the excavation in Nimrud (in which Mallowan participated before embarking on an independent archaeological career) and Sidney Smith on the other, who were interested in the written evidence gleaned from cuneiform. Mallowan and Christie’s expeditions to Arpachyiah in 1932–3 marked out for him a professional territory, distinguishing him at the time as a “pre-historian” archaeologist. This choice and image, as well as the popularity of prehistory, is shrewdly evoked by Christie in her autobiographical and fictional work. Like the excavations in southern Iraq, the archaeological survey of the Khabur basin is described as a race for prehistory: The mounds in the immediate neighbourhood of Meyadin prove unattractive.

42 Satia, Spies.

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‘Romans!’ murmurs Max disgustingly. It is his last word of contempt. Stifling any lingering feeling I may have that the Romans were an interesting people, I echo his tone, and say ‘Roman’, and cast down a fragment of despised pottery. ‘Min Ziman . . . er Rum’, says Hamoudi.43

The dialogue between Mallowan and his foreman Sheikh Hamoudi Ibn Ibrahim of Jerablus in northern Syria, former foreman in Woolley’s expeditions to Carchemish and Ur, and supervisor of their extensive local labour force, is repeated here and elsewhere with the Arabic reiteration used as a refrain.44 There are no signs of any antique settlement other than Roman, which is treated with the proper disgust. ‘Min Ziman er Rum’, says Hamoudi, shaking his head distastefully, and I echo him dutifully. For to our view the Romans are hopelessly modern-children of yesterday. Our interest begins at the second millennium B.C., with the varying fortunes of the Hittites and in particular we want to find out more about the military dynasty of the Mitanni, foreign adventurers about whom little is known, but who flourished in this part of the world…45

A detour on the Mitanni is followed by the adage: “And from that period backwards, of course, into the dim ages of pre-history—an age without written records, when only pots and house plans, and amulets, ornaments, and beads, remain to give their dumb witness to the life the people lived.”46 Parts of the passage are transplanted in They Came to Baghdad, where they describe archaeologist Richard Baker, a thinly disguised Mallowan, a dedicated excavator who is also a paragon of an unobtrusive English masculinity and a defender of Cold War Western democracy, who wins over the heart of Victoria and carries on detective work.47 Christie’s witty depiction of prehistoric archaeology and the adulation of the prehistoric reflect her own attraction to them and accumulation of knowledge by experience and trial and error. During her career in archaeology she acquired both practical and formal knowledge in the field. Her personal education in prehistory and growing fascination with it are described twice, in An Autobiography and in Come Tell Me, and reiterated and fictionalized in her portrayal of fictional archaeologists like Victoria Jones, and of female narrators/investigators like Amy Leatheran. In all of these renditions the attraction of prehistoric ages lies in their materiality. It is the dominance of objects and matter that makes these ages and the prehistoric people of Halaf culture of the sixth to the fifth millenniums bc seem so real to her. Halaf culture was named after the site in northern Syria, where its wares had been first excavated by Oppenheim (in 1911–13, thence 1927) and 43 Christie, Come Tell Me, 45. 44 Mallowan, Memoirs, 43. 45 Christie, Come Tell Me, 42. 46 Ibid. 47 Christie, They Came to Baghdad, 143.

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was in evidence in sites dispersed from south-eastern Turkey to Iran and the northern parts of Syria and Iraq. Mallowan may have discovered a complete inventory of it in the Khabur Valley.48 Its greatest appeal was the distinctive Halaf pottery with its special patterns, colours, and finishing, transmitted down to derivative pottery cultures in the south of Iraq and surviving into the so-called Ubaid period (c.5200–4200 bc). And it was not only pottery that became Halaf culture’s best known feature which appealed to Christie, but an entire array of objects—vessels and tools—that made up the world of Halaf people, embodied the everydayness of antiquity, and made it close and palpable. Christie and some of her fictional heroes and heroines (and female victims) perceive the past mainly as the history of tool-making and people in the past as tool and object makers. They relate to them because these are ordinary people: industrious and practical, two traits that Christie could identify with. Hence her admiration of the small mound of Arpachiyah, about four miles from Nineveh, which she egged Mallowan to excavate because, notwithstanding its obscurity and the uncertainty about its pottery, The people who made that pottery must have lived here. Their occupation was perhaps primitive, but the pottery was not; it was of the finest quality. They could not have made it in the great city of Nineveh, nearby, like some local Swansea or Wedgwood, for Nineveh did not exist when they were moulding their clay. It did not exist for several thousand years to come . . . to find out something new about the history of man one must use what he himself can tell you, in this case by what he made with his hands.49

The juxtaposition of the Neolithic site and the iconic sites of industrial manufacture and the First Industrial Revolution in Britain is revealing. In Josiah Wedgwood’s Staffordshire works, porcelain and bone china were mass manufactured and Swansea was known as the capital of copper smelting, mining, and pottery. Pottery manufacture in these three places is put on a par. For Christie, history as a narrative of tool-making is also a history of human creativity, thus: “One does feel proud to belong to the human race when one sees the wonderful things human beings have fashioned with their hands. They were the creators—they must share a little of the holiness of the Creator . . . He left the things to be fashioned by men’s hands.”50 Christie's version of the history of civilizations as a history of Homo Faber (not even remotely resembling Marxist senses of the term), makes it possible for her to accommodate an admiration to a material culture with the pessimism

48 See Chapter  7 and Lionel Gossman, The Passion of Max von Oppenheim: Archaeology and Intrigue in the Middle East from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Open Book, 2013). 49 Christie, An Autobiography, 475. 50 Ibid., 473.

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about human nature and weakness that characterizes her detective writing. This materialist notion of the past also testifies to her grasp of the ways in which archaeology mediated the modern experience of it. As she states at the beginning of her archaeological autobiography, the question “Come tell me how you lived?” is the question that archaeology asks of the Past (capitalized by her). The answer is found by digging and picking through cooking pots, bone needles, houses and systems of sanitation, cook-pots of the common type, and suchlike small items belonging to once living “little people”.51 The material presence of the past and the functionality and usability of archaeological objects, as well as the aesthetics Christie discovered in them, made them “modern” in a way that objects of later periods were not. Comparisons to modern luxury products and mass-produced objects are frequent. Ancient handmade vessels are likened to mass-produced Woolworth pots; the pattern on her printed dress has a running lozenge “Tell Halaf pattern”, and glazed sherds in pastel colours are like small Fabergé boxes.52

Archaeology and Disrupted Domesticity: Murder in Mesopotamia Archaeology as a compendium of the histories of “little people” and their things domesticates the remote past. And in Christie’s writings, domestication takes on a few forms. In the first place, the distant, unfamiliar, and anonymous past is rendered familiar by the association of everyday life and labour in it, and of prehistoric tools and pottery to their modern counterparts (Wedgwood’s and Woolworth’s pots, modern fashion, modern machine-work, and so on). Secondly, ancient material culture is related to the history of living and architecture and to domestic scenes. In making these associations and analogies, Christie followed a prominent strand of interwar archaeology and, more broadly, a preoccupation with antiquity that the book tracks: the stress on domestic and familial aspects of the ancient world. As we shall see, the domestication of antiquity by way of its association to home life and the family was especially prominent in popular Egyptology and became a staple of the publicizing of the excavations at Tell al- ʿAmarna that aroused popular attention. This strand was quite apparent in Mesopotamian popular archaeology as well, most notably in Woolley’s publications discussed in Chapter 5. Unlike the material cultures discovered in the Upper Nile, Amarna, or at Ur, the prehistoric cultures investigated by Mallowan and recorded and fictionalized by Christie could not be personalized and rendered into individual histories (such as Tutankhamun’s or Akhenaten’s). But, as already 51 Christie, Come Tell Me, 17, and They Came to Baghdad, 149. 52 Christie, Come Tell Me, 17, 55, 95, and An Autobiography, 410.

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noted, they could be, and were, represented as the history of ordinary craftsmen and tool-makers. Last, but not least, domestication is manifest in descriptions of life of the archaeological expedition on the excavation site—both the life and daily routines of the archaeologists themselves and those of the local labour force. Come Tell Me is the history of the expedition as a household, as well as being a discourse on travel and archaeology. Christie goes into painstaking detail to relate the preparations for, and workings of, an excavation as a tale of household management. Shopping for the expedition, including the purchasing of archaeological tools, work materials, and foodstuffs; storing and cooking; the exploits of local servants and house-staff (as distinct from those of the labour-force on the field), their leisure, their illnesses and medical treatment, their blunders and misfortunes, the histories of her pets—all these are belaboured in a way that is sometimes reminiscent of colonial domestic narratives, but also of interwar narratives of suburban domesticity. The expeditions’ houses, their construction, layout, and defects, too, are recovered in graphic detail. Moreover, Christie visualized life on the excavation sites in her photography and in a film, probably made in spring 1938, a 16mm shot with a Kodak camera (Set). Remarkably, the film consists of alternating black-and-white and colour sequences, with Christie’s subtitles, and is presumably an early exemplar of amateur experimentation in colour filming.53 Households and domesticity are, of course, central themes in the interwar classical British whodunnit, notably Christie’s. Crime and murder take place not just indoors in different kinds of houses—from big mansions, through bohemian lodgings, to village cottages—but are the ultimate sign of the disruption of home life, and of homes as secure places: murder embodies the potential dangers of home life. In the sequence of archaeological and historical novels set in the empire and most particularly in the Middle East, ancient historical sites and, especially, the archaeological Tell itself, become sites of murder and the characters, whether the murderers themselves, or their victims, investigators, or onlookers, are positioned as members of dysfunctional families, or of face-to-face communities, operating as a “transit” family, subverted from within. Disruption culminates in a murder that is investigated by the detective who reconstructs its history in the manner in which an archaeologist looks for clues to the past. Appointment with Death narrates the murder of the monstrous mother of a family, Mrs Boynton; although her murderer is not one of her children, the entire narrative builds up as a story of a justified matricide and their eventual emancipation from maternal tyranny and degradation. The murder itself takes place in Petra and its rock edifices are its literal background. Christie’s extensive notes on the characters are comments on their role in the Boynton dysfunctional 53 Charlotte Trumpler, “‘A Dark-Room Has Been Allotted to me . . .’: Photography and Filming by Agatha Christie on the Excavation Sites”, in Trumpler, Agatha Christie and Archaeology, 229–258, 236–7.

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household. Murder on the Nile deals with murder carried out by a couple against the husband’s estranged wife and features broken and incomplete households that deteriorate during the voyage up the Nile. Thus, archaeological travel and tourism themselves are represented as harbouring lethal dangers. Death Comes as the End is about serial killings in a Middle Kingdom household in Thebes in Upper Egypt of about 2000 bc. It probably is the first novel to have combined historicalarchaeological fiction and the whodunnit, thus inaugurating a genre. Reviewers of the first edition certainly noticed the association in the novel and in Christie’s oeuvre in its entirety between murder, domestic life, and material culture. As Maurice Richardson noted in The Observer: “With her special archaeological equipment, Mrs. Christie makes you feel just as much at home on the Nile in 1945 B.C., as if she were bombarding you with false clues in a chintz-covered drawing room in Leamington Spa. But she has not merely changed scenes; her reconstruction is vivid and she works really hard at her characters.”54 It is, however, in Murder in Mesopotamia that the juncture of the two investigative genres of the detective novel and the archaeological report, of digging and sleuthing, is most pronounced. Moreover, Murder highlights the themes of disrupted domesticity and domestic violence by apparently removing them from the setting of the middleclass home, locating them in the desert and connecting them to antiquity. Since the novel is still in wide circulation and has been serialized on television and issued as a graphic novel, it suffices only to briefly recoup its plot and set of characters. It is narrated by a female professional who is an archaeological ingénue, English nurse Leatheran, whose ignorance about Iraq and its past, and about Iraqi people, is matched by an Englishness that develops in the novel from narrowmindedness regarding cultural difference to some openness towards it. Her robust and commonsensical manner and conduct make Eric Leidner, American Swedish director of the archaeological expedition, hire her to shepherd his disturbed wife Louise.55 Almost the entire novel takes place in the expedition house at Tell Yarimjah and on the dig itself. Mrs Leidner’s history is discovered piecemeal, providing clues to her illness and character. She is the widow of Frederick Bosner, a German American who spied for Germany during the war and was thought to have been killed in a train crash en route to his execution for treason. During her widowhood she becomes the victim of anonymous letters allegedly from the dead husband, which stop upon her marrying the archaeologist but resume after the couple’s arrival at the Tell. As it later transpires, Bosner had survived the crash, assumed the identity of the dead Leidner, and remarried his own widow. Shortly after her nurse’s arrival Mrs Leidner is murdered in her bedroom, obviously by an insider, with an archaeological artefact—a quern—as murder weapon. Poirot is brought to the scene, which he investigates with the help of 54 Maurice Richardson, “Death Comes as an End”, The Observer, April 1945, 3. 55 Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia, 15.

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nurse Leatheran and outsiders who are either members of the British police force, or are other representatives of British authority in Iraq, like the local Dr Reilly. The murder is followed by another—that of Miss Johnson, a manly spinster and an archaeologist, devoted to Dr Leidner, after she had discovered the method of the murder. Leidner is eventually found out to be the assassin. Dedicated by Christie “to my many archaeological friends in Iraq and Syria”, Murder has long been taken to be, and approached as a roman-à-clef.56 Contemporaries, including Christie herself and Mallowan, as well as Christie’s biographers, identified the Tell and excavations with Woolley’s excavations at Ur. And the novel certainly is strewn with references to the layout and excavation at Ur—including the digging of the famous great pit aimed to touch virgin soil, the Ziggurat, and the Royal Cemetery. In addition to these famous Ur landmarks, known to Christie’s reading public from the extensive coverage of the expedition in the press, much-publicized objects turn up in the story. They are displayed to the outsiders/investigators in the antika-room as rare archaeological pieces and their antiquity value and aesthetics are expounded by the expert characters.57 These include the famous golden dagger found at Ur, and gold cups displayed at the British Museum and Penn Museum. Christie could easily assume that her readership had had at least a smattering of education in the history and archaeology of Ur, acquired from the illustrated and daily press, the bevy of exhibitions in London displaying the finds, and Woolley’s intense publicizing of them in the press, in lectures, and on the wireless. Nurse Leatheran’s initiation in Mesopotamian archaeology and the readers’ is completed by guided tours in the Royal Cemetery conducted by the experts/archaeologists on the Tell, and the epigraphist, Father Lavigny, allegedly of the French missionary order of the Pères blancs who played a major role in the proselytization of Africa. Not only the objects and settings but the characters, too, may be tentatively identified and had in fact been identified by contemporary readers. They were factional renditions of living archaeologists who published extensively on Ur and reconstructed its material culture. The Leidners were identifiable as the Woolleys, the fake Father Lavigny (in truth French arch jewel-thief Raoul Menier) with the expedition’s first epigraphist Father Legrain of Penn Museum, and the levelheaded and trustable David Emmott with Mallowan, Woolley’s aide at Ur. Christie’s list of “People” in her preliminary notes is practically the same as the novel’s cast.58 The “clues” to who was who in the novel were searched by specialist readers, including archaeologists and anthropologists. Henry Field, who noted

56 Ibid., dedication. 57 Ibid., 72–3. 58 Notebook 20, “The People”, including notes on “The window idea”, e.g. the method and plotting of the murder. Notebook 47 includes Christie’s thoughts about basing a play on the novel and sketching alternative scenarios. Both Christie, ACA.

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the thrill of the staff at the Fields Museum of Natural History in Chicago, wrote to Mallowan that Weeks have never seemed so long as they did between each installment, and I am all too ashamed to tell you that I guessed Dr. Leidner had a great deal to do with it at the end of the first. All Members of the Oriental Institute [of the  University of Chicago] thought that it must be Father Lavigny, alias de Genouillac [French priest, epigraphist and Assyriologist].59

Katharine Woolley’s own biography, her role in the Ur expedition and, not least, the couple’s married life, easily rendered themselves to analogues with Louise Leidner’s character and role in the novel. The former destroyed her personal records, but her presence on the dig and her part in its daily routines is apparent in Woolley’s own correspondence with his sponsors at the British Museum and Penn Museum, and in hundreds of photographs in their collections and the Agatha Christie Archives.60 Katherine Keeling (neé Menke) (1888–1945), widowed from her first husband, intelligence officer and colonial functionary Lieutenant Bertram Keeling, who committed suicide six months after their marriage, arrived at Ur as a volunteer worker in 1924 and became a paid worker after her marriage to Woolley. Attention focused largely on their apparently unconsummated marriage and her personality and, very recently, on her sexuality and an assumed anatomical and hormonal disorder she allegedly suffered from.61 As Henrietta McCall has pointed out, this focus has blurred her work as archaeological artist, illustrator, and draughtswoman; she made paintings and illustrations of the finds and by 1927 had completed some 150 drawings in ink and colour preparing them for publication.62 In addition to drawing, she restored famous objects found at the Royal Cemetery, most notably Puabi’s head and headdress (discussed in Chapter 5), took a substantial part in cataloguing finds, and supervised the dig’s domestic workers. She also wrote a series of articles on biblical Ur for the upmarket Britannia and Eve when it was still a ladies’ journal, catering for an exclusively female readership.63 She seems to have played a vital role in publicizing Ur, cultivating a network of supporters and donors that included representatives of the oil industry, such as her brother-in-law, agent of the Turkish Oil Concessions in Iraq. 59 Henry Field to Mallowan, 22 January 1938, BMA, MED, Mallowan Correspondence and Varia, Mallowan Archive 196.2. 60 Byron Gordon to Woolley, 5 October 1926 on her joining the expedition: Box 3, WY1/6/5; and Woolley to Kenyon, WY1/7/40, both BMA, MED. 61 For a summary of Henrietta McCall’s interpretations, see http://bjrichards.blogspot. com/2013/01/more-deadly-than-male-life-of-katharine_4954.html, last accessed 14 August 2018. 62 Woolley, report, 23 February 1927, Box 3, WY1/7/4; Woolley to Kenyon, 30 November 1925, WY1/7/38; Woolley to Kenyon, 18 February 1926, WY1/7/28. All BMA, MED. 63 It became a “journal for men and women” in 1930. See Katharine Woolley, “Digging Up Bible History”, Britannia and Eve, 4 January 1929, 24–6.

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Her undecided role, which has been alternately described as that of an amateur archaeologist and a highly skilled drawer and restorer, as well as the abundant comment on her character, both during her lifetime and posthumously, demonstrate notions about gender and female sexuality. Clearly, contemporaries found her difficult to place as a woman. Apparently playing an auxiliary feminine role, as an archaeologist’s wife, and displaying her female charisma, she did not fit contemporary gender and sexual roles: she was childless, widely believed to have been asexual, and was highly educated. Put differently, she transgressed notions of femininity and the Woolleys’ marriage challenged perceptions concerning middle-class marital relations. The character of Louise Leidner, like other female characters in Murder and Christie’s archaeological and travel novels, stretches the boundaries of gender and sexuality. Even some of the stereotyped female characteristics attached to her are far from being homogeneous and are bifurcated. On the one hand she exercises power over men, either by working her charm and allure on them, or by repressing and intimidating them, and is described by one protagonist as la Belle dame sans merci. Her power and her spell extend to women too. On the other hand, she is the victim of her enchanting but infirm body, is childless, and does not seem to fulfil her sexuality. The victimizer of weaker men and women, she is a victim of her illness, domestic violence, and ultimately of murder. Her murder typically occurs in a small face-to-face archaeological community that contains within it broken couples and gender transgressions that are apparent in the conduct of characters such as the archaeologist Miss Johnson, and the Mercados—a drugaddict archaeologist and his plebeian caretaker wife. The murder takes place in the victim’s bedroom in the expedition house, amidst a setting that is at one and the same time domestic and archaeological. Christie’s detailed description of the house, introduced by nurse Leatheran, a newcomer to the place, is supplemented by Christie’s drawing of a “Plan to the expedition house at Tell Yarimjah”, clearly based on the house at Ur.64 Additionally, her notes include a drawing of the position of the victim in her room, and of the room’s window and the roof.65 While the victim does not, and is not meant to, exude sympathy among most of the other characters and readers, her complex character, intelligence, and knowledge are drawn out: she possesses practical archaeological knowledge and some knowledge on history, popular science, and literature. The bookshelf by her deathbed reflects contemporary middle-brow taste in these subjects and includes books targeting non-experts like Who Were the Greeks? (presumably John Linton Myres’s), Introduction to Relativity, George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (1918), and a biography of the early nineteenth-century 64 Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia, 42. 65 “Can we work in the window idea?”, Christie, Notebook 20, ACA. See Curran, Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, 270–1, for sketches of the characters.

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traveller Lady Hester Stanhope, an amateur archaeologist who lived an independent life on Mount Lebanon where she exercised local authority during the 1820s and 1830s. The books also present her as an exceptional woman and a female misfit at one and the same time. The fiction department includes Rose Macaulay’s Crewe Train (1926) and Joseph Hergesheimer’s Linda Condon (1919), both depicting modern women and issues like female independence. The reading list certainly casts her as a modern woman and is repeated in detail twice, serving as a clue to her character.66 It is most likely that Christie was familiar with these books; her own 1930s reading lists included, in addition to fiction, the classics, histories of Greece and Rome, an assortment of books on Egyptology, and popular anthropological books. This mix is also apparent in a rather patronizing reading proposal sent to her by Mallowan from Ur in 1930.67 Middle-class self-education and progressivism is manifest in Louise Leidner’s acquired archaeological knowledge that serves her in educating the uninitiated and archaeologically ignorant like nurse Leatheran: ‘Dear, dear,’ I said ‘it’s a pity they’re all so broken, isn’t it? Are they really worth keeping?’ Mrs. Leidner smiled a little and said . . . ‘some of these are the oldest things we have—perhaps as much as seven thousand years old.’ And she explained how some of them came from a very deep cut on the mound down towards the bottom, [of Ur’s great pit] and how, thousands of years ago they had been broken and mended with bitumen, showing people prized their things just as much as they do nowadays…

A beautiful gold dagger with dark blue stones in the handle (the Ur dagger) is then displayed to be followed by a gold drinking cup . . . ‘early Akkadian. Unique’.68 By highlighting Ur fixtures and prize objects which had already been displayed to publics in London and Philadelphia, the novel further cements the association between the whodunnit and archaeology and between words, images, and objects, particularly because the presenter of the precious artefacts, her audience in the novel, and the readers who are also assumed to have viewed these artefacts, endow the archaeological finds with an aura of mystery and beauty. It is worth mentioning that in An Autobiography, Christie used the dagger as an iconic object that symbolized the aesthetics of Ur and the desert surrounding it.69 The association between expertise, female professionalism, and degrees of independence on the one hand and transgressions of domesticity, couple-hood,

66 Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia, 176–7, 305. 67 Mallowan to Christie, 8 November 1930, ACA, Christie and Mallowan’s letters. The list includes Herodotus, J. A. K. Thomson’s Greeks and Barbarians, and Flinders Petrie’s Revolutions of Civilization and similar items. 68 Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia, 72–3. 69 Christie, An Autobiography.

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and family on the other, also locate Louise Leidner alongside a gallery of Christie female transgressors who become the victims of their gender, infringements of family life and ambition for unmitigated power. In Appointment with Death, the victim Mrs Boynton and her killer Lady Westholme, notwithstanding the wide difference between them, complement one another. Boynton, a former women’s prison warder who married money, terrorizes her children and corrupts and disempowers everyone who encounters her. Lady Westholme embodies well-meant uses of authority; she represents the intrusiveness and exploits of international interwar institutions and their futility. Described in the notes as “a future prime minister”, she is demoted to a mere party politician and philanthropist who feminizes men (including her own husband), dominates other women, and humiliates colonial natives.70 She kills her jailer, Mrs Boynton, by using a modern weapon that is meant to heal—a hypodermic syringe, then commits suicide. The murder frees the Boynton family from bondage and normalizes it, at the same time that it rids the women’s milieu from forms of female power that they cannot contain. Christie’s interwar archaeological writings on the Near East were much more than thrilling reading matter: they may be regarded as supplementary to the writings of some of the period’s leading discoverers cum public archaeologists. Supplementing by no means entails a clear hierarchy that ranks the archaeologists’ works higher than her novels and autobiographical works. Archaeologists were popular public figures who wrote for broad audiences. As seen in Chapter 5, excavations in Mesopotamia/Iraq became fertile ground for the publication of profitable and widely circulating archaeological monographs and series, ethnographies, and autobiographies. Woolley is, of course, a prime example of the presence of the archaeologist-author in interwar popular culture. While he, Mallowan, and Gordon Childe popularized and dramatized the ancient past and archaeology itself, Christie did both, and defined and experimented with two literary genres that developed in tandem during the interwar period: the autobiography of an excavator that combines an archaeological travelogue, ethnography, and life on an excavation site that I have called “archaeobiography”, and the whodunnit set in the imperial territories subject to the new mandatory regime of antiquities and situated in recognizable excavation sites. Both genres developed together and appropriated a store of images and rhetoric, as well as the vast corpus of popular archaeological writings on Mesopotamia, particularly on Ur, and that were made easily available to the public by the press and by the archaeologists mentioned above and less glamorous excavators such as Campbell Thompson. His autobiography and mystery romances that border on the occult contradict his image as a dry-as-dust digger (which Christie herself cultivated).71 70 Christie, Notebook 61, ACA. 71 Reginald Campbell Thompson, A Pilgrim’s Scrip (London, 1915) and Diggers’ Fancy: A Melodrama in Blank Verse (London: 1938).

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It is also clear that Christie was familiar with Mallowan’s own records. Her work demonstrated to readers at the time, and still does, a deep knowledge of practices and routines on the dig, including the restoration and recording of archaeological finds. At the same time, and in contradistinction to a dominant trend in the press coverage of the discoveries in Mesopotamia, Christie did not glamorize the procedures of excavation, nor did she romanticize discovery. Rather she often satirized, sometimes caustically, and critiqued archaeologists and the broader preoccupation with the “most ancient past” in Mesopotamian archaeology, trends in periodization, and notions of temporality. We may recall her use of the refrain “from Roman times”, or the rebuke of Richard Baker’s preference for the bc and scorn for the ad that clearly reflect Mallowan’s own preferences.72 An almost identical passage appears in They Came to Baghdad and the later An Autobiography, in each of which a different character castigates archaeologists for being liars: “he never could understand how archaeologists were able to say so definitely how old things were. Always used to think they must be awful liars, ha ha . . . how did an archaeologist know how old a thing was?”73 If we define “supplement” as an addition of materials and representations to the body of knowledge about the ancient past, an addition that is relative to that body but may also serve to challenge it,74 then Christie’s casting of archaeology and its popularization may be understood as both an affirmation of, and a challenge to, it. Moreover, the discovery of Iraq’s past and the development of Mesopotamian archaeology serve her to address their connection to modern domesticity as well as the post-war empire. The plots, narratives, and sites, as well as the characters in her novels, are domesticated, but their domesticity is flawed, especially that of the female characters. Domesticity is placed not in a Little England, but in the new empire, typically in mandate territories, that are accessible by the new technologies of speed and mobility. At the same time, these territories are associated with remote pasts. Moreover, Christie’s histories connect not only empire and home but also broker archaeology and bring it to broad audiences, mediating between them and between antiquity and modernity.

72 Christie, They Came to Baghdad, 39. 73 Ibid., 44–5. See also Christie, An Autobiography, 406–7. 74 On the supplement, see Joan Scott, “Women’s History”, in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge, 1992), 49–50; Billie Melman, “Under the Western Historian’s Eyes: Eileen Power and the Early Feminist Encounter with Colonialism”, History Workshop Journal, 42 (1996), 150–1.

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Prehistories for Modernity Stone Age Humans and Others in Palestine and Mesopotamia

The Most Ancient East That the Near East had been “for a long time one of the richest fields for the historian” was a commonplace. But “Until recently no one seems to have suspected it of being an equally rich field for the prehistorian.” Thus wrote George Grant MacCrudy in 1935, American prehistoric archaeologist, anthropologist, founder and first director of the American School of Prehistoric Research, and museum curator.1 He was referring to Palestine in particular but included in his observation the larger region and, indeed, Asia, which he regarded as “Man’s birthplace”. World prehistory and subsequently history, noted MacCrudy, were characterized by a westward movement of people and inventions from the Orient.2 The prehistoric Near East, he observed, was the key to a discovery of the West and “therefore an indispensable prelude to the true appreciation of European history” and Europe.3 MacCrudy and Vere Gordon Childe, Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at Edinburgh University with a distinct public presence, were registering the spreading interest in a “most ancient” Near East that had preceded even ancient history and the thriving activity of (literally) unearthing it, investigating, publicizing, and accessing it to broad and varied audiences. The post-war interest in prehistoric “orients” extended to the Indus Valley civilizations and China, and was part of a penchant for discovering the remotest pasts of humans and their predecessors. Discovery involved not just the excavation of remains—human and animal, material and organic—but also a reconsideration of the origins of modern humans, their relationships to the natural world, civilizational processes, and history itself. Near Eastern prehistory and its discovery had particular significances not least because they ruptured the prevalent biblical framework for making sense of

1 Dorothy  A.  E.  Garrod and Dorothea Bate, The Stone Age of Mount Carmel: Excavations at the Wady El-Mughara I (Oxford, 1937), Foreword. 2 Ibid. 3 V. Gordon Childe, The Most Ancient East: The Oriental Prelude to European Prehistory (New York, 1929), xiii, 1 and his later edition New Light on the Most Ancient East. Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and the Rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950. Billie Melman, Oxford University Press (2020). © Billie Melman. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198824558.001.0001

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antiquity and presented a serious challenge to it. Of course, creationist notions about the origins and age of Man and the world had been bust open already in the nineteenth century when Archbishop Ussher’s chronology of the world and the biblical interpretations of the beginning of the universe and Man were tested to their limits by discoveries in geology and prehistory, and evolutionary paradigms.4 But after the war, the unearthing in biblical lands, such as Palestine, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, of abundant remains of extraordinarily long sequences of tool cultures, stretching from the middle Palaeolithic (Stone Age to the Lower Palaeolithic and Neolithic), seriously contested the biblical master narratives of the past and the present. As Moshe Stekelis, prehistoric archaeologist who collaborated with Dorothy Garrod and like her had been mentored by the celebrated Abbé Henri Breuil, noted in the regional 1943 conference on the future of archaeology: “This country [Palestine] was one of the ancient centres of prehistoric man and in fact men inhabited the caves of the Holy Land from the most ancient times onwards.” He lamented the neglect of their abundant remains, caused by locals and settlers.5 The discovery that modern humans (of Homo sapiens breed) co-existed with extinct hominins—Neanderthals—also ripped open questions about who modern man was, when was man, when did human modernity begin, how and where from did civilization travel, and what was humanity’s uniqueness. “Prehistory”, as we shall see, was pluralized. In temporal terms it covered a duration that was exceedingly difficult to grasp and came to include anytime between the Lower Palaeolithic and the fourth millennium bc. It accommodated stone hand-axes and chipped flints, a variety of chiselled lithics and pottery cultures, such as Samarra and Halaf cultures in northern Iraq and Syria, described as advanced and elaborate. The variety and plurality of prehistory and its longevity that dwarfed history, were marked out in publications for lay publics like Childe’s The Most Ancient East. Its section on the Stone Age is followed by parts on the “Oldest Farmers”, “The Second Pre-dynastic Culture”, and “The Rise of Dynasties” (in Egypt), “The First Prediluvian Culture” (in Mesopotamia), and “The Invention of Writing and the Harnessing of Animal Motive Power”, with chapters on Sumer and the Indus civilizations. The scope and inclusiveness of prehistory are also apparent in that archaeologists with as different expertise as Mallowan, excavator of sixth-millennium Tells in northern Iraq and Syria, Dorothy A. E. Garrod, discoverer of Palestine’s Natufian culture (Neolithic) and Upper Palaeolithic culture, and anatomist Arthur Keith, were all classified as prehistorians. In this immense temporal stretch and variety a few commonalities loom large which will be addressed in the following. First is the tie to modernity that extends the meanings of the modern which have been discussed earlier in the book. 4 Daniel, The Idea of Prehistory, 50–69; see also Van Riper, Men among the Mammoths; Grahame Clark, Prehistory at Cambridge and Beyond (Cambridge, 1989); Melman, “The Power of the Past”. 5 Moshe Stekelis, “Minutes of the Archaeological Conference”, UNESCO, O.I.M.XII, 9–10.

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Prehistory complicated the notion of modernity. At one level, “modern” came to be applied to modern sapiens humans and not to extinct groups. But “modern” was occasionally related to “contemporary” and extended back in time, most typically in popular and autobiographical writings which stress commonalities between modern and Neanderthal women. One such example, which I study in some detail, is the writings of archaeologist, prehistorian, film-maker, and prolific writer on prehistory Jacquetta Hawkes. The wide circulation of Hawkes’s writings on world and human history, alongside her works on prehistoric Britain, demonstrates the second commonality which the chapter considers: the visibility of Near Eastern prehistory across forms of writing, spanning specialized reports and publications on excavations in the Near East; fiction, most notably prehistoric science fiction—an evolving genre, dating back to the 1870s and 1880s; archaeobiographies written by prehistoric archaeologists; and documentary films and exhibitions.6 Prehistory did not have the allure of ancient history. Its discovery did not match the spectacularity of the grand discoveries at the Upper Nile and Ur discussed in Chapters  6,  8, and  9. But it played a crucial part in public exchanges between prehistoric archaeologists and anthropologists that spilled over to the popular press. As already implied, these were debates on the origins of civilization, its spread and migration—in the most literal term of the word—and on race. The fascination with the migratory nature of civilizations, peoples, and tools has to do with a third commonality, the position of Middle Eastern localities in a worldprehistory that included Asia and Europe or Afro-Asia (but rarely the Americas). Fourth and last, is the firm relationship between discovery projects and the mandatory regime of antiquities that also ties in with the modernization of the postwar empire and its territories. In Palestine, the unearthing of prehistoric cultures was directly connected to imperial development projects and was overseen by the mandatory government. And although intervention and control in Iraq, at least before it gained independence (and Syria, where some British-initiated excavations moved after Iraq’s independence) were looser, the discovery of prehistoric sites and their representations were interwoven with debates on imperial governing, national interests, and international needs. To consider and highlight the web of relations between the multiple Near Eastern prehistories and modernity, I will focus on two sites whose locales, environments, and politics differed and that between them encompassed an extraordinarily expansive timescale: the complex of the prehistoric Carmel caves rising alongside the coast of Palestine, known as the Wadi al-Mugharah (Arabic), Nahal Me’arot (Hebrew), and the series of mounds in northern Iraq and Syria: Tell Arpachiyah, in the Nineveh Governorate and bordering Mosul, and Chagar Bazar in Al-Hasakah Governorate, the Upper Khabur Valley in Syria. The sites present 6 On prehistoric science fiction, see Nicholas Ruddick, The Fire in the Stone: Prehistorical Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel (Middletown, CT, 2009).

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registers of temporalities and civilizations that are remote from one another: the Palestine caves revealed a unique cultural sequence stretching over more than half a million years. The span of time revealed in northern Iraq and Syria was considerably shorter and the digs focused on the sixth and fifth millenniums bc. The excavations took place and were publicized at different stages and under different types of mandatory rule. While the Carmel caves were dug and studied during the height of the Mandate on Palestine, the northern Tells were excavated when Britain had already terminated its formal rule in Iraq and the new state’s antiquities regime was undergoing a transitional phase between mandatory control under international oversight and a nationalized system. Prehistoric research in Syria enjoyed the protection and support of France’s mandate authorities. Geopolitics and the differences in regimes impacted not just the scope of excavations, but also their characteristics. As will be shown, the Carmel project was collaborative in disciplinary terms—connecting together a variety of fields of knowledge across the sciences, and manifested international collaboration as well. It also and quite remarkably cut across gender and ethnicity in involving forms of collaboration between British experts, mostly women, and large numbers of local Palestinian women in the expedition’s workforce. The small-scale compact excavation in Arpachiyah ignited an international row over who owned the prehistoric artefacts and remains that had been unearthed. Both sites were represented to wider publics.

Modernity and the Stone Age on Mount Carmel: Development and Archaeology Notwithstanding their promotion as the single most important prehistoric site in mandate Palestine, and as key to the prehistory of the Near East, the four caves in the bluff on the Carmel Ridge, about two miles from the coast of the Mediterranean, were not the location of the first prehistoric discoveries in the country or, for that matter, in the region. Their excavation came hot on the heels of the uncovering, in 1925, of far older remains in Upper Galilee, in Mugharet al-Zuttiyeh (“Cave of Robbers”) in Wadi Amud. Directed by prehistorian Francis Turville-Petre, a twoseason excavation unearthed mammalian remains and a fragment of a fossilized skull, at that time the oldest hominine remain in western Asia, classified as Palaeonathropus Palestinensis and popularly known as the “Galilee Man”.7 At least one more excavation, in Shuqba cave near Wadi an-Natuf on the western flanks of the Judean Hills, established a considerably later sequence of human settlement, 7 A definition which is now contested. See Francis Turville-Petre and Arthur Keith [with sections by Dorothea Bate and Charlotte Baynes], Researches in Prehistoric Galilee 1925–26 and a Report on the Galilee Skull (London, 1927). The Galilee skull was studied by Sir Arthur Keith: see “Report on the Galilee Skull”, ibid., 53–107.

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on the cusp between a hunters and gatherers’ culture and an agricultural animaldomesticating culture, named Natufian.8 But undoubtedly Mount Carmel as a prehistoric site exuded the greatest appeal. And the painstaking recovery of its remote antiquity was intertwined with the mandatory project of modernizing and developing its urban vicinity—the city of Haifa—Palestine’s fastest growing city, an industrial centre, and the site of the biggest deep-water harbour in the eastern Mediterranean. Before the search for a prehistoric Palestinian past began, Mount Carmel was well entrenched in biblical narratives of the contest between polytheistic practices and a Judaic belief in one God, Yahweh. For the Mount, located in the prosperous Kingdom of Israel (whose heyday had been between the tenth and eighth centuries bc), was the setting of the biblical contest between the prophet and miracleworker Elijah and the prophets of Baal and Ashera, their dramatic massacre by Elijah (1 Kings 18), and Yahweh’s victory. Elijah’s life, deeds, and death—or rather disappearance into heaven and prophesized return—have been abundantly referred to in Talmudic and Church traditions, not least in the Carmelite Order, leaving their marks on the mount itself, as well as in the Quran and Islam. The scriptural associations attached to the Carmel were buttressed by the presence of the Crusades in its vicinity. The remains of the Crusaders’ Castle Atlit, erected in 1130 by the Knights Templar as Château Pèlerins (CastrumPerigrinorum), were in the proximity of the caves. The castle invoked both the theme of crusading, embedded in post-war narratives of the British occupation of Palestine, and that of the pilgrimage, the longest-surviving narrative in popular travel culture. Atlit was excavated by Palestine’s Department of Antiquities and garnered wide interest. The Palaeolithic caves were initially regarded as an addition to the area’s main attraction, the castle: references to them were appended to its descriptions in tourist guides like Benjamin Maisler and Samuel Yeivin’s Palestine Guide for Navy, Army and Air Force (1940) that catered for wartime tourists enlisted in the Imperial Forces and, more substantially, to Norman Johns and Dimitri Constantine Barmaki’s. Guide to Atlit.9 Within a decade, Mount Carmel’s prehistory, which was difficult to reconcile with a biblical temporality and with history, was grafted onto previous Judeo-Christian interpretations and imaginings. The discovery of this prehistory was inextricably related to, and precipitated by, mandate development policy. The geological composition of the mass of lime rock of Wadi al-Mugharah and its proximity to the booming city of Haifa and its harbour, made it the select location of a massive quarry, intended to supply the stone required to construct Palestine’s only deep-water harbour and its breakwater. The 8 See Mina Weinstein-Evron, Archaeology in the Archives: Unveiling the Natufian Culture of Mount Carmel (Boston and Leiden, 2009), 2–12 for an analysis of the excavation. 9 Benjamin Maisler and Samuel Yeivin, Palestine Guide for Navy, Army and Air Force (Tel Aviv, 1940); C. N. Johns and Dimitri C. Baramki, Guide to Atlit: The Crusader Castle Town & Surroundings with the Prehistoric Caves at Wadi el Mughara (Department of Antiquities, 1947).

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construction works were part of the city’s massive expansion during the mandate, as well as being constitutive to imperial development in the eastern Mediterranean: it was Palestine’s fastest growing urban concentration, with a soaring multi-ethnic and multi-religious population; the maritime gate to Palestine, and the only imperial naval station on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean; the terminus of all Palestinian British-developed railway lines; the main junction of the highroads in the northern part of the country; and, most important, a terminus of the oil pipeline of the Iraq Petroleum Co (IPC) from Kirkuk in Iraq to Tripoli in Libya.10 The immediate vicinity of the developed harbour was also home to several of the Near East’s largest factories, including foodstuff factories (such as flour mills). The hub of the city’s industrialized economy was the harbour itself which in the year the Carmel excavations wound up discharged 787,307 metric tonnes of goods, with imports slumping during the Arab Revolt and climbing up to over 500,000 in 1938.11 Other discoveries of prehistoric sequences, too, resulted from mandatory land development projects. The Lower Palaeolithic (Ahceulian) site at the Bnot Yaacov Bridge (in Hebrew Gehser Benot Ya’akov, and in Arabic Jisr Benat Ya’kub), connecting Palestine to Syria and serving both the Turkish and imperial armies as a passageway during the First World War, was discovered in the early 1930s during construction and engineering works. What marks off the Carmel caves are the urban and metropolitan features of development and its sheer scope. The proposed quarrying work risked the caves, the nearby crusaders’ castle, and ancient quarries in the area. The prolonged wrangles and disagreements over their location flared into serious rows between various mandatory and colonial bodies: between the mandate government and its own Department of Antiquities, between the government and the Colonial Office, involving the highest echelons in Jerusalem and London, and between imperial economic agencies such as the Crown Colonies Agents and a crew of tenderers and engineering experts and the Department. The long paper trail which documents the disputes about the quarries exposes competing views of prehistory and antiquities in general, and reveals tensions inside the mandate machinery and between its authority and metropolitan authority. Tensions, as will become clear, emanated from the clash between the economy and notions of development on the one hand and the regime of antiquities on the other, and touched on the rationale and practices of mandate rule. Information about government quarrying in sites that had been publicly declared and marked “historical” and “antiquities” (and were therefore protected from development and building), came to the attention of the Antiquities 10 Mahmoud Yazbak and Yfaat Weiss (eds), Haifa before and after 1948: Narratives of a Mixed City (Dordrecht, 2011); Daphna Sharfman, Eli Nachmias, and Johnny Mansur, The Secret of Coexistence: Jews and Arabs in Haifa during the British Mandate in Palestine 1920–1948 (North Charleston, SC, 2007); Deborah Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries: Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory Palestine (Albany, NY, 2000); Maisler and Yeivin, Palestine Guide, 251–3. 11 Maisler and Yeivin, Palestine Guide, 251–3.

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Department incidentally in late January 1928. The source of that information was not the Department of Public Works which had been pursuing the project energetically, but the Hebrew dailies Davar, organ of the Histadrut (The General Workers Union) and Haaretz, the liberal civil-sector newspaper.12 Repeated protests from Richmond, Director of Antiquities, to Fawcett Pudsey, his peer at Public Works, were answered in the late spring with a request, from another department—Lands—to mark the antiquity sites on a blueprint plan produced earlier by the reputable London firm of civil engineers, Rendel, Palmer, and Tritton. The area in question included Atlit castle and its environs.13 The prehistoric caves in the Wadi al-Mugharah were to be the main victim of the construction project and came to the attention of administrators later, when it transpired in the summer that another quarry was to be dug at the entrance to the Wadi. An enraged Richmond wrote that both the Crusaders’ castle and the Wadi in its entirety were “registered antiquities sites. The whole area of Atlit site contains antiquities and the caves in the Wady [sic] are also antiquities, while the land in their neighbourhood is covered with antiquities.” The quarrying, he snapped, had been done “without any intimation having been conveyed to this Department” as requested in his (Richmond’s) letter of February and numerous reminders.14 And he took his ire to a higher authority, the Chief Secretary of the government of Palestine, the second highest ranking official after the High Commissioner. At that particular time, between 31 July and 6 December 1928, the Chief Secretary, Harry Luke, was Acting High Commissioner during the vacancy in this office between the end of (Field Marshal) Lord Plumer’s term and the beginning of Sir John Chancellor’s. Unlike his colleagues at Public Works, Luke was interested in history and antiquities. As we have seen, his guidebook to Palestine related the rediscovery of its antiquity to the mandatory mission.15 The incensed Richmond, who had rejected the Public Works’ proposal not to “restrict” the tenderers and contractors of the harbour quarrying project, wrote to Luke: To do so would be to insist on breaking the law. To break the Law would render him [Department of Public Works and, by implication the Mandate Government itself] liable to prosecution . . . The law already imposes definite restrictions. Hence it would seem only fair to make the tenderers and contractor aware of them . . . [the contractor] would still be subject to the Law of the Country. The observance of the Law can hardly be made dependent upon a statement, verbal 12 Richmond to Director, Department of Public Works, 24 January 1928; 22 February 1928; Director of Public Works to Richmond, 10 February 1928. All IAA, ATQ_1/41. 13 Rendel, Palmer, and Tritton to Director of Lands, 5 June 1928; Department of Lands to Richmond, 7 June 1928; Fawcett Pudsey to Richmond, 13 June 1928; Acting Director of Lands to Richmond, 23 June 1928. All IAA, ATQ_1/41. 14 Richmond to Pudsey, 14 July 1928, IAA, ATQ_1/41. 15 “Quarrying in Antiquity Sites for Stones for the Construction of the Proposed New Harbour of Haifa”, Richmond to Chief Secretary, 1 October 1928, IAA, ATQ_1/41. On Luke, see Chapter 2, 77.

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or other, to the effect that ‘Government wishes the caves to be undisturbed’. The Law is that they shall remain undisturbed, and the contractor should in my opinion be made aware that he should avoid damaging or endangering them.16

Richmond’s abundant references to the law are noteworthy. He rehearses the logic and letter of the constituting texts of class A mandates that the management of antiquities is subject to internationally sanctioned legislation. But in the late 1920s the protection and monitoring of antiquities was operated in Palestine and Transjordan by ordinances, rather than by an Antiquities Law. In the summer of 1928, in its thirteenth session, the PMC reprimanded the mandate’s representative for repeatedly failing to publish a Law of Antiquities in accordance with Article 21 of the Mandate.17 And it would return to the subject in later sessions. Richmond was emphasizing the superiority and authority of the law and its spirit in a mandate regime: the rationale of rule by law overrode contract and the economic liberties of individual tenderers and developers, even when they solicited the support of the government. His legalization of antiquities, specifically prehistoric antiquities, promoted law and somewhat dimmed their age value, albeit only for a while. His stand was eventually adopted by the government of Palestine, which initially had prioritized economic considerations, and was the opposite of the views aired by Leo Amery, Secretary of State for the Colonies, in a telegram to Palestine’s High Commissioner, dated 24 October1928. Amery did not ignore the antiquities regime. Far from it: he sanctioned the preliminary archaeological survey that had made clear the antiquity value of the prehistoric caves. But his language diverts from that of the mandatory archaeologists/administrators: any restriction imposed on quarrying may involve Palestine Government in additional cost possibly out of proportion to any antiquarian value attached to caves. Suggest tunnel and caves should be examined with a view of determining their antiquarian value and that unless caves prove to be of real values they should be removed from list of registered antiquity sites. Investigations should be put in hand forthwith and results reported as soon as possible.18

Amery’s frequent use of “value” and “antiquarian value” in reference to a registered monument is in stark contrast to Richmond’s, a veteran colonial administrator with an interest in Christian and Muslim architecture (see Chapter 1). By 1928 a recent appointee to the directorship, he was also a recent convert to Roman 16 “Minute by Department of Public Works, Haifa Harbour Survey Party”, 29 September 1928; Richmond to Chief Secretary Government Office (response to Minute), 1 October 1928, both IAA, ATQ_1/41. 17 PMC, Minutes, 13th Session, 12 June to 29 June 1928, 58, LON Archives. 18 Secretary of State to High Commissioner, 25 October 1928, Wadi el-Mughara, 1st Jacket, IAA, ATQ_30/6(38/39).

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Catholicism. His faith did not impinge on his fierce protection of the prehistoric caves that is apparent in his galvanizing the Palestine administration into quick action, seeing through a trial excavation and a report on it. The Wadi and caves, he maintained, “must be retained among those mentioned in the list of registered antiquity sites, and must be offered every measure of protection required by the law”. The importance and possibilities of the site “must, after investigation, be preserved as a permanent monument”.19 His letters to mandatory functionaries associate the archaeological value of the prehistoric site to the Crusaders’ castle, noting that there can be no quarrying anywhere in the area.20 Trial excavations carried out by the department’s Charles Lambert, civil servant and numismatist, proved beyond doubt that the caves had “antiquity value” and their excavation and preservation prevailed over development and financial considerations, thus manifesting the weight of local initiative within the mandatory system.21 The growing awareness of the value of the caves had particular significance for the appraisal of the finds in them that expanded beyond their locale and region and had an impact on, and meanings for, an understanding of Palestine’s antiquities and its past, as well as that of the eastern Mediterranean. “Value” had a special importance in regard to the status of prehistory. As Richmond urgently noted: There is reason to believe that evidence will be found on this site showing that [there were] stone-age civilizations . . . followed by later occupations up to and including the historic period. There is no site in Palestine, so far as is at present known that offers so promising a chance for acquiring the knowledge needed to compile a continuous record of man’s practices, customs and industries during the remote age.22

Early recognition of the importance of the caves served to buttress their rescue from development. Some of Palestine’s most important and most publicly visible archaeologists advocated research before Richmond reported to the mandate government and, via it, to London. Advocates included prehistoric archaeologists, such as Father Alexis Mallon of the Pontifical Biblical Institute’s branch in Jerusalem, diplomat and archaeologist René Neuville, and William Foxwell Albright. Already in late November Mallon had noted “the extreme importance [of the caves] for the prehistory of Palestine”, and their being “the most considerable and the most interesting” finds, and particularly appreciated Natufian sculpted artefacts which he dubbed the first such objects in Palestine.23 Albright, too, was enthusiastic and had “no hesitation in saying that the site promises to be more 19 Chapter 2, 45–6 and “A Preliminary Report Describing the Investigations Made at the Antiquity Site at Wady al-Mughara in November 1928”, IAA, SRF_1930(305/305), n.d. 20 Weinstein-Evron, Archaeology in the Archives, 13. 21 On Lambert, see ibid., 14–30. 22 “A Preliminary Report”, IAA, SRF_1930(305/305). 23 Alexis Mallon to Richmond, 12 and 25 November 1928; Richmond to Mallon, 15 November 1928, both Wadi el-Mughara, 1st Jacket, IAA, ATQ_30/6(38/39).

