T. E. Lawrence to his family

Kafr Ammar

Thurs., 11 Jan 1912

Have been here some days (3 to be exact) in great content. One Wainwright, excellent person to be described later, is lord of the digs. We go out every morning about 8 a.m. after breakfast, and look at tombs. About 15 men and 20 boys are digging for them: they find them in sand flint soil, the edge of the great desert of Africa, where it dips down in flats to the cultivated lands bordering on the Nile. They scrape this soft sand with hoes - one's feet sink in it each step - and where they do not feel rotten stone at the tool depth, they hollow out. In a few minutes, if they disclose a rectangular form of 4' by 3' 6" they know they are at the top of a well-tomb. They then dig down from 8 to 15 feet in the same soft sand, filling the shaft, and at the bottom find a room, or two rooms, still clear of debris, unless the roof has fallen. In these rooms are piled up three or four mummy-bodies, in rotting coffins with great store of bead-nets along their length, and amulets, and sometimes pottery. It is all of Harka period - about 700 B.C. - and so not very beautiful, but there is also to be dug - next week - predynastic tombs, and things of the first dynasty.

It is a strange sight to see the men forcing open a square wooden coffin, and taking out the painted anthropoid envelope within, and splitting this up also to drag out a mummy, not glorious in bright wrappings, but dark brown, fibrous, visibly rotting - and then the thing begins to come to pieces, and the men tear of its head, and bare the skull, and the vertebrae drop out, and the ribs, and legs and perhaps only one poor amulet is the result: the smell and sights are horrible. Digging here is very unlike our Carchemish work - and very much easier. They have nothing of our complications of depth, or of levels, and fragmentary [word unclear] of cities or civilisations. I shall be glad to be back in Syria - and should be now, only for the present beauty of the weather and the misty sunlight, magnifying the palm-trees, and making the pyramid of Illahun, our neighbour greater than many mountains. Also we see the Nile two miles away, with the brown sails of boats passing up and down its sluggish length. Our house would make you laugh. We spend our days stringing beads, or copying painted texts of the book of the dead, until the little room is more ancient than modern, and until you cannot go in or out without brushing past mummies or statuettes, or tomb pottery. Even our very firewood comes from 24th dynasty coffins, and our charcoal brazier first performed that office in the days of the fall of Carchemish. At night jerboas perform triumphal dances over my body, and mosquitoes are the orchestra.

To be earthy - I'm very well, and eat well, and sleep still better; W. believes in food, lots of food, and food hot: and the digging is so very different from ours that it will occupy me the three weeks I am here: Mr. Hogarth was quite right in arranging for no longer: I'm no body snatcher, and we have a pile of skulls that would do credit to a follower of Genghis Khan. These men are less squeamish than our fellows. 

Salaamat. 

L.