WOOLLEY, AGATHA & ARCHAEOLOGY

I last came to this splendid place some ten years ago when my biography of Howard Carter was published.

Not for the first time was I the recipient of the hospitality of a truly wonderful institution and of an academic staff without whose immense knowledge and generosity I could not easily have written my earlier studies of Gertrude Bell and Leonard Woolley, or of the unveiling of the ancient world itself.

The place I left was much as it had been when the famous and infamous before me took out daily leases on those prestigious seats under that same familiar Reading Room dome.

Now the Library has gone but the space remains, improved despite the Englishman's inevitable suspicion of change, a feast for all people and all seasons, a place of conspicuous democracy and at times, as my subject Sir Leonard Woolley was to discover, of famous vendettas and personality conflicts.

But all in all, it is a place of discovery and of wonder that sends a slight shiver down the spine when you come here regularly, as I did for more than two decades, to look day in and day out at artefacts that record and pre-date the history of civilisation, to order up a daily ration of books or manuscripts, and dash from place to place between times to look through the voluminous correspondence between Directors and Keepers and their charges at far-flung archaeological sites.

It was a most satisfying existence and I saw the move from London to the West Country as purely temporary, an opportunity to write quietly, productively and economically in Devon's peaceful and beautiful surroundings, before returning to this fount of knowledge.

I saw myself as an active writer in perhaps the last flush of youth.

I return to an even more magnificent museum in what feels increasingly like the advanced stage of dotage, with little to show for my absence, except for a heavy burden of years. I have to confess that I have reached the stage of being liable to forget in mid sentence the question I set out to answer or, even worse, the subject under discussion - a particular disaster, let me tell you, if one takes on radio interviews. I have taken the precaution of bringing along a script today.

 Of course we are here to discuss Agatha Christie and her conversion to archaeology, but we can't do that without reference to the two men who were her mentors and guides, in more ways than one, LEONARD WOOLLEY and MAX MALLOWAN.

In the archaeological context she was very much the creature of Max's - and thus of Woolley's - making. If it had not been for the latter - or at any rate for his very readable articles in The Times and Illustrated London News (the nearest thing to television in its day) - she would not in 1928 have gone to Iraq (still called Mesopotamia even then), would not have met the man she was destined to marry, and in all probability would have remained simply the most prolific, successful and famous crime writer of all time. Enough in itself you may say.

But I think it possible that she might have remained also an unhappy divorcee, would probably have been less productive of ideas and books, and would most certainly have known little of Ur of the Chaldees,  or of Ur of the Early Dynastic Royal Tombs, much less of Nineveh or Nimrud, Arpachiya, Chagar Bazar or Tell Brak; or even of the pronunciation of those little known place names. She was of course well established as a writer when, inspired by Woolley's journalistic efforts, she went off to Ur by way of Constantinople and Baghdad, for the holiday of a lifetime after two unhappy years which culminated in divorce. She was 39 years of age.

Ur and the archaeological team gathered there were surely fashioned by fate for her arrival. Ur provided everything that was lacking in her life. Everything that her instincts cried out for and that had been denied her in the comfortable and somewhat hedonistic middle-class existence that she emerged from. It provided argument, friendship, rivalry, companionship, eccentricity, an abundance of character studies, and subject matter that was, as the egregious Poirot might have put it, precisely her cup of tea - from biblical history to espionage, from colourful Arabs to brainy epigraphists, mostly but not entirely Jesuits, a heady mixture of colourful and mainly eccentric assistants, a team leader who exercised almost dictatorial authority over his professional assistants and workforce, the charismatic gang leader Hamoudi, conducting Woolley's symphony with iron will and extravagant gestures, and a lone woman - Woolley's wife Katharine - who was viewed by all with trepidation. An able writer of detective stories, mysteries and who-dunnits could hardly have failed to make a mint out of Ur.

 Agatha, in her autobiography, said it well:

'I fell in love with Ur, with its beauty in the evenings, the ziggurat standing up, faintly shadowed, and that wide area of sand with its lovely pale colours of apricot, rose, blue and mauve changing every minute... The lure of the past came up to grab me... The carefulness of lifting pots and objects from the soil filled me with a longing to be an archaeologist myself. How unfortunate it was, I thought, that I had always led such a frivolous life.'

