Lawrence of Arabia as Archaeologist

Home > Magazines > BAR > September/October 1997

Most people picture T.E. Lawrence as the dashing leader dressed in white and gold Arab robes portrayed by Peter O’Toole in the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. While the real Lawrence was not exactly like the character in the David Lean film—he never deliberately burned his finger with a match or said he enjoyed killing people, for instance—he was, nevertheless, one of the most colorful figures to emerge from World War I. Riding a camel and fighting like a Bedouin tribesman, T.E. Lawrence played a leading role as a British adviser to Prince Feisal during the Arab revolt against […]

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Footnotes

See Aharon Kempinski, “Hittites in the Bible—What Does Archaeology Say?” BAR 05:05.

See Edward M. Luby, “The Ur-Archaeologist: Leonard Woolley and the Treasures of Mesopotamia,” BAR 23:02.

See Alexander Flinder, “Is This Solomon’s Seaport?” BAR 15:04.

Rudolph Cohen, “Did I Excavate Kadesh-Barnea?” BAR 07:03.

Endnotes

Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T.E. Lawrence (New York: Atheneum, 1990), p. 27. This is the source for quotations from Lawrence’s letters throughout this article.

T.E. Lawrence, The Letters of T.E. Lawrence, ed. David Garnett (London: Cape, 1938), p. 74. This is also the source for quotations from Lawrence’s letters that appear throughout this article.

See the discussion of this issue in Stephen E. Tabachnick and Christopher Matheson, Images of Lawrence (London: Cape, 1988), pp. 97–99; see also Denys Pringle’s introduction to Lawrence, Crusader Castles (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), pp. xxi–xl. Another edition of Crusader Castles was published in London by Michael Haag, in 1986.

C. Leonard Woolley, Lawrence and P.L.O. Guy, Carchemish: Report on the Excavations at Djerabis on Behalf of the British Museum, 3 vols. (London: British Museum, 1914, 1921, 1952).

P.R.S. Moorey, Cemeteries of the First Millennium B.C. at Deve Hüyük, near Carchemish, Salvaged by T.E. Lawrence and C.L. Woolley in 1913, British Archaeological Reports (1980), pp. 3–4.

See Neil Asher Silberman, Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Archaeology, and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799–1917 (New York: Knopf, 1982), pp. 119–123.

Woolley, As I Seem to Remember (London: Allen and Unwin, 1962), p. 93.

Woolley and Lawrence, The Wilderness of Zin (London: Palestine Exploration Fund, 1915).

Woolley, “The Desert of the Wanderings,” Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement (1914), pp. 65–66.

10.

My translation of Arthur Segal, Shivta: Portrait of a Byzantine City in the Negev Desert (in Hebrew), in Shivta 9 (Haifa: University of Haifa Press, 1986).

11.

Nelson Glueck, Rivers in the Desert (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1959), p. 12.

12.

Lawrence also uses quotations from Matthew 5:39, about turning the other cheek, and 6:24, “service to two masters irked me,” referring to his role with the British and Arabs. See Jeffrey Meyers, The Wounded Spirit: A Study of “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” (London: Martin Brian & O’Keeffe, 1973), p. 148, for an appendix listing 17 Biblical allusions in this masterpiece.