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Sir Max Mallowan's excavations at Tell Arbid in 1936

In 1935 M. E. L. Mallowan was rightly considered to be one of the outstanding British archaeologists of his generation. Having served his apprenticeship under Sir Leonard Woolley at Ur and supervised the prehistoric sounding at Nineveh under R. Campbell Thompson, he had then directed a successful excavation of his own at Arpachiyah (McCall 2001: 41–4), followed by the immediate publication of the final report (Mallowan/Cruikshank 1935). As a result of a change in the Iraq Antiquities Law, the division of antiquities found during excavations ceased. Mallowan, like many other archaeologists whose fieldwork had been sponsored by museums, was obliged to abandon Iraq and look for new opportunities of research in neighbouring eastern Syria, which was virtually terra incognita at this time (Oates/Oates 2001: 121). No doubt, Mallowan's interest in this area has been stimulated by the discoveries of Max von Oppenheim at Tell Halaf, where pottery has been found similar to that excavated by Mallowan at Arpachiyah. Furthermore, in 1934 Poidebard's aerial survey was published, and it included photographs of numerous archaeological sites along the Khabur and its tributaries (Mallowan 1947: 1). In the fall of 1934 Mallowan, accompanied by his wife, Agatha Christie, and an architect, Mr R. H. Macartney, arrived in Syria to inspect a number of sites located along the Khabur and Jaghjagh rivers, as well as in the Khabur plain. After a winter spent in Egypt, Mallowan returned to the Khabur area in the Spring of 1935, not only to continue his survey, but first to excavate Tell Chagar Bazar. Sherds of the same so-called Halaf pottery had been found at the base of the mound, pointing to the possibility of obtaining at this site a long stratigraphical sequence, which would, in turn, serve as a chronological framework for research on other sites (Mallowan 1936: 7–11, Fig. 2). The season's work, however, was not limited to Tell Chagar Bazar. Small teams were detached from the main force for a few days to make trial soundings on some other principal sites, such as Tell Ailun and Tell Mozan (Oates/Oates 2001: 129).