28. Bell, Amurath, pp. 10, 22, 23. Strabo was a Greek geographer (64 BCE–c. 21 CE), responsible for producing two lengthy works, one entitled Geographica (in 17 books), which describes the physical geography of the chief countries of the Roman world, their historical and economic developments, and other features of their customs, animals and plants. Strabo's 16th book is dedicated to the geography of the land of the Near East. See Nicholas Purcell, ‘Strabo’, in Hornblower and Spawforth, The Oxford Classical Dictionary.
29. Bell, Amurath, p. 21. Lucian (115–80 CE), who was born in Syria and travelled in Asia, Greece, Italy and Gaul, is credited with writing De Dea Syria, which includes a description of parts of Syria. See Linda Dirven, ‘Author of “De Dea Syria” and his cultural heritage’, Numen 44 (1997), pp. 153–79; Kenneth Snipes, ‘Lucian’, in Alexander P. Kazhdan (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (Oxford, 1991); an updated version is available online at www.oxfordreference.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/view/10.1093/acref/9780195046526.001.0001/acref-9780195046526-e-3209?rskey=eMTOu3&result=3209 (accessed 29 July 2015).
30. Bell, Amurath, pp. 28, 38, 44 and 113–14. Ptolemy was a celebrated astronomer who lived in Alexandria in the second century CE. Besides his astronomical and mathematical endeavours, he also worked on geographical issues. His Geography contains tables of the positions of all the principal places in the world as then known. The work was provided with maps, some of which have survived. See Andrew D. Barker, ‘Ptolemy’, in Hornblower and Spawforth, The Oxford Classical Dictionary.
31. Bell, Amurath, pp. 23, 200; the Peutinger Table was a map created in the second century CE or earlier, representing the inhabited world from Spain and Britain in the west to India in the east. See Nicholas Purcell, ‘Peutinger Table’, in Hornblower and Spawforth, The Oxford Classical Dictionary.
32. Bell, Amurath, pp. 23, 28, fn. 1; the document is a written collection of roughly 225 routes along the road system of the Roman Empire. For each, the start and destination are provided, as well as the total distance and the relating distances between each of the main stopping points. See Nichols Purcell, ‘Itineraries’, in Hornblower and Spawforth, The Oxford Classical Dictionary.
33. Bell, Amurath, pp. 108–14; Isadore of Charax was a geographer who lived between the first century BCE and the first century CE. His best-known work, Parthian Stations, is an itinerary of the overland trade route from Antioch to India, specifically the caravan stations maintained by the Arsacid government as they existed around 26 BCE. See Rüdiger Schmitt, ‘Isidorus of Charax’, in Encyclopedia Iranica XIV/2 (2007), pp. 125–7; an updated version is available online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/isidorus-of-charax (accessed 29 July 2015).
34. Adam Silverstein, ‘Ibn Khurradadhbih’, in J.W. Meri (ed.), Medieval Islamic Civilisation: An Encyclopedia (London, 2006), pp. 359–61. Living in the ninth century CE during the time of the Abbasid Caliphate, he is known primarily for his geographical treatise on Muslim lands (Book of Routes and Kingdoms). The work includes itineraries of the caliphal road system, descriptions of overland and maritime routes, as well as information on the revenues collected from various regions of the caliphate. It also describes non-Muslim countries, including China, Byzantium and the region of the Indian Ocean.
35. For Istakhri, see Marina A. Tolmacheva, ‘Geography’, in J.W. Meri (ed.), Medieval Islamic Civilisation: An Encyclopedia (London, 2006), pp. 285–6. Living in the tenth century CE, Istakhri composed reference works pertaining to Islamic geography. Information was provided about various regions’ topography, administrative data, commercial and postal routes, descriptions of boundaries and information about the languages and peoples of these regions.
36. David Morray, ‘Ibn Jubayr, Abu'l-Husayn Muhammad B. Ahmad’, in Meri, Medieval Islamic Civilisation, pp. 358–9. Ibn Jubayr was an Andalusian traveller and author, born in 1145 CE, known for an account of his travels, entitled Rihla (Journey) through Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Egypt, and his pilgrimage to Mecca.
37. Claude Gilliot, ‘Yaqut’, in Meri, Medieval Islamic Civilisation, pp. 869–70 (the full article is pp. 284–8). Yaqut (al-Rumi al-Hamawi) was a twelfth-century slave by birth, who was purchased by a merchant of Hama in Syria and, who, over the course of his life, travelled to many places in the Middle East. He wrote several learned works, one being the Geographical Dictionary, which contains useful detailed geographical and historical information about place names in the Islamic world.