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important than any other prehistoric site yet examined in Palestine. The discoveries already may throw some welcome light upon a period which has hitherto been completely obscure—the period of transition from Mesolithic to the Neolithic.”24 He connected the finds to discoveries in Egypt, thus arguing for a regional framework of development and noting the potential of the Carmel caves to “revolutionize our knowledge of the age when agriculture and cattle breeding were first introduced to Palestine, not less than six thousand years ago”.25 Albright squeezed a prehistory that stretched back hundreds of thousands of years (he took account only of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic eras), jamming the Stone Age into a straitjacket that would ill-suit the sequence of civilizations apparent in the stratigraphy of the four Carmel caves. By the winter of 1929, the caves made it to the metropolitan press. The Illustrated London News announced not only the importance of Stone Age implements discovered on the mount, but also the aesthetic value of some artefacts, mainly carved bone objects that were not previously found in Palestine and Syria and were “not unworthy of the Magdalenian artists of Western Europe”.26 The comparison to European art (the Magdalenian specimens discovered in France and widely known by that time) that is, to European standards of aestheticism, is telling, as is the emphasis, at this early stage of the excavations, on art, rather than on implements for daily use. But the novelty in Levantine prehistory plainly was in the longevity and oldness of a continuous habitation, both “modern” human habitation and Neanderthal occupation discovered on the Carmel ridge, and in the stupendous quantities of objects and human remains. These were highly professionally recorded, sent for reconstruction and research in Britain (having been retrieved in Palestine years after the initial digging), and reported on. Directed by eminent prehistoric archaeologist Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod between 1929 and 1934 (except 1932), the massive exploit was a collaborative effort co-run by the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and the American School of Prehistoric Studies, with museums and specialized research institutions conjoining. These included the Royal College of Surgeons, the Natural History Museum in London (with its zoological and botanical sections), and Palestine’s Archaeological Museum, to name the most active among them. Variety and longevity were established by Lambert and corroborated by Garrod. In the first and biggest cave (Mugharet al-Wad) alone, ten layers were dug through, from the relatively recent Bronze Age to Byzantine times, proceeding backwards to the Upper and Lower Natufian, Atlitian (indicating the specificities of the locale), three Aurignacian (that is, Upper Palaeolithic) layers (pertaining to the Middle and Lower Aurignacian), and two Upper Levallois-Mousterian (Figure  7.1).27 The Tabun (Arabic for 24 Albright to Richmond, 17 December 1928, Wadi el-Mughara 1st Jacket, IAA ATQ_30/6. 25 Ibid. 26 ILN, 2 February 1929, 179. 27 Garrod and Bate, The Stone Age of Mount Carmel, 6; see also Gertrude Caton-Thompson, “Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod”, Proceedings of the British Academy, 1970, 347–9; Anna BelferCohen and Ofer Bar-Yosef, “The Levantine Aurignacian: 60 Years of Research”, and A.  Ronen,

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Figure 7.1 Charles Lambert, “section of Mugharat al-Wad Cave of the Wadi al-Mugharah”, showing the layers of Stone Age tool cultures, 1928 (courtesy of the IAA, mandate archives)

“stove”) cave displayed a plethora of implements covering an earlier sequence of habitation (including the Acheulean culture of the Lower Palaeolithic). The bulk of artefacts accumulated as the excavation progressed, with 15,000 reported in June 1930, to be supplemented with 3,000 more accumulated in a few weeks.28 The total number of flint implements harvested in this season amounted to 19,425 in each of the layers.29 In all, 92,000 implements are reported in Garrod and Bate’s report. The sense of the importance and singularity of the four caves is continuously recorded on the ground by the excavators who described them as “perhaps the most important so far dug in Palestine”.30 Implements, artefacts, and even parts of buildings and stones, were “the oldest” in the country and the region, imbuing them with an aura and rendering them an incalculable age value (Figures 7.2a and 7.2b).31 A. Tsatskin, and A. Laukhin, “The Genesis of the Age of Mousterian Palaeosols in the Carmel Coastal Plain, Israel”, both in William Davies and Ruth Charles (eds), Dorothy Garrod and the Progress of the Palaeolithic: Studies in the Prehistoric Archaeology of the Near East and Europe (Oxford, 1999), 135–152, 152–67, respectively. For definitions of the terms, see Ofer Bar-Yosef, “Defining the Aurignacian”, in Bar Yosef and João Zilhão (eds), Towards a Definition of the Aurignacian (Lisbon, 2002), 11–18. 28 Garrod to Richmond, 2 June 1929, Wadi el-Mughara, 3rd Jacket, IAA ATQ_30/6(102/103). 29 “Inventory of Finds”, April–June 1930, IAA ATQ_30/6(102/103). 30 Garrod to Lambert, 31 May 1929; Elinor Ewbank to Richmond on behalf of Garrod, 9 May 1929, both IAA, ATQ_30(92/92). 31 “This is a completely new thing in the Mesolithic and is probably the oldest known example of a shaping and fitting together of building stones”: Garrod to Richmond, 15 June 1930, Wadi el-Mughara, 3rd Jacket, IAA, ATQ 30/6(102/103).

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Figure 7.2a Palaeolithic tools, Mount Carmel (courtesy of the IAA, mandate archives)

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Figure 7.2b An early Natufian bone handle resembling a deer, Wadi al-Mugharah, Mount Carmel (courtesy of the IAA, mandate archives)

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Stone Age Men and Tools The abundant finds were much more than “implements”; they were man-made tools regarded as “ artefacts”. Contemporaries, not only professional prehistoric archaeologists, anthropologists, and a variety of other experts, but also public archaeologists and writers, endowed the tools with human agency. Two strands are discernible in their writings on the newly revealed non-European Middle and Upper (Late) Palaeolithic culture and world, and the transference to a Neolithic culture: the centering of man and, in some cases, the gendering of Palaeolithic people, and the search for modernity in the Palaeolithic. Modernity, as will become obvious, signifies all that pertains to “Homo sapiens”, but also implies a common humanity and is apparent in analogies between Stone Age people and their lives, and contemporary people. Occasionally there are analogues between the Stone Age and living “primitive” men in colonial contexts. The trend towards humanizing the Stone Age and tools was explained by contemporaries as a response to the prevalence of a strict typology, that is, characterizations of implements or “industries” according to their geographic “type” or the locale where they were originally found (for example, Mousterian after Le Moustier, Levallois after Levallois-Perret near Paris, or in the Near Eastern context Atlitian after Atlit). The apparently technical and expert categorizations diffused to popular writing and were, at one and the same time, ridiculed but made accessible to the non-initiated. H. G. Wells’s short story “The Grisly Folk”, first published in April 1921 in Storyteller Magazine, begins with a reference to the meaninglessness “to the inexpert eye” of bones sorted in museums according to scientific principles and labelled with “strange names. Chellean, Mousterian, Solutrean [sic] and the like taken mostly from places like Chelles, Le Moustier, Solutré . . . ”.32 Prehistoric science, Wells noted, extracted information from these bones and endowed them with meaning. Some experts opined that the predominance of typologies imported to the study of prehistory ideas and classifications from the sciences, particularly from geology and palaeontology, thus treating finds as “fossils”, that were subject to the laws and paradigms of evolution. Exaggerated insistence on typology and on it alone, noted Garrod, reduced Stone Age culture to its imperishable flints but “lost sight of the fact that the chipped stones which he [Palaeolithic Man] has bequeathed to us are indeed Man’s handiwork”.33 They were, she insisted, artefacts: “Stone implements, I repeat, are artefacts, imagined and made by Man, and variable at his free will; to ignore this element of incalculability is to force prehistory into a strait-jacket.”34 Significantly, Garrod makes an 32 H. G. Wells, “The Grisly Folk”, April 1921, Story Teller Magazine, http://www.trussel.com/prehist/grisly.htm, last accessed 2 April 2019. 33 Dorothy Garrod, Environment, Tools and Man: An Inaugural Lecture (Cambridge 1946, repr. 2014), 8. 34 Ibid., 9.

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analogy between the scientification of prehistory and G. M. Trevelyan’s critique of the notion that history was a science and no more, thus writing off the complexities and spiritual dimensions of human history.35 That Garrod made these observations the main subject of her inaugural lecture as Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge (and Cambridge’s first female professor at that) is revealing. For in making them, she introduced choice into prehistoric human action. As she noted, tool- making, humans’ defining capability, was not determined by conditions and the environment alone, nor was it a one-way process, as Soviet and more generally Marxist prehistory upheld. Adaptation to climate changes, in West Asia as well as in Europe, was made by “deliberate choice” and a purposeful human ingenuity and will. The Stone Age people of Mount Carmel lived in a woodland habitat and a warm climate that enabled the use of wood utensils even as stone was available.36 The use of stone and weaponry was a deliberate choice. Such an observation redefined the longevity of history: From the moment then that the geological record begins to carry alongside its fossils those roughly flaked stones which first announce the presence of the living, creative and unpredictable will of Man, history in the widest sense has begun. From the maker of hand-axes or choppers to the man of the twentieth century the human story is continuous and unbroken, and the student of the Old Stone Age who rightly comprehends his subject, equally with the Egyptologist or the expert in Greek sculpture, can claim the title of archaeologist . . . present at every stage, is the thread which leads clear back from us here on earth to-day to the lowly forbears whose stone tools . . . are gathered into ancient graves . . . the single unbroken thread which ties together the whole of Man’s story.37

The vocabulary of will and choice and emphasis on “incalculability” (derived from Thomas Carlyle) is accompanied by a bridging over the distance between Palaeolithic and modern men and conceptualizing prehistory and history as a continuum. The emphasis on the latter, implying that similarities cut across time scales and history, echoes the contemporary preoccupation with human origins, civilizations, and the relationship between modern humans and extinct types of hominins. The subject of the affinity of Palaeolithic men and women to moderns was often articulated in racial terms. Put differently, the discovery of Near Eastern Palaeolithic people and their cultures was also a recovery of the origins of the West and white man. The Carmel people were considered either in relation to white Caucasians and a European lineage, or they were compared to modern primitives in colonial territories. In Sir Arthur Keith’s rendition “the early

35 Ibid., 9.

36 Ibid., 9.

37 Ibid., 29–30.

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Palestinians . . . were quite unlike any people now living”. Certainly not the direct ancestors of modern Westerners, they were, nevertheless, “nearly akin to the stock which in the course of time gave to the world its Caucasian or white inhabitants”. Before Garrod’s excavations, the search for fossil evidence of a Caucasian ancestry and history was fruitless, but the Carmel discoveries “were destined to give to the small country of Palestine a very important place in the picture of prehistoric man”.38 Keith, anatomist and anthropologist, former president of the Royal Anthropological Institute and future rector of the University of Aberdeen, had been renowned for his interest in, and writing on, hominine fossils and the antiquity of humans before his involvement in the excavations on the Carmel. By 1925, his The Antiquity of Man, first issued in 1915, saw five editions and more were to follow. His views on race with their perceptible notions on racial separation and Eugenics are easily traceable to his public lectures and some of his writings. He played a major part in the research of the fossil remains of the Carmel caves (and fossils found outside Europe), which were transferred in quantity to his laboratory at the Royal College of Surgeons, where they were measured, analysed, and studied. The removal of human finds was wholesale and, in principle, contrary to the letter and spirit of the antiquities ordinances and the rationale of the guardianship, entrusted in the mandatories, of archaeological remains. Prehistoric archaeologists seem to have acquired a greater leeway to choose finds and pick shares in the division than archaeologists specializing in historical periods. Garrod, for instance, carried out most divisions of the Carmel finds by herself.39 This was partly due to the massive quantities of duplicate implements discovered, and partly to the expertise and technologies required for restoration that were to be found in metropolitan research institutions. But the leeway resulted in the inordinately long delay of the return of finds loaned for study or restoration to local museums. Keith’s laboratory procrastinated for about six years before finally returning the Carmel skeletons to Palestine.40 And Keith and McCowan contributed to Garrod’s volume on fossil remains in Mount Carmel, published in 1937–9 by the British School of Archaeology. As already noted, Keith’s (and others’) study of human fossils was integrated in a much broader interpretation of the course of human and racial development and hierarchy. According to Keith, although “the fossil Palestinians” had brains comparable to those of modern men, they displayed the widest range of structural variations and evolution from apes to Romans, “[from those] comparable to the chinless 38 “Prehistoric People on Mount Carmel, Lecture by Sir Arthur Keith,” The British Medical Journal, 390, 19 February 1938. 39 Garrod to Richmond, 2 June 1930; Richmond to Garrod, 5 June 1930; Garrod to Richmond, 21 June 1930; all Wadi el-Mughara, 3rd Jacket, IAA, ATQ_30/6(102/103). 40 Arthur Keith to Richmond, 15 March 1932; Theodor McCowan to Richmond, 2 May 21932, both Wadi el-Mughara, 4th Jacket, IAA, ATQ_30/6(311/311). On loaning prior to the division, see Chief Secretary Office to Richmond, 20 July 1932; McCowan to Garrod, 28 October 1935; Garrod to Richmond, 9 August 1936, Wadi el-Mughara, 4th Jacket, IAA, ATQ_30/6(311/311).

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stage of the Chimpanzee, to chins moderately developed. In some of them the nose form might well have been the prototype of the Roman”.41 But the Carmel inhabitants fell short of the European standard: the tall people of the Carmel being distant relations rather than direct ancestors of the Cro-Magnons.42 His blatant racialism was not shared by his partners to the Carmel project, but his cultural comparisons and analogues between Palaeolithic people and contemporary societies in colonial territories were certainly shared by others, including Garrod, who compared the Carmel man and his artefacts to “the native people of Australia”.43

“To a Neanderthal Woman”: Feelings, Gender, and the Stone Age Alongside the construction of civilizational and racial hierarchies and the distancing of prehistoric from historic men, there evolved a notion of the similarities between modern Homo sapiens and Neanderthals that accompanied assumptions about their possible co-existence and co-habitation, before the extinction of the latter. The notion that there were continuities and similarities between Stone Age peoples and moderns intensified during the aftermath of the First World War. As Edward Clodd, a popular writer and an anthropologist, noted in 1921, the year H. G. Wells’s Outline of History was published: Man has remained unchanged since the Stone Age. There is no evidence that our brains are superior to the remarkable Cro-Magnon people [. . .] And what guarantee have we that our civilization, with all its hideous engines of destruction, will not be added to the vast rubbish heaps that witness to the decline and fall of empires? To-day all the forces of disintegration are in full place.44

Technological superiority that had been regarded as an essential component of modernity, now signalled modern barbarism and relativized the hierarchies between Stone Age and modern people, as well as between Western and nonWestern civilizations, Europe, and the rest of the world. Furthermore, although representations of Neanderthals in popular culture usually demonized them and cast them as fearsome and barbarous inhuman creatures, there were sympathetic considerations of them, indeed of hominines as such, that endowed them with a gamut of humanlike feelings and sensibilities. Garrod’s attribution of will and a creative imagination to the predecessors of sapiens, discussed above, is one exemplar of this treatment. Another, which had a considerably wider impact on audiences outside the circles of prehistoric scholars, is the body of writings on Mount 41 Keith, “Prehistoric People of Mount Carmel”. 43 Garrod, Environment, Tools and Man, 18.

42 Ibid. 44 The Times, 11 April 1921.

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Carmel Neanderthals by archaeologist, public prehistorian, prolific writer and film-maker Jacquetta Hawkes (1910–1996). Hawkes, best known now for her poem The Land, produced a long succession of monographs on the prehistory of Britain, on Minoan, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian cultures, and a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)-sponsored overview of prehistory for their History of Mankind series.45 Her career combined an involvement in nationalist policy-making and internationalism: she worked for the Ministry for Post-War Reconstruction and in 1951 became archaeological advisor to the Festival of Britain. She also served as Principal of the UK National Commission for UNESCO and later became a CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) activist.46 The first woman to have studied archaeology and anthropology at Newnham College, Cambridge (earning a first), she travelled in 1932 to Palestine on a scholarship at the BSAJ and joined the predominantly female team of Anglo-American excavators at the Wadi al-Mugharah.47 For one season she participated in the excavations of the Tabun Cave and took part in the discovery of a mandible, reputedly by a Palestinian Fellahin woman and accomplished digger Yusra, then in the unearthing of what would be famously known as Tabun 1, or Tabun C1, a complete female skeleton. Hawkes integrated her experience of the excavations in Man on Earth, first published in 1954, a corrective to evolutionary narratives of human and civilizational development. The season on Mount Carmel is the subject of the book’s first chapter, which is followed by a concise history of organic lives on earth (covering in succession the emergence of vertebrates in “Backbone” and “Blood”), and the history of the human brain, intellect, and civilization (in chapters on “Brain: The Meeting-Place of Body and Culture”; “Intellect: The Steeling of Rational Thought”, and “Civilization: The Building of Human Worlds”). Throughout the book, human evolution is compared to the development of species and individual human life, from fetus to old age, and of civilizations. Thus the physical prowess and temper of youth is likened to those of Stone Age hunters and gatherers.48 Intertwined in the evolutionary story are snippets of Hawkes’s own physical and sexual development and autobiography. The autobiographical “The Seasons of the Plain” blends together a description of the landscape surrounding Mount Carmel, references to the Palestinian crew of excavators, and Hawkes’s thoughts about nature and love. 45 Christine Finn, “Ways of Telling: Jacquetta Hawkes as Film-Maker”, Antiquity, 74:283 (March 2000), 127–30; Becky Conekin, The Autobiography of a Nation: The 1951 Festival of Britain (Manchester, 2003), 155–6, 174–5. 46 Rachel Cooke, Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties (London, repr. 2015). 47 Including Martha Hackett (who joined the expedition in 1930), Anna Petronella Van Heeren (1930), Afrikaner medical doctor and feminist, Irene Leigh-Heseltine (1931), Elizabeth Kitson, and Eleanor Dyott. See Richmond to Chief Immigration Officer, 28 March 1930; British School of Archaeology to Director of Antiquities, 11 March 1931, both Wadi el-Mughara, 2nd Jacket, IAA, ATQ 30_30(92/92); and Crowfoot to Richmond, 21 June 1932, Wadi el-Mughara, 4th Jacket, IAA, ATQ_30/6(311/311). 48 Hawkes, Man on Earth, 30, 50.

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The chapter bears some of the trademarks of her writings, including the eroticizing of landscapes and nature, and the mystical aura with which the mountain, its vicinity, and wildlife, are endowed. Particularly relevant here is the association between her own spiritual and mystical experience and sense of the lives and civilization of humans in the Stone Age. Spirituality is invoked by the materiality of fossils that engender feelings about the prehistoric remains. Her sense of the Palaeolithic past, and the feelings for Palaeolithic people it arouses in her, are striking. Striking, because they are not engendered by handling objects whose beauty and aesthetics were thrilling in the way that objects from the 18th Dynasty thrilled Egyptologists, but by the immediate contact with human fossils: a mandible, a skull, and a female skeleton. Her description of the tactility of prehistoric finds and the emotions they may trigger in moderns is worth quoting at length: At last, towards midwinter [of 1932], we came upon the skeleton. It lay crouched on its side, the skeleton of a woman with low vaulted skull recalling the simian stock from which this race was lifting itself. Human consciousness had not been highly tempered when it was housed in that poor cranium, but now in us it was returning to discover, study, and reflect upon its ancient haunts. Flesh-covered hands used scalpel and brush to clean the delicate metacarpal fan of the bone hand; eyes charged with centuries of curiosity looked into the sockets of the skull. I was conscious of this vanished woman and myself as part of an unbroken stream of consciousness, as two atoms in the inexorable process to which we belonged. I saw us as two atoms, but also, a little sickeningly, as two individuals, myself . . . and this one-time mother of the tribe who must have lived and died hardly aware of the past or future, yet who would surely have known fear, and even sadness, when at last her shambling body weakened and she had to lay it down. With her mind a wordless hollow swarming with impressions and emotions she would not, like myself, have been condemned to live with the certainty of her death, but she would have felt some vague regret that she could no longer enjoy men or children or the saliva rising at the smell of venison . . . spring and the beauty of the world.49

The Tabun woman acquired an iconic status in Hawkes’s writings even before the publication of Man on Earth. To a Primitive Skeleton Uncovered on Mount Carmel reflects on the kinship between the modern woman and her perished ancestor, “whose ancient cloak of flesh I wear”. Man in Time, published in 1948 as the fifth part of a slim volume of poetry, Symbols and Speculations, may be read as an early verse version of the later autobiographical chapter.50 It contains the components discussed earlier: the mystification of the landscape, the rumination on time and 49 Hawkes, Man on Earth, 12–13. 50 Published in Jacquetta Hawkes, Symbols and Speculations: Poems (London, 1948).

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the possibilities of condensing it, and the attachment to prehistoric remains and early humans. Hawkes’s Carmel cycle, like The Land, endows the Stone Age with spirituality and mythicizes it. And it was precisely the combination of her expert knowledge and experience as a prehistoric archaeologist and gift for imaginative writing, that showed to contemporaries that “the profession of archaeology” and poetry were not incompatible, and that she could “animate the dry bones of prehistory”. The biblical image of the animated and revived bones is also capitalized upon by H.  G.  Wells—notwithstanding the substantial difference between their writing on prehistory, approach to popular science, and actual expertise. She was credited with injecting warmth and emotion into the subject of prehistory.51 In Man in Time, archaeological work and curiosity about the past, accompanied by an understanding that the difference between moderns and their remote predecessors is thin-skinned, do not pertain only to Western experts, but also to the local peasant excavators employed by the expedition. Together they fathom the passage of time: The girls’ quick hands, the men’s attentive picks Had sunk their shaft through time, at last to find, Hidden beneath accumulated motes . . . And now the living mind chap-fallen stands Before the mean skull-lodging it has known. What was it once that haunted that low roof 52

Hawkes is not innocent of stereotyping the Stone Age and circulates familiar oppositions between it and the modern, between the simian and human. The Carmel woman is speechless whereas the modern woman who handles her skeleton is articulate, the Neanderthal’s hollow mind is contrasted with the inquisitive curiosity of her distantly related progeny and, most crucial, the Neanderthal has no sense of time and is unaware of the future, hence of mortality—in contrast to historical people. But she is endowed with senses and feelings and the capability of recall, though not of an articulate memory. Here and elsewhere, memory and the ability to survive are gendered. The Carmel female simian skeleton is of “the mother of tribe”. Elsewhere Hawkes endows prehistoric women in general and women of the upper Palaeolithic and the Neolithic in particular, with productive as well as reproductive powers and attributes to the latter a particular authority in “cultivator communities” based on agriculture and the domestication of animals.53 The Neolithic Age was, according to her, a time of gender equality, even of female superiority, when women became “mistresses” of domestic crafts, as well as the honoured producers of children. Their special power in the New Stone Age was reflected in its religious cults with their emphasis on “the female principal”.54 51 Ibid., blurb. 52 “Man in Time”, in Hawkes, Symbols and Speculations, 40. 53 Hawkes, Man on Earth, 158–60. 54 Ibid., 160.

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What is notable is not Hawkes’s preoccupation with female hominins in itself. Stone Age women, their physical prowess combined with domesticity, apparent liberties, and sexuality, are quite visible in interwar popular writing on prehistory, particularly in prehistoric science fiction set either in a remote past, or in a future new society located outside Western civilization, or taking place in the modern subconscious, thus offering an escape from the present. One example is S. Fowler Wright’s Dream, or the Simian Maid, published in 1931, in which the heroine, Marguerite Cranleigh, having time-travelled to Babylon and Atlantis, visits prehistory, or rather dreams herself into it and becomes Rita—a simian maid.55 Her (Hawkes’s) singularity is in the sympathy and occasional identification with prehistoric people, their humanization, and a self-conscious emphasis on women as agents in nature and in human development. Awareness of female agency is by no means limited to representations or Hawkes’s analysis of gender relations, but is also relatable and is implicitly related by her, to her participation in the Carmel excavation in a predominantly female team and workforce. Garrod was aided by a team of British, American and South African women students and graduates in archaeology. Notably, the overwhelming majority of her field workers were women of the Palestinian villages of the Wadi al-Mugharah, particularly Jaba’ and Ljzim, who she trained and worked with for about six seasons (Figure 7.3).56 She and other members of the expedition, like antiquarian Mary Kitson-Clark, documented Palestinian women’s work in their written records and in photographs. One worker in particular, known only by her first name, Yusra, was employed by Garrod for six years between 1929 and 1935, acquired expertise, and became a sifter and forewoman (Figure  7.4). Born either at Jaba’ or Ljzim, she disappeared from history after their destruction in 1948, leaving no trace. In one famous photograph she holds an infant, probably hers, and points at Garrod who is seated beside her and looks at the child. Yusra has been credited with the discovery of Tabun 1—the mandible and celebrated skull. As noted in Chapters 3 and 4, local workers are present and are occasionally ubiquitous in descriptions of excavations and of labour routines and practices. But their collaboration in the Carmel excavations is notable, not just because of the visibility of Palestinian labourers in texts and images, but also because of the gender angle of their presence. To an extent, the training and employment of the women villagers reversed patterns and hierarchies of work: they gained expertise with the spade (adult men’s archaeological specialty) and local men performed heavy work that required physical strength. It seems, however, that training 55 S. Fowler-Wright, Dream, or The Simian Maid: A Fantasy of Prehistory (1931, repr. Cabin John, MD, 2009). 56 Jane Callendar and Pamela Jane Smith, “Pioneers in Palestine: The Women Excavators of El-Wad Cave, 1929”, in Sue Hamilton, Ruth D. Whitehouse, and Katherine I. Wright (eds), Archaeology and Women: Ancient and Modern Issue (Walnut Creek, CA, 2007), 76–83.

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Figure 7.3 Palestinian labourers removing finds from Mugharat al-Sukhul, Wadi al-Mugharah (courtesy of IAA, mandate archives)

Palestinian women and the apparent reversal of hierarchies of labour did not entail equal pay. An incomplete record of camp expenses kept by Garrod in an accounts’ notebook, lists the sum of wages in the 1933 season and includes a total sum paid—averaging between 34 and 42 Palestinian Lira, and a few wages specified by names—apparently of foremen and night watchmen. Women’s names are not specified and they appear as “girls”. In May, 420 mils were paid to “six girls”

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Figure 7.4 Yusra, a Palestinian villager and expert excavator, and child, with Dorothy Annie Garrod (courtesy Dorothy Garrod Photographic Archive, Pitt Rivers Museum)

and 75 mils for laundry services to three girls.57 The omission of names may indicate a preservation of familial authority within the villages in the labour force. Moreover, gender reversals were accompanied by sustained hierarchies of nationality and ethnicity among women.

The Attractions of Mesopotamian Prehistory: Pottery, Modernity, and Politics If Palestine’s prehistory was “unknown” and Egypt’s was slowly being revealed, the territories of Mesopotamia—particularly northern Iraq and neighbouring Syria—“from the point of view of prehistory were virgin soil”.58 Excavations of Middle and Upper Palaeolithic cultures were few, scattered, and far between. The 57 Garrod, “Expedition of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and the American School of Prehistoric Research to the Wady Mughara 1933”, 21, 8. Pitt-Rivers Museum (PRM), Garrod Papers, PRM Manuscript Collection. 58 Dorothy Garrod, “The Paleolithic of Southern Kurdistan: Excavations in the Caves of Zarzi and Hazar Merd”, Bulletin of the American School of Prehistoric Research, 6 (1930), 9–43.

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first Palaeolithic discoveries in northern Iraq were probably made by Garrod herself, even before she embarked on her expedition to the Carmel. The soundings she made at Zarzi cave near the Zab River, north of Sulaymaniyah (in Kurdish Iraq), yielded ample deposits. Later she began exploring Hazar Mazr, nearer to Sulaymaniyah where earlier flint industry and animal remains were discovered and listed.59 Later, and partly due to political reasons, efforts to track Stone Age cultures and people and the connection between western Asia and Europe relocated outside Iraq, to Turkey (where they were hindered) and the territories of the French mandate in Syria and the Lebanon.60 But as already noted, prehistory stretched over an extraordinarily expansive time scale and covered a variety of human species and cultures. And the use of “prehistoric” by archaeologists, anthropologists, and popular writers and the press, acquired an elasticity and became inclusive, expanding beyond the Neolithic Age. In the mandate territories of Iraq and Syria the prehistoric stretched to the sixth and fifth millenniums bc and on occasion even touched biblical chronologies. As we have seen, the discovery of “deep” prehistory in Palestine involved the study and preservation of toolmaking, but in mandate Iraq, “tools” and implements found in the prehistoric mounds were, first and foremost, pottery. The unearthing of pottery was associated with skill and craftsmanship (in the late Neolithic and Chalcolithic eras) and at the same time with modernity. As Agatha Christie, who participated in Mallowan’s excavations at a series of prehistoric mounds in northern Iraq and Syria, was to note in her autobiography: “now everyone was passionately interested in prehistoric civilization”. And prehistoric pottery “Although it was so old—it was new”.61 Pottery came to be the basis of periodization and classification into “cultures”. As we shall see, in addition to the association between prehistoric or “primitive” and modern material cultures, there developed analogues between prehistoric and contemporary local life in the border areas between Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Furthermore, as with the writings on Sumerian culture, here, too, the sequence and development of prehistoric settlements were located in a larger, regional and cross-continental history of the circulation and exchange of materials and utensils, and of human migration. The attraction of Mesopotamian prehistory lay, at least partly, in its non-literacy and the lack of written records. Repertoires of pottery discovered before the war in north-eastern Syria by German archaeologists revealed the culture known as Halafian. The superior quality of its pottery emerged after Baron Max von Oppenheim, archaeologist, traveller and, before the war, diplomat and spy, unearthed Tell Halaf. He was to return to it after Germany’s acceptance into the League of Nations and the resumption of German archaeological projects in 59 Ibid. 60 Garrod to Mallowan, 29 August 1938, BMA, MED, Mallowan Correspondence and Varia, 196.2, II, Archaeological Correspondence, 270. 61 Christie, An Autobiography, 471.

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mandate territories. Later discoveries by British archaeologists of pre- and protohistoric layers in Tell al-‘Ubaid and Nineveh expanded the repertoire, and the classification of periods established at an archaeological gathering in Baghdad sealed their acceptance.62 It was, however, the excavations at the compact mound next to the village of Arpachiyah in Iraq, across the border in the Syrian Khabur Valley, that brought Mesopotamian prehistory to the attention of scholars, museums, and collectors. Of the three prehistoric Tells extensively dug up by Mallowan, it is the smallest and to all appearances least spectacular that is worth particular attention, not least because of the degree to which international and national politics became enmeshed in its discovery.

Arpachiyah The “unobtrusive” mound of Arpachiyah lay less than four miles from the spectacular Nineveh, practically on the outskirts of Mosul in today’s Nineveh Governorate.63 So unobtrusive was it that Felix Jones missed it in his survey of Assyria in 1848, which established a benchmark in the modern village of Arpachiyah. The mound, in the shape of a small hillock with a maximum diameter of 125m., known locally as Tepe Reshwa, was nicknamed by Christie a “little pimple”.64 Its immediately obvious characteristic was “its smallness and compactness”, for that unobtrusiveness “enabled Arpachiyah to keep her treasures intact through a period of some thousand years since the days of its final abandonment”.65 The small-scale excavation operated on a small budget disbursed by the Trustees of the British Museum, the British School of Archaeology in Baghdad (the Bell Memorial), which donated £600, the Trustees of the Percy Sheldon Memorial Fund at the Linnean Society, contributing £400, with an anonymous donor and the ubiquitous Charles Marston adding £500 and £100, respectively. Agatha Christie gave another £100.66 The finds comprised particular forms of building, from huts to grain silos, cemeteries, and the remnants of the distinctive tholoi, or buildings with a circular ground plan. But undoubtedly Arpachiyah’s most appealing trophy was its pottery, particularly the items classified as Halaf pottery, roughly dated then from about 6000 to 5000 bc. Handmade, its material, design, colour, and texture were considered superior to later pottery made on slow or fast wheels, and to vessels made elsewhere in Mesopotamia. Its distinctive materiality 62 On the conference, see Sidney Smith, Director of Antiquities, Baghdad to Woolley, 18 November 1929 and Woolley to Smith, 1 December 1929, both BMA, MED, WY1/2/47 and WY1/ 2/48. 63 M. E. L. Mallowan and J. Cruikshank Rose, “Excavations at Tall [sic] Arpachiyah 1933”, Iraq, II: I (London, 1933), 4. 64 Christie, An Autobiography, 475. 65 Mallowan and Rose, “Excavations at Tall [sic] Arpachiyah 1933”, 7. 66 Sidney Smith, Report to the Trustees of the BM, 21 November 1932, BMCA, CE32/42/17; Mallowan to Hill, 7 March 1933, BMCA, CE32/42/25/1.

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is apparent in the superlatives lavished on it in a draft article sent by Mallowan to the Morning Post and Daily Telegraph: The finest material recovered from the site is the pottery which for variety and attractiveness of design as well as colour and finish is unrivalled by any other pottery from Mesopotamia. These wares are handmade, but nevertheless show an excellence of finish that was often lacking in the later days when the majority of pots were turned out on the fast wheel. In feel these painted wares with their polished surfaces resemble the finest Greek vases of the classical period.67

Mallowan’s hyperbole may be attributed to the platform of publication. Both newspapers regularly carried reports by archaeological celebrities. The fact that the then relatively obscure Mallowan approached them may not be accredited to his relationship with Christie, but to the demand and market for archaeological news. The excavator’s enthusiasm filters through the excavation reports to the Trustees of the British Museum, correspondence with its officials, and the published scholarly reports. The painted pottery was “remarkable”, “varied”, and unique (“not two vessels look alike”).68 Even the language of the list of artefacts for division between the archaeological museum in Baghdad and the expedition, submitted to the Department of Antiquities, is adjectival and its characterization of the pottery oozes its sophistication and analogies to contemporary style: A. 730 Pot, complete, champagne vase type, with oval cup, apricot engobaged or mouille surface, black paint . . . A. 731 Pot. complete, Salmon Pink slip black paint . . . A. 733 Pot, complete, pinkish apricot slip lustrous tango red paint . . .69

The polychromic pottery and the abundance of colour it displays is juxtaposed to the colourfulness and richness of contemporary objects, and prehistoric culture is compared to the material culture of northern Iraq, most notably Kurdish material culture. The design and paint of the prehistoric utensils have survived destruction and the abandonment of the mound, and are visible and tactile in Kurdish dress, cloth, and crafts. The brilliant variety of the coloured ceramics shows a “Certain kinship with the colour-loving peasants of the neigbourhood resplendent in their many coloured garments.”70 Similarly archaic Mesopotamia exists in local houses

67 Mallowan, “Copy Article for the Associated Press News Papers Discoveries at Tal Arpachyia”, 13 May 1933, BMCA, CE 32/42/29/3. 68 “Tell Arpachiya [sic] Report on the Last Five Weeks Excavations, April–May 1933”, BMCA, CE 32/42/38. 69 Mallowan Arpachiyah Records, BMA, MED, 196.1, B1475, 106. 70 “Summary of the Excavations Covered by First 14 Days Work”, BMA, MED, 196.1, B1475, 154.

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and in buildings as far away from the mound as Aleppo.71 Mallowan was to elaborate the comparison of Halaf people to the contemporary Kurds in his writing on Chagar Bazar, at the Khabur Valley in Syria, where he transferred in 1935 when the toughening of Antiquities Laws in Iraq made excavation there difficult for British expeditions. Chagar Bazar, excavated by him at the same time as the monumental Tell Brak, comprised Halaf and Samarra culture layers and pottery, and yielded votive female figurines, turbaned, dressed, and represented sitting on clay disks used as stools. According to Mallowan, their dress was identical to that of Kurdish women in Syria and Iraq. In itself, the comparison was quite in keeping with the prevailing contemporary analogies across time (and place) that posited side by side prehistoric and contemporary “primitive” people, typically colonial subjects. It suffices to mention here Henry Field, Gordon Childe, Flinders Petrie, and even prehistoric archaeologists like Garrod who bore deep sympathies towards local native populations. Such analogies, of course, de-historicized tribal and ethnic cultures and assumed their changelessness at the same time as prizing their authenticity. Comparisons and the search for similarities also involved special strategies and forms of writing about the prehistoric past: like the biblical archaeologists and travellers discussed in this book, Mallowan turned his text into an ethnography, recording contemporary rural practices in small communities. In his conjectural narrative of the passage from prehistory to modern historic times he also mixes race: Even on the evidence of the turbans [of the figurines and of Halaf figurines at Arpachiyah] we are still justified in calling attention to the apparent resemblance to the apparel of Kurdish women. Whether we are to go further than this and argue that Kurds, a blonde people, speaking an Aryan tongue, are the lineal descendants of the T. Halaf peoples [sic], is a speculative and more dangerous step. We may at least observe two interesting points: that the geographical distribution of Kurds to-day corresponds very roughly with the area over which the painted pottery of T. Halaf is found, that is to say, the country within easy reach of the Anatolian foot hills and the Kurdish mountains; secondly, the T.  Halaf ware may be described as first cousin to the early Iranian, just as the Kurds are first cousins of the people of Iran. So too the Kurds with their bright and variegated garments, and their pipe-stems incised with the geometric elements of T. Halaf Pottery, exhibit in themselves that fondness of colour which we naturally associate with mountain people.72

Mallowan’s very tentative association between the Kurds and their language and an Aryan race that had survived in northern Mesopotamia is also in keeping with 71 Mallowan and Rose, “Excavations at Tall [sic] Arpachiyah 1933”, 33. 72 Max Mallowan, “The Excavations at Tall Chagar Bazar”, Iraq, 3 (1936), 19.

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speculations about racial descent and origins. Northern Mesopotamia and Iran became a testing ground for archaeologists and philologists in search of an IndoEuropean or Aryan culture and race. The “Aryanization” before the First World War of the late Assyrian Empire was followed by that of earlier people and cultures, from the Hittite to the Mittani. Oppenheim’s own writing on Tell Halaf is an example of the racial approach to Mesopotamia’s ancient past, although during the 1930s he dissociated the Tell and Halaf culture from an Indo-European prehistory and argued that it had represented a local Subarian culture.73 More relevant than Mallowan’s conjecture which, he notes, may be a speculation, is the use of pottery as a measure for ethnic and racial similarities, differences, and diversions. The bridging between Halaf and contemporary ethnic culture is also apparent in the image of the northern Mesopotamian mounds as centres of archaic convergence and cultural exchanges. The unassuming Tell Arpachyiah is depicted as a small, peaceful, and defenseless village that owed its prosperity to cattle farming and grain growing, the latter manifest in the silos that the expedition found.74 The rural character of the site and its surroundings is juxtaposed to city life and culture of the adjacent Nineveh. At the same time, the hamlet was a junction of interconnections between peoples and cultures, the centre of exchanges with the West and the East. Its pottery was to be found in “the West” (Anatolia and Syria, with which it shared its predominant civilization), as well as the “East” (Persia and Baluchistan). It was connected to an archaic world far beyond its location. The reports on Halaf and Ubaid cultures abound with references to prehistoric connectivity that was manifest in migrations, exchanges of materials, artefacts and technologies, and occasional colonization. They repeatedly refer to Arpachyiah as “a centre of convergence” with connections to the West and East,75 its web of “links” stretching from the Aegean to the East.76 Exchange and merging applies to people as well as materials and objects: the “early prehistoric centre [was] a point of convergence for different stocks from all points of the compass” which is comparable to the “mixture of people” in its contemporary neighbourhood that included in addition to Kurds, Muslims, Armenians, Syrian Christians, and Yezidis.77 The stress on connectivity and the convergence of material cultures did not extend to politics in the present. The small-scale excavations at Tell Arpachiyah became the subject of international controversy and friction between the archaeological establishment in the newly independent Iraq, and the network of 73 Baron Max von Oppenheim, “Oldest Mesopotamia: Being an Appreciation of ‘Tell Halaf ’ ”, ILN, 29 April 1933. On German Assyriologists and archaeologists’ search for Indo-Europeanism, see Eckhart Frahm, “Images of Assyria in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Western Scholarship”, in Holloway, Orientalism, 76–91. 74 “Excavations at Tell Arpachyiah”, The Times, BMA, MED, press cuttings, 196.1, 163–4. 75 “Summary of the Excavations Covered by First 14 Days Work”, BMA, MED, 196.1, B1475, 156; Mallowan, “Tell Arpachyaih Second Report”, 11 April 1933, BMCA, CE 32/42/29/2. 76 “Excavations at Tell Arpachyiah”, The Times, BMA, MED, press cuttings, 196.1, 163–4. 77 Article for the Associated Press, 13 May 1933, BMCA, CE 32/42/29/3.

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European and American museums and academic institutions with an interest in Iraqi antiquities. Museum officials and experts cooperated and demonstrated degrees of solidarity that cut across national rivalries and consistently egged British officials in Iraq and in London, particularly at the Foreign Office, to intervene on their behalf. Iraqi officials and nationalists attempted to stop the circulation of archaeological finds outside Iraq; British and other Western museums sought to preserve the mandatory regime of archaeology even after the mandate had been officially terminated. They harped on the differences between metropolitan and local notions about the ownership of antiques and their control, and marshalled familiar arguments about the value of antiquities, their universal importance, and the role of Western science in keeping it. The contention over Arpachiyah is all the more intriguing because the finds in it seem to be much less spectacular than those of Ur, or Nineveh whose export was less noticed. A dispute broke out in April 1933, unsurprisingly about the division of the shares between Baghdad’s Antiquities Museum and the British Museum. Iraq’s Department of Antiquities was at that time directed by German archaeologist and (Nazi) politician Julius Jordan who was formally subject to Iraq’s Minister of Education, ‘Abbas Mahdi, and with time became increasingly answerable to him. Jordan ordered that the division be made not on the spot, as was customary, but at the archaeological museum in Baghdad. Later Mahdi refused Mallowan an export permit, thus detaining his and the British Museum’s share of the finds which technically and by the still valid Law of Antiquities was theirs, and effectively suspended the authority of the director who had approved it. Significantly the sanctions were not extended to the other six expeditions operating in Iraq at the time, including two Anglo-American ones (at Ur and Kish). Mahdi’s seems to be the first Iraqi embargo on the export of antiquities and probably the first such ban in the Levant during the interwar era. In the eyes of Iraqi nationalists in the government, the press, and in intellectual circles, an all-British expedition came to embody the historical drain of antiquities to foreign museums and the plunder of Iraq’s historic treasures. The Cooke episode, in which a British Director of Antiquities was involved in their smuggling and sale, indelibly damaged British reputation (see Chapter 1). Needless to say, as Iraq’s previous mandatory power and a continuing imperial presence in the country, Britain became the butt of local criticism and suspicion. The furore lasted for about five months, from late May to late October 1933, a period of transition from the mandatory regime of antiquities to a national regime which was instituted in 1936 with the passing and ratification of an Iraqi Law of Antiquities. The interim period was one of broader political insecurity and instability for the kingdom. The voluminous correspondence that ensued from the British Museum testifies to its interest in the expedition as well as the attitude of British archaeologists to the change of regimes. Letters, memoranda, petitions, and telegrams, most of them penned by George Hill, flew from it to fellow curators and directors of the

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museums excavating in Iraq, and the Foreign Office and diplomats, including Britain’s representatives in Iraq. In this intense exchange Britain was described as Iraq’s scapegoat, and the latter’s change of policy as “a reversion to the worst days of Turkish administration”, and an “illegal act” of rabid nationalists.78 Hill’s tone in further correspondences grew sharper and more urgent, and he orchestrated an international campaign of experts against the ban on export and the emerging new policy towards the circulation of archaeological finds. In a telegram penned in September, he mobilized the heavy guns of Mesopotamian archaeology and curatorship: James Breasted, Horace Howard Furness Jayne of the University Museum at Philadelphia, Walter Andrae of the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, and René Dussaud of the Louvre. It read: “Situation Serious Stop immediate action necessary stop Presenting Memorandum Stop Ask you to act independently in cooperation Hill.”79 In the meantime Hill was badgering officials at the Foreign Office to interfere on Mallowan and the Museum’s behalf and succeeded in mobilizing Francis Humphrys, High Commissioner of Iraq between 1929 and 1932 and later Britain’s first ambassador to the country. In a letter to Yasin al-Hashimi, at that time Minister of Finance, he familiarly and rather condescendingly asks him to intercede with the Department of Antiquities in the museum’s favour and embarks on the broader issue of the imminent changes in antiquities legislation, noting that Iraq is known to a very large number of people only through her antiquities, and it would be a bad thing not merely for science but for Iraq herself if all exportation of them were stopped. It is unnecessary, I hope, to add that I do not suggest that anything should be expected which Iraq wants for her own museums.80

The Arpachyiah boxes were eventually released, following Jordan’s testimony to the Iraqi Council of Ministers, but in the long run the British Museum’s boycott on excavations in Iraq and further attempts to prevent a revision of the mandate Law of Antiquities failed. We should be wary of regarding British attitudes towards the explosive issues of division and the ownership of antiques as monolithic. Officials demonstrated an appreciation of the political consequences of attempts to interfere in the policies of a newly independent state which Britain itself had sponsored as a new member of the League of Nations. Foreign Office officials did not mince their words in criticism of archaeologists’ positioning of themselves as self-made custodians of prehistoric and historic Iraq. They found “the BM and Oxford” “irritating and condescending” towards the Iraqis, their 78 Hill, “Memorandum on the Action of the Minister of Education in Iraq with Respect to Mr. Mallowan’s Finds at Tell Arpachiyah”, 24 June 1933, BMA, MED, Mallowan Correspondence and Varia 196.2, 76, 79; Hill to Mallowan, 18 August 1933, BMA, MED, Mallowan Correspondence and Varia 196.2, 94. 79 BMA, MED, Mallowan Correspondence and Varia 196.2, 109. 80 Humphrys to Yasin al-Hashimi, unsigned, 18 August 1933, BMA, MED, Mallowan Correspondence and Varia 196.2, 95.

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tone seemed to British officials plain “stupid”, and their opposition to the planned new law to be “flogging a dead horse”.81 The prehistoric pasts discussed in this chapter were far removed from one another in their location in time and place. They were also different in their relation to the post-war empire. To begin with the latter difference: northern Iraq and Syria and Palestine presented differing stages of mandate A rule and antiquities regime, and differing degrees of the implementation of development policies. The excavations on Mount Carmel took place during the height of the mandate and their initiation and process were enmeshed, as we have seen, with the idea and practices of urban and resources development that was so central to the Palestine mandate. Moreover, the antiquities ordinances enabled the transfer of quantities of finds outside Palestine. The change of the terms of imperial presence in Iraq diverted the debate from development to the question of national ownership of prehistoric remains. The detained boxes of Arpachyiah represented much more than their contents: they stood for the authority to oversee antiquities and the impossibility to further contain the tension between mandate and international stakes in antiquities and the national stake in Iraq’s past. The Arpachiyah furore also points at the relationship between the local and imperial, and international. But the discovery of prehistories traced here had a much wider potential, far beyond their limited scale and place and beyond national and internationally sanctioned borders. Prehistory, which became a thriving field after the war, was on the one hand firmly associated with specific locales and local lithic cultures— in Britain, on the Continent, the Near East, and elsewhere. On the other hand, narrow specificity and time-scale coexisted with an extraordinarily broad sweep of space as well as time. As  O.  G.  S.  Crawford, from 1927 editor of Antiquity, Britain’s most popular archaeological journal, has noted: “Our field is the Earth, our range in time is a million years or so, our subject is the human race.”82 The material remains of Stone Age tool cultures were regarded as clues to the riddle of a regional prehistory and of transcontinental migrations and origins. Archaeologists with different interests like Mallowan, Garrod, and Childe put stress on connectivity and exchanges revealed in the remains of non-literate cultures. Moreover, they and others articulated and, at the same time resonated, a broader preoccupation with what the prehistoric Near East fleshed out—a bigger canvas of time-scales, human origins, and modern (sapiens) humanity, and the relationship between prehistoric and other hominins.

81 Bernhardsson, Reclaiming a Plundered Past, 184–5. 82 See Kitty Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology and the British Landscape 1927–1945 (Oxford, 2007), 107, and Hauser, Bloody Old Britain: O. G. S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life (London, 2008).

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IV

EGYP T ’S A NC IE NT PAST S : EMPIR E , A N T IQU I T Y, A ND T E C HNOLO G Y

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8

Egyptian Antiquity, Imperial Politics, and Modernity Tutankhamun and After

1922 and Beyond: A Note In the annals of Egyptology and Egyptomania, 1922 is an annus mirabilis. Howard Carter’s immortalized remark on “the strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects” that he observed through a hole he had made in the wall of the antechamber of Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings on 26 November, and his alleged enunciation “It is wonderful”, circulated in popular lore and scholarly writing. The sense that the tomb was a “wonder” and “a marvel” was cemented by witnesses to the moment of the find and was recycled in the Anglo-American press.1 The vocabulary of wonder endowed the juvenile Pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty with glamour and spread to popular fiction, film, and music. He acquired a presence in material culture: in dress, everyday objects, design, and the plastic arts. He was inescapable. The discovery and the conflicts it provoked, about the ownership of the finds, hence of Egypt’s antiquity, generated substantial scholarly and popular interest.2 And both have loomed large in the vast scholarship on Western and Egyptian fascination with Egypt’s past, the history of modern Egyptology, and on Egyptian national memory.3 Some of this scholarship became a part of the popular culture that it had set to examine. The preoccupation with manifestations of Tutmania in public opinion, style, design and fashion, film, and

1 Howard Carter, Notes, Diary, and Articles, Referring to the Theban Royal Necropolis and the Tomb of Tutankhamen, Carter’s Excavations Diaries, 26 November 1922, Tutankhamen Anatomy of an Excavation, GIA, TAA 1.2.1, http://www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/discoveringTut, last accessed 27 February 2019; Howard Carter and Arthur A. Mace, The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen: Discovered by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter (1923–33; New York, repr. 1954), 3 vols; “The Egyptian Treasure Story of Discovery: Graphic Account by Lord Carnarvon”, The Times, 11 December 1922, 12; Colla, Conflicted Antiquities, 183–7. 2 T. G. H. James, Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun (London, 2008); Nicholas Reeves, The Complete Tutankhamun The King, The Tomb, the Royal Treasure (London, repr. 2008); Christopher Frayling, The Face of Tutankhamun (London, 1992). 3 The Times, 11 December 1922, 12; Colla, Conflicted Antiquities, 172–227; Reid, “Nationalizing the Pharaonic Past”, in Janowski and Gershoni, Rethinking Nationalism, 127–50; and Donald Reid, “Remembering and Forgetting Tutankhamun: Imperial and National Rhythms of Archaeology, 1922–1972”, in Carruthers, Histories, 157–74. Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and the Rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950. Billie Melman, Oxford University Press (2020). © Billie Melman. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198824558.001.0001

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the occult, has marked the “Tut” phenomenon as sui generis and has overshadowed broader continuities and changes in the history of British and international attitudes to ancient Egypt after 1922.4 The Tut effect diminished interest in other sites of antiquities in Egypt and in the interwar relationship between Egyptian archaeology, travel, modernity, and internationalism. As others have noted, this relationship has been depoliticized in the sense that the development of British interest in, and knowledge about, ancient Egypt after the First World War, and the absorption of Egypt into British culture, have been detached from the policies of empire and international politics. There has been research on the role of Egypt’s past in Egyptian nationalism and state-building, but the historiography of British cultural interest in Egypt has, by and large, omitted imperial international agendas from histories of Egyptology during the interwar era.5 This chapter sets out to fill some of these lacunae. It starts where most studies of Egyptology as a discipline and a broad cultural interest have left off and goes beyond the spectacular moment of 1922. The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb took place shortly after Britain unilaterally declared Egypt independent in the wake of the nationalist rebellion of 1919. Symptomatically, Britain reserved its control of imperial communications and transport that would become crucial to access to antiquities and antiquity tourism; its interests in regard to imperial defence; the rights protecting minorities and foreigners in Egypt; and the overseeing of Sudan. I do not overlook the tremendous impact of the discovery of the tomb—quite the contrary: it was crucial to both imperial antiquity culture and Egyptian culture. Tutmania and the broader Western Egyptomania coalesced with Egyptian Pharaonism and interwar nationalism. However, I seek to map other presences of ancient Egypt in the imperial culture of antiquity, and consider British political and cultural presences in the dynamic process of the rediscovery of ancient Egypt. As the Illustrated London News noted in 1923, “Tutankhamen’s tomb is not the only wonder of ancient Egypt that has recently come to light” and others were continuously unearthed.6 I attempt to situate this map in the broader context of changes in the antiquities’ regime in Egypt and its own relationship to overall imperial policies, as well as the international attempts at consolidating an oversight of cultural heritage through the network of the supranational organizations for cultural collaboration that operated under the auspices of the League of Nations. Egypt was allowed to join it as a member only in 1937, a year after the signing of the Anglo-Egyptian treaty that appeared to have finally regulated the relationships between the two countries, and five years after Iraq. However, forms of collaboration between the League and Egypt predated membership and

4 Brier, Egyptomania, 161–79. 5 David Gange, “Interdisciplinary Measures beyond Disciplinary Histories of Egyptology”, in Carruthers, Histories, 64–80. 6 “The Egyptian ‘Find’ and a Rival: The Giant Obelisk Unearthed”, ILN, 13 January 1923.

