By Amara Thornton
 
I seem to have a very informal research strand developing this year uncovering archaeologists suffrage activities – see my post on Jessie Mothersole at the 1911 Christmas Bazaar, and my short piece for the Imperial War Museum's WomensWork100 project on Agnes Conway's interests in suffrage. The British Newspaper Archive has come up trumps again. This time, it's Margaret Murray.
 
Just weeks before war would be declared, suffrage newspaper The Vote noted that Margaret Murray would be one of a number of women participating in a "Costume Dinner and Pageant" to be held in the Hotel Cecil on 29 June 1914. 
 
The event was co-organised by the Women Writers' Suffrage League and the Actresses' Franchise League.  Now, unless Murray had a stage career that I'm unaware of (unlikely), it seems highly probable that she was affiliated with the Women Writers' Suffrage League. By this point, she had published several archaeological articles and books, including her popular volume of (translated) Ancient Egyptian Legends in the intriguing "Wisdom of the East" series. That April, Ella Hapworth Dixon's article "The Woman's Progress" in the Ladies Supplement to the Illustrated London News had named Murray as "An Antiquary of Note", partly on the strength of her published work.
 
For the dinner, women (and some men) of the day who supported women's suffrage campaigns were asked to don fancy dress to represent famous celebrities from history, stationed at various tables throughout the event space. Each figure was introduced by Cicely Hamilton, founder of the Women Writers' Suffrage League.  
 
These historical celebrities weren't just British, though British historical celebrities far outnumbered those of other nations and regions.  Egypt, "Asia" (including China, Japan and the Middle East), France, Italy, Finland, the United States were all represented. Murray was the person in charge of the Ancient Egypt table. A review of the event published days afterwards in Vote noted that "Queen Ta-usert" (Twosret), who ruled Egypt in the 12th century BC (and whose jewellery had been discovered in 1908) made an appearance. Whether Murray was actually in costume as Ta-usert/Twosret is unfortunately not stated. But I'd like to think so.
 
In reviewing the event the "Special Costume Diner" of Votes for Women described the memorable fancy dress dinner, which attracted hundreds of attendees, as a "sensation" of mingling with "people who mattered in bygone days impersonated by people who matter today." Of which Margaret Murray was one.
 
References/Further Reading
 
Dixon, E. 1914. "The Woman's Progress". Ladies Supplement to the Illustrated London News[British Newspaper Archive] 18 April.
 
Park, S. 1997. The First Professional: The Women Writers' Suffrage League. Modern Language Quarterly 57 (2): 185-200.
 
Sheppard, K. 2012. The Life of Margaret Alice Murray: A Woman's Work in Archaeology. Plymouth: Lexington Books.
 
Thornton, A. 2018. Archaeologists in Print: Publishing for the People. London: UCL Press.\
 
The Vote. 1914. "Costume Dinner and Pageant" [British Newspaper Archive] 12 June: 121. 
 
The Vote. 1914. "Women of All the Ages" [British Newspaper Archive] 3 July: 181-2.
 
Votes for Women. 1914. "A Pageant of Famous Men and Women" [British Newspaper Archive] 3 July: 618.
​

By Amara Thornton

I've been working over the past few months on a new programme for HistoryHit.TV, "Archaeologist Spies of World War One".  It is an intriguing and complicated history, covering an international sphere of operations and several different wartime fronts.  
 
The programme concentrates on a network of archaeologists who had (mainly) travelled and excavated in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East before the war; when many of them volunteered for military service at or soon after the outbreak of war, their skills were valued, and they were swept into "special service".
 
I've been researching archaeologists' public visibility before, during and after this period over the past few years – you can see the results of this in my new book Archaeologists in Print (UCL Press). So it was interesting to discover, when doing some preliminary research for the programme, that before entering the war officially (though he had already been involved in war related activity), David George Hogarth gave a series of public lectures on Ottoman Turkey in relation to the ongoing conflict in the UK in early 1915. One of them, in Sheffield, was organised by the "War Lectures Committee" of Sheffield University. 
 
Archaeologists' popular books were also referenced in newspapers as the areas in which they had travelled became more militarily important.  At the end of 1914, Hogarth's 1902 popular geography book The Nearer East, a volume of Heinemann's "Regions of the World" series, was referenced in an article in The Sphere for its relevance to understanding the most likely routes Ottoman forces (only recently allied to the Central Powers) would take to get to Egypt via the Sinai Peninsula.
 
