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June 23, 2005

Murder in Mesopotamia

"In the era of Saddam Hussein, protector of Iraq, who rebuilt civilization and rebuilt Babylon."

The Guardian shows its usual meticulous attention to archaeological detail when the archaeology in question lets them have a go at the United States. It would be interesting to do a quick count of how many times this bastion of the free press chose to address the politics of Mesopotamian archaeology in four decades of dictatorship in contrast with the last two years of occupation. This article is noteworthy, however, for being the first I have seen to point out that many who worked on that fatuous Ba'athist "reconstruction" of Babylon, from whence that fatuous quote above, did so at gunpoint. Also, for this nice observation by Agatha Christie.

Britain's involvement in unearthing Iraq's antiquities was at its most intensive in the years after the first world war when the country was formally a British protectorate. Among those who led the excavations was Sir Max Mallowan, first director of the British School in Iraq. His wife, Agatha Christie, spent several seasons cataloguing archaeological finds at Ur and Nineveh in the late 1920s and 1930s.

Her novel Murder in Mesopotamia draws on her experience in Iraq. "An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have," she famously remarked of her time there. "The older she gets, the more interested he is in her."

Posted by Ghost of a flea at June 23, 2005 09:03 AM

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