Christie first thought of writing the book in 1938 and wrote to her literary agent, Edmund Cork, in July of that year, suggesting the project and telling him that it would be "not at all serious or archaeological".

[1] In the event, she wrote the book during the Second World War[2] after her husband, Max Mallowan, had been posted to Egypt with the British Council in February 1942[3] and she was living alone in London.

She wrote this book "out of nostalgia" feeling badly the separation from Max and wanting to recapture the "poignant remembrance of our days in Arpachiyah and Syria."

[6] Christie finished the book in June 1945, one month after a delighted reunion with her husband and passed it round for comment and opinion about the suitability for publication.

Supportive of the work was Stephen Glanville (who had previously assisted with the play Akhnaton and pushed Christie into writing Death Comes as the End), Edmund Cork and Max himself to who it was given as a homecoming present.

In the last two months of 1934, Christie joined Max and a young architect Robin Macartney (called Mac in the book) on a surveying expedition in Syria.

[12] Professor Rushbrook Williams in The Times Literary Supplement of 28 December 1946 was less impressed: "The enthusiasts of detective fiction who regard the publication of a new "Agatha Christie" as a landmark will experience something of a shock when they turn over these pages.

While those who know something of archaeological work in the Near East, and recognise in Mrs Mallowan's minor misfortunes and victimisations an echo of their own experiences, will sometimes chuckle as they read, the ordinary person will find the whole thing too long drawn out.

For it contains nostalgic descriptions of the profusion of mounds that mark bygone lives, and of the silence that surrounds them now, and of the flowers that cover them if you arrive on the right morning in the spring.

in The Guardian's issue of 22 November 1946 stated that the idea of writing the book was, "characteristically bright" and concluded, "The reader need not expect to find anything here about the famous Mallowan excavations which have done so much to fill out the heretofore thin web of the story of the origins of cultivation.