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contributed to the treatment of antiquities and their status. The changes which I discuss here may be seen as manifestations of the post-war imperial crises in the eastern Mediterranean. The ubiquity of ancient Egypt is also inseparable from processes of modernization that took place in the country and in Britain. The chapter moves between Britain and Egypt, between metropolitan webs of institutions, scholarship, and the media, and the ways they displayed and represented Egypt in writing, visual and material culture, and the study and experience of antiquity “on the ground”—in commercial travel, exploration, and excavation. I begin by briefly surveying the democratization of access to Egyptian antiquities via modernized travel and transport after the war. Here I point at the connection between technologies that facilitated exploration and discovery and military needs, a subject I return to in Chapter 10. Transport technologies changed contemporaries’ sense of place and time, and made distant Egyptian pasts more accessible and knowledgeable than ever before. Assessing relationships between technologies and the expansion of knowledge about antiquity is not enough, and I proceed to discuss the tensions between the diffusion of Britons’ access to Egypt’s past and the development of a new regime of antiquities in Egypt that is compared here to the mandate regime discussed earlier in the book. These tensions are tied to the role of the press as the chief facilitator of the coverage of archaeological discoveries. I conclude with a consideration of the presence of Egypt in material British urban culture. Similar to the trend to modernize Iraq’s ancient history, a variety of Egyptian pasts were perceived and made sense of, as antique-modern and associated with experiences of modern life, mobility, and connectivity.

“All Roads Lead to Egypt”: Connectivity, Speed, and Antiquity between the Two World Wars A 1937 advertisement by the Egyptian Ministry of Communications, published in The Times’s special issue on Egypt, features a map appropriately titled all roads lead to egypt (Figure 8.1). The map presents a network of archaeological sites that dot an otherwise empty canvas. The roster of ancient cities and monuments includes Rosetta, the Pyramids, Faiyum (sic) (ancient Shedet, Greek Krokodeilópolis, site of the Faiyum portraits), Assyut, Qena, Luxor, and Aswan, as well as oases on the edge of the Libyan Desert like Kharja and Siwa, where the Oracle of Zeus Ammon had reputedly pronounced the divinity of Alexander the Great, and Mediterranean ports like Marsa Matruh (Roman Paraetonium). The web of antiquities is connected by a network of means of transport that link them to an imperial and global net of transportation: Airlines “From the West”, “From the North”, and “From the East” get to Cairo, Alexandria, and Port Said. “From Europe” and “From America” Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean liners sail to Egypt’s shores. Travel by car across the Sinai Desert connects Egypt to Palestine and the

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rest of the Mashriq, and through to the Libyan Desert. Railway travel links Egyptian cities to the antiquities’ strip along the Nile. The caption in Art Deco lettering reads: “Egypt for Antiquities, Comfortable Trains, Luxurious Hotels, Motoring, River Travel, Sunshine”.7 The map showcases the range and diversity of archaeological sites, across periods and timescales, far beyond the better-known spectacular 18th Dynasty sites and legacies, covering a large stretch of antiquity from prehistoric settlement and lithic quarries, to Ptolemaic times and early Christian Egypt. And it illustrates two themes that are writ large in interwar popular genres and the media: Egypt’s connectivity to the modern post-war world via a worldwide network of travel and transport, as well as a repertoire of modern forms of leisure and lifestyle, and the diversity of its pasts and their uses. Not only mega attractions like the Valley of the Kings, but isolated ancient sites like Siwa and Kharja, are represented as accessible. As already noted, accessibility to Egyptian antiquities improved from the last quarter of the nineteenth century with the expansion of regular maritime transport and, following it, mechanized Nile transport and railway transport. To these may be added the building of a network of Westernized hotels that were gradually merged into hotel corporations in Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor, and elsewhere. Grand Hotels offered comfort and luxurious accommodation and an up-to-date lifestyle, and became nodes of organized and increasingly corporate travel—controlled by entrepreneurs like Thomas Cook.8 Frequently, their architecture and interior design displayed archaeological and Egyptianizing motifs. The diffusion of travel predated the war. Cook’s company burst into Nile travel with their introduction of steam transport after 1870. Steam travel shortened the voyage dramatically and was consistently marketed as democratic and affordable. Cook’s tourism revolution amounted to near monopoly of Nile travel and involved land development and changes in the local economies and coastline of towns on the itinerary, most notably Luxor’s, whose entire layout and coast were changed, particularly after the installation in 1907 of the Winter Palace Hotel. A halt in civilian travel during the war was followed by a tourism bonanza made possible by the new automobility and the development of new styles of travel associated with modern living. After the war, Cook’s Nile Services publicity represented Egypt as the hub of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and even African tourism that became increasingly affordable to middle-class consumers in western Europe and the USA. In addition to services from British and Continental ports, their service offered transatlantic sailings, departing from New York and operated by Cunard, White Star, Red Star, Fabre, and a variety of Italian lines.9 7 The Times Book of Egypt Reprinted from the Egypt Number Published 26 January 1937 (London, 1937), advertisements, n.p. 8 Andrew Humphreys, Grand Hotels of Egypt in the Golden Age of Travel (Cairo and New York, 2011), 101–79. 9 Cook’s Nile Services and Palestine Tours, Season 1927–28. Programme of Arrangements for Visiting Egypt, The Nile, Sudan, Palestine and Syria (New York, 1927), 4.

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Figure 8.1 “All Roads Lead to Egypt”. An advertisement showing a map of Egyptian antiquities. Antiquities are a part of the modern connective world, within easy reach from Britain and the USA (Times Special Egypt Issue, January 1937)

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By the mid 1920s, Cook’s agencies had sprouted in British cities and in Middle Eastern maritime towns and governmental centres (the majority in Egypt), as well as in a variety of US and Canadian cities. Transatlantic transport was packaged with land and river travel in Egypt: Cook’s flotilla of Nile steamers, running services between Cairo, Luxor, and Aswan and linking to services from Aswan to the Second Cataract, were buttressed by their fleet of multi-deck paddle steamers for river navigation (236 feet in length and 32 in width at the water line), offering “promenade decks” and viewing lounges, as well as comfort. An additional flotilla was connected to the railway network, providing combined rail and river travel.10 Cook’s host of private steamers and dahabeahs was chartered to up-market tourists, combining “the most ancient style of boat known on the Nile” and improvements “according to modern ideas”, and bearing names such as Chepos, Sestoris, and even Thames.11 Daily services including a twenty-one-day voyage from Cairo to Aswan and back could be booked for US$340.70 and included the comprehensive tour—the Sphinx and the pyramids, Memphis, Beni Hasan, Abydos, Dendera, Karnak, Luxor, Dayr al-Bahri, Edfu, the Elphantine, Aswan, and more. A fourteenday trip combining railway travel cost $US272.55.12 Peltours had a go at overland and air travel but hardly touched monopolist Nile travel and offered services via their Palestine & Egypt Lloyd Ltd, whose head offices operated in Cairo and Jerusalem with four branches in Egypt (out of a total of eleven branches in the entire Middle East) in 1933. Their daily Cairo–Luxor train service cost 2.885 Egyptian Lira; a second- class service was to be had for 1.390 and a Pullman wagon an extra 0.720.13 An Imperial Airways flight from Cairo to Wadi Halfa was considerably more expensive at £15. And car hire for five persons for a ride out of Cairo to Giza and Memphis was £2 10s. per day.14 A seven-day round trip package from Cairo to Aswan, with coupons, cost 14 Egyptian Lira and included a sleeping car berth plus coupons for hotel accommodation and pension at the Winter Palace Hotel at Luxor and second-class deals at approximately half price including accommodation and a pension at the less lucrative Savoy Hotel or Luxor Hotel.15 The ease of travel and the accessibility of Egyptian antiquity, along the archaeological beaten track, themselves became subjects of comment and lampooning. H. V. Morton noted that Egypt is the easiest country in the world to see as long as you remain in the Nile Valley which was made by the hands of Nature and Thomas Cook for the easy transport of the wealthy and the curious to certain well established ruins. It is easy to take a Nile steamer to Luxor or Aswan and to keep awake, whereupon an 10 Ibid., 9. 11 Ibid., 17. 12 Ibid., 21–31, 41. 13 Pel Service in Egypt, Sudan, Palestine, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq: Near Eastern Travel Manual for Tourist Offices, Peltours Services (Jerusalem, 1923), 9. 14 Ibid., 12–13. 15 Ibid., 19.

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ancient civilization will conveniently reveal itself at regular intervals on both banks of the river.16

Morton himself engaged in Nile travel when he reported on the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb for the Daily Express, and his later trips to conventional tourist sites are described in his travelogues. Leisurely up-to-date travel featured in the rich travel literature that had mushroomed since the mid nineteenth century and plied the reading public with descriptions of antiquities and details about conventionalized itineraries and practices of observation. It provided a vicarious experience for those who did not experience the real thing. Access to antiquities, and the modernization of Egyptology further boosted fictional renditions of Egypt’s Pharaonic past by novelists who developed an expertise in Egyptian archaeology such as Henry Rider Haggard and Norma Lorimer, whose earlier work, republished during the war, was augmented by newer publications. Lorimer’s There Was a King in Egypt and Rider Haggard’s Moon of Israel: A Tale of Exodus both appeared in 1918, covering the gamut of interests in Egypt—from biblical illustration (Haggard) to a popularization of Akhenaten, peppered with an implied criticism on expansionist imperialism (Lorimer).17 Archaeology and archaeological travel were soon to be taken over by some of the interwar era’s stellar popular middle-brow modernists. In their writing, Egypt and travel within the country came to stand for modern living, leisure, and style. The itineraries and the ancient sites depicted were the same as before the war, but there is no mistaking the abundant traces of contemporary life and even politics. Agatha Christie’s ample writing on Egypt includes not only a historical play and a whodunnit set in the Middle Kingdom but also renditions of contemporary detective work, featuring Hercule Poirot, travel, and archaeology. Her earliest attempt at archaeological mystery and one of the earliest appearances of the imperial sleuth is “The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb”, published by Bodley Head in 1924 in a collection of short stories, Poirot Investigates. The story draws on the Earl of Carnarvon’s death shortly after the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb and the speculation industry that evolved around it. The more mature Death on the Nile draws on her own voyages to Egypt in 1931 and 1933, and on a thorough acquaintance with Nile tourism. The narrative takes place mostly on board the eponymous S.S.  Karnak, on which Christie herself travelled, in hotels in Luxor and the Cataract, on coaches, and on guided tours. International politics and espionage interfere in the form of Italian border agitation in Egypt and the Sudan, Central European intrigue, and the Wall Street Crash. The central role of modern travel is accentuated in the design of the original cover of the novel, drawn—like the covers of her other Middle Eastern 16 Morton, Middle East, 4.

17 Gange, Dialogues, 320–1.

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whodunnits—by Robin Macartney. The Art Deco cover features two of the colossi of Abu Simbel against the background of the sky with a Nile liner mooring at the  front, a design that points at the centrality of the place of murder. The temple complex is merely a background to the real locus of crime—the ship—and a warning that travel and tourism, notwithstanding their luxury, may be lethally dangerous. The expansion and democratization of travel were not the result of private and civil enterprise alone but had distinct military/imperial roots which may be located in the First World War. At the same time that the war halted civilian travel, it propelled the advance of technologies of transport and mechanized mobility. As elsewhere in the Middle East, total war was an instrument of imperial development. War, particularly desert war, over large expanses of land, necessitated and engendered mechanical technological solutions to enable warfare outside accessible routes. British development dovetailed and often took advantage of Ottoman infrastructures. As I have shown in Chapter  2, wartime extension of railways across the Sinai made Palestine more connected than ever to Egypt and parts of the Mashriq. But railways, one of the tags of the initial importation of the “carbon revolution” to the area offered only limited mobility in the desert and their speed was limited. Unlike the development of river transport in Iraq which drew on local and Indian and traditional eco-technologies, materials and capital,18 wartime development in Egypt and the Mashriq was generated by the spread of the two spearheads of the transport and energy revolution of the late modern era: the combustion engine and aviation. The car and airplane, which between the wars became icons and metaphors for the modern connective empire, were introduced in the Middle East by the military and for military needs. The desert motor car appeared in Egypt early in the war and the Ford Model T (which antedated the war) initially supplemented camel transport in roughcrossing areas, particularly in the Western Desert. Light car patrols armed with machine-guns guarded the 800-mile Egyptian–Libyan frontier and covered large inhabitable and waterless expanses, protecting the border against Senussi raids. At the same time car travel served to map a considerable part of the desert between Siwa and the Nile, including its dunes.19 Organized as the Frontier District Administration (FDA), for the duration of the war, the small fleet of cars was unused until the mid 1920s, when Model T adaptations enabled it to cross enormous territories previously traversed by caravans, and exploration was taken over by officers of the Royal Corps of Signals and the Tank Corps (particularly the former).Their initiatives, albeit private, were taken under the auspices of the army. Their high-powered desert traversing peaked in 1932, in an expedition headed by Ralph Alger Bagnold that covered 1,500 miles of virtually unknown desert 18 Satia, “Developing Iraq”. 19 See R. A. Bagnold, Libyan Sands: Travel in a Dead World (1935, London, repr. 2010), 13–29.

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between al-Kharja, the north-east of Sudan and French Equatorial Africa and amassed geographical, morphological, and geological knowledge, particularly knowledge about the movement of dunes. Mechanized desert travel was a means to acquire knowledge that had both scientific and military uses. It was to play a crucial part in the Allies’ warfare in the North African Campaign during the Second World War—most notably in the operations of the Long Range Desert Group.20 At the same time that military mechanization and automobility served military needs and purposes, it was utilized for discovery and reshaped notions of archaeology and the materiality of the past. Bagnold explicitly connects his and other Signals officers’ passion for desert car travel to enthusiasm for ancient Egypt which “called him”. Fast driving off beaten tracks not only revealed unknown pasts, it changed perspectives on them. Put differently, the breaking of barriers of physical distance broke down the divides between moderns and antiquity. He and his fellow officers overcame the discouragement, by officials and Egyptologists, of laypeople from the pursuit of Egyptology and Merely felt, consciously and unashamedly, the exiting mental kick of an apparent breakdown of the flow of Time, whereby one sees and touches the buildings and belongings, perfect as of today but oddly different, of a people inconceivably old . . . There was in the visiting of the less accessible remains, away from guides and tourists, an excuse to get out into the desert, be it only for a mile or so, an excuse to imagine that in those unfrequented, unsurveyed expanses of sand and rock there might be something still to be discovered just a little farther out, and an excuse also to indulge in the newly-found excitement of driving a car where it was said cars could not go.21

Cars enabled explorers to navigate outside the boundaries of cultivated Egypt along the Nile, in the deserts to its east and west, traverse them, and blaze new paths that would later become military roads and routes like the coast road from Alexandria, leading to the Western Desert, and the track known as King Fuad’s Road to the Faiyum (al-Fayuum). The latter led to excavations on its borders: “You descended gradually for many miles down and down, below sea level, over a succession of sandy beaches, bare of all life as far as one could see, left by a shrinking of pre-historic times. Then in the distance the queer irrigated hollow of the Faiyum spread out like an oasis.”22 Cars and automobilized desert transport serviced archaeologists who excavated outside territories that had been well travelled and dug. Prehistorian and archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson and geologist Elinor Gardner used an adapted six-wheeled Morris truck (tested by Caton-Thompson in the Midlands on a military testing ground) during their 20 W. B. Kennedy Shaw, Long Range Desert Group (1945, repr. London, 1959). 21 Bagnold, Libyan Sands, 20. 22 Ibid., 21.

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expeditions to the Faiyum in 1925–6 and 1927–8, to cover the distances between the various spots of digging in rough and unreachable country, successfully suing Morris for compensation for damages when the car broke down.23 In 1930–1 they travelled to the Kharja Oasis in the traditional way, on camels. But during excavation of the giant site of fossilized Aterian springs they took advantage of the most advanced technologies of surveying and mapping: it was photographed from the air by the world-famous aviator Lady Mary Bailey, who landed her double-seater Puss Moth on a provisional landing ground prepared by the expedition.24 Like desert crossing by car, air-travel was not just a means of moving across impassable distances in deserts, but also served archaeological, surveying, and photography purposes (see Chapter 5). Bailey photographed from the air the massive Aterian Palaeolithic area around Kharja and the fast movement of sand dunes, monitoring from above the instability of the land surface itself.25 Like the Signals’ officers land explorations in the Libyan Desert, Bailey’s flights were distinctly imperial. So was their rhetoric: Bagnold compares Egypt to Ireland in the early 1920s (where he had served) and makes analogies between Egypt and India. A map attached to the first chapter of Libyan Sands is captioned “Libya Desert with outline of India Superimposed”, in which the form of the latter is, literally, projected like a shadow on a map of Egypt west of the Nile.26 Bailey, too, cast herself, and was represented as, an imperial aviator. In March 1928 she flew from London to Cape Town and back, and her Kharja landing came at the end of a flight from London via Tunis and Cairo. The military and imperial aspects of automobile and air travel are apparent in that the newly explored routes often led to imperial outposts or contested grounds where empires and ethnic groups clashed. During the First World War, the oases bordering Libya became a battle ground between the Ottoman Empire, Italian and British forces, and the Senussi federation. In the Second World War, the coastal and border area witnessed the fierce North African Campaign that raged from June 1940 to May 1943 between the Allies and Axis powers. During the interwar era, desert crossing and exploration presented forms of collaboration between civilians and the military, as well as between archaeologists, explorers, and surveyors of different nationalities: British, Egyptian, Italian, Greek, and Hungarian (for more detail, see Chapter 10). In addition to transnational collaboration, desert crossings offered a host of associations between modernity and antiquity that was neither Pharaonic nor biblical but prehistoric and classical.

23 Gertrude Caton-Thompson, Mixed Memories (London, 1983), 110; Caton-Thompson and Elinor Wight-Gardner, The Desert Fayum, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1934). 24 Gertrude Caton-Thompson, Mixed Memories, 149–50. 25 See Chapter 5, 163–4, Chapter 5 On Aterian culture, see Elinor M. L. Scerri, “The Aterian and its Place in the North African Middle Stone Age”, Quaternary International, 300 (25 June 2013), 11–130. 26 Bagnold, Libyan Sands, 15.

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Mortons’ analogues, for example, are with Alexander’s journey to Siwa, to the Oracle of Jupiter Ammon.27 Explorations off the beaten itineraries, as well as their descriptions, penned by officers, journalists, archaeologists, and geologists like Caton-Thompson and Gardner, and Egyptologist painters such as Myrtle Broome, who documents at length a camel climb to al-Kharja as well as trips to the Eastern Desert, reveal not only the expansion of mechanized travel and discovery, but also the scope of the repertoires of Egyptology after the war. Its temporal scope broadened and its association with the present became closer. Antiquity extended backward, to prehistory, and forward, to include Graeco-Roman, notably Ptolemaic, Egypt and early Christianity. This does not mean that biblical narratives of Egyptian history disappeared, or that the search for evidentiary illustrations of the Bible waned. Far from it: reference to biblical texts and the attempt to illustrate them via archaeology persisted. As Egyptologist Eric Peet, co-founder of the Archaeological Institute at the University of Liverpool, wrote to Percy Newberry, eminent Egyptologist, excavator, and collector and at that time Reader in Egyptian Art at Liverpool, and Fellow at King’s College London, the new programme catered to “Biblical students”, cramming them with courses on the history of Egypt and Mesopotamia “in relation to the Hebrews”, and he himself indulged in writing a popular book on the Bible which he later disowned. Peet vehemently criticized popular biblical illustrations such as Flinders Petrie’s Egypt and Israel (1911) which he considered to be “nonsense . . . a vile production, of which for some odd reason he [Petrie] is very proud”.28 As already noted, research interest in ancient Egypt did not develop linearly, with scientific “secular” enquiry replacing the quest for an illustration and substantiating of the Scriptures, and the two trends co-existed after the war. However, the Biblical Archaeology of Egypt was losing ground to competing fields of knowledge and enquiry—from prehistory to the new Hellenistic studies. The co-existence of approaches and temporalities is evident in Morton’s own itineraries in the Middle East, capitalizing on the New Testament, notably his writing on Palestine. His writing on Egypt extended to early Christianity and the Coptic Church. Variety is also apparent in Margaret Murray’s anthropological notes on Coptic religion and rituals in Naqada and their origins. Murray, however, did not employ the biblical framework. Of course, the extension of Egypt’s past beyond the Pharaohs and its ensuing reassessment of the history of civilizations had taken place before the First World War and has been dated back to the mid 1890s and Petrie’s discovery of prehistory and his introduction of race into interpretations of antiquity. And interest in Ptolemaic and early Christian Egypt, too, predated the war. Prehistory brought pre-war anthropologists closer to Egyptology. Furthermore, prehistory—integrated 27 Morton, Middle East., 30–5. 28 Eric Peet to Percy Newberry, 8 April 1922, GIA, Newberry Mss, 36–72.

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into grand narratives of civilizational progress—positioned pre-dynastic Egypt as the lynchpin of these narratives and elevated it to the place of origin of civilizations. Anatomist and Egyptologist Grafton Elliot Smith’s hyper-diffusionism (discussed in Chapter 4), placed it as the epicentre of human development and technologies and an Ur civilization already in the 1900s. By the 1920s Egypt’s prehistory had been popularized in the press and in world histories such as H. G. Wells’s extraordinarily popular Outline of History.29 Drawing heavily on Elliot Smith, his outline condenses Egypt’s antiquity from its cannibalistic Palaeolithic hut-dwellers to Alexander’s occupation in three and a half pages that themselves are located in a chapter on the races of men. It also puts their immediate successors, the Neolithic industrious tillers, on a par with the pyramid builders and founders of the 18th Dynasty. The broad temporal reach is apparent in the variety of archaeological, anthropological, and geological activity after the war, sponsored by a variety of scientific bodies. New Kingdom Egypt continued to fascinate diggers and audiences. Carter and Carnarvon’s expedition was somewhat atypical of interwar digging in that it was sponsored by an individual (later joined by the Metropolitan Museum). Most excavations, according to the rationale of the post-war regime of archaeology, were backed by institutions. Following the standstill imposed by the war, the network of archaeological and other scientific organizations resumed work in older sites, as well as in newly discovered ones: the EES dug at Amarna (Tall al-ʿAmarnah) (until 1936), Armant, and Abydos, and carried out a survey of Egypt conducted by Guy Brunton and Caton-Thompson. It later moved its interest to Sesebi in the Sudan. The BSAE dug at Qau (Qaw al-Kebir) and Badari (Guy and Winifred Brunton with Caton-Thompson), discovering Badarian civilization there and a settlement at Hamamieh, thus demonstrating Badarian and predynastic levels, and initiated the archaeological and geological survey of the northern Faiyum (Caton-Thompson with Gardner). Cut short by Petrie’s withdrawal from Egypt in 1926, it continued under the auspices of the Royal Anthropological Institute and was co-sponsored by multiple donors including the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), the British Association, several museums, “and my friends”.30 Their further prehistoric digs were in the Kharja Oasis, between 1930 and 1934.31 American institutions such as the School of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago and Penn Museum (at Mit Rahinah (Memphis), Gizah, and Maydun) presented serious competition that frustrated British 29 See Chapter 10, H. G. Wells, The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind Revised and Brought Up to the End of the Second World War by Raymond Postgate (New York, 1956), I, 113–16. 30 Caton-Thompson, Mixed Memories, 103. 31 Margartia Diaz-Andreu and Marie Louise Stig-Sorensen, Excavating Women: A History of Women in European Archaeology (London and New York, 1998), 186–7; Margaret Drower, “Gertrude Caton-Thompson”, in Getzel  M.  Cohen and Martha Sharp Joukowsky (eds), Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists (Ann Arbor, MI, 2004), 355–61.

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archaeologists and was much commented upon, testifying to the gap between imperial expectations and actual resources. Interest in the pre-dynastic and early dynastic periods, and in prehistoric Egypt, took on institutional forms with the foundation in 1932 of the International Congress of Pre-Historic and ProtoHistoric Studies, and the material culture of early Egypt attracted attention at the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Studies in 1934, attended by 1,000 members. Additionally, the Egyptian Antiquities Department itself carried out excavations and salvage projects, such as the unearthing, initiated by King Fuad, of the giant obelisk at Aswan in 1923.32 In contradistinction to the grand narratives constructed by Elliot Smith and Petrie in his popular publications, some interwar archaeologists attracted to the pre- and early dynastic era and prehistoric eras, shunned generalizations and meta histories of civilizational progress (or regress) and sought to recover lost cultures of gatherers and early agriculturalists by sifting out archaeological, botanical, and geological evidence. Here prehistory had its particular charms. Already in 1923, while excavating with Petrie at Abydos, Caton-Thompson in a rather audacious correspondence with classicist John Linton Myres, declared her intention of making the distant past her field and career: “I am taking prehistory of Egypt as my particular field of work, to which I hope to dedicate many active years.”33 Questioning a hazy paper, delivered in 1855 to the RGS by Leonard Horner and cited by Myres in The Cambridge Ancient History (1923) about the alleged presence of pottery among flint implements deep in Nile alluvium, she requested to see “the vanished objects” which bear too heavy a load of theory about periods and strata, to Wallis Budge’s exasperation and Myres’s polite response. She questioned the authenticity of the alleged finds, not to mention archaeological and geological authority.34 Later in the 1920s, the uninhabited northern Faiyum, the Faiyum Oasis and its saline under sea-level Lake Qarun (known as Lake Moeris), offered her and others a combination of a primeval wilderness, monumental inorganic natural resources, and evidence of geological changes, as well as material traces of early Egyptian agriculture. And the finds covered a remarkably long stretch of time. Caton-Thompson’s expedition discovered massive gypsum quarries of pre-dynastic times that supplied the building material for the pyramids, with the remnants of labourers’ villages to boot, an abundance of silos with grains of wheat and barley, and an entire Ptolemaic irrigation system, traceable by the line of grass growing on the terrain, the last two discoveries testifying to well-developed agriculture. It was the search for the 32 ILN, 13 January 1923, 39. 33 Caton-Thompson to J. L. Myres, 18 October 1923; Myres to Caton-Thompson, 20 October, 6 and 12 November 1923; Caton-Thompson to Wallis Budge 29 November and 6 December 1923. All GIA, Caton-Thompson Correspondence F1-2. 34 Caton-Thompson to Wallis Budge, 29 November 1923, GIA, Caton-Thompson Correspondence F1-2.

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origins of the grains that captured her attention and that of scholars across disciplines who debated the source of Egyptian wheat and bread. They were joined by the press and grain specialists from Guinness in Dublin (who calculated amounts of barley grains discovered in the ancient silos) and added to the general curiosity about life and agriculture in an unknown Egypt.35 Clearly there was more to ancient Egypt than its spectacular monuments and tombs. The combination of the monumental and quotidian, and the promise of new kinds of material remains, attracted a host of other explorers and diggers who competed for concessions in the area, including the great James Breasted who snatched from Caton-Thompson her old concession, although with little result. The growth, expansion, and democratization of access to the actual sites of antiquities, the temporal spread of interest, as well as the technological changes that condensed space and expanded the repertoire of locations of antiquities, were all accompanied by an institutional expansion in Egyptology. Although the leading learned Egyptological societies predated the war, their orientation and outreach changed in its wake. The tottering BSAE, founded in 1905 as a bank account (the Egypt Research Account) to finance Petrie’s Egyptological excavation projects, moved to Palestine—“Egypt over the border”—in 1926, as a result of the revision of Egyptian policies concerning the division of archaeological finds. The more robust, albeit ill-funded EEF persisted. In 1914 it launched the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, which replaced the excavation reports and catered for a broader reading public. In 1919 the organization assumed a new name: The Egypt Exploration Society (EES), substituting “members” for “subscribers”. The Society’s 1926 prospectus, attached to a letter of complaint penned by its president J. H. Maxwell to Lord Lloyd, Britain’s High Commissioner to Egypt, painstakingly details the EES work of forty-two years. The Society organized countless expeditions that expanded archaeological knowledge about Egypt; apprenticed seventy-eight students in archaeology and Egyptology; it was the first private institution to have collected and published materials on Egypt; it discovered numerous sites and tombs; cleaned monuments buried in dirt and waste, restored them and “returned them” to the Egyptian government and nation; published some 102 excavation records—not counting its twelve-year-old journal, and circulated quantities of objects that enriched the collections of museums throughout Britain and the USA.36 Frustratingly for Maxwell and for archaeologists on the ground, All this work . . . has been carried out without any assistance from the public funds either of this country or of Egypt, though the national collection of both 35 Caton-Thompson to Percy Newberry, undated letters and letters dated 13 July13 August, 9 September, 23 October, and 14 November 1926, all GIA, Newberry Mss. 9/4–15. 36 “The Egypt Exploration Society”; “Antiquities Department, Organization et cetera . . .”; TNA, FO141 487/3.

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countries have gained substantially by the many objects which have been added to them as a result of the Society’s activities. It has been done solely by means of subscriptions and donations of its members. In the course of 42 years these have amounted to rather more than 142,000 pounds all of which have been expended on archaeological research in the field and on the publication of the information and results obtained.37

Maxwell’s description of the Egyptological project as an on-the-ground pursuit of material evidence about antiquity should not mislead us. As has been noted, during the interwar period the study of ancient Egypt moved between a “material epistemology” and textual and mainly philological research carried on by independent scholars like Alan Gardiner, Battiscombe George Gunn, who both took an interest and participated in excavations, and Peet. Peet’s inaugural lecture, in which he argued that “we are not very likely to learn very much more Egyptian history from excavation in Egypt itself ”, voiced his (and others’) move away from “the material fact of history” towards philology.38 Even earlier and in private, he was far more outspoken. As he wryly noted in a letter to Newberry in which he expressed his reluctance to excavate for the EES at Amarna: “[a] work which I  really did not care for or consider valuable, as for example, cemetery looting with insufficient budget”.39 The letter is a reiteration of complaints frequently voiced against the Egyptian Service des antiquités, its director, Pierre Lacau, and the Egyptian government’s attempt at a reversal of the pre-war policy on the ownership of antiquities and their distribution. Maxwell’s complaint also reveals his failure to grasp the political changes in Anglo-Egyptian relations and acknowledge the competition to the EES from rival organitions representing other European and North American learned societies and academic institutions. And he failed to notice the network of Egyptian civic organizations for the study of archaeology and the international discourse on cultural heritages and property.40 His protests provide an insight on the fundamental change in post-war politics and its impact on the new archaeological regime in Egypt. Elucidating these changes is vital to establishing that archaeological discovery was inseparable from imperial and international politics and that the unprecedented coverage of discoveries (particularly in the popular media) itself was entangled with issues such as access to information and knowledge about the ancient world and its legacies.

37 Ibid. 38 Alice Stevenson, “The Object of Study: Egyptology, Archaeology, and Anthropology at Oxford, 1860–1960”, in Carruthers, Histories, 19–34, 27–8. 39 Peet to Newberry, 27 February 1920, GIA, Newberry Mss. 36/63. 40 On these organizations, see Donald Reid, Contesting Antiquity in Egypt: Archaeologies, Museums and the Struggle for Identities from World War I to Nasser (Cairo and New York, 2015), 81–109.

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The Politics of Discovery: The Changing Regime of Archaeology and Interwar Politics It is worthwhile to emphasize again that, unlike Britain’s newer imperial possessions in the eastern Mediterranean—Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq, and France’s Syria and the Lebanon, Egypt was not a mandate territory, hence its antiquities could not be directly controlled by the new imperial apparatus instituted for their monitoring and regulation. Egypt represents a mixture of the evolving post-war regime of antiquities and pre-war legal systems and governance and direct Franco-British involvement. Furthermore, the continuous conflicts surrounding its heritage and access to it showcase the intricate relationships between Egyptian nationalists, Liberal Constitutionalists and the monarchy, international cultural politics, and tensions between the new empires. The period between 1922 and 1937 was punctuated by national upheavals which contested the legitimacy of Britain’s imperial rule. British military power was challenged by party and popular opposition before and after British military presence was curbed by the treaty. The archaeological regime in Egypt was quite different from that in other imperial territories and access to Egypt’s past was mediated by a number of national, colonial, and international agents. Pre-war colonial agreements between Britain and France stipulated that the latter would control access to Egyptian antiquities, their distribution, and display: the Entente Cordiale of 1904, which signalled Anglo-French rapprochement and acknowledged their respective spheres of influence in Africa (not least British dominance in Egypt), left the Service des antiquités—as before—to France. It buttressed the veteran Institut français d’archéologie orientale, founded in Cairo in 1880, under the auspices of the French Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts and still in existence. Thus, throughout Egypt’s formal and informal occupation, the war and formal independence, central control remained French, with French directors of antiquities, while on the ground inspection was mainly British and, to a very limited degree, Egyptian. From 1922, the regulation of antiquities was overseen by a Board of Public Works (as in mandated territories) and directed by French functionaries with Egyptians in auxiliary roles. British imperial officials in Whitehall and Cairo were increasingly reluctant to interfere in the rabid conflicts between excavators and the antiquities service. Howard Carter, known for his refusal to grasp the political changes in Egypt and the immense symbolic national value of the Pharaonic past, was not alone in failing to understand the changes or, for that matter, British politicians’ reluctance to meddle in them. Not only archaeologists on the ground, who depended on trophies to satisfy their sponsors, be they individuals or museums, but also some of the biggest names in Egyptology, archaeology, and museology vigorously campaigned for imperial intervention in favour of the

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terms of the ownership of antiquities. Their siege on imperial policy makers of the highest level, in their effort to revert Egyptian policies regarding antiquities, is apparent in Alan Gardiner’s appeals to Stanley Baldwin shortly after the latter settled down in 10 Downing Street. Gardiner ritually repeats a history of Britain’s abandonment of the managing of Egypt’s past to the French in 1904 and French neglect of the Egyptian Museum—one of the richest and worst managed museums in the world, according to him, and calls for a rescue of Egypt’s past by the British Empire. The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb “enflamed” local national feelings, he notes, and crowds welcomed the Egyptian ministers in every railway station on their way to Luxor to the official opening of the tomb. They clamoured for complete independence for Egypt and the Sudan. The restrained response penned on behalf of the prime minister rejected the suggestion of an official protest. Gardiner’s complaints were nothing compared to Kenyon’s dogged attempts to intervene in the administration of antiquities. As we have seen, he played an active part in formulating the post-war archaeological regime, through the Archaeological Joint Committee and in his role as director of the British Museum. Writing to the Foreign Office on behalf of the Committee, he noted that the administration of Egyptian Antiquities “might be even after 1927 regarded as a ‘foreign interest’ entitled to the protection of His Majesty’s Government”.41 Austen Chamberlain did not think “antiquarian research” a “foreign interest” or a British area of influence.42 In similar manner, complaints to Ramsay MacDonald that British archaeologists were the most discriminated against in the community of excavators in Egypt were sternly disproved, with a note that British investment in digging was the smallest.43 Antiquities’ policies and the limits on imperial intervention represent continuity between the pre- and post-war overseeing of antiquities, and between the Ottoman and British empires. The legal and administrative base of access and control was Ottoman and Egyptian: Egypt had had the oldest Antiquities Laws in the Ottoman Middle East (dating back to 1835). The law in operation after the war was the 1912 Antiquities Law that stated the principle of the equal division of spoils between the antiquities service and the excavator/s. Its eleventh clause, which after 1923 Western archaeologists incessantly evoked and hankered after, stipulated that: “Whoever discovered an antiquity other than during an illicit excavation, will conform to the proscriptions of the preceding article, shall receive as a reward half of the objects found or of their value.” In the absence of an agreement on a division, the Service des antiquités would appropriate the objects it 41 Gardiner to Prime Minister, 24 November 1924, Kenyon to FO, 10 January 1925, Memorandum and following note, all in TNA, FO141-48. 42 Murray to Kenyon, 19 January 1925, telegram, TNA, FO141-48. 43 Ramsay Macdonald to High Commissioner, 28 May 1924, TNA, FO141 7436/106; Tottenham to Owen Tweedy, Residency, 20 July 1924, TNA, FO-141 7436/106.

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intended to keep. Other objects would be divided by the service and the excavators could choose from the two divisions.44 In October 1922 Pierre Lacau announced a new Antiquities Law that would change the rules of the game, effective from the next season of excavations. Although the existing law took quite a long time to change and was, theoretically, still valid, a new system of dividing and owning antiquities emerged and replaced the principle of parity. According to it, “All antiquities found during the duration of [archaeological] works will be returned (remise) to the Antiquities Service. With the exception of those that the Service decides at its discretion to give to the beneficiary, they shall belong to the public domain.”45 The new regulations galvanized the Anglo-American archaeological establishment into frantic action, initiated and led by senior functionaries in the chief national museums with large collections of Egyptian antiquities, Egyptologists who mobilized Foreign Office officials, the American diplomatic service, and the local colonial administration.46 But mobilization delayed rather than reversed the change of policy and of the rationale of division, a rationale that was both pragmatic (and financial) and ideational. It drew on the need to guarantee income and capital for excavations by remunerating institutional and private donors, but financial considerations were engrained in the widespread belief that the preservation and ownership of Egypt’s cultural treasures were better served by the West. One significant difference between the post- and pre-war regimes of antiquities was the emergence of an international institutional framework for managing ancient heritage and patrimonies. The network of institutions, publications, and international congresses under the auspices of the League of Nations that aimed at regulating access to, and ownership of, cultural property generally, and archaeological finds particularly, was discussed in detail in Chapter 1. Here it is relevant to briefly consider Egypt’s procrastinated integration into this network and Egyptian appropriation of the idiom and vocabulary of cooperation among nations for the preservation of the national past. Interest in collaboration partnered together the IMO, the main architect and coordinator of the internationalist regime of antiquities, the Egyptian Antiquities Service, individuals in the Egyptian government, and the monarchy, the latter sanctioning collaboration occasionally and presiding over its ceremonial manifestations. Egyptian use of the internationalist vent predated and was at its most intensive before Egypt was allowed to join the League and before it was granted the diplomatic and political

44 “Loi No. 14 De 1912 Sur Les antiquités”, TNA, FO-141 7436/106. 45 “Ministère des Travaux Publics Direction Générale des Antiquités”, TNA, FO141-48 7436/106. Compare to the existing law in “arrêté ministériel No. 52 Règlement pour les fouilles”. Loi No. 14 de 1912 sur les Antiquités, ibid. 46 Kenyon to Murray, FO, 2 December 1925; Lord Lloyd to FO (draft letter to Ziwar Pasha, Egyptian Foreign Minister), 3 April 1926; Austen Chamberlain to Lord Lloyd, 7 April 1926; President of the [Egyptian] Council of Ministers to Lord Lloyd, 26 May 1926. All TNA, FO141-48.

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rights of an independent state. Egyptian communications with the IMO were made via the Egyptian legation in Brussels that passed on to IMO headquarters in Paris correspondence to and from Egypt that itself was mediated by French representatives at the Service des antiquités and museums’ directors. Egypt was represented on the International Commission on Historical Monuments— convened by the League—by non-Egyptians: Étienne Marie Felix Drioton, Director General of the Antiquities Service and later the Louvre curator of Egyptology, and Gaston Wiet, Director of the Museum of Arab Art in Cairo. Cairo was set as the venue for the first International Conference on Archaeological Excavations which took place in March 1937.47 It was officially hosted by the Geographical Society of Egypt, a body that was largely controlled by King Fuad and the Ministry of Public Instruction. Collaboration notwithstanding, the IMO and the Egyptian ministries involved in the hosting of the event did not see eye to eye on the substance of international collaboration. Whereas the IMO took pains to describe the conference as a meeting of experts on administrative, technical, and legal questions regarding excavations, the Egyptian correspondents repeatedly raised the subject which they saw as the crux of Egypt’s regime of antiquities: the difficulty in reclaiming monuments and objects that had been illegally or illicitly removed from their place of origin. In the prolonged negotiation between Foundoukidis and his counterparts, the latter emphasized that the question which has a capital importance for Egypt, that is, a complete discussion and study of the measures that have to be taken for the claim (revendication) and restitution of objects of antiquity taken out illegally of their country of origin which adhered to the OIM. This question may not be avoided in a reunion that will take place in Cairo considering that primordial importance for Egypt.48

The key terms in the Egyptian response are, of course, “claim” and “restitution”. By reclaiming restitution as their international right, Egyptian educators, officials, and Egyptologists went one step further than the internationalist organizations for intellectual collaboration in the League. Clearly the internationalist language not only contested procedures of division of archaeological finds (before the revision of the Antiquities Law), but also went against the grain of the British and American campaigners’ argument against the revision. These had emphasized all along that Egyptian antiquities were rescued from neglect and oblivion in their “land of origin” and that their display in Egyptian museums such as the Egyptian Museum at Cairo was damaging. As Breasted noted, in the wake of the discovery 47 Manual on the Technique of Archaeological Excavation, 227–8. 48 Minister of the Egyptian Legation at Brussels to Foundoukidis, 12 May 1936, and Foundoukidis to Minister, 29 May 1936, both UNESCO, O.I.M.XIV 71.

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of the tomb of Tutankhamun, the combination of British power and American resources would preserve the heritage of the entire Middle East for universal interest (read Western interest).49 By stressing the claim for restitution, which the IMO skirted around, Egyptians utilized the letter and spirit of the new internationalist discourse. Nor were they satisfied with the attempt to relegate the right to restitution to the future, but demanded that it be discussed in regard to ancient objects already removed from their place of origin.50 The conference was a demonstration of French power in Egypt’s system of the safeguarding and keeping of antiquities and of a French-directed internationalism. It was dominated by French representatives, nearly 25 per cent of all the delegates, with Britain under-represented, no doubt a reflection of France’s position in the Egyptian bureaucracy of antiquities and the strongly French slant of the apparently global IMO, headquartered in Paris. Egypt’s six Egyptian delegates came from its new secular Cairo university: public intellectual and avowed nationalist Ahmad Lufti al-Sayyid; its rector, ʿAli Ibrahim Pasha; the vice rector, Egyptologist Salim Hassan, the first Egyptian to be appointed professor at Cairo University and Deputy Director of Antiquities; Sami Jarbah, professor at the Faculty of Letters; and Mahmud Shawkat of the Ministry of Public Education. The composition of the delegation demonstrates how the international society that evolved after the war, with its most prominent platform, the League, could become stages for the League’s less powerful members. Tension over the division of the spoils of excavations and their ownership coincided with, and may not be grasped outside of, the political, imperial, and constitutional struggle over authority, knowledge about the past, and its representation after 1922. In its traditional Anglo-American renditions this struggle was for long interpreted in biographical terms, centring the conflicts on personalities and individuals, and positioning French officials against British savants—archaeologists, curators, and museologists or, alternatively, an alliance between French and Egyptian nationalists against British excavators and scholars. More recent interpretations place emphasis on the emergence of Egyptian Egyptology in an imperial context. There is no doubt that these narratives, particularly the latter, have their power. But “sides” in the conflict over Egypt’s past were not monolithic and were riven with tensions: amongst British archaeologists and between them and officials; within the Egyptian nationalist movement over the Constitution of 1923; between the Wafd party, the monarchy, and the “Commission on the Constitution”; and more.51

49 Reid, Contesting Antiquity, 103. 50 Minister to Foundoukidis, 23 May 1936, via the chargé d’affaires Legeation Brussles, 8 September 1936, UNESCO, O.I.M.XIV 71. 51 Marina Romano, “La Costituzione egiziana del 1923: il rapport tra Stato e Islam nell constuzione di una identita nazionale”, Oriente Moderno, 94:1 (2014), 79–98.

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The contradictory pulls of nationalism and imperial interests persisted throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, but flared most vociferously and spectacularly during the battle over access to, and the publicizing of, the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. The story of the discovery itself and of the conflict over the tomb, its exposure to the public, and the control of access to it has been extensively studied in a vast popular and academic literature.52 To repeat it would serve no purpose. It would be useful, however, to focus on the ways in which access to the tomb, and to information about it, became tied together in a transnational public debate. Thus, the issues of access to the physical remains of Egypt’s past and control of knowledge about it became entangled in a clamorous discussion that took place on, and was played up in, the international and Egyptian press. The press was key to the popularization of Tutankhamun and, as the book has already demonstrated, archaeology and the culture of antiquity, mediating between a variety of metropolitan and colonial publics and the ancient past. Its functioning during the excavation of the tomb was vital because it not only made it a world event and archaeology into international “news”, but also influenced the characteristics and mechanisms of the circulation of information and knowledge about the past. Mechanisms of coverage and access to information were reset and contested when in January 1923 George Edward Molyneux Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, the excavations’ chief backer and long-time Egyptology enthusiast, sold exclusive reporting rights on the progress of the discovery to The Times. He thereby effectively granted it unlimited rights “for the distribution through the press of the world of all news and photographs of his discoveries in the tomb”, and employed it as “a single agency” of information and as sole supplier of news, illustrations, photographs, and interviews to “every newspaper, magazine and other periodical publication in the world”. In principle, this monopoly meant that news would be delivered to The Times’s headquarters “for simultaneous release to the press of the world”.53 These exclusive rights were widely interpreted as a form of exclusion and media suppression that flagrantly contradicted a democratic press and democratized regimes both in Europe and the empire. Carnarvon’s news deal was regarded in the commercial press as naked commercialism and a form of media cartel, encouraging secrecy unfit for a free press, as well as being an offence to Egyptian nationalism. Disapproval was voiced in the Egyptian press, cutting across political affiliation, in the nationalist paper of the Watani party al-Liwa, in Al-Ahram, and in the usually pro-British al-Muqattam.54 The Times’s patronizing claim that most

52 Accounts include Reid, Contesting Antiquity; Reeves, The Complete Tutankhamun; Frayling, The Face of Tutankhamun; and Julie Hankey, A Passion for Egypt: Arthur Weigall, Tutankhamun and the Curse of the Pharaohs (London, 2007). 53 “The Tomb of the King. Contract Given to the Times. Exclusive Service of News. Lord Carnarvon’s Plans”, The Times, 10 January 1923, 11. 54 For the Egyptian press, see Colla, Conflicted Antiquities and Donald Reid, “Remembering and Forgetting Tutankhamun”, in Carruthers, Histories, 174–84.

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Egyptians had little interest in the find, that initially it had been limited (to their “intrinsic value”—hinting at “gold value”), and that national feelings were incited by a belligerent press, itself disclosed an admission of defeat.55 In Britain the furore in the press was led by the Daily Express and its special correspondent to Luxor, none other than H. V. Morton (not to be confused with Morton of The Times), who was made a member of the expedition by the accommodating Carnarvon and Carter. Morton defied exclusivity, reached Luxor, and filed regular news reports from the tomb. The Express’s headlines hammered in the wrongs of news monopoly. Two days after the agreement, it carried a column on “Nationality in Art Treasures”, warning against the violation of Egypt’s national feelings and its rightful belongings, treated by Carnarvon as his own private property.56 On 15 January headlines were more explicit: “No Monopoly at the Tomb; Egyptian Government Takes Action; Open to All”, and the following report described Egyptian resentment of the agreement and the Egyptian authorities’ intention to maintain an attitude of impartiality towards all reporters.57 The self-referential article posited the Express as a defender of Egyptian nationalism, an alternative to monopolistic journalism, and as a leader of a free press. And this image was bolstered in the series of “specials”, a “Service de Lux” to British readers with Morton’s own copy and title as special correspondent to Luxor.58 Morton had not yet reached his fame as a chronicler of modern travel in Britain—both by car in rural Britain and tourism in London—and the Middle East, but he built up a reputation as an intrepid reporter with a grasp of the modern press, modern forms of communication like the telegraph (he reported on the telegraphic service installed at Luxor), and of the role of newspapers as mediators between a vast readership and antiquity. He carved for himself the role of both an expert reporter on archaeology and ancient Egypt and an investigating journalist, exposing the wrongs of the apparatus of reportage. He continued lashing at The Times’s monopoly long after Carnarvon’s death and followed their “Road of Blunders”, “the fight for information”, and his own effective breaking of the agreement.59 There is far more to Morton’s coverage than a scramble for copy. The Express used the monopoly policy to bolster its own status as a mass-circulation democratic daily. Democracy was not political—given its owner, Lord Beaverbrook’s, politics—but represented affordable access to news, reports, and popular subjects ranging from sports to fashion.60 By 1923 it had Britain’s second largest readership, trailing behind the Daily Mail, but its circulation figures reached 600,000, far exceeding The Times’s, and would double by 1931 and almost treble by 1936.

