volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

262 Our Faramdn or Permit to Excavate Dir.
of them and packed them in stout wooden boxes for
transport to England. These represented the cream
of the collections. I then went over the collections
a second time, and made a further selection of about
7,000 tablets, and arranged with some friends to take
charge of them until the 2,500 tablets were out of the
country. When I had paid for the 2,500 tablets, and
they had been sent down the river a few boxes at a time,
I packed up the 7,000 tablets in boxes and arranged
with their owners to send them to the British Museum
after my departure from Baghdad, and to receive payment
for them then. This arrangement they carried
out loyally, and the Trustees acquired the whole collection
before the end of 1893.
Having thus secured the best of all the tablets shown
to me in Baghdad, I reported the matter to the Principal
Librarian through Sir William White, and then devoted
myself to finding out what could be done on the site
of Der itself. I saw and talked with some of the men
who had been secretly digging at Der, and they told me
that there were many places near the ruins of the walls
where small " nests " of tablets were discovered, and
that if I did not dig them up someone else would. On
December 27th I received the permit, of which Sir
William White had announced the dispatch on December
2nd, and I took it to Colonel Tweedie to register officially,
and to have a translation made. This done. Colonel
Tweedie, who was much displeased with the document,
said that we had better show it to the Wall Pasha,
and he and I went to the Sarayah, taking Ya'akub
Thaddeus with us to discuss the terms of the permit
with the Walt's secretary. When the permit was read
to the Wall he declared that it was not a permit to dig
at Der, but only an authorization from the Commissioners
of Crown Lands in Stambul to inspect the parts of the
site of Der which had been marked on the plan submitted
by Sir William White. In the covering letter
to the document, the Minister of Public Instruction
stated that he hoped to send a Delegate to watch the
" inspection " of the mounds early in January, but that