Throughout the 1930s and 40s, Mallowan continued his rise, emerging from Woolley’s shadow to become a director in his own right. (Is the Orient Express amoung the world's best train trips? Find out here.) Dedicated to Mallowan, it was inspired by the many journeys she had taken on that remarkable train to Baghdad. While Mallowan was working near Nineveh at Tall Arpachiyah, a Neolithic settlement dating from the sixth millennium B.C., Christie wrote her celebrated 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express. The long, exhausting journeys and austerity of life on a dig proved to be no obstacle to her writing, and enriched her murderous plots. She worked on restoring pieces of pottery, inventorying finds, and photographing artifacts.
Photograph by BRITISH MUSEUM/SCALA, Florenceįrom then on, leaving aside the interlude imposed by the Second World War, Agatha Christie would spend long seasons at various excavation sites in Syria and Iraq, accompanying her husband’s expeditions. The photo shows the couple in Ur, accompanied by Leonard Woolley, standing on the right. Six months later, the young archaeologist became the writer’s second husband.Ĭhristie got to know Mallowan in Ur in 1930, and they married soon after. Thirteen years her junior, the two got to know each other over the course of the season and fell in love. On this second visit to the ancient Sumerian site, Agatha Christie first met Max Mallowan, Leonard Woolley’s assistant.
Christie needed no persuading and joined them in 1930. In turn, they proposed that she join them when they returned to the dig in Ur. Later, after Christie returned from the Iraqi desert, she hosted the Woolleys at her home in Chelsea, London. She had been enthralled by Christie’s novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, published three years earlier. A close friendship developed between the two women, which grew in part from Katharine’s fascination with the author’s work. The carefulness of lifting pots and objects from the soil filled me with a longing to be an archaeologist myself.ĭuring this first trip to Ur, Christie met Leonard Woolley, the director of the excavation, and his wife, Katharine. To see a dagger slowly appearing with its gold glint, through the sand was romantic. I enjoyed the workmen, the foremen, the little basket boys, the pick men-the whole technique and life. I fell in love with Ur, with its beauty in the evenings, the ziggurat standing up, faintly shadowed, and that wide sea of sand with its lovely pale colors of apricot, blue and mauve, changing every minute.
It was the perfect remedy, as she later recalled: After a few days in Baghdad, she set off alone on a trip to the site of Ur, the great capital of the kings of Sumeria from the middle of the third millennium B.C. She longed to escape from the things that reminded her of England and to explore the rich culture and illustrious history of Iraq. But their games of bridge, tennis, and cricket bored her. Escape to IraqĪlready a well-known author by the late 1920s, Christie received a steady stream of invitations from the British colonial population when she arrived.
The next day, she canceled her ticket to Jamaica and bought one for Baghdad. The prospect of such a journey was a turning point in Christie’s life. The most obvious way to travel there was by steamboat-but there was another option: the Orient Express, the train that took travelers to Baghdad via Milan and Istanbul. Christie was utterly seduced by their tales of the Middle East: the bazaars of Mosul and Basra and the fascinating ruins of ancient Ur, which, thanks to the sensational discoveries unearthed by British archaeologist Leonard Woolley, were being widely reported in the newspapers. But two days before leaving, she had dinner at a friend’s house in London where she met a couple who had recently returned from Baghdad. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Īt age 39, Agatha decided that a solitary holiday in the West Indies might help her recover from the breakup.
0 kommentar(er)