55 The Times, 15 January 1923, 11. 56 Daily Express, 11 January 1923, 6. 57 Daily Express, 15 January 1923, 1. 58 Daily Express, 2 February 1923, 7. 59 H. V. Morton, “Curse of the Tomb. Inside Story of its Discovery. Road of Blunders. Quarrel Over Coffin”, Daily Express, 14 February 1924, 3. 60 Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination, ch. 1.

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Its contents and layout stood for modernity and an up-to-date reporting sense that the battle waged against monopoly in the media fit well. Critique on access to news and knowledge about archaeological discovery was inextricable from the loaded issue of the ownership of Egyptian antiquity which exploded over “Tutankhamun and Co Ltd” (the nickname given to the news’ deal by popular Egyptologist Arthur Weigall).61 The coincidence of the discovery and the election of a Wafdist parliament, a new constitution, and the installation of an Egyptian government, as well as the evolving reform of Antiquities Laws, determined that the finds would be kept in Egypt. But, as already noted, the debate over who owned the exposed treasures of the Pharaoh persisted, and the 18th Dynasty child-monarch became a national Egyptian icon and a deeply politicized object. As Ahmad Shawqi noted in his Tutankhamun and the Parliament, the dead Pharaoh travelled forty centuries before coming home and finding there “England, and its army, and its lord, brandishing its Indian sword Protecting India”.62 In nationalist discourse, archaeology itself came to be synonymous with despotic rule, or, in the words of al-Ahram, “the Government of Lord Carnarvon and Mr. Carter Limited”.63 At the same time, Tutankhamun was associated with the past grandeur of a monarchy that represented a “high civilization”. And no Egyptian, it was noted in 1922, could fail to be moved by the physical presence of the royal body under its majestic canopy that stirred national emotions.64 The debate on the control of access to Tutankhamun’s tomb and information about it highlighted and publicized, as never before, issues that have ever since touched at the core of archaeological discovery, its trajectory, display, and the agency of audiences. In the debate humanity and civilization and their interests were often pitted against national Egyptian rights which imperial participants often represented as local. But occasionally ideas about Western cultural custodianship, couched in universalistic language, were mitigated and even contradicted by more relativistic notions about respect for other cultures. The public debate echoed opinions voiced by representatives of the chief European and American museums who deplored the accommodation of the finds at the Cairo museum and recommended their guardianship for humanity and science. But some commentators and newspaper readers in Britain lamented the mass exposure of the tomb. The urge to respect and protect Tutankhamun contradicted the very rationale of a museum of archaeology (indeed of archaeology itself) and the modern idea of collecting, because it advocated the concealment of the dead king’s body, not its display. The idea that the body and coffin should not be exhibited was probably first articulated in the press by the bishop of Chelmsford, who

61 Hankey, A Passion for Egypt, 260. 62 Colla, Conflicted Antiquities, 220. 63 Cited in the The Egyptian Gazette, 21 February 1923. 64 Abdul [sic] Khalck Sarwat Pasha, formerly premier of Egypt, telegram, The Times, 22 February 1923, 10.

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compared the invasion of the king’s tomb to a futuristic invasion in 5923 of Victoria’s burial place and its exhibition—an offence to decency, cultural respect, and to Christianity itself. His own arguments were directed against him by Dr  A.  M.  Blackman (Egyptologist Aylward Manley Blackman), who noted that invasion and removal to the Cairo Museum—without exposure to the public— would serve mutual cultural respect and religion better.65 Rider Haggard’s long letter to The Times highlighted this position and touched on the archaeological practice itself: “digging out”, he noted, was a process of dislocation and destruction as well as discovery. It is worth quoting at some length: Now the minor Pharaoh, Tutankhamen [sic], is to be added to the long list of more illustrated “dug-outs”. Presently he too, may be stripped and, like the great Ramses and many other monarchs . . . lay naked to rot in a glass case of the Museum at Cairo . . . Yes. To rot. For thus exposed I doubt whether any of them will last another century; and meanwhile be made the butt of the merry jest of  tourists of the baser sort, as I have heard with my own ears. Is this decent? . . . When we remember what was the faith of these men, Pharaohs and peasants, and that the disturbance of their tombs and bodies was the greatest horror by which they were obsessed, is it not an outrage and one of the most unholy? Examine them by all means; X-ray them; learn what we can of history from them . . . but then hide them away again for ever, as we ourselves would be hidden away.66

Regretting his own previous collector’s obsession with ancient Egyptian objects, he concludes: “Such relics of a people who in their way were as great as we are, and certainly more religious, should be sacred.” Of course, Rider Haggard’s portrayal of ancient Egypt and the Egyptians as “religious” reflects traditional Western attitudes to them. And his characterization of the Cairo museum as unfit to accommodate Egypt’s own treasures is a typical exemplar of cultural condescension, but these views are accompanied by a critique of the rationale of display and of archeological tourism. The idea that antiquities in general and human remains in particular are better left in situ, thus in their proper place, reverberates in some critical travellers’ accounts of museums, such as Olga Tufnell’s. Referring to “the gaudiness of Tut”, she unfavourably compares the gorgeousness of his display to sculpture and artefacts of earlier rulers and dynasties. She notes how “so out of place [are mummies and bodies] in museums”.67 The preoccupation with the king’s dead body and his mummy is also easily relatable to popular fascination with “Tut’s curse”, or the “mummy’s curse”, and the scare it engendered 65 The Times, 3 February 1923, 12; 5 February 1923, 9. 66 The Daily Express, 13 February 1923, 13. 67 Olga Tufnell to her mother, 21 November 1927 and 18 December 1927, PEF, PEF-DA-TUF 103.

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as a result of Carnarvon’s death (probably caused by a combination of blood poisoning and pneumonia) a short while after the grand official opening of the tomb. The legend that the disturbed Pharaoh took his revenge on the invaders of his burial place and body was drummed up in the press with the aid of such popular authors as the best-selling Marie Corelli, and Arthur Conan Doyle, and started a popular panic. Corelli’s admonition to Carnarvon, which circulated in British and American newspapers, echoed the notion that the disturbance of the Egyptian dead and interference with their bodies was either sacrilegious or immoral. It became widespread long before the opening of Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus: mummies had been present in Western popular culture—as displays, collectibles, medicinal objects, and affordable commodities. Whereas in popular lore the disturbed Egyptian dead were represented as victims, with the discovery of the tomb, the least disturbed and almost intact tomb of a Pharaoh, his invaded resting place and body were transformed into avengers—aggressively revenging the archaeologists who had disturbed them. As Jasmine Day has put it, the dead Pharaoh, indeed any mummified Egyptian, was endowed with a malevolent character. The tomb’s discovery presented a certain turn in uses and representations of mummies and indeed of the dead.68 The turn from mummymania to scare is apparent in the renunciation of mummies and other Egyptian mementoes by British and American collectors who sent them to the British Museum. Reportedly, an avalanche of parcels of mummies’ hands and feet from ancient tombs descended on the museum. The unwarranted gifts resulted from “The belief that a dead King’s curse is potent for evil after thousands of years won thousands of adherents the day when Lord Carnarvon became ill. ” Previous deliveries of allegedly cursed Egyptian objects had occurred when a myth of the curse of the Priestess of Amen Ra circulated but it was nothing like the flood triggered by the alleged curse of Tut.69

The Ancient as Modern: Tutankhamun, Modern Life, and Egyptian Presences in Popular Culture Notwithstanding the panic and obsession with the “curse of the pharaohs” in Anglo-American newspapers and in popular visual representations of mummies in film, fiction, and later popular histories, it was the stupendous wealth of objects found with the mummy that held the greatest appeal for contemporaries. The materiality of the world of Tutankhamun that these objects represented was 68 Day, The Mummy’s Curse, 19–64; see also Matt Cardin, Mummies Around the World: An Encyclopedia of Mummies in History, Religions and Popular Culture (Santa Barbara, CA, 2014). 69 “Egyptian Collectors in a Panic: Sudden Rush to Hand Over their Treasures to Museums. Groundless Fears”, Daily Express, 7 April 1923; Mark Benyon, London’s Curse: Murder, Black Magic and Tutankhamun in the 1920s West End (London, 2012).

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conveyed in extraordinary detail in Carter’s meticulous records and his books, and in the world press. The repetition of detail resembles that of the contemporary and comparable descriptions of the Royal Cemetery at Ur discussed in Chapter 5. But the better physical condition of the majority of Egyptian objects, their sheer abundance in one tomb, and the staging, on the ground and in the press, of the process of their exposure, all contributed to the making of a spectacle of Pharaonic Egypt. Even more than the finds in Ur, the treasures in Tutankhamun’s “trove” were strongly associated by contemporaries with modern ity and celebrity. “Modern” is easily one of the most common attributes of Tutankhamun’s belongings, and they are repeatedly likened to contemporary objects. Moreover, analogue between the modernity of material Egyptian culture and twentieth-century artefacts is not limited to objects and lifestyle, but also projects on the status and role of Egyptian civilization and races in interwar interpretations of world history. The modernity of material culture of the fourteenth century bc was represented as proof of ancient Egyptian cultural superiority and racial superiority. And the material ingenuity and inventiveness of the ancient Egyptians served to buttress hyper-diffusionist theories about the origin of civilizations and Egypt’s place and role as an Ur civilization, promoted by Elliot Smith (with the evidentiary part of the argument moving on from prehistoric civilization to the civilization of the 18th Dynasty). The jumble of aesthetic appreciation and popular anthropology is quite apparent in a number of articles dated May 1923, by The Times’s scientific correspondent. “Progress of Science. Civilization Born in Egypt”, subtitled “The New Anthropology”, enthuses about the “apparent modernity” unearthed in the tomb. “These articles of use and luxury, thousands of years old, older than the polished implements of our immediate ancestors, may be unfamiliar in their texture and ornament, but otherwise might be sold in London’s West-End shops.” They all show that in the fourteenth century B.C. Egypt was the home of a high civilization, rich in accomplishments of the artist and craftsman centuries before the Greeks had produced anything of the same order of merit. Their nature and characters also serve to call attention to what is almost a Revolution in the conception of the past history of the race, a change of ideas by which the original home of civilization was placed in Egypt.

Special homage is paid to Elliot Smith and the anthropologist and therapist W.  H.  R.  Rivers—famous for his treatment of shell-shocked patients after the Great War—and the multiple-origins interpretations of civilization is dismissed. Egypt is hailed as the creator of a civilization transmitted by a pre-dynastic “Brown Race”.70 Elliot Smith himself drew on the excavations of the tomb to highlight his interpretation.71 70 The Times, 22 May 1923, 10; 25 September 1923, 8.

71 The Times, 15 September 1923, 10.

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Notions of the modernity of ancient Egypt touched on contemporary materiality, styles, and tastes. The array of objects entombed with Tutankhamun seemed modern because they could stand for and mean newness and contemporaneousness. Contemporaries associated them with modern consumption and noted that they could be reproduced and distributed to modern buyers. Observers noted the new and fashionable look of objects whose “modernity is one of the most striking features of ancient Egyptian art”, including a faience polychrome colour “elaborate as any modern ornament”, shirts “in the modern style”, the Royal emblem of the lion, “in Ancient Egypt as in Modern Britain”, a modern wine strainer and gold rings, attractive today as 3,000 years ago.72 In the Express, Morton publicized the sustainability of the king’s cosmetics, most notably his still usable face cream. “Tut’s face cream and perfumes have been found. After a lapse of thirty centuries men smelt the cosmetics which must have scented the royal palace of Thebes.” Indeed, the scents and creams proved more durable than the royal edifices. The inevitable cross-gender analogue follows: It is a strange thing that a modern girl could use perfumes that delighted the heart of Pharaoh or Queen Ankhenpaaten [sic] 3,000 years ago. It is hoped that these liquids can be analysed in order that modern chemists may manufacture the scent for which ancient Egypt was famous.73

Fascination with the modernity of the Pharaoh’s material world was enhanced in analogues with some contemporary icons that were regarded as embodiments of modern life and the modern condition, such as Charlie Chaplin. The figure of an Asiatic captive carved on one of many royal walking sticks found in the tomb was supposed to resemble Chaplin in his bowler hat. The press circulated the Chaplin analogue following a comparison made by Carter himself (never to have missed an opportunity for publicity) between the ornamented object and the film star in a previous incarnation “among the Hittites or Assyrians of Tutankhamen’s day”.74 The “human” and contemporary aspect of the finds of the tomb made it the subject of a world-wide commercialization. Tut motifs were imitated and massreproduced in dress, jewellery, accessories, and interior design. They were copied on textiles, wallpaper, in women’s Tut fashions in coats, dresses, and sandals, in Tut haircuts of modern flappers, and in a plethora of gadgets: Tut purses, gloves, trinkets, boxes, walking sticks, cigarette holders and lighters, pocket-knives, boxes, brooches, and earrings, flooded the market and advertisement columns. Of course, there was nothing novel in the commodification and mass-reproduction of Egyptian or Egyptianized objects and motifs. The attraction and vogue of

72 ILN, 22 September, 1923, 528. 73 H.  V.  Morton, “Scent 3,000 Old, Little Pots Full of Pharaoh’s Face Cream, Still Fragrant, Discovered by Accident”, Daily Express, 13 February 1923, 7. 74 “Charlie Chaplin of Tutankhamen’s Day: Stick and Standard”, ILN, 29 September 1923, 561.

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things Egyptian date back to the Graeco-Roman era and have recurred at intervals since the late eighteenth century. The massive demand for reproduced Egyptian objects marketed as Tut artefacts has to do with both their association with modernity and the personal, human angle of the discovery which the media circulated and mediated. Press coverage stressed similarities between contemporary and ancient styles, fashions and interests so that, in the words of the disparaging Evelyn Waugh, “it was impossible to dissociate them from all the irrelevant bubble of emotion and excitement”. So much so, he argued, that the discovery that ancient and modern humans shared practices and needs blurred the unique aesthetic (art) value of Egyptian artefacts.75 The constant coverage of the flow of objects exposed to the public eye in texts and photographs diminished their authenticity and the initial status of the finds as unique and rare. Moreover, unlike the Ur finds that reached Western museums, the overwhelming majority of the originals from the tomb was kept at the Cairo Museum and Anglo-American audiences became familiar with their reproductions, which themselves were purported to be “authentic”. At the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924 and 1925, a “replica” of the tomb, together with “a complete replica” of its contents (that was far from being complete, as at that time only the contents of the tomb’s antechamber had been exposed) was made from photographs by architectural sculptor William Aumonier. Due to the political tensions that the excavations fuelled in Egypt, the imitation was moved outside the main exhibition and displayed at Wembley’s Amusement Park, next to two gadgets of speed and modern mechanics: The Flying Machine and The Safety Racer. Visitors entered the tomb via a façade of the cliffs of Thebes and a sandy walkway, accompanied by guides in tarbushes. Needless to say, the giant replica was publicized by the press which had, in the first place, provided material for the reproductions that served as the material for the facsimile.76 Press coverage thus literally transformed the Egyptian archaeological finds into copies with an aura of authenticity, in more than one sense. Pharaonic antiquities could be copied and imitated, or appropriated and adapted for consumption, and visualized; they sold newspaper copy. Their reproducibility and usages in everyday life, and often attachment as objects for daily use to the body, made them seem relevant, contemporary, and global, in the sense that their vicarious ownership was not limited to one place—Egypt, but was potentially everyone’s in Britain, the USA, and elsewhere. But the role of the media in the commodification and politicization of Tutankhamun does not sufficiently explain the presence and pull of ancient Egypt in popular culture and the multiple manifestations of Egypto-Modernism. 75 Evelyn Waugh, Labels: A Mediterranean Journal (1930; London, repr. 1985), 88. 76 The Times, 24 May 1924; see also “The Queen at Wembley”, The Times, 31 May 1924; “Luxor Tomb Dispute Settled”, The Times, 13 January 1925, 11.

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The availability of a particular modern international style, Art Deco, made possible the “translation” of Egyptian artefacts into modern, everyday vernacular and objects. The term Art Deco itself, coined retrospectively, refers to the decorative arts described in the 1920s and 1930s as “modern”, or as “Jazz Art” (or alternatively as “Style 1925” after the International Decorative Arts exhibition in Paris). It embodied some characteristics that were deemed quintessentially modern and dynamic: it stressed functionalism and innovation, and combined a contemporary aesthetics and usefulness with a cultural eclecticism, drawing on an array of non-Western cultural heritages, not least on Egyptian art and styles.77 Egyptian motifs could be, and were, easily integrated in Art Deco designs and patterns in Britain and North America and applied to industrial materials identified with the late industrial era, like reinforced concrete and steel, nickel, plastic, and rayon. Moreover, Art Deco, notwithstanding its sumptuousness and application to objects of luxury, easily rendered itself to mass manufacture. Egyptian-style furniture and jewellery were produced by modernist artists like Kathleen Eileen Gray, known for her “Lotus Console”, made to measure for modernist couturier Jacques Docet, and firms like Cartier manufactured Egyptian coffin boxes, scarab brooches, and vanity boxes.78 But these Egyptiana were also copied or integrated into cheap models that adopted Art Deco Egyptian lines.79 The reproductions were deemed tags of modernity, literally worn, or carried on modern bodies. The coincidence of an archaeological discovery that was internationalized by the press and an international style of applied art facilitated the appropriation of the ancient in everyday objects and life. It was in architecture, however, that Art Deco Egyptian revival was most pronounced and visible. “Nile Style” became increasingly visible in metropolitan public architecture. Unlike the many architectural revivals of Egyptian styles in Britain and the USA, which had been heavily represented in private spaces and public spaces like cemeteries, interwar Art Deco Egyptian design was particularly prominent in public sites and buildings associated with modern industries, work, and leisure, such as factories, office buildings, and cinema halls. The new Nile Style factories did not draw on a particular Egyptian style, but eclectically utilized a mixture of materials, colours, and motifs classified “Egyptian”. They were the abodes of new, post-war industries that symbolized up-to-date life and pace like car tyres, electric appliances, and mass-produced cigarettes, and were advertised as hygienic, healthy, and modern. Importantly, they were concentrated, though not exclusively, in urban areas that underwent the most intensive development 77 Alastair Duncan, Art Deco (London, repr. 2000); Iain Zaczek, Essential Art Deco (Bath, 2001), 11. 78 See, for example, scarab belt buckle made by Cartier (1926), a vanity case, Egyptian sarcophagus made of sapphires, diamonds, gold, and onyx, also by Cartier (1925), and a belt buckle with diamonds and brilliants (1926). Cooper Hewitt Collection, https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/exhibitions/ 69117611/, last accessed 19 July 2018. 79 Zaczek, Essential Art Deco, 96–9.

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during the interwar period: suburbs and industrial estates, located along transport arteries that represented the ribbon development of British cities at the time. The Hoover Factory, manufacturers of vacuum cleaners and electric utensils, and Firestone Tyre Company, both located on the Great West Road, were designed by Wallis, Gilbert, and Partners and came to represent clean and hygienic industrial production, like the General Electric Company’s buildings at Wilton.80 The giant Luxor, Astoria, and Carlton cinemas in Twickenham, Streatham, Upton Park, and Islington, seating up to 3,000 spectators, were located on main “ribbon roads” that developed along the underground and overground railways which sprouted during the 1920s and 1930s and became the basis for suburban development. The association between modern transport and the Tutankhamun craze is apparent in the proposal floated in the 1920s that the Underground extension from Morden to Edgware be “called Tutancamden because it passed through Tooting and Camden Town”.81 And Edgware, which was publicized as an exemplar of modern and healthy living away from the inner-city, was developed due to the dual and connected revolution in transport and land speculation.82 The Nile Style factories and cinemas displayed Egyptian motifs on their exteriors, or in interior decoration and furniture (including organs accompanying films), and in their publicity materials. The Pyramid cinema at Sale near Manchester boasted a Christie organ encased in an Egyptian sculptural construction.83 But without doubt the most Egyptian of all Egyptianized sites and buildings and, arguably, the one that came to be synonymous with modernity, was the Carreras Cigarette Factory on Hampstead Road, housing from November 1928 the firm’s New Arcadia Works. Designed by M. E. and O. H. Collins to accommodate Britain’s biggest cigarette factory, it displayed an Egyptian exterior, inspired by a mixture of styles exposed in archaeological excavations, with lotus-shaped columns ornamented in colour at its front, the sun-disc on its lintel, a Nile- Style cavetto with engravings and, most famously, two giant bronze cats flanking its main entrance—these last being references to the firm’s Black Cat brand of cigarettes and allegedly invoking the temple of Bubastis. The eclectic bricolage of the exterior covered a building that was publicized for its modernity and Britishness. “The largest building in the metropolis”, it was light, spacious, air-conditioned, and entirely British-made, using some 3,000 tons of home-made steel, bronze, and machinery. In short, it combined a modern and unusually sterile factory, in which the process of production was sanitized, the machinery kept clean, and even the air was deodorized, with “ancient” design and ornamentation. 80 Chris Elliott, Egypt in England (Swindon, 2012), 174–6, 256–60; Zaczek, Essential Art Deco, 28–31. 81 Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain 1918–1939 (London, 1941). 82 Christian Wolman, The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How it Changed the City Forever (repr. London, 2005), 233–54. 83 Elliott, Egypt in England, 42–6, 286–90.

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Observers were impressed by its facilities which included a medical department, a dentist, a welfare department, and library and a host of cultural activities it offered to its employees.84 Art and architecture luminaries of the time, including Nikolaus Pevsner, captured the synergy of ancient Egypt and modern industry and consumption, disparaging Carrera’s as “bogus modern . . . with a showy Egyptian centre and utilitarian side ranges”.85 The after-effects of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb were the peak of the surge of preoccupation with ancient Egypt that expanded beyond the Tut frenzy. A central feature of this preoccupation was its internationalism that underlines and welds together what may seem to be separate aspects of the pursuit of Egyptian antiquity: the cooperation between colonial, national, and international bodies, and individuals seeking to protect antiquities; an international press, including the Egyptian press, British and US newspapers that made the discoveries of antiquities international news, and the international dispersal and consumption of commodities designated Egyptian, as well as the spread of an international and modernist style that translated the heritage of the Upper Nile into the grammar of Art Deco, identified with modernity and functionality and dubbed Nile Style. Internationalization is apparent in the cooperation between organizations that developed from the 1920s to establish transnational standards for the excavation and preservation of antiquities, the antiquities service in Egypt, and the straggling Egyptian Egyptology. Initially, the internationalist architects of the post-war regime of antiquities regarded Mandate A territories in the Mashriq as the system’s template and linchpin. In Egypt, Ottoman and Egyptian Khedival policies relating to antiquities persisted after the war and survived the changes in the international balance between the Great Powers. Ideas about the inalienability of national patrimony were incorporated into the discourse of the League of Nations and the IMO on international standards of excavation and preservation and that of Egyptian nationalists. They all drew on the internationalist discourse, but, as we have seen, in different ways. Moreover, the Cairo Conference, discussed in Chapter 1, placed Egypt on the international platform of debates about archaeology, archaeological excavations, and preservation. Internationalization characterizes not only organizational cooperation and rhetoric, but also material culture: the mass reproduction of Egyptiana and its vast transnational consumption. To be sure, the flow of archaeological objects from the Middle East to Europe, North America, and Australia, discussed in previous chapters, was not particular to Egyptian antiquities; but what characterized the consumption of Egyptian objects was their reproducibility. And reproducibility was the outcome of scarcity outside Egypt after the First World War of actual antiquities due to the application of Antiquities Laws. Thefts of antiquities and 84 Hayes, “Carreras: Family, Firm and Factory”. 85 Nikolaus Pevsner, London, Except the Cities of London and Westminster (Harmondsworth, 1952).

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smuggling, discussed in Chapter 9, continued, alongside trade between museums, archaeologists, collectors, and antique dealers—such as M.  A.  Mansoor, whose list of clients reads like a who’s who in Western Egyptology. But getting antiquities out of Egypt was becoming more and more difficult. The presence of the treasures of the Tomb of Tutankhamun did not have the physical immediacy the finds at Ur had, and were not visually accessible at first hand, but only via reproduction. Reproduction and visualization were facilitated by the press which reported on the discoveries, sensationalized them, made them into news, and became an agent in the process of the commodification of Egypt’s past. Rather than being a part of a unique phenomenon, the features outlined here became a staple of the prominence of a variety of Egyptian pasts that will be examined in the next two chapters.

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9

“Nefertiti Lived Here” Amarna, Imperial Crises, and Domestic Modernity, 1920–1939

Amarna: A Map The Times’s lavish special number of 26 January 1937,1 already discussed in Chapter  8, was issued at a moment of international and imperial crisis, a little over a month after the ratification of the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty and three weeks after its registration in the League of Nations’ Treaties Series. Signed after the Egyptian uprising of 1935–6, the treaty apparently ended British occupation. In fact, it regulated Anglo-Egyptian relations amidst the Second Italian Abyssinian War, the Italian threat on the Sudan (and on Britain and Egypt’s status in it) and at a time of an imminent threat of Fascism in Europe. It circumscribed Egyptian sovereignty by maintaining British military presence in the Suez Canal, in the air and in ports, thus guaranteeing a de facto imperial control and a status quo between Britain and the Wafd party. Republished as The Times Book of Egypt, the special issue is a digest of this status quo. It focuses on politics and the economy, celebrating Egypt’s modernization under the auspices of the empire, and represents it as a safe haven for investors and tourists. Here again, the country’s past and antiquities and its role in the path to human progress are connected to modernity. An ad of the Museum of Cairo’s Department of Antiquities publicizes it and Egypt as the place for anyone interested “In the Origins of Man. His development his surroundings. His advance in communal life. His control of Nature through agriculture. His adaptation of Nature through manufacture”, his art, religion, and activities “from before the dawn of history down to To-day” (Figure 9.1). The museum’s collection is described as comprehensive. It exhibits a linear development of material culture from prehistoric times through the dynastic era to Roman and Arab Egypt, to a contemporary Egyptian industrial culture (its textiles were the envy of Lancashire). The text of the advertisement is flanked by two photographs—a bust of one of Pharaoh Akhenaten’s daughters and a canopic jar, in Amarna style, from tomb 55 at the Valley of the Kings.2 1 The Times Book of Egypt. 2 Ibid. See also Dominique Montserrat, Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt (London and New York, 2000), 83–4. Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and the Rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950. Billie Melman, Oxford University Press (2020). © Billie Melman. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198824558.001.0001

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Figure 9.1 “Come to Egypt”. Amarna as a showcase of Egypt’s antiquities and tourism (Times Special Egypt Issue, January 1937)

The layout of the advertisement and its language represent the collection of antiquities as a showcase of Egyptian history in its entirety, echoing the language of archaeologists and anthropologists that described Egypt as the origin of all civilizations. The photographs single out Amarna and Akhenaten, the Pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty, as recognizable icons of Egyptian antiquity and

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at the same time illustrate the juncture of the rediscovery of Egypt’s past and its modernity.3 By 1937, modern excavations at the short-lived, Middle Egypt capital of Akhenaten who probably reigned between 1353 bc (succeeding, as Amenhotep IV, his father Amenhotep III) and 1335 bc, had a history of about four decades preceded by an older antiquarian and literary fascination with the Pharaoh and his city that dates back to the early seventeenth century.4 By the outbreak of the First World War, Akhenaten had had multiple afterlives in British culture, in the USA and on the Continent, in scholarly writing and debates among Egyptologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, and psychologists, and in popular renditions of his and “his” city’s life and time. In the 1900s, both the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh and his capital Akhetaten, known as Tell el-Amarna (Tall al-ʿAmarnah), were ubiquitous in fiction, the visual arts, and in Western material cultures, and became emblems of a refined aesthetics, sophisticated arts, religious thought, and an array of political ideologies and beliefs. And to their literary and material presences were added psychoanalytical interpretations.5 As Dominic Montserrat and others have demonstrated, the king and the city were endowed with multiple and contradicting meanings by multiple audiences and groups. It is doubtful whether their appeal reached the proportions of a “mania”, but their allure was not dimmed by the spectacle of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun and the craze surrounding it—quite the contrary.6 We shall see interwar images and uses of Amarna accommodated competing notions of antiquity and modernity that seem to have been more complex than those attached to Tutankhamun. Furthermore, interest and excavation in Amarna, and the discovery of its material culture highlight four strands that are less pronounced in the furore around “King Tut”, but are quite crucial for our understanding of the pull of Egyptian antiquity after the First World War and, more broadly, the interwar culture of antiquity. First is the interest in imperial crisis and decline. As we shall see, Akhenaten and his reign were described as both the products and generators of an imperial crisis, propelled by demilitarization and the neglect of a world empire by its rulers. They served to represent the era in the history of dynastic Egypt which had the greatest popular appeal—the 18th Dynasty—not in its glory, but at its politically and militarily lowest point. Moreover, Egypt’s imperial decline was implicitly and explicitly associated with contemporary imperial instability and crisis. A second 3 On Akhetaten, see Barry Kemp, The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and its People (London, 2012) and http://www.amarnaproject.com/pages/publications/index.shtml, last accessed 20 July 2018. 4 Montserrat, Akhenaten, 52–4, 55–95. 5 Henceforth Amarna or Tell al-Amarna, as used in the sources consulted here and both versions are common. Richard H. Armstrong, A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World (Ithaca NY and London, 2005), 245–6. 6 Montserrat, Akhenaten.

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strand in the preoccupation with Amarna is the strong emphasis on urban culture and urban life. As has become apparent in the previous chapters, ancient cities and urban cultures were quite prominent in the modern vision of the ancient Near East and of antiquity generally. But an association between Pharaonic Egypt and urban life was less facile than the integration of ancient Mesopotamia, Hellenistic Egypt, and even biblical Palestine into the modern interwar urban imagination, not least because from the early nineteenth century, archaeological discovery in Egypt unearthed monuments, over-ground and underground. Of course, temples, tombs, and settlements yielded quantities of inscriptions, objects, and papyri, and Petrie and his disciples put great emphasis on pottery as a register of material civilization and life. But large built urban areas were only beginning to be unearthed. Amarna seemed unique in being the largest excavated lived-in urban space in Egypt and testifying to everyday urban Egyptian life. It was, and still is, an example of an Egyptian city whose internal plan was quite preserved. Its urbanity and “living” character offered a sharp contrast to Luxor’s association with burial and death. Amarna did feature tombs and burials, but during the interwar period it came to symbolize everyday living, lifestyles and lives which were discussed, and strongly associated with contemporary urban and even suburban modernity. The third strand is fascination with Egyptian domesticity and the familial aspect of ancient life. The Pharaoh’s family, their habitat and recreations, representations of their emotions and private lives, were noticed and considered in great detail. Fourth and last, but by no means least, is the central place and role of Amarna objects in the lives of British women and men and in their everyday, mental and emotional, worlds. The materiality of the ancient past, its physical presence in things, has been demonstrated throughput the entire book, but the discovery of Akhetaten/Amarna highlights the relationships between moderns and ancient objects, more than most of the other sites examined here. This relationship exceeds the cash value of Amarna antiquities, which will be addressed below, the value and passion invested in their collecting, a sense of their aesthetics, and their use (though it includes them): it concerns feelings about ancient things and how these things worked on the senses of actual people— archaeologists, painters and writers, tourists and spectators. Rather than being separate, the four strands converge: in scholarly and popular discussions of Amarna, imperial growth or decline and Akhenaten’s religion were related to his family and domestic life. The crumbling and fall of his city, Akhetaten, were tied to the deterioration of his family life. But it was precisely in the connection between the imperial and the domestic that Amarna’s appeal to interwar audiences lay. In the following I shall trace these strands and the interconnections between them and examine textual and visual representations and uses of Amarna both on the ground—at the excavation’s location—and at the metropolitan centres, mostly at the city’s multiple reproductions and representations in London, but also in New York. These were mediated by the EES in Britain,

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its US branches and by museums, but at the same time were inflected by local politics, national rivalries, and international interest and commerce in Amarna objects. But first, a few signposts that will help locate Amarna in the physical and imaginary geography of contemporaries, the history of Egyptology, and imperial politics in regard to archaeology. Notwithstanding the hold of Akhenaten on the scholarly and popular imagination, Amarna was “not usually included in the itinerary of a visitor to Egypt”. Situated on the eastern bank of the Nile in the modern province of Minya, some 190 miles south of Cairo and 250 miles north of Luxor, it was not accessed regularly and easily like the latter. It was difficult to reach and was off the beaten track so that “only the most ardent and strenuous are prepared to spend their energies on a trip to the distant” finds.7 A pocket guidebook to Luxor, including sites in Upper and Lower Egypt, instructs tourists to travel by train to “Deir Mawas or Denirat” (Dayr Mawas), cross the Nile by a ferry and, upon embarking, take a walk to the site. First issued in 1926 and appearing in four editions before 1942, the book did not include the extensive excavations and finds at Amarna and dismissed its rock tombs as “scarcely worthwhile visiting”.8 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, excavators in it had to compete over public and scholarly attention with a number of other archaeological sites in Egypt. The EES alone dug simultaneously at Abydos and Armant, the latter under the sponsorship of Robert Mond, and, from the second half of the 1930s, at Sesebi and Amara West in northern Egypt, and the BSAE—at Al Badari and Qau al-Kebir. British interest in Amarna dated back to at least 1824, when John Gardner Wilkinson first visited it and later discussed it in his classic Modern Egypt and Thebes and in the enormously popular Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Egypt (1847), for decades the standard guidebook for British travellers. Persistent Egyptological attention to the site may be traced to the discovery of the Amarna Letters in 1887 and Petrie’s subsequent season of excavations, between November 1891 and March 1892.9 Petrie, capitalizing on the growing interest in the Letters, partially excavated and drew plans of a number of the city’s official buildings. At the same time that he published for specialists, he popularized Amarna in publications for Sunday reading which highlighted its ties to the Bible. After Norman de Garis Davies’s expedition (1901–7), British excavations came to a halt with the growth of German interest in Amarna. The concession to excavate which, before the outbreak of the First World War, was successfully and fruitfully operated by the Deutsche OrientGesellschaft and directed by Ludwig Borchardt, lapsed during the war and the 7 J. D. S. Pendlebury, Tell el-Amarna (London, 1935), ix. 8 N.f.M.M., The Latest Pocket Guidebook to Luxor and Environments, including Also Tut-AnkhAmen with Comments on Memphis, Sakkara, Tel El Amarna, Assiuot, Abydos, Dendera, Esna, Edfu, Komombo, Assuan and Nubia (Luxor, 1926, repr. 1942), 22–3. 9 Yuval Goren, in Yuval Goren, Israel Finkelstein, and Nadav Na’aman, Inscribed in Clay: Provenance Study of the Amarna Tables and Other Near Eastern Texts (Tel Aviv, 2004).

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subsequent realignment of the archaeological activity of victors and vanquished in its aftermath. Less known than the national and imperial conflicts erupting around the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the renewal of excavations in Amarna was highly politicized and heightened pre-war Anglo-German and Anglo-French rivalries. After the war the right to excavate, indeed the practice of archaeology itself, was interpreted by some British Egyptologists and the popular media as the privilege of the victors and its denial as an appropriate punishment of a vanquished enemy. Terms such as “allies” and “alliances” invaded the apparently neutrally legal and technical vocabulary of archaeological concession agreements. Unlike the debates on the Tomb, discussions on Amarna were devoid of the rhetoric of international cooperation across national borders. This is probably because Germany was not then a member of the League of Nations and, until the mid-1920s was officially (albeit not necessarily effectively), largely excluded from the League’s platforms of debate on cultural collaboration and exchanges. Correspondence among British Egyptologists, and between them and their German peers, disclose a patriotic and even chauvinistic idiom that highlights the war’s impact on archaeology. The early post-war correspondence between Alan Gardiner and Adolf Erman, renowned German Egyptologist and lexicographer and director of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, recently analysed by Thomas Gertzen, exemplifies their respective nationalist feelings.10 Ironically, Gardiner’s own patriotism was questioned by fellow British Egyptologists such as Peet. At the EES, the accommodation of the British expedition (whether it would occupy the German expedition’s house on the site) became a loaded issue, opening up a debate on the war, patriotism, retribution, and victors and vanquished relationships. A few Committee members opposed proposals that the German House be purchased as “pro-German” and “pacifist”. Peet, who would himself later direct an expedition to Amarna, had volunteered for active war service and served in Salonika and on the Western Front, fumed over the EES “Pro-Germanism” and apparent slight of the loyal Frenchmen directing the Egyptian Service des antiquités. Evoking his feelings in the trenches he remarked: When in France I had some copies of our Journal with me, and two brother officers who looked them over made the same comment. They both asked me how my paper could on one page appeal for subscriptions and on the next print obituaries of slain Germans with, and this was the point, expressions of regret for their deaths. I had no answer. Now these men were no fools, but rather typical British readers, and what occurred to them has, as I have heard more than once, struck and offended other readers. The irony of it to people whose 10 Thomas L. Gertzen, “The Anglo-Saxon Branch of the Berlin School: The Interwar Correspondence of Adolf Erman and Alan Gardiner and the Loss of the German Concession at Amarna”, in Carruthers, Histories, 34–50.

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sons and husbands and brothers were in the trenches was a little too fine to be relished . . . Now I do not want to see our journal full of intentional insults to Germany, but I do know that if we are to work with comfort and convenience with the Service our policy must be purged of Pro-German traits.11

And not treat “allies worse than our enemies”.12 From 1921 a succession of British archaeologists and Egyptologists including Peet (1921–2), Woolley (1922), F. G. Newton later succeeded by Dutch-American Egyptologist Henry Frankfort, thence by J. D. S. Pendlebury (1929–36), yielded, with the aid of epigraphists and architects, a steady stream of objects and artefacts which they uncovered in unexcavated precincts of the site. John Devitt Stringfellow Pendlebury’s comparatively long Directorship of Amarna excavations coincided with his role as curator of the excavations at Knossos. With a solid education in the classics at Winchester College and Pembroke College Cambridge (a First in the Classical Tripos and a special distinction in Archaeology), he went through the training provided at the British School of Archaeology at Athens, the first such school to be established in the eastern Mediterranean, which apprenticed archaeologists and cemented the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern network of British scholars of antiquities.13 His two positions, in Crete (1930–4) and Amarna reflected his interest in Graeco-Egyptian relationships and confluences. His studentship was given to him to catalogue Egyptian artefacts in Greece up to 664 bc and his following curatorship at Knossos was pursued under the un-benign auspices of Arthur Evans. During his directorship at Amarna, however, he gave his full attention and rendered some glamour to the city’s unique role in Egypt and to Akhenaten. The continuous availability of material evidence gathered by the successive expeditions became the basis of a continuous debate on Akhenaten himself and his city that built on pre-war assessments of his religion, politics, aestheticism, and gender identity. Arthur Weigall’s The Life and Times of Akhnaton Pharaoh of Egypt, first published in 1910, appeared in a new, updated, and revised edition in 1922 and idealized the Pharaoh as a religious reformer, representing him as a proto-Christian, and acquainted new audiences with him. General books on the history of Egypt or the ancient Near East habitually included chapters on Akhenaten, sometimes focusing almost entirely on his religion. James Breasted’s encyclopedic A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest, first appearing in 1905, had sixteen reprints by 1939 and was in great demand during the 1920s. Breasted devoted at least two chapters to the “Religious Revolution

11 Peet to Newberry, 28 September 1920, GIA, Newberry archive, 36/68. 12 Ibid. 13 See http://www.winchestercollegeatwar.com/archive/pendlebury-john-devitt-stringfellow/, last accessed 21 July 2018 and Imogen Grundon, The Rash Adventurer: A Life of John Pendlebury (London, 2007).

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of Ikhanaton” [sic] and to his fall. H.R. Hall The Ancient History of the Near East from the Earliest Times to the Battle of Salamis, running into eleven editions by 1951, included only a few disparaging pages on the king (“a doctrinaire”, a “prig”, and “insane”).14 Its impact on archaeologists and in the classroom remained solid until at least the aftermath of the Second World War. Hall’s descriptions of Akhetaten and Egypt during his reign echo in some of Pendlebury’s renditions of them. And his (Hull’s) notions about Amarna still enjoyed classroom popularity in the empire well into the late 1940s. My mother, Glila Rosenzweig (née Aloni), an archaeology student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in mandate Palestine, owned copies of Breasted and Hall, well used after rounds of cramming for exams, and borrowed Weigall’s oeuvre.15

Royal Amarna and Crises of Empire The popular pre-war accounts on Amarna located the city’s brief history in a broader narrative of the rise, decline, and fall of empires. Its intensive building from scratch in an empty landscape, its short existence, sudden decline, and abandonment, signified not only the rise and decline of Akhenaten and the cult of Aten, but also the crisis of the Egyptian empire and the ancient imperial world of the fourteenth century bc. Breasted frames this history in a larger story of imperial growth. His chapter on “The Religious Revolution of Ikhnaton (sic)” follows the chapter on “Empire” that describes “the imperial age . . . at its full noontide Nile valley”, an age characterized by the end of Egyptian seclusion and isolationism and the breakdown of frontiers between Africa and Asia: “The currents of life eddied no longer within the landmarks of tiny kingdoms, but pulsed from end to end of the great empire.”16 Although some historians and archaeologists would remark that the tide of imperial expansion had already been stopped during the reign of Akhenaten’s predecessor and father, Amenhotep III, virtually all writers, before the war and after it, identified the new empire’s lowest point with the former’s reign. After the First World War, Akhenaten’s reign was regarded as pacific, introvert, and inward-looking, and as ultimately self-destructive. Thus Woolley in his summary of the 1922 Amarna season, published in the Illustrated London News, notes that: “here [at Amarna] while the neglected empire went to wreck and ruin, he devoted himself to the One God symbolized in the disc of the

14 Harry Reginald Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East from the Earliest Times to the Battle of Salamis, 11th edn (London, 1950), 298. 15 Glila Aloni-Rosenzweig’s library and private archive. 16 James Henry Breasted, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest, 11th edn (1905, New York, 1951), 322.

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Sun . . .”.17 Even enthusiasts like Weigall associated Akhenaten’s religious reformation and the innovations in the arts during this reign with his disregard for the empire and its neglect. The expansion of the British Empire to its biggest ever dimensions, following the war and the ensuing treaties with the German and Ottoman Empires, encouraged analogies between the Egyptian Empire at its pinnacle during the 18th Dynasty and the modern mega-empire at its zenith. Pendlebury, in a shorthand history of Egypt and a biography of the dynasty at the beginning of his popular Tel el-Amarna, compares the imperial administration at the age of Thutmose III to that of British India, and the relationship between Egypt and its dependencies during the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries bc to the links between Britain and the Indian principalities: “Travelling inspectors made their rounds. The local kings sent their sons to Egyptian universities. In many ways the Empire resembled the Native States of India, with their English advisers and their heirs to the throne at Oxford and Cambridge.”18 Yet the sense of imperial crisis that by the 1930s became endemic both in Britain and in dependencies like Egypt and the new Middle East mandate territories, prompted comparisons with Egypt’s imperial decline. Analogy between ancient and modern empires went far beyond comparison of details and included thoughts on imperial power, authority, and dynamics. Pendlebury’s official communication to the Service des antiquités in 1930–1 comprised a report on the progress of the season’s excavations at Amarna, as well as an excursus on the cycle of imperial rise and decline, later to be incorporated in the EES catalogue of its annual exhibition in London. The study of an empire [sic] rise to power surely reaches its most interesting point at that moment when the upward sweep slackens and the ebb sets in; could that empire have strained even higher, we wonder, to a greater pitch of power and culture? Or if not that, could it not at least have maintained its high level for a longer period under the right leadership, and not sunk back so soon. It was just at this point in the history of that Egyptian Empire which flourished under the line of Pharaohs of the XVIIIth Dynasty that the city of Akhenaten, known throughout the world as Tell el Amarna was built . . . Akhenaten, a pacifist, and dreamer having received from his father a great empire already showing dangerous signs of disintegration, disregarded the imminent peril.19

And neglected a “crippled empire”. Even Margaret Murray’s later The Splendour That Was Egypt, published at the time of the dismantling of the British Empire 17 Winstone, Woolley of Ur, 110; Leonard Woolley, “Excavations at Tell el Amarna”, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 8:1/2 (April 1922), 48–82. 18 J. D. S. Pendlebury, Tell el-Amarna (London, 1935), 3. 19 Pendlebury, “El Amarna, 1930–31 Official Communication”, EES, Tell el-Amarna.

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and of growing domestic disillusionment about its unjustified costs, breaks her neutral narrative to report on the “painful” downfall of Egyptian power reflected in the Amarna Letters.20 Commentators, both Egyptologists and popular writers, explicitly attributed ancient Egypt’s decline as a world power to the growing pacifism of its rulers, noting the reluctance of Amenhotep III to wage war and his son’s explicit anti-militarism. After the First World War, an abhorrence of war and conquest engendered sympathy; during the second half of the 1930s pacifism was increasingly associated with the growing sympathy towards Appeasement politics, at least until after the Munich Agreement of September 1938. Akhenaten’s depictions as an anti-war monarch resonated the broader antagonism towards an imminent war. Agatha Christie’s forgotten three-act play Akhnaton (sic), written in 1937, brings to the fore his pacifism and a critique on empire. Drawing on vast research, guided by eminent Egyptologist Stephen Ranulph Kingdom Glanville, Edwards Professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology at University College London, who had popularized ancient Egypt, the play remained unpublished and was not produced until 1973. At the time it was considered “unreproduceable and unplayable”.21 Even the interest in it of stellar theatrical impresario Charles Cochran, did not redeem it from oblivion. Notwithstanding its failure, Akhnaton captures the contemporary fascination with its main character and Christie’s own complex and ironic attitude towards the modern empire, discussed in Chapter 6. Criticism on empires and on imperial military power is voiced in written-in dialogues between the young Akhenaten and Horemheb (in future the successor of Tutankhamun and Ay (possible dates 1323–1295 bc)), who Christie presents as “very much a soldier and definitely a pukka sahib . . . simple and straightforward”.22 Horemheb, a “career soldier”, stands for a greater Egypt that is a world empire and is edged by Ammon’s (nameless) High Priest to believe that “The great empire . . . must be one of Culture and Progress”.23 The imperial state and religion, Ammonism, are sharply contrasted with the new cult of Aten and an indictment of expansion and war is forcefully pronounced by Akhenaten: Akhnaton: The Empire? Horemheb: Yes. Akhnaton: Tutmose III, Tutmose IV, Amenhotep III. Those are heroes. What were they all? Horemheb: [reverently] They were conquerors.

20 Margaret Murray, The Splendour that was Egypt: A General Survey of Egyptian Culture and Civilization (New York, 1949), 55. 21 Christie, An Autobiography, 488; Mallowan, Memoires, 219–21. 22 Agatha Christie, Akhnaton: A Play in Three Acts (London, 1973), 11. 23 Ibid., 17.

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Akhnaton: [frenzily] Conquerors, conquerors. Do you know what that word means to me? [Slowly as though seeing a vision] I hear the groaning of dying men. I see a heap of festering corpses. I see women who weep and wail for their dead husbands—and children who are fatherless. And the groans of the dying and the stink of the festering corpses and sobs of children ascend to heaven, ascend to Ra saying ‘Why—why are these things done?’ And the answer that comes—listen Horemheb—listen—the answer is very simple. It is in order that the King may set up a stela and engrave on it a list of his conquests!24

His recitation of some of the dynasty’s greatest pharaohs, whose exploits and buildings were known to readers and tourists between the wars, reverses their image as emperors and connects them and Egypt’s legacy to destruction and war. It also reverberates with implicit reference to the destruction and carnage of the Great War that by the 1930s had become quite familiar topics in war poetry, memoires, and novels, and were repeatedly evoked in popular forms and practices of commemoration.25

Urban Lives Past and Present Although the history of Amarna was located in the longue durée and served to illustrate processes of imperial rise and decline, it was its short existence, the very lack of a history prior to its foundation, its pastlessness as it were, that distinguished it from other ancient sites and attracted scholars and writers in many fields and disciplines. It was, noted Pendlebury, a “mushroom city”, or “mushroom capital”, grown and vanished.26 And its sudden abandonment made it a city without a future. The short-term and ephemeral existence set it apart from the Mesopotamian cities and from cities discovered in Palestine with their longterm histories of human settlement and layers of material civilizations. “It is unique among the great cities of antiquity”, so notes the catalogue of the EES 1933 exhibition, “in that the length of time from its foundation to its final desertion was less than a generation”.27 An ILN article by Pendlebury published on 5 September 1931, appropriately titled: “Ephemeral City of the Heretic Pharaoh”, drums up this particular feature: The royal city of tell el Amarna has a particular importance not only to archaeologists, but for architects, engineers and those interested in town planning. 24 Ibid., 24. 25 Fussell, The Great War; Hynes, A War Imagined; Winter, Sites of Memory. 26 “ ‘Tel el Amarna’ where he [Akhenaten] established a New Religion and built a ‘Mushroom Capital’ . . .”, ILN, 5 October 1935, 564; Pendlebury, Tell el-Amarna, 1. 27 Catalogue of the Exhibition of Recent Work of the Egypt Exploration Society at the Architectural Association . . . June 26–July 15, 1933, EES (London, 1933) 3.

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Here we have an enormous city, the capital of the most powerful kingdom in the world, laid out all at one time according to the pleasure of the king, built, decorated, inhabited and deserted in the space of a quarter of a century: No town stood on the site before Akhenaten deliberately chose a “clean spot”.28

Ephemerality and the city’s transitory nature, which contemporary archaeologists and architects did not tire of singling out, were familiar features of modern megacities. Built public areas like the grounds of the international exhibitions that periodically emerged in London and Paris between the 1850s and the outbreak of the Second World War and materialized in cities on the Continent and the USA, were temporary and purpose-built and most were demolished or removed after they had served their purpose. The perimeters of imperial and colonial exhibitions like the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley (1924–5, which accommodated a replica of Tutankhamun’s tomb) and the Exposition Coloniale at the Bois de Vincennes in Paris (1931) included numerous temporary constructions. The exhibitions were icons of urban modernity and of the overseas empires at their heights. As students of the history of the exhibitions have noted, their transitional character and architectural symbolism enhanced their imagining as modern utopias: the new technologies displayed in them carried the promise of a future envisioned as an achievable material heaven.29 Amarna was habitually regarded as a utopia, the realization of Akhenaten’s religious dream in the city’s architecture and design.30 However, its temporariness and representation as a visionary’s utopia corresponded not only to images of urban ephemerality but also to interwar urban growth and planning that will be discussed in some detail later. While Amarna was associable with modern urbanism, the physical characteristics of its site presented an image of Near Eastern antiquity and civilizations that ran counter to the dominant image of the man-made mound or Tell that, as I have demonstrated, came to serve as an organizing concept of the practice of excavation and an overarching metaphor in the archeological imagination. As will be recalled, Tells signified human development, most notably urban development, and indicated successive settlement in cities that formed, in the most literal and material sense, sequences, continuities, and destructions of material civilizations whose remains testified to cycles of habitation and demolition. Amarna appeared to be hardly layered and its remains, rather than presenting long sequence and development, “froze” a moment in a city’s life. It was, so noted The Architect and Building News,31 almost as complete as Pompeii. Amarna was pristine and built 28 ILN, 5 September 1931, 366. 29 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: History of the Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs (Manchester, 1990); Jeffrey Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation of Display (New Haven, CT, 1999); Geppert, Fleeting Cities; Melman, London: Place, People and Empire. 30 Montserrat, Akhenaten. 31 The Architect and Building News, 11 September 1931.

