1928-1930: The City of Ur
The lure of the past came up to grab me. To see a dagger slowly appearing, with its gold glint, through the sand was romantic. I fell in love with Ur, with its beauty in the evening, the ziggurat standing up, faintly shadowed, and that wide sea of sand with its lovely pale colours of apricot, rose, blue and mauve changing every minute.
--Agatha Christie, An Autobiography ![[threesome]](21701725_threesome.jpg)
The British Museum | Max Mallowan, Agatha Christie, and Leonard Woolley at Ur, 1931. The ruins at the biblical city of Ur were discovered in the 1840s by English geologist William Kenneth Loftus, but excavation work was not resumed in earnest until the end of the First World War. |
Agatha Christie had read the exciting reports of the ancient city of Ur that began appearing in The Illustrated London News in 1925. The site was being excavated by the English archaeologist Leonard Woolley, and since 1925 some of his finds had even rivalled those emerging from the tomb of Tutankhamun in Egypt. On Agatha's arrival at Ur, she was made welcome by Katharine Woolley. Katharine had been reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, one of Agatha's murder mysteries, and had made all the young men on the dig read it too. Leonard Woolley himself took Agatha round the vast site, and made sense of the ruins for her so that she could imagine the lives of the ancient inhabitants. The excavations, the companionable life in the expedition house, the exotic landscape and the fabulous objects all captivated Agatha's imagination. She readily accepted an invitation from the Woolleys to return at the end of the following season. Excavations at Ur The importance of our archaeological material is that it throws light on the history of men very like ourselves, on a civilisation which is bound up with that of today.
--Leonard Woolley, Digging Up the Past, (1972) The name of Ur (modern Tell al-Muqayyar) was familiar from the Old Testament as the birthplace of Abraham (Genesis 11:29-32). The city had been identified as early as 1850 by Sir Henry Rawlinson from inscribed bricks brought back from the site. In 1849 the English geologist William Kennet Loftus saw the ruins known as Tell el-Muqqayar (the 'pitch-built hill') and wrote an enthusiastic account of the possibilities they might present. From 1854 onwards various small expeditions were made, but it was not until October 1922 that Charles Leonard Woolley was appointed leader of a major expedition to Ur. It was sponsored jointly by the British Museum and the University Museum of Pennsylvania.  | |
| Thinking Point | | | How is your reading of Agatha Christie's crime novels enhanced by learning about Christie's archaeological work and observations? | | |
Woolley's excavations produced spectacular results. He concentrated first on unearthing a vast temple tower or ziggurat, built of baked bricks. The ziggurat had once stood about 12 metres in height, the summit approached by three converging flights of stairs. More sensational still was the discovery in 1925 of the Royal Cemetery, dating to about 2500 BCE, which produced some of the most beautiful Sumerian artefacts to survive from ancient Mesopotamia. They included the Royal Standard of Ur and the Ram in the Thicket. Gertrude Bell No tigress could have safeguarded Iraq's rights better.
--Max Mallowan, Mallowan's Memoirs, (1977) Gertrude Bell had been a frequent visitor at Ur, having known Woolley since 1911. Bell was born in 1868. She studied history at Oxford, and during the First World War worked in Mesopotamia behind enemy lines gathering information for the British. She was a pioneer in desert travel, a writer, an archaeologist, and a brilliant cartographer who had drawn the only maps of the area available at the time. In 1922, King Faisal of Iraq appointed Gertrude Bell honorary director of antiquities in Baghdad. She created the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, establishing a new system whereby Iraq received a larger and better share of antiquities. At the end of each season, the Museum's director would decide which antiquities western excavators could take home to their own museums. Bell came to Ur at the end of the 1925-6 season, and Max Mallowan, then a general field assistant to Leonard Woolley, described her as a 'tigress' in the division of the objects. Bell died in 1926 after taking an overdose of sleeping pills, whether by design or accident is not clear. Her legacy included a gift of money to help found the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, which was to sponsor Max in many future excavations. Murder in Mesopotamia You would have made a good archaeologist, M. Poirot. You have the gift of re-creating the past.
--Agatha Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia, (1936) ![[mesopotamia]](21701725_meso.jpg) | | Matthew Pritchard | | Book jacket by Robin Macartney for the first edition of Murder in Mesopotamia, the Crime Club, Collins, 1934. |
The action of Murder in Mesopotamia takes place in an archaeological dig house. Although the novel was not written until 1936, many of the characters are clearly based on participants in the Ur excavations. The most obvious parallel can be made between the character of Louise Leidner, the fascinating if highly assertive wife of the expedition leader, and Katharine Woolley. Agatha Christie filled the novel with details of excavation work: washing mud from the surface of objects, or working for hours carefully cleaning away the soil from a find. She even included descriptions of grave goods that she saw in real life at Ur. The suspense of the novel lies not only in the murder, but also in the difficulties that emerge when a disparate group of individuals start living and working together in an isolated place, in extreme conditions. The setting was a typical expedition house, self-contained with a large interior courtyard and a flat roof. It provided a variation on a familiar device: a restricted group, one of whom must have committed the murder. Meeting Max He was a thin, dark young man, and very quiet.
--Agatha Christie, An Autobiography ![[max]](21701725_max.jpg) | | Rosalind Hicks | | Max Mallowan at the time of his wedding to Agatha Christie, September, 1930. |
In March 1930, Agatha came back to Ur in the middle of a five-day sandstorm. Everyone was busy with the end-of season tasks, and to entertain her guest, Katharine ordered one of her husband's field assistants, Max Mallowan, to take Agatha on a tour of the surrounding countryside. Agatha tried to remonstrate--she felt sure that a young man would not wish to take a strange older woman on a visit of sites at the end of a long season. Max and Agatha set off and soon fell into a comfortable relationship. On the way home, at Istanbul, Agatha discovered that her daughter was dangerously ill, and Max insisted on accompanying Agatha to England. Their friendship deepened into love, despite an age difference of nearly 15 years. They were married in Scotland in September 1930 and spent their honeymoon travelling slowly across Europe. At Athens they parted, Agatha to England and Max to Ur. Woolley had made it clear to Agatha that as Max's wife she would not be welcome at Ur. Max resolved to resign and accept the invitation he had received from Reginald Campbell Thompson to join his excavation at Nineveh. |
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