David Hogarth
Among her fellow British acquaintances, no one held a more prominent place in Bell's archaeological life than David George Hogarth (1862–1927) (Fig. 2.2), an accomplished archaeologist, geographer and distinguished author whose expertise included not only the lands of the Classical world, but the regions and peoples of the Near East and Egypt. Since Bell had come to know and respect Hogarth's work a great deal by 1909, a short overview of his life and accomplishments is warranted here, especially for identifying aspects of his activities and scholarship that had the greatest impact on her own work at this time.
After graduating from Oxford in 1885, Hogarth travelled first to Greece and then to Anatolia, where he joined William Mitchell Ramsay, the celebrated Oxford scholar of Classical Antiquity and Early Christianity (with whom Bell herself would eventually become well acquainted).3 These journeys honed Hogarth's Classical training, particularly his epigraphic skills, which in his case involved the location, measurement, mapping and copying of countless ancient inscriptions in the hills and valleys of Anatolia's rugged landscapes.4 Hogarth's first excavation experience was gained on the island of Cyprus, and thereafter he dug in Egypt, Greece and Crete, working alongside other notable archaeologists such as Flinders Petrie, Édouard Naville and Arthur Evans.5 His archaeological work eventually took him back to Anatolia, where he dug at the site of Ephesus (1904–5), and finally to northern Syria, where he directed the British Museum excavations at Carchemish on the Euphrates River, beginning in 1911.6 In England, Hogarth was no less busy, becoming Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, at Oxford, in 1908. He would retain that prestigious appointment until his death in 1927.7
Hogarth's numerous scholarly publications included reports of his archaeological excavations, as well as colourful accounts of his travels through places such as Cyprus, Egypt and Anatolia. His other written works included perceptive observations of the modern inhabitants of the lands through which he passed – their cultures, languages, religions and political leanings.8 Hogarth also observed the geography of the regions through which he travelled, taking careful note of their landscapes and climates, and speculating on how such features would have affected the cultures of the people who lived in them, both past and present.9
Hogarth had a particular fondness for exploratory travel, this being in part connected to his long-time fascination with Alexander the Great and ‘the spacious world’ of the East over which this extraordinary man had moved.10 Of Alexander's conquests, Hogarth wrote that they ‘fired my imagination and stirred a lust for discovery’.11 His ‘explorer's itch’ led him to several places in Anatolia and Syria seldom frequented by European visitors, and it promoted his interest in the Arabian peninsula, which had remained a largely unsurveyed and little understood region of the Near East. While it is surprising that Hogarth never actually travelled to Arabia until 1916 – and by this time he was only on official wartime business – he nonetheless acquired considerable knowledge of its geography, history and peoples through various publications.12 His 1904 work, The Penetration of Arabia: A Record of the Development of Western Knowledge Concerning the Arabian Peninsula, chronicled that region's history and geography and made a detailed report of the European travellers who had ventured there up to the nineteenth century. The travels of the exceptionally intrepid Charles Montagu Doughty (1843–1926), a distinguished Arabian traveller, were capaciously chronicled in the book, and Hogarth would return to this subject towards the end of his life, when he penned Doughty's biography.13 While recent travel and the current conditions of Arabia were Hogarth's main subjects in The Penetration of Arabia, he did not neglect topics pertaining to antiquity, as evidenced by his report on Roman or pre-Roman inscriptions at Teima, ancient roadways to Petra, Gerra and Sheba, and Ptolemy's map of the peninsula.14
Fig. 2.2 David Hogarth – traveller, archaeologist, author and political operative – in the centre of the photograph, with T.E. Lawrence (left) and Alan G.C. Dawnay (right). Hogarth was a source of inspiration and encouragement for Bell at the time of her early trips to the Near East. Their association continued into the years of World War I and afterward, when they served as political agents of Britain in the Near East.
