Britain and the Arab Middle East

by Cooper, Lisa;

  I have left few places so unwillingly as I left Kal'at Shergat.151

  Bell's later publication on Ukhaidir contains numerous references to the findings made at Assur and Hatra, another site whose excavations were directed by Andrae (see Chapter 5). Bell also liberally cites Andrae's opinions regarding key Near Eastern architectural developments through time, again reflecting well her admiration for the man's intellectual qualities. Above all and most telling is the fact that of all the people in Bell's life to whom she could have dedicated her book on Ukhaidir, her most mature and scholarly archaeological report, she chose Andrae:

  To my friend, Dr. Walther Andrae. In grateful recollection of happy and profitable days spent in the first capital of Assyria which has been revealed by his labour and recreated by his learning.152

  As already discussed in the context of Koldewey's work at Babylon, Bell's antiquities legislation in her later role as Iraq's new Director of Antiquities, which called for more scientific procedures in the field, is almost certainly a reflection of what she had witnessed at both Babylon and Assur. At the same time, Bell's friendly relationship with Andrae was put to the test in the years after the war. Earlier in 1920, Bell had taken an opposing stance to Andrae regarding the problematic ‘Lisbon Collection’, some 448 cases of Assur antiquities that had been apprehended in Lisbon at the outbreak of the war and were now considered a war prize. Despite Andrae's pleas for the objects’ safe delivery to Berlin, Bell claimed that the antiquities rightfully belonged to the ‘future Mesopotamian State’ and its new museum in Baghdad.153 Fortunately for the Germans, most of this collection ended up in their hands. Furthermore, as has been discussed, the bulk of the antiquities from Babylon that had been left in Iraq during the war were also authorized to go to Germany around the same time, this latter action clearly reflecting Bell's much-softened attitude towards her old German archaeological friends and their treasured antiquities.154

  Fig. 4.27 Dinner in the German Expeditionshaus on the eve of Bell’s departure from Assur, 6 April 1911. Seated from left to right: Walter Bachmann, Paul Maresch, Gertrude Bell, Walter Andrae and Conrad Preusser. Julius Jordan, the other German team member, is absent from the group and is probably the photographer.

  Andrae, recalling late in life his relationship with Bell, showed appreciation for her passionate interest in archaeology and her competence as a scholar but never forgot the key role she had played in Mesopotamian political affairs.155 He suspected that even at the time of her early visits to Mesopotamia, she was on a ‘diplomatic mission’ (i.e., that she was acting as a spy).156

  When we return once more to Bell's own writings from 1909 and 1911, it is impossible to discern any motives other than her intense passion for travel and archaeology, this especially evident during her visits to Assur. Her words, laden with superlatives, remind us of the impact that this site and its excavators made upon her:

  I spent at Assur the most delightful days of my whole journey. [...] Yes, these have been wonderful days. I was very very sorry to come away and they pressed me to stay, but I thought if I once began staying there was no reason why I should ever leave off.157

  K. Shergat was looking its best, all clothed in grass and flowers. I love it better than any ruined site in the world, but perhaps that is mainly because of the gratitude and affection which I feel towards my hosts there.158

  Nimrud

  Following the Tigris River on its northerly course, Bell approached another ancient site with spectacular remains from the same period as Assur. This place, however, left a starkly different impression on Bell, given its state of neglect. The site was Nimrud, its vast mounds marking the place of ancient Kalhu, known from the Bible and numerous ancient sources as one of the great capital cities of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Situated at the confluence of the Tigris and the Greater Zab rivers, the city was founded by King Assurnasirpal II in 878 BCE. During his reign, Assurnasirpal built a lavish palace, temples and a ziggurat on the high mound by the river. Later kings would add to the city with further palaces and temples and a massive arsenal, the place for the king's military equipment and booty. Although the mudbrick walls of these edifices had decayed, the materials within them – including innumerable inscribed clay tablets, stone statuary and exquisitely carved wall panels – were often found intact, and they reflect well the prosperity of Assyria and the formidable imperial power once wielded by its ancient kings.159