Reginald Campbell Thompson's unusual memoir A Pilgrim's Scrip was published by John Lane The Bodley Head in early 1915. Thompson's evocative description of Port Said, at the head of the Suez Canal and an important naval base and steamship alighting point, was reprinted in an article in The Globe: "a place of passage, a khan at one of the world's toll gates, to pass the night and change the order of a journey."  
 
Shortly afterwards, Thompson's archaeological colleague Leonard Woolley arrived in Port Said to head up a small intelligence headquarters there.  Woolley recorded his wartime exploits in his own post-war memoirs, injecting at the end of his life light-hearted and humourous notes into an otherwise extremely serious subject. Woolley's wartime raid in a Port Said flat, recounted by Stephen Smith in "Archaeologist Spies of World War One", was posthumously published in 1962 in his memoir As I Seem to Remember. (Unlike many of his archaeological contemporaries who were more involved in processing information, mapping, and breaking codes, Woolley was actively running agents and arranging drops.  Those who worked with him put their lives on the line more than once.) 
 
Woolley's intelligence activity ended in August 1916, when the yacht he used for operations hit a mine and he was picked up by Ottoman forces.  His time as a prisoner of war began. In 1921 Oxford-based publisher Basil Blackwell issued From Kastamuni to Kedos, a volume of reminiscences, poems and drawings edited by Woolley of life as prisoners of war at three different camps in Ottoman Turkey. 
 
Archaeological interest was not abandoned during this time. Kastamuni records Woolley providing lectures on archaeological topics ("The Hittites", "Roman Frontier Problems" and "The Evolution of Religion in the Old Testament") as well as modern languages ("Hindustani and Arabic") to his fellow POWs. Dramatic productions also took place, with "Woolley & Co" highlighted for admirable work in costumes and props.
 
When they died, many of the archaeologists in "Archaeologist Spies of World War One" were commemorated in part for the roles they played in intelligence during the war.  This intense experience in their lives has been for the most part superceded by their archaeological and (for T. E. Lawrence & Gertrude Bell particularly) their political work in the post-war period. But in the early 1980s journalist H. V. F. Winstone's book Illicit Adventure provided the first broad history of this wartime network.
 
Perhaps the best acknowledgement-summary of the work of archaeologists in intelligence comes from Leonard Woolley himself.  He wrote the Preface to his 1920 memoir Dead Towns and Living Men in 1918, while still a prisoner in Turkey: 
 

Watch "Archaeologist Spies of World War One" on HistoryHit.TV (subscription needed)
 
Read Archaeologists in Print online (free) via UCL Press.
 
References/Further Reading
 
"Turkey and the War" Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 20 Feb 1915.
 
"Books Worth Reading" The Globe, 20 Feb 1915.
 
"The Situation in Egypt" The Sphere, 14 Dec 1914.
 
Hogarth, David George. 1902. The Nearer East. London: William Heinemann.
 
Thompson, R. Campbell. 1915. A Pilgrim's Scrip. London: John Lane Bodley Head.
 
Thornton, Amara. 2018. Archaeologists in Print: Publishing for the People. London: UCL Press.
 
Winstone, H. V. F. 1982. The Illicit Adventure: The Story of Political and Military Intelligence in the Middle East from 1898 to 1926. London: Jonathan Cape.
 
Woolley, C. Leonard. 1920. Dead Towns and Living Men. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 
Woolley, C. Leonard (Ed). 1921. From Kastamuni to Kedos: Being a Record of Experiences of Prisoners of War in Turkey. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Woolley, C. Leonard. 1962. As I Seem to Remember. London: George Allen & Unwin.  

By Amara Thornton

My first book, Archaeologists in Print: Publishing for the People, has been published today by UCL Press.  It's available to read for free, open access, via UCL Press's website.  You can also purchase a paperback or hardback copy, should you want one, from the same link.

