Digging up Turkey’s past C.L. Woolley and the Hittite splendors of Karkamış

Karkamış is on the radar of very few visitors today because of its sensitive location -- smack bang on the frontier separating the Turkish and Syrian republics -- and it is currently off-limits. Following the recent rapprochement between the two countries, however, plans are afoot to clear the area of mines and open it to the public. In the meantime, the very best of the finds from the site, unearthed by Woolley and other archaeologists who worked there in the unstable years leading up to World War I, can be seen in Ankara’s Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. Indeed, so impressive are the relief-carved basalt and limestone slabs (depicting stylized marching soldiers, chariots, sacred animals, Hittite gods and rulers) that once adorned the passageways, palaces and temples of Hittite Karkamış, that they form a focal point of this superb museum.

After decades of permitting foreigners to ship the most impressive ancient artifacts abroad, by the early 20th century, Ottoman authorities had become wise to their true value. Every dig on Ottoman soil had a government official attached to it, whose job was to ensure that whatever agreement had been reached between the archaeologists and the state was adhered to. Woolley’s “commissaire” as he called him, Fuad Bey, arrived at the dig in 1912. Despite being an Arab from a noted Baghdad family, according to Woolley, he had “spent all his life in Constantinople and was as much a Turk as imitation could make him -- indeed, he could speak only a few words of his native Arabic.” Woolley was initially scathing about his 22-year-old “minder,” calling him “of mean physique, pasty-faced, and faint-hearted” and saying that “he was convinced we were out to steal every ‘antika’ we could lay hands on.”

Bedouin and Kurdish workers

The urbane Fuad Bey was none too amused about having to sleep under canvas on the settlement mound the archaeologists were delving into and “swallowed with open mouth the stories of the ghosts that haunted the ruins, and would not go to bed without an armed man stretched across his tent door.” He was initially contemptuous of the Bedouin and Kurdish workers (between 70 and 100 were employed on the dig) and according to Woolley looked at them as “beasts of prey whose chief amusement was throat-slitting.” But over time Fuad Bey won Woolley’s respect and gratitude. “He was conscientious in his work and strictly honest” and, on realizing that Woolley was not out to steal everything, he found Fuad Bey “threw himself into the work with enthusiasm, and became a real help to us: he took a great pride in arranging and cleaning our field museum.” When Fuad Bey’s tenure ended, the hard-bitten archaeologist could write approvingly that “by 1914 he was a pleasant and a helpful companion, and as he said himself, more of a man than he had ever hoped to be.”

If Woolley had managed Fuad Bey well, he inspired even greater loyalty in one Haj Wahid, a hard-drinking Arab from Aleppo whom he employed as “cook, dragoman, and general factotum.” Wahid, a “big, brawny fellow, handsome, vain-glorious, a lover of finery, honest and faithful, and a brave man for all his boasting” showed his mettle in a conflict of interests with the Germans working on the railway. Whilst Woolley and his fellow archaeologist T.E. Lawrence (who would later go on to win himself the opprobrium of the Turks for inciting the Arabs of the Ottoman Empire to revolt, later becoming known in the West as Lawrence of Arabia) were absent from the site, the Germans began taking soil from the mound to use for a railway embankment. In doing so, they accidentally uncovered a couple of Roman period sarcophagi. Although the area the sarcophagi were found was not within Woolley’s excavation remit, Wahid took it upon himself to confront the German chief engineer, Contzen, asking him, “Who gave you permission to find antikas?” When the German replied, “The Kaimmakam of Birijik” (the kaymakam, or local governor, of Birecik, a town upstream of Karkamış), the cook boldly replied, “I am the Kaimmakam of Carchemish, and I tell you to stop.” When Contzen ordered his two (armed) Turkish minders to turf Wahid off the site, he “knocked the engineer down, and seizing him then by the back of the neck proceeded to rub his face in the mud.”

