Sir Charles Leonard Woolley (April 17, 1880 to February 20.1960) was a British archaeologist. He is remembered for the excavations he conducted at Carchemish, (Hittite) and then Ur (Sumerian). In 1922, he began work at Ur, and around 1928, he found there the world famous figures,we now call, the 'Ram in a Thicket' statuettes.One of his assistants was Max Mallowan, (later the husband of Agatha Christie who shared their fascination with the past.). Lion sculptures were part of the iconography of this civilization, but we quote Woolley about the modern city of Aleppo, which he mentions in Dead towns and living men: being pages from an antiquary's notebook (1920):
You pass along the tunnel where the tent-makers and the saddlers sit, and through the gateway into the sudden daylight, and before you is the Castle. A huge moat with steep stone-revetted sides runs round it, and in the midst rises the mound with its coronal of mellow walls. Just in front of you, a little to the right, is the main gateway: a lofty tower four-square and with bronze-latticed windows set in carved stone frames stands rooted on the moat's bottom, and from its arched doorway springs a gossamer bridge with slender stone piles to span the ditch and join the outer gate-tower on the level beyond. The mound, which like that of Carchemish, is in part natural rock and in part artificial, must have been the site of a fortress since very early days. Aleppo or Beroea was a city allied to the lords of Carchemish: a Hittite inscription can still be seen built into the wall of one of its ancient mosques, and until recently there stood in the Castle gate-tower a lion supposed to be of Hittite workmanship, which may originally have been found in the older ruins of the acropolis; but a few years ago the lion was prised out and its head broken off by an enterprising German scientist, and we have no evidence left as to the early character of the Mound. The Castle that stands there to-day was mostly built by the Saracens, who held it against the crusaders. ...
You pass along the tunnel where the tent-makers and the saddlers sit, and through the gateway into the sudden daylight, and before you is the Castle. A huge moat with steep stone-revetted sides runs round it, and in the midst rises the mound with its coronal of mellow walls. Just in front of you, a little to the right, is the main gateway: a lofty tower four-square and with bronze-latticed windows set in carved stone frames stands rooted on the moat's bottom, and from its arched doorway springs a gossamer bridge with slender stone piles to span the ditch and join the outer gate-tower on the level beyond. The mound, which like that of Carchemish, is in part natural rock and in part artificial, must have been the site of a fortress since very early days. Aleppo or Beroea was a city allied to the lords of Carchemish: a Hittite inscription can still be seen built into the wall of one of its ancient mosques, and until recently there stood in the Castle gate-tower a lion supposed to be of Hittite workmanship, which may originally have been found in the older ruins of the acropolis; but a few years ago the lion was prised out and its head broken off by an enterprising German scientist, and we have no evidence left as to the early character of the Mound. The Castle that stands there to-day was mostly built by the Saracens, who held it against the crusaders. ...
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