AGATHA CHRISTIE HELPED UNCOVER ANCIENT CITY.

Her diligence and face cream cleaned Nimrud's most famous ivory. She captured the archaeological dig in Iraq on celluloid and Kodak film, developing the prints in water painstakingly filtered from the nearby Tigris. And every day, after she balanced the books and arranged for the next day's meals, Agatha Christie sat down to write. The British mystery writer's second husband, Max Mallowan, was an archaeologist who build his career on digs in the 1950s in Nimrud, the remains of the ancient Assyrian city that survived 3,000 years only to be blown into rubble by ISIS in 2016. And Christie, then in her 1960s, was there to document his work, in photo and film.
Every winter, according to her grandson Mathew Prichard, "they disappeared into Iraq or Syria and returned in May or June. To her it was just as important as writing. Her role was to go on these digs and help her husband with the photography and dealings with the local labour force", he said.
Famed for her detective characters Mrs. Marple and Hercule Poirot, Christie had a longtime fascination with archaeology that showed up in novels set in the Mid-east, including "Death on the Nile" and "Murder in Mesopotamia". 
Christie's non-fiction book "Come Tell Me How You Live", about a series of digs in Syria in the 1940s, is testament to her love for adventure, travel and the ancient sites of civilisation. But seven decades later Nimrud is in danger as never before. Islamic State fighters took over the site near the city of Mosul in 2014, and in 2015 smashed the winged bulls guarding the entrance and blew up the Northwest Palace where Mallowan made his most significant discoveries. The site, though liberated in December 2016 from the extremists, is reduced to rubble, largely unguarded and vulnerable to looters.
Among Mallowan's finds were a series of ivories, including one of a series of a woman's face dubbed the Mona Lisa of Nimrud, which was extracted with difficulty from a muddy well.
"She spent hours drying it and cleaning it off, with her face cream", said Georgina Herrmann, a British archaeologist who worked there with Mallowan. Other ivories were discovered smashed, and Christie delighted in assembling them, Herrmann said. "Agatha was a passionate solver of jigsaw puzzles. She laid all these pieces out - there must have been hundreds - and put them together". According to Pritchard, Christie and Mallowan would be dismayed to learn what has become of the site.
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