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A Visit to the BIAA

During the last week of September, I was fortunate to be able to spend a week in Ankara working on the tablets from Sultantepe. Excavations there were conducted from 1951–1952 under the direction of Seton Lloyd, then director of the British Institute at Ankara, and Nuri Gökçe, director of the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. While some materials were kept close to the site at the Şanlıurfa Museum, Lloyd and Gökçe brought the bulk of the material back to Ankara. The results were quickly published, including the sensational tablets pieced together by Oliver Gurney. The main goal of the trip was to take a closer look at a group of tablets, including the Sultantepe Sb, which Gurney had thought not worth copying in full: more on this hopefully soon.

Folder containing photographs of the Sultantepe excavations (1951–1952) in the archives of the BIAA.

Thanks in large part to the help of Burçak Delikan, Resource Manager, Nurdan Atalan Çayırezmez, Digital Repository Manager, and Nihal Uzun, Assistant Librarian, I was also able to spend the last working day in Ankara looking through the Sultantepe excavation archives kept at the British Institute at Ankara. I won’t say more here about the absolute jewel of a library at the BIAA. It is easy to see how generations of scholars have fallen in love with the Institute. The archive materials, still largely unpublished, include a large collection of photographs of the ongoing excavations and of the object finds from Sultantepe made by Seton Lloyd himself (1951) and by Lloyd and John Davies Evans (1952), then fellow of the BIAA, later one of the leading British prehistorians of the twentieth century. Here, I’d like instead to highlight what the archive materials tell us about a figure largely overlooked in the history of the excavations, the artist Ulrica “Hydie” Lloyd.

Though Ulrica Lloyd naturally figures in Seton Lloyd’s The Interval, it is worth putting together some of her biography here. She was born Margery Ulrica Fitzwilliams-Hyde (1911–1987) as the daughter of Major John K. L. Fitzwilliams, granddaughter of the businessman and Liberal Party politician Clarendon Golding Hyde. Her father would be killed in the last months of the First World War. Against some opposition by her mother, she studied at London’s Royal College of Art and later in Paris. Notable works from this period include a wood-engraving titled “The Skull,” now in the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū in Christchurch in New Zealand; the linocut “Nude Black Woman,” now in the Prints and Drawings Department of the British Museum (accession number 1934,1208.115); and the frontispiece for the collection of short stores by W. Somerset Maugham, The Judgement Seat.

Already famous as an artist, Ulrica Hyde joined the Royal Army Service Corps as a sergeant during the Second World War. Driving convoys of heavy equipment from Cairo, she met the archaeologist Seton Lloyd in Baghdad, and they were married the next year. South Gate in Baghdad became their first home even as she continued to move loads from Cairo to Palestine and to Tehran. The letters of Freya Stark, another member of the wartime “Baghdad Set”, give a glimpse of their life together during this time, with picnics on the riverside accompanied by their pet mongoose. When Seton Lloyd became the second director of the BIAA after the war in 1949, she became a fixture of the institute. Freya Stark’s letters again recall the warm reception and shared evenings with the Lloyds during her visit in 1952, when she used the Institute’s library as a base for her Ionia: A Quest.

Ulrica Lloyd had already contributed her talents as illustrator and artist to the development of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, as in the arrangement of the display of Queen Pū-abi sculpted by Jewad Selim. It was natural that Ulrica Lloyd also join the expedition to Sultantepe. As the tablets emerged from the soil at the end of the first season’s work, it was Ulrica who helped to consolidate the fragments. The archives of the BIAA provided some of the greatest surprises in her work as draughtsman: color illustrations by Ulrica Lloyd, in photographs and slides, of some of the spectacular objects from the so-called Neo-Assyrian “priestess’ room” M2, including the Egyptianizing furniture ornaments and the marvelous bag woven of frit beads, shown here according to Barnett’s black-and-white publication photograph. There is much to unpack with respect to the room and its interpretation. The colored illustrations bring a vivid presence to the assemblage.