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on a “clean spot” and everything found on its site “was made or at least brought there during [its] moment” of existence.32 It was precisely the absence of habitation underneath or above surfaces that prevented the destruction by future settlers. Amarna presented “a unique opportunity to excavate a cross section in the life of a nation undisturbed by questions of stratification”.33 After the First World War, the “moment” discovered was increasingly related to the present, and to modernized city life. As Montserrat has shown in some detail, Akhenaten was associated with progress and modernity. He was described as a precursor of the modernization of religion, the creator of the modern notion of the self, “the first modern individual” (Freud’s term), a pioneer and experimenter in modern family life and domesticity, and a modern town planner. Such an up-to-date-pharaoh needed an up-to-date city, and Amarna was associated with modern movements for rationalized and planned urbanization like the Garden City movement whose vision and politics, as we have seen, shaped the views of imperial urban planners and preservationists.34 Amarna’s history and archaeology made it ideal ground for “Amarnatopia”. Reports in the popular press by Peet, Woolley and, of course, Pendlebury, abound with analogues between it and the post-war suburb and modern life in it.35 The idiom of modernity is apparent in the application to Amarna of ideas about the reformed and rationalized city and urban living. It is described as a planned city, where the need for development is met by standard building according to social and economic needs and is initiated from above, like some development projects in Britain’s cities and a number of Continental housing projects. Its northern part is “the northern suburb”; the entries to standard affluent buildings have “porter lodges”; its official buildings are likened to the buildings that accommodate the administrative centres of modern states; sanitation—including baths and lavatories—is repeatedly referred to as proof for material progress; workers’ shanties are likened to workingmen’s houses, and so on and so forth.36 The new idiom of modernization is effectively visualized in drawings that reconstruct Amarna architecture, most notably the architecture of private houses. The two- and three-dimensional reconstructions by architects Seton Howard Frederick Lloyd and Ralph Lavers, in models and isometric painting, respectively, employ the conventions of technical and engineering drawing to represent images of houses, palaces, and temples. Seton Lloyd, later a prominent archaeologist, president of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq and director of the School at Ankara, and a trained architect, produced drawings and models of private dwellings. His model of a Tell el-Amarna 32 D. G. Hogarth, “The Wonder City of the ‘Heretic Pharaoh’ Tell el Amarna”, ILN, 15 September 1921. 33 Pendlebury, “The Ephemeral City”, ILN, 5 September 1931, 366. 34 Ch 2, Montserrat, Akhenaten, 76. 35 Montserrat, Ibid. 36 Catalogue of Exhibition of the Recent Work of the Egypt Exploration Society at the Architectural Association, 36, Bedford Square, 26 June–15 July 1933, 6, 7, EES Amarna Archive, personal notes and papers of Hilary Waddington.

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house, based on Frankfort’s plans of the house marked T36.I1, embodies the idea of the model in two ways: a scaled-down and even minimized copy of a bigger construction, and a prototype for identical artefacts—hundreds of Amarna houses. Made in 1933, Seton Lloyd’s model displays both the outside of a house and a cross-section of its interior, lived-in, space, with the roof and walls flipped.37 The model seems a far cry from the interwar suburban semi-detached or detached house: it presents houses that are geometric, curveless, devoid of imitation of English period architecture (such as mock-Tudor), and visibly corresponds with Art Deco building that, as already noted, became associated with Egyptian architecture (see Chapter  7). Like Lavers’s isometric drawings of public and private houses the model exudes simplicity, a stress on light and airiness, and functionality, motifs that were central to interwar architecture. The representation of Amarna as a modern city extended beyond material urban culture to include lifestyle, everyday practices and, most notably, aspects of Egyptian private life. It presented a lived-in past that was personal and easy to connect to. Archaeological material evidence uncovered private and even intimate aspects of life in the Amarna period—not only the life of kings and queens and their households, but also the ordinary lives of “little people”. This personalized history fascinated both experts and audiences because We are concerned with the private life of the whole population, slave and noble, workman and official and the royal family itself. So strong is this homely atmosphere that we feel we really know as individuals the people whose house we are excavating. Alike as these houses are in plan, each one shows little variation indicating the tastes as well as the profession of its owner.38

Even the nameless inhabitants of Amarna acquired social lives and “personalities” and revealed themselves in the remnants of their houses, in architecture, and most particularly in “the objects they had about them”.39 Objects not just mediated between antiquity and contemporaries but could also express individual tastes and choices: they were extensions, of sorts, of their owners and makers that reflected their status, habits and practices, and values. Pendlebury’s personalized history of Amarna which is reminiscent of Woolley’s histories of Ur, and the gesture towards the history of society and private life in antiquity, reiterated a broader post-war trend in Egyptology apparent in such works as Petrie’s Social Life in Ancient Egypt (1923) and Stephen Glanville’s Daily Life in Ancient Egypt (1931), based on his series of Christmas lectures for children

37 Seton Lloyd, “Model of a Tell El-Amarnah House”, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 19:1/2 (May 1933), 1–7. 38 Pendlebury, Tell el-Amarna, xiv. 39 Catalogue of the Exhibition of Recent Work of the Egypt Exploration Society, 3.

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“How Things Were Done in Ancient Egypt”, delivered at the Royal Institution in Christmas 1929–30 and serialized in the ILN. Interest in the private lives of ordinary ancient Egyptians, or Sumerians, did not replace fascination with royal Egypt, or Sumer. The frenzy around Tutankhamun, and the fascination with Akhenaten and Nefertiti and their lives that had begun before the war and persisted after it, are further proofs of the attraction of ancient royalty. The histories of Egyptian monarchs combined the imperial and the private, and welded together narratives of royal domesticity and the rise and decline of the Egyptian Empire. The fascination with royals notwithstanding, the popular histories of antiquity became distinctly inclusive and democratic in the sense that their subjects cut across social hierarchies and distinction and expanded far beyond the lives of the Pharaohs and the priesthood. It now dealt, noted Petrie in 1923, “not only with the rulers but the ruled—indeed with every class; with the framework of society . . . private life, supplies and commerce”.40 This trend was made possible by the prodigious amassing of the “material facts of life”: the discovery, classification, and study of artefacts, as well as by the persisting tendency in the field of Egyptology towards material anthropology. Although texts and philology held their sway during the 1930s, the role of objects as mediators of knowledge about society in all its strata, and about domestic life and the family, expanded.41 Texts like objects informed on the social and public, as well as private life. They were made available by philologists and incorporated into popular writings on Egypt. One example of the travel of texts between genres and forms of enquiry is Battiscombe George Gunn’s (Professor of Egyptology at Oxford from 1934 to 1950) translation of the Heqanakht letters, dedicated to Glanville and introduced by him to Agatha Christie. They became the basis of her Death Comes as the End. Christie mined the translated papyri, dating to the Middle Kingdom’s 11th Dynasty, to reconstruct one family’s life, including its intimate aspects, as well as details on agriculture, money, and the economy in their domestic aspects.42 The infusion of the social and private in Egyptian antiquity is manifest in their central role in representations and imaginings of royal life in Amarna and during the times of Akhenaten’s successors, notably Tutankhamun. Akhenaten’s own life—his childhood, early youth, marriage, fatherhood, and home life are repeatedly discussed, alongside his religion. His religious faith, whether it is regarded as a heresy, or as a revolution in ethics and religion, is associated with domestic life. This biography is analysed and psychoanalysed, with the aid of texts and images, the latter used to indicate his effeminacy, uncertain gender, and his bodily inversions. Hall and Weigall’s interpretations of the Pharaoh’s private life and its impact 40 Flinders Petrie, “Less a Master than Henry VIII: The King in Ancient Egypt-‘Social Life in Ancient Egypt’ ”, ILN, 28 July 1923. 41 Alice Stevenson, “The Object of Study: Egyptology, Archaeology, and Anthropology at Oxford, 1860–1960”, in Carruthers, Histories, 19–34. 42 Christie, Death Comes as the End (1944, London, repr. 2001), Author’s Note.

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on religion and politics impacted on popular and some specialist versions of the life of Akhenaten. Hall’s imprint is apparent in the writings of such archaeologists as Pendlebury, and Weigall’s left its mark on popular American and central European historical fiction and on early psychoanalytical writings, most notably Freud’s, but also Karl Abraham and Ernest Jones.43 Hall regarded the Pharaoh’s diversion from Egyptian religion and cults as the result of the transgression of the borderlines of gender in his education and the ambiguity of his masculinity, not to mention his physical deformities. His heresy was effeminate and was influenced by the unhealthy influence “from behind the harem curtain” of his domineering mother Tyie and a “regiment of women”. It was not only harmful and “monstrous”, but un-Egyptian and foreign.44 Hall’s association of Akhenaten’s life to a modern lifestyle connects him to contemporary fads in dress and child education. Akhenaten, as he confides in a viciously irrepressible letter to Weigall, is a crank, a “Crackitaten” and a “Montessori prig” (a reference to the Montessori avant-garde system of education in early childhood).45 Weigall, on the other hand, produced a romance of a middle-class affectionate and progressive family, and described Akhenaten as a feeling, monogamous husband and father. In his chapter on “Akhenaton’s [sic] Affection for his Family”, he notes: It is strange to picture this lofty-minded preacher in his home, with his six little girls around him, as he is shown upon the monuments. No other Pharaoh thus portrayed himself surrounded by his family; but Akhenaton seems to have never been happy unless all his children were with him and his wife by his side. The charm of family life, and the sanctity of the relationship of husband and wife, parents and children, seems to have been an important point of doctrine to him. He urged his nobles also, to give their attention to their families; and the tomb of Panehesy [chief servitor of Aten], for example, one may see representations of that personage sitting with his wife and three daughters around him.46

Depictions of family worship, pastimes, and gestures of affection like cuddling and playing are abundant, but there are also descriptions that reveal family discord and the fracturing of its solidarity. One such description is to be found in Peet’s factual and informative biography of Akhenaten in The Kings and Queens of Egypt, a collection of royal portraits painted by Winifred Brunton and accompanied by texts penned by some of Britain’s foremost Egyptologists. Initially assigned by Brunton to Newberry, the family history that was eventually written by Peet includes, in addition to his portrayal of Akhenaten, descriptions of three royal women: his mother Tiye, Nefertiti, and Mutnedjmet (spelt Mutnezemt), most probably consort of Horemheb. In a sparse and matter-of-fact description, devoid 43 44 45 46

Armstrong, A Compulsion for Antiquity; Montserrat, Akhenaten. Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East, 297–8, 304–5. Hankey, A Passion for Egypt, 210. Arthur Weigall, The Life and Times of Akhnaton Pharaoh of Egypt (1910, London, 1922 edn), 186.

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of melodrama, Peet refutes the “oedipal psychodrama” that attributed to the king’s mother his conversion and gender transgressions and a great influence. He takes apart the family romance and points at Nefertiti’s removal from the palace, the waning of her influence, and her detachment from the king at the end of his reign.47 The core of the book is the portraits, which Brunton—an Egyptologist, trained at UCL by Margaret Murray and as field archaeologist at Lahun and Badari by Petrie—researched extensively, painted from sculptures, mummies, and reliefs, and exhibited before their reproduction in the annotated volume. Her portrait of Queen Tiye, royal consort of Amenhotep III, is based on the pair’s colossal statue at the Cairo Museum, the queen’s electrum collar at the museum, as well as other artefacts, making up “a profusion of jewelry” meant to reflect a “reign remarkable for its magnificence & the queen would be on the apex of all the splendour” (Figure 9.2).48 Set against a rich blue background, the queen’s face

Figure 9.2 Winifred Brunton, Kings and Queens of Egypt, Queen Tiye (consort of Amenhotep III and mother of Akhenaten). Visualizing the Amarna dynasty in eclectic Art Nouveau profusion 47 Peet in Brunton (ed.), Kings and Queens of Egypt. 48 Winifred Brunton to Newberry, 8 April 1920, GIA, Newberry Mss 1, 61–94.

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Figure 9.3 Winifred Brunton, Kings and Queens of Egypt, Akhenaten

and features are more in tune with late Victorian and Edwardian historical portrait painting than with angular Art Deco art. And like Brunton’s other portraits of members of Akhenaten’s family it somewhat blurs the characteristics of Amarna art and lacks the distinctive features of Amarna depictions on reliefs of Akhenaten (Figure 9.3) and Nefertiti (Figure 9.4). This is particularly apparent in Nefertiti’s portrait which appropriates conventions of the Nile Style and diverts from her portrayal on reliefs and in sculpture. The eclectic mixture of styles, however, contributed to the popularity of the portraits and helped introduce an ensemble of Amarna and other Egyptian motifs, thus enhancing the appeal of the Egyptian modern.

Commerce and Display Private life, the public crises of empire and the perceived connections between them, derived their hold on popular and expert fascination with Amarna and, more broadly, on senses of Egyptian antiquity, from the material presences of ancient history both in the excavation site, and in metropolitan centres. Amarna

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Figure 9.4 Winifred Brunton, Kings and Queens of Egypt, Nefertiti

objects acquired a value that emanated from their antiquity, aesthetics—apparent in the distinctiveness of Amarna art and its supposed naturalism—and exchange value as rare commodities. But their special worth and appeal seems to have been in the emotions that these objects generated in diggers, viewers, and users. It is worthwhile to first trace the global itineraries of these objects and their transformation into artefacts and exhibits, then discuss their appropriations by individuals and the repertoire of emotions that they developed towards them. Clearly the finds uncovered in Amarna during the 1920s and 1930s were not as dazzlingly spectacular as the treasures of Tutankhamun’s tomb, but they were more accessible to viewers, not least because a continuous trickle of objects, which occasionally intensified, supplied Western museums and art dealers, in Berlin before the war and in London, Paris, Brussels, and New York after it, with displayable originals. The transfer of antiquities was directly related to the economy of archaeology: although the excavations were conducted by the EES, the bulk of its support during the interwar period came from the Brooklyn Museum, with additional sums from The Royal Museums of Art and History in Belgium (Musées royaux d’art et d’histoire (MRAH)), which supported the chronically underfunded Society. As a grateful Pendlebury confessed, had it not been for the

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support of the former, the very existence of the excavation would have been in danger and it would be terminated. The Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences was a newcomer to the international Egyptological scene and embarked on building its collections of Classical and Egyptian Antiquities in 1898. Competition with the far more prestigious and richer Metropolitan Museum spurred the efforts to develop a network of connections with the EES and its US branches, as well as with continental curators and dealers. A succession of the museum’s directors and curators regarded the objects of the 18th Dynasty and particularly the Amarna period as an asset to be further developed and invested in.49 The Brooklyn Museum’s sponsorship of British Egyptologists and the societies they were affiliated to, preceded the war. Petrie, always in need of cash, regularly shipped antiquities that accumulated to a “Petrie collection”. They were “presented” in return for US subscription to his Egyptian Research Account and the BSAE, and continued after he moved to Palestine.50 When home support of British excavations in Egypt dwindled, the museum remained a mainstay and its annual $5,000 donations to the Amarna expeditions during the 1930s, occasionally topped up with additional grants, were quite indispensable.51 Investment was remunerated. As Gardiner noted in a letter to Yutz, the museum’s curator, it was “a great mainstay of the Society” and the EES were “more than anxious to give you a satisfactory quid pro quo”. And they gave.52 The network of exchange of sponsorship for antiquities was not exclusively Anglo-American and incorporated imperial agents who mediated between the museums, Egyptological societies, the Egyptian service of antiquities and the IMO. They hailed from empire states that were not known to be archaeological powers, and their fledging museums and Egyptological establishments. But their apparent marginality invested them with power in the international market and forums of Egyptology and made them into brokers. Consider Jean Capart, known as the father of Belgian Egyptology, who conducted Belgium’s first excavation in Egypt and served from 1925 as chief curator of its fast-growing museum complex, later to be its director and in charge of Queen Elizabeth’s Egyptological Fund. Belgium, neutral and occupied during the First World War, expanded its Congolese Empire to the internationally sanctioned Mandate B area of Rwanda and was a founding member of the League of Nations and permanent member of the PMC. Augmenting its national museum went hand in hand with its imperial agendas and prestige. Capart espoused both, and realized the benefits in transnational and international 49 Pendlebury to William H. Fox Director, “Report of the Director”, Museums of Brooklyn Institute: Report on the Year 1933, https://d1lfxha3ugu3d4.cloudfront.net/archives/ECANEA_2013.pdf, last accessed 22 October 2018. 50 Petrie to W. H. Goodyear, 4 June 1906; List of antiquities, 8 October 1912; Hilda Petrie to Fox, 12 October 1931. All Brooklyn Museum Archives (Brooklyn), Egypt Exploration Society [01] ECA/GE. 51 Yutz to S. R. K. Glanville, 18 October 1934; Mary Jonas to Yutz, 6 December 1934; Jonas to Yutz, 12 March, 22 March 1935, and 3 January 1936. All Brooklyn, DIR 1934–45. 52 Gardiner to Yutz, 1936, Brooklyn, DIR 1934–45.

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cooperation. At the same time that he expanded the Egyptian collections in Brussels he was alternately honorary curator of Egyptology and advisory curator at the Brooklyn Museum (1932–40), advised on purchases and sanctioned them, and was involved in the division of finds of the Amarna expedition. He became honorary vice president of the EES and was elected member of numerous other national archeological societies. He was also involved in the initiatives, orchestrated by the IMO, to regulate and standardize archaeology. The dynamic Capart brokered traffic in antiquities that stretched the borderlines between legal and illicit traffic in national heritages. In October 1936 he bought in Paris “19 fragments which, it was declared to me, came from the bricks tombs at Tell El Amarna” which he immediately recognized as belonging to the Royal Tombs. Three years earlier, he had purchased other fragments for the Egyptian antiquities service.53 Now he offered his service again and made an offer on the pilfered goods, which he proposed to assist the services to acquire for the Museum of Cairo. Illegal traffic in antiquities (including Amarna’s) was not novel; nor was Egyptologists’ purchasing of finds. What appears to be new is the expansion of the negotiations over them to the internationalist agencies set to monitor and normalize trade. The transatlantic circulation of Amarna objects reveals networks of collaboration between learned Egyptological societies, museums, dealers, robbers, and the antiquities authorities that were the official guardians of Egypt’s past and, occasionally, the international bodies set up to oversee fair dealing in antiquities and a follow-up of their origins. Legal and illicit exchange replenished Western museums with Amarna collections but now raised questions about their ownership and, more broadly, about who owned the legacies of Akhetaten and Egypt’s past. Brokerage and collaboration augmented museum collections and exposed museum goers to Amarna artefacts. Their display enhanced their characterization as “individual” or “individualist” and modern by archaeologists, viewers, and users. These artefacts, as we shall see, were regarded as mirrors and embodiments of the aspirations and individual lives of their creators or original owners—their extensions as it were, and set off sensations about these past owners and emotions about them and about Egypt. With the renewal of EES excavations in 1922, the society’s own annual summer exhibitions acquainted audiences with Egypt, competing with other organizations for the study of antiquity over the public’s attention and funds. At first the exhibitions and their audiences may seem modest compared to such contemporary displays as the Ur exhibitions. Due to the small scale of the displays and the lack of a permanent venue to host them, they moved between a variety of scientific institutions and organizations. The 1934 “Exhibition of Recent Work at Amarna, Armant and Abydos” took place at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in 53 Jean Capart to Etienne Droiton, General Director of the Antiquities Service, 12 February 1938, UNESCO, O.I.M.XIV 73.

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Wigmore Street,54 the previous annual exhibition having taken place at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square.55 In 1935 and 1937 it was moved to the premises of the PEF at 2 Hinde Street, Manchester Square.56 A specially boosted exhibition took place at the same venue between 14 September and 3 October 1936 “with a Special Collection of Cat Figures illustrating the Cult of the Cat”.57 Occasionally, the Institute of Archaeology served as a temporary exhibition space. Admission was usually free in order to attract visitors, and on special days opening hours were late, until 20:00.58 The displays were supplemented by casts, plans, and drawings and accompanied by lectures. Henri Frankfort’s lecture “Akhenaten” at the Royal Society in Burlington House was accompanied by lantern slides and followed by similar lectures at the same venue in 1929 and 1930. Pendlebury was to give annual talks from 1931 to 1936 and make extensive use of “cinematograph film[s] of the work in progress”.59 The hub of the activities surveyed here was what I have described earlier as the metropolitan “antiquities triangle” with its vertices at the West End, Bloomsbury (not including the British Museum), and Euston, sometimes branching to societies and institutions outside London and to museums in the northern USA.60 In addition to closely viewing fragments of Amarna life in the original, viewers could look at, and possess their reproductions. Casts of Nefertiti’s death mask, of “a princess head”, Akhenaten’s life mask (at £1–£5) and of trial pieces of sculpted heads were on sale at both the exhibitions’ venues and on the society’s premises.61 They were considerably cheaper than Brunton’s original portraits which sold at  her 1922 exhibitions at around 25 guineas each, but were clearly far out of the reach of many exhibitions’ viewers. Moreover, both the locale and profile of the platforms (members’ societies such as the EES and its American branches, the PEF and the Royal Society) were situated in solidly middle- and upper-class venues of leisure and consumption, one possible exception being Swedenborg Hall, Bloomsbury, where some lectures took place.62 Press coverage, too, reached mainly middle-class audiences: it concentrated in the ILN which regularly carried the EES excavators’ reports and the Daily Telegraph to which Pendlebury regularly reported. But a more varied public came in touch—sometimes in the most literal sense of this term—with Amarna royalty and Amarna style. Already in 1912, Players’ cigarette packets carried portraits of “King and Queen Amenhopis” (Queen Tiye) with short descriptions of them that depicted Tiye as a foreigner.

54 EES, Misc. EES Exhibition material. 55 Catalogue of the Exhibition of Recent Work of the Egypt Explorations Society, 3, EES Ibid. 56 Catalogue of an Exhibition of Recent Work, 16 September–12 October 1935; Catalogue to an Exhibition of Recent Work, 4 July–25 July 1937, both EES, Ibid. 57 Postcard, EES, Ibid. 58 Postcard, Box containing exhibition cards, 1935, EES. 59 Cards, 10 September 1931, 26 September 1935, EES. 60 The Birmingham Conversazione in January 1936, EES. See also Monsterrat, Akhenaten, 77. 61 Exhibition of 1934, casts sold, EES, TA. COR. (AO/3D). 62 Cards, 6 July 1929, EES.

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Later the scene of Akhenaten and Nefertiti distributing gold from the tomb of Parennefer at Amarna was embroidered onto fashion accessories such as an evening purse, probably home-made.63 As well as visual and tactile consumption of images and objects from Amarna, its aural representation proved quite effective and lasting. From its beginnings in Britain, the radio served to propagate and popularize knowledge of the ancient world, particularly of Egypt, which was the subject of series of lectures, catering for various audiences, by Egyptologists and archaeologists. Early BBC transmissions to live audiences date back to at least 1923, and the series remained popular a decade later and after the Second World War. In 1947, the BBC’s Features Department broadcast a drama feature, The Pharaoh Akhenaton, produced by Leonard Cottrell, which was “an imaginative reconstruction of his life rather than a factual treatise”. Cottrell’s considerable research included extensive reading supervised by Newberry, and travel to Amarna, the Museum of Cairo, and the Valley of the Kings, yet his project, as he insisted, was not the work of an Egyptologist but a history “in dramatic form”, though as far as possible accurate on “known facts”.64 Promoted in the Radio Times, the feature was broadcast twice—on Sunday 6 July with a repeat on Saturday 12 July—on the Third Programme, the BBC’s flagship service that sought to bring quality music, drama, and documentaries to a cross-class audience. It also represented post-war extension of social democracy and the welfare state from economy and life to a “welfare culture” that would offer education and high culture to all. Broadcasting on a Sunday (or a Saturday) evening could guarantee a fairly large audience. And dramatization involved the change of some historical names (explained in Radio Times) for easier digestion of historical detail.65

Nefertiti Lived Here: Feelings and the Matter of Antiquity The array of representations and uses discussed here presents an active consumption which involved traffic in antiquities that were traded, exchanged for sponsorship, or dispensed as gifts, their duplication, collection, and display, but it does not reveal spectators and users’ sense of things and the meanings they endowed Amarna culture and history with. To assess individuals’ active possession of, and connection to, Amarna objects that extend beyond exchange and aesthetic value, and indirect appropriation (via interaction with modern Amarna-style products), we need to closely examine personal accounts of relationship with them. Henry Rider Haggard’s biography of his Amarna rings and Mary Chubb’s Amarna 63 Montserrat, Akhenaten, 85–7. 64 Leonard Cottrell to Newberry, 20 January 1947; Newberry to Cottrell, 23 January 1947; Cottrell to Newberry, 7 February and 11 February 1947. All GIA, Newberry Archive: 6/3, 6/6, 6/7. 65 Daphne B. Laney to Newberry, 1 July 1947, GIA, Newberry Archive, 6/13.

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archaeobiography were published over thirty years apart and represent different relationships between people and ancient Egyptian objects. Haggard’s appeared in The Times in 1922 as a letter to the editor, immediately after the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and summarizes his relationship with Amarna archaeology from 1877. Chubb’s autobiographical Nefertiti Lived Here, first published in 1954, relates her season’s work as secretary of the EES expedition to the site which was her first excavating site, to be followed by a long career in archaeology. Their records thus cover the period of British archaeology in Egypt from its nominal independence in 1922 to the effective end of imperial rule. Rider Haggard’s letter appears to be a biography of consumption. It details the purchase of rings discovered in a tomb alleged at the time to be Queen Tiye’s, where additional mummies had been discovered. It is also a story about the authenticity of archaeological finds and a history of an antique object, its display, and the author’s attachment to it. The letter was triggered off by Elliot Smith critique on the misidentification of the mummies (one of which, it transpired, was that of a man). Rider Haggard’s interest in Akhenaten was long-term and began even before Petrie’s excavations in Amarna,66 which he had visited and described quite unfavourably. In 1912 he published in Strand Magazine “Smith and the Pharaohs”, serialized in three instalments and issued in book form in 1920. The story caricatures the king, his verbose views on the world and on religion, and his physique. In 1886 or 1887, Rider Haggard bought, together with the writer, folklorist, and amateur anthropologist Andrew Lang (1844–1912) “two private and personal gold rings” allegedly found on the queen’s and Nefertiti’s bodies, in a deal brokered by the popular historian and traveller W.  J.  Loftie (1839–1911) (who had bought ornaments from the tomb and sold them when he was broke). Haggard got the ring, allegedly taken from Nefertiti’s finger, and later inherited from Lang another, attributed to Tiye. Years later, the two buyers visited the Museum of Edinburgh which had bought the rest of the ornaments purchased by Loftie and examined them. “I recall”, noted Haggard That we were allowed to take the signet rings out of the case and to place them on our fingers against the other private rings which we were wearing, and that Mr. Lang remarked how strange it was that after their thousands of years of fellowship in the tomb they should meet for the last time upon the fingers of modern men.67

The museum scene echoes a passage in the 1912 story in which the eponymous character Smith, who is an amateur Egyptologist, spends the night in a museum, witnessing the kingly mummies come to life and talk to each other. Haggard 66 On Haggard and Egypt, see S. M. Addy, Rider Haggard in Egypt (Accrington, 1998). 67 Rider Haggard, Letter to the Editor, The Times, 19 December 1922, 11.

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describes the episode of the rings as “hearsay only”, written for the second time and “repeated from memory after the lapse of five and thirty years”, the first version of which was transmitted in a letter to Gaston Maspero, the legendary director of Egypt’s antiquities service. The rings are “private” and “personal” in two senses. They are the possessions of the dead queen and the author and are, literally, in direct touch with their persons: the long-dead body of Nefertiti and the living body of a modern man, thus binding him to antiquity. Significantly, the rings are worn during the public act of viewing archaeological pieces in a museum and the two viewers are invited to try them on. Mary Chubb’s archaeological autobiography covers a considerably shorter span: about a year (1930) to Rider Haggard’s thirty-five, but it unfolds a far more complex relationship between a modern human and ancient objects and a gamut of emotions associated with this relationship. Chubb, who was born in 1903 and lived to the age of one hundred, came from a solid middle-class background and was connected, through family ties and her work, to the network of Egyptologists in London even before she embarked on her field career. While studying sculpture at a Bloomsbury arts school, she became in 1928 assistant secretary at the EES. In 1930 her campaign to be sent as secretary to the society’s expedition to Amarna succeeded and she joined Pendlebury’s staff and served as general secretary and recorder of the finds, a drawer, a model-maker, and a restorer, and as an occasional digger. In 1933 she joined the expedition of the Oriental Institute (under the direction of Henri Frankfort) at Tell al-Asmar (Eshunna) in Iraq, then travelled to the USA. During the Second World War she began a career in broadcasting, serving at the BBC. She launched her literary career with her classic Nefertiti Lived Here, followed by City in the Sand: Reminiscences of the Author’s Sojourn in Eshunna, Mesopotamia (1957) which fictionalizes her stay in Iraq. The archaeological autobiographies were followed by a collaborative series on the ancient world for children, written by Chubb and illustrated by Jill Wyatt. It was launched in 1966 with An Alphabet on Egypt (1966) and included the “Alphabets” of Ancient Greek, Assyria and Babylonia, Ancient Rome and the Holy Land. Chubb’s first archaeobiography, a classic which has barely been studied, is not only about field work or about Egyptology. Nefertiti Lived Here is an account by an insider, but one who is writing from the margins of the professions of Egyptology and archaeology, about her own development as an excavator and a student of Egyptian antiquity. It relates how she acquired working knowledge about ancient Egypt and its influence on her life. Her narrative begins in Bloomsbury, the site of the EES and the hub of Egyptological activity in London, as well as the place for Chubb’s own artistic ambitions, proceeds as a travelogue that details her journey to Amarna in late 1929, records her stay and work there, and ends with the winding-up of her first season as an archaeological worker. Chubb’s familiarity with EES administration and its difficulties, its fragile finances and with life and work on the dig, make Nefertiti a trove of insights on such topics

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as the economy of archaeology and Egyptology, the distribution and consumption of antiquities, and on the labour-force employed by foreign excavators in Egypt—a subject she deals with in sympathetic and detailed attention, and with much less condescension than her contemporaries. Notwithstanding the variety of topics, the book’s core that glues together its parts is the development of Chubb’s sense of the ancient past and her feelings for it through her contact with objects. It is this touch of, and with, things Amarna that makes Egypt—ancient and modern—into a place she can identify with and literally feel. The change from ignorance to an intelligible emotion is represented as a conversion that is attained by contact with a small object—a piece of a glazed tile, wrapped in a cloth, which she happens upon in the society’s dingy basement. The scene of the conversion appears in the first chapter which is set in the EES’s bleak premises and contrasts the gloom, cold, and dreariness of London life and the tedium of Chubb’s secretarial job, with Amarna’s physical embodiment in the colourful ancient object: I picked it [the tile] up and carried it under the light; the greyness was thick dust, and I wiped it off carefully. It was a piece of a glazed tile—that was all—but at that blank bleak moment of depression, it touched off some unguessed spring. The background was an incredible, adorable, hedgesparrow blue, the glazing just high enough to give it the same shell-like glowing quality. Against this grew three lotus flowers; the slender curling items just firm enough to hold up the swaying heads of the flowers, faintly lilac-tipped within their dream-green, fan shaped sepals. When I turned it over, a trickle of fine yellow sand slipped through my fingers out of the cracks and crevices of the rough surface beneath. Egyptian sand. I was holding something that had scarcely been touched since it had been found in Egypt years before, something which might still bear the fingerprints not only of the finder, but even of the maker.68

Photographs and highly cleaned antiquities “sterile behind their glasses in museums” never moved her as did the small rough, un-cleaned tile in her hand, and While I still watched the formal static beauty of the tile, somewhere behind my eyes I was aware for the first time of ancient Egypt as a living reality, and I knew that even if I learned much about it I should never be really nearer to it than at this moment.69

Chubb was not wholly unfamiliar with Amarna art and finds, whose presence on the premises of the EES could not have escaped her. And by the late 1920s the 68 Mary Chubb, Nefertiti Lived Here (London, repr. 2001), 13.

69 Ibid., 15.

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distinctive colours and topics of glazed artefacts and faience became recognizable through Petrie’s discoveries (of painted floors) and publications, as well as the lucrative copies made by artists like Nina de Garis Davies.70 But what she related to is described as a primary contact with antiquity and the emotions this contact released. This and similar experiences are repeatedly evoked in scenes that record her discovery in the dig of objects that are small, touchable, and easily gripped and carried by hand: a gold and silver mascot found in a robber’s hoard of silver and gold ingots, or the small sculpted head of a princess, presumably Ankhesenpaaten, Akhenaten’s daughter and royal wife of Tutankhamun. The objects she handles, cleans, and registers acquire not just histories and aesthetic value, but become animate and are humanized. “There”, she remarks about the miniature sculpture of the princess she lay in her soft white bed [the container it was installed in], a faintly smiling look in the long eyes and gentle mouth, as I picked her up in my hand and moved the electric torch slowly from side to side to catch, once again, from the shadows it threw, the perfection of the modelling . . . It was only now that I knew the true exhilaration that comes from literally unearthing a treasure which in one flash eliminates time . . . The wonder of touching something that had lain buried and unmoving so long came over me again . . .71

Chubb represents a connection to ancient objects that is quite complex. She is fully aware of their age value and history, as well as their aesthetic value: the handling of the princess’s head is preceded and followed by paragraphs on its perfection as a work of art. And she is most certainly aware of the exchange value of Egyptian objects, both on the international antiquities’ market and as commodities exchangeable for donations that finance projects of discovery. A considerable part of her work both in Amarna and in London consisted of recording income, expenditure, and credit.72 But her main emphasis is on the sense of the past as a sense of its tactility—the touch of its remains—and on the living relationship of modern individuals like herself with objects. Moreover, she anthropomorphizes the miniature sculpture and puts stress on its gender (“she”; “her”). In marked contradistinction to Pendlebury’s use of Amarna artefacts, her own is not proprietary. It is worth comparing Chubb’s description above to his posing as Akhenaten, in what is perhaps Pendlebury’s most famous photograph at Amarna. His most familiar photographic image represents his torso; its original shows the upper part of his body, decked with a necklace made of Amarna faience and donning modern trousers. His arms are akimbo and, from the front, there is little to associate him with the Pharaoh’s elongated head and body. Indeed, the 70 Henry Frankfort (ed.), The Mural Painting of El-Amarneh (London, 1929). 71 Chubb, Nefertiti Lived Here, 151–2. 72 Ibid., 16–17, 115–16.

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photograph publicizes Pendlebury’s glamorous image as a super-hero, a champion Olympic sportsman. It connects well to his posthumous aura of war hero who, during the Second World War, contributed his knowledge of Crete as Special Operations Executive (SOE) officer on the island, and was captured and shot after the German invasion. But in another version, standing in half profile, he poses in a manner that imitates Akhenaten’s representations. His chest appears sagged, pronounced, and feminine, similar to the Pharaoh’s on reliefs and in sculptures. During the interwar era a number of art historians and physical anthropologists referred to Akhenaten as effeminate, physically degenerate, and even as androgynous.73 As Chubb herself acknowledged, her own relationship with objects did not come to her as easily as that of the Egyptian excavators who play a significant role in her archaeobiography. Commenting on the ease with which they carried the damaged lintel in the house of the overseer of works Hatiay, found at Amarna’s so-called North Suburb and bearing his name, she recognizes their 6,000-year-long mastery of the techniques of removing parts of monuments, the same that had been employed by the original builders of Akhetaten.74 Their role and native knowledge are reconstructed in a documentary film by Hillary Waddington, the expedition’s architect, photographer, and film-maker, who in 1930–1 produced a series of short films, one of them showing the rescue operation of the damaged lintel. The film climaxes in a scene in which one of the workers, Ali Tantawi, walks through the door, as if he were the authentic Hatiay himself.75 The range of emotions stirred by Amarna objects and artefacts acquired national and international meanings, especially during the 1930s. As already noted, their pilfering, vandalizing, and traffic in them, as well as the attempts to retrieve them, fuelled debates that intensified and became ideological and political after the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty and involved international bodies as well. Capart’s offer to broker the purchase of smuggled fragments is a case in point. He made an offer to the director general of the Antiquities Department, that he would buy it for them from the dealer for a price of 600 Egyptian Lira, adamantly refusing to disclose his name and “play the detective” for the Egyptian government, which refused to purchase them. The heated correspondence that followed his offer presents two opposing points of view; the curator’s, implicitly supported by the IMO, and that of the Egyptian government. The well-meaning and exasperated Capart found it “impossible that Egypt does not interest itself in the fragments detached from royal monuments of considerable artistic value and unique in their genre”.76 73 Elliot Smith, Tutankhamen and the Discovery of his Tomb by the Late Earl of Canarvon and Mr Howard Carter (London, 1923), 83–8; J.  Strachey, “Preliminary Notes Upon the Problem of Akhenaten”, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 20 (1940): 33–42. 74 EES Excavations at Amarna Part 2: The House of Hatiay, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=uXVy4cyyTSM, last accessed 12 July 2018. 75 Ibid. 76 Capart to Droiton, 12 February 1938, UNESCO, O.I.M.XIV 73.

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The Egyptian government refused to buy, thus declining the offer to recover what “had been torn away from the patrimony of Egypt”.77 The government remained adamant for the same reason: that it should not negotiate payment for what according to its own guidelines, published in 1933, and international law, was its own. Capart too put premium on “principles”. His were the safeguarding of the integrity of the Amarna remains and the prevention of their dispersal in foreign museums, and the letter and spirit of Clause 23 of the Acte Finale of the Cairo Conference that mandated the IMO to intervene in disputes between national administrations and foreign museums and agents.78 The IMO committee weighed the arguments of both sides and their affects, including the limits to the power to impose on sovereign governments the salvage of their own antiquities. Compared to the spectacular discoveries at Luxor and Ur, the unearthing of Amarna may appear modest, small-scale, and penny pinching. Yet it continued to draw heightened attention to a set of issues that were at the centre of the post-war imperial archaeological order, the international regime of antiquities and the debate on Egypt’s patrimony and the commerce in antique objects. The war, as we have seen, signalled a shift in imperial power that was complicated by Egypt’s status in the British Empire from 1922 and especially after the agreement, as well as the gap between Britain’s political prominence and its marginal role in the antiquities service. It came into Germany’s excavations’ concessions at Amarna, stepping as it were into its place, but chronic lack of finance and French dominance in the service and the IMO, slowed down British efforts and tempered Britain’s international role in the organization. As a depressed Maurice Peterson noted in a letter to the Foreign Office after a conversation with Pendlebury, the most deplorable aspect of the situation at Amarna “is undoubtedly the complete collapse of British Egyptology”.79 The debate on the illicit traffic in Amarna artefacts and their restitution to Egypt took place in Brussels, Paris, and Cairo and more marginally on British platforms. Notwithstanding this relatively muffled presence, Amarna, its Pharaoh builder and remains retained their central place in the imperial culture of antiquity and continued to draw the attention of Egyptologists, excavators, writers, readers, and spectators. Attention to it focused, as we have seen, on the comparability of ancient imperial Egyptian crisis during the height of the 18th Dynasty, and the contemporary imperial crisis and possibly the crisis of the British monarchy. Both crises were “personalized”, perceived, and imagined as a decline in leadership and governing. The analyses of the collapse of Akhetaten focused on the character of a failed Pharaoh and his predecessors. At the same

77 Ibid. 78 “Avis de L’Office Internationale des Musées sur le cas d’interpretation et d’application de l’Acte Finale de la Conference Internationale des Fouilles”, UNESCO, O.I.M.XIV 78. 79 Petersen to Stephen Gaselee, 26 November 1934, TNA, FO141, 563/8.

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time, it was precisely the personalization of Akhenaten, his representation as a man and his domestication, that made him and his family accessible to modern audiences. Charles Brasch, the New Zealand poet, critic, and arts’ specialist who, like Chubb, hailed to the excavation site with little previous knowledge in Egyptology, noted: “Akhenaten was one of the few Pharaohs who emerged from its shadows as a man . . . in his reign a very personal naturalistic style of art suddenly made its appearance.”80 His declining empire was depicted as inward-looking and domestic: indeed, imperial crisis and decline were translated by Egyptologists and authors into familial terms. Domesticity and its centrality were also attached to other major interwar national issues such as housing and the crisis of urbanization in Britain’s cities. Amarna was represented as a royal, planned and rational city, but at the same time it was described and visualized as a suburban place populated with individuals from a variety of social groups—including workers—that were hierarchized. A potentially ideal city and suburb, it also encapsulated urban degeneration and collapse: its short life and survival made it a utopian dystopia fit for a connective modern age.

80 Charles Brasch, Indirections: A Memoir 1909–1947 (Oxford, 1981), http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/ scholarly/tei-BraIndi.html, last accessed 31 July 2018.

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The Road to Alexandria, the Paths to Siwa Hellenism, the Modern World, and the End of Empires, 1915–1956

Competing Hellenisms The considerable interest in ancient Egypt between the two world wars and the frenzied worldwide Egyptomania that accompanied it may seem to have left out one slice of Egypt’s varied antiquity—its Graeco-Roman past. The scholarship on the rediscovery of Egyptian antiquities has tended to focus on Pharaonism and has sidelined the rise of a modern Hellenism as a set of forms of engagement with ancient Egypt. The abundant corpus of studies on Hellenism in British culture did not pay enough attention to Egypt and the Near East as inspirations to the multiple forms of modernity and their manifestations in the British imperial experience between the wars and at the beginning of decolonization. But, as Gilbert Murray has noted in 1953 and 1954, in his aptly titled Hellenism and the Modern World, the essences of Hellenism and the history of the Hellenic world remained meaningful even (and perhaps particularly) after the apparent collapse of its heritage following two murderous global wars. Revealingly, his notions of empires, nationalism, and Hellenism were publicized on the wireless, first on Radiodiffusion française (RDF) in 1952, then on the BBC Home Service in 1953, before their publication in a concise printed version.1 Murray was aware of the criticism that his stress on the development of Christian and Hellenic civilizations to which “we people of Europe and the English Speaking world historically belong and to consider how we may still preserve or even raise its traditional standard”2 would draw. But he left the text of the broadcast largely unchanged and it included references to European superiority, ability to govern, knowledge, “better justice, higher culture, more humane ways of life”, and no “habitually breed [ing] to the famine limit”.3 In this, he maintained, Europe was heir to Hellenism. Hellenism which, as Martin Ceadel has noted, formed the basis of Gilbert’s internationalism and liberalism (or rather “liberality”), was not just a historic period, but also a compound 1 Gilbert Murray, Hellenism and the Modern World (Boston, 1954), 5. 2 Ibid., 5. 3 Ibid., 53. Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and the Rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950. Billie Melman, Oxford University Press (2020). © Billie Melman. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198824558.001.0001

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of cherished values, inherited by Europe, which he regarded as modern Hellas: freedom, independence, a respect for law, a belief in the common good, and a detachment from arhce, or the unlimited “craving for power over others”.4 More broadly Hellenism was, “that peculiar way of looking at things, that extraordinary shrewdness and knowledge of the world, that child-like impulsiveness for wild hope and idealism”.5 Murray had an enormous impact as a classicist, a public figure, an avowed internationalist who welded together Britain’s two rival league associations into the League of Nations Union and was, between 1928 and 1939, chairman of the ICIC.6 But his association between Hellenism and the modern world competed with other perceptions that linked the Hellenic world to a different periodicity and a different spaciality. In one influential competing concept which thrived between the wars and immediately after the Second World War, the Near East, and predominantly, though not exclusively, Egypt, came to be the centre of a modernist Hellenism. Alexandria, not Athens, was celebrated as its epicentre— together with urban centres and cultures whose remains were discovered in Transjordan and Palestine. Its golden age was not fifth century bc Athens, but the era between Alexander’s conquest of Egypt and Egypt’s subjugation to Rome. This notion of Hellenism did not supersede the Athens-centred concept but supplemented and challenged it, stressing cultural syncretism and exchange that welded together Greek and eastern Mediterranean cultures and religions and blended Hellenism and orientalism. Far from condemning arche, this competing modern Hellenism centred on conquest and empire-making, most notably on Alexander’s attempt to build a world empire and to a lesser degree on Cleopatra VII Philopator’s embroilment in Roman imperialism. As a number of students of global empires and the dynamics of their making and unmaking have noted, Alexander’s empire was universal and, in contradistinction to the Roman or Chinese empires, did not remain in control of its enormous territories after his death.7 But the short-lived world- kingdom had been integrated into Christian and Muslim lore in Europe and throughout Asia and Egypt for centuries and its memory was woven into the imperial imaginary. Between the beginning of the First World War and the end of the Second, his conquests and rule and their aftermath had a special attraction for authors, artists, ethnographers, explorers, and archaeologists.8 Egypt between his 4 Ibid., 41, 44–5. 5 Martin Ceadel, “Gilbert Murray and International Politics”, in Christopher Stray (ed.), Gilbert Murray Reassessed: Hellenism, Theatre, and International Politics (Oxford, 2007), 220. 6 The two rival associations were the League of Free Nations Association and the League of Nations Society. Peter Wilson, “Gilbert Murray and International Relations: Hellenism, Liberalism and International Intellectual Cooperation as a Path to Peace”, Review of International Studies, 37 (2011), 881–909. 7 Jane Burkbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2010), 23, 34; Kumar, Visions of Empire. 8 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia”, Modern Asian Studies, 31:3 (1997), 735–62.

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short sojourn in it and its conquest by Rome acquired a special presence in a postwar culture of antiquity which may be described as a popular modernism and that flourished in a grid of genres that included ethnography, biography, fiction, travelogues, tourist guidebooks, and writings on desert-crossings. These genres were circulated by networks of institutions and publishing houses devoted to the study of Graeco- Roman Egypt and developed alongside newly experienced forms of travel that emerged during the First World War. Exploration literature and popular writings for tourists did much more than just describe and represent Egypt; they re-enacted, and performed anew, Hellenistic travel, most notably Alexander’s alleged movements in Egypt in 332–331 bc. As I show later, re-enactment and writing on the Graeco-Roman world was not, or not merely, meant to provide information and a scholarly exercise that demonstrated a proficiency in reading the classics, but was also part and parcel of a project of exploring and mapping an unknown Egypt that was distinctly imperial and military. The bulk of the writing on, and re-enactment of Alexander’s expeditions and the history of his Ptolemaic successors, was directly related to imperial defence. A number of features stand out in the appropriation of the Hellenic past: first is an emphasis on Egypt’s connectivity to Greece—and, more broadly, to Europe—a connectivity that is presented as more predominant than the connections to the East and Africa. A second feature is a focus on cities and on an urban cosmopolitanism that is associated chiefly with Alexandria—both the ancient and modern Alexandria. A third feature is the juxtaposition of a Hellenized and, most notably, Alexandrine urbane life that is associated with Ptolemaic Egypt and the urban Hellenized Seleucid Near East which reached their peak between 323 bc and the Roman conquest in 30 bc, and 63 bc, respectively, and contemporary urban life.9 Fourth is the pre-eminence of the desert that is not conceived as an empty quarter or a wilderness, but as a historic locus, where Egypt’s pasts, particularly the Graeco-Roman past, are inscribed on the terrain and morphology. Unlike the Nile, Egypt’s deserts remained largely unexplored. The Western Desert especially taunted travellers and ethnographers and challenged them. It did not preclude mobility and was routinely crossed by camel caravans carrying goods, people and, in wartime, arms. But during the First World War its crossing became mechanized; it was possible due to the development of transport technologies and automobility that have been discussed throughout the book. The discovery of Alexandrine and Ptolemaic Egypt, as will be shown here, developed in tandem with the modernization of imperial travel and in relation to military needs. Fifth, and last, is the collaborative and internationalist characteristic of the turn to Hellenism. Curiosity about it was not exclusively British and French and research, 9 Although both remained important Greek centres after the Roman conquest. On Greek communities and identities in Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Palestine and Syria, see Joseph Geiger, The Tents of Japheth: Greek Intellectuals in Ancient Palestine (Jerusalem, 2012), (Hebrew).

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publication, and study of the Hellenic past attracted Italian, Greek, and eastern European researchers and entrepreneurs. Moreover, Hellenism was far from being European or Western: it presents varied forms of collaboration between Egyptians and British explorers, particularly desert explorers, who experimented in mechanized desert travel. To point at continuities between the pre-war discovery of Egypt’s Hellenic past and the interwar upsurge in it, I shall briefly outline the former. Since popular Hellenism was not confined to Egypt, I shall proceed to briefly consider its revival in British mandate territories, especially in Transjordan, which I shall examine alongside the rediscovery of Alexandria and as a backdrop to the special role which it played in the revival of interest in that city and its heritages. As I have noted above, and as observers and scholars have argued, Ptolemaic Alexandria stood out for its cosmopolitanism, cultural hybridity, and predominant Greek-ness, rather than for its Egyptian-ness. These same traits have been attributed to the massively expanding modern Alexandria which developed from the 1880s and were associated with modernity. I shall proceed to discuss at length the development, from the beginning of the First World War, of desert crossings that followed in the footsteps of Alexander, particularly crossings from Alexandria to the Siwa oasis, the site of the cult and oracle of Zeus Ammon that had played a special role in the legends of Alexander and his construction of his paternity, birth, and status as God. From the First World War until the aftermath of the Second, the arduous journey to the secluded oasis, or from it back to Alexandria, became the subject of re-enactments that retraced the historical road trod by past armies and the Macedonian ruler-God who was Hellenic and Egyptian, Western and Eastern, while at the same time modernizing and mechanizing it.

