Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  The Carchemish dig lay about three-quarters of a mile away from the village, and consisted of three huge mounds, the largest of which – the central mound – was believed to cover the main Hittite town. George Smith had discovered the site through some sixth sense, for though the town was mentioned in Jeremiah, the biblical account revealed no more than the fact that the city had stood somewhere near the Euphrates – one of the longest rivers in the Near East. Smith, a self-educated engraver, had already been world-famous when he discovered the site, having translated certain texts found in ancient Nineveh which confirmed the biblical story of the Flood. These texts were inscribed in Babylonian-Akkadian cuneiform, a writing system common to many civilizations of the ancient East, so called because its pictograms took the form of cone-shaped wedges which could easily be inscribed by a split reed in wet clay. Cuneiform had been deciphered in 1860, but while the Hittites had used it for their texts, most of their monumental and ritual inscriptions had been in hieroglyphic script which had yet to be deciphered. The secrets of Egyptian hieroglyphs had been unlocked by the Rosetta Stone – an inscription of the same text in three languages – and, as Smith had learned that the city of Carchemish had harboured a colony of foreign hieroglyphers, it was hoped that an excavation there might reveal such a key to ancient Hittite.

  Carchemish had been built on the intersection of two waterways, and centred on a 130-foot acropolis which dominated the flat landscape and directly overlooked a major ford on the Euphrates. In spring the waters of the spate would leap and toss, foaming brownly down the maze of channels, and form a stream 1,000 yards wide, which licked around leaf-shaped islands yellow with flowers. On the opposite bank the village of Zamora stood in fields and orchards, set against the backdrop of the Taurus mountains, green in summer but in winter capped white with snow. Carchemish had been a Hittite capital as early as 2500 BC, but its position on the river had given it a strategic importance to invading armies, and it had changed hands many times. Sargon the Assyrian had captured it in 717 BC, and a century later the Assyrians had been defeated there by the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho – an event recorded in the Old Testament. The early excavations had revealed some promising hieroglyphic scripts, but no progress had yet been made in their decipherment. The discovery of the Hittite metropolis at Boghazkoy near Ankara in 1907 had brought the question of hieroglyphics to prominence again, and so it was that Hogarth, Lawrence and Thompson found themselves at Jarablus in 1911.

  Work began within two days of their arrival, with a workforce 100 strong which they recruited from Jarablus and the neighbouring villages. While Thompson made a survey of the site, Lawrence marshalled the men, beginning where the previous excavators had left off, and almost at once uncovering a great staircase. The staircase proved to be Roman, however – part of a much later stratum which superimposed the Hittite levels. The great task of the early days was to clear away the Roman detritus in order to get at the more interesting layers, which lay about twenty feet below. Under the supervision of Grigori – a Cypriot overseer Hogarth had imported specially for the task – the men worked with ropes and crowbars, hauling up enormous slabs of Roman concrete, all of them shouting and giving orders at once. Lawrence would be up in the freezing dawn, to breakfast on ‘bread like indiarubber sheeting’ which was produced by their cook, dragoman and general factotum, Haj Wahid. The Haj was a memorable character. A brawny, powerful townsman from Aleppo, he proved to be honest, faithful and hardworking, but very much given to boasting, especially after plying himself with strong liquor – a habit which he indulged in over-frequently. About forty years old, he was a veteran of the British Consulate in Aleppo, where he had worked as a dragoman, and was said to have once, in a drunken stupor, held up the camel caravans entering the city’s Antaki gate by taking pot-shots at the camel-drivers from the roof of his house. Badly beaten in a fight with the five brothers of a woman he had been meeting clandestinely, four of whom – according to the Haj – he had shot down, he had taken refuge from the blood-feud at Jarablus, where he went about his cookery with a revolver stuffed into his belt. Though an admirable cook in his own way, his abilities did not extend to making bread without an oven, and his ‘wash leather-like’ offerings were only made palatable by copious addition of some of the nine varieties of jam Hogarth had judiciously brought along.

