The Professor, The Archeologist and Me

Serendipity…

When I was in Syria, my guide to the ancient city of Ebla was Mohammed Ali (not the fighter). I want to use Ebla as part of a future novel. http://ragz-international.com/ebla.htm Ali put me in touch with the Italian professor who translated most of the cuneiform letters found there. As luck would have it he was spending one day back in Rome between a trip to Chicago to give a paper and his summer holiday at his Sicilian holiday home.

I spent Saturday morning doing pre conference stuff then waited for his phone call. “Can you come to me?” he asked. Of course, I could. I would have walked or crawled for this short cut in my research. However, the taxi ride through flower-decked streets deposited me in front of his home.

He offered me orange juice, moved a fan so I would be cooled and preceded to give me more information that I dreamed possible. I know the names of kings, ministers, intrigues, what people ate, supposition on gender roles. I can now build a plot.

His wife who has her own dig near Ebla, stopped in and we started talking about career choices, passion in work and what we feel we accomplish. The translating professor even though he knows Sumerian, Eblabite, Hittite and other ancient languages, can translate cuneiform etc. does not feel he has accomplished much. Accomplishment, I told him, is often not considered important by those doing it. We think if we can do it, everyone can. It is a trait I find more common in women than in men. His wife agreed with me.

Their flat was huge, large rooms, book-filled of course, antiques, high windows, but the warmth came not from the heat, but their generosity in sharing their knowledge with me, a fiction writer not a scholar, when they were both jet lagged and preparing for a holiday.