Carchemish - A Kurdish Glee Club with college trimmings

Thomas Edward Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) attended the City of Oxford High School for Boys during the years 1896-1907 before studying history at Jesus College, Oxford, where in 1910 he gained a First Class Honours degree largely based on an outstanding thesis on Crusader castles which had involved a lengthy walking tour in Palestine and Syria. He then joined the British Museum’s excavations of the ancient Hittite capital at Carchemish on the River Euphrates under the direction of D.G. Hogarth who would become his mentor and of whom he once said, ‘I owe every good job ... I've ever had in my life.’

The digging season of 1911 was the first to be carried out at the site for thirty-years. Having set up the digs in March, Hogarth handed over to Reginald Campbell Thompson, previously an assistant in the Egyptian and Assyrian Department of the British Museum, who ran the site with Lawrence as his assistant until July of 1911. The field campaigns of years two, three and four were under the directorship of C. Leonard Woolley, an experienced archaeologist who became best known after the war for his work at the ancient Sumerian city of Ur in present day Iraq. Looking back from beyond the war years, Lawrence remembered the time spent digging at Carchemish as a golden age, with a young Syrian Arab assistant named Dahoum as his almost constant companion. “We were there for four years,” he recalled, “and it was the best life I ever lived.” 

Lawrence and Woolley with Dahoum seated to the far right next to Hamoudi

Throughout the four years that the site was excavated before war interrupted diggings Carchemish attracted attention from scholars and serious travellers from Europe and America. Among them were engineers, archaeologists, soldiers and diplomats, all requiring hospitality and usually a tour of the site, prompting Lawrence to describe them as worse than fleas. One such flea was a young missionary teacher from the Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut), Maynard Owen Williams, who arrived in 1913 and wrote an account of the British Museum’s excavations where Lawrence makes one of his earliest appearances in print in the popular and widely-read newspaper, the New York Sun (21 September 1913). Williams, a 25-year-old graduate of Kalamazoo College, Michigan, was a keen observer and recorder in both the written word and as an early pioneer of travel photography. For the next fifty years he would make a significant contribution to the National Geographic Magazine as its first foreign correspondent. 

His coverage provides a picturesque and unique insight into the lifestyle of the archaeologists at Carchemish. “‘Both Woolley and Lawrence are disappointing archaeologists,” he wrote. “I expected to find grey-haired old men with spectacles and a scholarly stoop.” Williams, writing in the year prior to the Zin survey, described Lawrence as: “...apparently in his early twenties, a clean-cut blond with peaches and cream complexion which the dry heat of the Euphrates Valley seemed powerless to spoil. He wore a wide-brimmed Panama, a soft white shirt open at the throat, and Oxford blazer bearing the Magdalene College emblem on the pocket, short white flannel ‘knickers’, partly obscured by Scotch decoration hanging from the belt, which did not, however, obscure his bare knees, below which he wore heavy grey hose and red Arab slippers.” 

Williams continued with his theme of mock denigration: “Woolley is hopeless as an archaeologist.  He is young and friendly and as companionable as a college chum.  Surely not the stuff of which archaeologists are made.” The author, though, was only teasing his readers and had not been fooled by the perceived ‘romance’ of the trade. “But I fancy,” he wrote, having already guessed the truth, “that these two young men are competent to hold down the Carchemish 'digs' for a while at least; for better than their years of excavating and their skill in using French, German, ancient and modern Greek, Turkish and Arabic, is their remarkable knowledge of men. I cannot give a correct estimate of their worth as archaeologists, but I do say that they know more about handling Orientals than any man I have met during my two years in Syria.” It was a pertinent observation and the key to why Lawrence would later be so successful in waging unconventional warfare in the deserts of southern Arabia with an irregular native force. 

 

Carchemish (Karkemis) with part of the workforce

Williams then went on to describe a memorable evening spent with the archaeologists as their guest at what he called ‘A Kurdish Glee Club with college trimmings’. He had walked for miles through a pitch black night as a thunderstorm raged, one of those severe weather fronts that from time to time swept across the valley of the Euphrates lighting up the landscape with electrically charged flashes and filling the warm night air with booming cracks of thunder. One such illumination showed Williams that he was standing on the very precipice of a test shaft some 20 feet deep that the archaeologists had sunk a short distance from the house. He was hugely relieved when Hamoudi, the site foreman, answered his hammered arrival and ushered him into the excavators’ cosy residence. He was heartily welcomed by the occupants of the house who in a show of international solidarity graciously accepted this young American in his college football sweater, emblazoned with a big orange K. Sartorially, he had stiff competition that night as Lawrence was sporting a white Magdalen blazer trimmed with red and Woolley one of bright green, trimmed with white. “It was,” Williams wrote, “if one overlooked the Kurdish musicians huddled at the far end of the room, a most ‘collegey’ looking group. The air was thick with smoke from Hogarth's pipe and Woolley’s cigar, and the wind outside could whistle chilling tunes without detracting from the cosiness of the low room and its dark, rich hangings.” 