Taking the Graeco-Roman Turn: Some Continuities The Hellenization of Egyptian antiquity in scholarly and popular Egyptology was not sudden but preceded the First World War. The “Hellenic turn” may be dated back to at least the mid-1880s and to archaeological discoveries such as Petrie’s in Naucratis, a site that readers of Herodotus were familiar with. It culminated about a decade later, following the finding of the stupendous collection of GraecoRoman and early Christian papyri in Oxyrhynchus by Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt from 1897, and their prolonged and piecemeal release in a steady stream of publications. From these decades onwards, Egyptology slowly reoriented towards the Hellenic and Roman world and, as David Gange has observed, classical scholarship admitted Egypt into its temples of knowledge.10

10 Gange, Dialogues, 276, 284, 306–9.

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This reorientation was buttressed in a network of institutions in the metropole, such as the EEF which sponsored Grenfell and Hunt’s excavations and, no less important, in Egypt. London’s Classical Association, electing Evelyn Baring, First Earl Cromer, Britain’s proconsul in Egypt between 1883 and 1907, as president after his retirement, embraced the association between Graeco-Roman antiquity and Egyptology. Cromer’s inaugural address to the association, reworked in his 1910 Ancient and Modern Imperialism, built on comparisons between the Roman and the modern British empires but related Hellenism to imperialism in his comment that Ptolemy I Soter was “the most successful imperialist amongst those who seized on the disjecta membra of Alexander’s vast dominations”.11 Cromer considered Rome to be the model empire, but the Hellenization of the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt became the subject of alternative analogies between empires of the past and the present. And Victorian and Edwardian scholars, from George Grote in his mammoth 1850s A History of Greece; from the Earliest Period to the Close of the Generation Contemporary with Alexander the Great to John Pentland Mahaffy, The Progress of Hellenism in Alexander’s Empire, pursued these analogies which he developed in the 1890s in his works on the Ptolemaic Empire. Bury chose to end his 1900 History of Greece, which was to appear in seventeen editions in the following three decades, with Alexander’s death. Fascination with Alexander’s life, conquests, and particularly with his exploits in Egypt, filtered down to popular biographies, notably to Arthur Weigall’s Alexander the Great which appeared in 1933. The classical turn in Egyptology was by no means limited to it, nor was it exclusively Western. Far from it: fascination with the Graeco-Roman and Phoenician pasts was central to the Ottoman discovery of the ancient Near East, Ottoman archaeology, and museology, as Çelik and others have recently demonstrated. Early Ottoman archaeology and museology which were centred at the Imperial Museum in Istanbul (Müze-i Hümayun) privileged Hellenic antiquities and marginalized and orientalized Muslim ones.12 The merits of Graeco-Roman arts and aesthetics became the topic of an international debate in which polychromatic sculpture was raised to a pinnacle of aesthetics and was regarded as Eastern and not Attic, indeed as the counterpoint of Attic artistic achievements. Visualizations and imaging of Alexander became the acme of Hellenic antiquities. The so-called Alexander Sarcophagus was the museum’s most treasured exhibit and was seconded by the collection of other sarcophagi from Sidon’s necropolis.13 The Graeco-Roman past was revived outside the imperial centre and kept alive in Egypt in a number of Egyptian institutions that could boast of an international and cosmopolitan cooperation, and circulated the growing interest in classical 11 Moyer, Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism, 14. 12 Çelik, About Antiquities, 43–56; Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism”. 13 Çelik, About Antiquities, 56–60.

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Egypt. A few operated in Alexandria which, after the war, grew to become the hub of the Hellenizing project. The city’s Graeco-Roman museum, founded in 1892 and run by a succession of Italian directors (most notably Annibale Evaristo Breccia), who in turn produced guides to the city’s antiquities, was appropriately housed in a classical building. E. M. Forster noted the colourlessness and drabness of its collection that gave “a false impression of a civilization” to the uninitiated, but included a detailed twenty-four-page description of the museum in his Alexandria: A History and Guide, published in 1922.14 The description is to be found in the guide’s first of eight itineraries, a walk that departs from the city’s Westernized centre, Place Mohammad Ali and the Rue Rosette, thus firmly locating Alexandria’s GraecoRoman past and heritage in Egypt’s present and modernization. In 1913 the museum attracted a mere 4,977 visitors compared to the Egyptian Museum’s 29,718; in 1922 9,497 compared to 37,470; and in 1926 11,336 compared to the latter’s peak of 143,162, no doubt triggered by the display of the spectacular finds in Tutankhamun’s tomb. When visits in Cairo slumped to 100,485 during the first year of the Great Depression, the Alexandria Museum kept to a solid 11,403, surpassing the Museums of Arab Arts and the Coptic Museum.15 The Graeco-Roman Museum was associated with Alexandria’s Archaeological Society, founded a year later, which published a bulletin and boasted of a multinational, though not an Egyptian membership. In Cairo the classically imposing Egyptian Museum and Institut français d’archéologie orientale hosted classicists. After the war, the classics entered the new Egyptian universities, the result of a British and Egyptian monarchist cooperation, possibly directed against the Wafd and Egypt’s nationalist movement. One example is the Egyptian University in Cairo (founded in 1908), later King Fuad University, which had a Classics Department and required all students at the Faculty of Arts to study Latin.16 From an imperial point of view, researching the classics in Egypt was not only a means to combat Egyptian nationalism, but a challenge to French predominance in the Egyptian archaeological and (non-Islamic) academic establishment. As Robert Graves, who was briefly Professor of English at Cairo University wryly remarked, “although I had not come to Egypt as an ambassador of Empire, it irked me to let the French indulge in semi-political activities at my expense”, referring to the first Belgian professors of classics and ancient history, and the academic imperial rivalries between so-called “Latins” and Britons).17 A. J. B. Wace, whose fields of expertise included Mycenae, Sparta, and Corinth, was its best known classicist in the 1940s. A Classics Department was founded at the newer 14 E. M. Forster, Alexandria a City and Guide (1922, London, repr. 2014), 134. 15 Reid, Contesting Antiquity, table E, 139. 16 Donald Reid, Cairo University and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge, 1990). 17 Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (1929, repr. Harmondsworth, 1960), 267 and Reid, Cairo University, 87–94.

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university of Alexandria (formerly Farouk I University), established in 1942. Although, as Reid has noted, the classical discourse which developed in Egypt after the war had much lesser leverage than Pharaonism and the Islamic past, it drew the attention of prominent Egyptian scholars and educators such as Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, Mustafa Fahmi, and Taha Hussein, and of artists.18 When Taha Hussein published his Future of Culture in Egypt in 1938, painter Muhammad Nagi (Naji), began working on his monumental mural School of Alexandria modelled on, and in dialogue with, Raphael’s School of Athens. The mural, which adorns Alexandria’s city hall, is a paean to the city as a site of cultural exchange that cuts across religions. At the centre of its background is an equestrian statue of Alexander, flanked by the Ptolemaic city’s celebrated monuments: the Pharos and library. The city’s founder is the main point of reference of a scene of continuity between Alexandria’s cultures and religions, in which Archimedes hands a scroll to Ibn Rushd (Averroes), the same Aristotelian who is represented in Raphael’s painting. Continuity between Hellenistic and Muslim Alexandria and the modern cosmopolitan city is further displayed in the mural in a group of contemporary Alexandrian luminaries who themselves cherished the Hellenic past, such as the famous poet Constantine Cavafy, Hussein, and Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid.19 The Egyptian classicist turn came to an end after the Free Officers’ Revolution of 1952 led by Nasser.

Hellenized Cities on the Margins of Empires By now, the central role of cities in the interwar culture of antiquity has become quite clear. The newly recovered urban material cultures were regarded as more than sites of imperial civilizations; their remains served to connect the ancient Near East to Western modernity. Greek and Roman urban history, previously part and parcel of the British urban and imperial imagination, was now attached to Britain’s (and France’s) new, post-war empires and associated with the mandates’ post-war modernization projects. Mandate archaeologists who were administrators identified, indeed equated, Hellenism with urban growth and development, economic prosperity, and a Greek lifestyle (that they regarded as characterizing life after the Roman takeover of the Near East) guaranteed by the regional imperial rule of Alexander’s successors and later by a Pax Romana. Archaeologists/administrators, travellers, and ethnographers sought to trace the Graeco-Roman urban heritage in parts of the Mashriq that were rural and

18 Donald Reid, “Cromer and the Classics: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Greco-Roman Past in Modern Egypt”, Middle Eastern Studies, 32:1 (January 1996), 1–29; Reid, Contesting Antiquity. 19 Reid, Contesting Antiquity, 229–30; see also Effat Naghi et al. (eds), Mohamed Naghi (1888– 1956): un impressionist Égyptien (Caire, 1988), 44–5.

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where tribal society was considerably stronger than central, state authority. The territory of the newly created Emirate of Transjordan included ample physical evidence of the existence of a vibrant Hellenic and Roman urban past. It was the place of most of the Decapolis—Gerasa (Jerash), Gadara (Umm Qais), Pella (Tabaqat Fahl), named after Alexander’s own birthplace, Philadelphia (Amman), Capitolias (Bayt Ras), and Raphana (usually identified with Abila).20 Their rise and decline, indeed their very existence, were described as the outcome of Hellenism. Jerash, where settlement had begun during the Neolithic period and no traces of Greek origins were found at the time, is a case in point. As the official guide to the site, written by George Horsfield, Chief Inspector of Transjordan’s Department of Antiquities, and published by the department (probably in 1930), stated: That the original inhabitants were Greeks is more than doubtful: as Colonists these were few in number, and there was a big demand for them. At this period the influence of Hellenism was great—it was civilization itself—and was expressed among the upper classes, at the end of the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C., in an insistent desire to adopt a Greek political form, the city state. They were permeated with Greek ideas; they wrote, read and spoke the Greek language, the language of culture and commercial intercourse.21

Jerash’s rise and decline, its historic role, and the agency of its inhabitants were determined by its short-term Hellenization. It “grew and declined within the space of three hundred years without taking any part in passing historical events; nor is it known that any of its citizens had any part in making history”.22 Hellenization was equated not only with urbanization, but also with the rise of a unique civic culture that was syncretic but predominantly Graeco-Roman. As Mrs Erskine-Steuart noted in her Vanished Cities of Arabia, the Decapolis “bound together by so many ties of nationality, of culture and of common interests, there arose a special type of civilization, which has been described as a curious, unique civilization, talking Greek, imitating Rome, at heart Semitic”.23 Nearly three decades, several rounds of preservation and reconstruction of the town’s ruins, and a few archaeological expeditions, separate Horsfield’s shorthand notes and Gerald Lankester Harding’s The Antiquities of Jordan which took him eight years to complete. As the guidebook’s title indicates, it covered both the mandate era and Jordan’s early statehood and emergence from the tutelage of mandate archaeology. As noted in the conclusion, Lankester Harding’s life and 20 Scythopolis (Beisan) is east of the River Jordan, Hippos (Qal’at al-Hisn or Husn, or Sussita) was under French mandate. 21 George Horsfield, Government of Trans-Jordan Department of Antiquities Official Guide to Jerash with Plan, 1–2; David Kennedy, Gerasa and the Decapolis (London, repr. 2013). 22 Horsfield, Official Guide, 2. 23 Mrs Steuart-Erskine, The Vanished Cities of Arabia (London, repr. 1927), 190.

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work in Transjordan/Jordan, is an example of cultural relativism in attitudes towards the country’s ancient pasts. He was instrumental in recovering its biblical, Nabataean, and Islamic civilizations and valued them all. But he placed Hellenism high on a scale of civilizational growth and prosperity that he identified with urban development. Greek culture, he maintains, was received with great acclaim throughout the Near East as an urban culture: new towns sprang up in the area and old ones grew. Hellenized city life touched “even the Nabataeans”. Urban growth “only really ceased with the Arab invasion in the seventh century A.D.”. Regional urban expansion was inseparable from “international relations” in a Hellenic world, thence in an imperial Roman one.24 Moreover, the Decapolis strove to belong to a polity and a world that were broader than its narrow and peripheral location in the past as well as the present. The emphasis on Hellenization is all the more significant because no physical remains of the Hellenistic Jerash/ Gerasa were found, although traces of it were believed to have related its foundation to Alexander, Ptolemy II Philadelphus (283–246 bc) and Seleucid Antiochus III or IV (223–187 and 175–163 bc, respectively). It was evident that “the emergence of Jerash from the chrysalis village of mud huts to the brightly colored butterfly of a Hellenistic town was due to increasing prosperity and security” of the era.25 Lankester Harding did not acquire a classical education nor, for that matter, an academic one. The lack of “proper” scholarly (and, by implication, social) “background” had caused opposition to his appointment as Transjordan’s Chief Inspector of Antiquities. But during his long stay in the post he developed an interest in the Graeco-Roman past and made an effort to reconstruct and, literally, re-enact it in Jerash. As an active member of the Amman Dramatic Society, one of many British colonial amateur theatrical societies, he initiated and participated in productions of plays that were themselves interpretations of the Near Eastern Graeco-Roman past, notably Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. The first production which premiered in November 1949 featured him as Roman general and politician Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus (d. 31 bc).26 Six years later, in a production sponsored by the Arab Legion, Shell Company, and an array of other imperial bodies that outlived formal British rule in Transjordan, he appeared in a double role, of Lepidus (statesman and triumvir Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, 89?–12 bc), and the Soothsayer. Appropriately, the reproduction took place in Jerash “which presents the most complete example of a Roman provincial town to be seen anywhere, a perfect setting for Shakespeare’s great Roman tragedy”. It was played by Jordanian, British, and American amateurs to an audience of 400 that travelled from Amman, Beirut, and Damascus to attend the performance.27 For Lankaster Harding Jerash was not just a “setting”, 24 Lankester Harding, The Antiquities of Jordan (London, 1959), 32. 25 Ibid., 65, 68. 26 IOA, GLH, Box 4. 27 “Julius Cesar in Roman Setting: Shakespeare at Jerash”, Illustrated London News, 27 August 1955, cutting in IOA, GLH, Box 7.

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but a home in which, like his predecessor Horsfield, he lived for a time. It was also his final resting place. His ashes were flown to Jordan, brought to Jerash in a coffin, and placed in a niche at a Byzantine chapel.28 Preference for the Graeco-Roman past is all the more significant in writings that Hellenize landscapes and built sites where it clearly was contested by other local pasts, notably the Arabian pre- and post-Islamic past. Greek and Rome stand for greatness, civilization and progress, whereas the Nabataean past and Arab presences signify decline to a state of wildness. As Corbett has noted, the archaeology and narratives of Transjordan’s antiquity were dominated by the biblical framework; we may add to it the emphasis on the Graeco-Roman past that marginalized Arab pasts. Publicist and popular historian E. W. Polson Newman’s description of Petra, “Arabia’s Pink City” in his chapter on Transjordania in The Middle East, probably penned in 1925, is a case in point. Petra, the Emirate’s most famous site was, he notes, a flourishing centre of eastern splendour on the crossroad of caravan routes from the Mediterranean, Syria, Persia and Egypt. Now it was “miles from nowhere”, desolate and unsafe. But it remained “a treasurehouse of the most delicate masterpieces of Greece and Rome. Perfect Columns of Corinthian capitals . . . Facades and doorways of exquisite design stay desolate in the wilderness. The architecture of Kings is used to provide shelter for a few wandering Bedouin.”29 A hidden place, known from 1812 only to a few privileged Westerners, Petra would be within safe and easy reach thanks to the protection of the mandate. His description is copied down by hand into the unpublished travelogue of Kitty Dixon, secretary of the Department of Antiquities in Jerusalem, that records in the form of letters to unnamed recipients, the “Adventure of Four Women who Visited Petra in 1925”, escorted by the military to and around the site. Although Dixon is astounded by the site and view from the “Place of Sacrifice” that served for Nabataean religious practice and cults, it is in the Hellenic grandeur of the Khazane (“Treasury” or Pharaoh’s Treasure) that thrills her.30 The discovered Graeco-Roman sites in Transjordan and Palestine were described as outposts of a colonial or imperial metropolis, whose power safeguarded their prosperity. The key term in the portrayal by archaeologists and travellers of their current state, as well as their position in the Graeco-Roman world is “provincial”. Their past is also contrasted with present wildness and insecurity that the state-in-the-making under mandate tutelage helps advance to civic and political maturity. Provinciality and a peripheral status were the very reverse of Hellenistic Alexandria or, for that matter, the interwar city. Nor could it be defined as “near eastern”.

28 IOA, GLH, Box 8. Also, author’s correspondence with Michael MacDonald, 30 October 2016. 29 Kitty Dixon, “Adventure of Four Women Who Visited Petra in 1925”, Middle East Centre Archive (MECA), Oxford, GB165-008, 1. 30 Ibid., 19–20.

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Alexandria: Hellenistic Cosmopolitanism Present and Past In the Western imagination Alexandria was placed in a Mediterranean world as a site of cosmopolitan culture and life that bridged between the Greek and Roman worlds and Pharaonic Egypt and presented a cultural hybridity. It was long envisioned as a capital of Western culture and science that throve during the Ptolemaic era yet, at the same time, came to stand for the corruption of power by oriental norms and customs that brought to an end the dynasty and Egypt’s independence. Alexandria was facilely placed in a Judeo-Christian meta- narrative of past glory thence decline. It was the city where the Septuagint, or earliest extant Greek translation of the Bible from Hebrew was produced upon the behest of Ptolemy II, and was associated with early Christian martyrdom and steadfastness in the defence of Christianity. At the same time the city was associated with modernization, sometimes an enforced one, identified with Westernization. From the time of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign in 1798–1801 Alexandria, where he inadvertently landed, invoked ideas and images of imperial rule that persisted down to the Second World War. Graeco-Roman Alexandria fed the political imagination in a variety of regimes in Europe, from imperial and republican regimes in France, to Greek irredentist ethno-nationalism embodied in the Megáli Idéa, to Italian fascism. And it nourished Egyptian monarchic nationalism. Yet at the same time that it mobilized nationalist imaginations, Alexandria, past and present, was conventionally depicted as a cosmopolis, a place where a variety of nationalities, ethnicities, religions, and cultures had long coexisted in proximity. The city’s cosmopolitan aura was associated with its rapid development and modernization.31 From the third decade of the nineteenth century it underwent intense expansion, initiated by “the second Macedonian”, Egypt’s Khedive Muhammad Ali. During his reign the city was connected to the Egyptian hinterland from which it had been detached, and the latter to the Mediterranean, by the Mahmoudiyah Canal, Alexandria’s means of water supply that linked the Nile to the Western Harbour. From a declining settlement of some 5,000 inhabitants at the time of Napoleon’s embarkation, it grew rapidly to a town of 13,000 in 1821, to 104,128 in 1848, soaring to 231,396 at the time of the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, to 332,246 by the time Cromer retired from office in 1907, and 573,063 in 1927. Towards the end of the First World War the number of its foreign nationals soared to 84,705 or 19 per cent, with Greeks making 33 per cent of them.32 In 1943, when its population reached 750,000, its university was founded; 31 For a critique on the cosmopolitanism narrative, see Khaled Fahmy, “For Cavafy with Love and Squalor: Some Critical Notes on the History and Historiography of Modern Alexandria”, in Anthony Hirst and Michael Silk (eds), Alexandria Real and Imagined (Aldershot, 2004), 263–81. 32 Robert Marbo, “Alexandria 1860–1960: The Cosmopolitan Identity”, in Hirst and Silk, Alexandria, 248 and 257; Robert Ilbert, Alexandrie, 1830–1930: Histoire d’une communauté citadine (Caire, 1996), vol. 2, 765–72; Robert Ilbert and Ilios Yannakakis with Jacques Hassoun (eds), Alexandria 1860–1960: The Brief Life of a Cosmopolitan Community, trans. Colin Clement (Alexandria, 1997).

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both the city and the new institution were hailed as sites of a cultural revival of Hellenistic culture and a modernity that was dated to the Khedival projects of the 1830s and 1840s. Promotional publications intended to hype the university’s patron, King Farouk I, compared him to Ptolemy I Soter. The university had the Pharos for its official logo and was advertised as a seat of new Hellenic learning and internationalism. Cosmopolitanism and the characterization of the city as a site of national and cultural hybridity went hand in hand with its positioning in, and outside, Egypt. Alexandria, both the ancient city that left very few traces, and its modern parts, is conventionally detached from Egyptianness. Its Hellenism attaches it to Greece and via it to Europe. In the imaginary geography of twentieth-century travellers and antiquaries like Breccia, it was an unplaceable entity. The title of his definitive guidebook to Alexandria, published in Italian in 1914 and issued in English in 1922, is Alexandrea ad Aegyptum: A Guide to the Ancient and Modern City and to Its Graeco-Roman Museum. Ad and not in Aegyptum: at Egypt and not in, or of it. It was increasingly envisaged as a maritime and a Mediterranean rather than a Near Eastern place, and imagined as a European enclave. As E. M. Forster has noted in his 1923 collection of essays, Pharos and Pharillon, “Nor have the Alexandrians ever been truly Egyptian. Here Africans, Greeks and Jews combined to make a city.”33 Although he recognizes the coexistence in it, as well as in Egypt as a whole, of three civilizations—Pharaonic, Hellenic, and Muslim—it is clear where his own sympathies lie. Forster took no part in post-war Egyptomania and denigrated its commercial and touristic aspects. He particularly disliked its manifestations after the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. He certainly sympathized with Egyptian nationalism and was openly critical of British rule and policies in Egypt, but could not identify with “Arab Egypt”, which he regarded as static and incomprehensible. He was clearly attracted to the Egypt which was, from the days of Herodotus, European, “A European personality, I feel kindly towards this coastal strip . . . a civilization of eclecticism and exiles”.34 He was not alone in his preference for Egypt’s Hellenism. H. V. Morton plainly stated that “Alexandria is still one of the largest Greek cities in the world”, not only in terms of demography and the visibility of Greeks and Greekness. In his rendition it was easily exchangeable with Athens, even preferable to it. As he has noted in his omnibus Middle East, “if someone who had never been to Athens were taken there blindfolded and told he was in the capital of Greece, it might be some time before he discovered his mistake.”35 Moreover, the city, which had lain in ruins from the Middle Ages until about a century before his own visit to it (that is its moderniza33 E. M. Forster, Pharos and Pharillon (London, 1923), 15. 34 E. M. Forster, The Uncollected Egyptian Essays of E. M. Forster, ed. Hilda Spear and Aly AbdelMoneim (Dundee, 1988), 37; Hala Halim, Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive (New York, 2013), 120–79. 35 Morton, Middle East, 43.

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tion, again dated from the reign of Muhammad Ali), was “not Arab but European. It never belonged to Egypt. It has always been a piece of Europe grafted on to Africa. In the Hellenistic Age it belonged to Greece, and to a great extent, to the Jews: and today it belongs to the Levant.”36 Alexandria’s separateness from Egypt and Africa is even more manifest in historical biographies which emphasize the city’s Greekness and situate it at the centre of a Graeco-Roman imperial world. This centring of Alexandria is especially noticeable in the expanding revisionist literature on Cleopatra traceable to the nineteenth century and expanded during and after the First World War. It evolved alongside the familiar literary, theatrical, and filmic representations of the queen as a corrupt and lascivious oriental tyrant and as Rome’s other. The vindication of Cleopatra went hand in hand with the rehabilitation of Alexandria and their placing in a world-history of empires. The new revisionist trend fed on the web of classical representations of the queen in Augustan poetry which has had distinct propagandist features. Horatian, Virgilian, and Propertian Cleopatras (who were not referred to by name) are lascivious and corrupt oriental despots, representing a Matrix Regina. Embodying Egypt, they are the binary opposites of a virile, self-controlled, and rational Rome. As Maria Wyke, Lucie Hughes-Hallett and a few others have demonstrated, Augustan imagery and Plutarch’s moralizing diffused to, albeit were complicated, in English Renaissance and modern drama and fiction, notably in Shakespearean and Shavian drama (Anthony and Cleopatra and Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1906)) that were familiar to broad audiences.37 The array of stereotypes was further buttressed in visual images in painting, as well as films featuring the West–East encounters between Caesar and Marc Anthony and Cleopatra.38 One influential exemplar of the new portraiture of Cleopatra and its connecting to Alexandria is Arthur Weigall’s The Life and Times of Cleopatra Queen of Egypt revealingly subtitled A Study in the Origin of the Roman Empire, first published in 1914, almost two decades before his Alexander the Great, and reissued in 1923 and 1924. Weigall, whose term as inspector in Egypt’s antiquities service was followed by a successful career as a popular writer, anticipated the interwar surge of interest in the rise and decline of empires, as well as changing notions of gender. Weigall Hellenized Cleopatra completely, undercutting her Egyptianness thus de-orientalizing her, and featured her as a strong woman and an imperial visionary and politician, versed in statecraft. Her Greekness is matched by that of her city. Weigall devotes the second chapter of The Life, which follows a study of the queen’s character, to “the City of Alexandria”. The symmetry of the two chapters is clear: Cleopatra’s rule and role in history

36 Ibid., 44. 37 Maria Wyke, The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations (Oxford, 2002); Lucie Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions (London, 1990), 252–312. 38 Wyke, The Roman Mistress, 244–321.

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may not be comprehended unless the position of her capital is fully understood. The city was, still is, more Mediterranean than Egyptian: It bore, geographically, no closer relation to the Nile valley than Carthage bore to the interior of North Africa. Indeed, to some extent it is legitimate in considering Alexandria to allow the thoughts to find a parallel in the relationship of Philadelphia to the interior of America in the seventeenth century or of Bombay to India in the eighteenth century, for in these cases we see a foreign settlement, representative of the progressive civilization, largely dependent on transmarine shipping for its prosperity, set down on the coast of the country whose habits are obsolete.39

In a similar manner it would be misguided “to class” Cleopatra “as a native Egyptian, as it would be to imagine William Penn as a Red Indian or Warren Hastings as a Hindoo. Cleopatra in Alexandria was cut off from Egypt.”40 Like the city, she too was not of Egypt. The analogy between Ptolemaic Alexandria on the one hand and Philadelphia and Bombay on the other, locates the three cities in a genealogy of maritime empires: the Hellenized Roman Empire, Britain’s First (American) Empire, and its growing Indian Empire amassed by the East India Company under Hastings, Governor General of Bengal thence of India, are represented as outposts of Western imperial civilizations. Cleopatra’s own rule is associated with the (different) sources of authority of Penn and Hastings. Other Lives of Cleopatra too centre the city in a declining Greek world and an unurbane and uncultured Roman world: it is superior to Athens and Rome, and outshines them. Rome, although much older, is “tumbling”, “no more than a cluster of peasant huts” and “huddle of tenements”.41 Alexandria’s cultural superiority and supremacy in the Graeco-Roman world has its parallel in Cleopatra’s centrality in it. Like Weigall, authors such as Mary Butts, and film-makers, focused on Cleopatra herself rather than on her Roman male protectors. Butts' experimental Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra, published in 1935, is probably the most original rendition of the queen’s life. Like her contemporary modernists Forester, T.S. Eliot, and Pound, Butts was steeped in the classics and, more than most of them, in the writings of prominent classicists such as Murray (who she often cites) and the Cambridge ritualists, most notably Jane Ellen Harrison. In the early 1930s she moved towards historical writing and within two years produced factional biographies of Alexander (The Macedonian) and Cleopatra. Unconventionally, Scenes experiments with temporalities, is not sequential, and does not end with Cleopatra’s

39 Arthur Weigall, The Life and Times of Cleopatra Queen of Egypt: A Study in the Origins of the Roman Empire (1914, repr. London, 1924), 28. 40 Ibid. 41 Mary Butts, Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra (1935, repr. Los Angeles, CA, 1994), 77.

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death, but in an imagined reunion with Mark Anthony in Pelusium in 37 bc, a whole seven years before their demise. Butts’ ending thus avoids the suicide scene that had for so long aroused the Western imagination. And it also experiments with history and historical records. The novel transmits an acute sense of place, as well as time. It not just includes descriptions of the city, its harbours and the Pharos, markets, and streets, but is spatially constructed, moving between Alexandria, Rome, and Ephesus, thus presenting a Hellenic metropolis which surpasses Athens (“pedantic little hole”). For “It is in Alexandria that the scales between the West and the East are held . . . where the last words of Hellas may be heard.”42 Significantly it is Caesar, awaiting the birth of Caesarion in a gallery at the palace overlooking the harbour and Pharos, who places Greece in Alexandria. Butts challenges the familiar binary histories and representations of Rome and Egypt, West and East, by diffusing gender dichotomies and emphasizing Cleopatra’s Greekness and power: she is an Egyptian monarch-goddess, an incarnation of Isis, but first and foremost a Hellene, with not “one drop of eastern blood in her veins”. She is the descendent of a northern dynasty, last of the Lagidae, and heir to Alexander, and a stateswoman. The acute sense of place that is prominent in Butts’ descriptions of Ptolemaic Alexandria is missing from depictions of the modern city.43 The physical remains of Alexander and Cleopatra’s city vanished almost completely and the city easily yielded itself to reconstructions by travellers, tourists, and novelists. They related Alexandria’s uniqueness to its actual location in Egypt and its geo-political and strategic significances. It was not only a port city and an embarkation and landing post for modern fleets and armies, but also the closest big urban concentration to Libya and the Western Desert that stretched from the Nile westward. This position made it an imperial outpost during the First World War, when it served as a huge military centre and chief depot throughout the campaign in the Sinai and Palestine between 1917 and 1918. During the Second World War Alexandria came to be identified with imperial defence and frontiers: it was 677 kilometres from Tobruk in Libya, a mere 106 kilometres from El-Alamein, and some 290 kilometres from Mersa Matruh (ancient Paraetonium), an airbase halfway between it and the border. The Western Desert Campaign was fought between it and Gazala in Cyrenaica on the Libyan coast and it had served, even before the war, as a provision stop and base for the military as well as for desert explorers and archaeologists. The two wars initiated and triggered a stream of writings on Alexandria and accounts of travel from it to desert oases. Most writings drew on the authors’ varied war experiences in the city. When Forster arrived in Alexandria in 1915, to work for the Red Cross as a (civilian in uniform) “researcher” of news on soldiers

42 Ibid., 57.

43 Ibid., 27–8, 77.

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who had been wounded or went missing in action, he was already an established and influential novelist. His sojourn in the city produced a range of texts, from a travel book cum tourist guide, began in 1918, to some of his most rigorously critical texts on the empire, and helped engender his fictional colonial writing on India. Alexandria: A History and Guide, first issued in 1922, by the Alexandrine publishing house Whitehead Morris, appeared after the publication of his newspaper article that later expanded into Egypt and England, a series of essays written for the Egyptian Mail and issued in 1923 by the Hogarth Press as Pharos and Pharillon, as well as his Notes from Egypt, part of a Labour Party pamphlet published as The Government of Egypt in the early 1920s. A number of his Egyptian texts remain unpublished.44 Forster refrained from living in Alexandria’s British enclaves, mingled with the local Greek population, and became acquainted with its literary and intellectual luminaries (Constantine Cavafy and George Antonius—later renowned author, historian of Arab nationalism, and mandate functionary in Palestine—being the best-known examples).45 He distanced himself from the official empire and criticized the war and, after his departure in 1918, became increasingly critical of Britain’s policy in Egypt.46 However, even in his most politicized writings he did not propose to grant Egypt complete independence and favoured granting it a mandate under the League of Nations.47 His depictions of his most intimate relationships with Egyptians, most notably with his lover Mohammed el Adl, probably the most significant sexual and emotional attachment in his life, are also rife with judgmental attitudes towards Egyptians. Moreover, his stay in Alexandria and possibilities for mobility in it were determined by the war that he criticized. His classical guide/history, initially known to a small audience of cognoscenti, served as the basis of the Service Guidebook for the military forces in Alexandria, issued in a series of Service Handbooks in 1940 and distributed free of charge. Its Foreword includes an acknowledgment and a lavish credit to Forster’s publisher, Whitehead Morris, thus, indirectly, to the author. Its shorthand historical part directly refers to Forster’s oeuvre and follows it closely.48 The First World War prompted another especially designated guidebook that was available to Forster, in addition to Breccia’s, Martin Briggs’s Through Egypt in War-Time with his own illustrations, brought out by Fisher Unwin in 1918. Briggs, an architect, was attached to the sanitary section of the Royal Army’s Medical Corps (RAMC) and his guidebook purported to be a record of “Egypt as 44 Halim, Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism, 121–2, 348. 45 Michael Haag, Alexandria: City of Memory (New Haven, CT, 2004), 11–33. 46 Forster to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, 5 May 1915, Forster to George Barger, Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, Volume I, 1879–1920, ed. Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank (Cambridge MA, 1938), 250, 254–6. 47 Haag, Alexandria, 101; Mohammed Shaheen, E.  M.  Forster and the Politics of Imperialism (London, 2004). 48 Standard spelling of el Adl’s name Services Guide to Alexandria Published by the Coordinating Committee for the Welfare of H.B.M. Forces, 2nd edn (Alexandria, 1940?).

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a Soldier has seen it”.49 A great deal of his description of Alexandria is devoted to the various military camps surrounding it, such as Camp Mustafa and Sidi Bishar, as well as military posts installed in the modern parts of the city and around it. The connection between imperial defence, exploration, and the recovery of the Hellenic past, notably of the city’s past during and after Alexander’s conquest of Egypt, became firmer during the interwar period but was nuanced. Some writers regarded Alexandria as a stopover on the way to Cairo and the conventional Nile journey. Passing travellers—writers like Evelyn Waugh, who disembarked in Port Said—skipped it altogether. Others, who left a particular mark on its images, as well as that of Hellenistic Egypt, paid a great deal of attention to it. Morton begins his Middle East with two chapters on his journey from Alexandria to Siwa then proceeds to a chapter on the city, dismissing the remark that there was “nothing to see in Alexandria”.50 But seeing Alexandria is an act of the imagination shaped by his rudimentary knowledge of the classical texts. His mind is filled with a vision of the “splendid city”, which had perished so completely, and even its ugly concrete buildings seem “satisfactory” when first viewed from on board a ship.51 His patchy description is devoted almost entirely to the Pharos and Alexander’s (unknown) burial place. The city’s Christian past is mentioned only in passing, and the long stretch of Muslim history is touched upon indirectly and related to the destruction of the Pharos.52 His and Forster’s work on Alexandria are usually not studied together. Clearly, they were addressed to different audiences—the former to the imperial forces which constituted a major part of Near Eastern wartime tourism, the latter to an audience of cognoscenti—and the perturbed history of its publication made it rather inaccessible.53 Yet both texts suggest that Alexandria requires special practices of seeing that intimately relate the present to the ancient past. And both seem to connect the interwar city, as well as the Ptolemaic one, to mobility and modernity. Touring Alexandria was special not because of what was there to see, but because of what was invisible. By the outbreak of the First World War it could boast of very few physical remains of its Graeco-Roman past. In stark contrast to Athens and Rome and to Hellenistic and Roman remains of urban settlements around the Mediterranean, Alexandria was almost completely devoid of archaeological finds. Among the few exceptions were Pompey’s Pillar, parts of the Serapeum, remains at the Graeco-Roman Museum, and the second century ad catacombs of Kom El Shoqafa. The ancient city was covered over by modern, “featureless”, nondescript built areas and Westernized quarters. In themselves its sights were “not interesting”.54 And it offered very little by way of actual, physical seeing. Alexandria became alive when it was “approached through the past” that 49 Martin E. Briggs, Through Egypt in War-Time with Illustrations by the Author (London, 1918), 5. 50 Morton, Middle East, 44. 51 Ibid., 45. 52 Ibid., 45–9, 46–7. 53 Lawrence Durrell, “Introduction”, in Forster, Alexandria, xiii–xiv. 54 Preface, Ibid., xx.

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mediated between modernity and its history and endowed the present with a meaning.55 The bulldozed-over past determined the layout of the modern-day city. As writers and cartographers noted, the Ptolemaic city was geometric and characterized by regularity and orderliness. It was designed as a grid with its main road, the Canopic Way, running from west to east and cut by the Soma, running from south to north. There was nothing picturesque in this layout: the city’s original plan was strikingly abstract and orderly. As Breccia and Forster noted, and as virtually every guidebook indicated, the plan conceived by Alexander’s legendary architect Dinocrates and executed by the Ptolemies, was strikingly modern. Alexandria was a Hellenistic Manhattan, with streets divided into blocks, running parallel to its main crossing and labelled by the letters of the Greek alphabet. “The American regularity” remained dominant through to the twentieth century. The city’s main streets, Rue Rosette (from 1922 Rue Fuad), running the exact course of the Canopic Way and the Rue Nebi Daniel, running that of the Soma, were the city’s most Westernized centres. The Ptolemaic layout seemed to spell out modernity avant la lettre and was represented in words and images: in maps as well as in aerial photography of Alexandria. It was discovered and established already in 1865 by the cartographer Mahmud Bey al-Falaki (1815–1885), whose map, accompanied by a list of 855 toponyms, would become the precursor of many later maps.56 His cartography, like that of the later maps and guidebooks, relies on components that have not just been observed, but also supposed, and combined archaeological evidence and hypotheses. One example of the blending of past and present is the transplanting of ancient monuments onto the modern grid, as drawn by Mariano Bartocci (1881–1929) and published in 1914 by Evaristo Breccia. The ancient and vanished past is laid not just on plans and city maps, but also on itineraries for pedestrians, locals and tourists, and commuters riding Alexandria’s tram, an electric vehicle of modernity and a symbol of the city’s development. Forster’s description of the tram route from the terminus railway station to Ramleh, the city’s newly built quarter favoured by its Anglo-American official community, presents a journey across time. From the Obelisks station to Chatby station: The first half mile of the tram line traverses ground of immense historic fame. Every inch was once sacred or royal. On the football fields to the left were the

55 Ibid., xx. 56 Forster, Alexandria, 12, Carte de l’antique Alexandrie et de ses faubourgs. Dressée sur les ordres de S. A. le Vice-Roi d’Egypte à l’aide de fouilles, nivellements et autres recherches par Mahmoud-Bey, Astronome de Son Altesse. Fait en 1866/Mahmoud-Bey, Astronome de Son Altesse: https://gallica. bnf.fr/services/engine/search/sru?operation=searchRetrieve&exactSearch=false&collapsing=true& version=1.2&query=%28%28%28%28dc.title%20all%20”Alexandria”%20or%20dc.title%20all%20 ”Alexandrie”%20%29%20or%20dc.subjechttps://gallica.bnf.fr/services/engine/search/sru?operation= searchRetrieve&exactSearch=false&collapsing=true&version=1.2&query=%28%28%28%28dc. title%20all%20”Alexandria”%20or%20dc.title%20all%20”Alexandrie”%20%29%20or%20dc.subjec, last accessed 10 July 2018.

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Ptolemaic Palaces (p.19) stretching down to the sea and projecting into it in the Promontory of Lochais (present Silsileh). There was also an island palace on a rock that has disappeared. The walls of the Museion, too, are said to have extended into the area . . . [we] can only be certain that the Ancient World never surpassed the splendor of the scene. On the right, from the higher ground, the Theatre overlooked it, and the dramas of Aeschylus and Euripides could be performed against the background of a newer and greater Greece. No eye will see the achievement again, no mind can imagine it. Grit and gravel have taken the place to-day.57

The ride back in time informs Forster’s interpretation of Alexandria’s present, as well as the structure of Alexandria. He conceives its first part, the “History”, as a mobile pageant. His vocabulary stresses movement and “attempts (after the fashion of a pageant) to marshal the activities of Alexandria during the 2,250 years of its existence”.58 Like history, the city acts and lives in time. Moving in the city, on foot or by tram, and outside it towards the desert, in cars, is a means of taking hold and making sense of it. The image of Alexandria as a moving historical pageant is most apparent in the citation of Cavafy’s famous poem God Abandons Antony, written in 1911, which evokes Plutarch’s story in his Lives about the night before the latter’s last battle with Octavian, hearing a sound of music on his way to the gate that led to the enemy camp. He was abandoned by the god Bacchus, his protector, and by the city.59 Cavafy and Forster have in mind the Canopic road, which Forster marked on the maps of Alexandria that he drew (alongside its present name Rue Rosette) and included in the book. The poem appears at the end of the “History”, just before the “Guide”, thrice urging the vanquished hero “bid farewell to her, to Alexandria” “who is departing” “Whom you are losing”.60 Notwithstanding the statements about the long stretch of history that he recovered, it is on Alexandria’s Hellenic past and its loss that Forster focuses. Of the four periods forming the division of History—“Graeco-Egyptian”, “Christian”, “The Arab Period”, and “The Modern Period”, it is clearly the first that most interests him. His longue durée is cut by a long gap that spans the centuries between the city’s Arab conquest in 641 and Napoleon’s embarkation in July 1798, which he modelled on Alexander’s conquest of Egypt.61 The period of over a millennium between Amr ibn al-As and the Second Alexander “is of no importance”.62 In Forster’s meticulous list of “Authorities” that includes works he had consulted,

57 Forster, Alexandria, 213. 58 Ibid, Preface, xix. 59 “Plutarch, Antony 75.3–4”, Plutarch’s Lives 9, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge, MA, 1920). 60 Forster, Alexandria, 121. 61 Christian Augustus Fischer, Collecion General et Complete des lettres, proclamations . . . de Napoleon le grand (Leipzig, 1808), 58–9: https://web.archive.org/web/20160407184159/https://play. google.com/store/books/details?id=2sFBAAAAcAAJ, last accessed 29 June 2018. 62 Forster, Preface, Alexandria, xx.

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“The Arab Period” is followed by the telegraphic remark: “Too obscure to possess a History”.63 His erasure of the city’s Muslim past is reiterated by Lawrence Durrell in his 1974 Introduction. Durrell’s own life and his literary and diplomatic career were enmeshed in Alexandria’s. During the Second World War he served as press attaché to the British Embassy. Justine, the first volume of his Alexandria Quartet, published in 1957, fictionalizes life in it during the interwar period and the war, with insights on its Greek past. Although writers and ethnographers characterized Alexandria as a Mediterranean Greek city, they realized that the desert encroached on it and was inescapable. The desert is ubiquitous in many of the descriptions of the city and these include routes of itineraries to it, some by the electric tram, and a few by car. In the 1920s and early 1930s, short-distance automobile travel to surrounding historic and contemporary landmarks, such as Borg El- Arab, became popular pastimes with British and American officials who were also avowed amateur classicists. They founded the Desert Club that included American jurist Jasper Brinton, Judge on the Court of Appeal of the Mixed Courts and from 1934 its president, and Anthony de Casson, director of the Desert Railways and author of Mareotis (1935), an account of the morphology and history of Lake Mariout, who both played a part in guaranteeing the reissue of Forster’s guidebook. But the range of the activities of the club was limited compared to the terrain covered in crossings of the Western Desert, and the scale of automobile expeditions that embarked on them. From the First World War these expeditions crystallized into a tradition which combined a re-enactment of Alexander’s legendary expedition to the temple of Zeus Ammon in 331 bc. Already in the eighteenth century, his journey had become a reference point and a template for travellers and explorers, the destination of imperial military trajectories, and a test of the advantages and limits of automobility in the desert.

All Roads Lead to Siwa Alexander’s journey to Siwa and his famous sojourn in it, were known in antiquity and became, as Robin Lane Fox has noted, the “victim of myth and legend”, about the motives for the expedition, the road to the Oasis, his audience with the oracle of Ammon and the oracle’s variedly interpreted message of the conqueror’s divine parentage, son-hood and his ensuing status as a god.64 Alexander’s own historians, notably Callisthenes, who reconstructed the story some twenty months after the journey had taken place, Ptolemy himself, Strabo, Diodorus, Plutarch, and Pliny 63 Ibid., xxiv. 64 Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great (London, 1973), 200; Pierre Briant, Alexander the Great and his Empire: A Short History (Princeton, NJ, repr. 2010).

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and, later, Arrian, all mentioned it: he is assumed to have travelled westward to Paraetonium on the Mediterranean shore, where he took leave of Cyrene’s envoys and continued southward.65 It was not, however, before 1792 that the route to Siwa was first visited by a European, William  G.  Browne, who celebrated it in his Travels in Africa, Egypt and Syria, from the Year 1792 to1798 (1799). From then on, it was to be repeatedly reconstructed by British, Continental, and American travellers, administrators, and the military (mainly British), and Egyptian explorers and royalty, including Muhammad Ali and King Fuad  I.  It came to be the subject of re-enactment: appropriating a past event, acting it out, interpreting it and, during the twentieth century, modernizing the journey. Explorers followed in the footsteps of Alexander, as well as tracking their predecessors, who they listed, critiqued, and cited, thus placing their own itineraries in a tradition of desert crossing and exploration. One nineteenth-century example, fairly familiar to later travellers, is Bayle St John who, after reading the classical texts, embarked in September 1847 on a journey on camels with Bedouin guides. Like Alexander, he moved too far west from Paraetonium and was stranded in a sandstorm. St John's eerie description of his night crossing, up passes lined with dried shells that reflected the moonbeams till the whole road sparkled like a valley of diamonds, is recognizably Gothic, explicitly evoking earlier and contemporary orientalist Gothic writer William Beckford and painter John Martin, known for his gigantic reproductions of the decline and fall of ancient empires.66 Other prewar explorers included Hermann Burckhardt (1900) and Egyptologist Georg Steindorff.67 But it was the war and its aftermath that precipitated a surge of interest in the Oasis’ Hellenistic past and its present, thus combining popular Hellenism, ethnography, and the technologies and imagery of automobility. The three most significant differences between the enactment of journeys to Siwa before the First World War and after it probably have to do with the militarization of travel, its motorization, and the accumulating impact of speed technologies on knowledge about the desert and perceptions of it. Travel on camels continued and was conducted mainly by the Imperial Camel Force, a mounted police force, launched in 1915 as a part of the Frontiers District Administration to help control the Western Desert and border, the Sinai, and the territories between the Red Sea and the Nile. In the early 1920s it was 170 camel-riders strong— mostly Sudanese, and a third of it was stationed in Siwa where the District Administration resided. Charles Dalrymple Belgrave who, during the war, served in the Camel Force, commanded it in 1920–1 and was District Officer of the

65 Fox, Alexander the Great, 201–18. 66 Ibid, 205, Melman, “I the Bull of Nineveh: Antiquity and Modernity in the Mega-City: London 1800–1900, Zmanim, A Historical Quarterly, 119, Summer 2012, 74–88 (Hebrew). 67 Georg Steindorff, Durch die libysche Wüste zur Amonsoase (Leipzig, 1904), 111.

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Oasis. His journey to it with the Force took six days, four more than the journey by car. But typically, exploration, under the auspices of the government of Egypt and the army’s irregular forces, became increasingly motorized. Bagnold was followed by others, like Thomas Ingram Dun, whose lavishly illustrated From Cairo to Siwa: Across the Libyan Desert in Armoured Cars was published simultaneously in Cairo by Schindler, a specialist printer who produced editions on Egyptian exploration, and in Glasgow, by Smith. Of all the motorized expeditions it was probably the biggest and best-equipped, including ten Rolls Royce armoured cars, a wireless Leyland, three Austin Seven cars, six motorcycles, and six lorries, not to mention vehicles carrying supplies, water, spares, appliances, and ambulances that were, when necessary, accompanied by airplanes. Robin Maugham travelled more lightly, to Marsa Metruh in a truck loaned by the Egyptian army and commanded by an Egyptian officer, thence in a rattling lorry to Siwa. His Journey to Siwa, based on his 1947 journey and published in 1950, came out at the tail of the motorized rides to the Oasis. Its exceedingly citationary text that draws on Belgrave and Bagnold accompanies the striking photography by Greek Cairo-born war photographer Dimitri Papadimos, who, upon mobilization, became the official photographer to the Publicity Section at the British Embassy in Cairo.68 These descriptions, which differ from one another in their renditions of the classics, treatment of Alexander’s voyage, and their impressions of Siwa, pay special attention to the mechanics of motorized desert travel and the adaptation of new technologies to the needs of desert crossing. The cars are at the centre of the new automobility that stands for survival in extreme conditions, as well as for speed and risk. The crossings are also associated with, and were directly connected to, imperial warfare and strategy. Siwa acquired strategic importance and was controlled in turn by the Senussi federation, Italian forces, the British army and, during the Second World War, by the Afrika Korps. Scuffles for control of the Western Desert preceded the First World War and involved three empires—the Ottoman, British, and the aspiring Italian Empire—each attempting to mobilize the Senussi forces. During the First World War, open warfare erupted and the EEF organized and commanded the Western Frontier Force of armoured cars to enable fast movement in the desert. It was led by Hugh Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster, Olympic motorboat racer, and a fast driver with technical skills (shared by most cross-desert drivers cum explorers), who developed a prototype Rolls Royce armoured car. After the war, technical prowess, navigation skills, and knowledge of the terrain became key to exploration and research. In the Second World War these would become the basis for the development of the Long Range Desert Group, initially known as the Long Range Desert Patrol, in 1940. During its years of operation behind Axis lines it carried on reconnaissance and intelligence as

68 Robin Maugham, Journey to Siwa with Photographs by Dimitri Papadimos (London, 1950), 27.

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well as combat operations.69 Numbering about 350 members, it included some of Bagnold’s earliest partners in motorized desert travel. Exploration of the Western Desert and its navigation by car made Siwa and its adjacent oases accessible and “mechanical transport has robbed these spaces of most of their ancient terror”.70 But its impact on travellers’ senses of place and time was complex: the road to Siwa was made shorter by four days, but movement through the desert disoriented travellers and thwarted their sense of direction and place and its relatedness to antiquity. Virtually all explorers, regardless of their familiarity with classical culture, repeatedly referred to the Hellenistic associations of modern travel. Bagnold, an engineer and later a physicist, with no particular training in the classics, was motivated by the combination of the allure of mechanics and speed technologies, the challenges of the difficult journey, and “that odd craving for antiquity, which made us try the four hundred miles of direct crosscountry to Siwa” that even the desert patrols had never attempted before. He toyed with the idea of happening upon the remains of lost ancient warriors: the vanished Persian army of Cambyses II (529–522 bc), son of Cyrus the Great, which (according to Herodotus) was swallowed in a sand storm on its way to conquer the Siwan Kingdom. Bagnold’s route, like others’, was Alexander’s, but it followed the road from the Oasis on the way there.71 His party, consisting of members of the Royal Engineers and the Royal Tanks Corps, made their first foray into the Western Desert in 1927 in adjusted Model T Fords, after a few motoring expeditions westward, to the Sinai, southern Palestine, and Transjordan. He represents the Western Desert as entirely uninhabited, waterless, and featureless, lacking any landmarks to navigate by.72 It was the road to Siwa, rather than the place itself, that ignited his imagination. His description of it is dominated by the Western Desert’s main feature: sand. Indeed, sand is his travelogue’s main subject and character. And he would transform his early observations of sands, their movement, and morphology into science in his classic The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes, published in 1939. The regularity of the direction of the dunes and their apparent erasure of all trace of past travellers in fact revealed the marks of Bagnold’s modern predecessors who, in their time, had attempted to re-enact Alexander’s march. On parts of the road Bagnold and his party deciphered the traces of motor travellers in the way in which Bedouins would read camel marks. “Reading” these traces reveals to him a history of exploration and discovery that is far from being a Western activity: quite the reverse.

69 R.  A.  Bagnold, “Early Days of the Long-Range Desert Group”, The Geographical Journal, 105 (January/February 1945), 1, 2; Kennedy Shaw, Long Range Desert Group. 70 T. I. Dun, From Cairo to Siwa: Across the Siwan Desert with Armoured Cars (Cairo and Glasgow, 1933), 13. 71 Bagnold, Libyan Sands, 54–5. 72 Lieutenant E. Bader, and Captain V. F. Craig of the Royal Engineers, Lieutenants R. J. Maunsell, G. L. Prendergast, and I. B. Fernie of the Royal Tanks Corps: Bagnold, Libyan Sands, 60.

