Amanda Adams (7 page)

United by love and two pairs of trousers, Jane and Marcel spent a full year planning for their excursion to Persia, a trip that would last nearly twenty-four months. They departed in
1881
, and upon arrival in Persia they started to travel by horseback, carrying bags filled with photography equipment: cameras, glass plates, chemicals, and such. They also carried weapons. Two westerners— seemingly two
men
by anyone’s quick glance—without escort were very vulnerable to attack from unfriendly strangers.

The Dieulafoys traveled an extraordinary
3
,
700
miles in the saddle between
1881
and
1882
.
⁸
As they moved across the landscape, they systematically documented and photographed old buildings along the way, creating a treasure trove of reference material for generations of future historians and archaeologists. Their “unbroken companionship” was put to a test that would sink many couples. There were days of pummeling rain, bad fevers all around, nights spent sleeping on rocky floors, stretched financial resources, and, for Jane Dieulafoy, a head full of lice and hair that she had to continually shave. Her blond locks gone, she looked just like a young man, “a rifle on her shoulder and a whip in her hand,” and one of her biographers explains that “she fooled everyone, from robbers on the highways to the shah himself, who did not want to believe her when she revealed her actual gender.”
⁹

Throughout their travels the goal was always a remote and legendary place called Susa. Situated at a distance east of the Tigris River, the Susa region was home to an ancient city that had already undergone some cursory excavation years before. The Dieulafoys knew that its potential was great, and they wanted to have a hand in uncovering the ruins. All of that would come later though.

Their journey to Susa was strenuous, and both were sick and worn down by the time they arrived in a deluge of heavy rain. After nonstop travel, saddle burn, and months of camping, they must have craved a clean, comfortable bed. Perhaps even some croissants and a current copy of
Le Tour du Monde.
Having made the acquaintance of Susa, they left knowing that they would be back. Dieulafoy wrote in her notebook, “The
souvenir
of Susa haunted my husband in his sleep.”
¹⁰

SUSA
WAS AN
ancient town surrounded by what was then a widespread emptiness: “. . . there is not a single habitation to enliven the landscape. Some nomad Persians and Arabs camp in this vast solitude, and live wild and savage on the milk of their herds, or on the fruits of plundering raids,”
¹¹
explained Jane through her nineteenth-century looking glass. As a royal city, Susa once exerted an influence greater than that of Babylon, and it was a town of “radiant focus” where artists from as far away as Greece would gather, flourish, create.

When the Dieulafoys returned to Susa in
1884
—now on site to properly excavate and with all permissions secured as well as a formal team to begin work—they stood before an artificial mountain and a series of hills technically known as “tells.” It was a landmass created by thousands of years of earth and wind quietly cooperating to bury a city. Crumbling palace towers were peaks, and ancient roads had become low valleys where “wild cats and boars” roamed. Dieulafoy was bursting with happiness at their arrival: “The weather was rainy; our tents let in the moisture; provisions were short; our soup cooked in the open air, was better provided with rain water than with butter; nevertheless we were joyous—joyous because we had reached Susa, joyous because we had taken possession of the site which we had so long aspired to excavate.”
¹²

The team unloaded their pickaxes, buckets, and tools and then, with enthusiasm still pouncing, faced three small dilemmas: the first, where to start? Choosing where the first trench should go was like opening the pages of a coverless book, hoping it was the one you wanted in a library’s line up of thousands. Would they plant their shovel right? Find something fast, or sift sand that contained nothing at all? Second, they had no workmen and they would need scores. And third, everything they excavated was under the watchful eye of locals who believed, perhaps rightfully so, that the artifacts belonged to them, not the Dieulafoys. The dunes were alive with these looters in search of golden relics, and come nightfall they would try to raid the site.

In deciding where to start, the team considered the work of excavations conducted thirty years earlier by two British men. Based on their preliminary findings, the Dieulafoys had a rough sense of where column bases and even a helpful inscription or two were located. The team decided to take their chances and excavate three tells all at once. These consisted of a throne room, the citadel, and a private residence called the “King of Kings.”
¹³

With the massive digging task before them, they turned to the locals for help in recruiting a veritable army of workers. In her notes, Jane laughs at the process whereby “an old Arab, whose only nourishment consisted of the herbs which he browsed on the tumulus [an archaeological mound, or tell], a poor devil who had been robbed by the nomads, and the son of a widow who was dying of starvation in the Gabee, were at last enrolled at fancy prices . . . Marcel and myself took command of this glorious battalion.”
¹⁴
It was a modest start, but the ranks of their field crew would eventually swell to more than three hundred men.

News of the excavations carried far and wide, and eventually their biggest headache was too much help. Crowds of men wanted to work the trenches. Every morning at the crack of dawn they would surge to the site, spades in hands, and if not put to use and given a day’s wage, they became surly and tried to “pillage the tents.” Once a desolate spot in the desert, the Dieulafoys had transformed Susa into a hub of swarming bodies—shoveling, sweating, and sorting.