Gertrude Bell could be counted among the many readers of The Penetration of Arabia whose imaginations were fired up by the prospect of exploring this vast desert land of the Near East, as she was by the other regions through which Hogarth had travelled. But Bell's familiarity with Hogarth extended beyond his writings, as has already been reported. We know that she had met him through his younger sister, Janet, a friend from her Oxford days in the late 1880s. Her letters indicate that she encountered Hogarth on several occasions in the course of her travels through Europe, including in Athens in 1898, by which time he was Director of the British School at Athens and involved in the excavations of the site of Phylakopi on the island of Melos.15 Thrilled as Bell was by the opportunity to see and handle some of the pottery that had been excavated at that site, we may perhaps credit Hogarth for having sown some of the seeds of her incipient interest in archaeology.16
In the years that followed, Bell's own travels in the Near East, especially her journey up through the Hauran of northern Jordan and southern Syria, which she undertook in 1905, did not go unnoticed by Hogarth. He acknowledged her efforts in a lecture on Near Eastern exploration, delivered to the Royal Geographical Society in London in November 1908.17 That a personal association also continued to exist between the two is indicated by Hogarth's request, prior to her 1909 journey to the Near East, to proceed to the site of Tell Ahmar on the left bank of the Euphrates River in Syria, in order to take additional paper squeezes of the Hittite inscriptions, since his own squeezes of those stones had not been successful.18 Upon the conclusion of her Mesopotamian journey, we know from Bell's letters that she visited Hogarth in Oxford, reporting on her visit to Ahmar and giving him paper squeezes and photographs. Some of these materials subsequently appeared in Hogarth's published article on Carchemish and surrounding archaeological sites, and Bell must be given credit for their clarity and informative character.19
Bell clearly shared Hogarth's love of exploration, as already shown by her earlier travels in the Near East that veered from the paths well-trodden by previous Europeans. One can also detect within Bell, like Hogarth, a similar fascination for Arabia, given its unexplored quality. The central Nejd region of Arabia seems to have particularly captivated Bell, this containing the Ruba el-Khali, the ‘Empty Quarter’, which no European had traversed.20 Coupled with that was her ongoing curiosity for the House of Rashid, an Arab family of the northern Nejd, which was centred on the city of Hayil. Reports about the goings-on of the prince Ibn Rashid had been made to Bell as early as 1900 during her travels in Syria,21 and she harboured a fascination for this elusive character that would ultimately be realized by her daring trip to his capital at Hayil in 1914. Hogarth would report the details of this perilous journey in his obituary for Bell in 1926, remarking that she was only the second European woman, after Lady Anne Blunt, to see the Nejd.22
For her 1909 journey, Bell selected a Near Eastern itinerary that was considerably less hazardous than the desert wastes of the Nejd she would tackle five years later but still entailed the kind of exploration of which Hogarth would have wholly approved. He himself had noted, in print, sections of the Euphrates River Valley that required closer inspection, and we can guess that parts of her 1909 itinerary were intended to take into account those regions. As remarked above, Bell's visit to the site of Tell Ahmar, downstream from Carchemish, was certainly made at Hogarth's specific request. Her overland route from Aleppo to the Euphrates River, and her further travels down the left bank of the river from Tell Ahmar, as far as ‘Anah, appear to have been partly in response to Hogarth's observation – together with Bernhard Moritz's advice (see Chapter 3) – that these areas had seldom been travelled since Chesney's expedition 70 years earlier but were much changed, now dotted with agricultural villages where once had been bu
t a few wandering Arabs,23 and that many new places needed to be added to the map.24