  After breakfast, Lawrence and Thompson would stroll down to the site, where the men had begun work at about 5.30 a.m. For the first few weeks they excavated at the base of the stairway, which had not been disturbed by the previous diggers, and where they believed the royal palace to have been. Lawrence found the actual digging ‘tremendous fun’. The men generally laboured in teams of four – each team consisting of a pickman, a shoveller and two basketmen, whose job it was to carry the spoil to the river and dump it there. All the men received the same pay, but most wanted the job of pickman, since it was the easiest and the most likely to reveal antikas or artefacts. This was a great incentive, for baksheesh was awarded to the man who discovered an antika, and the importance of the find was reflected in the amount. The finds actually became more valuable as they neared the river, so that even the basketmen stayed alert for what the pickman and shoveller might have missed. Later, Lawrence displayed his masterly grasp of psychology by introducing a system by which the overseer would fire pistol-shots to announce the finds, the number of shots varying according to the object’s importance: a fragment of sculpture might be worth one shot, for instance, while an entire sculpture was valued at seven or eight. The award of pistol-shots came to be regarded as a greater honour than the baksheesh which went with it, for baksheesh was, after all, only money. The finders of antikas would argue hotly with the overseers as to how many shots their find was worth, and even come to blows over it. Grown men who had gone days without a single shot fired in their honour were seen to break down in tears. Lawrence soon demonstrated that his forte lay in motivating the workers, and he would often turn the work into a game, pitting pickmen against shovellers and basketmen until the whole team, including himself, was yelling and running about, and a whole day’s work might be accomplished in an hour.

  From about eight in the morning, streams of women and children wearing shimmering red and blue colours could be seen pouring out of the villages on the water-plains, carrying piles of fresh bread wrapped in checked handkerchiefs and balancing pots of sour milk on their heads. This was the time of day Lawrence relished: the fierce heat had yet to rise, and the men were still fresh enough to chat, sing and play shepherd’s pipes. Though predominantly Arab in culture, these Euphrates villagers were a mélange of peoples – Kurd, Circassian, Arab and Turkoman – and they sometimes spoke three or four languages, often compounding sentences from all at once. Lawrence, who had been studying written Arabic with Fareedah al-Akle in Jebayyil prior to meeting Hogarth, found their dialect Vile’ and almost unintelligible. While the men were working, Lawrence and Thompson – who also spoke Arabic – would busy themselves in measuring depths, taking squeezes, copying inscriptions, making sketches and taking photographs. Soon, though, they realized that there was not enough work for the two of them, and decided to work shifts, alternating with periods at the house going over the finds. The men finished work at five, and Lawrence would retire to the house to write up the daily log, compile object-lists, and examine the pottery found during the day, which was his particular charge. His superb memory served him well, and he was able to piece together potsherds almost instantly even when they had been found months apart. He could recall the intricate details of the stratum in which an object had been discovered, even if it was not he himself who had found it. Between 7 and 7.30 p.m. the Haj would produce dinner – a rather limited affair until Hogarth hit on the idea of buying bread from the Turks. Lawrence and his colleagues almost came to grief once when the cook emptied an entire pot of curry powder into the pilaff: ‘It was,’ said Lawrence, ‘like eating peppered flames, and the other two are complaining about their livers!’9

