Chapter 1 Early Life and First Steps in Archaeology
1. Geoffrey Tweedale, ‘Bell, Sir (Isaac) Lowthian, first baronet (1816–1904)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), available at http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/view/article/30690 (accessed 29 July 2015).
2. Ibid.; Janet Wallach, Desert Queen (New York, 1996), p. 7.
3. Wallach, Desert Queen, p. 7.
4. Tweedale, ‘Bell’; Wallach, Desert Queen, p. 7.
5. 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. 145.
6. Tweedale, ‘Bell’.
7. Wallach, Desert Queen, p. 7; Asher-Greve, ‘Gertrude L. Bell’, p. 145.
8. Wallach, Desert Queen, p. 25; Asher-Greve, ‘Gertrude L. Bell’, p. 147.
9. Many aspects of Gertrude Bell's early travels can be reconstructed from her letters. Good accounts of her experiences abroad in Europe and Persia can also be found in H.V.F. Winstone, Gertrude Bell (London, 1978), pp. 22–31; Wallach, Desert Queen, pp. 26–37; Georgina Howell, Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations (New York, 2006), pp. 42–59. Elizabeth Burgoyne's lightly biographical work, Gertrude Bell: From Her Personal Papers 1889–1914 (London, 1958) also gives valuable background details to Bell's letters and other writings from the period of her early travels.
10. Bell's mountain-climbing escapades are described in Wallach, Desert Queen, pp. 58–65; Howell, Queen of the Desert, pp. 74–93.
11. Bell's diary entries and letters sent to family members provide a valuable source of information about these world tours. The second world tour is also documented through numerous photographs taken by Bell. See GB diaries and letters, December 1897–June 1898 and November 1902–July 1903; GB photographs, Albums RTW, vols 1–5, 1902–3, Gertrude Bell Archive.
12. Wallach, Desert Queen, p. 32; Asher-Greve, ‘Gertrude L. Bell’, p. 150.
13. Wallach, Desert Queen, pp. 32–7; Asher-Greve, ‘Gertrude L. Bell’, p. 151.
14. Lady (Florence) Bell (ed.), The Letters of Gertrude Bell, vol. 1 (London, 1927), p. 29.
15. Asher-Greve, ‘Gertrude L. Bell’, p. 151.
16. Numerous entries in Bell's letters and diaries attest to the energy she exerted learning Arabic. See GB letters and diaries, December 1899–March 1900, Gertrude Bell Archive.
17. See GB letters and diaries, March–June 1900 for the details of these journeys, as related by Bell herself, Gertrude Bell Archive.
18. Gertrude Bell, The Desert and the Sown (London, 1907), reprint, with a new introduction by Rosemary O'Brien (New York, 2001), p. 1.
19. Bell employed Mikhail, a native of Jerusalem who had formerly travelled with Mark Sykes, as her cook. See Bell, Desert and the Sown, p. 3. Towards the end of her trip, while in Cilicia in Anatolia, however, Bell picked up Fattuh, an Armenian from Aleppo, and he would continue to be her cook on all subsequent trips; see GB letter, 24 April 1905, Gertrude Bell Archive.
20. Anonymous, Review of Gertrude L. Bell, ‘The Desert and the Sown’, The Academy (2 March 1907), p. 210.
21. Anonymous, Review of Gertrude L. Bell, ‘The Desert and the Sown’, The Spectator (16 February 1907), p. 17.
22. Ibid., p. 17.
23. Bell, Desert and the Sown, pp. x, xiii and 228.
24. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), pp. 229–31; Bell, Desert and the Sown, pp. viii–ix; Andréa Elizabeth Schnell, Gertrude Bell: An Orientalist in Context (MA thesis, McGill University, 2008), pp. 32–40.
25. Bell, Desert and the Sown, p. xxi.
26. Schnell, Gertrude Bell, p. 37; Billie Melman, Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918 (London, 1992), p. 9.
27. Schnell, Gertrude Bell, p. 37; Melman, Women's Orients, pp. 308, 310 and 315.
28. Bell, Desert and the Sown, pp. 160–8; 198–209.
29. Ibid., p. 176.
30. Ibid., p. 235.
31. Ibid., p. 238.
32. Ibid., pp. 241–2.
33. Ibid., p. 256. The Princeton archaeological expedition that Bell encountered was directed by Howard Crosby Butler (1872–1922). First a student, then a faculty member of Princeton University, Butler undertook three archaeological expeditions to Syria: one in 1899, a second in 1904–5 (when Bell met up with him), and a third in 1909. He and his team travelled through northern and southern Syria, measuring, drawing and photographing buildings, inscriptions and sculpture. Most praiseworthy was Butler's exploration, mapping and photographs of the area of the Dead Cities in the Limestone Massif of Syria between the Orontes and Afrin Rivers. Agricultural life had flourished here during the Roman and Byzantine periods, reaching a peak in the fifth and sixth centuries CE. Literally hundreds of ‘Dead Cities’ occupy this region, their livelihood having been largely drawn from the production of olive oil, which was exported all over the Mediterranean world. Bell would have been familiar with Butler's work, Architecture and Other Arts (New York, 1903). For a short biography of Butler, see ‘Butler: Catalogue of Photographs’, Research Photographs of Princeton University (Princeton, 2015), available at www.princeton.edu/researchphotographs/archaeological-archives/butler/ (accessed 29 July 2015).
