Britain and the Arab Middle East

by Cooper, Lisa;

  In her capacity as honorary Director of Antiquities of Iraq, Bell took her job seriously, issuing excavation permits only to individuals and institutions she considered qualified and fiscally capable of carrying out the prodigious task of excavating an ancient site in Iraq.60 During her tenure, she also visited archaeological projects throughout the countryside and was present at sites for the division of the finds, which took place at the end of each field season. Wearing her official hat as Iraq's Director of Antiquities, Bell would select from among the excavated objects those that she felt were a representative sample of the site's archaeological remains, keeping them for Iraq's new national museum, while the remainder could be claimed by the excavation director. Her letters report in particular her visits to the ancient city of Ur, where, under the direction of the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley, a joint venture sponsored by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania was excavating some of the most exciting finds of the entire twentieth century in Iraq, including an incredibly rich ‘royal’ cemetery dating back to the Sumerian period of the third millennium BCE. Bell and Woolley spent many difficult hours negotiating over the division of Ur's extensive finds.61 At the excavations of the multi-period ancient site of Kish, Bell and the director of the joint mission of Oxford and the Chicago Field Museum often settled the division of the finds by spinning a coin.62

  Bell's second important activity relating to Iraq's antiquities concerned her creation of a museum in which to house the country's archaeological treasures. First established in 1923, this was a modest affair, consisting of a room in one of the government offices in Baghdad, but in 1926, it was transferred to its own building in the northern part of the city and was officially opened by the king in a special ceremony.63

  On the one hand, the new museum, which was a place to display the country's heritage to its people, testifies to Bell's efforts to link Iraq's glorious past with its present, hopeful future. On the other hand, the museum's emphasis on pre-Islamic artefacts and history – those of a most ancient past – rather than the country's more recent Islamic-period remains, falls short of its ability to inspire modern Iraqis, the majority of whom would have found the Islamic past particularly relevant and meaningful.64 This disregard for Islamic-period remains is all the more striking when we remember that Bell's own knowledge of ancient Iraq derived in large part from her archaeological research of the early Islamic periods, and that she was well aware of the political potency of that history. She had, after all, used this more recent history to empower King Faisal at Ctesiphon.

  Bell's attitude towards the establishment of a museum for Iraq does not appear to be particularly politically minded beyond her belief – shared by most British politicians charged with overseeing Iraq's creation – that Iraq should have a national museum like other advanced states in the modern world.65 Rather, for her the most important function of the new museum was one of practical necessity: a large quantity of antiquities was beginning to pile up as a result of archaeological excavations in the country, and the need for a place where these items could be housed was becoming increasingly urgent. In this way, in its earliest stages, the Iraq Museum was principally regarded as a safe repository for the country's ancient treasures and archaeological records and was not formulated as a display of ‘a metanarrative of the Iraqi nation’.66

  As for the pre-Islamic content of the new museum, this too was very much associated with the reality of the archaeological excavations that were taking place in Iraq. The excavations were invariably run by Western foreign missions whose principal interests tended to be ancient cultures of the very distant past. Much of their focus continued, like that of their nineteenth-century predecessors, to be on the peoples and cultures of ancient Mesopotamia which could be linked in some way to the Bible. Despite the increasing scientific interest in the history of ancient Mesopotamia for its own sake, the fact remained that Western audiences were still hugely enthused by antiquities that could be related to the stories of the Bible, and thus archaeological missions in Iraq still strove to satisfy those public interests. It is also important to remember that most successful archaeological investigations in Iraq were those financed by generous funding sources coming from the West, and that those funds usually supported the digging of ancient sites of the Biblical period. In the end, it is fair to submit that the new museum's lack of Islamic-period artefacts was simply the product of Western antiquarian interests and associated economics, and that Bell largely conceded to those interests in her position as the museum's director.

