Britain and the Arab Middle East

by Cooper, Lisa;

  the Great King seated in state in his hall of audience, with the light of a thousand lamps, suspended from the roof, catching his jeweled tiara, his sword and girdle, illuminating the hangings on the walls and the robes and trappings of the army of courtiers who stood round the throne.12

  Bell was not unique in her predilection for evoking the East's history, often in romantic terms. In fact, she was preceded by a long line of European artists, poets, historians and experts in Oriental languages who had endeavoured to capture, through writing or the visual arts, some of the romance and exoticism of the East, both present and past.13 Mesopotamia, the Near Eastern land with which Bell would become most intimately associated, was not exempt from this treatment, its tumultuous past being conjured up by many artists, even before archaeological investigations had revealed any of the region's real antiquities. In art, rousing examples of Mesopotamia's torrid history included, for example, the English painter John Martin's image of the Fall of Nineveh (1830), or the famous Death of Sardanapalus (1827–8), painted by the French artist Eugène Delacroix.14 These paintings depict with considerable imagination the destruction of Babylon and Nineveh and the defeat of its kings, brought about by excess and decadence. The artists relied on Classical Greek histories or Biblical accounts to formulate the settings for ancient Babylon and Assyria and their infamous rulers, and their negative portrayals of the Mesopotamian cities and their tyrannical despots are in line with these accounts.15 After all, Babylon was ‘the mother of all whores, and of every obscenity on earth’, according to the Bible (Rev. 17.5), while the Assyrian city of Nineveh was ‘the bloody city, all full of lies and booty’ (Nah. 3.1).16 Mesopotamia did not fare much better among Classical historians. While admiring Assyria's political, military and architectural achievements, Greek and Roman historians still stressed its rulers’ brutality and decadence.17 Overall, the images within these paintings, as with many other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European works of art that portrayed the ancient Near East, comprised a strong moralizing tone, serving to illustrate the much-deserved, devastating endings brought about by greed, corruption and the tyrannical behaviour of ancient Oriental despots.

  Besides the highly embellished, exoticized images of the ancient East produced in romantic literature and art, travel reports of Westerners who had ventured into the remote parts of the Near East, including Mesopotamia, often contained historical accounts of the places through which they passed. Many travellers sought to learn about the ancient magnificence that had once existed in various places they visited, much as they had while travelling through the antique lands of Greece and Italy on the Grand Tour. When confronted with the reality of a ruined Babylonian or Assyrian site in Mesopotamia, however, few writers could bring themselves to say anything remotely pleasing about the ruins themselves or the landscapes in which they were located. The parched, sun-baked plains of Mesopotamia were a far cry from the lush, pastoral landscapes of Greece and Italy, and decaying brickwork hardly matched the beauty of Greece and Rome's ruined stonework.18 Austen Henry Layard, the English adventurer whose archaeological investigations in northern Mesopotamia led ultimately to the fantastic discovery of two of Assyria's grandest ancient capitals, Nimrud and Nineveh, expressed well the contrast between Classical and Mesopotamian ruins:

  The graceful column rising above the thick foliage of the myrtle, the ilex and the oleander; the gradines of the amphitheatre covering the gentle slope, and overlooking the dark blue waters of a lake-like bay; the richly carved cornice or capital half hidden by the luxuriant herbage; are replaced [in Mesopotamia] by the stern shapeless mound rising like a hill from the scorched plain, the fragments of pottery and the stupendous mass of brickwork occasionally laid bare by the winter rains.19

  There is no ‘visual delight’ in this Mesopotamian landscape. Layard goes on:

  The scene around is worthy of the ruin he is contemplating; desolation meets desolation; a feeling of awe succeeds to wonder; for there is nothing to relieve the mind, to lead to hope, or to tell of what has gone by.20