According to a possibly rather biased Woolley, the Germans “neither understood nor tried to understand” the local villagers and tribesmen they employed, and an argument over pay led to a major altercation. Woolley stood on the mound looking down on the fray, with a Kurdish woman next to him screaming, “Kill the Christians,” when she learned that one of the workers, a tribal Kurd, had been shot dead. Only with great difficulty did Woolley and Lawrence, backed up by the loyal and charismatic Wahid, manage to prevent their own Kurdish workers from joining the melee below. Indeed Woolley was eventually asked to intercede in the dispute by the German consul, which he did successfully by persuading the leader of the dead man’s tribe to accept 120 pounds in “blood money” in compensation and the Germans to employ more of the slain Kurd’s tribe on the railway -- in return for which the tribal head, Busrawi, swore to accept “personal responsibility for any trouble that might arise through his followers breaking the terms.”

Colorful and trying excavation

Such incidents provided the colorful, if trying, backdrop for the excavation of a site whose natural hill-top defenses and strategic location, commanding one of the few fordable points on the Euphrates, meant the mound “hid” the traces of millennia of human occupation. “Starting at the top of the mound, we have dug down over fifty feet through the accumulated debris of the ages, and still human remains meet us.” Beneath the remnants of Arab and then Armenian huts, were several strata containing Byzantine remains. Yet further down were the “scanty remains of the Roman fort,” below were “Greek things dating … back to the second century B.C.” But it was the levels below, those of “Carchemish of the Hittites” that were the real goal of this British Museum-funded dig. Excavations of the extensive remains of the imperial Hittite capital of Hattuşaş, outside the village of Boğazköy some 100 kilometers east of Ankara, began as early as 1893. But 18 years later, when Woolley began digging at Karkamış, still relatively little was known about this enigmatic people, referenced several times in the Bible, who ruled most of Anatolia for much of the second millennium B.C. Following the collapse of the first Hittite empire, centered on Hattuşaş, at the end of the 13th century B.C., Karkamış became the chief settlement of a smaller Hittite empire which survived down to its capture by the Assyrian King Sargon in 717 B.C.

Woolley, like many pioneering archaeologists, had entered a profession still in its infancy by accident. As a young man at Oxford he’d originally thought to enter the church, but soon dismissed this idea in favor of becoming a schoolteacher. On hearing this, the warden of his college (New College) declared: “Oh, yes, a schoolmaster, really. Well, Mr. Woolley, I have decided that you shall be an archaeologist.” So, on the whim of an Oxford warden, Woolley ended up on a remote hill-top overlooking the river Euphrates, in charge of dozens of unruly Arab and Kurdish tribesmen, diligently uncovering the remains of the Hittites.

Woolley describes in some detail the features of the Hittite settlement he and Lawrence uncovered. The lowest part of the walls of the “better class” buildings were “faced with stone slabs,” sometimes plain, “sometimes covered with inscriptions or reliefs...”

Particularly fine were the slabs adorning what Woolley calls the Processional Way, including a “frieze of warriors a very imposing thing. At the rear of the line come foot-soldiers marching two by two, in front are chariots whose horses trample upon the beaten enemy … on the last slab … stands the figure of the goddess, Ishtar or some kindred type, naked and holding her breasts, the symbol and the spirit of the temple to which the army brings its triumph.” It is these slabs which are displayed to such effect in Ankara.

Woolley was not one to mince his words, and Turkophiles may well be appalled at some of the things he wrote about the people who had, after all, permitted him to operate on their territory. Although he admitted that “the Turkish peasant is a decent enough fellow,” for him the late-Ottoman Turkish government had an “utter inability to understand the rudiments of what civilized government should mean.” Indeed, when faced with an obstreperous Ottoman official who refused to issue the papers he required to continue the excavations at Karkamış, he notes with relish how he dealt with the situation. “I rose again, and levelling a revolver at the Cadi … I said, ‘You will not leave this room alive at all unless I get those papers...”