ABSTRACT
TH E Turks lived in their camp at U r Junction and marched up silently every morning to work at dawn with their Indian guard, when also the Arabs straggled up from their village with much talking and screaming, with their hoes and baskets, accompanied by their draggle-tailed boys and girls as basket-bearers. The three raises lived together in a Turkish tent, returned, like the rest of my borrowings, to A.P.O. Hillah at the end of my work. In the kitchen-tent resided my cook, Sousa, and my two Indian chauffeurs, who came later. At night I was alone in camp with the three Indians. There was a slight element of danger in this, or the military authorities thought so, since we were open to an attack by desert-raiders such as that which actually did happen to Mr. Woolley’s first expedition in 19 22-3 . So we were protected, at first by a section of Indian privates under a naik from the prisoners-of-war guard, then after a day or two when we had settled down, by at night a section of three Shabanas or Arab constabulary from the fort at Nasirlyyah, since the Indians were, properly speak ing, only there to look after the prisoners, not after me. By day two of these Shabanas went off to Nasirlyyah, while one stayed behind to guard their kit from the cook, whom they considered to be a bird of prey. He slept most of the time. The youngest of them, aged about eighteen, a great buck in his own estimation, wore his hair in four long plaits or ‘horns’, one hanging from each corner of his head over his shoulders: this is common fashion among Arab dandies, as Doughty noted.1 We called him Abu Qurun, ‘father of horns’. These worthy constables were an unkempt, dirty trio of Muntafiq, ruffians to outward appearance, but not very formidable really (Fig. 102). They had no idea of discipline,
and were always giving me trouble about their food, which they accused the cook of stealing, by occasionally not turning up at all, and so forth. But matters are no doubt different with the Shabanas or their successors now: that was in 19 19 . Once or twice they tried to impress me with a sense of their value by loosing off near my tent at night at supposed ‘haramlyd or thieves, who may or may not have existed only in their imagination: I suspected them, however, to be like the sycophants in Liddell and Scott, pure figments. These our protectors were supposed to watch wakefully from the top of the ziggurrat all night. By day, we had the Indian prisoners’ guard, both at U r and at al-‘Ubaid, but not at Shahrain, which was out of bounds, so to speak. So was al-‘Ubaid really, but for the purposes of the dig it was regarded as a legitimate annexe of Ur, since, as I suc cessfully represented, it had un doubtedly been anciently a suburb of the city. Shahrain, however, the ancient Eridu, was incontest ably quite a distinct city anciently from Ur. It was uncompromis ingly out ‘in the blue’, more than twelve miles from Ur, and beyond the military rayon. At Shahrain 10 2 .— sh a b a n a s a t u r we were handed over to the cove nanted protection of the shaikh of the nomad Dhafir Badu’, and I could not take there more than four of my best Turks as a sort of treat or outing from their camp in consideration and as a reward of their good work. At al-‘Ubaid I could have twelve or more if I wanted them: that was different. But on one occasion the military did visit Shahrain, as shall be told in its place, on an alarm of Dhafir treachery. And this irregularity, committed though it was in order to protect us from possible attack, caused considerable perturbation in military circles at Nasirlyyah, and was not to occur again. It was for me to scuttle back to Ur, abandoning my work on such an alarm, not to take His Majesty’s soldiers fourteen miles out into the desert into a possible shindy with the Dhafir on my own responsi
A SEASON’S W ORK AT U R
bility, clad though I was in uniform and with minor military authority. It was not to occur again. So now I knew.
