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95th Anniversary, Agatha Christie Disappears For 11 Days - Ep 7
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20th December - Episode 7 - 95th Anniversary, Agatha Christie Disappears For 11 Days. (3rd December 1926)
It is quite common for mystery to be associated with the festive season, in particular, adaptions of Agatha Christie's famous work have had a place as Christmas reading or nowadays watching since they were first published. This is a tradition which holds today with my own family and in honor of the season we want to share it with you! This episode is luckily then inspired by the 95th Anniversary of the most mysterious event in Christie's own life, her disappearance for 11 days whereupon she reappeared with apparent amnesia, on 3rd December 1926. But how is archaeology involved... well, in quite a few ways actually, Christie was a pretty brilliant archaeologist-in-training, was married to a professional archaeologist, was a fixture at many Middle and Near Eastern sites, and wrote quite a bit of insightful narrative surrounding archaeology in her fiction novels. Joining me this episode is Dr. Rebecca Mills a lecturer in Communications and English at the University of Bournemouth, also Agatha Christie aficionado. From my family to yours, Merry Christmas, Yule, or simply Happy Holiday Season, may next year be utterly brilliant for all of you!
Dr. Mills has rather brilliantly also provided a further reading list below:
Graphic biography: The Real Life of Agatha Christie, by Anne Martinetti and Guillaume Lebeau, illustrated by Alexandre Franc, translated by Edward Gauvin (SelfMadeHero, 2016)
J.C. Bernthal, Queering Agatha Christie: Revisiting the Golden Age of Detective Fiction (Palgrave 2016)
Christopher Prior, 'An Empire Gone Bad: Agatha Christie, Anglocentrism and Decolonization' in Cultural and Social History: The Journal of the Social History Society Volume 15:2 (2018)
More about Christie's young women: Merja Makinen, Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity (Palgrave 2006)
Rebecca Mills and J.C. Bernthal, editors, Agatha Christie Goes to War (Routledge 2021)
More about Death on the Nile and Appointment with Death: Brittain Bright and Rebecca Mills, 'The Revelations of the Corpse: Interpreting the Body in the Golden Age Detective Novel' in New Perspectives on Detective Fiction
Mystery Magnified, edited by Casey Cothran and Mercy Cannon (Routledge 2015)
Brittain Bright, Beyond the scene of the crime : investigating place in Golden Age detective fiction (Doctoral Dissertation, Goldsmiths University 2015) https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.650408
Nadia Atia has a forthcoming chapter on Orientalism in Christie's work in the forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie (November 2022)
Music
Intro/Outro Music - Creative Commons - "Fantasia Fantasia" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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Transcript
Introduction to Flipside Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:20
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Flipside. This is, as always, the podcast that brings to you important discussions about the past, prompted by specific historical events.
Meet Dr. Rebecca Mills: Agatha Christie Expert
00:00:32
Speaker
This month I am joined by Dr Rebecca Mills of the University of Bournemouth. She is a lecturer in communications and English. Dr Mills has specific interests in the Golden Age of crime fiction and Agatha Christie's post-war work, specifically assessing the importance of setting and geography. Dr Mills's most recent book, Agatha Christie Goes to War, which she produced with J.C. Bernthal is
00:01:01
Speaker
utterly brilliant. It explores the effect of conflict on the social and psychological nature of Christie's detective fiction, which is something which hasn't really been done before. Dr Mills will give more details on this later in the episode, but it will soon be coming out in paperback. Dr Mills is an expert on Agatha Christie and a truly wonderful speaker, so we are delighted that she agreed to speak with us on Flipside this month.
00:01:31
Speaker
Now my guess is you will all want to know what inspired this month's episode.
The Mystery of Christie's Disappearance
00:01:37
Speaker
And that would be the events of the 3rd December 1926.
00:01:43
Speaker
This is the 95th anniversary this year of Agatha Christie's disappearance from her home for a total of 11 days, before she miraculously appeared again. But why did she disappear? Well, the consensus is that she disappeared due to emotional trauma
00:02:01
Speaker
after her husband Archie asked her for a divorce. The following morning, her car Amoris Cowley was discovered at Newlands Corner. Parked above a chalk quarry, it was empty apart from an expired driving licence and clothes.
00:02:17
Speaker
And no one knows what happened to Agatha, what she did in those 11 days where nobody knew where she was. There was a massive uproar and everyone was trying to find her, the police were of course involved, other crime writers even got involved.
00:02:35
Speaker
What's more is even years later Agatha didn't even comment on the event herself. And it was quite a big deal at the time. But why have I specifically chosen this event for a December episode of All Things? Well, that's because of a family tradition. And a sort of incidental tradition in the UK.
00:03:00
Speaker
You see, it used to be the case that every Christmas a new episode of a crime fiction TV programme would come out. And for many years it was usually an Agatha Christie. For that reason, many people, including my people, associate film classics like Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express with Christmas time. So from my family to yours,
00:03:28
Speaker
we hoped you wouldn't mind sharing in this small tradition. With that, on with the episode. The best place to start this episode of Flipside has got to be with the event itself. So apart from the obvious maybe, why was Agatha Christie's disappearance such a big deal? So she was very famous at the time. She had captured the public imagination
00:03:58
Speaker
with her mystery stories, her detective stories, and then all of a sudden it seemed like the public collectively became involved in this real-life mystery. So I think we can kind of map a contemporary preoccupation with true crime stories and so on onto this, this kind of participatory nature
00:04:20
Speaker
what was happening. So there were, this happened in 1926. Her car was found by a pond and this led to a massive manhunt. Other mystery writers got involved, Dorothy Alsace, for instance, Christie's contemporary. People were consulting mediums
00:04:38
Speaker
looking for answers in the in the spirit world there were all sorts of speculative headlines and people began potentially to suspect that her husband might have had something to do with it so I don't know how much people will know about the backstory to this disappearance but Archie Christie, her first husband with whom she had a daughter, had during a very troubled period in Christie's life after the death of her mother
00:05:06
Speaker
had told her that he was going to leave her for secretary, Neil. And this is not something Christie wanted, of course. She was very attached to her husband. She was very attached to their family unit. Divorce in the 20s was becoming more common, but it was still not as easy a process mentally, financially, legally as it might be in some cases today. And so
00:05:35
Speaker
falling apart around her and this was one reason why people suspected the worst when she was missing. And so after the massive manhunt, massive police investment, huge public interest, she was discovered in Harrogate at a spa where she'd booked in under the name of her husband's
00:05:59
Speaker
new lover, her husband's romantic interest, and people were very angry about this. Her explanation to this was amnesia. She never really commented on it to the press very much. Archie Christie certainly didn't really give any indication of what had been happening on his side. Her biography doesn't talk about it. Her autobiography doesn't talk about it. What we know about the events
00:06:24
Speaker
has been reconstructed afterwards and the information is by no means complete or infallible. So there's still this void of information at the heart of the narrative of her life. People have speculated various things. One of the things I've written has been looking at how trauma and amnesia are related in a number of her mystery stories and linked to a kind of loss of identity, some sort of
00:06:52
Speaker
fugue state caused by trauma is possible.
Christie's Identity and Writing Evolution
00:06:56
Speaker
Other people think she wanted to have some sort of revenge over her husband and this was how she decided to do it. So stress-induced amnesia is definitely a thing that happens and is certainly possible but just the act of putting her reservation at the Spa Hotel in Neil's name
00:07:22
Speaker
It makes me think that perhaps it was a symbolic event which was planned by Christie in a way, this disappearance, sort of solidifying her identity and proving to the wider public that she still had this identity as a mystery author.
