Dahoum - Relationship With T.E. Lawrence

Relationship With T.E. Lawrence

There were widespread and scandalous allegations that T.E. Lawrence was engaged in a romantic relationship with Selim Ahmed at Lawrence's home in Carchemish, where it was said that Ahmed came to live and where Lawrence had "erected a naked statue of Dahoum." Yet there is no mention of a model in the letter T.E. Lawrence wrote to Will Lawrence on 21 October 1913, "I persuaded Young in his week here to spend his spare time carving gargoyles for the better adornment of the house. He managed in limestone an ideal head of a woman; I did a squatting demon of the Notre-Dame style, also in limestone, and we have now built them into the walls and roof, and the house is become remarkable in N. Syria. The local people come up in crowds to look at them." In Young's photograph of the statue, it can clearly be seen that the figure has a hook-shaped tail, confirming Lawrence's assertion that the sculpture is intended to be that of a demon. It shows no obvious resemblance to Dahoum and a model would not be a necessity for such a relatively crude figure any more than for the "ideal(ised) head of a woman" carved by Young. According to Lawrence biographer Jeremy Wilson, however, the photograph was the cause of Leonard Woolley's allegations that "Lawrence, stopping in the house after the dig was over, had Dahoum to live with him and got him to pose as model for a queer crouching figure which he carved in the soft local limestone and set up on the edge of the house roof; to make an image was bad enough in its way, but to portray a naked figure was proof to them of evil of another sort. The scandal about Lawrence was widely spread and firmly believed."