  If, in her capacities as museum director and Iraq's Director of Antiquities, Bell maintained an attitude of deference to Western excavators, this was also due to her tendency to bestow authority and ownership upon those with learning. She acknowledged that the directors of the foreign archaeological missions, by virtue of their intensive investigations, were important shareholders in the past, and that they ultimately should have a large say in the destiny of the artefacts they had so carefully extracted from the sites that they had brought to light. Bell's attitude explains especially her lenient behaviour at the divisions of the finds, where the directors of foreign archaeological missions received a generous share of the antiquities they so greatly prized, and were permitted to take them home to their sponsoring institutions. They rarely felt that their most precious discoveries had been grabbed by Bell for her Iraq museum.67 Having confidence in and respect for the excavators and their prodigious efforts to know the past, Bell rewarded their achievements accordingly.

  Bell's lenient attitude towards Iraq's antiquities garnered opposition from a number of Iraqi officials, particularly Sati’ al-Husri, a leading proponent of Iraqi nationalism. King Faisal had appointed this individual as Director General of Education; during his tenure, al-Husri had been active in promoting Arab and Islamic history within the Iraqi school curriculum, especially Iraq's role as the centre of the Abbasid Caliphate.68 Later, as Director of Antiquities in the 1930s, al-Husri would continue to strengthen recognition of Iraq's Islamic past, directing funds and energies towards the restoration of Islamic monuments, overseeing the writing and publication of several guidebooks pertaining to Arab monuments and antiquities, and sponsoring official archaeological excavations such as the site of al-Wasit, this having been a prominent Islamic city during the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties.69 Lastly, al-Husri was instrumental in the establishment in 1937 of the Museum of Arab Antiquities, which contained objects solely from Iraq's Islamic era, in a famous covered market in Baghdad, the Khan Murjan.70 With such noble aims to empower Iraq's modern inhabitants with their rich past, it is not surprising that al-Husri opposed Bell's proposed antiquities legislation, which still permitted the export of much of Iraq's precious cultural heritage. Indeed, according to Bernhardsson, who has tracked the progress of Bell's proposed antiquities legislation, it was largely due to al-Husri's opposition to the bill within the Iraqi cabinet that its passage took almost two years.71

  One might consider it puzzling that Bell did not show more support for al-Husri, given his noble aspirations, with the interests of Iraq guiding his objectives, as well as their shared knowledge of and interest in the Islamic period. Rather, she seemed to dislike him intensely, referring to him as a ‘dry, little stick of a man’.72 It is likely that some of this animosity toward al-Husri may also have come from the fact that he was one of Faisal's political appointments and not whom the British administration had recommended, and that his anti-British leanings made him an unfavourable individual with whom to collaborate. At the same time, Bell's own attitude of authority must be taken into account, along with the underlying understanding that policy was to be carried out principally on her terms. Given her own proprietary hold on the past, Bell may have believed that al-Husri was usurping what she considered to be her own particular area of expertise and felt threatened by his interference in what was largely being guided, in an official capacity, by her own special knowledge of Iraq's history. In the end, it was her version of
the country's past that held the greatest authority and authenticity in the new state of Iraq. As it transpired, as long as Bell was the Director of Antiquities in Iraq, al-Husri's impact over the museum and antiquities legislation was minimal. It was only after her death, when he assumed the position of Director of Antiquities himself, that his own particular vision and pedagogy with respect to Iraq's history took a prominent place in the country's cultural life.