00:07:41
Speaker
a proof of her own tangible existence beyond the role of being a wife and in this case almost a spurned wife because it's almost certain that she did not want this divorce herself. That was a decision that Archie Christie had made for her in a way. So this is her almost rebelling against that and making her own decisions.
00:08:08
Speaker
But of course, as Eve already said, we can't know that that is what she was thinking about when she made the decision to disappear, because she almost religiously maintained the mystery. But in any case, the association of amnesia and loss of identity
00:08:29
Speaker
is interesting when it comes to the disappearance of Agatha Christie. In the end, the disappearance itself could just be Christie's way of reaffirming her identity as a mystery author. That's really interesting. Yeah. There's a graphic biography that does take a very kind of similar perspective. So it actually should be talking about making her decision to commit this act. And it's
00:08:59
Speaker
interesting because a lot of the biographical information we have afterwards, I mean it is to an extent speculation, it's an imaginative reconstruction and then this particular text kind of fills it in kind of visual terms, it has the, because it's not a biography in the conventional sense, it has the license to speculate on and visually express this kind of overlap between her identity as a mystery author and her identity as a wronged wife and a lonely and troubled woman and
00:09:29
Speaker
the kind of path she takes out of that. I think one of the things that is key to all her writing is the deep understanding that people aren't who they seem to be, that people aren't just one thing, people aren't just a public persona, an outward facing figure. And I think absolutely what you say could be related to that, that she's reminding herself and the public and her husband that she's not just this
00:09:57
Speaker
abandoned wife. She is this highly skilled, also this highly imaginative and creative person who clearly has a dark side. I mean, the signing in under the name of Theresa Neal, that's that's gone girl kind of stuff, right? That's there's something quite dark going on there. And that's not something that we necessarily associate with Christie as this kind of cozy, cozy figure sitting by the fireside with her dog and her tea and so on.
00:10:27
Speaker
Yeah, we don't get the privilege of really seeing that side to Agatha Christie even in her own autobiography, which really interestingly skips over the event of the disappearance. It's briefly mentioned but nothing more, which means she made a conscious choice to do that, but quite apart from that when you read her autobiography or you listen to it,
00:10:52
Speaker
It is almost like there are two parts to it. Obviously Agatha Christie is writing with hindsight but there is a change in her life, a very very obvious change in the way she lives her life in the years before versus after the disappearance event.
00:11:14
Speaker
What's intriguing is that her mindset also seems to change. The Agatha Christie that we see before the disappearance in her autobiography seems quite domestic. She's happy with family life and a lot of it focuses around the mundane and the importance of her family unit.
00:11:34
Speaker
Afterwards, there's far more stereotypical adventure and outward-looking thoughts. It would be far too bold to say that Agatha Christie changed her entire personality pre and post the Disappearance event, but it was certainly a life-altering event for her. Which might seem… kinda obvious to say.
00:11:59
Speaker
But I don't think we truly recognise quite how life altering it was. Yeah, I think there's just the one sentence, something like, England had become troubling to me. And so she goes to the Canary Islands with her.
00:12:17
Speaker
kind of companion assistant to get away from what we presume to be this publicity backlash.
Themes in Christie's Westmacott Novels
00:12:23
Speaker
And so she but she wrote about a woman having a breakdown and having this kind of crisis in her life in Unfinished Portrait, which was published under her pseudonym Mary Westmacott, a name under which she wrote a number of non
00:12:44
Speaker
serious because I think crime fiction is quite serious. Yeah, I think they're more personal perhaps. They have more links to her where you could see reflections of events that are happening or have happened in her life than you can in her crime fiction. Yeah, I mean, I think we get inevitably, I mean, we can't fully conflate the author into the text, of course.
00:13:11
Speaker
But we do see themes of love triangles in a lot of her crime stories. We see jealousy. We see crisis as something that needs to be negotiated. But of course, she was writing these crime stories before her divorce, before her disappearance. In the Mary Westmacott novels, absolutely. Yet there's more freedom to talk about interiority, to talk about feelings, to talk about womanhood in a way, in a way that's more oblique and
00:13:41
Speaker
indicative in the crime stories but it's more fleshed out in. I'm thinking of Absinthe in the Spring Man which is about a woman who stranded in the desert on her way back to England from I think Baghdad and she's alone at this tiny little station she has nobody to talk to
00:14:03
Speaker
She's in the desert, which is, of course, traditionally a place of visions and transformation and prophecy in the Christian tradition. And she has this absolute breakdown of the self of everything she thinks she knows about herself and her past. She realizes that she's pushed her family away. She realizes that her focus on being a kind of good middle class English woman has led her to alienate her husband.
00:14:31
Speaker
stop him from following his dreams. And she absolutely cracks. And it's cathartic in a way she decides to be different. But then as she gets closer and closer back to England, this kind of facade builds up again. And so the Marist mascot novels are very much about the kind of psychology about narratives, but also looking at the way
00:14:52
Speaker
place informs narratives that how different environments and atmospheres affect people, affect how people interact with each other, what they think about each other. And I think that's what her travel mystery novels do as well. They take people out of their own environments and put them somewhere that's unfamiliar and that leaves them open to unusual influences, creates different kinds of tensions and epiphanies as well about themselves and how they see the world.
00:15:19
Speaker
Interestingly, that really reflects what I mentioned earlier, that Agatha Christie almost has two characters pre and post the disappearance when you use her autobiography as an example.
00:15:35
Speaker
And it makes you wonder if her epiphany came, if her breakdown of self occurred, when she travelled the world post her disappearance. And I'm not surprised in terms of environments that the desert recurs so often in many of her, both her crime novels and the Mary Westmacott novels.
00:15:58
Speaker
Because it is traditionally a landscape of mysticism and is still archaeologically a landscape which we don't have as much understanding as we'd like about. It is a landscape cloaked in mystery. As humans, it's also an incredibly hostile landscape which breaks us down. It's very difficult to hide in the desert because it's such an open landscape.
00:16:26
Speaker
And that includes hiding from yourself, from your challenges. But it's also very difficult to maintain complex challenges in the desert. It tends to break down challenges to rather simple levels of what do I need to do to survive.
00:16:47
Speaker
It brings you back to the fundamentals of human survival.
Symbolism in 'Death on the Nile'
00:16:51
Speaker
And let us not forget that the desert itself, as an environment, surrounded many of the earliest civilisations. Deserts may seem ageless, but temporally, they are constantly changing. And the human struggle for survival in desert landscapes is an extremely old problem.
00:17:14
Speaker
Now, when archaeologists begin working in desert landscapes, we're often surprised by the depth and the complexity of what we find. There has always been a rhetoric of lost paradises and the oasis effect
00:17:32
Speaker
of civilisation in desert landscapes. Desert kites, for example, which I have recorded in the Syrian Black Desert, are structures which can run to kilometres in length and many of which were constructed thousands of years ago in the middle of the desert by the Achaemenid Empire.
00:17:54
Speaker
They are, in some senses, frivolous constructions, and there are hundreds of them, made for the purpose of hunting. For the nobility, of course, various herbivorous mammals. The herds would be driven alongside two long, stretching arms of walls into a pen which would become a killing zone, across kilometres of desert. That's the main theory as to their use, of course.
00:18:21
Speaker
But the point is, you wouldn't expect to find a frivolous construction that would have taken a great deal of manpower to build in the middle of a desert. Civilization, where it should not be constantly challenged by its environment.