The excavation site of Ur was nothing more than a sand-covered mound inhabited by lions when Woolley took it over. (Students of its earlier history may recall that when Kennet Loftus went there in the mid 19th century for the Survey of India his beloved dogs were consumed before he could intervene to save them by the hungry lions then in residence). Such students may also recall that when Woolley returned to the family home at Bath he was waylaid by an eccentric local lady, Miss Tanner, who said, 'Oh you must be Mr Woolley who has been digging at Ur, a friend and I slept there once you know, about ten years ago, the Arabs called it Tell Muqayyar'.

'Yes, Madam,' said Woolley, 'but Tell Muqayyar was occupied by lions in those days.'

'Oh, I dare say', said the intrepid Miss Tanner.

Woolley and his team arrived on the scene in 1922, charged with the task of uncovering the ziggurats, palaces and ordinary homes of the place known from Genesis by its neo-Babylonian name of Ur of the Chaldees, birthplace of the Patriarch Abraham. By the time of Agatha's appearance late in 1928 the dig was nearing its end and the greater glories discovered not among the relics of the ancient city but in the pre- and early dynastic royal graves beneath the waste and rubbish of six thousand years or so, outside the perimeter wall.

Woolley had competed all along with the expedition across the Red Sea in the Valley of the Kings that had been going on simultaneously. He had competed on very unequal terms for space in the world's media against Howard Carter's gold laden tomb, but he had succeeded where few other archaeologists would have dared even to compete. Whatever else he may or may not have been, Woolley was a master of Public Relations, though he wasn't quite so good at what might be described as employer relations. Like most field archaeologists Woolley was always looking for more money.

I was amused to find in the correspondence between him and the directors of the two sponsoring museums, Sir Frederic Kenyon here at the BM and Dr Gordon at Philadelphia, a remark to the effect that Woolley's idea of a budget was the largest sum referred to in his most recent conversation. But Woolley's unique merit was his ability to appeal to the layman and the expert, to the wealthy connoisseur - even the idle rich - and not least to the press, even against odds such as Carter's contemporaneous finds at Luxor.

As it happens, the two digs had the special merit of providing this writer with a dual biographical challenge.

In a sense, one could hardly tackle Woolley without Carter too, especially since Carnarvon had sought the former as his assistant at Thebes in 1913, an invitation that might have changed the entire face of archaeological discovery in the 20th century. There was competition with the Carter biography but I have so far been able to claim Woolley as my own.

And what a medley of enduring and contradictory human characteristics he was, both as archaeologist and man - assured, polished, stoical in the extreme, brilliant if over insistent raconteur - as raconteurs tend to be -and a good writer with an easy style; yet vain to a degree, indifferent to the opinions and doubts of his peers and his seniors alike, and sometimes insensitive to the tribulations of his workers and colleagues - 'Too good' as his friend 'Rick', Mortimer Wheeler was to say of his archaeology - 'Too naive by half', as a High Court judge was to say of his penchant for strong women.

His feud with one of his earliest epigraphists Sidney Smith, a distinguished figure at this museum, pursued the latter to his deathbed and resulted in the two men having offices on different floors of the building whenever Woolley took up residence. Woolley always said that architects made the best field archaeologists. He reversed the order, however, by always working strenuously, sometimes tediously, at the drawing board on his own plans and surveys, even when he had highly trained architects around him. Both Max and Sinclair Hood regarded that as a sign of the chief's vanity.

Women were, by way of perhaps unfortunate metaphor, his Achilles' heel. His personal life was spent until he reached old age in the shadow of strong and wilful women who dominated his personal life and to a large extent limited his professional advancement. A man who goes to bed in one room with a length of string leading from his big toe to his hypochondriac wife's wrist in another room, so that she can tug on it at the onset of a headache, might be said to deserve his fate, or perhaps a sainthood. Woolley was not alone in his elected fate. The young Max Mallowan, just down from Woolley's old college at Oxford, joined the dig within a few months of Katharine's arrival on the scene.

Max, full of Continental blood on both parents' sides, was the typical English gentleman. I am sure he was well known to many in this audience so I need not go into detail, especially as his biographer is nearby. Enough to make my point is the fact that he was interviewed for the job not by Woolley but by Katharine, and that at the time he did not know who his new chief was but rather hoped that he might be related to the great Kent cricketer Frank Woolley. His first tasks at Ur were to brush Katharine's hair, give her daily massage, and apply leeches whenever a headache threatened. Not the immediate reward he had expected for an Oxford 'First'.

