volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

Turkish Chicanery. 257
friend in Baghdad of whom I have already spoken
(see vol. I., p. 317) ; I will here call him " Hasan." When
he was dressed and had drunk coffee, and had thanked
Allah for His mercy in letting us meet again, he began to
tell me what the business was which had made him wait
three whole days on the river bank watching for my
raft. He had come to give me information about the
permit to excavate at Der, and the substance of his
remarks was this :
In 1889 the British Ambassador at Constantinople
applied to the Porte, on behalf of the British Museum,
for a permit to excavate Der, The Porte asked the
Ambassador for a plan of the mounds at Der, and
wanted the exact places where it was proposed to
excavate marked on it. The Ambassador obtained a
plan of Der from the British Museum, and forwarded it
in due course to the Porte, according to instructions.
The Porte sent the Ambassador's application, with the
plan, to the Wali Pasha of Baghdad, and asked the
usual questions about the ownership of the site, and
whether any objections to the proposed excavations
would be made locally. In Baghd§.d someone discovered
that the mounds at Der stood on land which formed a
part of the Crown Domains in the neighbourhood,
and this was duly reported to the authorities at Stambul.
What exactly happened then at Stambul is
unknown, but a few months later the Wali of Baghdad
arranged for the excavation of the mounds at Der,
and told the local authorities that he had been instructed
to do so by the Porte. He committed the management
of the excavations to the local dealers, and work was
carried on at the mounds for some months. Meanwhile
the British Ambassador was waiting for a reply
to his application for a permit to dig there. When at
length his demands for an answer became insistent,
the Porte enquired of the Wali of Baghdad what success
had attended his excavations at Der, and pressed for
an immediate answer. The Wali replied that they
had dug through all the places marked on the plan of
Der which had been sent to him, and that, with the