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Bagnold and his contemporaries were aware that Egyptian explorers played a dominant role in the mapping and discovery of completely unknown parts of the Western Desert in Egypt and Libya. Their desert crossings, in camel caravans and cars, supplied their interwar British, Italian, and Hungarian counterparts with vital information on navigation, as well as with maps, knowledge, and insights on the desert. Bagnold himself read and admired Hassanein Bey’s classic The Lost Oases. Aḥmad Moḥammad Makhlūf Ḥ asanēn al-Būlākī was an Egyptian courtier, politician, world renowned explorer, King Farouk’s tutor and, during his reign, Chief of Diwan and Chancellor, on top of being an Olympic fencing medallist. A gold medallist of the Royal Geographical Society from 1924, he addressed a Western audience and influenced a number of the Western explorers of the Libyan Desert. In his “Crossing the Untraveled Libyan Desert”, published in September 1924 in the National Geographic Magazine, he noted, “My first objective from Sollum was Siwa, where I arrived after a nine days trek. This is one of the oldest oases of the Libyan Desert, and the most prosperous”, a central trading post connecting Egypt and the interior of Cyrenaica.73 The Egyptian stamp left on the road to Siwa was also visible in the different signs of the wheels of Egyptian vehicles on the sand: the marks of Prince Kemal al-Din’s fleet of Citroen caterpillars made during his ride across the desert in 1923–4, and those of his cousin, Prince Omar Toussoun’s, made by six-wheeled Renaults. Both dignitaries were pioneers in desert travel and antiquaries. Prince Kemal, son and heir of Sultan Hussein Kemal, renounced his right of succession which was filled by his halfbrother Fuad. The Hellenistic layer of his travel covered an earlier stratum: in 1925 he discovered and named the unknown Gilf Kebir in the south-west tip of Egypt, a massive sandstone plateau known for its Petroglyphs, or prehistoric rock incises and carvings. Prince Toussoun, grandson of Said Pasha and honorary president of the Société archéologique d’Alexandrie valued desert exploration and historical geography, and sponsored some of the earliest projects of maritime archaeology in Egypt, enabling the underwater discovery of a marble head of Alexander and other objects which he donated to the Graeco-Roman Museum.74 The car traces left by surveyors for the British army by Egyptian pioneers of desert exploration testified to collaboration between them. Kemal al-Din and Hassanein Bey cooperated with John Ball of the Egyptian Survey Department. The mechanized desert experience of modern travellers is grafted upon that of the young Alexander. When Bagnold’s convoy joins the Masrab Mahashash, the old camel road that kept to the north of the dunes, following a depression (by which he wished to return from Siwa) he notes: How this dead country with its legend of Medusa must have stirred the young mystical mind of Alexander, already keenly affected by the secret words of the 73 See http://www.saharasafaris.org/hassaneinbey/ngs1924article.htm. 74 Reid, Contesting Antiquity, 247.

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oracle at Siwa. This was his first journey across a true desert, entailing transport and supply arrangements he had never made before. Perhaps afterwards it was the memory of this successful experiment which decided him to attempt the less fortunate journey along the Markan coast on his return from India.75

Bagnold’s reference to the Medusa is significant—the mythical, lethal (but mortal) gorgon, whose gaze petrified the living and who, according to Herodotus, resided in the Libyan Desert. Her image appears on Alexander’s breastplate in the famous Alexander Mosaic dated to about 100 bc, which depicts the battle scene between him and Darius II. She is evoked in Bagnold’s descriptions of petrified trees and vegetation, the remnants of a prehistoric forest that were the only signs of growth in the desert. Like Alexander, his followers crossed a “dead world upon which all life, [where] all movement except that of the wind”, directing the dunes, had ceased from the far-off time when the primeval Medusa “had looked out over the land and petrified it forever”.76 While Bagnold references the classics selectively, Maugham gloats in flaunting his proficiency in them, at the same time debunking them, by resorting to excessive citation, both second and first hand. He hectors his readers with information on the Oracle of Ammon and Alexander’s journey, and uses this demonstration of knowledge to trivialize travel guidebooks and explorers’ accounts. By the time of the publication of the story of his crossing, Maugham had already made a name for himself as a prolific author (The Servant, the novella he is best known by, appeared in 1948), travel writer, and unofficial liaison between Churchill, Glubb Pasha, from 1939 until 1956 commander of Transjordan’s Arab Legion, and General Bernard Paget, Commander in Chief of the Middle East Command. Maugham’s narrative is not just a rehearsal of Alexander’s journey to Siwa and of the itineraries of Maugham’s British predecessors, but also a personal itinerary that recapitulates his own experience and memory of the Second World War, in which he served in a tank unit. This is also one of the most politicized accounts of Alexander’s quest for the Oracle. Maugham’s memory of the war is of loss and suffering. He himself was wounded and suffered a severe head injury in the Gazala Front of May–June 1942. He recalls a moment of defeat, the Allies’ bloodiest defeat in the campaign in the Western Desert, and indeed the Middle East, and one of the war’s lowest points. The desert that he and his companions move through is devoid of the sublime. Like Bagnold’s desert it bears the marks of motorized movement, but they are the debris of a mechanic war: skeletons of German panzers are strewn along the coastal road from Alexandria to Marsa Matruh and live minefields are being cleared by German prisoners of war. Travel to Siwa requires a special permit from the military, and Egypt’s landscape, both the desert landscape and that of its chief cities/military bases, seem not to have 75 Bagnold, Libyan Sands, 67; Stephen Wilk, Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon (Oxford, 2007). 76 Bagnold, Libyan Sands, 61.

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recovered from the devastation of the war. His first stop is the Allies’ military cemetery in El Alamein, where he pays homage to his tank driver, whose grave does not invoke thoughts of glory or sacrifice but of the dead soldier when he had been alive.77 The descriptions of devastation in the desert are accompanied by covert criticism on the empire in the form of a dialogue with Talaat, the Egyptian officer in charge of the expedition, who notes that the poverty of the Egyptian peasantry, the country’s post-war economic crisis and deterioration of infrastructure and transport, are the doing of the British Empire. And he concludes: “I hate the British. Everyone hates the British”, adding that “I don’t hate English people, it’s the British I hate”. Maugham explains: “the British consisted of an abstraction . . . compounded of pompous officials, imperialist plots to dominate Egypt, supercilious business men and snobbish women”. His remedy, however, is not quitting Egypt—which would begin to take place two years after the book’s publication, but a softer, more personal British policy in the Levant (his term).78 His reservations about the war and the empire are also demonstrated in his treatment of Alexander’s dream about kingship, its legitimation and relationship to divinity, and the role played by the oracle in them. The book begins with a facetious thirteen-page monologue on the reasons that had brought Maugham to Siwa in the first place. Maugham is lured to Siwa by the entry on it in the Encyclopedia Britannica which notes its chief distinction: the oracle temple of Ammon. Maugham, who lampoons didactic travellers, reads more about Siwa and the oracle. His abundant references to the classical sources on the oracle and Alexander’s trip to it, as well as to previous twentieth-century explorers of the Oasis, exceed the conventions of the desert travelogue. Clearly their purpose is to demonstrate familiarity with the classical accounts: Herodotus, Plutarch, Quintus Curtius Rufus, and Arrian are marshalled in and are buttressed by Weigall’s Alexander the Great. But Maugham’s narrative is belied by his facetious and irreverent tone. He describes Alexander as a youth in “a high state of auto-intoxication [who] felt himself not only hedged by divinity but completely enveloped in it. Manifestations of Ammon abounded, and all those around him were quick to recognize and appreciate them.” And elsewhere: “what god could do more? Onward plodded the son of the oracular god, with his head on one side, more purple than ever in the face, trundling across the sands until at last he reached Siwa.”79 The allusion to Alexander's purplish skin hue may be a reference to his face in the famous Mosaic.

Siwa Past and Present: Antiquity, Customs, and Manners The isolated oasis presented a stark contrast to the dramatic road to it. Situated in a depression some seventy-two feet below ground, its green forests of dates 77 Maugham, Journey to Siwa, 33–4.

78 Ibid., 38.

79 Ibid., 22.

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stretched over a conglomerate of settlements watered by underground springs. Its chief settlements, Siwa itself, and neighbouring Aghourmi, site of the Temple of Ammon, accommodated several thousand inhabitants. Siwa was a mud fortress which towered to considerable heights, composed of houses built on top of each other that grew narrower and narrower towards their tops and were reachable by winding inner passages (Figure 10.1). By the late 1920s they became unsafe and were abandoned by order of the Egyptian government. The towering houses and Siwa became the object of intense curiosity, ethnographic observation, and

Figure 10.1 Siwa, uninhabited centre, photographed by Dimitri Papadimos (Robin Maugham, Journey to Siwa, 1950, courtesy of Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive/National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation Athens (ELIA/MIET))

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photography. They attracted anthropologists, as well as the military and explorers, and appealed to artists. The Berber Sudanese population which hardly mingled with others, was characterized by a unique oasis culture, Muslim with a Senussi hue yet preserving a singular and rare language—Siwi, customs, manners, familial structures, forms of labour and commerce, trade, dress and jewellery, rituals, and festivities. Present-day Siwa became the focus of an intense anthropologicalhistorical gaze. Marriage customs and particularly male marriage that were rampant before the attempts, beginning in the early twentieth century at Egyptianizing Siwa, aroused special interest and engendered a spurt of writings on Siwan homosexuality and the position of women in the oasis. Studies included Mahmud Mohammad 'Abd Allah’s Siwan Customs, written for the Peabody Museum at Harvard in 1917 and Walter Cline’s Notes on the People of Siwa. Virtually every description of the re-enactment of the journey to Siwa included separate parts on its customs and manners, producing striking photographs of Siwans, male and female, the latter in their customary giant silver virginity necklaces and pendants marking their status (Figure 10.2). Only a few writers openly depicted (and admired) Siwan male rituals as Maugham did.80 Most referred implicitly and euphemistically to Siwan homosexuality and associated the low status of women to it. But what is common to the vast majority of descriptions of the place and its history is that present-day Siwa became a live ethnographic and historical museum, presenting forms of life and people that changed little over time. Their customs and manners are attributed to their isolation and remoteness. Like Alexandria, Siwan civilization is contrasted to Egypt’s and regarded as being at but not in and of Egypt. The emphasis on ethnography is quite in tune with the conventions of desert travel literature which combines descriptions of the journey itself, highlighting travellers’ movements across stretches of country and large spaces, with minute ethnographic detail. But the attention that is paid to life and customs in Siwa may have to do with the paucity of physical remains of the oasis’ glorious past. The temple of Jupiter Ammon is “a ruin and the ground, over many acres, is strewn with plinths and boulders. The only stones standing are those which appear to form part of the gateway, to which the crumbling steps of a once splendid stairway, lead up” (Figure 10.3).81 The ruins are a reminder of the contrast between Siwa’s present and its past. Belgrave, who records his travel to the Oasis and stay in it in Siwa, the Oasis of Jupiter Ammon, purports to write the first comprehensive history of the place. It includes its ancient history which culminates in the history of the oracle and, unusually, Siwa’s “Medieval” and “Modern” Muslim period (the latter including a comprehensive history of the Senussi impact on it). Yet the description of the temple, the history of the oracle, and Alexander’s visit to it concludes: 80 Ibid., 112–14.

81 Dun, From Cairo to Siwa, 40.

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Figure 10.2 A Siwan maid with the virginity disk (Robin Maugham, Journey to Siwa, 1950, courtesy of Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive/National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation Athens (ELIA/MIET)) This solitary ruin, and two massive stone gateways almost hidden by mud buildings in the middle of the village of Aghurmi, is all that remains of the temple that was once famous throughout the world. In a way the ruins are symbolic of Siwa which was once a powerful dominion, but is now nothing more than a wretched desert station . . . In 331 B.C., the fame of the oracle reached its zenith, owing to Alexander the Great visiting it . . .82

82 C. Dalrymple Belgrave, Siwa, the Oasis of Jupiter Ammon (London, 1923), 84.

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Figure 10.3 Siwa, Ruin of the Temple of Jupiter Ammon (Robin Maugham, Journey to Siwa, 1950, courtesy of Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive/National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation Athens (ELIA/MIET))

Rather than drawing on the past to mediate between it and modernity, and make sense of the present, like the writers on Alexandria, he, like other visitors to Siwa, compares the Ptolemaic Oasis to its present incarnation: Those spaces among the palm groves at Aghourmi must have witnessed in ancient times many a splendid spectacle. One can imagine the magnificent ceremonies and awe inspiring rites which were solemnized among the shady vistas of tall palm trees, in the shadow of the great temple on the rock, the processions of chanting priests, the savage music of conches and cymbals, and the gorgeous caravans of Eastern monarchs, carrying offerings of fabulous treasures to lay

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before the mystic oracle of the oasis, whose infallible answers were regarded by the whole world with profound respect . . . Today the people of Aghourmi build their fires against the great crumbling archways that gave access to the holiest altar of Ammonium, and shepherds graze their flocks among the ruins of the smaller temple.83

The itineraries and roads discussed here, from Alexandria to Siwa and back, may teach us about both the imperial characteristics of scholarly and popular interest in Graeco-Roman Egypt and about varieties of the passion for classical antiquity and its relationships to empire and modernity. This chapter has demonstrated that the classical turn in Egyptology did not develop linearly and that it accommodated a brand of Hellenism which placed Alexandria, and not Athens, at its centre. It was characterized by a plurality in style and genre—from modernist experimentalism, apparent in the writing of Butts and Forster, to reports of mechanized desert travel, to cartography and ethnography. At its centre was re-enactment: appropriating and acting out, by repetition, classical texts in writing, tourism, and exploration suited to modernity. It was quintessentially imperial and inseparable from a broader preoccupation with the empire’s defence and strategies. Hellenism was also inextricable from the development of technologies that encapsulated the essence of modernity: speed, mechanized movement, and risk. Notwithstanding the military careers and ties of almost all the amateur and more professional classicists, authors, administrators, ethnographers, and explorers discussed here, their activities and writings may not be reduced to a reflection of imperial needs and the work of tools of empire. Their ventures usually began informally and in most cases were only later integrated into military agendas and structures. Some of them condemned the empire—quite vociferously. Forster is of course the most obvious example. Butts, who never visited Egypt, is another. Others, like Maugham, openly critiqued the British position in Egypt. Yet others, like Bagnold, subverted imperial traditions in the itineraries that they trod and in their writing. Moreover, the brand of Hellenism discussed here diverged from hierarchies of civilizational ideas and aesthetics, as well as hierarchies of class and sometimes of gender, that were ingrained in Victorian and Edwardian, as well as Continental appropriations of the classical heritage and classical education. This divergence may also challenge some binaries in considerations of orientalism in archaeology and Egyptology. In the first place, the Hellenism discussed here was not exclusively Anglo-American or Western, but Ottoman and Egyptian as well. Hellenism was mobilized in Alexandria and more generally in Egypt to serve a variety of national agendas. It encouraged a classical education, but though this targeted elites, it differed from the class education that went hand in hand with

83 Ibid., 86.

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schooling in the classics in British public schools and universities. Moreover, Hellenism bred cross-national collaborations that are writ large in the exploration of the Western Desert and its crossings.84 Of course, Egyptians served in such crossings in supporting roles, sometimes as auxiliaries: soldiers, escorts, guards, and drivers, but they also navigated and led expeditions, used the desert as a training ground for automobiles, utilized speed technologies and, literally, broke unknown paths and recorded their exploits. Transnational cooperation, alongside imperial friction, is also apparent in the institutionalization of knowledge about Graeco-Roman Egypt—in the plethora of societies, museums, publishing houses, and publications based in Alexandria and Cairo, as well as at universities and in the visual arts. Dun’s record of his mechanized and heavily militarized crossing from Cairo to Siwa was produced in customized bi-national editions that were specially illustrated by hand. The manual production and self-consciously archaic design of the book apparently contradicts the high technology of the project it set out to celebrate. Its lavish illustrations may seem to corroborate this archaism, but the predominant style of the graphics is Art Deco. Unlike the Nile Style discussed in Chapter 8, they show local, folkloric motifs representing Egyptian arts and crafts pursued by Fellahin men and women. They were produced by Egyptian artists, pupils, and members of the School of Fine Arts in Cairo. The eclecticism of Dun’s compilation and his journey is an obvious manifestation of a broader characteristic of the Hellenistic turn discussed here. They re-enact patterns of exploration, conquest, and their representation that celebrate the empire of Alexander and his successors and a Graeco-Roman past, while modernizing them. They present forms of collaborations that manifest imperial hierarchies past and present—between imperial agents and nationalists with a variety of agendas in Alexandria and in Egypt generally. They reconstruct a Hellenic world for a modern empire.

84 Ruth Hoberman, Gendering Classicism: The Ancient World in Twentieth-Century Women’s Historical Fiction (New York, 1997).

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Conclusion Gerald Lankester Harding’s Second Funeral

In February 1979, Gerald Lankester Harding’s ashes were flown to Jordan for a second and final funerary service. His body had been cremated in London but, following the behest of the Royal House of Jordan, the ashes which had been deposited by the undertakers in an ungainly plastic box were placed in a sealed coffin and made their way to Amman. To hide the plastic the box was wrapped in lush black velvet and laid on a hearse at Jordan’s University Hospital, then transported to Jerash, Lankester Harding’s object of study, restoration, and development, and sometimes his home. After a short speech by Prince Hassan of Jordan and a brief ceremony, Jordan’s Director of Antiquities solemnly carried the improvised urn to a Byzantine chapel where it was put in a niche.1 Lankester Harding’s remains were finally laid to rest in the country of his adoption from which he had been expelled and—temporarily—exiled. His burial is a fitting end to his life and an appropriate coda to an imperial career, spent in the pursuit of Near Eastern pasts. It is also an appropriate ending to this book. Lankester Harding’s life had born the stamp of empire even before his arrival in the Middle East; he was born in Tientsin, grew up in Singapore and, after a hiatus in Britain, moving from one job to another, began to study Egyptology at University College London with Margaret Murray, who apprenticed generations of Egyptologists. In 1926 he began excavating in Palestine with Petrie, until in 1932 he moved on with some of the master’s other “pups” to Tell ed-Duweir/Lachish. From 1936 he served as Transjordan’s Curator of Antiquities then Inspector, and in 1943 was offered its Directorship of Antiquities.2 His long service was cut short in 1956 during the Suez crisis, amidst a regional wave of opposition to Britain’s involvement in the Middle East. Like a number of other British imperial officials who continued to hold office in the independent Kingdom of Jordan, he was expelled from it. He did not return to Britain, but relocated to Lebanon, resuming his life in Jordan after an invitation by its Royal

1 Author’s correspondence with Michael Macdonald. 2 “Professor Gerald Harding”, Daily Telegraph, 13 February 1979; G.  M.  Bennett, “G.  Lankester Harding an Appreciation”, Jordan Times, 15 February 1979, 3; Michael Macdonald to Editor, Daily Telegraph, 17 February 1979. All IOA, GLH, Box 8: Obituaries. Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and the Rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950. Billie Melman, Oxford University Press (2020). © Billie Melman. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198824558.001.0001

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House in the early 1970s.3 His life as an archaeologist, a restorer, a surveyor of antiquities, a museologist and curator, musician and amateur actor, spans almost the entire era of the regime of antiquities recovered in this book and expands beyond it. Indeed his remaining in office long after the termination of the mandate in Transjordan exemplifies the extent of imperial influence on this regime. It personifies the persistence of imperial mechanisms after the formal end of an empire and during decolonization. When the Palestine Museum of Archaeology was declared in 1948, by an Order in Council, an international territory, to be directed by an international board, Lankester Harding became its acting director. Exiled and in retirement, he was commissioned to conduct the first ever archaeological survey of Aden, then still a British protectorate and one of Britain’s last colonial footholds, and catalogue his findings for the Aden museum. The duration and scope of his imperial career are matched by the unusually broad scope of his interest in antiquities and his specialties, from Biblical Archaeology, through pre-Islamic epigraphy, to Hellenistic and Byzantine cultures. He restored Roman and Byzantine Jerash, galvanized and orchestrated the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Qumran Caves and the initial efforts at their deciphering, and discovered thousands of pre-Islamic inscriptions which he indexed.

The Complex of Antiquities and Empire: Continuities, Changes, and Commonalities Lankester Harding’s life and death do not represent others’. He seems to have practised his homosexuality openly, and his long-time established relationship with Hasan ‘Awad al-Qatshan was accepted by their contemporaries. He clearly preferred life in the Middle East to residing in Britain (which he avoided visiting before his final hospitalization). Both these choices mark him off from the overwhelming majority of scholars, archaeologists, explorers, painters, writers, architects, planners, and administrators discussed throughout this book. Their seasonal itineraries—which followed the pattern of annual migration to the Middle East during the excavation seasons and return to Britain to display and publicize their finds in venues of exhibition and academic institutions to varied metropolitan audiences—conform to the temporary repetitive pattern of movement of imperial officials. Yet his career and search for antiquity pinpoint, and highlight broader and recurring commonalities that characterize the unique complex of antiquities which evolved within the imperial order that emerged during the First World War and appears to have declined by the Second. In temporal terms, the new regime of antiquities may seem comfortably placed in 3 For one version of the circumstances of his expulsion, see Falastin, 3 August 1956; summary of papers, 2 August 1956, IOA, GLH, Box 10.

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Britain’s post-war empire and the world’s imperial order implemented between the wars. Its chronological boundaries appear to be clearly marked. The regime that developed in tandem with the mandates system was based on international oversight which had endowed both with legitimacy and, at the same time, manifested the authority, clout, and agendas of the victorious powers. The history of Britain’s interwar empire and those of its allies span a period that is dwarfed beside the longevity of most known previous empires. The evolving regime of antiquities which emerged during this short term is framed by the prolonged ends of empires that were connected to two total, global wars and the shifting relations between world powers and national movements.4 However, the divides between imperial archaeological regimes were not rigid, their development was not linear, and their ends were blurred. Control of access to antiquities and regulation of traffic in them, their circulation and display, preceded the First World War and had begun during the last reforming decades of the Ottoman Empire. And remnants of the new regime lingered well after the “end of (the British) empire”: in fact, they formed the basis for national laws of antiquities in the independent states that emerged in mandate territories.5 What distinguished the new regime of antiquities from older ones, was its legal and institutional internationalization and an idiom, rhetoric, and practices of collaboration and standardization. Yet the implementation of the new regime was uneven and based upon hierarchies. The international bodies like the IMO, IIIC, and the League of Nation’s Council, which fostered the collaborative agenda of preservation, archaeological discovery, and the propagation of national interest in antiquity, reflected imperial power relations inside the League and its institutions and outside them. US archaeological institutions, academic and non-academic, were heavily invested in mandatory excavation projects. Their investment was not only scholarly and institutional but also financial. Similarly, the economy of discovery depended on corporate global capital embodied in foundations such as the Wellcome Institute, or Rockefeller’s. Some losers of the First World War, notably Germany, an antiquities’ empire before the war, were let into the circle of cooperation only in the mid 1920s, to quit it after the advent of the Nazi regime. The internationalist idiom and vocabulary of cooperation represented the mandatory imperial powers as the guardians of the past in their temporarily held territories. Their custodial power over the control of antiquities and the regulation of their ownership was considerable. However, power, although arbitrary, was relative and negotiable and we should be wary of simplifying how its machinations and practices worked and describing it in binary terms, positing Western 4 On the empire’s end, see John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (New York, 2012), 342–86, and Kumar, Visions of Empire, 378–86. 5 Bernhardsson, Reclaiming a plundered past; Reid, Contesting Antiquity; Colla, Conflicted Antiquities especially 234–77; Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago, IL, 2001); Abu El-Haj, “Producing (Arti)Facts”.

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mandatories and rulers against Near Eastern subjects. It was at its most authoritative where the mechanisms and apparatuses of the mandate or a de facto protectorate, held longest (albeit remarkably unsuccessfully)—in Palestine and Transjordan. The power over the past triggered sustained resistance where the mandate was withdrawn early, but legislation and British presence in the network of institutions managing antiquities lingered. The mandatory framework stayed on in Iraq well after it had been granted independence and membership of the League of Nations in 1932. Egypt’s course of imperial history was quite different, as was the genealogy of management of antiquities in it. Pre-mandatory forms of British rule in it persisted but so did the strong legacy of Khedival and Ottoman antiquities’ legislation, a strong French presence in its antiquities’ service and establishment, as well as in Egyptian universities. The new internationalism and the rhetoric of a transnational cooperation permeated the practices and apparatuses that regulated the excavation and ownership of antiquities in Egypt. British incursions into Egypt’s heritage continued between nominal independence in 1922 and the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1937, but their influence gradually diminished. Moreover, the interwar period saw the gradual development of dialogue between Egyptian institutions and the international bodies, notably the IMO, culminating in the 1937 Cairo Conference and its product: the manual of excavations that standardized a protocol and procedures for excavations, the distribution and circulation of antiquities, and control of traffic in them. Collaboration was not merely organizational and institutional: the spirit and letter of the new internationalist rhetoric suffused the debates on the ownership of Egypt’s past, alongside the varied national discourse. Power diffused to, and was contested down, the imperial ladder. The emerging regime with its mechanism for overseeing and controlling the discovery and circulation of antiquities acquired authority, but was seldom powerful enough. The authority and power to regulate, articulated in ordinances that became Laws of Antiquities and were implemented by Departments of Antiquities and their inspectorates, were bogged down by a chronic lack of cash, a dilapidated manpower, and by the incursions of metropolitan government and institutions. The regime of antiquities exemplifies an empire “run on the cheap” and reflected interwar chronic financial upheavals. By and large, the economy of the new regime drew not on the mandatory state that owned, shepherded, and temporarily guarded local antiquities, but on civic and private capital. Capital was institutional, emanating from museums and universities, corporate and global (supplied by the Wellcome or Rockefeller Foundations or by donors like Marston). Small capital was solicited from individuals who were antiquities’ buffs or enthusiasts. On the ground, imperial authority and finance were consistently haggled over, negotiated, and contested by groups and individuals in Egypt and throughout the Mashriq. Egyptian and Iraqi nationalist intellectuals remonstrated against the plunder of the historic treasures of their countries; politicians protested

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against antiquity laws and the denial of indigenous access to national patrimony. Increasingly, and occasionally, the archaeologists themselves became the butt of their criticism (the well-deserved Egyptian criticism of Carnarvon and Carter over the managing of the excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun is a case in point). Nor did the protest stop there. Local ethnographers and educators, as well as campaigners for the revival of national languages, objected to the predominance of English as the main language of naming and labelling archaeological antique objects and publications on them. They canvassed for speaking about the past and representing it in the vernacular. The Hebrew Defence League protested, in Hebrew, against the labelling in English of exhibits at the Palestine Archaeological Museum, and adamantly demanded that these be explained in “one of the official languages of the country”. They did not mean it to be Arabic. Their remonstration immediately galvanized the antiquities’ administration into producing a policy memo which reveals the worry that “if a comparative translation is made, the request would be followed by another viz: that Arabic translations should also be provided”!6 Contestation was by no means limited to local and regional elites which had more opportunities to negotiate with the mandatories than other local groups. It also emanated from below: from landowners and landholders whose plots of land were declared historical monuments and leased or bought out, or put for expropriation when sale was objected to. As demonstrated in Chapters 3 and 4, a variety of landholders petitioned for due payments that were in considerable arrears, for rents owed them, and services rendered, such as hiring out of domestic draft animals like mules and donkeys. They sought compensation for soil dug and thrown as waste during the preparations for excavations, for orchards felled, and for crops that would have grown on uncultivated archaeological mounds. Negotiation evolved alongside varying degrees of collaboration that took place in and across locales, regions, nationalities and social groups: in museums, the Antiquities Departments, on the ground, and underground. The complex of antiquities was based, and depended upon local and regional cooperation. The rediscovery project discussed here was not an exclusively Western project—far from it. It hung on local knowledge, cooperation, and labour. Knowledge and labour came in varying forms, ranging from the professional expertise of locals— linguists, epigraphists and archeologists, archivists and librarians, ethnographers, and a few archaeologists, to administrators—who manned the lower and mid-range echelons of antiquities inspectorates—to field labourers. Archaeological field labourers gained proficiency and even expertise on the excavation sites. Some evolved into fully fledged archaeologists. Hasan ‘Awad’s career and partnership 6 Hebrew Defence League in Palestine to Keeper, 29 November 1933; Richmond to Chief Secretary, 4 February 1933; Defence League to Director, Department of Antiquities, 12 February 1933. All IAA, ATQ_9/37 (147/167).

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with Lankester Harding is described as a progress from adolescence (he began working in excavations at the age of 12 or 13), and simple manual jobs as “basket boy”, to “pick man”, to aide, and finally to a trained expert, drawing on experience, apprenticeship on the ground, and on his connections with Bedouin tribes.7 And the book located and discussed similar experts who appear not only in excavations’ budgetary ledgers, in photographs or on films which document local gang-labour (some produced by Lankester Harding himself), but also in long descriptions by their employers and sometimes in their own words. Local and regional archaeological labour was itinerant, in a manner similar to  that of British archaeologists, pre-historians and linguists. The work of field labourers in excavations in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine was a group experience, as well as an individual one. Expert diggers came from families of archaeological workers, from lineages of experienced excavators and tribes, and sometimes comprising entire villages. Take, for example, the women of the villages of Ijzim and Jaba’ (Gaba) at the mouth of Wadi al-Mugharah, near Mount Carmel in Palestine, or the men of the Hamoudi family, annually hired, and depended upon, by Woolley and Mallowan in their excavations in Iraq, thence in Syria. Or consider the sought-after excavators of Qift in Upper Egypt, a dynasty of expert diggers and Raises (or foremen). In the early 1930s (probably in 1931) Rais Muhamad ‘Awad of Kift-Kalla, who had been sacked from his work on the Amarna expedition after a quarrel with a co-worker, penned or dictated a letter to “The Secretary of the Company” which included a detailed labour biography that surveyed his work with the EES. He had “served the company since the year 1909” (Norman de Garis Davies’s term on the site). From then until 1931, the Rais “stayed at work” under eleven directors at Amarna and Armant. What is striking about this letter and others that ‘Awad addressed to Stephen Glanville, using expressions of familiarity, is not the causes of his sacking but the long-term connections of foremen and excavators with sites and archaeologists.8 The sum of expressions of cooperation and friction discussed in the book manifests collaborative and contested hierarchies that characterized the regime of antiquities. Hierarchy is also manifest in the mixture of, on the one hand, red tape and leg-dragging that is apparent in the stupendous correspondence between Departments of Antiquities and locals in mandate territories and, on the other, a paternalist attitude towards local men and women workers on excavations sites. Archaeologists offered their hired local employees medical services, entertainment in the form of organized recreation and sports, and employment. Their care was demonstrably paternalist— or maternalist: women archeologists like Olga Tufnell, who operated clinics on

7 Gerald Lankester Harding Biography, IOA, GLH. See also Lankester Harding, “Recent Discoveries in Transjordan”, Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 80 (1948), 118–20. 8 Muhamad Awad (sic), 3 December 1931; Awad to Glanville, 13 April 1931; both EES, Amarna, Box 3.

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archaeological mounds like Tell al-Ajjul and Tell ed-Duweir/Lachish, sought to improve the health and culture of their local clients. Moreover, archaeological work itself came to be seen as a means for ameliorating the condition of locals and providing them with better lives and futures.

Knowing about Antiquity: Forms and Practices Skilled as they were, local labourers and field experts had limited access to the expanding cluster of new forms of knowledge on the ancient Near East that developed across the humanities and social and exact sciences. But what has by now become clear is that knowledge about antiquity was not only literary and academic, nor primarily textual. It was visual, tactile, and experiential. And it was acquired through manifold forms of study, observation, and travel. Of course, written words—the biblical or scriptural Word, and votive, literary, and administrative texts on papyri, bricks, cylinders, ostraca, stelae, and monuments—were vital not only to epigraphists, Egyptologists, and archaeologists but were also instrumental for investigating and interpreting material remains. However, texts were not privileged over objects and artefacts and their visualizations. Clearly the ancient past had had material presences long before the moment of explosion of the materialization of antiquity during the first part of the twentieth century: enough to recall the discovery of a material Assyria in the 1840s, and the earlier discovery of Egyptian monuments and smaller antiquities. Yet the new complex of antiquities that emerged during the First World War was dominated by its materiality. The past acquired a physical immanence and became more tactile, visible, and accessible than ever before. Archaeology, which Julian Thomas has defined as that distinctly modern branch of enquiry that seeks knowledge about the past through the medium of material things, became the chief mediator between it and the present.9 Archaeological objects were recovered by an array of modern technologies that also became icons of modern life—from flying and aerial photography, through X-ray scanning, to forms of mechanized transport that made them more easily reachable than ever before. Modernization was not merely mechanical and technological: it had to do with a conceptualization of a tie between antiquity and modernity that made them associable. Associations between the ancient and modern multiplied. The discovery of antiquity was connected to a modern cult of celebrity that staged famous archaeologists at its centre, not only as mediators between the past and the present, but also as interpreters of cultures and civilizational progress, or their lack. Moreover, their glitz corresponded to the allure of archaeology, indeed of the pursuit of the ancient

9 Julian Thomas, Archaeology and Modernity (London, 2004).

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past and the set of practices involved in it. The search for the ancient Near East was represented as a modern pursuit and its practitioners as modern heroes. Examples are legion and include the highly visible public presence of Woolley and Carter, Arthur Keith’s consistent public interventions in the interpretations of civilizational progress, based on physical anthropology and race, and Jacquetta Hawkes’s popular writing on Stone Age people and her brand of mixture between science and mysticism. The popular modern hero-archaeologist could become an iconic martyr: Starkey’s posthumous role as a mandate hero/victim being the most obvious example. The increasing appeal of archaeologists and the search for antiquity corresponded to the growing allure of ancient Near Eastern people. They too were connected to modernity and represented as modern. They acquired a persona and individualities and biographies. Occasionally they had a private life: Tutankhamun, Akhenaten, Cleopatra, Puabi of Ur, Abraham, the urbanized patriarch and man of his world, even the Stone Age Tabun 1 skeleton of Mount Carmel, and lesser ancient folk, were represented as persons. They were fictionalized, their lives dramatized and replicated in an array of two- and three-dimensional reproductions: in paintings, illustrations, photographs, and hand and industrially reproduced replicas. The reproducibility of the ancient Near East further augmented its appeal and became a central part of its consumption. Furthermore, not only ancient people, but Near Eastern objects and material civilization were perceived as analogous to modern Western civilization—indeed as “modern”. Their modernity was associated with lifestyle, design, and taste, but also with experiences and even with emotions that were occasionally regarded as human and universal. To be sure, the ancient past, especially periods that had preceded historical written records, was distanced from, and contrasted with the present and with progress. The sensationalizing of ancient death and destruction, apparent in the press coverage of the discovery of the civilization of Sumer, exemplifies the juxtaposition of the modern and very ancient. The Death Pit at Ur’s Royal Cemeteries was associated with cruelty and barbarity that were all the more sensational because of their inseparability from the splendours of a rich material culture. At the same time, they were associable with modern mass massacre in the First World War. And the instincts of Stone Age people were evoked in relation to the drives of all humans.10 Even more importantly, the shifts in interwar archaeology and anthropological research towards a remoter past, induced some fundamental questions about the meaning of the modern and modernity, about temporality and the chronological boundaries of history, to be addressed shortly. The vast repertoire of visual and tactile forms of knowing about the ancient Near East expanded to experiencing it through new modes of mobility. Some of

10 See Chapter 5, 182–4, Hawkes, Man on Earth; Garrod, Environment, Tools and Man.

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these modes were adaptations of earlier means of transport, such as maritime travel (that had connected the eastern Mediterranean to Europe and the Americas), railway travel, and river transport. The car and the culture of automobility that accompanied it, and the airplane, both developed during the First World War, enhanced connectivity across the mandates empire and Egypt, and between them and the world. Their use, and the related development of infrastructures, signalled the beginning of the shift, that was not linear, from a regime of energy based on carbon to one based on oil. Both these forms of mechanized mobility served military and strategic purposes; at the same time both expanded travel and enhanced archaeological research. Furthermore, automobility and flying literally transformed ways of knowing about antiquities and practices of looking at them, and created a gamut of forms of visual knowledge, learning, and representations that were inextricably related to technologies of seeing—notably aerial photography. By the mid 1920s, shooting archaeological photographs from the air became a habitual practice. It cut through surfaces into depths and exposed to the eye layers of habitation and settlement that were undetectable and invisible at ground level. Projects of archaeological photography included large-scale operations such as the RAF’s recording of excavation sites in the entire British Mashriq and Egypt. Less ambitious, smaller-scale military projects served to record sites in smaller areas: Antoine Poidebard—missionary, archaeologist and aviator— mapped from the air the Roman Limes of Syria/Lebanon and Iraq.11

The Most Ancient Past: Texts, Narratives, and Temporalities The expansion of non-literary forms of knowledge about the “most ancient Near East” (Vere Gordon Childe’s expression), visual, tactile, and experiential knowledge gained through forms of mobility, did not replace texts. And the development of the complex of antiquities may not be described linearly, as a progress, or regress, from words, to images, to objects. Text, visual image, and matter coexisted, as the debates between epigraphists and archaeologists, common enough among specialists on Mesopotamia and Egypt and humorously captured by Agatha Christie, reveal.12 The pulls of written texts and material culture are apparent in the development of archaeology itself and of the framework for the interpretations of Near Eastern antiquity, its role in world history, and civilizational and human origins. As Chapters 2–4 and 5 have demonstrated, the biblical and, more broadly, scriptural framework remained central to professional and popular experiences and senses of the past and cut across religious affiliations, backgrounds, beliefs, 11 Fabrice Denise and Lévon Nordiguian (eds), Une aventure archéologique, Antoine Poidebard, photographe et aviateur (Beirut, 2003, Marseille, 2004). 12 Christie, An Autobiography, 474–5; Christie, Come Tell Me.

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and specific interests within the field of archaeology. To be sure, belief and education inclined William Foxwell Albright and Woolley towards a biblical reading and interpretation of material civilizations. Father Roland de Vaux and Léon Legrain of the École biblique in Jerusalem and Penn Museum, respectively, were disposed by faith and ecclesiastical training to search for the illustration of the Scriptures. But the biblical framework is also quite apparent and sometimes writ large in the analyses and interpretations of archaeologists and explorers who had no religious education and no leanings towards corroborating the Scriptures. Flinders Petrie adopted a racial interpretation of history in his popular writings, but cultivated a rhetoric that put stress on the Bible; Starkey opposed heavyhanded attempts by a sponsor to impose the Bible on the archaeological evidence found at Tell ed-Duweir/Lachish. but his writings as well as Olga Tufnell’s are suffused with biblical allusions. Lankester Harding’s own narrative of the discovery and rescue of the Dead Sea Scrolls that takes near to seventeen pages of his spoken biography, as well as the part played by Hasan ‘Awad in their actual finding, demonstrate just that. Occasionally the biblical and Judeo-Christian framework was imposed upon the discovery of remote pasts whose remains did not bear material evidence in regard to the veracity of the texts. The construction of Ur as the City of Abraham had no material evidence to support and “prove” it, but was drummed up in the Anglo-American press, hyped the excavation, and engendered a wide popular interest. The biblical framework marginalized temporalities and chronologies that could not be accommodated within creationist interpretations of Nature and Man. Their literalist version excluded pre-Muslim Arab histories and Muslim history, notably Ottoman history after 1700. This last exclusion resulted from the definition of antiquities in the mandate A texts, in antiquities ordinances, and later in the laws themselves. To be sure, even before the discovery of the material, physical ancient Near East the biblical frame was not the sole textual authority on it. The Classics constructed a competing view of Near Eastern antiquity that remained powerful among scholars, explorers, and travellers. Although it was class-specific, to do with the prominent role of the classics in Victorian and Edwardian schooling of middle- and upper-class men, it spread among individuals and groups that had had no systematic classical education—for example, desert explorers who had acquired education in the sciences, or technical education, and soldiers who were stationed in the area during the two world wars.13 However, the experienced and imagined Graeco-Roman Near East examined here diverted from aesthetic and civic classical models that had been central to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hellenism and to the thought of internationalist classicists 13 Examples include Bagnold and the distribution of abridged parts of Forster’s Alexandria to members of the military forces during the Second World War. See chapter 10.

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like Murray and Alfred Zimmern, and focused on the model of an empire that never materialized: Alexander’s world empire, and a West–East hierarchical syncretism. This brand of imperial and military Hellenism is apparent in the reenactment in texts and exploration, by authors, journalists and travellers of his travels and of Ptolemaic history. The classics and classical texts had been, and remained, not just repositories of knowledge on the ancient Near East; classical antiquity had occupied centre stage in Victorian and Edwardian culture. It had been the yardstick to measure the value of all antiquities and their aesthetics, or the value of ancient objects as works of art. The discovery of the far remoter Near Eastern civilizations did not substitute for the classical legacies in the same way that it did not replace the biblical framework. Indeed Egyptology took a classical turn towards the last decade of the nineteenth century and it culminated during the interwar period. Its imperial connections were apparent in the outburst of interest in the Hellenistic Near East, but interest in the Graeco-Roman past and the centrality of this past in reconfigurations of modern empires did not contest the biblical timescale and temporalities. Put differently, the two master narratives that formed the basis for textual knowledge and imagining of the Near East—the biblical and classical, were complementary in this sense. It was the rediscovery of the remote past that burst open temporalities and raised questions in regard to human origins and the origins of civilizations. Interwar archaeology as well as its contemporary physical anthropology were characterized by some of their practitioners and by popular advocates as privileging the distant past. In the “rush” for discovering and recording this past, earlier southern Mesopotamian cultures and Egyptian cultures were singled out for their age value and ancientness. They came to be identified as Ur cultures, the origins of all civilizations. Archaeologists competing for public attention and finance upped the competition over temporal remoteness and seniority (in the literal meaning of this term), between pre-dynastic Ur and Egypt. The rise and development of prehistoric archaeology pushed time scales and the borders of antiquity beyond imaginable limits. The Levantine Stone Age with its immense stretches of time dwarfed history; it towered over the known and knowable antiquity. The exposure of remote, material Near Eastern pasts that far preceded recorded history thus relativized antiquity itself. It had the potential of rearranging hierarchies within it. Although, as has been noted throughout the book, the biblical and classical frameworks persisted, their placing in the hierarchies of what was considered ancient was challenged, and the remoter the past, the greater the curiosity it elicited. Christie’s reference to Mallowan’s disinterest in Roman remains and artefacts comes to mind: he picks some piece of pottery, throws it, disgustedly noting “Romans”. His remark is echoed in Hamoudi’s saying “Min Ziman . . . er

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Rum”. This remark becomes an adage in her rendition of their excavations in northern Syria.14

Empires of Antiquities: The Past as a Future The wealth and variety of Near Eastern ancient civilizations and the scope and range of their discovery connected antiquities and ancientness to an imperial present and attached them to possible imperial futures. The territories in the eastern Mediterranean, which Britain and France governed after the First World War, had been the sites of sequences of ancient empires whose rise, decline, and fall were grafted on the landscape and their material remains. Unlike the Roman and Mongol empires, the Byzantine Empire or, for that matter, the Ottoman Empire, Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, the Hittite and the Achaemenid empires, and ancient Egypt were not regarded as models for imperial rule. But their newly discovered civilizations and their cycles of growth, corruption (real or imagined), and fall were constantly evaluated as cautionary morality tales and accommodated in a modern historical consciousness about the empires of the past. They fed the imperial imaginary and constructions of imperial memory. Their histories gained relevance in an era of imperial overstretch into the areas that they had once occupied, an era that was also a moment of crisis. The British Empire was the world’s most expansive but it was shaken by anti-colonial sentiments and movements and anti-British and intra-national clashes. Britain’s post-war Near Eastern territories were empires of antiquities in more than one sense. Britain’s (and, for that matter, France’s) authority to rule and its legitimation, were extended from the present to the past of the territories entrusted to them by the League of Nations and international consent, and to their future. As the guardian of mandate A territories, Britain was endowed with a custodial (and, by definition, temporary yet indefinite) power that was aimed at apprenticing those peoples and subjects that were deemed advanced enough in the process of modernization and progress and ushering them into a state of political independence. Political apprenticeship and a civilizing custodianship were inseparable from modernization. And modernization was part and parcel of the internationalist mandatory project and, more broadly, of the interwar non-mandatory imperial territories. As an extended corpus of studies on mandates has recently demonstrated, and as the book has pointed out, material growth and development were key to the mandate project; it included developing infrastructures, urban concentrations, and technologies.15

14 Christie, Come Tell Me, 45. 15 Jacob Norris, Land of Progress: Palestine in the Age of Colonial Development 1905–1948 (Oxford, 2013); James Whidden, Monarchy and Modernity in Egypt: Politics, Islam and Neo-Colonialism between the Wars (London, 2013); Satia, “Developing Iraq” and Frederick Meiton, Electrical Palestine.

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Technological development was enmeshed with archaeological excavations and the intensive searches for the remains of the ancient past. Suffice to mention here the discovery of the construction of infrastructures for Haifa’s harbour and resultant rescue excavations of the Stone Age caves on Mount Carmel; urban planners’ visions of eastern (ancient) Jerusalem divided from its modern and “developable” parts; Alexandria’s modern quarters laid over its Ptolemaic vestiges; and the proximity of Ur to the railway and RAF bases. The relationship between the exhumation of antiquities and development was two-pronged. The modern apparatus of empire regulated and rationalized the handling of antiquities. It was represented in internationalist and imperial discourse as a major instrument for the rescue of the ancient past from destruction and oblivion, and as a means to teach imperial subjects their own histories. The past fulfilled a role in preparing them for the future. The same rescue rhetoric and practices took a turn in nationalist discourses: nationalists regarded antiquity as the origin of their rights to their patrimony and claims on their own pasts. Moreover, the regulation and standardizations of discovery were deemed urgent and vital because they were threatened by the pace and conditions of modern life, as Bergson himself noted in his proposal in 1922 to the ICIC to constitute a regime of antiquities.16 Archaeology developed in modernity but development, accelerating material changes and growth—both quintessential characteristics of modernity—endangered antiquities and made them vulnerable. Imperial projects of urban development threatened to destroy ancient buildings, mounds, and troves of objects. And the act of recovery itself—excavation, proceeded by the destruction of layers of the past. Notwithstanding the awareness of the destructive components of excavation, archaeologists, ethnographers, and explorers regarded themselves as developers and the act of digging itself as a means for bringing progress to the Near East. They adopted and elaborated the modernizing rhetoric. And quite a few of them regarded themselves as guardians and empire builders. Writing Empires of Antiquities involved more than researching and recovering the webs of relations within the complex of discovery of the ancient past. It has sought to place the multilayered roles that antiquity acquired in late modernity. It was also a modest exercise in telling a history of discovery that extracts the passion for, and appropriations of, the ancient pasts from the national framework and what has been called a methodological nationalism. I have attempted to connect this history to units that are larger than the nation states—a region, where borders were artificially constituted during and after total war, but were crossed: by people, objects, and ideas, an empire, or an international, albeit hierarchical

16 “International Understanding for the Discovery of Archaeological Monuments and the Publication of the Results”, 5 August 1922, LON, Geneva, R1041.

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and exclusionist body of nations.17 Or, to smaller units: cities, oases, border zones, and archaeological mounds, where the intricate relations between the imperial, international, and local were played out, often collided, and sometimes interacted. Of course, looking at the connections between the local and global scale is not to say that they supplanted national agendas and appropriations of antiquity. Far from it; these histories were entangled and need looking at as an ensemble. Telling the story of discovery from different vantage points also connects kinds of history that usually are pursued separately. The history of internationalization is more often than not institutional, or structural, or legal. Many histories of the searches for the past, in archaeology or other fields of knowledge, are intellectual histories, or they are art or literary histories. These different strands are usually seldom practised together. They may, however, be linked and related to their broader contexts and this linkage may point at the various dimensions of humans’ engagements with their pasts. Like the excavation of a Tell, the multilayered history presented here is incomplete and indefinite. But it may contribute in a small way to our understanding of how antiquity became so central to the British and international reorganization of the Near East, how it captivated the imperial imagination and impinged on visions, or delusions, of possible empires, how it was experienced and expanded to mass audiences, and how it became modern.

17 Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Condition: Why Methodological Nationalism Fails”, Theory, Culture and Society, 24 (December 2007), 7–8: 286-90.