Agatha arrived at Ur two years after Woolley's marriage to Katharine.

I describe the extraordinary nuptials in my biography. Agatha soon decided that she could never 'like' Katharine, but she learnt to tolerate her.

Also in 1926, while Leonard Woolley was in England, fate decreed the premature death of another very strong woman, and another of my biographical subjects, Gertrude Bell, Director of Antiquities in the newly established Iraq and founder of the Baghdad Museum. It was her task each season to agree the division of the Ur finds between the Baghdad, Philadelphia and British museums. At the 1925 division of finds, Gertrude had come face to face with Katharine Keeling, as she was then. She unhesitatingly described the attractive and determined lady at Woolley's side, queening it among the hundreds of men of Ur, as 'dangerous'. Gertrude did not mince her words and another meeting might have been explosive. She did not much care for Woolley either in point of fact, 'brilliant as ever' but 'tiresome' she thought him, after the 1925 division of spoils. But at the same division she was accompanied by the distinguished scholar Lionel Smith, then an adviser to the new administration in Iraq, and when he supported Woolley in a difference of opinion over the disposal of one of the artifacts Gertrude muttered all the way back to Baghdad 'The traitor! The traitor!'.

By good fortune, Katharine had only just finished reading Roger Ackroyd when Agatha turned up. Katharine was impressed and for the moment at least relations were harmonious. Infact, relations were so good by the end of Agatha's initiation that she offered the Woolleys the use of her Cresswell Place house between seasons. The experience of living in the centre of things in London would inspire a series of moves for the Woolley's, trying one Chelsea house after another until Katharine pronounced herself happy in Embankment Gardens, and finally Royal Avenue, where the great and good were entertained in style - Allenbys, Curzons, Coxes, Anthony Blunt and Ronald Storrs, General Neil Malcolm, Sydney Cockrell, the peripatetic connoisseur neighbour Eumorfopoulos, and the odd archaeologist. The young Freya Stark was taken to Katharine's bosom, eventually setting up temporary home at the Woolley establishment when the keyholders were absent, remaining there on and off until 1939. A peerage, or at the very least a knighthood, was Katharine's precondition of a party invite, she declared.

I am afraid I must be discursive in this talk. I am anxious to convey the many influences that infused and enthused the young and prolific writer when she was first introduced to archaeology.

Woolley's great depth of intellect and knowledge went hand in hand  with a remarkable physical inheritance. He was a short man; 5ft 6ins. Almost exactly the same height as T.E. Lawrence with whom he spent a good deal of time early on in his career at the Ashmolean, in Egypt and at Carchemish, where, readers of Dead Towns and Living Men will recall, they were photographed together in Oxford blazers and caps, surrounded by Hittite stela. Despite their lack of height, both men were extremely strong and robust.

Woolley undoubtedly inherited his physical strength from a stoical father who, though prone to illness, was devoted all his life to the cold bath, winter and summer. Though he missed a year at Oxford through ill health, he still came away with an outstanding academic record, yet he never progressed beyond the livings of Clapton and Bethnel Green. The Revd George Herbert Woolley was a very determined man who was admired and feared by his children and grandchildren. As he grew larger in girth, and his bushy black beard grew thicker and longer, his grandchildren feared nothing so much as being held up to him to be kissed when they visited him in retirement in Essex or, finally, at Bath. He was a man of exceptional judgement in both arts and crafts, an outstanding amateur pianist and authority on Beethoven, who brought together a magnificent collection of old masters and contemporary drawing and painting, craft pottery and other baubles as Macauley would have put it. He ruined the family wine importing business, spending his long-suffering wife's small fortune on such things, refusing to sell anything when times were hard.

One can't help thinking of that family background when assistants at Ur are heard to complain that 5am is an early enough starting time, particularly when a long walk to the actual excavation is demanded of them, and that on the rare occasions that they are a few minutes late the chief is liable to suggest that they go to bed earlier. A 7pm finish to the working day, a quick bath and a meal leaves little leeway, one of them remarked. Woolley, needless to say, was the earliest starter and last finisher, not withstanding that most nights he was awakened by his wife pulling on the toe string.