  To some, the current desolation of an ancient site served to underscore the long temporal distance between a city's once glorious past and its thoroughly decayed present. Further, this reality could be seen to affirm the just outcome of Mesopotamia's past wickedness. The bleak, indistinguishable masses of ruined brickwork testified well to the price that the people of Assyria and Babylonia had paid for their sins and greed, conveying in a sense the same moralizing subtext as the paintings of Martin and Delacroix. Finally, it didn't help that Mesopotamia's modern occupants didn't seem to be remotely aware of or interested in any of the histories of their country's venerable past. They were perceived as being completely ignorant of the past; only Western ingenuity and enterprise, possessed by individuals such as Layard, could reveal the grand palaces and monumental gates which had lain completely unknown beneath the feet of the local inhabitants for their entire lives.21 Any romanticism was to be found not so much in the ancient ruins themselves as in the picture of the enterprising Western archaeologist in Oriental garb, or the turban-wearing Arabs, who gazed in horror and fascination as human-headed bull colossi emerged from the rubble before their eyes.22

  It is worth comparing Bell's own histories of the East, especially of Mesopotamia, to the works of other Western artists and travel writers such as those just described. For one, Bell's works rarely carried moralizing undertones that were influenced, for example, by stories drawn from the Hebrew Bible, in which Mesopotamia's past civilizations paid the price for their decadence, as testified by their present ruined, desolate state. Gertrude's indifference to such moralistic attitudes is due to the fact that she, like most other of her Bell family members, with the exception of her brother Hugo, were ‘happily irreligious’ and not particularly predisposed to assessing their lives and actions in terms of righteous conduct.23 If Bell had an interest in the Bible, it was for its valuable information about the history of ancient Mesopotamia, not because it was a repository of divine treatises on good and evil behaviour. Bell pronounced few moral judgements on historical figures, such as the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, for example, despite the Bible's infamous portrayal of him as a tyrannical, ruthless despot. In Bell's own references to this king, Nebuchadnezzar is respected for his greatness as a prolific builder and conqueror, and he is grouped together with other such important figures who graced the history pages of Mesopotamia's past, such as Alexander the Great and Harun al-Rashid, irrespective of the moral character of their deeds.24

  We have outlined contemporary writers’ tendency to accentuate the striking contrast between Mesopotamia's glorious past and its present reality of desolation amid a degenerate, ignorant population. Even David Hogarth, a friend and mentor of Bell and fellow archaeologist, was known to have stated that the antiquities of the Near East ‘conspicuously exalt the past at the expense of the present’.25 In contrast, Bell was more often prone to discern remarkable similarities between past and present realities. The landscapes through which she travelled, with their haunting ruins, took hold of her senses and powers of imagination, this most amply demonstrated in her evocative descriptions, quoted above, of the Syrian ‘Dead City’ of el-Barah and the palace of Ctesiphon. Through her eyes, one can vividly access the past in these impressive remains. It is also significant that Bell often wrote of ancient places and peoples as if they were but links in a long, unbroken sequence through time. The traditional ways of doing things and ancient behaviour were still very much present in today's inhabitants, in Bell's view. This sense of continuity is nicely conveyed when she describes the bitumen-producing town of Hit on the Euphrates, through which she passed in mid-March 1909:

  The sun was setting as we came down to the palm-groves by the river. The fires under the troughs of molten bitumen sent up their black smoke columns between the trees; half-naked Arabs fed the flames with the same bitumen, and the Euphrates bore along the product of their labours as it had done for the Babylonians before them. So it
must have looked, this strange factory under the palm-trees, for the last 5,000 years, and all the generations of Hît have not altered by a shade the processes taught them by their first forefathers.26

  While this melding together of past and present produced a thrilling sensation, it also elicited within Bell a kind of uneasiness. On the one hand, she could feel the excitement of being in a place so evocative of the past that it was easy to imagine ancient Babylonians engaged in the same task as Arab workers today, or perhaps even to envision Alexander the Great and his soldiers striding forward across a dusty plain. On the other hand, the unchanging quality of the landscape and its inhabitants over millennia accentuated to her the transitory, futile endeavours of humankind. What significance can be attached to any past action or achievement if, even after centuries, nothing has changed? Bell seems to have been particularly conscious of this paradox when she composed Amurath to Amurath, the account of her 1909 journey through Mesopotamia. Even the title, which references the succession of the Ottoman rulers of the same name,27 not only conveys the fact that the history of the land through which she was travelling was once governed by Turkish rulers of great power, but also draws attention to the fleeting nature of their power: they were merely a succession of kings of the same name, one after the other, through time. This image is similarly evoked in the book's preface:

