Agatha and Archaeology

Rising up from a sea of sand in the desert flatlands of southern Iraq, stands the impressive Ziggurat of Ur, once the center of trade in ancient Mesopotamia. Traveling from Baghdad on a rickety six-wheel bus, Agatha Christie would have had her first glimpse of the site: white-robed workmen dotting the landscape and a confetti of dirt, sand, and shards swirling around the trenches. These first visions persisted decades later in her memory: “The lure of the past came up to grab me.” 

So began Agatha Christie’s love affair with archaeology, the East, and the companion with whom she shared the rest of her life, Sir Max Mallowan. They met on Christie’s first visit to the ancient Sumerian city of Ur, in modern-day Iraq. In March of 1930, their pairing was not conventional; at age 45, Christie was divorced and 15 years Mallowan’s senior.

The fortuitous invitation to Ur was issued by field director Leonard Wooley, whose wife, Katherine, was a fan of Agatha’s detective stories. Wooley charged his young archaeologist assistant, Mallowan, with showing their famous guest around. A site-seeing trip to the nearby city of Nippur turned into a desert adventure – an impromptu swim in their skivvies at a nearby lake, a broken-down vehicle, a marooning, and a night spent in adjoining police cells. All of this advanced the budding courtship between the writer and the archaeologist, partners who shared intrepid, no-fuss attitudes. They were married six months later.  

For the next 30 years of her life Agatha lived, traveled, and worked in the East alongside her husband, continuing to produce some of the best-selling novels in history, while making considerable contributions to the field of archaeology.

Christie’s Love Affair with Archaeology

Agatha considered life on her husband’s archaeological expeditions to be a privilege, and also a deep thrill. In her personal memoir, Come, Tell Me How You Live, Agatha writes: 

“These autumn days are some of the most perfect I have ever known. We get up early, soon after sunrise, drink hot tea, and eat eggs and start off. It is cold then…the light is lovely – a very faint soft rose softens the browns and greys. From the top of a mound, one looks out over an apparently deserted world. Here, where nowadays only the tribesmen move with their brown tents, was once a busy part of the world. Here were the beginnings of civilization…”

Her daily routine reflected the new diversity of her passions. Agatha spent the early hours of the day focusing on her writing, while afternoons were spent in the field: photographing trenches, cataloging finds, and managing the expedition's accounts. Christie’s photographs of Nimrud – developed in filtered water from the Tigris River –  and the reconstruction work she did of 30 wood and ivory writing boards, remain crucial in shaping our understanding of the ancient Neo-Assyrian site.

Dreaming up Murder in the Ancient Near East

Through life on her husband’s digs, Christie recognized and marveled at the parallels between the archaeological method and the process of reconstructing a crime, imbuing her novels with a palpably keen understanding of both. The exotic settings of her novels set in the east brought that fascination to life  – aboard a Nile Steamer, the crags of the winding Siq in Petra, a sleeper car on the Orient Express, a dig in the Iraqi desert, or in the Valley of the Kings. In one of these tales, the recurring detective, Poirot, channels the author directly when he remarks:

“You take away the loose earth, and you scrape here and there with a knife until finally your object is there, all alone, ready to be drawn and photographed with no extraneous matter confusing it. That is what I have been seeking to do — clear away the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth — the naked shining truth.”

The premise of the 1936 novel Murder in Mesopotamia, centered around the murder of an archaeologist’s wife, was plucked from the environment of Leonard Wooley’s excavation house at Ur. Amid the dust and heat of the Iraqi archaeological season, Christie witnessed the full spectacle of human behavior: tension and resolution; competition and comradery; jealousy and pride. She worked it all into her novel, along with the rather less than flattering image of Katherine Wooley, who Christie observed rule over her husband’s site with a mercurial and manipulative personality. Christie enacts writer’s revenge by making Katherine Wooley the murder victim in the novel. The character based on her persona is bludgeoned to death by her husband with an ancient stone disk. When the killer is finally unmasked by Poirot he concedes, “You would have been a good archaeologist, Monsieur Poirot. You have the gift of recreating the past.”

Death on the Nile (1937), which is perhaps considered one of Christie’s finest works, was inspired by a trip she took on the S.S Sudan Nile River Steamer with Mallowan and her daughter Rosalind. Egypt had already left a distinct impression on a teenage Agatha; unable to afford a traditional London coming-out season, Christie and her mother made for Cairo for the young lady’s debutante ball. This is where the shy, guarded Agatha had her first taste of the Middle East. 

The famed novel is distinguished by its close attention to historical detail and demonstrates Christie’s deep knowledge of Egyptology.  In her biography of Christie, Laura Thomas notes:

“[Death on the Nile] is a book that feels unusually full of the place, the symbolism and resonance of the place, and that fits in with [Christie’s] profoundly developed sense of the miracle of and the survival of antiquity.”

The Hercule Poirot murder mystery aboard a river steamer was so popular it was adapted several times for film, most famously in 1978, starring Peter Ustinov as Poirot, along with a cast that included Mia Farrow, Bette Davis, Angela Lansbury, and Maggie Smith. Just like Christie’s novels, the film tapped into the nostalgia of pre-World War II adventure tourism.

Traveling to and from her husband’s archaeological expeditions was invigorating for Christie since it involved boarding “the train of her dreams”: The Orient Express. In her autobiography, Christie writes about the sensation of traversing continents, “There was a subtle difference on passing from Europe to Asia. It was as though time had less meaning.” It was on one such trip that the idea for Murder on the Orient Express came into being. On her way back to England from Mallowan’s dig in Nineveh, Iraq the train broke down in a snow drift stranding everyone on board. Agatha turned this into a sinister murder mystery featuring a dénouement with a twist unlike any other of her novels: all of the suspects are the collective killer. It was Mallowan who gave her the idea.

Read side-by-side, the memoirs of Agatha Christie and Max Mallowan reveal a marriage of industry, intellectual curiosity, and true companionship. “Few men know what it is to live in harmony beside an imaginative, creative mind which inspires life with zest,” writes Mallowan in the epilogue of his memoirs. Their accounts are suffused with deep respect for the societies of the ancient world, yet they also reveal the perennial tension between tradition and change. 

The Mallowans’ travels in the Levant and the Middle East left indelible impressions on Christie, influencing the way she crafted her novels and the lens through which she viewed the world. Sifting through shards of archaeological fragments, traveling on dusty desert roads, and exploring the bazaars of Baghdad, Agatha discovered her second life. In the very last lines of Christie’s memoir, she writes of Nimrud:

“Inshallah, I shall go there again, and the things that I love shall not have perished from this earth.”