34. Bell, Safar Nameh: Persian Pictures (London, 1894), p. 31.
35. GB letter to her mother, 11 April 1899, Gertrude Bell Archive.
36. GB letter to her family, 6 December 1899, Gertrude Bell Archive.
37. GB letters to her mother, 28 February and 3 March 1902, Gertrude Bell Archive.
38. GB letters to her mother, 6, 7 and 8 March 1902, Gertrude Bell Archive.
39. GB letters to her mother, 17 and 19 March 1902. See also Asher-Greve, ‘Gertrude L. Bell’, pp. 164–5, and p. 191 endnotes 163 and 164. Asher-Greve notes rightly that Bell simply watched over these archaeological excavations as opposed to actually participating in them, as previous biographers had often assumed.
40. GB letter to her family, 29 March 1900, Gertrude Bell Archive.
41. GB letter to her family, 20 May 1900, Gertrude Bell Archive.
42. GB letter to her family, 22 May 1900, Gertrude Bell Archive.
43. Bell, Desert and the Sown, p. 167.
44. She learned this fact only after writing the chapter on this region for her book, The Desert and the Sown; see Bell, Desert and the Sown, p. 276 fn.
45. Ibid., p. 278.
46. Stephen L. Dyson, Eugénie Sellers Strong (London, 2004), pp. 59–60; Aron Rodrigue, ‘Totems, taboos, and Jews: Salomon Reinach and the politics of scholarship in fin-de-siècle France’, Jewish Social Studies 10 (2004), p. 5.
47. Dyson, Sellers Strong, p. 60; Rodrigue, ‘Totems’, p. 5.
48. Claude Schaeffer, ‘Salomon Reinach: Born 29 August 1859: Died 4 November, 1932’, Man 33 (1933), p. 51. A complete list of the works published by Reinach was itself published as a book; see Arthur E. Popham, Bibliographie de Salomon Reinach (Paris, 1936).
49. The date of Bell's first meeting with Reinach is inconsistent in the latter's writings. In his obituary of Bell, written in 1926, Reinach notes that through a letter of introduction from Eugénie Strong, Bell saw him in Paris towards the end of 1905, eager to show him her photos and drawings from her trip to the Levant and Anatolia; see S. Reinach, ‘Gertrude Bell’, Revue archéologique 24 (1926), p. 265. In Bell's own letters, however, it is evident that she became acquainted with him one year earlier, in November 1904, and it was at that time that he invited her to write her piece on Mshatta for the Revue archéologique. Nevertheless, Bell did also visit Reinach on at least two occasions in 1905, one briefly in January and another in October, after she had returned from her Near Eastern journey with plans and photographs. One can only suppose that Reinach had forgotten about that earlier meeting in 1904.
50. Dyson, Sellers Strong, p. 89.
51. Ibid., pp. 60, 99.
52. GB letters to her mother, 7, 8, 10 and 11 November 1904; 24 October 1905, Gert
rude Bell Archive.
53. Pascale Linant de Bellefonds, ‘Vogüé, (Charles-Jean-) Melchior de’, Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online (Oxford, 2007–15), available at www.oxfordartonline.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/subscriber/article/grove/art/T090069 (accessed 29 July 2015). In actuality, Bell tried to visit, but never managed to see, de Vogüé while in Paris with Reinach; he was away at the time. See GB letter to her mother, 8 November 1904, Gertrude Bell Archive. Nevertheless, she was familiar with his work and travels in the Hauran and the region of the Dead Cities of Syria, herself passing by the same sites in these areas in 1905 and making reference to his publications. See Bell, Desert and the Sown, pp. 76, 125, 131, 244 and 297.
54. Édouard Dhorme, ‘René Dussaud (1868–1958)’, Revue de l'histoire des religions 153 (1985), pp. 149–53. Bell was able to meet Dussaud, ‘the Syrian traveller’, during a visit to Reinach in Paris in October 1905, having a ‘most delightful hour's talk’. See GB letter to her mother, 24 October 1905, Gertrude Bell Archive. As with de Vogüé, Bell retraced some of the steps that Dussaud had taken in Syria, although she additionally hoped to explore places he had not yet visited. See, for example, GB letters to her family, 17 and 18 February 1905, Gertrude Bell Archive, in which she expressed interest in visiting a site since it had not yet been explored by a European, only to decide, after learning that Dussaud had in fact visited it, not to go there. Later, when reporting her desire to visit the Nejd, she urged herself to hurry, for Dussaud meant to go there too! See GB diary, 1 March 1905, Gertrude Bell Archive.