00:18:41
Speaker
You can see all these themes relating to deserts and other landscapes in Agatha Christie's writing. That's what we really wanted to talk about, wasn't it? It was the relationship between environments and landscapes, and particularly archaeological landscapes, within Agatha Christie's writings. Death in the Nile, I would argue, and maybe other people have argued as well, but I haven't impressed it, is basically Heart of Darkness, but as a crime novel.
00:19:10
Speaker
People have been focused on the formula of the puzzle and the mystery and the detection process in Christie. Scholars haven't really considered place, for instance, or travel or politics or sexuality and queerness or these more kind of contemporary scholarly viewpoints. What happens in
00:19:31
Speaker
is this journey down the Nile that starts off as a tourist party but ends up, I think it's probably quite a high body count for her books. I think about five people are killed by the end. This boat essentially becomes what one character calls a morgue, a floating morgue. And so
00:19:53
Speaker
It's mainly American and English tourists on board. There's a love triangle tension. Lynette Ridgeway has married Simon, who used to be engaged, Jackie. And Jackie is following Lynette and Simon around on the honeymoon, which again is quite a dark, dark, obsessive thing to do. Poro is on board. There are various other kind of secondary crimes. There's an archaeologist.
00:20:20
Speaker
or at least a man who claims to be an archaeologist. And so they visit the pyramid. There's this bit where Lynette, this young American woman, is gazing up at this kind of symbol of ancient civilization and antiquity. And it's kind of the new world meeting the past. But then as the landscape becomes more and more dramatic and elemental, then people begin to confront their own
00:20:43
Speaker
elemental passions and desires and murderous impulses, or at least so it seems, what is made to look like a crime of passion
00:20:53
Speaker
And this kind of outpouring of elemental human possessive instinct is actually something that's been carefully planned for a long time before that. And so I think that's a clever game she plays with place and atmosphere and people's perceptions of the mystery novel at the time and its purpose.
00:21:13
Speaker
Yeah that's really interesting in that just like there are layers and features within the landscape, there are layers and features within her writing in terms of plots and then subplots which really gives a different depth to the characters and that there are always stratigraphies of crime within her writing.
00:21:37
Speaker
which is a really useful device in terms of obscuring the main plot and the main aspect of crime. But it's also really interesting as you say in terms of the journey. They are of course journeying down the Nile and the landscape is as you say becoming more elemental the further down the Nile they get.
00:21:57
Speaker
and they are going further into a past landscape, a landscape which is still historically recognisable as if stuck in a temporal reality. And at the same time as they're making that journey through this changing landscape, the various subplots and sub-crimes are being discovered until you're left with what is perhaps the most primal and the worst crime, which is the murder itself.
00:22:26
Speaker
It's almost a commentary reflected in the landscape, which is by this point one that ancient Egyptians would recognise aspects of. The Nile has been used as a transportation route for thousands of years.
00:22:42
Speaker
Indeed, there are artworks from the Old Kingdom which depict boats transporting various products and goods including wood, vegetables, fish, livestock down the Nile. In terms of the Old Kingdom, you're talking 2,686 BC to 2,181 BC.
00:23:05
Speaker
The Nile itself was the giver of life to the land, with the Nile Valley being an important part of ancient Egyptian identity. Their world was divided into the black land or kemet of the Nile Valley, where there was enough water and nutrients within the soil for the production of food and for cities and civilizations to thrive. In contrast, going back to earlier discussions, you had the red land, Deshret, the desert,
00:23:34
Speaker
where survival was difficult, nigh on impossible. Civilisations lived based on the annual flood of the Nile. The nobility of Egypt were often buried with boats, so that even in death they could navigate the Nile. Many pharaohs over many centuries would view Egypt from the Nile, observing the construction of monuments.
00:23:57
Speaker
There was a great deal of ceremony and symbolism associated where the everyday Egyptian could look from the backs of the Nile and see their leaders, who, depending on the era, could have been seen as actual gods, or at least the representative of gods.
00:24:16
Speaker
Sometimes the pharaohs would even be dressed as their particular patron deity. The Nile cruise of Cleopatra VII and Julius Caesar is particularly well known in terms of an example, but this event may have or may not have happened.
00:24:35
Speaker
What is intriguing is the parallels between the journey down the Nile for the Ancient Egyptian and the journey down the Nile in Death on the Nile that Agatha Christie portrays.
Crime and Human Nature in Christie's Work
00:24:49
Speaker
So yes, in Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile there are depths upon depths upon depths in terms of landscape and in terms of character.
00:24:58
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. And it kind of goes with the idea that everybody has something to hide. On Death of the Mile, there's also jewel thieving going on. There's potential terrorist activity in one of what English novels murder Roger Ackroyd. Then there's petty theft and blackmail and drug use happening at the same time as this kind of central murder. So, yeah, there's sort of barely anyone who's untouched by some sort of transgressive
00:25:29
Speaker
desire or behavior. Absolutely. And it is camouflaged in some sense. It kind of, and I mean, I guess in some ways it's not unlike archaeology as that kind of sorting out what's really important from the kind of distractions and the layers around it that is part of what the reader is expected to do in tandem with the detective.
00:25:49
Speaker
But she does treat landscapes differently depending on what is within those landscapes. Of course we've seen how deserts are very different to archaeological landscapes like the pyramids and Luxor and even Cairo which is treated as this antiquated centre which hasn't changed for a great period of time apart from the exception of small
00:26:17
Speaker
European influenced areas but that's very different to how she treats Baghdad in for example they came to Baghdad which isn't her traditional mystery story with murder as the beginning and the end it's more of a spy thriller but Baghdad in that instance is not treated as this antiquated city
00:26:45
Speaker
as an archaeological landscape. Baghdad in this case is a new and upcoming city and it's quite an exciting place to be. It's a city which is described as dynamic but in a new way. Yes, and I think her sense of the polypsestic nature of space is very much evident in their came to Baghdad. So that's from 1951, I think, and it's more of a thriller.
00:27:13
Speaker
As you say, it takes place in a modern Baghdad, I actually have. So she writes about the marketplace in Baghdad, for instance. Here, the produce of the west and the east were equally for sale side by side. Aluminium saucepans, cups and sauces and teapots, hammered copperware, silverware from Amara, cheap watches enamel mugs, embroideries, and gay patterned rugs from Persia. Brass bound chests from Kuwait, secondhand coats and trousers and children's willy cardigans.
00:27:42
Speaker
Local quilted bed covers, painted glass lamps, stacks of clay, water, jars and pots. All the cheap merchandise of civilisation together with the native products. And there'd be a lot to unpack in that kind of exposition of the cheap merchandise of civilisation and the native products.
00:28:01
Speaker
But she also notes that kind of in this city, and then among the kind of political intrigue of the city, there are these traditions in craftsmanship, in hospitality, in architecture that have persisted for centuries.
00:28:19
Speaker
The main character here is the protagonist is Victoria. He's a young woman who very impulsively decides to travel to Baghdad because she meets a nice young chap called Edward in a park in London and he's being sent to Baghdad the next day. And so she gets a job looking after an American woman on the way there and ends up in Baghdad with no money and not even knowing Edward's last name.
Modernity and Adventure in 'They Came to Baghdad'
00:28:46
Speaker
So it's
00:28:47
Speaker
It's not particularly plausible, the setup, but there is this sense of adventure, there's this sense of kind of impulsiveness, there's a sense of agency. Victoria very much kind of takes things into her own hands. She's literally the pursuer rather than the pursued. And then she encounters the city and it's different aspects. She gets kidnapped and gets taken outside the city where she
00:29:14
Speaker
escapes and then ends up at an archaeological dig. But I think when she does find Edward, they visit the site of Babylon and that becomes somehow symbolic of a lot of the different understandings of the past and different understandings of power and the way that traces of the past interact with modern world views, the way that
00:29:40
Speaker
Christie tries to find a connection between the contemporary life and worldview and this kind of past cosmology. And so this is they arrive at Babylon. They reached Babylon, bruised and shaken in a couple of hours. The meaningless pile of ruined mud and burnt brick.