The atmosphere at Ur reads rather like a Christie book, with touches of Lewis Carrol. It was charged with religion and religious observances from orthodox Judaism and Islam to just about every variety of Christianity; along with an extreme devotion to the work ethic; and with inevitable personal battles and animosities.

Another of Woolley's inheritances was an unquestioning faith, an orthodox Protestantism that coincided with Agatha's resolute Anglicanism. They were well suited, temperamentally and culturally. Max on the other hand was a lapsed Roman Catholic.

And I feel I should mention another and, academically speaking, more significant influence on Woolley which in its way played a part in the creation of that pervasive atmosphere.

In 1911, Aurel Stein the great Orientalist who had just taken over as Superintendent of the Indian Archaeological Survey, asked Woolley if he would be willing to put his (Stein's) finds in the British Museum in order. For a young man of limited experience, it was a flattering request. Woolley was greatly impressed by the man and his work. Here, early in Woolley's career, was someone who actually played the Great Game, who was closely mixed up with the Indian Survey and with the military intelligence activities of the powers on the Roof of the World, in the Pamirs and the upper reaches of the Khotan river. And Woolley was able to fill a large room here at the BM with an ordered arrangement of the Orientalist's finds. He described Stein's work as an 'unparalleled archaeological scoop'. His maps and his contacts amounted also to a remarkable intelligence coup in Kim's own backyard.

I am reminded that these days I walk my dogs on what are nowadays called the Kipling Tors at Westward Ho! where Stalky and Co played out their schoolboy pranks on the brow of the Atlantic and in the shadow of their school, the old United Services College. I often lose my canine charges, temporarily, in the nooks and crevices where Kipling, Dunsterville and the others hid from their masters and swapped tall stories with local poachers and n'er do wells. It was there, as I prepared this lecture, that I fell to thinking of Stalky and recalled that he met Dr Stein and became a close friend through the most bizarre of coincidences. He contracted severe malaria while serving as a Subaltern in Lahore and at his father's request was allowed extended leave in Paris in order to recuperate. In Paris he met a Hungarian nobleman and musician and the two men became so friendly that Stalky invited his new-found companion to spend a holiday in Lahore. There the Hungarian (his name was de Justh) met a fellow countryman, Dr Stein, teaching at Lahore College, and introduced him to Dunsterville who introduced him to Kipling. Of course, it was some years later that Woolley met Stein. Late in life Kipling and Woolley often met in Bath, a city with which both men had close ties, and conversation seems to have turned naturally to matters of religion and espionage. Woolley in fact dedicated his book on Abraham to his friend Rudyard Kipling.

As Meyer and Brysac put it with prescient contemporary overtones in their recent book Tournament of the Shadows, the 'covert uses of archaeology' tended to confirm the 'credible suspicions of rulers in Asia and the Middle East'. Stein was a Hungarian who became more British than the Brits and who, in the words of his biographer Jeanette Mirsky, 'mastered the fundamentals of how the real world works'. Woolley declared that Stein had made 'the most daring and adventurous raid on the ancient world that any archaeologist had attempted'.

 It was a feat that Woolley in different ways would try to emulate; a feat that would help to create other strands of fascination for a writer such as Agatha Christie - espionage, intelligence gathering and patriotic fervour. In a sense, one feels that the Central European contribution to Woolley's development manifested itself in Dr Leidner, a barely concealed portrait of the chief, in Murder in Mesopotamia, though Louise, the archaeologist's wife, 'lovely Louise' who is murdered by a blow from a heavy object - delivered by her husband according to the detective who knows all - takes centre stage.

Writers can always have the last laugh.

In a nutshell, when Agatha recovered from the breakup of her marriage and the effect of her famous disappearance in turning her into a veritable real life study of one of her own subjects, she could hardly have done better than to catch the Orient Express to Constantinople, and proceed overland to Ur Junction. By the time she arrived in that ancient city, made universally recognisable as Ur of the Chaldees by the Old Testament, she had acquired enough impressions and character studies to fill the pages of several books. I find it hard to believe, but I read somewhere that those books have sold altogether more than 100 million copies. Elsewhere I have seen the figure 2 billion mentioned. I won't quibble. If either is remotely accurate, we are in the presence of a literary phenomenon that is enough to make any other writer, however successful, green with envy, and which certainly makes dismal reading of my royalty statements.