The book is the culmination of a research project on the history of popular publishing in archaeology, which was funded through a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, which I held from 2013 to 2016.  Focusing on the late 19th and early-mid 20th centuries, I explore the varied ways in which British archaeologists (men and women, many working primarily overseas) wrote about archaeology for a non-scholarly audience.  Along the way, Archaeologists in Print reveals the personal histories of many archaeologist-authors during this time period, drawing on extensive research in archives, as well as lots and lots of newspapers. It connects this archaeological publishing history to wider cultural, social, political and economic contexts, including travel and tourism, education, gender, professional development, communication technologies and imperialism.  

I've encountered many fascinating texts and authors through researching and writing this book.  You can find more discussion of some of them by going through the entries on this blog, which I began when I started the postdoc in 2013.  

Happy reading!

By Amara Thornton
 
I've been busy adding to my collection of tourism ephemera lately with issues of a publicity periodical called Egypt and the Sudan, which was issued by the Tourist Development Association of Egypt in the 1920s and 1930s.  Tourism one of the topics that I've been researching for my forthcoming book Archaeologists in Print (coming very soon with UCL Press).
 
Archaeologists were well aware of the value of tourism for attracting public attention to their work, and the archaeologists who excavated in Egypt were particularly well placed to feed into and exploit this attention.  
 
As far as I can work out, the Tourist Development Association of Egypt (TDAE) was created in the mid 1920s.  The Association had an international membership, comprised chiefly of hoteliers, representatives from shipping lines and railway companies and business people. There were TDAE offices (eventually) in Cairo, London, and Paris.  Its patron was Egypt's king, Fuad I.
 
From 1926 (according to my searches in the British Newspaper Archive), illustrated newspapers began carrying quarter page TDAE advertisements promoting six key areas of attraction to Egypt – "HISTORY", "MYSTERY", "ROMANCE", "HEALTH", "SUNLIGHT" and "LUXURY".  At this stage, those interested in finding out more could pick up an illustrated pamphlet entitled The Valley of the Nile from the TDAE's offices.  
 
Eventually in 1927, the TDAE began issuing what I suspect was a more substantial periodical with enhanced content, Egypt and the Sudan, which offered readers specially written insights from noted  (Western) authorities and seasoned tourists and residents on a diverse range of topics – music, theatre, sport, internal travel, social life, and, of course, archaeology.  
 
Various archaeological contributors, both men and women, used their detailed knowledge of Egypt's past to lure tourists towards Egypt's ancient sites.  Alongside these articles were pages and pages of advertisements for shipping lines, airways, railways, hotels and tourist services, as well as images of sites, artefacts and people supplied by photographers and artists.
 
Egypt and the Sudan's Editor (and secretary to the TDAE) was a man named R. A. Bartholomew – apparently a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.  He wrote frequently for the magazine, and commissioned pieces on Egypt from different perspectives.  Some of the authors wrote under pseudonyms; for example in 1928 "Cleopatra" wrote about "Winter in Aswan". 
 
The Ocean Liners: Speed and Style exhibition at the V&A (closing soon!) celebrates this age of international travel, and includes amongst the material on display posters for travel to Egypt. British Museum curator Neal Spencer has also been posting some fantastic interwar era tourism posters in the Department of Egypt and Sudan archive – see here, here, here, here, here and here. And the Museum has also opened this month a new temporary Room 3 exhibition to showcase its growing collection of objects representing modern Egypt, ​The Past is Present. I'm very much looking forward to checking this out.
 
I go through the issues I've now acquired of Egypt and the Sudan more thoroughly, I'll have a better idea of how these notable contributors framed Egypt for the Western tourists of the inter-war period, and how their own experience of Egypt is represented in its pages.  More to come, I suspect!

Further Reading

Reid, D. M. 2015. Contesting Antiquity in Egypt: Archaeologies, Museums & The Struggle for Identities from World War 1 to Nasser.  Cairo/New York: American University in Cairo Press.

By Amara Thornton

The humble postcard is, I'm happy to say, becoming something of a 'heritage' research field.  My colleague Jamie Larkin has explored the history of postcard sales at museums and heritage sites in the UK while Elizabeth Edwards has been researching photography, postcards and heritage sites. 
 
I've blogged about the history behind the production of postcards relating to specific excavations – namely, the postcard produced in the 1920s by the Palestine Museum (now Rockefeller Museum), showing the Galilee Skull, discovered in 1925 during an excavation near the Sea of Galilee by students at the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. In the same period, the Transjordan Department of Antiquities produced a postcard showing part of one of the key sites in the country – the remains of a Roman city at Jerash.  One of these postcards (hand annotated) is found in the Horsfield collection at UCL.
 
