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." 

Theft of T.E. Lawrence's letters

The Times of London reported today that handwritten letters of T.E. Lawrence have been stolen from the offices of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) under the heading 'Thief snatches Lawrence of Arabia's historic letters'. In the letters, which are more than 100-years old, Lawrence of Arabia discusses his involvement in what the newspaper describes as a 'devious archaeological expedition'. Felicity Cobbing, the curator of the archive, said the letters were stolen by a “gloating thief”.

“They’re going to be very difficult to shift because they’re well known,” Ms Cobbing said. “They were probably taken by somebody who likes to look at things and gloat in their own privacy.”

Lawrence and C.L. Woolley had been invited by the PEF to provide archaeological cover for Royal Engineer surveyors under the command of Stewart Newcombe who were operating in the desert region south of the Gaza-Beersheba line in southern Palestine as part of a secret survey carried out on behalf of the British War Office.

PEF Quarterly Statement

It is thought the theft of the letters occurred between November 2013 and January last year and only came to light after it was revealed by Anthony Sattin, the author of Young Lawrence, who was the last person to see some of the stolen material whilst researching his book. Having left the file on a table to be put away by the archivist Sattin believes that an opportunist took the documents when he left the room.  

“The PEF had a very relaxed way of handling their archive,” he said. “They only found out when someone else requested the material and it wasn’t in the folder.”

Ms Cobbing said that the PEF had “toughened up” its security. “It was a horrible reality check because as an archive, the whole reason for us existing is to promote research and scholarship.”

The offices at the PEF are small and intimate and admittance is normally by appointment by people genuinely interested in researching the work of the organisation or the many personalities connected to it. Kitchener, Lawrence and Newcombe are well represented in the archives which date back to 1865 when the society was founded. The PEF's offices also house a unique collection of photographs, pictures, maps and antiquities. The organisation describes itself as the "oldest in the world created specifically for the study of the Levant, the southern portion of which was conventionally known as ‘Palestine’. The PEF is a major bridge and information resource for the public and academic community."

NOTE: Lawrence once wrote to Colonel Wavell admitting that when he first received Wavell's book The Palestine Campaigns his first vanity was to look himself up in the index. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Anthony Sattin for acknowledging my insignificant contribution to his research and mentioning me and my forthcoming biography of Newcombe in his own Acknowledgments for Young Lawrence. Although I have not yet had the time to read Mr. Sattin's book I was pleased to see it receive positive reviews:

“A compelling, pioneering biography - Sattin has written a compelling account of a young man learning to live according to his dreams” - The Observer

“Reading Anthony Sattin’s “The Young T.E. Lawrence” is particularly fascinating when the West’s empathy for the Arab world is at such a low, undermined by violence and mistrust” – Wall Street Journal

“A quirky but rigorous biographical study” – The Economist

“Anthony Sattin proves that the British know how to write a great adventure as well how to have one. This highly readable book never lacks for the big story but it also does not let that history lose the hero” – New York Journal of Books

A Cartographer's Tool Kit et al

Theodolite and Gunter's Chain

A Cartographer’s Tool Kit

On the eve of the First World War, a team of military cartographers and surveyors, under Stewart Newcombe’s command, was sent out to measure and map a strategic triangle of southern Palestine - today’s Negev Desert – as part of a secret survey carried out on behalf of the British War Office between January and May of 1914. The survey of the region known since Biblical times as the Wilderness of Zin would gather vital information about a previously uncharted area, considered to be of military importance in the run up to any future conflict with Turkey. It would provide the Director of Military Operations in London with the missing piece of a jigsaw that was started by Conder and Kitchener’s extensive Survey of Western Palestine in the 1880’s, carried out on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund - the P.E.F. 

The Wilderness of Zin survey proved to be the last opportunity before the First World War to systematically gather reliable intelligence on the ground. By the time the War Office got their maps of the Sinai and the Negev, a shift to visual air reconnaissance had been introduced, augmented in the latter half of 1916 by photo reconnaissance. Some years later, Newcombe himself would explore a method of land contouring by use of the Thompson Stereoplotter on aerial photographs. But in the great surveys of Palestine, Sinai and the Wilderness of Zin the surveying teams in the field used the simple tools of their trade – theodolite, compass and measuring chain - essential components of a cartographer’s tool kit. What were also needed were ingenuity, courage, diplomacy and tact when dealing with local tribes or Ottoman authority. Newcombe was highly praised by T.E. Lawrence for possessing these qualities in abundance and paving the way for future travellers in the desert.

Suez Canal showing Sinai to the east

A resourceful and tenacious character, Stewart Newcombe’s life epitomized those robust Victorian qualities that helped paint the globe pink but whose life encompassed the eventual shift in Britain’s relations with its subject peoples and saw the beginning of the fall of the last of the great world empires, a life that spanned Pax Britannica to decolonisation. He died in 1956, just days before Gamal Nasser of Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal and three months before the débacle that became known as the Suez Crisis created shock waves across the region, when Israeli incursions into the Canal Zone "forced" Britain and France to attempt to regain control under a pre-arranged agreement known as the Sèvres Protocol. Politically it was a shoddy operation; militarily it was of benefit only to Israel which gained an outlet for international shipping through the Straits of Tiran, an 8 mile bottleneck between the Sinai Peninsula and Saudi Arabia that the Egyptians had previously kept shut with strategically placed guns to close off access for Israeli ships entering the Red Sea for routes to and from Africa and Asia. The fiasco also helped bring about the abandonment of the British policy of slowly nurturing the colonised people of Africa to self-determination. The cry now was for Britain’s immediate departure. Suez had been fought over by Britain for the last time; the crisis would prove to be the death knell not just of the British Empire but to all the empires of Western Europe.

