{"meta":{"version":"2.1","_links":{"self":{"href":"https://api.vam.ac.uk/v2/object/O1763656"},"collection_page":{"href":"https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1763656/"}},"images":{"_primary_thumbnail":"https://framemark.vam.ac.uk/collections/2024NR5832/full/!100,100/0/default.jpg","_iiif_image":"https://framemark.vam.ac.uk/collections/2024NR5832/","_alt_iiif_image":[],"imageResolution":"low","_images_meta":[{"assetRef":"2024NR5832","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5833","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5834","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5835","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5836","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5837","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5838","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5840","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5841","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5842","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5843","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5844","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5845","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5846","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5847","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5848","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5849","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5850","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5851","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5852","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2024NR5853","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false}]},"see_also":null},"record":{"systemNumber":"O1763656","accessionNumber":"ME.76-2023","objectType":"Chest of drawers","titles":[],"summaryDescription":"","physicalDescription":"Chest of five drawers, Syria, 1928. The chest is fully  inlaid all over the front with designs in mother-of-pearl,  outlined by silver wire, and banded by bone and dark  wood. The sides and top are of wood with a more  restrained floral design inlaid with mother-of-pearl. On  the top panel at the front of the chest is a bone plaque  inlaid with an Arabic inscription in a bluish mother-of- pearl. This reads 'Agatha Christie' and the date which is  equivalent to 18 December 1928. ","artistMakerPerson":[{"name":{"text":"unknown","id":"A1848"},"association":{"text":"","id":""},"note":""}],"artistMakerOrganisations":[],"artistMakerPeople":[],"materials":[{"text":"mother of pearl","id":"AAT11835"},{"text":"bone","id":"AAT11798"},{"text":"teak","id":"AAT12453"},{"text":"tin","id":"AAT133748"}],"techniques":[{"text":"inlaid","id":"AAT53850"}],"materialsAndTechniques":"The bone used is probably camel bone, though this needs to be verified. The wood used to make the chest is probably teak. The metal wire outlining the design is probably tin.","categories":[{"text":"Middle East","id":"THES268061"}],"styles":[],"collectionCode":{"text":"MES","id":"THES48607"},"images":["2024NR5832","2024NR5833","2024NR5834","2024NR5835","2024NR5836","2024NR5837","2024NR5838","2024NR5840","2024NR5841","2024NR5842","2024NR5843","2024NR5844","2024NR5845","2024NR5846","2024NR5847","2024NR5848","2024NR5849","2024NR5850","2024NR5851","2024NR5852","2024NR5853"],"imageResolution":"low","galleryLocations":[{"current":{"text":"133","id":"THES49881"},"free":"","case":"BY11","shelf":"","box":""}],"partTypes":[[{"text":"Chest of drawers","id":"AAT39009"}]],"contentWarnings":[{"apprise":"","note":""}],"placesOfOrigin":[{"place":{"text":"Syria","id":"x29200"},"association":{"text":"made","id":"x28654"},"note":"This chest of drawers was most likely made in Damascus."}],"productionDates":[{"date":{"text":"1928","earliest":"1928-01-01","latest":"1928-12-31"},"association":{"text":"made","id":"x28654"},"note":"The date of 18 Kanun al-Awwal (December) 1928 is inlaid in Arabic on top of the chest, in the abbreviated form '18 K 1 sanah [year] 1928'."