38. Daniella Talmon-Heller, ‘Abū l-Fidā’, al-Malik al-Mu'ayyad ‘Imād al-Dśn’, in G. Krämer, D. Matringe, J. Nawas and E. Rowson, The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three (Leiden, 2008), 2008/1: pp. 39–40. Abu'l-Fida was a Syrian Ayyubid prince of the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries CE, known for his learned treatises pertaining to the history of humankind and world geography.
39. The site of Thapsacus, for example, which figures in Xenophon and the Greek army's crossing of the Euphrates in 401 BCE, is now almost unanimously located at Zeugma above Birijek, not at Dibseh as reported by Bell (Amurath, pp. 18, 22, 24 and 47). Bell's location of Thapsacus at Dibseh is based on the suggestion provided by her friend Bernhard Moritz (ibid., p. 18). For recent scholarship regarding Thapsacus’ location at Zeugma and the possibility of there being a lower Thapsacus at Halebiyeh-Zalebiyeh as well, see Michal Gawlikowski, ‘Thapsacus and Zeugma: The crossing of the Euphrates in antiquity’, Iraq 58 (1996), pp. 123–33.
40. For example, frequent mention of the place-name Europus on the Euphrates River in the Classical accounts of Appian, Lucian, Ptolemy, Procopius and the Peutinger Table led Hogarth to conclude that this was the Greco-Roman name of Jerablus, the place of the ancient mound of Carchemish; Hogarth, ‘Carchemish and its neighbourhood’, pp. 167–9. Actually, if one must look for the original source of inspiration for Bell's investigations into matters of historical geography – and Hogarth's too, for that matter – one must turn to William Ramsay, the scholar with whom they were both familiar. As reported, Hogarth had accompanied Ramsay on his epigraphic travels through Anatolia in the 1880s, while Bell worked with Ramsay at Binbirkilise in Anatolia. Both would have become well acquainted with Ramsay's method for the study of ancient geography, amply presented in works such as his magisterial The Historical Geography of Asia Minor (London, 1890). The work took into consideration a myriad of ancient sources, both epigraphic and archaeological, from all periods of history, and combined them with his own careful observations of the topography of the lands through which he travelled. As a Classical scholar par excellence, Ramsay had an unparalleled command over ancient textual sources, but even he recognized the importance of actually seeing and moving over the landscapes being described in those ancient texts. ‘Topography is the foundation of history,’ Ramsay wrote. Hogarth – and Bell even more so – could hardly agree more, their own research being heavily informed by their physical presence in a given Near Eastern region, and their own journeys, either on foot or on horseback, through its varied landscapes.
41. Gill, ‘Hogarth’.
42. Hill, Stepping Stones, p. 9.
43. Wallach, Desert Queen, pp. 145–6.
44. Ibid., p. 16, quoting from T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (New York, 1991), p. 58.
45. Margaret Olin, ‘Art history and ideology: Alois Riegl and Josef Strzygowski’, in Penny S. Gold and Benjamin C. Sax (eds), Cultural Visions: Essays in the History of Culture (Amsterdam, 2000), pp. 162–3.
46. Suzanne Marchand, ‘The rhetoric of artifacts and the decline of classical humanism: The case of Josef Strzygowski’, History and Theory 33 (1994), p. 110.
47. Marchand, ‘Rhetoric of artifacts’, p. 121.
48. Talinn Grigor, ‘Orient oder Rom? Qajar “Aryan” architecture and Strzygowski's art history’, Art Bulletin 89 (2007), p. 564.
49. Marchand, ‘Rhetoric of artifacts’, p. 118; Jás Elsner, ‘The birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Stzygowski in 1901’, Art History 25 (2002), pp. 375–6.
50. Marchand, ‘Rhetoric of artifacts’,
pp. 109–11, 123.
51. Ibid., p. 116.
52. Ibid., p. 120.
53. Ibid., p. 126; Robert Hillenbrand, ‘Creswell and contemporary Central European scholarship’, Muqarnas 8 (1991), pp. 27–8.
54. Olin, ‘Art history and ideology’, pp. 164–5; Elsner, ‘Birth of Late Antiquity’, p. 372.
55. Olin, ‘Art history and ideology’, p. 167.
56. Elsner, ‘Birth of Late Antiquity’, p. 361.
57. GB letter to her mother, ? February 1896, Gertrude Bell Archive; 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), p. 101.
58. Bruno Schulz and Josef Strzygowski, ‘Mschatta’, Jahrbuch der Königlichen Preuszischen Kunstsammlungen 25 (1904), pp. 205–73.
59. Bell, Review of ‘Mschatta’, pp. 431–2; Szymaszek, ‘Josef Strzygowski’, pp. 102–4.
60. Marchand, ‘Rhetoric of artifacts’, pp. 124–5; Thomas Leisten, ‘Concerning the development of the hira-style revisited’, in Ann C. Gunther and Stefan R. Hauser (eds), Ernst Herzfeld and the development of Near Eastern studies, 1900–1950 (Leiden, 2005), p. 373.