  [those with] experience of the East, have learnt to reckon with the unbroken continuity of its history. Conqueror follows upon the heels of conqueror, nations are overthrown and cities topple down into the dust, but the conditions of existence are unaltered and irresistibly they fashion the new age in the likeness of the old. […] past and present are woven so closely together, the habitual appreciation of the divisions of time slips insensibly away. Yesterday's raid and an expedition of Shalmaneser fall into the same plane; and indeed what essential difference lies between them?28

  This emphasis on the futility of human achievements is a recurring trope in Bell's writings and occasionally injects a pessimistic flavour into her otherwise lively imaginings of antiquity. It also hints at her somewhat conflicted attitude, believing on the one hand that humanity was capable of positive change, while at the same time doubting that this was really possible. While Bell appears to be referencing the Middle East in this specific case, other writings suggest that she often found the West equally incapable of enlightened, ‘progressive’ behaviour, thus highlighting her pessimistic outlook on life in general.

  Nowhere is Bell's writing more evocative of the past than when she writes of an ancient site that she herself spent time recording, or which had been excavated by others but presented ample traces of its rich past for her to view. As we have seen, Bell was particularly caught up by the romance of the desert castle of Ukhaidir, whose architecture she had planned and recorded with tremendous effort in 1909 and 1911. Its monumentality and impressive preservation made it easy to imagine what it would have looked like in its original state. The castle's present Arab occupants also served to re-animate its lofty spaces, according to Bell. Some of her most stirring writing in Amurath to Amurath describes Ukhaidir's residents as the inheritors of the castle's greatness: They ‘lived and starved and died in this most splendid memorial of their own civilization’; they ‘passed like ghosts along the passages, they trailed their white robes down the stairways’ and at night ‘gathered round the hearth in the great hall where their forefathers had beguiled the hours with tale and song in the same rolling tongue of the Nejd’. To Bell, their songs of past powerful princes were ‘all pages out of the same chronicle, the undated chronicle of the nomad’.29 Far from being a distant cry from the past noble residents of this palace, the present Arab occupants were Ukhaidir's true descendants and rightful inheritors, belonging to one and the same race as its first owners. Such an effect rendered Bell's readers closer to rather than further away from Ukhaidir's magnificent past.

  No less evocative of a rich past to Bell were the sites of Babylon and Assur, where contemporary German excavators had revealed traces of their monumental edifices and occupants, transporting her vividly back into their ancient days. When Bell writes of these cities, her descriptions are replete with colourful visions of their past and how they are entwined with her present reality. She hears the nightingale singing at Babylon and muses that the same sound would have been heard by Nebuchadnezzar and even Hammurabi.30 While gazing at the excavated brickwork of the city before her, she is fascinated to be able to locate the places where soldiers slept and where Alexander lay dying.31 At Assur, Bell is at her most lyrical when she imagines, as we have already noted, the ‘lavish cruel past’ rushing in on her, with Assyrian soldiers marching through the gates, bound captives crowding the streets, and defeated princes and subject races bowing to the victorious king and piling up their tribute before him. ‘Splendour and misery, triumph and despair, lifted their head out of the dust.’32