}],"associatedObjects":[{"object":{"text":"NCOL.286-2024","id":"O1783033"},"association":""},{"object":{"text":"NCOL.287-2024","id":"O1783035"},"association":""},{"object":{"text":"AM/IS/0004","id":"ARC250589"},"association":"Archive record"}],"creditLine":"Bequeathed by Carol Smith","dimensions":[{"dimension":"Height","value":"137","unit":"cm","qualifier":"","date":{"text":"","earliest":null,"latest":null},"part":"","note":"Measured by MRO 30/06/23"},{"dimension":"Width","value":"118","unit":"cm","qualifier":"","date":{"text":"","earliest":null,"latest":null},"part":"","note":"Measured by MRO 30/06/23"},{"dimension":"Depth","value":"57","unit":"cm","qualifier":"","date":{"text":"","earliest":null,"latest":null},"part":"","note":"Measured by MRO 30/06/23"}],"dimensionsNote":"","marksAndInscriptions":[{"content":"Agatha Christie 18 K 1 sanah 1928","inscriber":{"name":{"text":"","id":""},"association":{"text":"","id":""}},"date":{"text":"","earliest":null,"latest":null},"description":"","interpretation":"","language":"","medium":"","method":"","position":"","script":"","translation":"Agatha Christie 18th Kanun al-Awwal [December] year 1928","transliteration":"","type":"","note":"Kanun al-Awwal is the Arabic phrase used in the Levant and Iraq to refer to the month of December in the Gregorian (solar) calendar. K 1 is a type of abbreviation used in Ottoman official documents for months in the Hijri (lunar). The inscription indicates that the chest of drawers was made for the best-selling crime writer, Agatha Christie (1890-1976). 1928 was the year Christie travelled to the Middle East for the first time as an adult, following her divorce from her first husband."}],"objectHistory":"This chest of drawers is a spectacular example of the kind of mother-of-pearl inlaid furniture that was made in Syria since the medieval period, of which many examples survive from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The craft is known as sunduq, after the large storage chests that were regularly decorated in this technique. The craftsmen were known as the sanadiqi, and the ornamented furniture that they made were popular as wedding gifts. An early 20th-century dictionary of Damascene crafts (studied by Marcus Milwright) says that this type of furniture was also popular amongst travellers from Europe and America. \r\n\r\nThis demand had an impact on the form of the furniture objects offered for sale. This chest is in the style of Western examples, although the curved profile of the apron (at the base of the chest) points to its Middle Eastern manufacture. The Western market also seems to have had an impact on the style of mother-of-pearl inlay, which is now based on a grid of abutting triangles (outlined in a metal wire, possibly tin), rather than vegetal or geometric designs which can be seen on Syrian chests from the 18th and 19th centuries, for example.\r\n\r\nOne famous example is the American heiress and Islamic art collector, Doris Duke (1912-1993): a photograph taken in 1938, and now in the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Historical Archives at Duke University (PH.SL047), shows her inspecting several chests of drawers very like this one, in the courtyard of the House of the Spanish Crown in Damascus. The chests were being offered to her by Syrian antiquities firm Asfar &amp; Sarkis, as the dealers can be identified in the photograph. Duke bought three of these cabinets, which are in the collection at Shangri La, the house in Hawaii in which she displayed her Islamic art collection.\r\n\r\nThis chest-of-drawers was bought in Damascus ten years earlier, in 1928, by the best-selling crime writer Agatha Christie (1890-1976). This information is provided by an inlaid panel on the top with an  inscription in Arabic, giving her name, and the date of 18th December 1928. This was on her first visit to the Middle East as an adult, immediately after her divorce from her first husband, Archie Christie. She bought herself a ticket to Baghdad and travelled to Damascus on the Orient Express, before proceeding to Iraq. She spent a couple of months therefore before returning via Damascus, where (as she wrote in her autobiography) she enjoyed the shopping. Perhaps Christie bought the chest for herself as a Christmas present before travelling home again.\r\n\r\nAgatha Christie went on to have an extensive relationship with the Middle East, through her own travels and through working on excavations alongside her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan (1904-1978), whom she met while visiting the Iraqi site of Ur in 1930. Mallowan was particularly well-known for his  excavations in Iraq and Syria. Christie wrote many of her most famous novels on these excavation sites and of course the Middle East provided the inspiration and the setting for some of these.