As for the nightly danger of looters, that was solved simply: firearms. Armed watchmen were installed around the site and paid a fee more lucrative than theft. It was with all this in place that Jane Dieulafoy stood up tall, walked to the trench, and grabbed hold of her tools for the first breaking of ground (a little like smashing a champagne bottle in celebratory spirit). She captures the moment: “Full of emotion, I struck the first blow with the pick on the Achaemenidaen tumulus, and worked until my strength gave out . . . this was how the excavations at Susa were begun.”
¹⁵

The trenches grew deep quickly, but they were achingly empty. Fourteen feet of nothing. A few funeral urns were found here and there, each with a skeleton curled up inside, but aside from that the dirt was barren. Rain continued to pour, and the team stood mired in tacky mud, working long hours all day with only two things to look forward to: a wet tent and hope for tomorrow’s discovery. This was the stuff of typical field archaeology. For each day of glory and spectacular finds there are long weeks— and sometimes entire seasons—of toil and tedium.

Luckily for the team, Dieulafoy soon had cause to shout, “Heaven be praised!”

One of the workmen had scraped the surface of some bricks glazed in colorful enamel. The workers redirected the trenches and opened them wide: two hundred feet long and twenty-six feet across. A month of careful excavation followed, and they were rewarded with the find of a lifetime: the Lion Frieze. They assembled this ancient masterpiece, fragment by bright fragment, on the floor of their tent. It was by Dieulafoy’s own account “magnificent,” with each lion measuring more than eleven feet long. Dieulafoy wrote of her find: “The animal stands out against a turquoise blue background; the body is white, the head surrounded by a sort of green victorine, the mustache blue and yellow, the flanks white, the belly blue. In spite of its extravagant coloration the beast has a terribly ferocious aspect.”
¹⁶

The Lion Frieze ushered in a new pace of discovery. Soon there was an opal seal in Dieulafoy’s hand that belonged to Xerxes the Great, along with carved ivory, spear heads, bottles, bronze and terra-cotta lamps, engraved stones, coins, funeral urns, and a “thousand interesting utensils.” A life-size painting of a black man in rich robes was revealed and left the crew to ponder whether they were in the company of the ancient Ethiopians Homer once spoke of. In fact, much of what they uncovered let their minds run with theories and speculation about the ancient world. This was not a single dwelling or cave they were exploring; it was a cultural epicenter, a whole city. The Dieulafoys and team scraped away all they could to shine a light on the region’s sprawling past.

MIDWAY THROUGH THE
excavations at Susa the Dieulafoys had accumulated so much cargo that they had to figure out how to transport it out of the country. There were fifty-four wooden boxes filled to the brim, and everything that didn’t fit in those was buried by night in a secret spot known only to the Dieulafoys.
¹⁷
Anxious to avoid a two-hundred-mile-long journey through a country where the objects they had collected were viewed as “belonging of the prophet” and therefore “treasures and talismans” that the locals would (naturally) want back, they made a dash for Turkey. An etching titled “Transporting Treasures Across The Jungle From Susa To The Persian Gulf” depicts seventeen villagers heaving a single cargo box through tall grass by rope. Their effort wasn’t helped by two men in pith helmets (or could it be Jane sitting beside Marcel?) who sat lounging on
top
of the cargo the workers were shouldering.
¹⁸

Once they reached the Turkish coast they breathed a sigh of relief, only to find that customs officials wanted thousands of francs in exchange for the cargo’s unblocked passage; the Dieulafoys’ plan for an easy exit was ruined. If the money wasn’t forthcoming, customs suggested that the treasures of Susa might sit nicely in the museum of Constantinople. The situation was precarious.

Through delicate negotiation, the Dieulafoys managed to have the boxes stored in Bassorah, while the French consul tried to solve the messy situation diplomatically. Like parents unwilling to let their children out of sight, Jane and Marcel camped by their crates of artifacts. Dieulafoy described the intensity of their predicament: “we were kept continually under strict watch, while gun-boats cruised in the river with orders to sink us if the slightest attempt at escape was made.”
¹⁹

In the end, they had to leave their cargo and wait patiently for matters to be solved through political forces. That would take at least a year. Jane and Marcel packed their bags, sneaking a lion’s head and small objects into their personal luggage, and returned to France for a visit.
²⁰

As soon as they could, however, they returned to Susa to conclude their work. When they arrived back on site they were greeted by hundreds of workmen already there and eager to get back to it. Excavations resumed as if they had never been interrupted. More stunning finds were soon made, including the Frieze of Archers and the Palace of Darius. “One day we discovered a hand, the next day a foot shod with a golden boot; finally the enamels became abundant.” The archers were in a marching procession so grand and handsome they could compete with the lions still marooned in Turkey. Throughout all of this, Dieulafoy was at the center of the action: overseeing the workmen, watching the trenches, and organizing the “daily harvest of enameled bricks,”
²¹
each of which needed to be cleaned, labeled, and packed perfectly for future reconstruction.

Her delight in the excavation’s results is made plain in all she wrote about it. For her, there was a steady stream of optimism in spite of workdays that started at
4
:
30 AM
and never quite ended (evenings in the tent were devoted to note taking, strategy, artifact analysis, and the piecing together of broken pots). During her time at Susa, Dieulafoy endured every fist the field could throw, from foul weather to sterile excavations to dangerous attacks from raiders, and still she writes about the site’s fruitful excavations in a breezy style. For Dieulafoy, uncovering the wealth of Susa was deeply satisfying, and she came to know her way through the trenches of an ancient city much better than any kitchen or tea parlor.