volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

to Excavate Several Sites in Mesopotamia. 145
Instruction, Constantinople. The Trustees discussed the
matter, cind ordered the Principal Librarian and Rawlinson
to make all arrangements for resuming the
excavations. I submitted to Rawlinson a list of the
" Tulul " or " mounds " which I thought would repay
excavating, and when he had supplemented it with
the names of other mounds well known to him, a
petition for a permit was drawn up and sent to the
Foreign Office on August 14th. In September Sir
William White wrote saying that he had applied for a
permit in writing and verbally and that he was hopeful
of obtaining an ordinary permit. To apply for anything
else just then would be to court disaster, though the
Minister of Public Instruction viewed the petition
favourably. Early in December another dispatch was
received from Sir William White, who reported that
the Delegate who had been with me at Mosul was
causing trouble at the Porte, but as the Grand Wazir
was in favour of granting the permit, he hoped to get
it in due course. He pointed out that the season of
the year was unfavourable for excavating, and that
cholera was just then very prevalent in Mesopotamia,
and he recommended the postponement of the proposed
excavations.
Late in January, 1890, the Foreign Office transmitted
a dispatch from Sir WiUiam Wiite announcing
that the Porte had refused to accede to the Trustees'
application for a permit to make tentative excavations
in Mesopotamia. The Turkish Government refused on
the grounds that the Turkish regulations concerning
the excavations of ancient sites did not allow excavations
to be made, however superficially, at several
places at the same time ; and they thought that any
exception to this rule would be a bad precedent and
would lead to many inconveniences. When Rawlinson
had read the dispatch he asked me to put in writing
any suggestions I could make, and after talking the
matter over with him I proposed that application
should be made for a permit to excavate Der, such
permit to date from the expiration of the permit which
I