Although he had been hoping to return to the East after graduation, no immediate prospect presented itself, and in October he decided to apply for a Fellowship of All Souls College. He failed to gain one of the two places on offer, and instead he registered for a B.Litt. degree in Archaeology, offering a thesis on medieval pottery. Jesus College made him a grant of Ј50 per year for postgraduate work, and his proposal was accepted on 1 November. The same day he sailed to France for the second time that year, to see the extensive medieval pottery collection at Rouen, where, thanks to a letter of recommendation from the eminent scholar Salomon Reinach, he found himself treated by the museum staff as ‘a kind of god’. He carried more exciting prospects than pottery with him on the ferry to Le Havre, though. Some time in October, David Hogarth had sailed for Constantinople to discuss the re-opening of the archaeological site at Carchemish, near Jarablus on the upper Euphrates. Rediscovered by George Smith in 1876, it was an ancient Hittite city mentioned in the Bible, which had subsequently been excavated by the British Museum. In 1881, work on the dig had been abandoned, but now, thirty years later, Hittites had become fashionable again. Hogarth hoped to find at Carchemish the key to ancient Hittite hieroglyphics for which the world was waiting. That September, the Sublime Porte had given the British Museum a firman to re-open the dig, but had specified that the work should begin within three months. Hogarth wanted to commence the following February, and had travelled to Turkey to seek a deferment.

As a frequent visitor to the Ashmolean, Lawrence had discovered Hogarth’s plans, and asked Edward Leeds casually ‘if he knew of any excavations coming up in the Near East’. Leeds told him that he should have spoken sooner – a cuneiformist called R. Campbell-Thompson had already been taken on as Hogarth’s assistant for the Carchemish dig. Lawrence suggested that he might go without pay, but Leeds felt that the British Museum would not take him even on those terms. This was a blow, but Lawrence had learned to be persistent. When Hogarth returned at the end of October, he tackled him personally with a request to join the team at Carchemish. He knew that his qualifications could not match those of Campbell-Thompson, yet he trusted that Hogarth had not forgotten how, the previous year, he had been ‘rather smashed up’ by hostile tribesmen while collecting Hittite seals on his behalf. In fact, his gambit now paid off handsomely. Hogarth leapt at the idea. He told Lawrence that he would not only take him as an extra assistant, but would arrange for him to receive a ‘Demyship’ or Junior Research Fellowship from Magdalen College which would pay him Ј100 a year while working on the site. Lawrence could scarcely believe his good fortune. The door to the East had suddenly creaked open: the lands he had dreamed of as a youth now lay before him. At first he had told no one about the arrangement, but while at Rouen in November he could no longer contain his excitement: ‘Mr Hogarth is going digging,’ he wrote to Leeds exuberantly, ‘and I am going out to Syria in a fortnight to make plain the valleys and level the mountains to his feet.’⁷ He added with facetious delight that he nurtured only one hope greater than this: that he would enjoy a quieter ferry crossing back to Newhaven than the one he had endured the previous day, when he had been tossed out of his bunk in the middle of the night, on top of another passenger. He had tried to thank the stranger for breaking his fall, he explained, to which the other had answered only, ‘Mon Dieu!’: ‘I laughed for about half an hour after I got back to bed,’ he wrote, ‘but I don’t think he saw the funny side at all.’⁸

Lawrence, Hogarth and Campbell-Thompson arrived at the village of Jarablus on the afternoon of 11 March 1911, frozen stiff, having forded the Sajur river and battled through a Siberian gale with a caravan of ten camels and eleven pack-horses. They had left Aleppo three days earlier, a week behind schedule, owing to bad weather, for it was the coldest winter in the Near East for forty years. As the caravan wound into the village, the Arabs came swarming out to greet them, and many hands helped the caravaneers to couch the camels and unload the horses. A house belonging to the local liquorice company had been vacated for them, and soon they were out of the biting wind, while a jostling, gabbling crowd of natives cleared out the storehouses, and brought their luggage in piece by piece.

