Backward Glance: The Ur-Archaeologist

Sir Leonard Woolley, renowned as the excavator of “Ur of the Chaldees,” was no stranger to publicity. Through best-selling books, popular magazine articles and extensive newspaper interviews, Woolley painstakingly translated the results of his Near Eastern archaeological investigations into a language accessible to the public, winning himself legions of friends and followers—among them, Agatha Christie, T.E. Lawrence, Freya Stark, Gertrude Bell, Winston Churchill and even England’s Queen Mary. Born in London in 1880 to a strict clerical family fallen on hard times, Woolley spent much of his youth focused on school. He won a scholarship to Oxford in 1899, […]