The British Museum from the early part of the 20th century produced a series of postcards of objects in their collection, collaborating in the production of these with Oxford University Press.
 
But the British Museum's collection also incorporates relevant externally produced postcards.  In the Middle East Department's ephemera collection are a series of five postcards showing images of inscribed ostraca known collectively as the Lachish Letters (EPH-ME.1562, EPH-ME.1563, EPH-ME.1564, EPH-ME.1565, EPH-ME.1566).* 
 
According to the information provided in the BM's collection metadata, these postcards were created around 1935.  The production date is significant because the Letters were discovered during the 1934-35 season at Tell Duweir, so the postcards would have been made in quick-time – probably, I suspect, so that they could be sold at the end-of-season exhibition in July 1935.
 
I hope more of these ephemeral artefacts will come to light – they are a potent reminder that discoveries made did not always go straight onto the shelves of museum storage or display case and that the ubiquitous postcard is also part of the history of archaeology.
 
* A selection of the artefact Letters is on display in Room 57 in the British Museum.

By Amara Thornton

The Royal Academy will be turning 250 this year.  Two and a half centuries since it was founded to give a home to Britain’s artistic elite. It’ll be interesting to see how the 250th celebrations are received, and what people make of greater exposure of the RA’s history in the forthcoming exhibition (“The Great Spectacle”) and research project in conjunction with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.  Personally, I’m pretty excited about the prospect of the RA's historic Summer Exhibition catalogues being made available online (about which more below).
 
2018 also happens to be the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act, giving a portion of women the right to vote.  This centenary celebration is drawing attention to women in history in a number of ways, I’m happy to say. But the Royal Academy has a pretty dire record of admitting women to the lofty heights of Academician status.  Beyond 18th century artists Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffmann, who were part of the foundation of the RA, no women were admitted as Royal Academicians until Annie Swynnerton in 1922 (admitted as a Associate RA) followed by Laura Knight in 1936 (admitted as an RA outright).  So the result is (by my count, excluding Moser & Kauffmann) only 55 women have been admitted as Royal Academicians between 1768 and now.
 
The Summer Exhibitions, thankfully, tell a different story.  That’s why it’s so important that those catalogues are digitised and made available this year. The Exhibition catalogues yield valuable information about the activities of women artists over the course of the RA’s history.  And among those women represented in the RA’s Summer Exhibition catalogues are three artists – Jessie Mothersole, Freda Hansard, Florence “Kate” Kingsford – who also worked as tomb-painting copyists for Flinders Petrie in Egypt.
 
In 1906, Algernon Graves published an 8 volume history of contributors to the Royal Academy.  This included artists who had had work hung in the RA’s Summer Exhibitions, and it is a fantastic resource for exploring the history of women artists in Britain. So, how are my three archaeological artists reflected in Graves’s history?
 
Well, all three had work accepted in multiple Summer Exhibitions. In 1899, Freda Hansard, listed as a painter, had two works exhibited: “Medusa Turning a Shepherd into Stone” and “Isola dei Pescatori in Lago Maggiore”. Kate Kingsford, also listed as a painter, had “Greek girls playing at ball” accepted and displayed. The following year, Hansard’s “Priscilla”, an oil painting, and Kingsford’s water colour “Harmony” and black & white work “1844” were all exhibited.  In 1901, Hansard’s “Rival Charms” was exhibited, as well as Jessie Mothersole’s “Lilian”.  Mothersole was listed as a miniature painter in Graves’s history, so this may well have been a miniature portrait.
 
Unfortunately, I have no idea what most of these works looked like, barring a small black & white reproduction of Hansard’s “Priscilla” published in Hearth & Home in May 1900.  I don’t know if they are still extant – though you can see two of Freda Hansard’s other paintings online at art.org.uk.  One of Jessie Mothersole’s watercolours, displayed at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1911, is also available to see digitally – she included a reproduction of her watercolour “The Oldest Inhabitant – Scilly” in her 1910 book The Isles of Scilly: Their Story, Their Folk and Their Flowers, which you can read and download on Internet Archive.