The Carchemish dig lay about three-quarters of a mile away from the village, and consisted of three huge mounds, the largest of which – the central mound – was believed to cover the main Hittite town. George Smith had discovered the site through some sixth sense, for though the town was mentioned in Jeremiah, the biblical account revealed no more than the fact that the city had stood somewhere near the Euphrates – one of the longest rivers in the Near East. Smith, a self-educated engraver, had already been world-famous when he discovered the site, having translated certain texts found in ancient Nineveh which confirmed the biblical story of the Flood. These texts were inscribed in Babylonian-Akkadian cuneiform, a writing system common to many civilizations of the ancient East, so called because its pictograms took the form of cone-shaped wedges which could easily be inscribed by a split reed in wet clay. Cuneiform had been deciphered in 1860, but while the Hittites had used it for their texts, most of their monumental and ritual inscriptions had been in hieroglyphic script which had yet to be deciphered. The secrets of Egyptian hieroglyphs had been unlocked by the Rosetta Stone – an inscription of the same text in three languages – and, as Smith had learned that the city of Carchemish had harboured a colony of foreign hieroglyphers, it was hoped that an excavation there might reveal such a key to ancient Hittite.

Carchemish had been built on the intersection of two waterways, and centred on a 130-foot acropolis which dominated the flat landscape and directly overlooked a major ford on the Euphrates. In spring the waters of the spate would leap and toss, foaming brownly down the maze of channels, and form a stream 1,000 yards wide, which licked around leaf-shaped islands yellow with flowers. On the opposite bank the village of Zamora stood in fields and orchards, set against the backdrop of the Taurus mountains, green in summer but in winter capped white with snow. Carchemish had been a Hittite capital as early as 2500 BC, but its position on the river had given it a strategic importance to invading armies, and it had changed hands many times. Sargon the Assyrian had captured it in 717 BC, and a century later the Assyrians had been defeated there by the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho – an event recorded in the Old Testament. The early excavations had revealed some promising hieroglyphic scripts, but no progress had yet been made in their decipherment. The discovery of the Hittite metropolis at Boghazkoy near Ankara in 1907 had brought the question of hieroglyphics to prominence again, and so it was that Hogarth, Lawrence and Thompson found themselves at Jarablus in 1911.

Work began within two days of their arrival, with a workforce 100 strong which they recruited from Jarablus and the neighbouring villages. While Thompson made a survey of the site, Lawrence marshalled the men, beginning where the previous excavators had left off, and almost at once uncovering a great staircase. The staircase proved to be Roman, however – part of a much later stratum which superimposed the Hittite levels. The great task of the early days was to clear away the Roman detritus in order to get at the more interesting layers, which lay about twenty feet below. Under the supervision of Grigori – a Cypriot overseer Hogarth had imported specially for the task – the men worked with ropes and crowbars, hauling up enormous slabs of Roman concrete, all of them shouting and giving orders at once. Lawrence would be up in the freezing dawn, to breakfast on ‘bread like indiarubber sheeting’ which was produced by their cook, dragoman and general factotum, Haj Wahid. The Haj was a memorable character. A brawny, powerful townsman from Aleppo, he proved to be honest, faithful and hardworking, but very much given to boasting, especially after plying himself with strong liquor – a habit which he indulged in over-frequently. About forty years old, he was a veteran of the British Consulate in Aleppo, where he had worked as a dragoman, and was said to have once, in a drunken stupor, held up the camel caravans entering the city’s Antaki gate by taking pot-shots at the camel-drivers from the roof of his house. Badly beaten in a fight with the five brothers of a woman he had been meeting clandestinely, four of whom – according to the Haj – he had shot down, he had taken refuge from the blood-feud at Jarablus, where he went about his cookery with a revolver stuffed into his belt. Though an admirable cook in his own way, his abilities did not extend to making bread without an oven, and his ‘wash leather-like’ offerings were only made palatable by copious addition of some of the nine varieties of jam Hogarth had judiciously brought along.