00:29:58
Speaker
appointment to Victoria, who expected something in the way of columns and arches looking like pictures she had seen of Baalbek, but little by little her disappointment ebbed as they scrambled over mounds and lumps of burnt brick led by the guide. She listened with only half an ear to his profuse explanations, but as they went along the processional way to the Ishtar Gate, with the faint reliefs of unbelievable animals hiding the walls, a sudden sense of the grandeur of the past came to her.
00:30:25
Speaker
and a wish to know something about this vast pride city that now lay dead and abandoned. Presently, their duty to untick the tea accomplished, they sat down by the Babylonian line to eat the picnic lunch that Edward had brought with him. And then she goes on to say that she doesn't really want to go to a museum, that things all labelled and put into cases don't seem a bit real.
00:30:46
Speaker
somehow. I went to the British Museum once, it was awful and dreadfully tearing on the feet. And so this kind of site-specific immersion is key to how Victoria's interest in the past and how it kind of comes alive to her, that the kind of more scientific approach, the artefacts in the British Museum don't mean nearly as much as these traces do in our existing environment. It would be interesting to know what you think as an archaeologist about this.
00:31:15
Speaker
I would say that the first thing that we need to understand is that sites outside of Europe are still very much active parts of the landscapes in which they sit. So in Europe we're all about preservation of archaeological sites and where possible archaeological sites are labelled, monitored, preserved.
00:31:38
Speaker
And the way that we as humans now interact with those sites is often quite clinical and is purely based on educational grounds. In contrast, sites outside of Europe, whilst preserved, certainly the larger sites, a lot of the smaller sites and some of the less well-defined sites and even those that are also under preservation orders,
00:32:06
Speaker
Those sites are still actively a part of the communities which subsist around them. Many of them are still interacted with on a daily basis in quite a mundane way. And because of that, there is greater, in some respects, immersion within these sites because they are still alive.
00:32:28
Speaker
Or at the very least, the landscapes around them are still alive. There are still individuals farming around these sites. There are individuals who subsist on a daily basis around these sites. So when you're clambering over these walls, as Victoria does, and as Victoria notes, there is no grandeur there anymore,
00:32:55
Speaker
There is still something which humans value even more than pretty palaces and evidence of nobility and kings and wealth and power, and that is permanence. And I think something which Agatha Christie gets at here is that it's a living permanence, it's a permanence that we can recognise as human beings.
00:33:23
Speaker
There are much better preserved sites than Babylon, but what Babylon has is that connection to humanity that comes from people still actively working and living around it. There is now an entire branch of archaeological theory which involves
00:33:44
Speaker
archaeologists actually entering the landscapes they're studying and using their senses, their human senses of sight, smell and hearing, to learn more about how individual historical peoples would have interpreted their own landscapes.
Archaeology's Role in Understanding History
00:34:03
Speaker
And this is a theory originally suggested by Christopher Tilly in his 1994 A Phenomenology of Landscape. He pointed out quite how difficult it is to relate to actual people, actual hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies from two-dimensional depictions of landscapes.
00:34:28
Speaker
So previously archaeologists used a lot of maps and we still, don't get me wrong, use a lot of maps. But now it's generally considered a positive thing for archaeologists to also go out and experience the landscapes they're studying.
00:34:48
Speaker
Now, phenomenology as a theoretical technique has had quite a lot of criticism over the years because some people can take it too far. It seemed to be unscientific and subjective, particularly if phenomenologists try to discern what an individual in prehistory had for breakfast, for example.
00:35:14
Speaker
It's also held back by the fact that we will never think how our ancestors thought. We will never think exactly how ancient civilizations thought, because we don't face the same issues or problems, and we aren't existing within the same context.
00:35:36
Speaker
It is useful though and requires imagination. And apart from that, not a lot of equipment. You just go to an archaeological site, you just stand in that landscape and you think. And that's exactly what Victoria is doing when they came to Baghdad. She stops thinking about the crumbled walls and the remnants and how disappointing it seems that this once powerful ancient city
00:36:04
Speaker
is now rubble and she thinks instead about the people that inhabited that site and then she feels impassioned about the area, the settlement, the people and the landscape again.
00:36:19
Speaker
As to her commentary on museums, well I can't really blame her. Knowing a thing or two about early museums, I seem to remember being taught that it was the 1940s, 50s and 60s which saw poor museum curators trying to tackle the Victorian mania of collecting
00:36:43
Speaker
into the museum collections anything that was shiny without much context information. Many museums, although public institutions, were not actually made for the public at that time. They were essentially large archives or catalogues.
00:37:03
Speaker
I'd like to think though that if Victoria was faced with a modern museum, she'd be a lot more impressed because our main aim now, although we do far more scientific investigation into artefacts,
00:37:19
Speaker
Our main aim now is to be able to communicate that data effectively to the public whom we have a responsibility to as custodians of their heritage. Now museums are all about how we can best communicate our own knowledge and how we can best inspire and this is where we're going to take our first break of the podcast a little later than usual but
00:37:49
Speaker
What could I say? I was enjoying the discussion a bit too much. If you're listening to this, then you're getting something out of the Archaeology Podcast Network. We've got volunteers from around the world helping bring these podcasts to you. We want to do more though, and we can do it with your support. For $7.99 US dollars per month, you can support us and get a little in return. For details, go to arcpodnet.com slash members. That's arcpodnet.com slash members to support archaeological education and outreach.
00:38:19
Speaker
It's interesting because what you're describing is very much resonates with, but I will read out in a second, in that kind of sense of allowing for the imaginative role and the kind of empathetic role and thinking about the cosmology of people who lived thousands of years ago.
00:38:40
Speaker
And so when Victoria finds, she basically scams her way into an archaeological dig because she's running away from the people who kidnapped her. And she kind of picks up enough to help. She thinks the baskets of broken pot shards had at first excited her astonished to derision, although this she had been careful not to display. All these broken bits of coarse stuff, what was the good of them?
00:39:08
Speaker
When as she found joins, stuck them and propped them up in boxes of sand, she began to take an interest. She learned to recognize shapes and types. And she came finally to try and reconstruct in her own mind just how and for what these vessels had been used some 3000 odd years ago.
Imagination and Artifacts in Christie's Stories
00:39:25
Speaker
In the small area where some poor quality private houses had been dug, she pictured the houses as they had originally stood and the people who had lived them with their wants and possessions and occupations, their hopes and their fears.
00:39:38
Speaker
Since Victoria had a lively imagination, a picture rose up easily enough in her mind. On a day when a small clay pot was found encased in a wall with a half dozen gold earrings in it, she was enthralled. Probably the diary of a daughter, which it had said smiling. And then she goes on to comment that this is all related to all the everyday life and fears and hopes of a community of unimportant, simple people. And she compares these artifacts to
00:40:07
Speaker
harangue, the sentimental objects in harangue life. My Saint Anthony he finds things for me when I lose them and a lucky china pig I've got and an awfully nice mixing bowl that I used to make cakes in. And so these objects are for her a way into understanding harangue connection to the past, but also the value of ordinary everyday things which
00:40:29
Speaker
comes important in the thriller plot, which is about this kind of quasi Nazi group of people who want to destroy the world and rebuild it in the middle of what they consider to be Superman.