\r\n\r\nChristie actually owned two Syrian inlaid chests-of-drawers, as another is in her former home of Greenway, in Devon, now owned by the  National Trust (NT 120373, https:// www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/120373). The two chests are very similar though the designs of their inlay are  subtly different. Only one, however, is mentioned in her  autobiography (p.381 of the 1993 paperback edition): \"[In  Damascus] I also bought a chest-of-drawers - a huge one,  inlaid with mother-of-pearl and silver - the sort of furniture that  reminds one of fairyland.\" She writes that it was already an antique (though she might have been spun a yarn by the dealer who sold it to her, as both of her chests appear to date to the early 20th century), and humorously describes how it was riddled with woodworm whose munching kept her awake at night.\r\n\r\nThe 'V&amp;A' chest is pictured in a photograph taken in January 1946, which shows Christie \"typing at home\" in Greenway (so she kept both chests there), as part of a series taken for a news story about Christie and Mallowan (see: https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/english-detective-novelist-agatha-christie-typing-at-her-news-photo/515355076?adppopup=true). A print of this photograph has also been acquired as associated archival material.\r\n\r\nWhen Christie died in January 1976, she bequeathed her \"Damascus Pearl inlay Chest of Drawers with the name 'Agatha Christie' in Arabic inlaid on the top\" (ie the chest now in the V&amp;A) to Edmund Cork, who had been her literary agent since 1923. Edmund Cork ran the literary agency Hughes Massie. He died in 1988. It appears that through ownership changes and mergers over the next 40 years, the chest also changed ownership. Its most recent owner was Carol Smith, who died in June 2023. She was also a literary agent who became a successful crime novelist in the 1980s and 90s, following in Christie’s footsteps (see: https://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/client/carol-smith). Smith instructed the executors of her will to bequeath \"the Agatha Christie chest [to] an appropriate museum\", and they offered it to the V&amp;A.","historicalContext":"","briefDescription":"Chest of five drawers, inlaid in mother-of-pearl, outlined by silver wire, and banded by bone and dark wood. An Arabic inscription on the top of the chest gives the name of 'Agatha Christie' and the date which is equivalent to 18 December 1928. Made in Syria (probably Damascus). ","bibliographicReferences":[{"reference":{"text":"","id":""},"details":"","free":"Marcus Milwright, \"Wood and Woodworking in Late Ottoman Damascus: an Analysis of the <i>Qamus al-sina'at al-Shamiyya</i>\", <i>Bulletin d'Etudes Orientales</i> 61 (2012), pp.545-566"},{"reference":{"text":"","id":""},"details":"","free":"<i>Agatha Christie: An Autobiography</i> (originally published by Collins, 1977)"}],"production":"","productionType":{"text":"","id":""},"contentDescription":"","contentPlaces":[],"associatedPlaces":[],"contentPerson":[{"text":"Christie, Agatha Mary Dame","id":"N1127"}],"associatedPerson":[],"contentOrganisations":[],"associatedOrganisations":[],"contentPeople":[],"associatedPeople":[],"contentEvents":[],"associatedEvents":[],"contentOthers":[],"contentConcepts":[],"contentLiteraryRefs":[],"galleryLabels":[{"text":"This chest exemplifies the kind of mother-of-pearl inlaid furniture made in Syria since medieval times. The technique was particularly used to decorate storage chests. Furniture in this style was popular among travellers from Europe and America. This chest was bought by crime novelist Agatha Christie (1890–1976), during her first solo trip to the Middle East in 1928. She travelled to Baghdad via Damascus where, as she wrote in her autobiography, she ‘enjoyed the shopping’. ","date":{"text":"","earliest":null,"latest":null}}],"partNumbers":["ME.76-2023"],"accessionNumberNum":"76","accessionNumberPrefix":"ME","accessionYear":2023,"otherNumbers":[],"copyNumber":"","aspects":["WHOLE"],"assets":[],"recordModificationDate":"2025-11-20","recordCreationDate":"2023-09-07","availableToBook":false}}