Follow-up volumes to Graves’s History were published in the 1970s, pushing the history of exhibitors to the Royal Academy up to 1970.  These illuminate even further the lives of these women as working artists.  Freda Hansard (listed as Freda Firth, her married name), exhibited a rather intriguing piece called “Men may come, and men may go, but I go on for ever” in the 1908 Summer Exhibition.  I can’t imagine what it looked like, but I hope it’s still around, somewhere.  In addition to her contribution to the 1911 exhibition, Jessie Mothersole submitted one painting in 1913, and two in 1914.  Two of these paintings showcased Mothersole’s experiences in Egypt – showing Deir-el-Bahari, the site of ancient Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut’s temple, and Abu Simbel.
 
There is a lot of art and associated archive material to explore on the Royal Academy’s new Collections interface.  It’s there that I discovered, for example, that Florence Kate Kingsford (Cockerell) exhibited her illuminated manuscripts, including “Hymn to Aten, the Sun Disk” (now held at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), in the 1916 Arts & Crafts Society Exhibition.  And that Winifred Newberry Brunton, another archaeological artist, had her miniature “The Nile” included in the 1915 War Relief Committee Exhibition, held at the Royal Academy.

So let’s hope, that with the digitsation of the RA’s Summer Exhibition Catalogues, we start to learn a lot more about the women whose work was featured there, year after year – so that, as I have argued elsewhere, “the digital makes visible the invisible”. Including the work of Misses Mothersole, Hansard, and Kingsford, artists.
 
References/Further Reading
 
Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society. 1916. Catalogue of the Eleventh Exhibition, 1916. (catalogue online via RA Collections beta site)
 
Graves, A. 1905. Preface. The Royal Academy of Arts: A Complete Dictionary of contributors and their work.Vol 1 of 8.  London: Henry Graves & Co/G. Bell & Sons.
 
Royal Academy. 1900. Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts MDCCCC. One Hundred and Thirty- Second. [Catalogue]

Royal Academy. 1911. Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts MDCCCCXI. One Hundred and Forty- Third. [Catalogue]

Royal Academy. 1915. War Relief Exhibition in aid of the Red Cross and St John Ambulancew Society and the Artist’s General Benevolent Institution. London: Royal Academy (catalogue online via RA Collections beta site)
 
Royal Academy. 1973-. Royal Academy exhibitors 1905-1970: a dictionary of artists and their work in the summer exhibitions of the Royal Academy of Arts. EP Publishing.

This month's post is on trowelblazers.com, where I've written a piece about archaeologist Marie-Louise Berges Garstang!  I didn't have much to go on - her husband John Garstang is much more well known - but thankfully historical newspapers helped illuminate her activities a bit.  Do check it out!  Read "Marie Garstang - Meroe to Mersin in the Middle of it All" here.

By Amara Thornton

Tuesday 3 June 1930, 2.30 p. m. London’s Hippodrome Theatre. Lady Newnes (aka Emmeline de Rutzen) hosts a “Historical Egyptian Matinee” to raise funds for the British School of Egyptian archaeology's excavations in Palestine and the Friends of the Poor.   Mrs Julia Chatterton, a well-known folk song collector, composes all the music for the occasion, to be played on Egyptian instruments.  The audience enters to the strains of Verdi’s Aida – first presented in 1871 at the Khedival Opera House in Cairo.
 
Once everyone is seated, a gong tolls.  The familiarity of Verdi gives way to something entirely different, and much more authentic. Julia Chatterton wants the music to take the audience away from themselves, away from London, away from the 20th century.  They are to learn and appreciate, the programme notes tell them, “the Oriental mode of musical expressions.” 
 
Julia Cook-Watson Chatterton was no dilettante. She was a member of the Society of Women Musicians before World War 1, she had moved to Egypt at some point before 1914 to edit the illustrated newspaper The Sphinx, and spent ten years living in Egypt with her husband, architect Frederick Chatterton, who was employed in the Egyptian Public Works Department.  While there, she began researching Egyptian songs and instruments alongside making her name and garnering official recognition for her work entertaining the troops based in Cairo via the “Cards Concert Party” during the war. Her wartime medals were sold at Bonhams in 2013.
 
