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INTRODUCTION
It was at Oxford in 1904, towards the end of my last year at New College, that I was summoned to wait upon the Warden in his lodgings at xo a.m. Wondering which of a good many things might be the reason, and hoping that it was not most of them, I duly presented myself in as non-committal a frame of mind as I could assume; but I was not at all prepared for the turn which the conversation took.
“Ah, Mr. Woolley,” began the Warden. “Quite so. I think that when you came up to Oxford you had every intention of taking Holy Orders?”
I murmured something unintelligible and waited.
“And I am afraid that you have quite abandoned the idea?”
“Oh, rather,” I said hurriedly; “yes, quite, Mr. Warden, quite given it up.”
“And what do you propose to do?”
“Well,” I answered, “I want to be a schoolmaster. I’ve done a little at odd times and like it awfully, so I think of going in for it permanently.”
“Oh, yes; a schoolmaster, really. Well, Mr. Woolley, I have decided that you shall be an ârcïïæolo-gist.”
I was not quite sure what an archaeologist was, but there was no gainsaying Warden Spooner, so I became one, and I have never regretted it. Work in the Ashmolean Museum, on the Roman Wall, in Egypt, in Italy and at Carchemish filled me with gratitude to the pastor and master who had thus “decided” on the course I was to follow.
Towards the close of 1916 I was a prisoner of war in Turkey, and my fellow-prisoners—there were but four ofustogether at the time—bewailed the fact that there was not so much as a single book to read, nothing to help make the long clays'pass. So I said that I’d write one, and this book was the ultimate result. My companions did not want to be instructed in the details of scientific discovery, so I planned to set in order a mere scrap-book of a digger for antiquities. The work of such a digger takes him far afield, and he gets to know countries and the ways of men from a point of view other than that of the tourist or the resident official. He is thrown into close touch with just that class—the labourer and the country villager—which is least obvious to most; he penetrates into the less well-known parts, becoming more familiar with some obscure town or lonely hamlet than with the social centres that attract the student or the casual visitor; he speaks the language of the people and, because of duties towards them freely shouldered, becomes in a measure a sharer of their lives and of their confidence. In this book, then, archaeology plays but a minor part and stories deal mairdy with things seen or done in work’s interludes.
The work goes on meanwhile—that Is the background of it all—but there are free times when one can study, as one must study if the work is to go well, the men who are busy with pick and spade and basket, their characters and the conditions of their being: there are the incidents which arise out of the work without being precisely of it, serious happenings and laughable. All about one as one digs there is the atmosphere of the historic past and of the still living world wherein that history took shape; and if out of all this a man cannot reap a harvest for the widening and the delight of his own soul he must be a purblind creature and poorly suited to his task—for him and through him there can be no stirring and murmur of new life in the valley of dry bones where he works. It was this side of the digger’s life which I thought might appeal to my fellow-prisoners.
After the war the book was published, and later was re-issued in a somewhat longer form, and now I have been asked to add to it again and to bring it up to date. To add to it was easy, for, although many tales that might have been included have already appeared elsewhere,1 there were plenty more to be told; but to “bring it up to date” was not easy at all. I had written of the Middle East as I knew it, but since 1916 that world has changed beyond all recognition, and certainly my description of Turkey and the Turks bears no relation to the Turkey of the present time; my story would be pointless if it were not set against its proper background, but the background is no longer true. For that reason, I have decided to let it stand; it is not true, but it was. To my many good Turkish friends I would say that only by picturing things as they were in the last years of the old Sultanate can we do justice to the miracle which is modern Turkey; to have substituted order and decency for that chaos of corruption and ineptitude is the measure of the Revolution’s triumph.
But in any case, this is not a very serious book and should not be taken seriously. It has given a certain amount of amusement in the past, and if what is to-day almost ancient history can yet amuse I make no further excuse for it; let it go at that.
1 As in Spadework, Lutterworth Press, 1953.
Chapter One
Egypt
For anyone who would be a field archæologist Egypt is an admirable preparatory school, though its teaching is strictly limited and for his higher education the pupil must pass on to other establishments. It is a rich hunting-ground and generally provides plenty of objects, so that he quickly gets experience in the handling of “antikas it does not give great scope for the imagination, because so much work has been done in the Nile Valley that its archæology is for the most part well known, and he can, and must, at almost every turn check his results by reference to the published records of his predecessors; in that way he can avoid palpable mistakes; moreover, if he is to add any detail at all to the knowledge we already possess, it can only be done by really minute observation and the most painstaking method.
I shall always be thankful, therefore, that I served my apprenticeship in Egyptology, though I had no intention of specializing in that branch, nor was qualified to do so. I am convinced that nobody ought to undertake field-work in the Nile Valley unless he has at least a fair knowledge of Egyptian, and can decipher sufficiently for his own guidance the hieroglyphic inscriptions which he may find. I never had that knowledge, and cannot forget how great a drawback was my ignorance when I was digging some XIXth Dynasty graves at Anibeh in Nubia. Many of these graves belonged to members of a single family, descendants of one Penno, who was governor of the city of Ma’am under Thothmes III. Penno’s own rock-cut sepulchre, the only known example of its kind between the first and second cataracts, lies on the edge of the upper desert: the painted reliefs of the main chamber were well preserved, and it is a grievous pity that they were ruined in 1910 by a …
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