volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

The Application for a 'Permit Successful. 147
Der. Early in May dispatches were received from the
Vice-Consul at Wan and the Consul for Kurdistan stating
that the Turkish authorities at Wan had stopped
the excavations which unauthorized persons had been
carrying on there. When these persons were questioned
they said they were only digging out for building purposes
the stones which they were told they might keep
for themselves by the British Vice-Consul when they
were digging for him in 1880 and 188 1. The Trustees
withdrew all claims to the uninscribed stones, and informed
the Foreign Office that if possible I would visit
Wan and report upon the site generally.
In June the Keeper of the Department received a
private letter from Sir William White stating that the
application for the permit to excavate Der had passed
certain stages, and that he did not anticipate any serious
difficulty in obtaining the permit. The Keeper reported
the receipt of this letter to the Trustees on June
14th, and recommended that an application be made
to the Treasury for funds sufficient to finish the work
at Kuyunjik and to excavate Der. Application was
made to the Lords of the Treasury in due course, and
the Trustees received their sanction for the expenditure
on July 8th.
And here I must break the trend of my narrative
concerning excavations in Mesopotamia and explain a
matter about which much misconception has existed.
It will be remembered that in passing through Port
Sa'id in 1889 I made arrangements for the dispatch
of a box containing papyri to England. This box
arrived in due course, and held several rolls of papyrus,
three being inscribed in hieroglyphs and the rest in Greek.
The Greek rolls were transferred to the Department of
Manuscripts, where they were examined and transcribed
by the present Director of the British Museum
(Sir F. G. Kenyon) who discovered that the reverses of
the rolls were inscribed with a copy of Aristotle's lost
work on the Constitution of Athens. This was a very
great discovery, and the Trustees decided to publish a
facsimile of the text of the work with a transcript and
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