00:40:43
Speaker
kind of there's this tension set up between these fascists who want to rule over everything, remake everything in their own image, and then the ordinary simple people, the kind of people who use these pots and who cared about their own lives and their families and their own communities. And that eventually enables her to kind of make a choice about her part in saving the world for the ordinary people, which is very much a consistent theme in Christie's texts.
00:41:14
Speaker
But on the other hand, there is an appointment with death from 1938. The protagonist, Sarah, is a doctor. She's travelling in Jordan and she's come to the city of Petra.
00:41:30
Speaker
And they've gone on a sort of touristy day trip to a place of sacrifice, a high place, which is suggested that that's where the Jewish patriarch Abraham almost sacrificed his son. And here again, like in death in the Nile, the landscape is very important. All around and below stretch the blood red rocks, a strange and unbelievable country unparalleled anywhere.
00:41:53
Speaker
Here in the exquisite pure morning air, they stood like gods surveying a baser world, a world of flaring violence. And this is 1938, so this is just before the Second World War. Here was, as the guide told them, the place of sacrifice, the high place. He shed them the trough, cut them the flat rock at their feet. And then Dr. Gerard, somebody else in the tour, says, you appreciate the appositeness of the devil's temptation in the New Testament. Satan took our Lord up to the summit of a mountain and showed him the world.
00:42:23
Speaker
all these things will I give thee if they will fall down and worship me? How much greater the temptation up on high to be a god of material power? And there's this kind of anxiety that Sarah is also being seduced into taking on this godlike role.
Ancient Power and Ritual Spaces
00:42:38
Speaker
She says it's a wonderful idea to have a place of sacrifice up here. I think sometimes don't you that a sacrifice is necessary?
00:42:45
Speaker
I mean, one can have too much regard for life. Death isn't really so important as we make out. And then Dr. Gerard comments, if you feel that, Ms. King, you should not have adopted our profession. To us, death is and must always be the enemy. And so when they came to Baghdad and in murder in Mesopotamia, there's this sense that connecting with the ordinary, everyday artifacts of the past, the kind of things we can think of as universal, so marriage, family,
00:43:15
Speaker
death rituals, that's a good thing. But thinking, but being seduced into thinking in these sites that one has power over life and death, or one takes on the role of what, and they came to Baghdad as referred to as a king of Babylon. That's a bad thing. That's, that's too much. That's kind of destabilizing the kind of ordinary everyday life.
00:43:39
Speaker
Interestingly, it's always been a point which surrounds archaeology that when we excavate items and artefacts, we recognise that everyday domestic pieces, which we uncover, but there are always pieces which we have
00:43:57
Speaker
no idea about and no matter how much we try to interpret we can never be sure as to those items purpose or their use because for whatever reason they are no longer a part of our lived experience.
00:44:14
Speaker
And quite humorously, these items of the unknown are often referred to as ritual aspects, because that is something about ancient civilizations that we can no longer understand or comprehend. That's quite an old joke in archaeology, in that if you can't identify something, then oh well, it must be a ritual item.
00:44:44
Speaker
Christine makes exactly the same point in her memoir of her archaeological life with Sir Max Malloine, and come tell me how you live. She says there's different baskets in the room, and then there's one that's kind of euphemistically called the one for ritual objects. So yeah, I see that, yeah. And I think the ritual aspect is absolutely key here if there's this sense that at these certain places, these certain ancient places,
00:45:12
Speaker
there is this kind of ritual energy that modern people shouldn't try to access that that can influence modern people badly and that that's something that's an issue in a lot of her thrillers which kind of center around this creation of a new world order and they are often linked to these kind of out of the way places these
00:45:35
Speaker
sublime or uncanny landscapes, these places that in which the ordinary modern person is out of place, if there's nothing kind of mediating between them and the past, there's no screen or label or this kind of touristic trapping, then this kind of direct connection to sacrifice, to power is dangerous. And so again, there's a lot more kind of symbolic
00:46:02
Speaker
value and anxiety to place than people have often thought in her work. And there is this kind of continuing theme of privileging the everyday people
00:46:15
Speaker
everyday objects, everyday items. But I think there's also recognition of kind of the power of narrative in murder in Mesopotamia. Poirot has figured out who murdered Mrs. Leibner, who's the wife of the kind of head archaeologist and who's basically a terrible woman who is hilariously based on, I think, allegedly based on Leonard Woolley's wife. So she's brutally murdered and Poirot has deduced what happened to the sequence of events
00:46:44
Speaker
has put all the pieces together and created a narrative around them. And it's this kind of classic bringing everybody together and explaining what happened. And there's no proof that things happen in the way they did, but the narrative is convincing enough that people believe it. It's, as he says, it's psychologically perfect, but there was no proof, no proof at all. But this, the power of the narrative
00:47:07
Speaker
compels the person who did it to confess. He says, no, there is no proof that that does not matter. You knew that I would not deny truth. So there's a kind of scientific ethic there. And he says, you would have made a good archaeologist, Monsieur Poirot. You have the gift of recreating the past. And I think that kind of comes back to what you were saying just now about this kind of predictive thing, that it's not enough to kind of have the site and map the topography and collect the objects and do them together.
00:47:37
Speaker
putting them into a convincing narrative, a narrative that has imaginative and emotional appeal and some sort of sense of psychological truth that's quite important as well. And I think that's something Christie was very aware of.
00:47:52
Speaker
I think we can say with some degree of certainty that people would have significantly less interest in archaeology if it didn't have a narrative surrounding it. On a basic level, that's just the nature of humanity which thrives on story and always has. But on a deeper level, if we have an artefact, if we don't construct a narrative around the artefact, what do we in actuality have?
00:48:21
Speaker
We have a sherd of pottery, which has value in itself for existing, but would have very little value to further study of human societies and dynamics. Equally, and this might seem shocking, when we construct a narrative, it is the most logical story we can come up with for an artifact that does not necessarily mean that it is the absolute truth, because we cannot know
00:48:51
Speaker
with absolute certainty that that is the actual story associated with that artefact.
Christie's Disappearance: A Lasting Mystery
00:48:59
Speaker
We weren't there when it was made, we weren't there when that object slowly processed through its history. There is very rarely any sort of written record for the especially mundane object of everyday human existence.
00:49:15
Speaker
Which is why some artifact histories that we come up with might actually be considered fiction. Let me be clear before I get emails and letters to this effect. Archaeology itself is not fiction.
00:49:32
Speaker
It is at its best a highly scientific and complex process. All good archaeologists when coming up with artefact histories do so from logical standpoints, based on the facts that we have about the objects. But there will always be a certain degree of interpretation.
00:49:55
Speaker
involved until someone invents us a time machine. I mean, I think that kind of brings us back to the disappearance. People are still trying to piece that together in ways that make sense, according to what we know of, what we like to think of as human nature, according to what we like to think of as this quote, I'm quite Agatha Christie, what we like to think of her different texts. But I mean,
00:50:22
Speaker
And again, I think this perhaps comes back to historical archaeological methodology. We can't take her autobiography as truth. We can't take Archie Christie's version of events as truth. What we have are these texts that we situate in a certain way according to our own understanding. And I think that's important for helping us figure out what our own understanding of human nature and transgression and people and community and relationships is. It's perhaps thinking
00:50:53
Speaker
One of the things that reading mystery fiction can do is make it easy to think that there is a central truth that can be uncovered if you put the clues together, if you follow the right sequence of events. But I think this is kind of secondary mysteries, not just in terms of the minor crimes, but also the mysteries of people in Christie's work remind us that actually it might figure out who did the murder. But that doesn't mean we'll ever fully understand people or fully understand the past.