Carchemish Expedition house interior

Williams had seen much on his travels to inspire him to write or photograph but the scene he was about to witness was unlike no other. Even before the music started the hushed room was charged with an electric atmosphere that complemented the atrocious conditions outside the shuttered windows where a wind was howling around the house like a fury. A grizzled Kurd sat quietly awaiting his turn to sing with his shepherd's pipe across his lap. In his deep-set eyes there was a far-away look. The Kurd seated beside him was a true man of the desert who Williams describes as “swarthy of skin and clear of eyes, his thin lips compressed to a narrow line, his sun scarf draped gracefully around his head and neck.” The musical instruments that the men carried were of particular interest to Williams. He had even seen one of them illustrated on a three-thousand year-old Hittite carving. When the first man began to pluck at his instrument it was with the skill of a hundred generations animating his fingers. “Certainly it was no modern music that came from the mandolin-like affair with the long neck and the small body,” recalled Williams. “It was a spirit of the ancient days returned to play for the men who had rediscovered the site of the brilliant Hittite capital.” 

What happened next is best described by Williams himself: 

“Hogarth rapped the ashes from his pipe and threw his leg over the arm of the easy chair. Lawrence, the blond Oxonian, curled down into the throne-like seat, in which his white suit stood out from the soft-toned background of a Persian rug. Woolley motioned the musicians to begin. The accompaniment seemed to be the echo of the winds that swept across the Euphrates and moaned as they passed on across the city of ruins. But it was something different when the old singer blew a few notes on his pipe. The windy wastes were now inhabited. The spirit of man animated the scene with the sad, shrill cry of a creature in pain... The figures of the room were blotted out. This was no concert music, designed for bright lights and well-dressed audiences. A soul was stirring in that flute, an out-of-door spirit communing with its God across vast distances, but with a sense of sympathetic nearness. He began to sing. I started at the first note. It was a protest against the wrongs of the Angel of Death, a plea for mercy at the hands of a determined despot. Each note was wrung from the heart of a despondent soul, fearing, pleading, crying out for a relief that would never come... The eyes of the singer were fixed; the cords of his throat were visible under his swarthy skin. The veins of his forehead stood out under his dark kaffiyeh, and with each line he seemed to swallow, to choke back a sob that was springing to his lips.  For some time I could not turn my head. I had forgotten the others. I could not understand the words of the singer, but the music wrenched my heart.  I turned to Woolley and asked what the man was singing. It was the lament of a Kurdish woman whose husband, Said Ahmed, the greatest of warriors, had been brought home dead. I understood the sorrow of the song, its harrowing complaint against an unkind Fate. 

Then, in an instant, the music changed. The notes were the same; the rhythm was unaltered. The singer was as still as if he were carved out of rock, but the soul-stirring complaint of the bereaved wife at the death of her loved one was changing to the cunning, low, tense song of a Jael at the side of Sisera. Revenge was taking place of despair. Hatred was blotting out womanly love. The funeral chant was fast becoming a battle-song, in which the hatred of a race was stirring murder in the hearts of her hearers. This woman, after kneeling by the side of her husband's dead body, had raised herself to a proud height, and with outflung arms like Davidson's “France” was praying that his tribe would avenge her husband's death. A Fury, with ghastly face and disordered hair, was hurling Death back upon itself, was already sucking sweetness from the thought of pillage and bloodshed. A note of victory crept into the awful chant. Then Deborah's song of conquest and thankfulness burst forth - cruel, menacing, exultant. In a moment it was over. Only the shrill sound of the pipes remained. The woman, having seen her tribe depart on its mission of revenge, was once more at the side of her loved one, whose cold lips would not respond to her long, passionate kiss." 

Other than Lawrence's own letters home to his family, I think there is no better contemporary description of a day in the lives of the Carchemish team in their expedition house. It was certainly an evening that Williams would not forget. Some twenty years later and after Lawrence had achieved worldwide fame he made a point of writing to remind Lawrence of the occasion and the fond memories it still held for him. It was 1932 and Williams had long been a key National Geographic contributor. In his letter to Lawrence he asked if he would like to write an article, "one that would lend itself to photographic illustration and related to geography or some other non-political phase of your life and travels". Unfortunately, nothing came of his enquiry and Lawrence continued with his boat development work for the Royal Air Force until his retirement on 25 February 1935 and subsequent death in a motorcycle accident less than three months later.  

"Be sure my kindest regards, linked with happy memories, are yours," Williams wrote. Those last poignant words written to the 'clean-cut blond' of Carchemish recall a simpler time when desert winds swept across the city of ruins like a Kurdish lament carrying the dreams of two young men beyond Arabia to a world as yet undiscovered. 

The life and work of Maynard Owen Williams needs further exposure than this brief article can provide. Be sure to check out his work which can be found on the web and in the archives of the National Geographic Society and the Kalamazoo College. As a pioneer of travel photography he was more than just a self-described "camera-coolie and a roughneck". Having travelled by his own estimate 25,000 miles per year for more than a quarter of a century his efforts produced more than 2,250 self-illustrated pages in the Society's prestigious magazine. His secret to staying out of danger in some of the most dangerous of situations was in meticulous advance planning. As he put it: "Helter-skelter adventure and work of solid scientific worth do not go together as a rule."