When she eventually returned to England in the 1920s, she began composing pieces with Egyptian themes, using instruments she had collected in Egypt, and presenting them in London.  The 1930 issue of Egypt and the Sudan features Chatterton’s article on “The Music of Egypt” in which she attempts to educate English tourists about the history and musicality of Egyptian songs and instruments.
 
I first came across references to Julia Chatterton’s work on the Hippodrome event some years ago; it’s been on my list of topics to blog about ever since.  In preparing for a talk at the Museo Egizio in Turin, I’ve revisited my initial research. Thanks to Petrie Museum curator Anna Garnett and former curator Alice Stevenson, I’ve now been able to see some of the fantastic ephemera created for this event in the Museum's archive.

The enormous event poster prominently promotes Chatterton’s “Original Egyptian Music”, and lists some of the Egyptian instruments to be featured – pipes, sistrum, lyre, nay, harp, oud (lute), darraboukeh.
 
In the programme, a full picture of the musical programme for the afternoon emerges. Fourteen individual musical interludes, with additional “incidents” occurred during the event. Italian-born London-based composer Francesco Ticciati conducted the orchestra.  Noted music historian, archaeologist and British Museum curator Kathleen Schlesinger loaned instruments from her personal collection.  Vocalists included one soprano, three mezzo sopranos, two tenors and four baritones (one of whom was Petrie student Gerald Lankester Harding).  Among the instrumentalists were a lute player, a tamboura player, a harpist and a pianist. Mamoun Abd el Salam was responsible for playing the nay, the argul and the rebab. Julia Chatterton herself was also one of the musicians playing the darraboukeh, an instrument with which she was particularly skilled, and the kithara.
 
Complementing the music was a series of fourteen tableaux showing ancient Egyptian history between 8000 and 30 B. C.  The performance had 81 cast-members, and “one white pigeon” (representing a dove). It began with a scene of earliest Egypt, accompanied by “Rhythmic Hand Clapping”, showing the Badarian civilisation, the remains of which had recently been excavated by Petrie students Guy Brunton and Winifred Newberry Brunton (also a noted artist). The story of King Khufu and "The Pyramid Age” of the 4th Dynasty was commemorated in Terence Grey’s short play The Building of the Pyramid. 
 
Princess "Sat-hat-hor-ant" (Sithathoriunet), whose elaborate jewellery had been the highlight of Petrie’s 1913-14 season at Lahun, was also featured in the tableaux.  The jewellery worn during the performance was recreated from published plates by Lady Leeds (Eltheleen Winnaretta Singer), who took the part of Nefert in the Pyramid Age Tableaux, using cardboard, beads, wax and macaroni.  The action wound up in Roman Egypt, with appearances from Marc Antony, Julius Caesar and Cleopatra (played by Lady Newnes herself).
 
The matinee attracted an audience of 1400 people, among them Princess Beatrice, Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter.  Lotus-badge wearing volunteers handed out further information on the British School of Egyptian archaeology’s research, schemes and publications to interested audience members - it was a fundraising venture, after all.
 
It seems to have been quite the Society event, and there are so many elements to explore in this one action packed aural and visual extravaganza it’s impossible to cover in one blog post, or in one lecture.  Needless to say I’ll be returning to this topic in due course, and perhaps someone with a connection to the event will have even more information!  (Pretty please?)

*Special thanks to Heba Abd el Gawad for finding suitable links for the Egyptian instruments featured in this piece.
 
References/Further Reading
 
Drower, M. 1995. Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
 
Chatterton, J. 1930. The Music of Egypt. Egypt and the Sudan. London: The Tourist Development Association of Egypt, Cairo Station.
 
Chatterton, J. 1930. The Intimate Significance of Folk-Song. The Sackbut 11 (1): 11-13.
 
Petrie, H. 1930. Notes and News. Ancient Egypt (Part II, June): 63-64.
 
The Sketch. 1930. Nefert – and her Egyptian Matinee Jewels of Macaroni. 4 June. p 461.
 
Times. 1936. Mrs Julia Chatterton. 3 January, p. 17.
 
Copies of the event poster, programme, and preliminary notice are held in the Petrie Museum archives.