00:51:22
Speaker
or fully understand how things work or fully be able to figure out some sort of central truth about Christie's life or even our own lives perhaps.
00:51:33
Speaker
Yeah, what we have from Christie and what we have in archaeological study as well actually is just varying shades of grey. There isn't a black and white approach to take, there's never an absolute moral truth and an absolute moral wrong. Except perhaps in some aspects of archaeological ethics.
00:51:54
Speaker
But I think, I mean, looking at what these shades are and kind of how they're represented and how they're valued is incredibly important in itself.
Cultural Perspectives in Christie's Novels
00:52:04
Speaker
And I think something that Christie shows awareness of is the kind of culturally relative understanding of death and murder and transgression. And when she's writing about then
00:52:20
Speaker
Mesopotamian sites and come tell me how you live or in murder in Mesopotamia. She's writing about a space that she doesn't fully understand. She's an outsider there herself, but she's aware that it's different, that people don't look at time the same way, don't look at the traces of the past the same way, don't think about their relationships to each other in the same way that they would do in England. And there is anxiety around that. There's anxiety that people come to value human life less in the face of
00:52:50
Speaker
these kind of eternal landscapes, these enduring artifacts of civilization, if you're looking at time on such a vast scale, thousands of years rather than a single lifetime, then the individual doesn't necessarily matter that much. So she kind of balances this awareness of the sublime vastness of time and the kind of layering of civilizations in this kind of palimpsistic way on these tells, these digs, with this emphasis that some things endure, like people's
00:53:20
Speaker
pots and pans and need to feed their families and fall in love and bury each other appropriately kind of thing. So there's this kind of, sometimes it's balance, sometimes it's tension between this understanding of vast temporality and then this kind of understanding of what are immediate concerns for people throughout the ages.
00:53:43
Speaker
Yeah, that actually immediately reminds me of two different types of study which we have in archaeology. Of course there are many other types of study but these are two of the really big main ones. And that's landscape slash environment study which tends to be focused on generational changes within a landscape.
00:54:07
Speaker
It's really difficult to get a high resolution in terms of time in landscape and environment study, partly because these changes take a while to take effect or to be noticeable within their environments and the landscapes in terms of their impact, but also because the data streams we use aren't
00:54:33
Speaker
directly datable themselves. So we're reliant upon stratigraphies which tend to be laid down over larger chunks of time. So we have landscape study which is essentially breadth study. But then you have the depth study associated with artefactual studies which
00:54:53
Speaker
in a way are the opposite. In this case, it's possible to do things like material analysis, which can help you determine what specific localities objects were produced in. And there's a lot of stuff you can do in an artefactual study, but stuff like identifying individual makers or groups of makers of artefacts
00:55:19
Speaker
essentially curating and creating a artefactual history, which does heavily implicate the individual. So this could just be what I recognise in Christie as an archaeologist, but it does seem to reflect the tension between, and actually the positive interrelation between as well, artefactual study and landscape study, the broadly temporal and the individual
00:55:48
Speaker
large, intimidating scale of broad spans of time in landscapes which seem reliable and outside of the bounds of the effects of time in a way which human societies clearly aren't. That's really
Balancing Time and Detail in Archaeology
00:56:06
Speaker
interesting. I'd like to shed on this kind of dichotomy there. And come tell me how you live, for instance, she writes. For to our point of view, the Romans are hopelessly modern children of yesterday.
00:56:17
Speaker
Our interest begins at the second millennium BC with the varying fortunes of the Hittites. And in particular, we want to find out more about the military dynasty of Mitanni, foreign adventurers about who Middle is known, but who flourished in this part of the world and his capital city of Washoe Coney has yet to be identified. And then she goes on to say after kind of sketching that, OK, we're thousands of years ago now, the Romans are basically pointless.
00:56:42
Speaker
She goes on to say, and from that period backwards, of course, written into the dim ages of prehistory, an age without written records and only pots and house plans and amulets, ornaments and beads, remain to give the dumb witness to the life people lived. And I think that Joseph Frey's witness there is quite important as it does resonate, obviously, with the crime genre. And she has a book called Dumb Witness in which the dumb witness is a dog, spoiler alert. But yeah, there's this sense that these objects
00:57:09
Speaker
have their own language. It might not be written, it might not be textual, but within this landscape, within this situation, the relation to each other has their own language that can be read even in the face of all this kind of vast, vast time. There's a bit in the Kimtabad dad where she talks about, this isn't something I'd really thought about before,
00:57:28
Speaker
But she talks about the actual topography, the countryside, in terms that suggest the kind of smallness of the human in the face of eternity of the sublime. So Victoria is escaping from where she's been held captive in this village of mud brick houses. Victoria took a deep breath and ran. Dogs continue to bark, but no human being took any interest in this possible nightmare order.
00:57:49
Speaker
Soon she came out on a wide space with a muddy stream and a decrepit humpback bridge over it. Beyond the road or trackway heading towards what seemed infinite space, Victoria continued to run until she was out of breath. The village was well behind her now, the moon was high in the sky. To the left and the right and in front of her was bare stony ground, uncultivated and without a sign of human habitation. It looked flat but was really faintly contoured. It had as far as Victoria could see no landmarks,
00:58:17
Speaker
And she had no idea in what direction the track led. She was not learned enough in the stars to know even towards a point of the compass she was heading. There was something subtly terrifying in this large empty waste, but it was impossible to turn back. She could only go on. And so she's in this. And then a couple of pages later, she climbs up what turns out to be a tell. Here she was able to take a survey of the country all around in her feeling of meaningless panic returned. For everywhere, there was nothing. The scene was beautiful in the early morning light.
00:58:46
Speaker
I know what it means now, I thought Victoria, when anyone says they are alone in the world. And so she's all alone in this vast, empty wilderness, or what to her seems like wilderness.
00:58:55
Speaker
She shortly afterwards is picked up by an archaeologist who looks at the landscape in a different way. It's not empty to him. The manza tells the potential burial sites. He picks up a random shard of artifact from the track. He views it. He views the space not as something he's alone in, but as something that connects these sites of past culture and past civilization. So I think that's quite an interesting illustration of this temporal balance.
00:59:23
Speaker
It brings us back in a way to something I thought about when we were talking about Petra. And that is the way that Christie uses high places within her writing to emphasise high ideals, like aloneness and the dynamics of power. It's almost because by using those high places, she is removing
00:59:49
Speaker
Her characters, mindsets and discussions from the mundane and the everyday, which is below them, figuratively and literally when they are on this higher space.
01:00:05
Speaker
Which is an even more interesting association when you think that a lot of early religious and ritual sites and ceremony sites were constructed on upland areas.
Ritual Significance in Ancient Landscapes
01:00:21
Speaker
There is a prehistoric association for many cultures between height of sight and sacredness. Many cultures had entire cosmologies and mythologies associated with the sky, and by going into upland regions you are closer to the sky.
01:00:40
Speaker
Many of these ritual spaces are associated with sky deities. But apart from that, many of these high places also allow visualisation of regions below.
01:00:56
Speaker
which are often agriculturally rich valleys, which are important to the survival of cultures and communities. By placing ritual spaces upon high places, cultures can make that connection between the protection of something otherworldly and powerful with their own mundane existence which depends on productive regions in valleys.
01:01:23
Speaker
And that is just one of the many potential reasons why ritual spaces were placed in high places and why they were important. Of course, that's not every reason and it wouldn't apply to every culture. Oh, absolutely. In appointment with death for Victoria, then the aloneness is frightening. But in appointment with death for Sarah, it's deliberating.
