Flood Pit

And if, in his so called “Flood Pit”,

identical traces of the “huts in the marshes” appeared above and below what was

called the “Flood deposit”, these terms were only meant for publicity purposes:

and for archaeologists his section already envisaged an interesting sub

division of his Al’Ubaid period into distinct.

So here were the two sides of Woolley’s

work: an appeal to the public by means of interpretation and presentation of

his results (with undoubted educational advantages in addition to their

practical purpose of obtaining funds); and behind this the patient and

meticulous work of a research scholar. The results of twelve seasons of arduous

digging at Ur alone can be seen in his publications. First, annually came the

admirable preliminary reports, written often on board ship on the way home,

when the whole fabric of his discoveries was still fresh in his mind. And then,

in the years before his death, sixteen heavy volumes of final publication as

Mallowan has called them “a mine of information, a deep repository which will

grow richer as the years pass and the common store of knowledge is continually

pooled.”

But now, to examine Woolley’s place in the

new forum of archaeological Methodism. By all the most recently devised codes

of procedure and disciplinary generalizations, Woolley was an unconventional

excavator, to say the least of it. To begin with, during the whole of his

twelve campaigns at Ur, he never employed more than five assistants an

astonishingly small number considering that they had to control the activities

of a labor gang consisting of from two hundred to two hundred and fifty men.

Partial extenuation

And that during that time more than twenty

thousand small but valuable objects were in the process of being found. One partial

extenuation of this idiosyncrasy was that he tended to depend

largely and increasingly on his Arab staff. A great deal of practical

responsibility was taken off his shoulders by his supervisor, Sheikh Hamoudi

Ibrahim.

Hamoudi was a Syrian of strong character

and remarkable talents, which afterwards acquired for him the position of

Deputy in the Syrian Mejlis. Woolley had acquired his services before the First

War, when he was excavating Car  chemish

on the Turco Syrian frontier, and Hamoudi had at one time saved the life of T.

E. Lawrence who was also a member of the excavating party.

By the time Woolley came to excavate the

Royal Cemetery at Ur, Hamoudi had been joined by his three sons, Jahya, Ibrahim

and Alawi, all of whom were brilliant archaeological craftsmen, and the first

of whom, Jahya, completely took charge of Woolley’s photography.