  Hi
s reference to ‘the other two’ is significant because despite his contentment at Carchemish, it is clear that even here he adopted his self-fashioned mantle of oddness. The continual emphasis in his letters on his uniqueness, his distinction, his greater hardiness, was actually the product of a deep dissatisfaction with himself. While Hogarth’s teeth refused to eat the leathery bread, for instance, and Thompson could only just get through it, Lawrence ‘flourished’. Lawrence was ‘the only one of the three’ who got a good night’s sleep, due to a special power he had to sleep through anything (though at home he had asked for his cottage to be built because he was unable to stand the noise). It was Lawrence who hung doors, windows and shelves in the house, because he was the ‘handiest’, and he, apparently, who solved all the practical problems of the dig, with his superior facility for ‘fixing and improving things’. This aura of superiority was, of course, assumed – a shell protecting inner frailty – yet some found it disturbing. Ernest Altounyan, who visited Carchemish that year, was one of them. The son of the Armenian doctor who ran Aleppo’s hospital, and his Irish wife, Altounyan was a medical undergraduate on vacation from Cambridge when he met Lawrence, and perceived that he was a young man who has ‘spun his cocoon but had not yet the assurance which enabled the full-grown man to leave it when required’.10 Altounyan found the ‘frail, pallid, silent youth’ snobbish and impossible: ‘The shut-up Oxford face,’ he wrote, ‘the downcast eyes, the soft reluctant speech, courteous, impersonal, were impressive, disturbing, disagreeable.’ He thought Lawrence a poseur and commented that his power would have been more constructive had he only ‘acknowledged less grudgingly the possibilities of others’.11 Lawrence was afraid of Altounyan, who was a fluent Arabic-speaker, half-native, half-European, and an educated man like himself, who could see through all his colonial poses and deceptions. He was unable to acknowledge Altounyan’s possibilities, simply because deep inside he felt that all men were more ‘men’ than himself.

  Lawrence retained a certain awe of Hogarth, thinking him ‘a splendid man’ for his vast experience of the East, his ability to converse with equal intelligibility in six languages, and his encyclopedic knowledge. He continually tried to impress him, once, for instance, waking him up on their train journey to Aleppo to see the village of Harosheth, the setting of Deborah’s Ode in the Old Testament. Fortunately, Hogarth shared his admiration for the poem, and was delighted: ‘That went down very well,’ Lawrence wrote home with satisfaction.12 For his part, Hogarth was suitably convinced of Lawrence’s potential as an antiquarian, and thought him technically a better archaeologist than Thompson. Though he wrote later that Lawrence was an ‘admirable adjutant’, he doubted his ability to drive the work forward. That Lawrence had a certain devil-may-care attitude was noticed also by Leonard Woolley, who was to take Hogarth’s place at Carchemish the following season. Woolley wrote that Lawrence was curiously erratic where work was concerned: if he was interested he could be remarkably astute, but if he disliked an object or thought it unimportant he would ignore it. He got on very well with the men, Woolley said, to such an extent that he would sometimes return from another part of the dig to find Lawrence sitting in conference with the Arabs discussing some question of folklore or point of local dialect.13 Such a fault could not have been levelled at Campbell-Thompson, who had an insular contempt for the natives which enabled him to drive them unhesitatingly – a quality which Hogarth, whose nickname among the Arabs was ‘The Angel of Death’, appreciated. Lawrence wrote that Thompson was ‘pleasant’ and ‘very good fun’ and admired his knowledge of Semitic languages. According to Hogarth they got on excellently, but this was Lawrence’s charm working for Hogarth’s benefit, for actually he felt a sense of competition with the older man, inwardly mocking his overt displays of physical strength, and the collection of rifles, pistols, swords and fencing equipment he had brought with him to the site.