01:01:45
Speaker
Yes, she thought the emptiness was marvellous, healing, peaceful. No human beings to agitate on with their ties and interrelationships. No burning personal problems. She felt soothed in that peace. He was loneliness, emptiness, spaciousness, in fact, peace. And so that's yet another kind of way of looking at these spaces and this kind of contact.
01:02:04
Speaker
with the landscape, it's not frightening and it's not a map of potential knowledge. It's somewhere that's liberating and peaceful and soothing. But then a couple of pages later, she starts to feel murdery when she's looking down. So there is a kind of sense of anxiety there as well. There's an author called Gladys Mitchell, who is not hugely studied. I have to give a shout out to my sometime co-writer and friend, Britton Bright, who has written on Mitchell and also Place.
01:02:33
Speaker
in the work of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Alsace as well. But Come Away Death is set in Greece in the mid-30s. It deals with a party of archaeologists who want to, well the main archaeologist who's described as being quite mentally unstable, wants to recreate the conditions of the Eleusinian mysteries. So there's something to do with fertility rights, to do with Demetra and Persephone.
01:02:56
Speaker
He thinks that if he can recreate the pilgrimage to the site of these mysteries and perform a sacrifice in the right way, perform the right acts in the right way, then he will know what they're actually involved. As far as I understand that it's still something of a mystery, what people did in these spaces.
Secrets and Mysteries in Archaeology and Fiction
01:03:13
Speaker
And eventually he kind of gets murdery. They visit my city and he becomes inhabited by the spirit of Agamemnon and wants to sacrifice his own daughter, that kind of thing.
01:03:22
Speaker
But then one of the party is murdered and one of the characters who's an English woman living in Athens says, what's more, one doesn't feel the same here about these things, murder and being suspected of it and regarding it as something belonging to the Sunday papers and so on. One remembers all the old stories, one sees things as Homer saw them and as Aeschylus and Euripides and Darling Aristophanes saw them and they seem, death seems trivial compared with, I don't know how to put it, great things looming and slaves lives meaning nothing and fate hovering.
01:03:52
Speaker
great wings, great mountains, great clean sweeping skies. So the detective figure in this book, Mrs Bradley, is fine with this. She's fine with the murderer not being brought to justice. She feels that the sort of ancient drama has been fulfilled and that things don't work the same way in these spaces in this blurring of the past and present as they would back in England, which is quite unconventional for a detective story of this piece.
01:04:20
Speaker
of the ancient world in Christie's work, where there is always this reminder that
01:04:26
Speaker
people are people and people's lives matter and people's communities matter and being drawn too far into the past is a source of anxiety rather than liberation. I wonder if perhaps as well it has just got something to do with the very nature of the Eleusinian mysteries because there's something really powerful about a set of rights which remained a secret and a mystery to those outside of the group
01:04:55
Speaker
for millennia. Now I hadn't heard of that book you mentioned before but it sounds really exciting and cool and I really understand the point actually of murder seeming to be satisfied by a different form of justice just because of the setting in which it took place. In a sense it's easier to accept the continued existence of a mystery
01:05:22
Speaker
or at least no solid conclusion with a murderer being brought to justice in a setting where a greater mystery has been actively preserved as such for millennia. It's almost as if it's saying that this is a place where secrets are kept and that is the natural order of things.
01:05:49
Speaker
I have so much enthusiasm for this idea because for me, every archaeological site is the same way. There will always be secrets that it keeps that we will not know. There is always the sense that when we excavate a site, we are uncovering a lot of secrets, a lot of knowledge about that site, but there's always something left behind in the soil.
01:06:15
Speaker
That's different in Agatha Christie because there's very rarely something left behind. The crimes are comforting in a way because at the end Poirot sets it all out. There has been and always will be boundless comfort in knowing.
01:06:32
Speaker
On the other side of things, however, this would probably be a really good place to take a break, but also when we come back think about how the studies could be moved forward and benefit from modern trends and themes in thinking.
01:06:52
Speaker
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01:07:12
Speaker
But I think in terms of kind of thinking about looking forwards, then I absolutely think how the detective writers of this interwar period looked at the past and not just the kind of past of a human lifespan, but the past beyond that and how they view time and death and transgression and knowledge, epistemology, ways of thinking would be something that would be interesting for people.
Decolonizing Christie's Work
01:07:35
Speaker
There are also at the moment scholars who are doing really interesting work on decolonizing Agatha Christie who are kind of re-evaluating these places we've talked about in terms of in terms of empire, in terms of understandings of race as well, and I think that's particularly topical and important at the moment.
01:07:54
Speaker
One book by Agatha Christie that we haven't mentioned yet and is perhaps the most obvious when talking about archaeology is her novel Death Comes as the End, which is actually set in ancient Egypt. So that's, again, a text that requires a fair bit of research to write. I don't know how accurate it is, but it's set on the banks of a Nile. The patriarch has brought home a new concubine.
01:08:23
Speaker
and his family are worried about their inheritance. So in that sense, it's a lot like the kind of English country heritage mysteries. But I think, again, there is a kind of specificity to the place and an attempt to enter into the worldview, the cosmology of people who lived thousands of years ago on the banks of the Nile and then balance that with what she views as these kind of more human universal desires. So there's detail about burial rites and clothes and
01:08:50
Speaker
even the kind of poisons and how they're applied and the kind of relationships that people would have with their father's concubine, for instance, or their half sibling or
01:09:03
Speaker
a younger brother might have with an older brother. And then there are these bits where Rene Sembe, the main girl, who's come back to the family after her husband dies, she sits at the entry to this tomb looking over the Nile, looking over Egypt. And there's, again, this kind of sense of space and liberation and being away from the ordinary everyday quarrels. And yeah, it'd be interesting to know what you make of all this.
01:09:25
Speaker
So this is a really interesting one for many reasons, in part because it was actually based on genuine Egyptian Middle Kingdom texts which were translated by, I think, Batiskim Gunn, who was an Egyptologist.
01:09:42
Speaker
And these texts are letters written by a man called Hakanaket, I think that's how you pronounce it. And in these letters he complains to his family about their treatment of his concubine.
01:09:59
Speaker
Now there is always the problem with translation because it's partly down to interpretation as with most of these things are, but the actual dynamics between family and the plot line itself actually has basis.
Historical Depth in Christie’s Egyptian Settings
01:10:15
Speaker
So to do the various religious and superstitious aspects which are mentioned in the Agatha Christie text.
01:10:23
Speaker
The everyday activities of people living in this compound also have basis archaeologically, as do the accounts which are constantly mentioned as a bit of a source of tension within the household.
01:10:41
Speaker
I think Christie was actually helped with this plot line from a family friend, Stephen Glanville, who was also quite a noted Egyptologist. I think he had particular input on the household day-to-day aspect of this text.
01:11:01
Speaker
Even the names of the chapters are quite cruelly named after points in the Egyptian agricultural calendar. So the attention to detail here is truly amazing. But there's also this discussion which seems like a modern person looking back about how the Egyptians valued the dead more than the living, with the elaborate graves and rituals and jewels in their grave clothes and so on.
01:11:30
Speaker
Traditionally, we have always thought that in terms of ancient Egypt, we have a lot of evidence for the dead. Modern thinking recognises that what we actually have evidence for is the grieving process and the way in which living people interact with the dead.
