Near the end of Agatha Christie's 1937 novel under the title "Death on the Nile", investigator Hercule Poirot semi-inquiries his investigation into the police case he was working on with archaeological excavations, saying: "I removed the loose earth, and scraped here and there with a knife until I finally reached my goal. To do - I removed the extraneous material so I could find out the truth.”
Poirot's sentence reflects Agatha Christie's interest in archeology as the wife of Max Mallowan, a British archaeologist who led archaeological excavations in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt and often accompanied her husband on his travels to the Middle East while she was at the height of her best-selling author.
The methodological nature of archeology has greatly attracted the world-renowned novelist, who "was fascinated by mysteries and small artifacts," said Charlotte Trumpler, who co-curated a turn-of-the-21st-century exhibition on Christie's and archeology as she told CNN in 2011: “She had a knack for putting puzzles like artifacts together very patiently.”
In addition to fulfilling her "desire for lifelong learning," expeditions allowed Agatha Christie and her husband to escape the stresses of fame, says Laura Thompson, author of Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life: "She didn't have to be Agatha Christie all along... She could spend a good part of the year away from it all and just be the wife of archaeologist Max Mallowan.”
According to Smithsonian magazine, Christie's fascination with ancient civilizations, especially Egypt, is shown through works such as Murder in Mesopotamia, a 1936 novel focused on the murder of an archaeologist's wife; The death novel comes like the end issued in 1945, whose events took place in Egypt in 2000 BC, and perhaps the most famous of them was “Death on the Nile.”
Agatha Christie drew up the lines of her first novel, Snow Upon the Desert, in Cairo, but was unable to publish it. More than a decade later, in 1923, Christie, provoked by Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, returned to Cairo as a place with a short story called The Adventure of the Egyptian Cemetery.
Agatha Christie visited the Middle East in the fall of 1928 after her recent separation from her first husband Archibald Christie, where the writer planned to recover by "sunshine" in the Caribbean and two days before her scheduled departure, her friends suggested an alternate destination, Baghdad.
Christie traveled to the Iraqi capital via the Orient Express, a train that inspired another famous Christie novel. British archaeologist Leonard Woolley was excavating for the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Leonard Woolley's wife, archaeologist Catherine Woolley, was a fan of Christie, and the couple encouraged her to Monitor ongoing excavations.
In her autobiography, Christie recalls the impact of this trip: "I fell in love with Ur in Iraq...the temptation of the past came to take me...to see a dagger slowly appear, with its golden luster, through the sand was a romantic thing, it filled me with eagerness to lift pots and things out of the soil." Longing to be an archaeologist."
In 1933, Agatha Christie and her husband, Max Mallowan, visited Egypt on their way to expel archaeological excavations, and then to Sudan on a cruise across the Nile on board a luxury ship that was inaugurated in 1885 for the royal family in Egypt before converting it into a cruise ship in 1921. Passengers were from the European elite who preferred "Egypt's sunny skies and blue waters," Christie later said, who also made careful notes of her travel companions and the sites she saw on her travels including the Temple of Karnak and Ramses II.
Mon, Feb. 14, 2022