55. Schaeffer, ‘Salomon Reinach’, p. 51; see also GB letter to her mother, 8 November 1904, Gertrude Bell Archive: ‘He does nothing but work – never goes out, never takes a holiday except to go and see a far away museum. And the consequence is he knows everything.’
56. Reinach wrote these words about Bell to their mutual friend, Eugénie Strong; see Dyson, Sellers Strong, p. 89 (from the Girton College Archives: S. Reinach/ES 1905, note 53, p. 226).
57. GB letter to her mother, 10 November 1904, Gertrude Bell Archive.
58. Bruno Schulz and Josef Strzygowski, ‘Mschatta’, Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 25 (1904), pp. 205–373.
59. Gertrude L. Bell, Review of B. Schulz and J. Strzygowski, ‘Mschatta’, in Revue archéologique 5 (1905), pp. 431–2.
60. Gertrude L. Bell, Review of Karl Holzmann, ‘Binbirkilise: Archäologische Skizzen aus Anatolien. Ein Beitrag zur Kunstgeschichte des Christlichen Kirchenbaues’, in Revue archéologique 7 (1906), pp. 219–20; G.L. Bell, ‘Notes on a journey through Cilicia and Lycaonia’, Revue archéologique 7 (1906), pp. 1–29, 385–414; 8 (1906), pp. 7–36, 225–52, 390–401; 9 (1907), pp. 18–30.
61. Josef Strzygowski, Review of Gertrude L. Bell, ‘Notes on a journey through Cilicia and Lykaonia’ (in Revue archéologique 1906 and 1907), Byzantinische Zeitschrift 16 (1907), p. 381. This French passage was translated into English by Asher-Greve, ‘Gertrude L. Bell’, p. 167. See also Maciej Szymaszek, ‘Josef Strzygowski in the letters and diaries of Gertrude Lowthian Bell’, in P.O. Scholz and M.A. Dlugosz (eds), Von Biala nach Wien: Josef Strzygowski und die Kunstwissenschaften zum 150. Geburtstag von Josef Strzygowski (Vienna, 2015), pp. 104–5.
62. See endnote 60, above.
63. GB diary and letter to her family, 16 May 1905, Gertrude Bell Archive. 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), p. ix; for a biographical sketch of Ramsay, see pp. xi–xiv.
64. GB letter to her family, 28 May 1907, Gertrude Bell Archive; Ramsay and Bell, Thousand and One Churches, p. 9; 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).
65. Ramsay's contribution is essentially to be found in Parts I and IV of Thousand and One Churches, while Bell's constitutes Parts II and III.
66. Jackson, ‘A critical examination’.
67. Ramsay and Bell, Thousand and One Churches, pp. 13–15; Jackson, ‘A critical examination’.
68. Ramsay and Bell, Thousand and One Churches, pp. 298–302; Jackson, ‘A critical examination’.
69. Ibid.
70. Ramsay and Bell, Thousand and One Churches, p. x.
71. Robert G. Ousterhout, John Henry Haynes: A Photographer and Archaeologist in the Ottoman Empire 1881–1900 (Hawick, 2011).
72. Ramsay and Bell, Thousand and One Churches, p. x; John Winter Crowfoot, ‘I. Binbirkilise (Madenschehr)’, in J. Strzygowski, Kleinasien. Ein Neuland der Kunstgeschichte (Leipzig, 1903), p. 2; Jackson, ‘A critical examination’. Jackson mentions earlier explorers who observed the attrition of the standing remains.
Chapter 2 Euphrates Journey
1. Gertrude L. Bell, Amurath to Amurath (London, 1911), pp. 1–3.
2. Ross Burns, Monuments of Syria: An Historical Guide (London, 1992), p. 28.
3. David Gill, ‘Hogarth, David George (1862–1927)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), available at www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/view/article/33924 (accessed 29 July 2015); David Hogarth, Accidents of an Antiquary's Life (London, 1910), p. 6.
4. Hogarth, Accidents, pp. 7–11.
5. Gill, ‘Hogarth’.
6. David Hawkins, ‘Karkamiš’, Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie (Berlin, 1976–80), p. 434; Gill, ‘Hogarth’.
7. C.R.L. Fletcher, ‘David George Hogarth, President R.G.S. 1926–27’, The Geographical Journal 71 (1928), p. 333; Gill, ‘Hogarth’.
