The show examines how the writer Agatha Christie became interested in archaeology, the areas of excavation where she worked, and how this experience affected her writing.
Agatha Christie originally became interested in archaeology on a spur of the moment visit to the site of Ur in 1928. It was at Ur that she met her future husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, and became involved in excavation of the sites that were to make his name: Ur (where he was trained by the great Leonard Woolley), Nineveh, sites in north eastern Syria including the massive mound of Tell Brak, and the site with which he is most closely associated, Nimrud, where a fabulous collection of ivories was discovered. Agatha was greatly devoted to her husband and did everything she could to nurture his career, accompanying him on digs and fulfilling the role of junior assistant: cleaning and repairing objects, particularly ivories, matching pottery fragments, and cataloguing finds. She became very expert, and was much respected by Max's colleagues for her painstaking and skilled work and wonderful cuisine: only on Mallowan digs were there chocolate éclairs and vanilla soufflés. In between her professional and domestic tasks, she found time to write, and some of her best known books are based on her life in the Middle East: Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, Appointment with Death and most particularly, Murder in Mesopotamia. She also left a unique record of the excavations themselves through the photographs she took and the very early home movies she made which capture the mood and excitement of the digs. She also left a personal account of those happy days in her book, Come, Tell Me How You Live.
The exhibition features a mixture of artefacts from serious archaeological finds to interesting ephemera. Visitors will be able to see anything from the Royal Standard of Ur to the murder weapon used in Murder in Mesopotamia, from the original costumes used in the film, Death on the Nile, to an archetypal Tell Halaf pot, crucial to the chronology of prehistoric Assyria.
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