Flinders Petrie

But it was of course the Director himself

whose inexhaustible energy and multifarious talents animated the whole

undertaking. The fact is that Woolley, like Flinders Petrie and others,

belonged to a generation of archaeologists whose individual genius kept them

withdrawn from any confidential relationship with their staff. To his

assistants he deputed specific work and himself inspired sufficient loyalty to

ensure that it was carried out to the limits of their ability.

But the purpose and progress of his operations

and the sequence of conclusions to which it led, were seldom discussed with

them. It was in fact not unusual, after an excavation was over, for his junior

assistants to read with interest in the newspapers the details of discoveries

in which they themselves had presumably taken part. This was the case, for

instance, with the attribution of certain rifled tombs to the Second Dynasty

kings of Ur, on whose identity Woolley had apparently remained undecided until

the season’s digging was finished. In these days, when the secondary function

of a field director is to train younger archaeologists, this form of reticence

would have the most obvious disadvantages.

Also, it is hardly surprising that his

conclusions were occasionally wrong. To recollect that his dating of the Royal

Tombs now proves to have been approximately five hundred years too early is

perhaps to be “wise after the event”, since his interpretation of the available

evidence has been corrected by more recent discoveries. But undoubtedly certain

theories which he devised, mainly for purposes of publicity, required the most

tortuous arguments to justify them. One remembers for instance, how, in his

soundings, clay deposits which appeared out of context in relation to the

Flood, became “quays for shipping.” And soon, in the press Ur became the

“Venice of the Ancient East.”

Deductive reasoning

But here again, on the serious scientific

side, nothing could detract from the almost intuitive logic which distinguished

Woolley’s deductive

reasoning. As Sir Mortimer Wheeler has understandingly

observed quite recently, “The confident but always acutely experimental

intelligence underlying the remarkable discoveries which again and again

advertised his achievements was too often of a kind that escaped the easy

comprehension of his cloistered critics.

In this unimportant sense he suffered from

success.”1 In the polemical phraseology which has sometimes been used to point

a contrast between the shortcomings of old fashioned archaeology and the newly

perfected academic discipline, Woolley’s work has tended to be included by

implication in the general target for categorical disparagement. Posthumous

testimonials like that quoted above must be treated as a welcome corrective.