I need not spend a great deal of time on the events of 1928-29. As we have seen, Katharine was already a devotee of Agatha's storytelling and was delighted to have the famous author on her patch, so much so that she invited her new friend back the following season, when she was destined to meet the young archaeologist Max Mallowan, who at that time was undergoing an appendectomy in London. It was of course a careful piece of matchmaking on Katharine Woolley's part.

The journey home at the end of the next season, 29 - 30, you may recall, took in Nippur, Diwaniyah, Ukhaidar, the necropolis of Nejef, the beautiful mosque of Karbala, a 'venemously offensive' young Political Officer who confided that 'all archaeologists are liars', and his loquacious wife, and a bathe in a salt lake with Agatha wearing pink dress and double knickers. And there was a meeting with the incomparable American missionaries of the Dutch Reformed Church, Gertrude Bell's very close friends the Van Esses. Dr Van Ess taught 'politicals' of all the nations Arabic according to the rules of Latin grammar. Nobody ever quite identified the ablative in Arabic. They went on overland by Model-T Ford to Mosul, Nineveh, Aleppo, and on to Greece and Delphi with the Woolleys, deferring always to Katharine's demands.

Could any novelist have asked for more?

For the young Mallowan, the advantages of a union with so successful and wealthy a young woman who was fascinated by archaeology, could hardly be overstated. For my part, however, I greet with great relief the account of Max's life as man and archaeologist written my friend Henrietta McCall, whose book has enjoyed an altogether excessive gestation. In truth, she should have delivered this lecture.

I am not at all sure that I have the complete measure of Max, partly because of the habit - which he seems to have derived to a large extent fom Woolley - of writing tongue in cheek, as it were. I suspect that it was the clandestine nature of some of Woolley's work with Hogarth, Lawrence and Campbell Thompson at Carchemish, and later with the Kitchener brigade in the Arab Bureau, that led him along a path better known to journalists than to archaeologists, of never spoiling a good story for want of a few facts. And of course Woolley was an inveterate story teller. He could never resist the temptation to divert from some important historical or archaeological theme to tell an anecdote about his adventures among the Turks, or a very improbable conversation with a German spy or a kaimakam or pasha or practised forger. It must be said that more than one academic who worked and lived with Woolley in Nubia, at Ur or Atchana, or who attended his very popular lectures, has described as 'extremely wearing' his habit of endless story telling, of trying too hard to be the resident raconteur of the party.

I am reminded of an abstract from the Proceedings of the British Academy in which Max writes of Cyril Gadd's journey with Peter Shinnie to join Woolley at Atschana-Alalakh.

According to Mallowan's version, Gadd found Shinnie a most 'agreeable' companion and colleague, but there was 'no evidence of any warm regard for Woolley.' One has the feeling that Agatha - like Max - had reservations, though so far as I know she only voiced them vicariously through her characters. Of course, Leonard Woolley like most people, was many sided in his personality. I cite Sinclair Hood in my biography. As a young archaeologist he knew CLW well, at the British School in Rome and at excavations, enjoyed his yarns, and was most impressed by his willingness to confess when he was wrong, even to the most junior members of a class or dig. According to several of his students, Woolley would often tell young aspirants in archaeology, 'never be afraid to admit that you are wrong; it is the surest way of learning and remembering something'.

Pity he was not able to convince his wife of the same truth!

You may remember that it was she who insisted 'Well, of course it's the Flood', when Woolley dug down to the Ubaid level at Ur and found evidence of mud rather than the virgin soil he had expected. 'That was the right answer', said the dutiful husband with an implied dig at his assistants. Evidence of the biblical, or perhaps a Sumerian, deluge was more grist to his propaganda mill and it brought a new wave of wealthy visitors to the site already made famous by his graphic descriptions of the birthplace of Abraham. Many visitors were quite convinced that they had seen the actual home of Abraham and his family.

I must retrace my steps. After Agatha's eventful journey home in 29-30 escorted by Max as far as Athens, they joined up with the Woolleys and were introduced to the art of nursing Katharine on the hoof. They were married as soon as they arrived home in 1930 and set up the marital home at Cresswell Place, before Max returned to Ur.