  Bell would have been familiar with Nimrud on account of the well-publicized excavations that had been carried out there in the previous century by the English adventurer-archaeologist Austen Henry Layard.160 Layard's probes on the acropolis mound at Nimrud had unearthed the treasures of Assurnasirpal's palace (known today as the Northwest Palace), and he had overseen the shipment of many of its lovely sculptures to London, where they became housed, amid considerable fanfare, in the galleries of the British Museum.161 Layard would go on to dig also at the Assyrian site of Nineveh, opposite Mosul to the north, and find there several other palaces and their precious tablets and sculptures. Today, the Assyrian artefacts of the British Museum, which are largely the product of Layard's and his successors’ prodigious diggings in Mesopotamia in the mid to late nineteenth century, constitute a key collection of that institution.162

  In contrast to the Nimrud antiquities’ revered state in the British Museum, however, Bell found the ancient remains at the site itself much neglected. Layard's old excavation pits and holes were ‘filled to the brim with grass and flowers’, and it was virtually impossible to trace the lines of the ancient Assyrian structures that stood here.163 Bell found it distressing that several excavated sculptured stones, which had not been previously removed, lay half-exposed in the ground and had been subjected to vandalism and damage from the elements. The British Museum still held the permit for the excavations of this site, but it had not taken the steps to conserve and protect these antiquities that it had left in the ground. Bell remarks in particular on a large statue of an Assyrian god whose upper half was exposed above ground. His nose and ears had been much defaced.164 She also photographed a pair of stone-carved, human-headed, winged lions (lamassu), leaning into the ancient doorway they once would have guarded (Fig. 4.28).165

  Fresh from her visit to the Germans’ neat excavations trenches at Assur, and having witnessed the care with which all of the antiquities were being exposed, documented and removed, Bell found Nimrud's neglect all the more pronounced. She responded by publishing what she saw, carefully contrasting the responsible diggings of the Germans at Assur with the neglectful attitude she had witnessed at Nimrud, and she appealed to the British Museum to pay to have the exposed antiquities either removed or reburied so they would no longer be subjected to damage.166

  Despite her published reports, however, nothing appears to have happened immediately with the exposed pieces at Nimrud, although in 1926, probably at the instigation of Bell as Iraq's Director of Antiquities, some of the sculptures were brought to the Iraq Museum.167 The massive statue-in-the round of a god, now known to be from the Nabu Temple and dated to the reign of the Assyrian king Adad-Nirari III, stands in the Assyrian gallery of that museum.168 The two lamassu that Bell photographed are human-headed, winged lion-centaurs, each holding a goat. Their heads were smashed at some point after 1909, but they were restored to their upright position in 1955. They continued to guard one of the main doors to the throne room of the Northwest Palace of Assurnasirpal II at Nimrud until recent tragic events, perpetrated by IS militants; a video released on 11 April 2015 shows that much of the Northwest Palace's in situ contents were vandalized and smashed, after which the militants used barrel bombs to destroy large parts of the palace.169 Much of the grand and highly celebrated palace of the Assyrian ruler, ‘king of the four quarters of the world’, for which Bell showed so much concern over a century ago, has been obliterated. A giant field of debris marks its once proud place on the site.

