Agatha Christie: Come, Tell Me How You Live: An Archaeological Memoir

AGATHA CHRISTIE MALLOWAN

With an Introduction

by Jacquetta Hawkes

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by

William Collins Sons & Co Ltd 1946

Copyright © Agatha Christie Mallowan 1946

Agatha Christie® copyright © Agatha Christie Limited. All rights reserved.

www.agathachristie.com

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

Cover photograph© Christie Archive Trust 2015

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2015

Agatha Christie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008129460

Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 9780007487202

Version: 2017-04-11

To my husband, Max Mallowan; to the Colonel, Bumps, Mac and Guilford, this meandering chronicle is affectionately dedicated

Contents

Cover

Title Page AGATHA CHRISTIE MALLOWAN

Copyright Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co Ltd 1946 Copyright © Agatha Christie Mallowan 1946 Agatha Christie® copyright © Agatha Christie Limited. All rights reserved. www.agathachristie.com A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library. Cover photograph© Christie Archive Trust 2015 Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2015 Agatha Christie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008129460 Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 9780007487202 Version: 2017-04-11

Dedication To my husband, Max Mallowan; to the Colonel, Bumps, Mac and Guilford, this meandering chronicle is affectionately dedicated

Introduction

A-Sitting on a Tell

Foreword

CHAPTER 1: Partant Pour la Syrie

CHAPTER 2: A Surveying Trip

CHAPTER 3: The Habur and the Jaghjagha

CHAPTER 4: First Season at Chagar Bazar

CHAPTER 5: Fin de Saison

CHAPTER 6: Journey’s End

CHAPTER 7: Life at Chagar Bazar

CHAPTER 8: Chagar and Brak

CHAPTER 9: Arrival of Mac

CHAPTER 10: The Trail to Raqqa

CHAPTER 11: Good-Bye to Brak

CHAPTER 12: ’Ain el ’Arus

Epilogue

Plate Section

Back Ads

Footnotes

Index

Also by Agatha Christie Mysteries

About the Publisher

There are books that one reads with a persistent inner smile which from time to time becomes visible and occasionally audible. Come, Tell Me How You Live is one of them, and to read it is pure pleasure.

It was in 1930 that a happy chance had brought a young archaeologist, Max Mallowan, together with Agatha Christie, then already a well-known author. Visiting Baghdad, she had met Leonard and Katharine Woolley and accepted their invitation to stay with them at Ur where they had been digging for several seasons. Max, their assistant, was charged to escort Agatha homeward, sight-seeing on the way. Thus agreeably thrown together they were to be married before the end of the year and so to enter their long and extraordinarily creative union.

Agatha did not see her own renown as any bar to sharing in her husband’s work. From the first she took a full part in every one of Max’s excavations in Syria and Iraq, enduring discomforts and finding comedy in all such disasters as an archaeologist is heir to. Inevitably her personal acquaintance, who knew nothing of the mysteries of digging in foreign lands, asked her what this strange life was like—and she determined to answer their questions in a light-hearted book.

Agatha began Come, Tell Me How You Live before the war, and although she was to lay it aside during four years of war-work, in both spirit and content it belongs to the thirties. Like the balanced, bien élevée bourgeoise that she was, she did not think the tragedies of human existence more significant than its comedies and delights. Nor at that time was archaeology in the Middle East weighed down with science and laborious technique. It was a world where one mounted a Pullman at Victoria in a ‘big snorting, hurrying, companionable train, with its big, puffing engine’, was waved away by crowds of relatives, at Calais caught the Orient Express to Istanbul, and so arrived at last in a Syria where good order, good food and generous permits for digging were provided by the French. Moreover, it was a world where Agatha could make fun of the Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Turks and Yezidi devil-worshippers who worked on the excavations as freely as she could of Oxford scholars, of her husband and herself.

The author calls her book, ‘small beer… full of everyday doings and happenings’ and an ‘inconsequent chronicle’. In fact it is most deftly knit together, making a seamless fabric of five varied seasons in the field. These began late in 1934 with a survey of the ancient city mounds, or tells , studding the banks of the Habur in northern Syria—its purpose being to select the most promising for excavation.

Max showed his sound judgement in choosing Chagar Bazar and Tell Brak out of the fifty Come, Tell Me How You Live examined, for both, when excavated during the four following seasons, added vastly to our knowledge of early Mesopotamia. Agatha, on her side, showed characteristic discipline by denying herself all archaeological particularities in her book, so preserving its lightness and consistency.

In the primitive and culture-clashing conditions of the time and place ‘everyday doings and happenings’ were sufficiently extraordinary to occupy the reader: men and machines were equally liable to give trouble, and so, too, did mice, bats, spiders, fleas and the stealthy carriers of what was then called Gippy tummy. Not only is episode after episode most amusingly told, but there emerges from the telling some excellent characterisation. If Agatha Christie the detective writer can be said to have taken characters out of a box, here in a few pages she shows how deftly she could bring individuals to life.