  If Lawrence stood slightly aloof from his English colleagues, he was more at ease with the Arabs, whom he regarded with the paternal benevolence of the autocrat. His relationship with them was not one of equality. It was Alec Kirkbride who later commented that Lawrence was more apt to like those who were his juniors in age and standing, and Lawrence himself later talked much of the satisfaction to be found in living among the lowest strata of society. His first response to the Arabs, though, was aesthetic: they were fine-looking chaps, he thought, though most were thin as rakes, and few were taller than himself. He was fascinated by their culture and set himself the task of learning all about their customs and language. Not only did he learn the names of all the workers, he also quickly assimilated the names of their tribes and families, and the nature of their relationships. Lawrence understood almost instinctively that in the Arab world a man is more than an individual: that his family and kinship ties define him. Soon this knowledge gave him a special standing among the local people, and he was able to use it effectively as a psychological weapon, pointing fun at slack workers by bringing up some skeleton in the family closet. This was not morally defensible but it was an effective style of management, and within months of his arrival Lawrence had become a sort of unofficial arbiter of disputes, sorting out the jealousies between pickmen, shovellers and basketmen, separating members of families with blood-feuds between them, settling fights, castigating the water-boys for falling short, advising a man on the payment of bride-price, bailing another out of prison, and driving away an Armenian tobacco-seller he suspected of trying to buy antikas. He even took pride in doctoring their injuries, treating scorpion-stings and dressing cuts they had received from tools or falling rocks. He began to behave and think, in fact, like the model British District Officer in a backwater of the Empire, administering ‘his’ natives: ‘Thompson and I have to be doctors and fathers, & godfathers and best men to all of them,’ he wrote.14 He might have been echoing any decent-minded British colonial official carrying ‘the White Man’s Burden’ when he told his mother: ‘Our people are very curious and very simple, and yet with a fund of directness and child-humour about them which is very fine.’15 Before his eyes, the Arabs had been transformed into noble savages, and while in 1909 he had praised the ‘civilizing’ influence of foreign missions, he now condemned them for introducing foreign ideas which ‘vulgarized’ traditional culture. The ‘vulgar’ educated Arab, worldly-wise and aspiring to power beyond his control, was a threat. Far better the ‘noble’ traditional Arab who knew his place, who treated him with unselfconscious and forthright respect, and never challenged his right to dominate. Since Lawrence was the one who hired and fired the men, he had absolute power over their fortunes, and there is no doubt he enjoyed that power: ‘It is a great thing,’ he wrote, ‘to be an employer of labour.’16 He took great pains in choosing the new labourers, and rejected many, not on the grounds that they seemed lazy or incompetent, but because they seemed too solemn or over-polite – that is, because they lacked the child-like simplicity required of the ‘noble savage’.17 Unfortunately, his aesthetic criteria for recruitment did not pay off, for in May there was a serious dispute among the men which was quelled only by sacking no fewer than thirty of them – a good third of the workforce. It was Leonard Woolley who later pointed out that despite Lawrence’s paternalistic fondness for the Arabs and their culture, he had no deep personal liking for the men of Jarablus-Carchemish. He had only two friends among them, Woolley said: the local overseer or Hoja, Hammoudi, and the water-boy Salim Ahmad, known by the nickname ‘Dahoum’.18

  Hammoudi, a swashbuckler, proud of his Bedu roots, had lived wildly as a youth and had become embroiled in a number of blood-feuds. Declared an outlaw by the Turks, he had hidden out in the hills for five years, visiting his village only in disguise. An amnesty in 1908 had ended his exile, but he had found life tedious until Hogarth had come along and opened the Carchemish dig. On the site, his keenness had quickly brought him to notice, and Hogarth had earmarked him as overseer. Tall, lean, hatchet-faced, imposing in his long-sleeved astrakhan coat and purple
headcloth, he never went to work without his cartridge belt and revolver, and could frequently be heard to declare that if only he had £100, he would buy a good horse and a gun and have done with the sedentary life. I’ll shoot a man or two,’ he would say, ‘and take to the hills again, and by God, I should be happier than living within walls like a cow!’19 If Lawrence’s admiration for Hammoudi was marred by the fact that he found him ‘a terrible bore conversationally’ and as sticky as a limpet, his affection for Dahoum was not similarly hampered. Dahoum first appears in a letter written in June 1911, as a fourteen-year-old donkey-boy who, as part of a trick being played on a Turkish gendarme, is forced to drink Seidlitz powder on pain of being beaten or ridiculed, and declares, in a good impersonation of Crusoe’s Man Friday, that the white man’s sorcery is ‘very dangerous for by it men are changed suddenly into the forms of mares or great apes’.20 In a letter written a few days later, though, he emerges as an ‘interesting character’ who could read a little and was more intelligent than the ‘rank and file’, having expressed a wish to spend the money he was making at Carchemish on attending school in Aleppo, thus becoming the kind of ‘vulgar’ half-Europeanized Arab that Lawrence disliked. Indeed, Lawrence found himself firmly wedged in an ideological cleft stick over Dahoum, for while he declared grandiosely, ‘better a thousand times the Arab untouched’, he admitted that the life of the ‘Arab untouched’ was a ‘hideous grind’ fit only for the ‘low level of village minds’.21