  Mosul and Beyond

  Our narrative and discussion of Bell's arch
aeological investigations pertaining to her first Mesopotamian journey comes to a close with her arrival in the city of Mosul on the Tigris River in late April 1909. To be sure, Bell would continue to take a deep interest in many of the ancient sites and monuments of the lands through which she passed right up to the end of her journey in June, when she reached Constantinople, but it is at Mosul that one sees a shift in her principal attentions. Pre-Classical, Parthian, Sasanian and Islamic-period sites and monuments, which had dominated the landscape and Bell's attentions since her entry to the Tigris-Euphrates Valley of southern Mesopotamia back in early March, now took a back seat to the multitude of early Christian remains that characterize the rolling hills and mountainous regions of northern Mesopotamia and Anatolia. Beginning with the antique churches and monasteries in and around Mosul, and continuing up through eastern Anatolia, Bell committed herself to reporting and extensively photographing the early ecclesiastical art and architecture she passed. Her focus on churches would culminate in her visit to the Tur-Abdin, a remote, rugged region of south-eastern Anatolia between Diyarbakir and Nusaybin, where Christian communities existed as early as the third century and continued to thrive, with unbroken traditions, for at least 1,000 years.170 As it transpired, Bell's fascination with these churches, as well as those in the surrounding districts of northern Mesopotamia, resulted in their publication – not only in her 1909 travel account, Amurath to Amurath, but in a chapter of a monograph by M. van Berchem and J. Strzygowski.171 Finally, after another journey to Mesopotamia and a visit to the Tur-Abdin in 1911, during which time Bell carried out additional investigations and made extra observations, she published a substantial report as a journal article.172

  Fig. 4.28 Bell’s photograph of her servant, Fattuh, on the right, and another man, standing next to a pair of leaning human-headed winged lion-centaurs, these once upright and guarding one of the entrances to Assurnasirpal II’s throne room at Nimrud, c.883–59 BCE. Excavated and then reburied by A.H. Layard in the 1850s, by the time of Bell’s visit in 1909, they had become partially exposed to the elements and were subject to vandalism. Bell contrasted the state of neglect at Nimrud ‘to the pious care with which the German excavators were uncovering the ruins of Assur’. The entire palace of Assurnasirpal II was destroyed by the Islamic State in April 2015, so it is presumed that these stone statues no longer exist.

  Other scholars have done an admirable job of bringing together Bell's research and analysis of late antique ecclesiastical architecture and underlining the significance of her work in the grand scheme of contemporary research on late antique Christian material culture.173 More recent scholarship has also brought attention to the fact that many of the buildings of the Tur-Abdin that Bell documented have been lost through destruction and rebuilding, making Bell's notes and photographs an invaluable source of information about this unique region.174

  Many of the churches that Bell examined were constructed around the same time as the Sasanian and early Islamic-period structures and assisted her in tracking certain Near Eastern artistic and architectural trends through time, particularly those that were shared by Persian and Islamic artisans. In all, her work on these churches further underlines the incredible scope of her knowledge and the ambitiousness of her research.

  CHAPTER 5

  FURTHER TRAVELS AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH, 1910–14

  Bell emerged as a fully committed and capable archaeological scholar after her return from the Near East in 1909. For the next four years she plunged into archaeological research, immersing herself in the study of Classical and Near Eastern art and architecture, and travelling almost solely with archaeological objectives in mind. While many of her interests continued to be Byzantine churches, she also gave herself over to the study of the Sasanian and Early Islamic periods, acquired through her recent travels and her special discovery of Ukhaidir. The culmination of her work on these time periods was the publication of Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir in 1914.1 The monograph combined many of her recorded observations from her Near Eastern trips and represented her most mature and erudite treatment of an archaeological subject. In terms of its methodology and conclusions, it took into account the scholarship of colleagues such as Josef Strzygowski, Ernst Herzfeld and Walter Andrae. The work also reflected what Bell had learned from her Classical archaeology colleagues and what she had gained from her own experiences in Italy and the Dalmatian Coast, these affecting in particular her thinking about Classical influences on early Islamic architecture. In all, the years 1910–14 were incredibly productive for Bell and led to her most significant and commendable work in the field of archaeology.