  The fact that Bell was visiting Babylon and Assur just at the time when the massive brickwork of their ancient buildings was being freshly uncovered no doubt heightened the sensation of being transported back to the time of their original use. Further, one should not ignore the effect which the excavators themselves had on Bell's sensibilities. Physically present at Babylon and Assur during her visits, and taking the time to show her around their diggings, Robert Koldewey and Walter Andrae possessed tremendous knowledge about every aspect of the ancient cities, and they appeared to have willingly conveyed many of these details to Bell. Besides their superlative historical knowledge, their talent for evocatively summoning the cities’ pasts and great kings appealed tremendously to Bell's romantic proclivities. Bell records Koldewey as having said of Alexander the Great, who died at Babylon, ‘the perpetual drunkenness, the blood he spilt – he was mad with wine, love and power. And must he not be mad who conquers the world? There is no other way.’33 The fact that Bell found this passage appealing is indicated by its repetition in more than one of her writings.34 She was no doubt thrilled by its haunting quality, but we suspect that its appeal also related to Koldewey's beguiling narrative manner. One gets a similar sense of Bell's sensibilities being enlivened when she was in the presence of Walter Andrae, the excavator of Assur. Bell relates that she sat with her German host on the dig-house roof one evening and took in the form of the mighty, ancient ziggurat of Assur towering above them. When she asked Andrae what people would have watched for from the ziggurat's summit, he responded, ‘They watched the moon, as we do. Who knows? They watched for the god.’35 This pronouncement left Bell, as she remarks, most unwilling to depart from the site. The passage serves again to underline the thrill she felt when confronted with Mesopotamia's vivid past. At the same time, it hints at another layer of her romantic sensibilities, kindled through the act of sharing this remarkable past with an intelligent German man whom she deeply admired.

  Eastern Outlook

  Beside her romantic sensibilities, particularly in her encounters with the richness of Mesopotamian antiquity, it is also important to consider the importance that Bell placed on her acquired knowledge of Mesopotamia's past – achieved through her intensive travels in that country and study of its ancient remains – and the fact that much of her knowledge pertained to periods of time other than Classical Antiquity. Through her relationships with Koldewey and Andrae, for example, she had become familiar with the archaeology of the famous pre-Hellenistic cities of Babylon and Assur. Her own investigations of Sasanian and Early Islamic edifices such as Ukhaidir, Ctesiphon and Samarra had made her an expert on the periods post-dating the Classical Age. The art and architecture of these sites was all largely the product of indigenous development, born of traditions that ultimately sprang from the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Bell's scholarship, therefore, was largely acquired through the perspective of Mesopotamia's own history and culture. The fact that she had closely followed the scholarship of Josep Strzygowski from an early stage in her academic research may also have been responsible for this distinct
ive Eastern viewpoint. Like him, she had learned to appreciate the creative power of the Near East in its own right and sought to trace many of its traditions back to Mesopotamian origins rather than emphasizing the pervasive influence of Greece and Rome.

  Given her Eastern knowledge and perspectives, Bell was fairly unique among experts of Near Eastern antiquity in her time, the majority of whom came to know the Near East principally through their studies of Greek and Roman culture. A case in point was Bell's colleague David Hogarth, who over the course of his academic career became well acquainted with the archaeology and history of the ancient Near East. But he was initially drawn to this part of the world through his familiarity with ancient Greece and Rome, and the positive, powerful impact these Western civilizations had made upon the Near East through either conquest or cultural influence.36 It is interesting to consider the possible effect this Classical, Western perspective had on Hogarth's subsequent involvement in the political affairs of the Near East. It might explain in part, for example, his consistent denigration of the modern populations of the East – they were hostile, unappreciative and culturally degenerate – compared to the people of the West.37 Hogarth portrayed the East's modern inhabitants as childlike or adolescent in character, their sole hope for future survival being the motherly assistance of Britannia and the peace and good government that only she could provide. Hogarth even compared Britain to the ancient Romans, claiming the present British Empire was moving in the same direction in its efforts to ‘incorporate’ and ‘assimilate’ various disparate regions and populations under its sway, and in the process bring stability, justice and a sense of political and cultural unity.38 The strong Orientalist tone in Hogarth's writings, with its subtext of Western imperialist motives and its desire to control the East, has been pointed out by post-colonial critics such as Edward Said.39 Bell may occasionally be charged with the same underlying sentiments, noted, for example, in her unrestrained commendation of ‘Pax Britannica’ in her ‘Romance’ manuscript, quoted above. It seems that she could not always escape in her mind from the fact that she too was an agent of a colonial power. At the same time, however, her greater familiarity with the people and lands of the East, especially Mesopotamia, on their own terms, and her expert knowledge of their indigenous cultural heritage, frequently tempered these patronizing attitudes, revealing themselves in her writings far less frequently than those of her colleague Hogarth.