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Index Note: Figures are given in italics following the page number. For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abbasid Caliphate 29 Abimelech 83–4 Abraham 161–2, 171–4 Abraham: Recent Discoveries and Hebrew Origins (Woolley) 171–2, 187–8 Abraham, Karl 295–6 Absalom, Jehoshaphat and Zechariah’s tombs 109 Abu Simbel 256–7 Abydos 260–1 Acheulean culture (prehistoric) 225–6 A City in the Sand (Chubb) 305 Adamson, Miss M. 186–7 ad-Dhahiriya 152–3 el- Adl, Mohammed 325–7 ‘Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb, The’ (Christie) 255–6 ‘Adventure of Four Women who Visited Petra in 1925’ (Dixon) 320 aerial photography 4–5, 16–17, 70, 91, 162–3 Aghourmi 336–8 Ahab, King 90–1 A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (Breasted) 287–8 A History of Greece; from the Earliest Period (Grote) 314–15 air travel 69–72, 75–6, 90–1, 258–9, 285–6 Akhenaten 282–5, 287–9, 294–303, 298, 306–10 ‘Akhenaten’ (Frankfort) 301–2 Akhenaton (Christie) 193–4, 290–1 Akkad 162 al-Ahali (newspaper) 46–7, 159–60 al-Ahram 269–71 Al-Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem 45–6, 93 Albright, William Foxwell 82, 131–2, 224–5 Alexander the Great conquest of Egypt 312–13 following in the footsteps of 330–3 and Jerash 318–19 legends of 314–15, 335–6 and Medusa 335

regional imperial rule of his successors 317 and Siwa 258–9, 330–1, 333 Alexander the Great (Weigall) 315–16, 336 Alexander Sarcophagus 315–16 Alexandria Archaeological Society of 316 cosmopolitan city 313–14, 316, 320–30 Graeco-Roman Museum of 316 hub of the Hellenizing project 315–16 Alexandria ad Aegyptum (Breccia) 321–2 Alexandria: A History and Guide (Forster) 316, 325–7 Alexandria Quartet (Durrell) 329–30 Allenby, Field Marshal 80–1, 97–8 al-Liwa 269–70 Amarna (Akhetaten) crisis of empire 289–91 ephemeral existence of 291–8 feelings about 303–10 presence and display 298–303 a map 282 royal 288–91 Amarna Letters 73, 261–2 Amenhotep III 288–90, 296–8 American Civil War 34–5 American School of Oriental Research (ASOR) 58–9, 93–4 American School of Prehistoric Studies 225–6 Amery, Leo 223–4 Amman 8–9, 64–5, 95–6, 343 Amman Dramatic Society 319–20 An Alphabet on Egypt (Chubb) 305 An Autobiography (Christie) 193, 213, 215, 351–2 Ancient History of the Near East from the Earliest Times to the Battle of Salamis (Hall) 287–8 Ancient and Modern Imperialism (Cromer) 314–15 Ancient Monuments Act (1931) 40–1

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382

Index

Ancient Monuments Consolidation and Amendment Act (1913) 40–1 Ancient Monuments Protection Act (1882) 40–1 Ancient Records of Egypt (Breasted) 80–1 Andrae, Walter 244–5 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty (1937) 345–6 Anthony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare) 319–20 Antiquities definitions of 39–43 Department of (Egypt) 52, 264–7 Department of (Iraq) 244, Department of (Palestine) 43–4, 93–4, 103–6, 119–20, 123, 137–8, 149–50, 221–2 Antiquities of Jordan, The (Harding) 318–19 Antiquities Laws (Egypt) 265–6 Antiquities Laws (Iraq) 244 Antiquities Ordinances 38–9, 144–5, 151–2 Antiquities Ordinances (Garstang) 64–5 Antiquities Proclamation, Palestine (1918) 36–7 Antiquity (journal) 246 Antiquity of Man, The (Keith) 230–2 Apollo Belvedere 33 Appointment with Death (Christie) 195–6, 199–200, 208–9 Arab Legion 31–2, 319–20 Arab rebellion, Palestine (1936–9) 143–4, 152–3, 220–1 Arab–Israeli war (1948) 109–10 archaeobiography 17–18, 214 Archaeological Institute, Liverpool 259 Archaeological Joint Committee 53–6, 81–2 Archaeological Museum, Palestine 87, 89, 127, 225–6 archaeology and gender 193–4, 208–9, 213–14 and the mandate system 64–5 and physical anthropology 138–42 excavations at Tell ed-Duweir 131 growing popularity of 191, 215 in interwar years 127–8 as a modernizing force 148 and modern technologies 349–50 Armageddon 80–1 Armant 260–1 Arpachiyah mound 239–46 Art Deco 276–80, 293–4 Arts and Crafts Movement 100–1 Ashbee, Charles Robert 99–107 Assur (Qal’At Sherqat) 29 Assyria 33, 130–1, 165–7, 242–3 Aswan obelisk 260–1 Aten 288–9 Athens 95–6, 323–5, 327–8, 341–2 Athens Charter on the Restoration of Historical Monuments (1931) 52

Atlit Crusaders Castle (Castrum Peregrinorum) 220–4 Augusta Victoria, Jerusalem 93–4 Aumonier, William 276 ‘Awad al-Qatshan, Hasan 142–3, 344–5, 351–2 ‘Awad Muhamad 348–9 Automobility 17 Babylon compared to Egypt 166–7 fascination with 174–5 and Mesopotamian archaeology 165–6 Victorian cult of 167 Back to Methuselah (Shaw) 212–13 Badarian civilization 260–1 Baghdad museum 46–7, 244 Bagnold, Ralph Alger 256–9, 333–6, 341–2 Bailey, Mary 257–8 Baldwin, Stanley 264–5 Balfour Declaration 63–4, 112 Ball, John 334 Baramki, Dimitri Constantine 220 Baring, Evelyn see Cromer, Lord Barnabas Society 183–4 Bartocci, Mariano 327–8 Battat , Issa al-Hajj Sulayman 152–3 Bayt Jibrin 127, 150, 152–3 BBC 303, 305 Beckford, William 331 Belgium, interest in antiquities in 300–1 Belgrave, Charles Dalrymple 331–2, 338–9 Bell, Gertrude 39–40 Berbers 336–8 Bergson, Henri 49–50, 354–5 Beth Peleth see Tell el- Far‘ah excavations Beth Zur, Canaanite city of 73–4 Bible, The 71–4 biblical exhibition culture 85–6 biblical idioms 66–8 biblical materiality 81–92 Book of Revelation 80–1 Deuteronomy 110 as a framework for interpreting history 81–2 Genesis 161, 170–1 illustration of 66–74, 171–2 and modern transport 71–2 New Testament 66–8, 71–4, 91–2 and cities in 174 selling power of 184–5 use of as a source 83–5 Biblical Archaeology 65–6, 81–5, 127–8, 131–2, 135 and the discovery of Ur 161 and the Lachish Letters 135, 136 Biometrika 141

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Index Blackman, A. M. 271–2 Bliss, Frederick 108–9, 131–2 Book of Common Psalter (Ashbee) 107 Borchardt, Ludwig 261–2 Borg El-Arab 330 Brasch, Charles 309–10 Breasted, James 244–5, 261–2, 267–8, 287–8 Breasted, John Henry 65, 75–6, 80–1, 86–7 Breccia, Annibale Evaristo 316, 321–2, 327–8 Breuil, Henri 216–17 Bridges, Robert Seymour 159–61 Briggs, Martin 325–7 Brinton, Jasper 330 Britannia and Eve 211–12 British Empire Exhibition, Wembley 78–9, 276, 292 see Palestine Pavilion British Expeditionary Force (Mesopotamia) 29 British Museum dispute with Baghdad Museum 244 Duveen Gallery (for Elgin Marbles) 184–5 and Ram in the Thicket statuette 187–8 and Samarra Antiquities 33–4 sponsorship of Ur excavations 185–6, 211–12 Standing Committee of 29–30 and Tell ed-Duweir 130 and Tutankhamun 272–3 and Ur 1925 exhibition 186–7 British Schools of Archaeology British School of Archaeology in Athens 93–4, 287 British School of Archaeology in Baghdad 1–2, 244 British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (BSAJ) 43, 65–6, 84–5, 103–6, 120–1, 225–6 Brooklyn Museum 299–301 Broome, Myrtle 76–7, 259 Browne, Alexander 331 Brown, R. Richard 148 Brunton, Guy 260–1, 296–8, 302–3 BSAE (British School of Archaeology in Egypt) 83–4, 260–2, 285–6, 299–300 Budge, E. A. Wallis 261–2 Burckhardt, Hermann 331 Burrows, Eric 171–2 Bury, J. B. see History of Greece Butts, Mary 324–5, 341–2 Cairo Conference on Excavations (1937) 54–5, 345–6 Final Act of 54–7 Cairo Museum 186–7, 272–3, 276, 281, 300–1, 316

383

Callisthenes 330–1 Cambridge Ancient History, The (Myres) 261–2 Cambyses II 333 Campbell-Thompson, Reginald 161 Camp Mustafa, Alexandria 325–7 Canaan 141, 170–1 Canopic road, Alexandria 329 Capart, Jean 300–1, 308–9 Carchemish excavations 169 Carnarvon, Earl of 112–13, 168–9, 255–6, 260–1, 269–70, 272–3, 346–7 Carnegie Foundation 184–5 Carreras Cigarette Factory 278–9 Carter, Howard and Carnarvon’s expedition 260–1 and lack of understanding of political changes in Egypt 264–5 seen as a celebrity 349–50 and Tutankhamun 47–8, 249–50, 346–7 Cartier (Jewellers) 276–7 car travel 256–7 Caton-Thompson, Gertrude 56–7, 257, 259–62 Cavafy, Constantine 316–17 Ceadel, Martin 311–12 Çelik, Zeynep 85–6, 315–16 Chagar Bazar 166, 218–19, 241–2 Chamberlain, Austen 264–5 Chamberlain, Neville 154–5 Chancellor, John 77–8 Chaplin, Charlie 275 Childe, Vere Gordon 189–90, 214, 216–17, 241–2, 246 China 216 Christian Faith and Industry (Marston) 132–3 Christianity 170–1, 259–60 Christie, Agatha Autobiographies of (see An Autobiogprahy, Come Tell Me) and B. G. Gunn 294–5 cars, trains, liners and airplanes 191–2 and Egypt 255–6, 290 and Middle Eastern archaeology 188–9, 193–4 novels 193–200, 351–2 and, see Appointment with Death, Death Comes as an End, Death on the Nile Murder in Mesopotamia, Murder on the Orient Express, They Came to Baghdad participation in Mallowan’s excavations 239–41, 353–4 Chubb, Mary 303–10 Church of the Assumption 97–8 Church of Holy Sepulchre 97–8 Churchill, Winston 78 Classical Association 314–15 Clayton, C. F. 165

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384

Index

Cleopatra 312–13, 323–5 Cline, Walter 336–8 Clodd, Edward 232 Cochran, Charles 290 Coenaculum (site of the Last Supper) 113–14 Collins, M. E. and O. H. 278–9 Collins’s Crime Club 194–5 Colonial forms of collaboration 141–55 colonialism 31–2, 36 Colonial Office (CO) 31–2 colonial urban planning 101–2 Come Tell Me How You Live (Christie) 193, 195–6, 200–1 Communications and Works (Iraq) 43–4 Conan Doyle, Arthur 272–3 ‘Conference on the Future of Archaeology’ (1943) 56–8 Congo 300–1 Cooke, R. S. 46–7, 244–5 Coptic Church 259–60 Corelli, Marie 272–3 Cottrell, Leonard 303 Cox, Percy 33–4 Crawford, O. G. S. 163, 184–5, 246 Crewe Train (Macaulay) 212–13 Crimean War 97–8 crime fiction 191–2 Cro-Magnon man 230–2 Cromer, Lord 314–15, 321–2 ‘Crossing the Untraveled Libyan Desert’ (Ḥ asanēn al-Būlākī) 334 Crowfoot, John Winter 93–4, 114–18, 120–1 Crusades 81, 87–8, 103, 220 Ctesiphon 183–4 Cyprus 58–9 dahabeahs 254 al- Dajani, Sa’id 120–1 Daily Express 269–71, 275 Daily Life in Ancient Egypt (Glanville) 294–5 Daily Mail 270–1 Daily Telegraph 110–13, 302–3 Davar (newspaper) 221–2 David 93–4, 107, 110–11 David’s City 97, 107–11, 113–17, 119–21, 124 David’s Tomb 113–14 David’s Tower 103 Davies, Nina de Garis 306–7 Davies, Norman de Garis 261–2 Davis, Emily 191 Dayr al-Sultan Monastery 97–8 Dead Sea Scrolls 142–3, 351–2 death ceremonials 178–82

Death Comes as the End (Christie) 193–4, 208–9, 294–5 Death on the Nile (Christie) 208–9, 255–6 Decapolis 317–18 de Casson, Anthony 330 Deir al-Balah 72 Deuteronomy see Bible Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft 261–2 Dickie, Archibald 108–9 Digging Up the Past (Woolley) 191 Dinocrates 327–8 Dixon, Kitty 320 Docet, Jacques 276–7 Dome of the Rock 45–6 Dream, or the Simian Maid (Wright) 236 Drioton Étienne Marie Felix 266–7 Duckworth Laboratory 140 Dun, Thomas Ingram 331–2, 342 Durrell, Lawrence 329–30 Dussaud, René 244–5 Duveen, Joseph 184–5 Edinburgh Dispatch 112–13 Egypt administration of antiquities in 44–5 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty (1937) 345–6 archaeology of 59, 83, 138–9, 216–17, 346–7 Britain and France and regime of archaeology 264–73 and British popular culture 168, 272–80 and the Cairo conference 53–9 compared to Sumer 166–8 connectivity, speed and antiquity in 251–64, 253 course of imperial history 264, 345–6 as cradle of civilizations 141–2 crime fiction on 192–3 and E. M. Forster 322–3 vandalism of monuments in 308–10 Graeco-Roman past of 314–17, 320–30, 342 and H. V. Morton 63 in British popular culture 168, 272–80 the inter-war years 249–64 and its dependencies 288–9 implied criticism of British rule and peasant poverty 335–6 and internationalism 345–6 and the Jerusalem conference 58–9 and looting of antiquities in 33 and Napoleon’s invasion of 321 nationalism in 47–8 and new historical commission 52–4 not a mandated territory 31–2, 345–6 and Ottoman laws of antiquities 40–2

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Index registration in League of Nations 281 restoration of al-Aqsa Mosque 93 showcase of ancient history 282–4 and Siwa 336–8 and Tell Jemmeh 83–4 travel in 69–72, 76–7, 350–1 Egypt and England (Forster) 325–7 Egypt Expedition Force 43, 69–70 Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF) 65–6, 314–15 Egypt Exploration Society (EES) activities in Bloomsbury 305–7 EEF assuming a new name (1919) 262 and excavations at Abydos and Armana 263, 284–6, 299–302 ‘Pro-Germanism’ of 286–7 Egyptian Antiquities Service 266–7 Egyptian University, Cairo see King Fuad University Egypt and Israel (Petrie) 259 Elam 189–90 Encyclopedia Britannica 336 Enquirer, The 174 Entente Cordiale (1904) 264 (Pendlebury) 291–2 Eridu mound 162–3 Erman, Adolf 286 Eugenics 138–9, 140 Evans, Arthur 287 Exposition Coloniale, Paris (1931) 292 Expository Times, The 135 Fahmi, Mustafa 316–17 Faisal of Iraq, King 39–40, 146–7 Faiyum 260–2 al-Falaki, Mahmud Bey 327–8 Falkenstein, Adam 166 Farouk I, King 321–2, 334 ‘fertile crescent’ 75–6 Field, Henry 140–1, 241–2 Firestone Tyre Company 277–8 First World War Alexandria an imperial outpost during 325 antiquities, spoils of during 29–30 Battle of Megiddo in (1918) 63–4, 80–1 and complex of antiquities that emerged during 349–50 destruction and carnage of 291 and Jerusalem 65 Kut al-Amara campaign (1915–16) 169–70, 182–3 and the mandate system, failure of 31–2, 81 memory/commemoration of the dead 183–4 Mesopotamia campaign during 165–6 new cults of death and burial after 182–3

385

new order of antiquities 31 newly experienced forms of travel after 312–14 occupation of Palestine 68, 73, 91–2 post-war order 29–33 and technologies of transport 256–7 and railways 69–70 and redefinition of heritage 32–8 in the Western Desert 332–3 Fitzgerald, G. M. 82, 114–15 Ford Model T 256–7 Forestier, Amédée 178–82 Forsdyke, E. J. 53–4 Forster, E. M. 316, 321–2, 325–30, 341–2 Foundoukidis, Euripide 12–13, 50–1, 53–5 Fox, Robin Lane 330–1 France and the Cairo conference 54–5, 268 and the Entente Cordiale (1904) 264 and the mandates system 43, 354–5 and the new Museum’s Office 50–3 North African territories 52 post-war empire of 317 predominance in Egyptian archaeological and academic establishment 316–17 regulation of antiquities in 264–5, 268 and victory in the First World War 30 Franco-Prussian War 34–5 Frankfort, Henri 287, 293–4, 301–2 Free Officers Revolution (1952) 316–17 French Equatorial Africa 256–7 Freud, Sigmund 295–6 From Cairo to Siwa: Across the Libyan Desert in Armoured Cars (Dun) 331–2 Frontiers District Administration (FDA) 256–7, 331–2 Fuad, King 266–7, 331 Future of Culture in Egypt (Hussein) 316–17 Galton Laboratories 138–40 Gange, David 138–9, 314–15 Garden City movement 100–1, 103–7, 109 Gardiner, Alan 263–5, 286, 299–300 Gardner, Elinor Wight 257, 259 Garrod, Dorothy Annie Elizabeth discoveries in Palestine 216–17, 225–6, 229–32 and local inhabitants 241–2 and Mount Carmel excavations 236–8, 238 on Neanderthals 232–3 and Palaeolithic discoveries in northern Iraq 238–9 emphasis on connectivity 246 Garrow, Duncan 112–17

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386

Index

Garstang, John 43, 77–8, 93–5, 103–6, 110–11, 131–2 Geddes, Patrick 86–7, 102–7 Genesis see Bible Germany 33–4, 56, 239–40, 285–6, 288–9, 309, 345 Gezer see Tell Jazar Ghuzlan Jawad, Muhammad 120–1 Gibson, Shimon 65–6 Gilf Kebir, Egypt 334 Gladstone, William 170–1 Glanville, Stephen 290, 294–5, 348–9 Glasgow Herald 112–13 Glueck, Nelson 58–9 God Abandons Antony (Cavafy) 329 Goldhill, Simon 66–8, 100–1 Goodrich-Freer, Adela 108–9 Gordon, George Byron 175–8 Graham-Brown, George Francis 125 Graves, Robert 316–17 Gray, Kathleen (Eileen) 276 Great Britain administrative mandatory mechanisms 43 American Empire of 324–5 and Anglo-Egyptian Treaty (1936) 281 and articles on in Al-Ahali 46–7 Biblical Archaeology in 66–8 and the Board of Works (BOW) 43–4 British Empire, expansion of 3–4, 288–9 and the City of David 124 and the Crusades in British culture 81 custodial role as mandatory, of 45–6 and discovery of Ur 162 and Egypt 249–51, 264–73, 335–6, 341–2 and German excavations 285–6 and Iraq 31–2 and Jerusalem 93–5, 119 and Kut al-Amara campaign (1915–16) 169–70 and the League of Nations 50–1 and the mandates system 38–9, 354–5 Mesopotamian policies of 169–70 minor role in new historical commission conference 52–5 occupation of Palestine and the Sinai 73 and the Office of Works and Public Monuments 43–4 and Permanent Mandate Committee (PMC) 52–3 place of Iraq in Empire 169 and post-war Empire 79, 317, 344–5 power of in Arab eyes 154 preservation legislation of 40–1 redefinition of democracy in 57–8 termination of mandate in Iraq 218–19

urban development and anxieties about 174 and urban revival ideas 96–7, 106–7 Great Depression 316 Great Pit at Ur 147 Great War see First World War Great-Zimbabwe 56–7 Greece 51, 323–4 Grenfell, Bernard Pyne 314–15 ‘Grisly Folk, The’ (Wells) 229 Grosvenor, Hugh 332–3 Grote, George 314–15 Guide to Atlit (Johns/Baramki) 220 Guide to Lachish–Tell ed-Duweir (Harding) 137–8 Guild and School of Handicraft 100–1 Gunn, Battiscombe George 263, 294–5 Guy, P. L. O. 119–20 Haaretz (newspaper) 221–2 Haggard, Henry Rider 255–6, 271–3, 303–5 Hague Conventions (1899/1907) 34–5 Haifa 219–21, 354–5 Halaf culture 239–43 Hall, A. R. 161, 287–8, 295–6 Hall of Human Races, Chicago World Fair 140 Hamoudi family, excavators 10–11, 348–9 Handbook to Palestine, Syria and Iraq (Thomas Cook) 64–5 Harappan civilizations see Mohenjo-Daro Harrison, Austen St. Barbe 78–9, 87–8 Harrison, Jane Ellen 324–5 Ḥ asanēn Aḥmad Moḥammad Makhlūf al-Būlākī 334 al-Hashimi, Yasin 46–7 Hassan, Zaki 59 Hastings, Warren 324–5 Hatiay (in Amarna) 308 Haverford College 65 Hawkes, Jacquetta 217–18, 232–8, 349–50 Haycraft Commission 77–8 Hazar Mazr 238–9 Hebrew Defence League 347 Hejaz Railway 69–70 Hellenism 311–14, 316–21, 341–2 Competing Hellenisms 311–14 Egyptology, classical turn in 314–17 ‘modernist Hellenism’ 312–13 and Transjordan 316–21 see Graeco- Roman Egypt Hellenism and the Modern World (Murray) 311–12 Henderson, Arthur 52–3 Heqanakht letters 294–5 Hergesheimer, Joseph 212–13 Herzfeld, Ernst 29 Higher Biblical Criticism 132–3 Hill, George 42–3, 244–5

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Index History of Greece (Bury) 314–15 History of Mankind (series) 232–3 Holliday, Clifford 102–3 Hoover Factory, London 277–8 Horner, Leonard 261–2 Horses of St Marc 33 Horsfield, George 317–20 Howard, Ebenezer 106–7 ‘How Things Were Done in Ancient Egypt’ (Glanville) 294–5 How to Observe in Archaeology (British Museum) 81–2 Hughes, Richard 123–4 Human Adventure, The film (Breasted) 75–6 Humphrys, Francis 244–5 Huntsend (HM Transport) 29 al-Husri, Sati 44, 46–7, 54–5 Hussein Kemal, Sultan 334 Hussein, S. H. S. 150–1 Hussein, Taha 316–17 hyperdiffusionism 168 Illustrated London News 88–90, 135, 137, 167, 178–82, 224–5, 265–6, 302–3 Imperial Airways 69–70, 254 Imperial Museum, Istanbul 41, 315–16 Inca civilization 141 India 39–41, 48 India Office (IO) 29–30 Indus Valley 162, 170–1, 216–17 Inge, Charles 133, 153 Inner Jerusalem (Goodrich-Freer) 108–9 In the Steps of the Master (Morton) 63 In the Steps of Saint Paul (Morton) 63 Institut français d‘archéologie Orientale 316 International Academic Union (UAI, Union académique internationale) 49–50 international Archaeological Congress (1926) 74–5, 99–100 International Commission on Historical Monuments 52–4 International Commission on Intellectual Co-operation (ICIC, Commission internationale de coopération intellectuelle) 12–13, 30, 49–51, 354–5 International Institute on Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC, Institut international de coopération intellectuelle) 5–6 International Conference on Archaeological Excavations (1937) 266–8 International Conference on Excavations 52–3 International Congress of Pre-Historic and Proto-Historic Studies 260–1 International Decorative Arts exhibition, Paris 276–7

387

International Museums’ Office (IMO, Office international des musées) 5–6, 12–13, 31, 266–8, 279, 300–1, 308–9, 345–6 internationalism 11–12, 48–9, 65, 74–5, 95–6, 279–80 internationalization 11–15, see internationalism International Understanding for Recovery of Archaeological Monuments (Resolution) 49–50 Introduction to Relativity 212–13 Iraq Antiquities laws in (Ottoman) 44–5 (toughening of laws) 241–2 attempts to keep archaeological finds 243–6 British mandate in 171–2, 217–18, 250–1 consequences of end of mandate 46–7 considered part of Indian Empire 31–2, 34, 37–8 cultural heritage of 29–30 development by India 169–70 discovery of Ur 159–60, 162 and draft antiquity law 39–40, 42–3 invention of state 169–70 and membership of League of Nations 244–5, 345–6 rail connections to 69–70, 74 Iraq Petroleum Co (IPC) 220–1 Irish Times 112–13 Israel, history of ancient 66–8, 86–7, 170–1, 220 and Samaria-Sebaste ivories discovery of 90–1 Israelites, ancient 77, 79 Italian-Abyssinian War 281 Italy 56, 321 Janus Face of Modernity, The (Petrie) 138–9 Japan 56 Jayne, Horace Howard Furness 244–5 Jebel Moya excavations 132–3 Jemdet Nasr 166 Jerash 317–20 Jerusalem archaeological conference 58–60 excavation and exposure of a vertical city 108–9 ‘imagined’ Jerusalem 93–5, 100–3 internationalizing of 109–18 and the Jericho earthquake 93–4 municipal museum 85–7 park system 103–6, 106 planning vision of dominated by past 106–7 privileged antiquities status 97–8 Starkey, funeral in 125–8, 126, 127 town planning scheme, No. 1 102

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388

Index

Jerusalem (cont.) Wall Rampart 104, 105 Western Wall 93 Jewish Guardian, The 112–13 Jewish Palestine Exploration Fund 113–14, 142–3 Jisr Benat Ya’kub 220–1 Johns, Norman 220 Joint Archaeological Committee 29–30, 36–8 Jones, Ernest 295–6 Jones, Felix 240–1 Jordan, Julius 166, 244 Jordan River 64–5 Josiah of Judah, King 73–4 Journal of Egyptian Archaeology (EEF) 262 Journey to Siwa (Maugham) 331–2 Julius Caesar 324–5 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) 319–20 Jupiter Ammon temple of 340, 354–7, see Zeus Ammon, Alexander Justine (Durrell) 329–30 Juvelius, V. H. 108–10 Keeling, Bertrand 211–12 Keeling, Katherine, Née Menke (Woolley) 211–12 Keith, Arthur 140, 178, 217, 230–2, 349–50 Keith-Roach, Edward 77–8, 81 Kemal al-Din, Prince 334 Kendall, Henry 102–3 Kenyon, Kathleen 56–7, 114–15 Kenyon, Sir Frederick 36–8, 172, 264–5 Kharja Oasis 256–8, 260–1 Khabur 1–2 Khartoum University 93–4 Khorsabad (Dur-Sharrukin) 174–5 Kingdom of Judah 108–9 King Fuad’s Road to the Faiyum 257 King Fuad University 316 Kings and Queens of Egypt, The (Brunton) 296–8 Kish 244 Kitson-Clark, Mary 236–8 Klaniczay, Gábor (multiple antiquities) 3–4 Kom El Shoqafa, Alexandria 327–8 Kramer, Alan 34–5 Kurds 241–3 Kut battlefields/prisoners of war camps 183–4 Labour force, local seasonal recruitment 142–3 mobility of and hierarchies 347–9 Lacau, Pierre 47–8, 263, 265–6 Lachish, discovery forms of collaboration in 142

excavations regarded as instrument for modernizing rural Palestine 143–6 identification and deciphering 10–11, 15–16, 83, 128–38 interpretations of 155 labour disputes in 150–1 representations in films on 148–9, 154 skulls from 141–2 on Tell ed-Duweir 23–5, 127–8 see also Tell ed-Duweir excavations Lachish (Tufnell) 129 Lake Qarun 261–2 Lands of the Bible, The (Morton) 63 Land, The (Hawkes) 232–3 Langdon, Stephen 135, 159–60, 166, 172 Lankester Harding, Gerald 137–8, 142–6, 148, 318–20, 343–5, 347–8, 351–2 Laocoon 33 Lausanne Treaty (1923) 36–7 Lavers, Ralph 293–4 Lawrence, T. E. 169 Layard, Austen Henry 130–1, 147, 167 league of Canaanite kings 73–4 League of Nations Belgium a founding member 300–1 ceased to function 56–7, 59–60, 74–5 Covenant of 36 Egypt’s membership of 281, 325–7 Final Act of Cairo Conference 54–5 Germany’s membership of 239–40, 261–2 and international standards of excavation 279 Iraq independence and membership of 31–2, 244–5 and mandated territories 50–2, 54–5 and new antiquities laws 31, 38–9, 48–50 and the new Museums Office 50–1, 53–4 and ownership of cultural property 266–8 and Palestinian petitions 119–20 principle of guardianship 37–9, 44 and ‘Progress of Iraq’ report, (1931) 46–7, 159–60 spirit of the league 65 League of Nations Council 345 League of Nations Union 312–13 Lebanon 52, 74–5 Legrain, Léon 178, 351–2 Levant 83, 224–5 Lewis, Alkin 133–5 Libya 325, 334–5 Libyan Sands (Bagnold) 258–9 Lieber Code (1863) 34–5 Life and Times of Akhnaton Pharaoh of Egypt, The (Weigall) 287–8

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Index Life and Times of Cleopatra Queen of Egypt, The (Weigall) 323–4 Linda Condon (Hergesheimer) 212–13 Lloyd, Seton 293–4 Loftie, W. J. 304 Loftus, W. Kenneth 161 Long Range Desert Group 256–7 loot in war 29–30 Lorimer, Norma 255–6 Lost Oases, The (Ḥ asanēn Bey) 334 ‘Lotus Console’ (Gray) 276 Lubbock, John 40–1 Lufti, Ahmad al-Sayyid 316–17 Luke, Harry 77–81, 107, 221–3 Luxor 269–70, 285–6, 309 MaCalister, Robert Stewart 74, 110–18, 120–3 Macartney, Robin 255–6 Macaulay, Rose 212–13 McCowan, Theodor 230–2 MacCrudy, George Grant 216 MacDonald, Ramsay 264–5 MacInnes, Rennie 72–4 McLean, William 101–3 MacWilliams, H. H. 129 Magdalenian culture, discoveries of 224–5 Magoffin, R. D. V. 191 Mahaffy, John Pentland 314–15 Mahdi, Abbas 244 Mahmoudiyah Canal 321–2 Maisler, Benjamin 220 Makhuli, Na‘im 64–5 Mallon, Alexis 224–5 Mallowan, Max Edgar Lucien And Agatha Christie 193, 214–15 excavations in northern Iraq and Syria 217, 239–40 and the Hamoudi family 348–9 refused an export permit 244–5 and Tell Arpachiyah 240–3, 246 and Tell Brak 1–4 Mallowan’s Memoirs: Agatha and the Archaeologist (Mallowan) 193 Ma’mur of Waqfs (Jerusalem) 119–20 mandated territories and antiquities legislation 38–41, 48 logic of the mandates system 51–2 and guardianship of the past of 43–4 and Mandate A territories 48–52, 57–9, 74–5, 279 modernisation and guardianship 36–7 Palestine and Transjordan 95–8, 124, 137–8, 149–50 Man on Earth (Hawkes) 233–5

389

Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (Wilkinson) 285–6 Man 141 Mansoor, M. A. 279–80 Man in Time (Hawkes) 234–5 Manual on the Technique of Archaeological Excavation (Foundoukidis) 54–5 Mareotis (de Casson) 330 Mark Anthony 324–5 Marshall, John Hubert 168–70 Marston, Charles 84–5, 114–15, 132–5, 154–5, 184–5 Martin, John 331 Mashriq, the 58–9, 90–1, 192–3, 279–80 Maspero, Gaston 304–5 Maugham, Robin 331–2, 335–8 Maxwell, J. H. 262–3 Medusa 334–5 Megáli Idéa 321 Megiddo, Battle of 80–1 Megiddo excavations 75–6, 116–17, 128–9 Merneptah, Pharaoh 73 Meskalamdug of Ur 175–8 Mesopotamia antiquities and national legislation 186–7 archaeological mounds in 117–18 attractions of prehistory of 238–40 and Biblical Archaeology 83, 170–1 and crime fiction 191–4 notions of its antiquity 169–70 international interest in 161 material culture of 162 tourism to 183–4, 188–9 and Ur 174–5 writings on 165 Metheny, Evangeline 188 ‘Metroland’ 78–9 Metropolitan Museum 65, 299–300 Michigan University 65 Middle East (Morton) 58–9 Middle East, The (Polson Newman) 320 Miles, Geoffrey 140 Misr Air 69–70 Model T Fords 333 modernity 15–19, 191, 229, 273–5 Mohenjo-Daro civilization 168–70 Mond, Robert 84–5, 133, 285–6 Money, Sir Arthur Wigram 36–7 monotheism 172–3 Monthly Record of Anthropological Science, A 141 Montserrat, Dominic 283, 293–4 Moon of Israel: A Tale of Exodus (Haggard) 255–6

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390

Index

Morton, H. V. the biblical past in his writings 66–8 and Egypt 254–5, 258–9, 322–3 itineraries in the Middle East 259–60 journey from Alexandria to Siwa 327 and Palestine and Transjordan 63 special correspondent to Luxor 269–71 and travel guides 73–4 and Tutankhamun 275 Mosse, George L. 183–4 Most Ancient East, The (Childe) 217 motor travel 188–9 Mount Carmel excavations biblical narratives on the mount 66–8 during the mandate 246 female excavation team 236–8, 348–9 modernity and Stone Age on 218–29, 227–8 rescue of Stone Age caves on 354–5 writings on Neanderthals 232–4 see also Garrod Dorothy Mount Ophel declared a historical monument 118 disputes over ownership 149–50 and Tell ed-Duweir 128–9 excavations on 110–11 exchanges over access to 121–3 expensive concession to excavate 113–15 intense excavation of 109–10 and the Jericho earthquake 93 lack of spectacular finds on 116–18 ‘little history’ of 124 parcel-owners and their lots 122 Mount Scopus 93 Mount Zion 113–14 Mugharet al-Wad cave 225–6, 226 Mugharet al-Zuttiyeh 219–20 Muhammad Ali 321–2, 331 Mullineux, M. 183–4 Munich Agreement (1938) 290 Murder in Mesopotamia (Christie) 192–5, 197–8, 209–14 Murray, Gilbert 50–3, 311–13 Murray, Margaret 259, 289–90, 296–8, 343–4, 351–2 Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Egypt (Wilkinson) 285–6 Myres, John Linton 261–2 Nabataeans 319–20 Nagi, Muhammad 316–17 Nairn Transport Company 188–9 Napoleon 33, 321–2, 329–30 national patrimony 31 Natufian culture 217, 219–20

Nead, Lynda 108–9 Neanderthals 216–17, 230–8 Nebuchadnezzar 133–5 Necho II, Pharaoh 73–4 Nefertiti 294–5, 299, 302–7 Nefertiti Lived Here (Chubb) 303–6 Neo-Assyrian Empire 29 Neuville, René 224–5 Newberry, Percy 259, 296–8, 303 New Testament 66–8, 71–4, 91–2 New York World 111–12 Nicholson Museum 186–7 Nile Services and Palestine Tours (Thomas Cook) 73–4 Nile transport and travel 254 Nimrud (Kalhu) 174–5 Nineveh (Kouyunjik) 174–5, 239–41, 243–4 Notes from Egypt (Forster) 325–7 Notes on the People of Siwa (Cline) 336–8 Notes to Travellers by Road and Rail in Palestine and Syria (MacInnes) 72–4 Nottage, J. H. 70–1 Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA) 36–7 Office international des musées (OIM) See International Museums’ Office Ogden, Charles 185–6 Old Testament see Bible Ophel Circular (Garstang) 110–14 Oppenheim, Max von 242–3 Oracle of Ammon 258–9, 335–6 Ormsby-Gore, William 154–5 Oron-Orushkes, Zvi 125 Ory, J. 150 Osman, Hamdi 41–2 Ottoman Empire antiquities laws of 36–7, 40–2, 56, 121–3 archaeology in 44–5 architecture 103 areas ruled by 69–70 cast as ‘venerable and tolerant sovereign’ 160–1 and chronology of antiquity 39–40 collapse of 30–2, 80–1 and Egypt 265–6 mandate over territories represented as liberation 68 and modernization 91 and museology 85–6 practices of antiquity control 48–9, 97–8 procedures of petitioning 119–20 reforming decades of 345 rule of Palestine 77, 81, 96–7

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Index stereotype of as declining 165–6 state land in 48 transfer of imperial rule from 36–8 see Mesopotamia, Palestine, First World War Outline of History (Wells) 232, 259–60 Oxyrhynchus papyri 314–15 Palaeolithic cultures 229–32, 238–9 Paleo–Hebrew alphabet 133–5 Palestine administration of antiquities 121–3 Antiquities Ordinances 38–9, 48 and Armageddon site in 69–70 archaeological mounds in 117–18, 146 Assyrian invasion of 108–9 a base for imperial forces 70–1 battles fought in 72 and Biblical Archaeology 81–5 delivered after centuries of desolation 77 and Egyptian policies 262 expansion of interest in material past 64–6 expropriation of excavated land in 150–1 and foreign biblical and archaeological schools 142–3 Graeco-Roman sites in 320 guardianship and international oversight 45–6 and Haifa 220–1 and H. V. Morton 58–9 imperial travel in 70–2 and the International Archaeological Congress 74–5 and James Leslie Starkey 146–7 land ownership disputes 149–53 and the Mandate 31–2, 38–9, 43–4, 97–8, 137–8, 149–50, 154–5, 345–6 model regime of antiquities 52–3 modern archaeology in 83, 108–9, 114–15, 143–4 national tensions in 66–8 and Nelson Glueck 58–9 and Ottoman Empire antiquities laws 41–2 Ottoman rule in 80–1 Pavilion at Empire Exhibition 78–9 petitioning in 119–20 pilgrimage/Christian travel in 183–4 prehistory of 216–25 and rail travel 69–70, 74, 256–7 remote history of 66–75 urban planning in 106–7 tells in 117–18, 146 Palestine Archaeological Museum 85–92, 343–4, 347 Iron Age Hall displays 137–8

391

Palestine Education Department 119 Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) and Charles Marston 132–3 and City of David 110, 112–13 excavations in Jerusalem 108–9 mapping of archaeological sites for 169 and Petrie’s excavation at Tell al-Hasi 83 poor funding of 114–15 and Robert Macalister 114–15 securing concessions to excavate 113–14 Palestine Guide for Navy, Army and Air Force (Maisler/Yeivin) 220 Palestine Handbook (Luke/ Keith-Roach) 81 Palestine Pavilion Handbook and Tourist Guide 78–80 Palestine Post 88–90 Papadimos, Dimitri 331–2 Parennefer’s tomb, Amarna 302–3 Parker, Montague 108–9, 109–10 Parry, J. Wilson 141 Pearson, Carl 139–40 Peers, Charles Reed 56–8 Peet, Eric 296–8, 259, 286–7 PEF Annual 112–13 Peltours 254 Pendlebury, J. D. S. and Amarna excavations 287–9, 291–2, 295–6, 299–300 annual talks (1931 to 1936) 301–2 and collapse of British Egyptology 309 and Crete 287 and Mary Chubb 305 the press 302–3 use of Amarna artefacts 307–8 as war hero 308 Penn Museum (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) 65, 211–12 Penn, William 324–5 Permanent Mandate Committee (PMC) 49–50, 52–3, 119–20, 223 Peterson, Maurice 309 petitions 123, 151 Petra 70–1, 320 Petrie, Flinders and 1926 withdrawal from Egypt 260–1 and the Amarna Letters 285–6 and Biblical Archaeology 83–5 and Brooklyn Museum 299–300 collection of skulls from Palestine 141 and discovery of prehistory 259–60 and Egypt 262, 294–5 and Egypt and Israel 140 emphasis on pottery 283–4

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392

Index

Petrie, Flinders (cont.) and Lachish 131–2 and Galton Laboratories 138–9 grand narratives of human history 261–2 and Lankester Harding 343–4 and local native populations 241–2 and Naucratis discoveries 299–300, 314–15 publicity of 306–7 and skilled Arab workers 142 suggested that Jerusalem be dug up 99 and Tell ed-Duweir 140 views and narratives on race and history 141–2, 351–2 Petrie, Hilda 83–4 ‘Petrie’s Pups’ 83, 142–3, 146, 343–4 Pevsner, Nikolaus 278–9 Pharaoh Akhenaton, The (BBC) 303 Pharos and Pharillon (Forster) 321–2, 325–7 Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes (Bagnold) 333 Pike, David 108–9 Players’ Cigarettes 302–3 Plenderleith, Harold 53–4 plunder 33–5 Plutarch 329 Poidebard, Antoine 350–1 Polson Newman, E. W. 320 Pompey’s Pillar, Alexandria 327–8 Prehistoric Times (1865) 40–1 Progress of Hellenism in Alexander‘s Empire, The (Mahaffy) 314–15 Pro-Jerusalem Society (PJS) 46, 100 Ptolemy II Philadelphus 318–19 Ptolemy I Soter 314–15, 321–2 Puabi, Queen (Shub-Ad) 175–84, 211–12 Public Ledger 174 Pudsey, Fawcett 221–2 Qau (Qaw al-Kebir) 260–1 Qubayba 144–5 Qubayba ibn Awad see Qubayba Queen Elizabeth’s Egyptological Fund 300–1 Radiodiffusion française (RDF) 311–12 Radziwill, princess Gabrielle 12–13 rail travel 69–74, 90–1, 188–9, 252 Rehoboam, King of Israel 73–4 Reid, Donald 316–17 Rendel, Palmer, and Tritton (civil engineers) 221–2 Republican, The 172 Revelation, Book of 80–1 Revolution of Civilization, The (Petrie) 138–9

Richard Coeur de Lion 81 Richmond, Ernest Tatham 45–6, 97–9, 150–1, 221–4 Risdon, D. L. 140 Rivers, W. H. R. 168, 274 Rockefeller Jr, John 65, 86–7 Rockefeller Museum 86–7, 88 Roehrenbeck, Carol 34–5 Romance of Archaeology (Davis/Magoffin) 191 Roman Empire 33, 312–15, 324–5, 327–8 Royal Air Force (RAF) 4–5, 162–3, 350–1 Royal Anthropological Institute 260–1 Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) 325–7 Royal Cemetery, Ur 175, 186–7 Royal Corps of Signals 256–7 Royal Museums of Art and History, Belgium (MRAH) 299–300 Royal Society, Burlington House 301–2 Rue Rosette, Alexandria 327–8 Ruffini, M. F. 49–50 Rwanda 300–1 St George’s College, Jerusalem 125 Samaria–Sebaste ivories 90–1, 116–17 Samarra antiquities, Iraq 33–4 Samarra, Iraq 29, 217 Samuel, Herbert 78–81 Sawt-al-Iraq (newspaper) 46–7 Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra (Butts) 324–5 School of Alexandria (Nagi) 316–17 School of Athens (Raphael) 316–17 School of Fine Arts, Cairo 342 Shuckburgh, John Evelyn 29 Second World War Alexandria an imperial outpost during 325 and dream of international order of antiquities 56–7 and the Lachish letters 137–8 and the Long Range Desert Patrol 332–3 and the North African Campaign 256–9, 335–6 and scientific race categorisation during 139 travel increases during 70–1 Seleucid Antiochus III or IV 318–19 Sennacherib’s palace 130 Senussi 256–7 Service des antiquités 47–8, 264 Service Guidebook (Forster) 325–7 Sesebi, Sudan 260–1 Shaw, George Bernard 212–13 Shawqi, Ahmad 271 Shub-Ad, Queen see Puabi, Queen Shuqba cave, Wadi an-Natuf 219–20

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Index Side Notes on the Bible from Flinders Petrie’s Discoveries (Hilda Petrie) 83–4 Sidi Bishar 325–7 Silwan, Jerusalem 115–16, 120–3 Sinai Military Railway (SMR) 69–70 Siwa 314, 330–42, 337, 339 Siwan Customs (Mahmud Mohammad Abd Allah) 336–8 Siwa, the Oasis of Jupiter Ammon (Belgrave) 338–41 Smith, George Adam 113–14 and Tell ed-Duweir 131–2 Smith, Grafton Elliot 141–2, 168, 259–62, 274, 304 ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’ (Rider Haggard) 304 Smith, Sidney 130–1 Social Life in Ancient Egypt (Petrie) 294–5 Society of Biblical Archaeology 170–1 Solomon 90–1 Splendour That Was Egypt, The (Murray) 289–90 spoils of war 33–7 S.S. Karnak 255–6 Standard of Ur 175–8 Stanhope, Hester 212–13 Starkey, James Leslie agent of the mandate 154–5 and anthropology networks 141–2 and Biblical Archaeology 351–2 excavation of Tell ed-Duweir 131–3, 137–8, 147, 151–3 funeral of 125–9, 126, 127 and Lachish reliefs 131 land requisitioning 144–6 murder of 146–7, 149–50, 152–4 one of ‘Petrie’s Pups’ 142–3 posthumous representations of 143–4, 349–50 views on race and history 141–2 Steindorff, Georg 331 Stekelis, Moshe 216–17 Steuart-Erskine, Mrs 146–7, 318 Stoler, Ann Laura 31 Stone Age Implements and men 225–32 and Homo sapiens 229 Stone Age people, humanization, and affinity to modern people of 229–34 and racial and civilizational origins and hierarchies 202 in Mesopotamia 229–32, 238–40 Storrs, Ronald 100–1, 107 Strand Magazine 304 Suez Canal 281, 343–4

393

Sukenik, Elazar Lipa 59 Sulaymaniyah 238–9 Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan 102–3 Sumer 166–70, 189–90, 217, 294–5 Sumerian material culture, longevity of 166 Sumerian Art and Human Sacrifice (Woolley) 178–82 Supreme Muslim Council (SMC) 119–20 Swedenborg Hall 302–3 Syria and mandate support of British archaeologists 1–2 and the International Archaeological Congress 74–5 and new historical commission 52 Syrian Oblaq work 78–9 Tabun Cave, Mount Carmel 232–3 Tabun woman 234–5 Tall al-‘Amarnah (see also Amarna, Pendlebury) 260–1, 283, 288–9, 300–1 Tamari, Salim 85–6 Tank Corps 256–7 Tantawi, Ali 308 Tawfiq, Rida 64–5 Taylor, John G. 161 Tell al-Ajjul 348–9 Tell al-Asmar 305 Tell al-Hasi 83, 131–2 Tell al-Muqayyar see Ur Royal Cemetery Tell al-Mutesellim (Megiddo) 73 Megiddo excavations 65 Tell al-’Ubaid 162–3, 239–40 Tell Arpachiyah 166, 218–19 Tell Brak 1–4, 241–2 Tell ed-Duweir excavations and Babylonian destruction remains 133 collaboration at 142–4 discovery of the ‘Lachish Letters’ 133–8, 136 exceptional weight of 130 identifications, texts and sherds 128–38 and James Leslie Starkey 131–2, 154 and Lachish skulls 141 and land/labour disputes 149–53 and Olga Tufnell 348–9 ownership of 144–5 and Robert Mond 133 see also Lachish discoveries Tell el- Far‘ah excavations 84–5, 139 Tell Gezer (Jazar) 114–15, 128–9 excavations 74 Tell Jemmeh 83–4 Temple of Seti I, Abydos 76–7 Tepe Reshwa see Arpachiyah mound

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394

Index

Testament of Beauty (Bridges) 159 There Was a King in Egypt (Lorimer) 255–6 They Came to Baghdad (Christie) 194–6, 205 Thomas Cook 64–5, 69–70, 73–4, 252–5 Thomas, Julian 349–50 Thompson Campbell, Reginald 214 Thomsen, C. J. 82 Through Egypt in War-Time (Briggs) 325–7 Thutmose III 73, 80–1, 288–9 Times Book of Egypt, The 281 Times, The 112–13, 167, 172, 269–71, 273–4, 281, 303–4 Times Weekly (newspaper) 76 Tiye, Queen 296–8, 297, 302–4 Tomb of Miriam 97–8 Tombs of the Kings 109 Torczyner, Harry 133–5, 137 Toussoun, Omar Prince 334 Transjordan Ajloun site in 66–8 Antiquities legislation 40–1 and Biblical Archaeology 81–2, 320 Department of Antiquities 64–5 Emirate of 317–18 excavations of Samaria 56–7 and guardianship and international oversight 45–6, 64–5 and the International Archaeological Congress 74–5 and Lankester Harding 318–20 mandate, terms of 31–263–4, 96–7, 345–6 and Nelson Glueck 58–9 principal excavation sites in 64–5 Travellers’ Handbook to Palestine and Syria (Luke/Keith-Roach) 77–8 Travels in Africa, Egypt and Syria (Browne) 331 Treaty of Sèvres (1920) 36–7 Treaty of Versailles 30 Trevelyan, G. M. 229–30 Tufnell, Olga 129, 133–5, 146, 153, 272–3, 348–9, 351–2 Turville-Petre, Francis 219–20 ‘Tutancamden’ 277–8 Tutankhamun and the Parliament (Shawqi) 271 Tutankhamun’s tomb battle over access to 269, 271–2 compared to Amarna 299–300 compared to Ur 175, 184 discovery of 250–1, 261–2, 283–4 disturbance of 272–3 and E. M. Forster 330 and Egyptian museums 316 and Egyptian national feelings 264–5 exclusive rights of The Times 112–13

first observations of 249–50 frenzy around 294–5 and Harold Plenderleith 53–4 in popular culture 272–80 riches confined to Cairo Museum 186–7 and Rider Haggard 303–4 royal wife of 306–7 and Tutmania in popular culture 272–80 Ubaid culture 243–4 Underground Jerusalem (Vincent) 108–10 Underground Jerusalem (Warren) 108–9 UNESCO 232–3 United Kingdom see Great Britain United States 37–9, 162 University College London (UCL) 85 Ur of the Chaldees (Woolley) 69–70, 85, 166–7, 187–8 Ur railway junction 69–70 Ur Royal Cemetery and 1925 exhibition at British Museum 175, 186–7 abundance of objects from 162 access by rail 188–9 appeal of experience of materiality of 189–90 associated with cruelty and barbarity 350 as city of Abraham 351–2 compared to Arpachiyah 243–4 contemporary displays of 301–2 discovery of 159, 161–70 funding excavation of 184–7 grand discoveries at 217–18, 309 and Katherine Keeling 211–12 mass graves at 182–4 material riches of 178–82, 184–8 and popular culture 273–4 rewriting biblical histories of 170–5 sanctions law not extended to 244 Ussher, Archbishop James 39–40, 66–8, 216–17 Valley of the Kings 249–52, 281 Van Riper, A. Bowdoin 39–40 Vanished Cities of Arabia (Steuart Erskine) 318 Varley, W. J. 57–8 Vaux, Roland de 58–9, 351–2 Venus de Milo 33 Vincent, Louis- Hugues 108–11, 131 Wace, Alan 53–4, 316–17 Waddington, Hillary 308 Wadi al-Mugharah see Mount Carmel excavations

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Index Wafd party 268, 281 Wagons-Lits Co. 73–4 Wailing Wall 123 Wallis, Gilbert and Partners 277–8 Wall Street Crash 255–6 Waqf 93, 119–23 Warka 166 war monuments 182–3 War Office (WO) 29–30 Warren, Charles 108–10 Warren Pier 108–9 War Trophy Committee 33–4 Watani party 269–70 Wauchope, Arthur 52–3, 125 Waugh, Evelyn 275, 327 Weigall, Arthur 271, 287–9, 295–6, 315–16, 323–5, 336 Weil, Raymond 110–11, 114–15 Wellcome, Henry 132–3 Wellcome Historical Medical Museum 301–2 Wellcome Research Expedition see Tell ed-Duweir excavations Wellcome Research Institution 137, 153 Wells, H. G. 229–30, 232, 259–60 Western Desert 325, 330, 332–4, 341–2 Whitehead Morris 325–7 Who Were the Greeks? 212–13 Wilderness of Zin, Negev desert 169 Wilkinson, John Gardner 285–6 Winter, Jay 182–3

395

Winter Palace Hotel, Luxor 252–4 Woolley, Katharine 178, 211–12 Woolley, Leonard and the 1922 Amarna season 288–9 and Abraham 171–3 authored books on Ur 184–5 and Digging Up the Past 191 ecclesiastical background of 170–1 and gold discoveries 175–82 and the Hamoudi family 348–9 and histories of Ur 294–5 prime example of archaeologist/author 214 and private graves (PG) 183–4 publicizing Ur 186–7 and Queen Puabi’s head dress 147 and Robert Seymour Bridges 159–60 seen as a modern hero 349–50 and Ur 163–70, 186–8, 211–12 World Evangelical Alliance 84–5 Wright, S. Fowler 236 Wyke, Maria 323–4 Yeivin, Samuel 220 Yusra (digger) 236–8 Zarzi cave 238–9 Zeus Ammon 314 Temple of 336–8, 340–1 See Jupiter Ammon Zimmern, Alfred 11–12, 352–3