Besides in her choice of travel itinerary, Hogarth's influence over Bell may be discerned in her travel writing. In Amurath to Amurath, she provides ample information about the modern conditions of the regions she passed through, including the names of existing villages and towns, along with tribal groups and their pasturing lands, political opinions and sheikhs’ names, echoing Hogarth's own tendency to describe current conditions in his travelogues.25 Historical geography also held a tremendous allure for Bell. Her work attests to the diligence with which she located the ruins of ancient settlement sites, and to her subsequent efforts to discern their ancient names, suggest ancient caravan routes and military tracks, and locate river crossings. Such investigations often involved recourse to pre-modern geographers and historians who provided place-names and reports of the regions through which she had travelled. References to these are liberally scattered throughout Bell's published accounts. Readers of Amurath to Amurath, for example, often find themselves assailed with information mined from Classical authors such as Ammianus Marcellinus,26 Xenophon,27 Strabo,28 Lucian29 and Ptolemy,30 and ancient works such as the Peutinger Table,31 the Antonine Itinerary32 and the Parthian Stations of Isadore of Charax.33 Nor was Bell ignorant of the Arab historians and geographers Ibn Khordadhbeh,34 Istakhri,35 Ibn Jubayr,36 Yaqut37 and Abu'l Fida,38 these also assisting in her identification of pre-modern settlements, the location of older tracks and crossings, and other places and monuments of historical significance. While some of the locations of ancient sites suggested by Bell on the basis of these historical geographical studies have since proven incorrect,39 her method of inquiry essentially emulated Hogarth's own geographical investigations and his similar recourse to ancient authors.40
A final indication of Hogarth's influence is Bell's stepped-up interest in not only the ancient remains from the Greco-Roman periods but also those from the even earlier Bronze and Iron Ages. Bell did not hesitate to speculate on the date and function of several pre-Classical monuments and tell-sites, and she was eager to report these in careful detail. This echoed Hogarth's own interests, which although solidly based in the Classical world nonetheless had veered, through his travels and investigations in central Anatolia and northern Syria, to earlier periods of antiquity. He had become particularly fascinated by the Hittites. We see in Bell an increasing curiosity and interest in pre-Classical civilization as she progressed through her 1909 journey into Mesopotamia, this culminating in her detailed and enthusiastic reports on two of the region's most celebrated ancient cities, Babylon and Assur.
Significantly, Hogarth's association with Gertrude Bell did not end with their shared scholarly interest in the Near East, both past and present. Like Bell, Hogarth played an important role in Arab affairs during World War I. Because of his vast knowledge of the geography and people of the Near East, in 1915 Hogarth was appointed to head up the so-called Arab Bureau of the British Naval Intelligence Division in Cairo, gathering for its top policymakers vital information about the movements and loyalties of the Arab groups of Arabia, Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia, and their potential alliance to Britain.41 Hogarth was responsible for recruiting one of his archaeological protégés from the Carchemish excavations, T.E. Lawrence, to make contact with the Arab leadership in the Hejaz, this eventually leading to Lawrence's key role in the Arab Revolt.42 It was also in his capacity as director of the Arab Bureau that Hogarth invited Bell to join the Bureau in 1915, a move that essentially launched her legendary career in British–Arab affairs and the politics of Iraq.43 T.E. Lawrence would later commend Hogarth for his great knowledge and careful wisdom,44 and it is doubtful that Gertrude Bell would have been any less fulsome in her praise, given the force of his impact upon her travels, archaeological pursuits and political activities.
Josef Strzygowski
Discussion of Bell's archaeological interests and activities cannot rightly proceed without the acknowledgement of another source of inspiration and knowledge about the Near East: the German scholar Josef Strzygowski, whom I introduced in Chapter 1 (Fig. 2.3). Strzygowski was especially influential with respect to Bell's work on the art and architecture of the Byzantine and early Islamic periods, and she strongly emulated his scholarly method in her written works.