  First Publications after Bell's 1909 Near Eastern Trip

  Back in England, one of Bell's first aims was to publish an account of her journey, just as she had accomplished with her earlier travels through the Levant, The Desert and the Sown (1907). She now had field notebooks, diary entries, letters and photographs with which to put together this work, and after some effort, it was submitted to the publishers at the end of 1910. This book – carrying the somewhat obscure title Amurath to Amurath2 – has a more distinct scholarly character than The Desert and the Sown. The book contains lengthy deliberations over the dates of ancient events and the identification of place-names, detailed architectural descriptions of archaeological sites, and references to ancient historians and modern scholars who had commented on the places visited.3

  Amurath to Amurath also contains discussion about the region's modern peoples and the current political climate of the East. These subjects engaged the ever-inquisitive Bell, often with the same intensity as that which she applied to the area's antiquity. The book's dedication to Bell's friend Lord Cromer4 is particularly noteworthy for its political content, describing the reformist coup of the Young Turks, who had successfully deposed the despotic sultan of the Ottoman Empire in April 1909 and introduced an ambitious set of new, liberal reforms designed to bring the empire and its government into the twentieth century.5 Travelling through the East in 1909, Bell had been surrounded by news of the Young Turks’ actions and had taken note of the reaction to the dissemination of their progressive ideas among the Arabs of Mesopotamia, notably the little-understood notion of ‘liberty’.6 Bell found herself encouraged by these developments and urged Cromer to help her raise sympathy in England for the Young Turks movement.7

  Despite all of Bell's good intentions to produce an interesting work that mixed both current affairs and archaeology, Amurath to Amurath never found a good audience upon its publication in 1911. It did not fit well within the genre of travel writing because of its detailed exposé of archaeological sites, and its overview of current events was too scattered and impressionistic to be regarded as a true political commentary. When it was released, the book sold fairly well, possibly on account of the success of The Desert and the Sown and of people's continuing fascination with Bell as an intrepid woman traveller, but it didn't receive the same critical praise and public fanfare as the earlier work. One reviewer complained of its ‘detailed descriptions of ruins’, which were ‘apt to be skipped even by a conscientious reviewer’.8 Bell's friend David Hogarth commented that with its ‘maturer science’, the book possessed less of the ‘careless rapture’ of her first travel book.9 In spite of its mixed reception, however, Amurath to Amurath demonstrated Bell's abilities as an unparalleled observer of all things modern and ancient in the Near East, and of her ability to record them in all of their richness and diversity.

  Besides Amurath to Amurath, Bell produced several scholarly works during these years. She wrote a long article for the Geographical Journal, describing her journey down the east bank of the Euphrates River,10 and contributed an important chapter on the churches of the Tur-Abdin in Anatolia to a book entitled Amida, which her mentor and friend Strzygowski was putting together with her other scholar-friend Max van Berchem.11 Of particular importance to Bell, however, was the castle of Ukhaidir and her efforts to ascertain its date and influences, principally on th
e basis of certain architectural features found within it, like vaults. The outcome of her research was an article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies that appeared in 1910,12 much of whose content has already been discussed and assessed in Chapter 3.

  Rather than bringing an end to her work on this desert palace, however, Bell's Ukhaidir report in the Journal of Hellenic Studies only whetted her appetite. Ukhaidir had too many unanswered questions, and she wanted to be the one to answer them. To be sure, with Ukhaidir's complex blend of inspiration from the worlds of Greece, Rome and the Near East, she may have felt particularly well suited to taking on this project, given her considerable knowledge of all of these regions. Whatever the case, it was clear that further field research was necessary, and so even by the end of 1909, Bell was hatching plans for more ventures abroad. Two trips, in 1910 and 1911, not only entailed a second journey to Mesopotamia – including a brief but exciting excursion into the Persian frontier; they also included travel to inspect archaeological remains in Italy and the Dalmatian Coast. Upon her return from these trips, Bell spent much time corresponding and conferring with other scholars about the ancient remains she had seen, as well as formulating and writing up her conclusions.

  Italy and the Dalmatian Coast, 1910

  ‘Dearest Mother. I have begun life as a student [if you do not recall me] and have been working all day long at a palace, partly at the German Institute and partly in the Palatine. It has been delightful beyond words.’13 Such were Bell's sentiments upon writing home from Rome in February 1910. Never content to travel for pure, unfocused pleasure, even in a place which offered as many varied cultural delights as the Eternal City, Bell set herself to learn as much as she could about the Roman architectural remains and absorb what she could from the cadre of eminent Classical scholars residing there.