Stewart Newcombe was not to witness the inevitable conclusion to the dismantling of the British Empire, but he would not have been surprised at its outcome.

A wind of change blowing across the Arab world

Newcombe had once helped protect the canal by mapping its eastern approaches. Where maps then held the power, cheap transistor radios were the new weapons, distributed widely by Nasser to spread the word of nationalism and unity across Africa and the Arab world. Today, the internet is the weapon of choice where the rallying cry of a new generation can be heard across the Arab world on Facebook and Twitter - a wind of change that is felt more keenly when the cry is heard by those without access to the media. The use of force by regimes against its own people now changes the situation, as seen recently in Libya and Bahrain, while around the world the wheels of diplomacy turn slowly. Before a U.N. resolution was passed on 17 March 2011 the international community appeared reticent to reach an agreement on how to intervene – in most cases it was an oil-driven paralysis that had not affected their response to Egypt, in others it is the risk of setting a precedent when their own domestic condition may trip them up in the future.  

Today we exist with the consequences left over from the end of the age of empire, where an occasional aftershock pricks our collective conscience, yet one more seismic shift in the new world order – a constant reshuffling of the pack. Regimes come and go - our response to them is judged by history.

Japan and the Newcombes

In the 1870’S Newcombe’s father, Edward, helped build the first railways in Japan under the accelerated industrialisation of the period known as the Meiji Restoration. Two of Newcombe’s brothers were born in Osaka. It was therefore inevitable that Stewart Newcombe should have become interested in engineering, and especially in the engineering and construction of railways. During the scramble for Africa he helped push the railways through Sudan; by 1917 he was to prove equally adept at blowing up railway lines in the Hejaz. My thanks and thoughts go to the followers of this blog from Japan who, my stats tell me, have continued to visit during the last few days.

A Prelude to War - Mapping Palestine, Sinai and the Wilderness of Zin

Eretz Magazine

I recently wrote an article for Eretz, a bi-monthly magazine published in Israel, which has now appeared in English after first being published in Hebrew translation last November. The magazine focuses on "the heritage, geography history and culture of the Land of Israel and the Jewish People". The article looks at the surveys of the Negev and Sinai deserts carried out by and on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Society (P.E.F.) both for peaceful and military purposes and naturally features Stewart Newcombe, T.E. Lawrence and C.L. Woolley.

As Newcombe was firmly in the Arab camp and a strong advocate for a bi-nation state in Palestine, circa 1922-1948, I was not sure if his anti-Zionist stance would sit well with the readers of Eretz. He held strong views on what he considered were acceptable levels of Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine in the years between the World Wars, based on his long study of the region, its people, infrastructure and resources. He tried in his own way to come up with proposals that were fair to both sides, as they stood at that time, but as he tended to side with anti-Zionist European Jews his arguments are often seen as biased and at variance with the parallel Zionist movement as well as his own government. 

The article highlights the role played by the P.E.F. in charting the history and culture of a thriving Palestinian society within Ottoman Greater Syria. In mapping the historical geography of the Holy Land, and in meticulously chronicling the process, the P.E.F. sought to recover a landscape that was already familiar to the Christian imagination. By retrieving the original map of the Bible from place-names of a predominiantly Arab and Muslim country, the P.E.F. documented an urban and rural geography that would be largely transformed following the future development and colonisation by European Jews, a group which by then had not fully emerged as a likely candidate for the 'redemption' of the land after its neglect by an Ottoman government in decline. 

Wilderness of Zin

The article also discusses Newcombe's secret military surveys, largely in the Negev region, carried out on behalf of the War Office under the guise of a scientific survey for the P.E.F. prior to the First World War. His post-war joint surveys with the French for the Boundary Commission, delineating the borders of the British Mandate of Palestine and the French Mandate for Syria, are still relevant today in Israel's relations with Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. This intimate involvement with the country would naturally contribute to his strongly-held views on its future, leading to his association with organisations like the Palestine Information Centre in London where he held the post of Honorary Secretary.

Most Israelis today - at least the "reading" public - accept that the Zionist narrative runs parallel to an Arab narrative and that both have equal merit. There is definitely a growing interest in the Palestine narrative and an attempt to get a more balanced picture of the Mandate and Pre-Mandate years - including an interesting re-evaluation of the merits of the Mandate itself and in subjects represented by figures like Newcombe, the British Empire and the P.E.F.     

Newcombe believed that the Arabs would not vanish like the mist before the sun of Zion and therefore thought that it was imperative that they had fair representation in the contest for the hearts and minds of those in lofty power who would ultimately bring about the fulfillment of the Balfour Declaration, with all its stipulations - important provisos which supported his firm belief that only by respecting native interests could you achieve a lasting consensus. He worked tirelessly towards that aim after consulting the opinions of his many Jewish and Moslem friends before reaching his proposals that he hoped would satisfy both Moslems and Jews as well as best serving the interests of the British Empire.

Entrance to Islamic Centre

Whatever his lasting impact on mapping the region or subsequently in his life-long interest and involvement in Islamic affairs, Newcombe refused to be satisfied and once exclaimed, 'I wish I could have done more'. A legacy to his prodigious efforts can be found in the maps, papers and records held in government files or in libraries alongside those of his friend T.E. Lawrence, with whom he will be forever connected. But perhaps it the invaluable assistance he gave in helping to establish the East London Mosque, the first purpose built mosque in London, that Newcombe's legacy to his Muslim friends is best illustrated.

Eretz can be found at www.eretz.com