Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #777442 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-22
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 252 pages

Synopsis
In 1913, Lord Kitchener requested the services of an archaeologist from the British Museum to carry out a survey in southern Palestine. The outcome was that Leonard Woolley and T.E. Lawrence were employed to record archaeological remains alongside military surveyors in the Gaza region, through the Negev Desert to southern Jordan. In a mere six weeks, during January and February 1914, the two archaeologists covered large tracts of the desert wilderness studying monuments of numerous periods from the prehistoric to the Islamic. By the end of 1914, the work was written up and ready for publication by the Palastine Exploration Fund in 1915. Not only is this work of significance as an archaeological and historical record, it also represents an astonishing feat on the part of Woolley and Lawrence, characteristic of the indefatigable spirit and polymathic interests of so many explorer-scholars in the Levant during the 19th and early 20th centuries. This book includes previously unpublished letters and photographs, including several by T.E. Lawrence, and other material relating to the work still housed in the Palestine Exploration Fund's archives.

About the Author
Lawrence gained a first in history at Oxford, for which he wrote a renowned thesis on Crusader castles, before he embarked upon a career as an archaeologist. Woolley had already dug extensively in Egypt, Italy, and Britain before he joined Lawrence at Carchemish on the Euphrates in 1912. After his famous exploits in the First World War, T.E. Lawrence enrolled in both the Royal Air Force and the Tank Corps before his tragic death in a motorcycle accident. C. Leonard Woolley went on to become one of the greatest archaeologists of the 20th century, his reputation being made at Ur in Iraq.