Murder (and Theft) in Mesopotamia … continued from World’s Oldest Museum

Under the Antiquities Law devised by Iraq’s newly appointed Honorary Director of Antiquities, Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), archaeological finds were to be divided equally between the finders and the kingdom of Iraq. Thus 25% of Woolley’s finds from Ur went to Philadelphia, 25% to the British Museum, and 50% remained in Iraq, where sadly many have been looted or damaged in recent conflicts. The final choice rested with the Director of Antiquities, though Ms Bell was enough of a realist to recognise that western museums must be able to retain some treasures by way of an incentive, and were often better equipped to restore artefacts and translate inscriptions. In some instances allocations were decided by the toss of a coin. But as a passionate Arabist, she was determined to preserve vital elements of Iraq’s cultural heritage for a new national museum, opened shortly before her premature death in 1926.

After the first session of haggling in 1923, Gertrude Bell wrote: It took us the whole day to do the division but it was extremely interesting and Mr Woolley was an angel. We had to claim the best things for ourselves but we did our best to make it up to him … The best object is a hideous Sumerian statue of a King of Lagash, about three feet high but headless.

When Agatha Christie returned to Ur in the spring of 1930, again via the Orient Express, the duty of escorting her on a tour of other archaeological sites in Iraq fell to the junior member of the team, Max Mallowan. Quietly spoken, he was 14 years younger and a lot shorter than Agatha, but very considerate. In September 1930, after much agonising by the bride-to-be, they were married in Edinburgh.

From 1932 the Mallowans formed a team of their own, in part self-financed, at other digs in the Near East. Agatha spent part of each day at her typewriter, drawing on recent experiences to produce best-sellers like Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and Murder in Mesopotamia (1936). The latter is Dedicated to My Many Archaeological Friends in Iraq and Syria and begins: Louise Leidner, the wife of a prominent archaeologist, joins her husband at a dig in Iraq – and behaves as if she is in fear for her life! When those fears prove to be well-founded, the great Hercule Poirot is called in to investigate a seemingly impossible crime. The Leidner character was based, somewhat transparently, on the volatile Katharine Woolley. Fortunately, she did not recognise herself, or if she did, took no offence.

After 12 seasons, beginning in 1922, excavations at Ur were concluded. Katharine acted as Site Director in the final season. Years of work remained to be done on thousands of artefacts and cuneiform inscriptions, mostly on clay tablets. Woolley continued to write about Ur for 20 years or more, while undertaking other archaeo-logical projects assisted by his wife. In 1935 he was knighted for services to archaeology. During World War Two he advised Churchill as a recruiter of the art experts and museum personnel known as the Monuments Men (and women), whose task was to protect cultural property in war zones, and recover art treasures stolen by the Nazis. As Monuments, Fine Art and Archives Officer Lt. Col. Sir Leonard Woolley, he observed that: Prior to this war, no army had thought of protecting the monuments of the country in which and with which it was at war, and there were no precedents to follow…. All this was changed by a general order issued by Supreme Commander-in-Chief [General Eisenhower] just before he left Algiers, an order accompanied by a personal letter to all Commanders…the good name of the Army depended in great measure on the respect which it showed to the art heritage of the modern world.

After Katharine’s death from multiple sclerosis in 1945, Woolley was free to make his own decisions about where to live, and with whom. An ill-advised liaison with a clergyman’s wife led to involvement in a costly divorce case and did serious damage to his finances. His decision to rent Sedgehill Manor from 1948 to 1957 (by the end of which time he was seriously worried that his money would run out) provided the newly-founded Shaftesbury & District Historical Society with access to a famous lecturer and President. Sir Leonard Woolley and I knew each other for longer than he knew anyone outside his own family – off and on wrote Noel Teulon Porter in his Introduction to As I Seem to Remember, a collection of Woolley anecdotes, reminiscences and extracts from two BBC radio broadcasts. Their association apparently went back to a dig, Woolley’s first, at Roman Corbridge near Hadrian’s Wall in 1906. He was a man of slight stature and no commanding appearance – but presence, yes! … Sir Leonard took a keen and constant interest in the Society and Museum. He appears in a photograph with NTP and three others taken when the Museum first moved to premises on Gold Hill in 1954 – not the current ones. With the support of NTP, Shaftesbury Grammar School teacher Frank Hopton and at least one student, he began a small-scale dig at Sedgehill. One of the students, the late Dave Roberts, recalled this episode in 2021. Illustrious visitors to Sedgehill might have to walk about a mile from Semley station. Woolley himself seemed able, like the Prince of Wales in 1899, to have fast trains stop at Semley to suit his personal convenience. Biographer HVF Winstone describes how the sage of archaeology was known to arrive home from Semley in the cab of the local coal merchant’s lorry. The Mallowans might call when driving between their main residence near Wallingford and their summer retreat at Greenway in Devon, bought in 1938. As I Seem to Remember was published by the S&DHS in 1962, when the final (9th) volume of the Ur Excavations report also appeared. Both were posthumous, as Woolley had died in 1960.

In the final report Woolley stuck with his conclusion of nearly thirty years earlier that he had found evidence of probably the world’s oldest museum. On the intact floor of a chamber of the Princess Ennigaldi-Nanna were half a dozen diverse objects found lying on an unbroken brick pavement of the sixth century B.C., yet the newest of them was seven hundred years older than the pavement and the earliest perhaps two thousand: the evidence was altogether against their having got there by accident. (Woolley, “Ur of the Chaldees”, 1950 edition, p.135) One of the objects, a small clay cylinder inscribed with cuneiform of the time of the building of the palace / nunnery, described another object that was itself now nowhere to be found: a brick dated to around 2100 BCE (about 1500 years before the construction of the palace) (Moudhy Al-Rashid 2025) This cylindrical clay tablet, Woolley decided, must have been an exhibition label from a deliberately curated collection of local antiquities. (ibid.)

Moudhy, our lecturer on a new date to be confirmed, has taken each of the objects, plus the drum / label and the person of Ennigaldi-Nanna, as the themes of chapters in a superb new book Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History. (Hodder, 2025) One reviewer declares it an ingenious, passionate “history of histories” … we vividly witness how lives across the millennia are revealed and connected.