So although I was still relatively young in 1964, I’d racked up some unique and extensive experience, and it didn’t come as a total surprise when I got a call from Bob Dyson, an up-and-coming archaeologist back at Penn, seeking help excavating ancient graves at Hasanlu. Millions of people are familiar with the work of Egyptologist Howard Carter, the British archaeologist who discovered the tomb of King Tut. Far fewer are acquainted with Bob Dyson’s work, and that’s a shame, because Bob was the Howard Carter of Hasanlu. Six years before inviting me to Iran, when he was a mere thirty-one years old, Bob made the discovery of a lifetime at Hasanlu. Beneath a mound of rubble and charred embers in the wreckage of an immense two-story palace or temple, he found the skeletal remains of three men trapped — crushed — when the burning roof collapsed and the massive walls toppled. As the debris was carefully brushed from the buried bones, it became clear that the three men had died while at a dead run, literally, their arms and legs frozen in perpetual near-motion. It was a remarkable snapshot of death, preserved for nearly three millennia.
Even more remarkable — and a key reason Bob invited me to Hasanlu — was the object cradled in the arms of the front runner. The object was a bowl (or a vase, or a beaker): a metal vessel measuring about eight inches high, seven inches across the top, and six inches across the base. The falling walls had flattened the bowl, of course, along with the guy carrying it. Even so, the bowl’s elaborate ornamentation remained virtually intact and astonishingly detailed. An upper scene, enacted by a band of embossed figures encircling the bowl, showed three young men bringing offerings to the gods — two gods riding in chariots, and a third god wearing a horned headdress. The bowl’s lower ring contained a series of smaller scenes and numerous figures, including a nude goddess, a male hunter or warrior, an eagle carrying a woman, another woman riding a lion, and a trio of people — a seated man, a woman, and a child, whom the woman is presenting to the man. The bowl was such an extraordinary find that Life magazine devoted an eleven-page spread to it — the equivalent, back then, of a one-hour television special hosted by Katie Couric or Diane Sawyer.
Despite its relatively small size, the bowl was quite heavy. That’s because it was made of solid gold. Today — carefully guarded in a museum in Tehran — the bowl is one of Iran’s richest archaeological treasures. Three millennia ago it was equally prized, occupying a sacred place in the citadel’s palace or temple — as valuable as a freshly carved or painted masterpiece by Michelangelo would have been to a Renaissance pope or a Medici prince. Three men, at least, had died for the bowl’s sake — caught for all time in a dramatic act of desperation.
By the time Bob Dyson called me in early 1964, millions of Life readers had marveled at the bowl’s intricate beauty. But the question that still hung in the air, across all the centuries since the citadel’s gates were breached, the roof caught fire, and the walls collapsed, was this: Who were these three men, and what were they doing with the bowl? Were they all citadel defenders, frantically trying to keep a sacred relic from falling into the hands of infidels? Or were they looters, greedily racing from a burning temple with the richest plunder of all? Or were they a mixture of both: one lone temple guard, faithful to the last, fleeing a pair of ruthless pursuers?
Bob asked if I could help answer the question. I thought I could, but it wouldn’t be easy. I’d need to travel to Iran, dig up the bones of soldiers from both ancient armies, and compare their measurements to those of the area’s modern inhabitants. It was a long shot, back in those decades before scientists knew how to use DNA to trace ancestry, and it had never been done before. And it was irresistibly interesting.
Bob promised to provide me with a crew of ten local workmen to do the digging, and offered to pay travel expenses for one of my students, to help supervise the workers. I invited Ted Rathbun, an inexperienced but promising student who would be starting graduate school in the fall. I thought I was doing Ted a favor. Little did I know that soon my life would be in that young man’s hands.
Ted and I left Kansas City in early June aboard an eastbound TWA 707; we made stopovers in Washington, D.C., to visit my mother, and New York City, to take in the World’s Fair. (In those days, airlines didn’t charge extra for making stopovers between legs of a long flight.) From New York we flew to London, where we stayed long enough to make a side trip to Stonehenge, which had already been standing for a thousand years or more when the citadel at Hasanlu fell. While in England, we also visited with two of the scientists who’d exposed the infamous “Piltdown Man” hoax, in which some clever prankster created an evolutionary “missing link” by burying together pieces of the mandible (lower jaw) of an orangutan, teeth from a chimpanzee, and the jawless skull of a medieval human.
Having thus broadened Ted’s horizons, both geographically and archaeologically, we set off for the Middle East, arriving in Beirut, Lebanon. In those days Beirut was a beautiful, vibrant, cosmopolitan city, brimming with visitors from many nations. You could ski in the nearby mountains in the morning, then unwind with an afternoon swim in the Mediterranean, gazing above the blue waters at a sky filled with parasailors. There was no gunfire, no explosions; this was a decade before a long, bloody civil war tore Lebanon apart. Beirut was a last, urbane vestige of modern civilization before the wilds of Iran.
We’d flown into Beirut on TWA; in Beirut we switched to Cedar, a Lebanese airline, for the flight to Tehran. There, we rendezvoused with Bob Dyson and the rest of the American team who would be spending the summer in Hasanlu. From the airport, we were whisked straight to a dinner at the American embassy, where we were treated like visiting dignitaries rather than lowly academics and students.
Compared with Beirut, Tehran struck me as far more conservative and militarized. Soldiers patrolled everywhere, checking passports and other belongings. Iran was still ruled by the pro-American shah, so Tehran seemed relatively modern and Western, but here and there I saw signs of the Islamist fundamentalism that would eventually transform Iran into a militant Muslim state.
We stayed in the Iranian capital for nearly a week, getting our visas, passes, and other paperwork processed. In planning the expedition, Bob Dyson figured he might want to send some of the crew to other nearby sites, so he had requested driver’s licenses for me and several others. The request was refused — the government official who vetoed it didn’t say why. However, Bob had worked enough summers in Iran to know how the machinery of corruption and bribery worked. He handed over some dollars to lubricate the wheels of progress, and soon we had our licenses.
Official corruption wasn’t the only problem I encountered in Tehran. My first inkling of illness came there, when I developed a case of diarrhea. It wasn’t bad — it happens to travelers all the time — and I took some Imodium tablets, which seemed to help.