By Amara Thornton

A very short post this month to draw your attention to my latest article.  'Filming A Biblical City' was published at the beginning of this month in History Today's recently launched online platform 'Miscellanies'.  The article explores the history behind the creation of Lachish - City of Judah, a film made in the 1930s to document the Wellcome Marston Archaeological Expedition to the Near East's excavation of Tell Duweir.  Hope you enjoy it!

By Amara Thornton

In 1930, archaeologist Harry Reginald Holland Hall published a book on his wartime journey to Mesopotamia on behalf of the British Museum in 1918-19.  Its lengthy descriptive title - A Season’s Work at Ur, Al-Ubaid, Abu Shahrain (Eridu) and Elsewhere: Being an Unofficial Account of the British Museum Archaeological Mission to Babylonia, 1919 - masks what an interesting read it is.  
 
Hall was sent out to Mesopotamia as a military intelligence officer, “British Museum” unit, but on arrival he was converted to political service.  (I imagined, on reading his memories of this incident, something akin to a scene in Marguerite Vance’s Marie Antoinette in which the young Austrian Archduchess Maria Antonia changes from Austrian to French clothes to become the Dauphine Marie Antoinette.)
 
He’d packed up his trowel in a kit bag, to paraphrase that popular WW1 song, and gone to “Mespot” to check on its antiquities and conduct some preliminary excavations, in preparation for what he called a “new regime” of British administered archaeology in the region. 
 
He describes his rather complicated and quite fascinating journey to “Mespot”, involving several stops and changes en route, in great detail with characterful flair in the first chapter of his book. It begins at Waterloo Station, where he boarded a troop-train headed for the coast.  On arrival at the northern French port of Cherbourg, he boarded another train, travelling through France and Italy, celebrating Armistice Day en route at Lyon.  He caught a boat from Taranto, Italy to Port Said, and then went overland to Cairo to have an archaeological confab with fellow excavators David George Hogarth (in charge of the Arab Bureau intelligence network), Leonard Woolley (fresh from a prison camp), and James Edward Quibell (Curator of the Egyptian Museum).  
 
From Egypt he caught the British India Steamship Navigation Co’s Chakdarra, stopping in Bombay. Major-General Sir Walter Cayley, commanding the 13th (Western) Division in Mesopotamia, was also on board, and he asked Hall to deliver a series of archaeological lectures to the troops on board. This request is fascinating, as it indicates the provision of educational opportunities for soldiers serving on the Mesopotamian front during wartime, and an attempt satisfy troops' interest in the archaeological landscapes they were moving through.

Hall observed:

This juxtaposition of military manoeuvring and an archaeological landscape is highlighted in a contemporary publication on the war from the Amalgamated Press. An overview of the war’s theatres and main protagonists, The War Illustrated Album de Luxe highlighted stories of wartime triumph and tragedy alongside every-day activities. The Mesopotamian front was included in several volumes, with images of soldiers on the ground and the emerging British administration featured alongside the archaeology surrounding them. (Two such examples are “Ancient Ruins and Modern Doings in Mesopotamia” and “From the Ruins of Babylon to Modern Baghdad”.)
 
There is a 21st century equivalent to this history too.  After the looting of the Baghdad museum in 2003 archaeologists created a bespoke set of ‘heritage’ playing cards to educate US soldiers serving in Iraq about antiquities and archaeological sites.  Pictures of some of these cards were published in Public Archaeology journal in 2007.
 
The 100th anniversary of World War 1 is still continuing, and with it associated digital history and exhibition projects.  Although there is no equivalent for Mesopotamia that I know of (but do check out Paul Cooper's recent Twitter thread on his great-grandfather's archive), you can discover how WW1 soldiers captured their own experiences in Egypt and Palestine through the Views of an Antique Land project.  I’ve also written a post on the Palestine Exploration Fund blog about a fascinating series of post-war letters from WW1 soldiers who had served in Palestine.  You can read “To the Secretary, Palestine Exploration Fund” here.
 
References/Further Reading
 
Hall, H. R. 1930. A Season’s Work at Ur… London: Methuen.
 
Public Archaeology 2007. The Civilisation Cards: US Army Style. Public Archaeology 6 (4): 242-244.
 
Woolley, L. (Ed.). 1920. From Kastamuni to Kedos Being a Record of Experiences of Prisoners of War in Turkey, 1916-1918. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.