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Agatha Christie and archaeology

Stone frog

The full excavation of Tell Brak would have needed several decades, but time was running out. Not only were there the distant rumblings of war, but Mallowan was finding it hard to work with the local landowners. He decided to move about 160 kilometres westwards into the Balikh Valley, remote marshy country on the Syrian-Turkish border. A quick survey established that five mounds there showed rich potential.

Mallowan was at an archaeological conference in Berlin when war was declared. He hurried home, and too old to be called up, he settled down to write up his seasons at Chagar Bazar and Brak, and the Balikh Valley expedition.

The war interrupted archaeological activities in the Orient for a decade and none of the excavators could be sure of the future. Agatha wrote her account of her visit to Syria in the times when she and Max were apart (he was subsequently sent to work for the RAF in North Africa). She closes her book with the following remarks:

'I love that gentle fertile country and its simple people, who know how to laugh and to enjoy life; who are idle and gay, and who have dignity, good manners and a great sense of humour, to whom death is not terrible. Inshallah, I shall go there again, and the things that I love shall not have perished from this earth... Spring 1944.'
A. Christie Mallowan, Come, Tell Me How You Live (London, 1999), p. 205