61. See Chapter 4; Lisa Cooper, ‘Archaeology and acrimony: Gertrude Bell, Ernst Herzfeld and the study of pre-modern Mesopotamia’, Iraq 75 (2013), pp. 143–69.
62. Marchand, ‘Rhetoric of artifacts’, p. 119.
63. Ibid., p. 120.
64. Allan Marquand, ‘Strzygowski and his theory of early Christian art’, Harvard Theological Review 3 (1910), pp. 361–2.
65. Bell, ‘Notes on a journey’, p. 30 n. 19. GB's letter from 13 May 1905 indicates that she used Strzygowski's book as a reference guide to the architecture of the churches at Maden Shaher (Binbirkilise); 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), pp. xx and xxix; Szymaszek, ‘Josef Strzygowski’, p. 104.
66. Ramsay and Bell, Thousand and One Churches, pp. xx–xxi.
67. GB letter to her parents, 2 April 1909, Gertrude Bell Archive; Szymaszek, ‘Josef Strzygowski’, p. 108.
68. GB letter to her mother, 18 April 1909, Gertrude Bell Archive; Szymaszek, ‘Josef Strzygowski’, p. 108.
69. GB letter to her mother, 5 November 1904; GB letter to her father, 14 June 1907; GB letter to her father, 26 July 1907; GB letter to her mother, 7 July 1909; GB letter to her parents, 1 June 1911, Gertrude Bell Archive.
70. GB letter to her mother, 15 February 1909, Gertrude Bell Archive.
71. See, for example, GB photos J_121, K_023, K_053, K_218, L_052 and L_168, Gertrude Bell Archive.
72. Jim Crow, ‘Gertrude Bell – Fotografin und Archäologin’, in Charlotte Trümpler (ed.), Das Grosse Spiel. Archäologie und Politik zur Zeit des Kolonialismus (1860–1940) (Essen, 2008), p. 599.
73. Ibid., p. 605.
74. Ibid., p. 605; see GB photos K_232, K_239 and L_001 for panoramic views of Ctesiphon, and K_086–090 for panoramas of Ukhaidir, Gertrude Bell Archive.
75. Ibid., p. 605; see especially Bell's panoramas of Ukhaidir, K_088 and K_089, in which her shadow is particularly clear.
76. See, for example, GB's pace measurements of the ruins at Munbaqa, in field notebook GLB12, Royal Geographical Society (London).
77. See GB letter in October (date uncertain) 1913, Gertrude Bell Archive, where she relates her instructions for observing the stars and taking bearings for a map by someone from the Royal Geographical Society in London. See also GB letter to her mother, 3 November 1913, Gertrude Bell Archive. GB diary entries for 4 and 7 December 1913, Gertrude Bell Archive, report on work with the theodolite in Damascus. Her diaries and letters also contain numerous references to bearings taken over the course of her Arabian journey in 1913–4. Last, Bell's notebook for that trip, GLB 14, housed in the Royal Geographical Society in London, contains her written calculations for obtaining latitudes.
78. GB letter to her mother, 2 February 1909, Gertrude Bell Archive; GB diary entries for 16 and 17 February 1909, Gertrude Bell Archive, provide elevations above sea level. She refers to the instrument as her ‘aneroid’ or the ‘barometer’.
79. Bell makes references to Kiepert maps during her travels in Palestine in 1899, in western Syria and Anatolia in 1905, and in Anatolia again in 1907; GB diary entries for 21 and 26 March 1905 and for 17, 22 and 27 April 1905; GB letters 13 December 1899, 21 March 1905 and 3 May 1907, Gertrude Bell Archive.
80. Ute Schneider, ‘Die Kartierung der Ruinenlandschafter. Späte Würdigung’, in Trümpler, Das Grosse Spiel, pp. 46–7.
81. F.R. Chesney, The Expedition for the Survey of the Rivers Euphrates and Tigris, carried on by order of the British government, in the years 1835, 1836, and 1837; preceded by geographical and historical notices of the regions situated between the rivers Nile and Indus, 4 vols (London, 1850); W.F. Ainsworth, A Personal Narrative of the Euphrates Expedition, 2 vols (London, 1888).
82. Richard Kiepert, ‘Syrien und Mesopotamien zur Darstellung der Reise des Dr. Max Freiherrn von Oppenheim von Mittelmeere zu Persischen Golf, 1893, Westliches Blatt und Östliches Blatt’, in M. von Oppenheim, Von Mittelmeer zum Persischen Golf (Berlin, 1899–1900).