He was not there for long, however. He readily accepted Dr Campbell Thompson's invitation to join him at Nineveh. Apart from anything else, there was clearly room for only one women at Ur. Katharine it seems had advised Agatha to wait for two years at least before she tied the knot for a second time. It would, she thought, be 'very bad for Max at his age to think he can have everything he wants'. Before Max and Agatha left London, Leonard had called at Cresswell Place in a state of high embarrassment. He stuttered something about the difficulty of having anyone other than archaeologists at Ur. 'What I thought - what we thought - I mean what we both thought'. Agatha could guess what he was trying to say.

In any case, Ur was almost exhausted. Robert Bridges the Poet Laureate had set the seal on it with his 'Testament to Beauty;' which had started out as a desire on the Poet's part to see for himself what he had read about in The Times, that 'holocaust of treasures' as he called it.

From then on Agatha followed the archaeological trail with mounting enthusiasm and knowledge, producing of course her play Akhnaton, following a visit to Carter's workplace in the Valley of the Kings, as well as her Mesopotamian based thrillers. Nile and Euphrates became familiar settings to her legions of readers.

Max and Agatha made regular visits to the Woolleys at Aleppo (al-Mina and Atchana) after the Syrian excavation began in 1934 in the aftermath of Ur. Before  Atchana, of course, there was the visit to India on behalf of the Government, when Woolley was able to recommend his friend Mortimer Wheeler for the Indus Valley job.

In 1937, after the extensive dig at Nineveh in which Agatha had become almost passionately involved, Max went on to Tell Brak, assisted by Hamoudi who had deserted his old master Woolley and left one of his sons in charge at Atchana. Another memorable assistant at this time who contributed to Agatha's lexicon of characters was Louis Osman, who would become a distinguished creative goldsmith in years to follow, and who was known as 'Bumps', from his description of the Arabian 'Tell'.

Just before war came in 1939, Freya Stark followed the Woolley circus to the Syrian digs too, Tell Brak and Atchana, and caught a rare sight of Katharine, ' friendly and all cheerful'. Agatha's daughter Rosalind came out too at this time, to take over draughsman duties from her hopelessly inadequate mother.

 It was the writer Nigel Dennis who gave us some of the most penetrating insights into Agatha's mind. He put his finger on her devotion to Science Fiction, to her solid Anglicanism which was very much in line with Woolley's orthox and unquestioning belief, and on her alleged authorship of the remark: 'An archaeologist makes the best husband possible, the older you get the more interest he takes in you'; despite Agatha's denial that she invented the observation or even found it funny.

Nigel Dennis landed me in the same sort of trouble when in the course of reviewing my 'Illicit Adventure' he insisted that one of Gertrude Bell's Syrian photographs I had used, showing women of the Howaitat tribe, in fact portrayed TE Lawrence among the badawiyah, the desert ladies, complete with familiar indigo thobs and with no burqa or face mask. I always had my reservations about the identification, though many Arab friends agreed with Nigel. But from the wrath of those strange gentlemen whom the FO and MoD still send round the academic corridors of England to make sure that none of us betrays the Empire or strays too far from the official line, you would think that the very idea spelt the end of Western civilisation. I acquired an MI6 file so interesting that, according to inside friends, the then Foreign Office Minister Tim Renton sat spellbound by it when he was supposed to be despatching a visa to me at London airport. Needless to say, I missed the plane.

And so, in a sense, I come in a circular way to that remarkable combination of Woolley, Max, Agatha and Archaeology, via scholarship, academic co-operation and dispute, espionage and literature. In Agatha, all the ingredients I cite came together with such popular force that they contributed significantly to perhaps the most successful literary phenomenon in any language since the King James Bible and Shakespeare.

But, when all is said and done, she was not really - nor did she ever claim to be - an archaeologist, as was Gertrude Bell, for example, by dint of taking up challenges like the early churches of Anatolia as assistant to the learned Professor Ramsay, or the Palace of Ukhaidar, or the Ur finds for that matter; measuring and classifying as she went. Agatha helped and often inspired Max and, gave him and his mentor the kind of immortality to which few archaeologists can aspire. That was her contribution. She remained predominantly the prolific novelist.