8. See especially Hogarth's travels in Cyprus, described in Devia Cypria: Notes of an Archaeological Journey in Cyprus in 1888 (London, 1889) and in A Wandering Scholar in the Levant (New York, 1896); see also Adam Hill, Stepping Stones in the Stream of Ignorance: D.G. Hogarth as Orientalist and Agent of Empire (MA thesis, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, 2008), pp. 32–46.
9. Hogarth's work The Nearer East (New York, 1902), for example, describes the topography, climate, environment, population groups, economies and lines of communication in the Balkans, the Near East and Egypt. See also David Hogarth, ‘Geographical conditions affecting populations in the east Mediterranean lands’, The Geographical Journal 27 (1906), pp. 465–77.
10. Hogarth, Accidents, p. 2; Hill, Stepping Stones, p. 31.
11. Hogarth, Accidents, p. 2.
12. Gill, ‘Hogarth’.
13. David George Hogarth, The Life of Charles M. Doughty (London, 1928). The work would be completed by Hogarth's son after his death. See also Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia (New York, 1990), p. 816, in which T.E. Lawrence's cancelled introduction for this work is discussed.
14. Fletcher, ‘David George Hogarth’, p. 330.
15. Bell's letters and diary entries, April 1896 and April 1899, Gertrude Bell Archive.
16. GB letter to her mother, 11 April 1899, Gertrude Bell Archive.
17. David Hogarth, ‘Problems in exploration: I. Western Asia’, The Geographical Journal 32 (1908), p. 556.
18. Bell, Amurath, p. 29, fn. 1; Gertrude L. Bell, ‘The east bank of the Euphrates from Tel Ahmar to Hit’, The Geographical Journal 36 (1910), p. 513.
19. GB letter to her mother, 8 October 1909, Gertrude Bell Archive; David Hogarth, ‘Carchemish and its neighbourhood’, University of Liverpool Annals of Archaeology and Anthropology 2 (1909), pp. 165–84 – see especially pl. 40: 1, 2 and 4, which are Bell's photographs, as are all of the images on pls. 41–42. In addition, four letters sent from Hogarth to Bell between 1902 and 1911 are housed in the Gertrude Bell Archive of Newcastle University, Miscellaneous Item 13. One (dated January 1911) provides details about the Tell Ahmar inscriptions, and Hogarth describes a lecture which he heard on imperialism, delivered by their mutual acquaintance, Lord Cromer.
20. See GB letter to her father,
2 March 1917, Gertrude Bell Archive, in which she says that after the war, she wants to cross the Arabian desert but will come home first to get a theodolite and other equipment.
21. See Bell's letters to her parents, 31 March, 1 April, 23 and 26 May 1900, Gertrude Bell Archive, in which she first expresses her interest in Ibn Rashid.
22. David Hogarth, ‘Obituary: Gertrude Lowthian Bell’, The Geographical Journal 68 (1926), p. 366.
23. Hogarth, ‘Problems’, pp. 556–7.
24. Ibid., pp. 562–3. See also Hogarth's obituary of Bell, ‘Gertrude Lowthian Bell’, p. 365. He reports that ‘for a good part of the long east-bank track from Rakka to Anah she [Bell] remains our only authority.’
25. One can also note that the choice of journal for her account of the leg of the journey that proceeded down the eastern bank of the Euphrates was The Geographical Journal, this having recently printed two of Hogarth's own reports, namely ‘Geographical conditions’ and ‘Problems’.
26. Bell, Amurath, p. 23, fn. 4; p. 24, fn. 3; pp. 54, 62, 76, 79, 113 and 200. Ammianus Marcellinus (330–95 CE) was a Latin historian who participated in Julian's campaign in Persia and provided an account of it in his history, Ammianus Marcellinus, Books 22–5. John F. Matthews, ‘Ammianus Marcellinus’, in Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (eds), The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd revised edition, online version (Oxford, 2005), available at www.oxfordreference.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/view/10.1093/acref/9780198606413.001.0001/acref-9780198606413-e-361?rskey=Oqh5jT&result=363 (accessed 29 July 2015).
27. Bell, Amurath, pp. 16, 18, 24, 73, 82 and 114. Xenophon (c. 430 BCE) was a Greek Athenian, celebrated for his part in the expedition of the Persian prince Cyrus against his brother Artaxerxes II, king of Persia, in 401 BCE. Xenophon's account is provided in the work Anabasis. Bell frequently mentions the route of the long march of Cyrus’ expeditionary forces, which included 10,000 Greek auxiliary troops, to the Battle of Cunaxa near Babylon, and the route of their retreat to the Black Sea. See Christopher J. Tuplin, ‘Xenophon’, in Hornblower and Spawforth, The Oxford Classical Dictionary.
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