Born in 1862 in humble circumstances – the son of a cloth manufacturer in Austrian Silesia – Strzygowski was the object of many prejudices in academia, and he was considered something of an outsider in the elite academic circles of late nineteenth-century Germany; such factors may have shaped his combative and iconoclastic personality.45 He opposed traditional views about art and endeavoured to dethrone the older generation of narrow-minded German academics, whom he believed gave undeserved priority and pre-eminence to Classical antiquity – especially Classical languages – at the expense of other worthy fields of study of the ancient world. In 1909, the year Bell set out on her first journey to Mesopotamia, Strzygowski had just taken up a prestigious professorship in art history at the University of Vienna, remaining there until his retirement in 1934 (he died in 1941).46
Strzygowski's special interests and expertise lay with ancient cultures and countries that fell outside the cultural sphere of Rome. Over the course of his career, he studied and published numerous articles, reviews and monographs on the art and architecture of Armenia, and on Byzantine, Slavic, Serbian, Germanic, Coptic and, importantly, Near Eastern antiquities.47 His focus was primarily the Hellenistic, Byzantine and Early Islamic periods of the Near East, and he acquired an unprecedented knowledge of the material culture of these eras. As his research developed, he became more and more disillusioned with the traditional notion that the Classical world, especially Rome, was the origin of all great Western art, a belief that still persisted among his contemporaries. On the contrary, he argued, the Orient – by which he meant the Near East – was the source of a great number of important developments that had spread to the West and ultimately affected the development of European medieval art and architecture.48
Strzygowski's analytical method gave priority to the style and form of art and architecture. Once these formal characteristics had been carefully described, they were then compared with other sites displaying morphologically similar features. Similarities indicated a path of cultural diffusion, whereby the formal characteristics of a particular art style or architectural feature were seen as spreading out from one point of origin through time and across space. This comparative formal analysis was often carried out at the expense of textual sources and inscriptions that could provide a historical context.49 Nevertheless, Strzygowski argued that only with artefacts could one enter into otherwise inaccessible realms of prehistoric or illiterate cultures for which there are no inscriptions, or the everyday worlds of common people. Thus, he claimed that while ‘writing had largely been a pursuit of elites, artistic movements (and the artefacts they generated) reflected much more closely the actual life of the Volk’.50
Strzygowski's continuing attacks on colleagues, not to mention his odious personality – he was well known for his belligerence and arrogance – made him unpopular among some of his academic peers.51 Moreover, his style of inquiry was frequently called into question by more cautious scholars. As one reported, his method was to ‘make erratic combinations without the requisite critical sorting of the individual facts’, and, this critic opined, such an approach departed ‘too radically from the path of prudent method and source criticism’.52 Despite these shortcomings, however, Strzygowski could not be criticised for the breadth of his interests, his innovative approaches, his unique familiarity with out-of-the-way material, and the fact that a great many of his morphological observations were striking and brilliantly conceived.53
Fig. 2.3 Josef Strzygowski, the Polish-Austrian art historian who championed the ancient Near East over Rome as a source of many important artistic traditions that ultimately spread to the West and impacted European medieval art. Bell was strongly
influenced by Strzygowski’s theories about the primacy of the Near East, and she adopted his formal analytical approach to the study of art and architecture.
None of these accomplishments are what Strzygowski is remembered for today. Instead, he is remembered for his racist leanings. Although he was the Orient's greatest champion over Rome, with the Orient he situated Semitic races and their negative influences:
Strzygowski claimed that changes in late antique art, and the rise of Christian art were not a Roman development but rather the pervasive and malicious influence of the East, risen again from its slumbers after centuries of Greek dominance to destroy the Hellenic tradition.54
His racist themes developed over time, and eventually, he became sympathetic to the Nazi regime that gained power in Germany in the 1930s. It is because of his association with this infamous period of history that Strzygowski's name is seldom uttered today. As one modern scholar writes, ‘Discussions of his genuine scholarly significance have always been burdened by excuses or embarrassment, or his work is discredited altogether.’55 But as J. Elsner cogently writes:
Stripped of its proto-Nazi politics, the influence of this approach has been fundamental to the establishment of the history of Islamic art, to the study of image production on the eastern peripheries of the Roman empire, with a view to resisting Romano-centrism, and most ironically, to the study of Jewish art, in which Strzygowski can be hailed as a pioneer.56
Britain and the Arab Middle East Page 6