83. GB diary entries 27, 28 January 1909, and GB letter 29 January 1909, Gertrude Bell Archive.
84. See Bell's diary entries for 21 and 22 February 1909, Gertrude Bell Archive, in which she refers to ‘villages marked by Oppenheim’ and ‘Oppenheim's road’, together with descriptions of the tower tombs above Serrin that Oppenheim had recorded and the mosaic pavements at nearby Mas'udiyyeh. Bell also came to learn of Oppenheim's investigations at Tell Halaf at this time – she reports in her diary entry for 27 January 1909 that she purchased his publication of the site (Oppenheim's Der Tell Halaf und die verschleierte Göttin, Berlin, 1908). See also her reference to Oppenheim's 1899 trip across the Euphrates at Qalat en-Nejm and then on to Serrin, in Bell, ‘The east bank’, p. 515, fn. ‖. Bell's relationship with Max von Oppenheim, a fascinating and colourful German who figured prominently not only in Near Eastern archaeology but also in German–Ottoman politics before World War I, had its highs and lows. For more information on the life and activities of Max von Oppenheim, see Gabriele Teichmann, ‘Max Freiherr von Oppenheim – Archäologe, Diplomat, Freund des Orients’, in Trümpler, Das Grosse Spiel, pp. 239–49. She was first introduced to Oppenheim through her friend Moritz in 1907, when she was in Cairo with her father (GB letters 8 and 10 January 1907, Gertrude Bell Archive). As has been indicated, she had frequent exchanges with him in 1909, all of which were friendly and helpful. In 1911, when she made another trip into Mesopotamia and Anatolia, she had planned to meet up with Oppenheim while he was excavating at Tell Halaf, but failing to find him there would instead see him in Aleppo. Her letters provide a much harsher opinion of him at that point:
(On board the Niger) The next day was mostly occupied in winding up affairs, selling my horses and paying off my people. I went to tea with Mme Koch and presently there came in Oppenheim who was still in Aleppo preparing for his expedition to Ras al ‘Ain – where you remember I went expecting to find him already established. Oppenheim is really awful, the most shocking little vulgar Jew – blatant now, you might think he had taken all Mesopotamia into his wise keeping to hear him talk! He is much worse than he was in Egypt when he was well kept under. I prophecy that none of the architects and people he is taking out with him will stay with him – he is too dreadful. (GB letter to her mother, 29 May 1911, Gertrude Bell Archive)
Anti-Semitic remarks about Oppenheim were also made by David Hogarth and T.E. Lawrence, both of whom would have met Oppenheim in Syria before World War I. These are rather surprising given that Oppenheim never identified himself as a Jew. His mother was Christian and his father was only half Jewish. See Lionel Gossman, The Passion of Max von Oppenheim:
Archaeology and Intrigue in the Middle East from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 325, 330. Gossman suspects that Oppenheim's adversaries may have exploited anti-Semitic prejudice in order to present an even blacker picture of a fairly formidable foe. Oppenheim, after all, was not only an archaeologist before the war but a dangerous intelligence agent of the German Kaiser (ibid., p. 331); Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia (Toronto, 2014), pp. 37–9. It must be questioned, however, the degree to which individuals like Lawrence and Bell were fully aware of Oppenheim's political motives and activities as early as 1911.
85. Bell, Amurath, p. 3.
86. Ibid., pp. 3–10.
87. Burns, Monuments, p. 28.
88. Bell photograph J_085. Bell refers to the location of this stone as the Jami’ Elkikan, or mosque of ?i?ân; GB diary entry for 6 February 1909, Gertrude Bell Archive; Bell, Amurath, p. 11; Burns, Monuments, p. 38. The Hittite stone in question is a foundation document that records the building of the temple of the gods Hebat and Šarruma by the Hittite vice-regent Talmi-Šarruma around 1300 BCE; David Hawkins, Corpus of Luwian Inscriptions.Volume 1: Inscriptions of the Iron Age (Berlin, 2000), p. 388.
89. GB letter to her mother, 9 February 1909, Gertrude Bell Archive; Bell, Amurath, p. 11, Fig. 2.
90. This is Bell's Jâmi’ el Ḥelâwîyeh; Bell, Amurath, p. 11, Fig. 6; Burns, Monuments, p. 35.
91. This is Bell's Jâmi’ esh Shaibîyeh; Bell photos J_88–92, Gertrude Bell Archive; Bell, Amurath, p. 12. The mosque is also known as the Mosque al-Tuteh; see Burns, Monuments, p. 38.
92. This is Bell's Jamiet et Tawarki, GB diary, 10 February 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive. Bell photographs, Album J_075–080; J_076 is her photograph of the minaret. See also http://monummamluk-syrie.org/Fiches/Alep/HLB_mosquee_Tawashi_Jawhar.htm for recent images of the mosque, including the minaret before its destruction.
93. GB photo J_053, Gertrude Bell Archive.
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