  It is perhaps one of the most notable, and yet human, aspects of Bell's personality that she often found herself deeply conflicted with respect to her own actions and opinions. Thus, alongside her attitude of self-assurance and authority, she had at the same time serious doubts and uncertainties about her responsibilities. These qualms often found expression in her writings, especially in her letters to her parents. Of her role as antiquities director, Bell openly admitted that the task of dividing the archaeological finds at the end of each excavation season between the Iraq Museum and the foreign mission that dug was often ‘difficult’ or ‘agonizing’, given her competing roles of rewarding a foreign mission for their exertions and taking into consideration the requirements of building a representative national collection for Iraq.73 Moreover, as Bernhardsson has observed, as museum director she often showed uncharacteristic anxiety over how museum objects should be arranged and exhibited.74

  Nor in the sphere of politics did Bell show any more self-assurance or confidence in her actions. Indeed, Rory Stewart has observed that Bell is remarkable among her contemporaries for her propensity to admit in candidly honest terms, without dressing them in jargon and platitudes, the uncertainties of making policy in the new state of Iraq.75 She and her colleagues had to contend with a myriad of practically irresolvable complications, among them the corrupt and weak nature of the previous Ottoman administration, the persistence of the country's tribal system, the divisions between urban and rural areas, and the varied ethnic composition of its inhabitants. In this way, according to Stewart, Bell's strength lay not in her political success but ‘in the clarity and imagination with which she explored failure’.76 Bell's letters to her parents are replete with her conflicted attitude, many of these expressing her doubts about the success of the involvement of the West, particularly Britain, in Iraq:

  We're near to a complete collapse of society – the end of the Roman empire is a very close historical parallel. We've practically come to the collapse of society here and there's little on which you can depend for its reconstitution. The credit of European civilization is gone. Over and over again people have said to me that it has been a shock and a surprise to them to see Europe relapse into barbarism. I had no reply – what else can you call the war? How can we, who have managed our own affairs so badly, claim to teach others to manage theirs better? It may be that the world has now to sink back into dark ages of chaos, out of which it will evolve something, perhaps no better than what it had.77

  Fewer than two weeks earlier, she had written:

  All this adds to my general feeling of uncertainty as to the future. In the light of the events of the last 2 months there's no getting out of the conclusion that we have made an immense failure here. The system must have been far more at fault than anything that I or anyone else suspected. It will have to be fundamentally changed and what that may mean exactly I don't know. I suppose we have underestimated the fact that this country is really an inchoate mass of tribes which can't as yet be reduced to any system. The Turks didn't govern and we have tried to govern – and failed.78

  Despite her lifelong attachment to Iraq, both to its rich past and to its difficult birth as an independent state in the modern era, Bell ultimately remained doubtful about the real wisdom of the nation-building effort and her own part in it. Ever historically minded, she, above everyone else, was aware of the fleeting nature of power, and she was also conscious that her own encounter in this foreign land, as a Westerner and outsider, was to be brief and ultimately devoid of distinction. It is perhaps worthwhile to recall an excerpt from a letter Bell wrote to her father back in 1909, when she was sitting on a rise that commanded a wide view of the rolling hills stretching away from the Tigris River, below the great ancient city of Nimrud:

  I sat on the hill top for half an hour and considered the history of Asia that was spread out before me. Here Mithridates murdered the Greek generals, here Xenophon began his command, and just beyond the Zab the Greeks turned and defeated the archers of Mithridates, marching then on to Larissa, the mound of Nimrud, where Xenophon saw the great Assyrian city standing in ruins. Nimrud stood out among the cornfields at my feet. A little further east I could see the plain of Arbela where Alexander conquered Asia. We people of the west can always conquer, but we can never hold Asia – that seemed to me to be the legend written across the landscape.79

  In our presumed enlightened state today, we feel justified in criticizing Bell's emphasis in this passage – as in several of her other writings – of the West's dominant position as a conqueror of the East and the assumption of its moral superiority. At the same time, however, Bell's recognition of the futility of this action tempers its superior claim. More than 100 years later, when this very landscape within which Bell stood continues to be a raging battleground of clashing nations and ideologies, marked by ongoing and damaging interference from the outside, is anyone really justified in claiming higher enlightenment?

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1. GB letter to her mother, 30 November 1915, Gertrude Bell Archive. Janet Wallach, Desert Queen (New York, 1996), p. 146.