As for Leonard Woolley, his life grew ever more distant from many of the people who admired him and sought his friendship. His coterie of close friends stood by him almost to the end, but Katharine wore most of them down. Among the very few close friends who were able to weather the onslaught of Katharine was General Sir Neill Malcolm, Woolley's old chief-of-staff from the days when, as the Senior Intelligence Officer at Port Said he, Woolley, commanded Lord Roseberry's yacht Zaida, before the Turks sank it. It was Malcolm who lent his Mill House in Wiltshire to the Woolleys whenever they needed refuge and it was he who raised the funds that made the Atchana excavation possible. Woolley dedicated his book on the subject to his old military chief.

Katharine died soon after the end of the Second World War. That awful muscular disease which left her in hopeless, ironic dependence on Leonard at the end, might well have accounted for much that was inexplicable in her lifetime. And after she had gone, he moved to Worten Mill in Kent and to a liaison with another woman that was to prove even more costly than his first encounter. There were other moves, perhaps the happiest of them to Sedgehill Manor near Shaftesbury in Dorset which he rented in 1948, when he had completed his last major excavation, finished trying to cope with the opposite sex, and enjoyed a few years of tranquility.

Before Leonard left that scene for one of his last visits to Syria and the Amq Plain, Max and Agatha went to Dorset see him, and Agatha noticed how ill at ease he was. She read him a draft version of the verse she had written in Lewis Carroll vein for her biographical sketch Come Tell Me How You Live:

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.

There was a sting in that last line.

Perhaps for an expert verdict on Woolley's major achievement, its affect on Agatha and those like her who are fascinated by the earliest glimmerings of Civilisation, we should turn to an authority whose father must have known exactly the course of his progeny's life and work - Samuel Noah Kramer. In his encyclopaedic work The Sumerians, published in 1963 just three years after Woolley's death, he wrote:

 'We turn to Biblical Ur, or Urim as it was known to the Sumerians, the city which was excavated from 1922 to 1934 with skill, care and imagination by the late Sir Leonard Woolley.... Through his writings its royal tombs, ziggurat and "Flood-pit" have almost become household words.'

Of course the funeral processions in which the servants and retainers of deceased kings and queens paid their last respects before themselves drinking from a poison chalice and taking their leave of the world were described graphically by Woolley himself in The Times and ILN, and inevitably were instrumental in convincing the young crime writer that she must go post haste to Ur.

But there are one or two gems that Agatha seems to have missed and which might have served her and other writers. For example, the first known physician, in Sumerian an a-zu, whose actual name was Lulu, recorded on one of Woolley's tablets. Now there's a find that the Royal College of Physicians might some day pay homage to, perhaps with a smart blue plaque.

But it is Professor Kramer's Legacies of Sumer, which I can only deal with in passing here, that fixed Ur in particular - capital of Sumer at three different periods - in the minds not just of Agatha and the youthful Max Mallowan, but in the minds of all thinking men and women. By the same token, Kramer acknowledges Woolley's contribution to our understanding of the earliest civilisation. He who in his own words 'knows the mostest about the leastest', lists them thus:

Creation of the Universe, Creation of Man, Creation Techniques, Paradise, The Flood, The Cain-Abel Motif, The Tower of Babel and the Dispersion of Mankind, The Earth and Its Organisation (with biblical echoes in Deuteronomy 32:7-14 and Psalm 107); The Personal God (of 'Nahor' Genesis 31:53), Law (from Hammurabi to the present), Ethics and Morals, Divine Retribution and National Catastrophe, The Plague Motif, The 'Job' Motif of Suffering and Submission; Death and the Nether World.

Not a bad haul.

 As for Woolley himself, I think of him at the very last, still catching trains and buses around the country in order to deliver his popular lectures, never having learned to drive a car, and at the very last going out one day to give a talk, stopping irresistibly to visit a craft sale and buying a bargain or two, then going on to the dentist to have all his remaining teeth extracted, before catching the train home and calling it a day.

His utter inability to cope with women had deprived him of his home and most of his money. In the last few weeks he had still engaged in argument and dispute with the world's great scholars, put the last touches to the Ur report here at the BM, and composed at the instigation of his friend Julian Huxley, The Beginnings of Civilization. His contribution to UNESCO's History of Mankind was completed while he was residing at Winchester as the guest of a kindly businessman. His brother and his formidably learned sisters were among the last callers at Kingsworthy Court as the house was called, along with Mortimer Wheeler and his wife Margaret, the Huxleys and Max and Agatha, before his voluntary entry into a London nursing home.

It was I feel the kind of ending that Agatha herself might have contrived.