01:11:50
Speaker
In Ancient Egypt, death is not stationary. It is not a steady state that is an immortal existence in terms of the physical archaeological remnants that we have. Of course there are those tombs which seem to have been eternally undisturbed. Those tend to be either really well hidden or the upper class or pharaoh tombs in places like the Valley of the Kings.
01:12:20
Speaker
For middle and lower class Egyptians, the case was very different. Many lower class Egyptians or working class Egyptians did not have the disposable income to spend on lavish tombs or ceremonies. In the Middle Kingdom period, tombs were meant to be revisited and were meant for places of grieving and had some constancy.
01:12:47
Speaker
with regular offerings being made. However, there is evidence in many graveyards that when either a family stopped visiting a tomb because maybe they moved away or potentially the family died out and so there was no longer anyone available to visit, these tombs would be reused, updated and re-personalised for new families.
01:13:16
Speaker
Tomb reuse in some instances with the middle and lower classes of Egyptian was quite common, with either building materials from tombs being repurposed for a new venture
01:13:31
Speaker
or indeed the tomb itself just simply being reused as it is or was. So in reality the sacredness and constancy which we seem to associate with ancient Egyptian burial rites
01:13:47
Speaker
isn't as constant as we would expect it to be. Yes, burials were sacred and there was a great deal of symbolism and ceremony associated with the burial of the dead, but it has a time limit and it has a time limit because it depends on the continued existence and continued grieving process of the living. To sum up,
01:14:15
Speaker
Death in Ancient Egypt was actually more about the living participants in the death processes and the title of the book itself, Death Comes as the End, is quite jarring because in reality death wasn't an end in the cosmology of ancient Egyptians but it also wasn't an end in terms of the physical burial of the dead.
01:14:41
Speaker
final resting places and memorials were not so final. A similar system in Finland today actually is that if 90 years after a person's buried, if there's nobody in their family to claim the grave and look after it, then
01:14:59
Speaker
it can be reused for somebody else. The gravestone is taken down and it's used for somebody else, which is interesting. I mean, in the UK, then you see graves that have been there for hundreds of years. St Oswald and Durham, for instance, that's a lot of old graves. But yeah, I mean, I think in Death Comes as the End, then the burialists sort of seem to be quite a static thing, that this is where these people lie. And these burial ceremonies
01:15:25
Speaker
sites just kind of pile up, I guess. So with that excellent incidental description of exactly what archaeology is, just a pile up of bodies and debris and the everyday waste of human existence.
Reflecting on the Year and Celebrating Achievements
01:15:44
Speaker
It's been a difficult year and I am 100% certain that all of us can acknowledge that. So this little last section is just a space to celebrate anything we may have achieved this year despite anything, any new works that are coming out, any public outreach that you guys might want to get involved in, all of the cool stuff really.
01:16:10
Speaker
In terms of the future, the edited collection, I co-edited with the marvellous JC Burnthal, Jamie Burnthal, who is also written on queerness and Christie. Our collection is called Andy the Christie Goes to War. It's interdisciplinary. It's with Routledge. It is coming out in paperback.
01:16:28
Speaker
quite soon. So that's exciting. My own chapter in it is about the disappearance. It's about looking at trauma and the kind of gaps in narrative and the repetition of traumatic incidents. In Christie's autobiography in the Mary Westmaq art stories and in her mysteries. So this association of trauma with memory loss, loss of identity, change in identity,
01:16:54
Speaker
how that's linked to war, linked to the Blitz in particular, and how these are represented in these different genres across these different narratives, what kind of pattern emerges there. But there are also chapters on the village space during the war. There's a chapter on that actually talks about Christie and fascism in more detail. And yeah, it's a good little collection and all bad and bad back.
01:17:19
Speaker
And then I'm also I've also just submitted an article looking at golden age detective fiction, so fiction between the wars and how they deal with the idea of Europe or the European continent.
Future Studies on Christie
01:17:30
Speaker
A lot of golden age detective fiction, as I think we've mentioned, is associated with the English village, the country house, this kind of very kind of Anglo centric, essentially xenophobic
01:17:41
Speaker
worldview. I'm looking at the place continental Europe holds in that, particularly in Christie's novels, The Mystery of the Blue Train, which is set on the French Riviera, and then in The Labours of Hercules, which is a short story collection about Poirot in which he travels around Europe a lot. And again, kind of looks at me.
01:17:57
Speaker
and place and the detective as a mediator figure not just between the English and the European but also between the past and the present and the known space and unknown space. So that will hopefully be out at some point in the next couple of years.
01:18:11
Speaker
I think in terms of wider trends in the studies, then I think there is more and more a shift towards the interdisciplinary. Sarah Martin also works on Space and Place in Christie, as does Britain Bright, who I've just mentioned. There's a more of a kind of re-evaluation, like I said, of colonialism and empire in Christie's work. There's looking at queerness and transgressive sexuality in Christie's work. I think it's a very
01:18:35
Speaker
exciting time for the author, for the period for literary studies in general. Right. So if someone wanted to start the new year with a new interest in Agatha Christie, where do you think they should start?
Recommended Christie Novels
01:18:48
Speaker
the murder of Roger Eckford. That is very much the kind of English country house energy, if you will. And then I would suggest Dathom the Nile. And then I would suggest Taken at the Flood, which is a post-war text, which is quite dark. And then I would suggest they came to Baghdad. That's four so far. I tend to think top fives, what would be... Oh, Perilla End House from 1933 is also really good and fun.
01:19:15
Speaker
So you're being really nice there. I'd say throw them in at the deep end with mysterious Mr Quinn and see what they make of it. Well, that's a thing, but so much mysterious Mr Quinn is more of a kind of magical realism thing almost. I think if somebody wanted to look at the archaeological texts in particular, then I think murder in Mesopotamia is in terms of setting and archaeology practices and exploring the link between deduction and a narrative and then archaeological practices. I think that's really interesting.
01:19:44
Speaker
And there, in my opinion, we have the perfect Christmas list. There is no shortage of study of Agatha Christie's writings, and who can blame those that wish to study her, she is an entirely fascinating figure. I suppose something I've learnt this episode that I didn't expect
01:20:04
Speaker
is that Agatha Christie's writings are fundamentally linked to the contexts and to the landscapes and environments in which they're set, by far more than just the coincidence that the events of her stories happened there. But still there is a focus on time which goes beyond the grand scale needed to enact
01:20:28
Speaker
changes within landscapes and environments. Agatha Christie never forgets the individual, at the same time as she's describing power dichotomies and loneliness and vast concepts of philosophy in the grand scale of landscapes.
01:20:46
Speaker
There is not one moment where she fails to remind us of the human, for mundane everyday items. You won't ever completely understand humans through reading Agatha Christie, but you may take note of the power of everyday rebellion, because despite discussions of power and impacts on landscapes and environments, and the crushing weight of loneliness, powerlessness, everyday,
01:21:15
Speaker
humans, individuals carry on.
Conclusion and Holiday Wishes
01:21:19
Speaker
That, thank you ever so much for listening to this month's episode of Flipside and for taking part in our small family tradition. Whether you celebrate Christmas or Yule or just planning to enjoy the holiday season with friends and family,
01:21:37
Speaker
Or even if you're by yourself, by choice or not. I hope you all stay safe and have a wonderful time. I'm afraid there's going to be a couple of months break before the next episode but we'll be coming back stronger than ever. You can find this podcast every month on APN and on every other major streaming platform.
01:21:59
Speaker
Our special thanks to Dr. Rebecca Mills again for joining us this episode. It's been truly wonderful speaking and having this discussion with her. Without further ado, see you on the flip side guys.
01:22:32
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
01:22:57
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to archpodnet.com slash members for more info.