This was, in fact, the last day he and Beeson spent in each other’s company, for they had outgrown their friendship. Beeson had forsaken archaeology for zoology, his first interest, leaving Lawrence to archaeologize alone. He became even more deeply involved with the Ash-molean in late 1908, and one day, while visiting the medieval collection, he ran into Edward Leeds, a shy young man eight years his senior, who until recently had been serving in the Colonial Service in Malaya. Leeds had just replaced Leonard Woolley as junior Assistant Keeper of the Ashmolean, and he and Lawrence found much in common – not least their shyness. The following January Leeds introduced Lawrence to the museum’s new Keeper, David Hogarth – a man who was to exert a profound influence on his life. Hogarth was then forty-five years old, an Orientalist and antiquarian of the classical school, who had tramped Syria, Turkey and Palestine alone with a revolver for company, and who stood no nonsense from the natives. He had written a notable book about his adventures: A Wandering Scholar in the Levant,and was an archaeologist of repute who had once run the British School of Archaeology in Athens, and had excavated in Cyprus and in Egypt under the celebrated Flinders Petrie. He spoke French, German, Italian, Greek and Turkish, sat on the committee of the Royal Geographical Society, and had even worked as Timescorrespondent in Crete during the 1897 revolution. Hogarth was the archetypal Edwardian gentleman-Imperialist: chauvinistic, conservative, autocratic, almost congenitally hostile to democracy – an aristocrat of the intellect. Patrician in style, cool in temperament, superbly educated at Winchester and Magdalen, he was the eternal dilettante amateur, whose qualities Lawrence would later sum up with the single epithet ‘civilized’. Others, less impressed with his combination of physical repugnance and unstymied erudition, thought him a ‘highly educated baboon’. 13Despite his ability, Hogarth never achieved greatness in any one sphere: his talents were too diffuse, and like Lawrence himself, he was too restless to be labelled, always oscillating between the academic and the adventurous, and ultimately leaving his most distinguished legacy in his recognition of remarkable talent in the person of T. E. Lawrence. To Lawrence he was to become a kind of father-figure, a parent-surrogate who ‘was like a reserve, always there behind me; if I got flustered or puzzled’. 14Moreover, Hogarth was well connected. Unlike Thomas Lawrence, who had necessarily broken ties with everyone of influence and could no longer call on the Old School to assist him, Hogarth knew almost everyone. Edwardian society was no meritocracy, and despite his intellectual and academic gifts, Lawrence realized he required some kind of sponsor in order to ‘get on’. He later admitted that he owed Hogarth every good job he had ever had. He was, Lawrence concluded, ‘a very wonderful man … first of all human, then charitable, then alive … the parentI could trust, without qualification, to understand what bothered me’ 15 (my italics).From the beginning, Lawrence recognized what a man like Hogarth could do for him, and set out to win him over.
Hogarth was not much interested in Lawrence’s crusader castles. His attitude to any aspect of archaeology unconnected with classical antiquity and the ancient Near East was dismissive. What moved Hogarth was the Hittites, a mysterious biblical people about whom, before 1870, hardly anything had been known. The story of the Hittites was a curious one. In 1812, the Swiss explorer Johan Lutwig Burckhardt had discovered a stone set in the wall of the bazaar of Hama – a large town in Syria – which appeared to be incised with hieroglyphs. He was unable to examine it in detail because of local hostility, but on first glance he felt that the hieroglyphs were quite unlike ancient Egyptian ones. It was not until 1872 that the Hama stone was inspected closely, and then its hieroglyphs were compared with those discovered on a similar stone in Aleppo, and various other inscriptions found scattered over Asia Minor. By 1876, it was concluded that the script of the lost Hittite civilization had been found. Hogarth had already made several major journeys in search of that civilization, and had returned to Oxford with a collection of Hittite cylinder-seals which was unique of its kind in the world. These seals offered tantalizing insights into the lost culture. Of similar shape to the joint of a finger, and rarely much longer, they were incised with intricately made, sometimes surreal images – bloated plants, spiky animals, insect-like humans. Although referred to as ‘seals’, they had originally been printing devices which, when dipped in coloured pigments, could be rolled out to produce designs on human skin or clothing for decoration, or on property to signify ownership. Hittite cylinder-seals had no place in Lawrence’s medieval fantasy, but he flattered Hogarth by showing an interest in them, and by asking where traces of Hittite civilization were likely to be found. He explained that he was planning a trip around crusader castles in Syria the following summer, but could certainly spare a few days hunting for Hittites. Hogarth, unmoved, tried to dissuade him from the journey. It would be far too hot in summer, he said, for tramping about Syria. When Lawrence persisted, Hogarth advised him to contact Doughty, the expert on Arabian travel. Lawrence wrote, but Doughty’s attitude was little more encouraging than Hogarth’s had been. He explained, first of all, that he had been no farther north than Damascus, but added, ‘In July and August the heat is very severe day and night … it is a land of squalor where a European can find evil refreshment. Long daily marches on foot a prudent man who knows the country would I think consider out of the question …’ 16If Lawrence really intended visit the East, Doughty commented, he would be well advised to learn Arabic.
Doughty’s forebodings filled Lawrence with fear, but the more his betters insisted on the foolishness of the undertaking, the more tightly the screw of his determination was turned. His ride through France in 1908 had been the preparation: the East would provide the backdrop for the knight-errant adventures he craved. He began taking Arabic lessons from a Syrian Protestant clergyman, the Revd Nasar Odeh, and from him acquired a sound framework of grammar and a vocabulary of about 100 words which, he thought, would suffice for road directions, food, accommodation, and money transactions. His parents provided Ј40 to buy a camera and tripod, and to supplement his photographs he took drawing lessons from E. H. New, an architectural illustrator who, to Lawrence’s delight, had recently illustrated a biography of William Morris. Before leaving, he saw Hogarth again, and this time the Master set him a task. Since he would be visiting the region of southern Turkey in which Hogarth had found many of his Hittite cylinder-seals, would Lawrence bring back more seals for the Ash-molean collection? The seals were small and easily transportable. Lawrence now had his quest. To prepare himself practically for local conditions, he memorized long passages from Arabia Desertaand read Practical Hints for Travellers in the Near Eastby E. A. Reynolds-Ball. He took Ball’s advice and bought a Mauser automatic pistol for protection against footpads. He had a lightweight suit made with many pockets to carry his things, and through Hogarth met Harry Pirie-Gordon, who had travelled in Syria the previous season, and from whom he managed to borrow an annotated map. Meanwhile, his official iradeh –a letter of safe-conduct from the Ottoman Government – had been applied for by Sir John Rhys, Principal of Jesus College, through Lord Curzon, Chancellor of Oxford University. On 18 June 1909, with Pirie-Gordon’s map stuffed into one pocket and his Baedeker stuffed into another, he stepped aboard SS Mongolia,bound for Port Said and, ultimately, Beirut.