From: The New Leader | Date: October 18, 1999| Author: | COPYRIGHT 1999 American Labor Conference on International Affairs. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

IN DECEMBER 1914, a month after the Ottoman Empire declared war on the United Kingdom, 26-year-old T. E. Lawrence took up his duties as a map officer in British-controlled Cairo. He had already spent several years in the East as an archeologist, but that career did not presage the later champion of native peoples. On the contrary, he joined a British team excavating a site at Carchemish, in eastern Turkey, with the hope of "proving that `Europeans' [the Indo-European Hittites] played a part in creating the civilizations of the East," Michael Asher tells us in Lawrence: The ...