  2. Elizabeth Burgoyne, Gertrude Bell: From Her Personal Papers, 1914–1926 (London, 1961), pp. 30–1. Liora Lukitz, A Quest in the Middle East: Gertrude Bell and the Making of Modern Iraq (London, 2008), pp. 107–9.

  3. See especially Lukitz, A Quest; but also H.V.F. Winstone, Gertrude Bell (London, 1978); Wallach, Desert Queen; and Georgina Howell, Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations (New York, 2006). For a more critical perspective on Bell's part in the creation of Iraq, and the long-term consequences of Britain's involvement with Iraq in the 20th century, see Kwasi Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empires: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World (London, 2011), pp. 11–85.

  4. Gertrude L. Bell, Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir (Oxford, 1914), p. 1.

  5. Wallach, Desert Queen, p. 87.

  6. Howell, Queen of the Desert, p. 124. Wallach (Desert Queen, p. 364) notes that Bell's find of the palace had been ‘usurped and written about by French archaeologists before she had had a chance to publish her work’. This seems to confuse the efforts of the German team in 1910 with those of the Frenchman L. Massignon in 1908. See also Winstone, Gertrude Bell, p. 108.

  7. Julia M. Asher-Greve, ‘Gertrude L. Bell (1868–1926)’, in Getzel M. Cohen and Martha Sharp Joukowsky (eds), Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists (Ann Arbor, 2004), p. 143.

  8. Bell's dedication in Palace and Mosque reads, ‘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.’

  9. E.W. Andrae and R. M. Boehmer, Bilder eines Ausgräbers. Die Orientbilder von Walter Andrae 1898–1919/Sketches by an Excavator, 2nd enlarged edition, English translation by Jane Moon (Berlin, 1992), p. 140.

  10. Ibid., p. 140.

  11. GB letter, 2 April 1905, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  12. GB letter to her father, 15 April 1909, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  13. GB letter, 2 April 1909, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  14. GB letter to her father, 18 April 1918, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  15. Bruce Trigger provides an overview of the kinds of approaches prevalent in the early days of archaeological practice, including the concept of diffusionism and a typological method for ordering and dating artefacts (including architecture), which were largely employed by Bell and her contemporaries; see Bruce G. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge, 1989). For useful overviews of the prac
tice of archaeology in the latter part of the twentieth century and up to the present, and especially the kinds of analyses of artefacts undertaken, see Kevin Greene and Tom Moore, Archaeology: An Introduction, 5th edition (London, 2010); Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn, Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice (London, 1991).

  16. William M. Ramsay and Gertrude L. Bell, The Thousand and One Churches (London, 1909), reprint, with a new foreword by Robert G. Outsterhout and Mark P.C. Jackson (Philadelphia, 2008); Mark P.C. Jackson, ‘A critical examination of Gertrude Bell's contribution to archaeological research in central Asia Minor’, in Charles Tripp and Paul Collins (eds), Gertrude Bell and Iraq – A Life and Legacy Conference Publication (London, in press); Gertrude Bell and M. Mundell Mango, The Churches and Monasteries of the Tur ‘Abdin (London, 1982); M. Szymaszek, ‘The lost screens of the churches of Mar Cyriacus in Arnas and Mar ‘Azaziel in Kefr Zeh (Tur ‘Abdin, Turkey)’, Eastern Christian Art 9 (2012–13), pp. 107–18.

  17. Particularly notable is Bell's abandonment of her plans to produce archaeological reports of the sites of Raqqa and Samarra, both the subject of considerable investigation during her 1909 Mesopotamian journey (see Chapter 4). We can only guess that after the publication of F. Sarre's and E. Herzfeld's Archäologische Reise im Euphrat- und Tigris-Gebiet (Berlin, 1911–20) (which provided considerable coverage of Raqqa and Samarra), and then Herzfeld's subsequent, intensive fieldwork at Samarra, Bell realized that other scholars were producing learned reports of these sites that in many ways exceeded her own.