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 "THE UNCROWNED that he might return to the Near East better equipped in his speciality. Several years before the war, in 1908, the Oxford expedition headed by Lawrence's friend, Commander Hogarth, began exca- vations in the Euphrates Valley for the pur- pose of discovering new information regard- ing the ancient Hittites. Because of Law- rence's intimate knowledge of the native population of the Near East, Hogarth invited him to take charge of the Kurds, Turkomen, Armenians, and Arabs who were employed in digging. This Hogarth- Wooley-Lawrence expedition uncovered part of Carchemish, the ancient capital of the Hittite Empire. Lawrence amused himself with studying Hittite pottery and joining up the stages of Hittite civilization, and he and his associates actually uncovered a lost civilization, which proved to be a link between the civilizations of Ancient Babylon and the East, and the beginnings of Greek culture in the Mediterranean Islands which dated from 3000 B.C. down to about 600 B.C. Lawrence was engaged in archæ- ological work at Carchemish off and on for four years, from 1910 to 1914, and was in command of the digging gang, although he had never studied archæology at Oxford. One day in the Arabian desert, not far from the enchanted rose-red city of Petra, Lawrence remarked to me that archæolo- gical work in Egypt had never appealed to him, and that he would never dig, there at any price, because most of the important work had already been done and because Egyptologists of to-day spend most of their time trying to find out when the third whisker was painted on the scarab! On one of his expeditions for the Palestine Exploration So- ciety, Lawrence and his archæolo- gist companion, i.e., Wooley, at- tempted to fol- low the footsteps of the Israelites through the wilderness, and they actually succeeded in dis- covering Kadesh Barnea of the Bible, where Moses brought water gushing from the rock. They located a place in the Sinai Peninsula, which KING OF ARABIA." 45 " was one very poor well which may quite probably have been the place where the Israelites started complaining to Moses regarding the shortage of water. Lawrence remarked that the Israelites certainly were justified in grousing" if they had ever camped at that spot. Some five miles distant the two archæologists found a number of fine springs in a little valley called "Gudarat," and they are of the opinion that it was the place where Moses succeeded in regaining the confidence of the Children of Israel by quenching their thirst with the sparkling water of these springs. Here they also found a large and important ancient ruin. Later on, Wooley and Law- rence wrote a book on their expedition for the Palestine Exploration Society called "The Wilderness of Sin." On that trip, among other things, they discovered traces. of a civilization dating back to 2500 B.C. in the Sinai Desert, the oldest traces ever found in that country. The outbreak of the Great War found him excavating Hittite ruins in the valley of the Euphrates. Lawrence had been for some time aware of the seriousness of the situation in the Near East, and realized that a crash was imminent. A Major Young, of the Intelligence Department, who had known Lawrence in Mesopotamia before he entered the British Army, told me a little incident which illustrated Lawrence's keen. sense of humour. At that time, in 1914, just before the outbreak of the war, the German engineers were working feverishly along the road of the proposed Berlin to Bagdad Railway. Lawrence and his brother, who was later killed on the Western Front, were excavating ruins in the hills above the the Bedouins BEDOUIN CAVALRYMEN READY TO FOLLOW LAWRENCE INTO BATTLE. called Ain Kadis, THESE MEN CAME FROM OASES NEAR AND FAR, RIDING DASHING HORSES AND where there RACING CAMELS, TO SWEEP THE TURKS FROM ARABIA. Digitized by Google Original from CORNELL UNIVERSITY