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There were five boys in the Lawrence family, of which Thomas Edward was the second youngest. The eldest, Major Montague Lawrence, was a major in the R. A. M. C.; the second, William, a schoolmaster at Delhi, in India; the third, Frank, who finished Oxford and wandered off to the Near East with Thomas; and the youngest, Arnold, a star track athlete at Oxford, who is also interested in archæology, and for a time took his brother’s place in Mesopotamia. Both William and Frank gave their lives to their country on the battle-fields of France.

Since the war Major Montague Lawrence has taken up work as a medical missionary in China far up on the Tibetan frontier; their mother has also gone to this remote corner of Central Asia, while her youngest son is roaming around the museums of the world on a traveling fellowship from Oxford, studying the sculpture of the period of the decadence of Grecian art.

Several years before the war an expedition from Oxford, headed by Lawrence’s friend Hogarth, the great antiquarian and archæologist, began excavating in the Euphrates Valley, hoping to uncover traces of that little-known ancient race, the Hittites. Because of his intimate knowledge of their language and his sympathetic understanding of their customs, Lawrence was placed in charge of the digging gangs of unruly Kurds, Turkomans, Armenians, and Arabs. This expedition eventually succeeded in uncovering Carchemish, the ancient capital of the Hittite Empire, and there, amid the ruins of that long-forgotten city, Lawrence amused himself studying inscriptions on pottery and joining up the various stages of Hittite civilization. He and his associate, C. Leonard Woolley, director of the expedition, actually uncovered ruins which proved to be the missing link between the civilizations of Nineveh and Babylon and the beginnings of Greek culture in the islands of the Mediterranean, which extend back for five thousand years. The Ashmolean Museum at Oxford contains many exhibits “presented by T. E. Lawrence” before he was twenty years of age.