Woolley, Leonard, 1880-1960

Leonard Woolley was the third of eleven children of a Church of England clergyman, George Herbert Woolley, and his wife Sarah. He attended St John’s School, Leatherhead, in Surrey, and New College, University of Oxford, where he studied Classics and theology. It was the warden of New College, W.A. Spooner, who advised him to take up archaeology after graduation. In 1905 Woolley was appointed assistant to Arthur Evans, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford.

Woolley’s early career took him to Nubia in 1907–11, and after that he went as director of the Carchemish expedition sponsored by the British Museum. One of his assistants was T.E. Lawrence (better known as “Lawrence of Arabia”). Woolley and Lawrence collaborated in assisting the Palestine Exploration Fund in its program of making a definitive map of the Holy Land. This work was published in 1915 as The Wilderness of Zin.

After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Woolley was posted to Cairo where he acted as an intelligence officer. He was promoted to the rank of major in 1916 before being captured by the Turks and imprisoned at Kastamonu. He tried to return to Carchemish after the War but the political situation was too unsettled. In 1921, he excavated at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt with T.E. Peet, sponsored by the Egypt Exploration Society.

In 1922, Woolley was made director of the joint expedition at Ur funded by the British Museum and the Penn Museum. It is with this site that his name will always be associated. He spent twelve seasons at Ur, until 1934. Within two years of his arrival, Gertrude Bell had established the Iraq Museum in Baghdad which had a statutory right to first choice of all objects excavated. So rich were the finds from the site, however, especially from the Royal Cemetery, that when they were divided—in the custom of the time of the “partage” system—between the host country and the excavation’s sponsoring institutions, both the British Museum and the Penn Museum were also assigned fabulous objects from Ur for their collections.

After Ur, Woolley moved to Tell Atchana in northern Syria, digging there before the Second World War in 1937–39, and after it, from 1946¬–49. He was knighted for his services to archaeology in 1935. During the War, Woolley worked for the Military Intelligence Directorate to assess and protect art and museum collections throughout Europe. He reported to Winston Churchill personally. In this work he was most ably assisted by his wife Katharine.

After Katharine’s death and the end of his active archaeological career at Atchana, Woolley retired to Ashford in Kent. After an unsuccessful relationship, he retired to Dorset where he was looked after by a devoted housekeeper and her husband, thus enabling him to write up his archaeological work.