"Bead Object" of woven frit discs from room M2, Sultantepe

As far as I know, there is no complete catalog of Ulrica Lloyd’s works, or even of her contributions to excavations. Even a short list highlights what Seton Lloyd means in calling her his “Fellow Traveller.” After the end of his tenure as director, she returned again to Turkey, and to the BIAA, to join the 1965 expedition to Kayalıdere: J. D. Hawkin’s caricatures from the excavations, published by Dominique Collon (Ulrica’s niece), include one of Hydie fawning over a praying mantis. Her drawings added an imaginative richness which helped popularize the study of Mesopotamia. Lloyd’s Archaeology of Mesopotamia includes her drawing of Austin Henry Layard “in Bakhtiyari dress.” Later, she would design the “Gertrude Bell Memorial Gold Medal” awarded by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq depicted in Iraq 38 (1976). It is no coincidence that she contributed not only the map but also the frontispiece to Foundations in the Dust, Seton Lloyd’s history of Mesopotamian exploration, which showed the husband and wife pair Claudius James (1787–1821) and Mary Mackintosh (1789–1876) Rich: there is no small irony that Mary Rich’s own contribution to archeology is so often overlooked, and that the piece was removed from most later editions of the book.

I can end by highlighting some of her many other contributions to art, both in print and sculpture, beyond the archeological. Her popular illustrations adorn Diana Richmond’s 1978 retelling of the romance of the great poet ʿAntara ibn Šaddād al-ʿAbsī in ʿAntar and ʿAbla: A Bedouin Romance as well as Shirley Kay’s 1970 The Arab World, published as part of the Oxford Children’s Reference Library. “Our Lady of Iraq,” a statue of Mary and child, adorns the narthex of the chapel of Mucknell Abbey at Burford in West Oxfordshire: a sermon commemorating this dedication seems to be one of the few narrative biographies of Ulrica Lloyd available. J. D. Hawkin’s caricature, mentioned above, provides a fine image of Ulrica Lloyd and her love for animals. It is hard not to compare the undated bust shown here, auctioned in 2011, to the famous Lady of Warka. It is a self-portrait, and might give some sense of how she saw herself.

Self-portrait bust of Ulrica "Hydie" Lloyd auctioned by Toovey's on 7th October 2011, Lot 2747.

Bibliography

Barnett, Richard. “Assyrian Objects from Room M2.” Anatolian Studies 3 (1953): 48–51.

Gurney, Oliver R. “Sultantepe and Harran.” In Ancient Anatolia: Fifty Year’s Work by the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, ed. R. Matthews, pp. 163–176. London: British School of Archaeology at Ankara, 1998.

Hawkins, J. D. “Seton Howard Frederick Lloyd 1902–1996.” Proceedings of the British Academy 97 (1998): 359–377.

Kay, Shirley. The Arab World. Oxford Children’s Reference Library 13. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Lloyd, Seton. The Archaeology of Mesopotamia: From the Old Stone Age to the Persian Conquest. London: Thames and Hudson, 1978.

⸻. Foundations in the Dust: The Story of Mesopotamian Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947.

⸻. The Interval: A Life in Near Eastern Archaeology. Faringdon: Lloyd Collon, 1986.

Lloyd, Seton, and Nurı Gökçe. “Sultantepe: Anglo-Turkish Joint Excavations, 1952.” Anatolian Studies 3 (1953): 27–47.

Maugham, W. Somerset. The Judgement Seat. London: The Centaur Press, 1934.

Moorehead, Caroline. Freya Stark: The Greatest Woman Explorer and Travel Writer of Her Age. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985.

Renfrew, Colin. “John Davies Evans 1925–2011.” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy 14 (2015): 141–163

Richmond, Diana. ʿAntar and ʿAbla: A Bedouin Romance. London: Quartet Books, 1978.

Stark, Freya. Ionia: A Quest. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1954.

Thornton, Amara. Archaeologists in Print: Publishing for the People. London: UCL Press, 2018.


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Christian W. Hess (10 octobre 2023). A Visit to the BIAA. ScriPTS. Consulté le 14 mai 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/vtcy


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