118. Bell, ‘Vaulting system’, p. 79; Creswell's own discussion of this example from Jerash, within the baths, concludes on the current evidence presented to him that these buildings are actually no later than the first half of the third century CE and are among the earliest examples of pendentives set on a square base in the entire Near East. See Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture, vol. 1, p. 46 and fig. 520.
119. Bell, ‘Vaulting system’, p. 79.
120. Ibid.
121. Ramsay and Bell, Thousand and One Churches, pp. 438, 442; Bell, ‘Vaulting system’, p. 79. Bell's photographs of Anatolian churches from Binbirkilise (Church no. 9) and Mahaletch highlight particularly well the setting of the dome in this manner. See Ramsay and Bell, Thousand and One Churches, Figs 42 and 205.
122. Bell, ‘Vaulting system’, p. 79. See Michell, Architecture, p. 141 for a useful illustration of the squinches used in Sasanian architecture.
123. Bell, Palace and Mosque, p. 73. Bell was following the widespread belief in the early twentieth century that the palace at Sarvistan dated to the fifth century CE. L. Bier challenged this assertion in the 1980s, proposing instead an eighth- or ninth-century Early Islamic date for the palace. See L. Bier, Sarvistan: A Study in Early Iranian Architecture (London, 1986), pp. 1–2 (for history of the research of the site) and pp. 23–52 (for his proposed date of the site).
124. Bell, Palace and Mosque, pp. 50–3, 73.
125. Bell, ‘Vaulting system’, p. 79.
126. Bell, Amurath, fig. 99; Bell, Palace and Mosque, pl. 25, fig. 2; Reuther, Ocheïdir, Abb. 27 shows the same feature.
127. These are Creswell's circular coffers, Early Muslim Architecture, vol. 2, p. 76; Bell, Palace and Mosque, p. 18; Reuther, Ocheïdir, Taf. XV, left side.
128. Bell, Palace and Mosque, p. 73.
129. Bell, ‘Vaulting system’, pp. 77, 79; Palace and Mosque, p. 73.
130. The discovery of a true dome with pendentives at the Umayyad hunting lodge of Qasr ‘Amra in present-day Jordan, a structure universally regarded today as pre-dating Ukhaidir, makes the second factor – Ukhaidir's distance from the architectural development of the pendentive – a likely reason for its more primitive dome settings.
131. Herzfeld, ‘Genesis’, pp. 32, 34, 51, 59, 63, 121–2, 130–1; Hillenbrand, ‘Islamic art’, p. 64.
132. Bell, ‘Vaulting system’, p. 73 and fig. 7.
133. Bell, Palace and Mosque, pp. 22–3; 30–1; but Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture, vol. 2, p. 62, in referring to the two sets of tube-like galleries on either side of the Great Hall (no. 7), notes that these were intended to be closed and inaccessible.
134. Bell, ‘Vaulting system’, pp. 73–4.
135. W. Andrae, Hatra. Teil 2: nach aufnahmen von mitgliedern der Assur-expedition der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft (Leipzig, 1912), fig. 37, sections e–f and fig. 152. Creswell makes reference to the same Hatra tombs in his discussion of Ukhaidir's masonry tubes. See Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture, vol. 2, fn. 5 on p. 89, and fig. 77 on p. 90, the latter a copy of Andrae's drawing fig. 152, first cited by Bell. Creswell also repeats Bell's reference to an apparent masonry tube found at the Sasanian site of Firuzabad, between the barrel vaults of the side chambers of the entrance iwan and the domed chamber (Bell, Palace and Mosque, p. 143, who is herself citing Marcel Dieulafoy, L'Art antique de la Perse. Partie 4: Les monuments voûtés de l'époque achéménide [Paris, 1885], pl. 9), although he is doubtful of this example since the visible tube appears above the crown of the vault and may be part of a vaulted ramp. See Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture, vol. 2, pp. 89–90.
136. Bell, ‘Vaulting system’, p. 74; Amurath, fig. 133; Palace and Mosque, p. 143 and n. 7.
137. Bell, Palace and Mosque, pp. 143–4; pl. 89, Figs 1–2.
138. Bell, ‘Vaulting system’, p. 77.
139. Herzfeld, ‘Genesis’, p. 126.
140. Ibid., p. 126, n. 81.
141. Bell, Amurath, p. 152.
142. Ibid., pp. 156–8.
143. Bell, Palace and Mosque, p. 16, n. 2. Viollet was on his way to Mesopotamia to continue investigations at the site of Samarra, which he had initiated in 1908. Much of Viollet's excavations in the summer of 1910, which were carried out together with the archaeologist André Godard, were concentrated in the area of the Dar al-Khilafa at Samarra. Herzfeld, who would work at Samarra the following year, was very critical of Viollet's findings at Samarra and the fact that he had conducted his work without the official sanction of the Ottoman government in Constantinople. See Thomas Leisten, Excavation of Samarra. Volume I: Architecture. Final Report of the First Campaign 1910–1912 (Mainz am Rhein, 2003), pp. 4, 10–11, 24. Bell does not appear to have been particularly impressed with Viollet's archaeological abilities either, as we learn from one of her diary entries: ‘He [Viollet] said that he had planned all those interesting monasteries in the Tur Abdin, but he had never heard of Khakh!’ (GB diary, 4 January 1911, Gertrude Bell Archive).
144. GB letter to her mother, 5 January 1911, Gertrude Bell Archive. Bell would not have learned about Viollet's finding until January 1911. By this time, her manuscript Amurath to Amurath – which expressed her continuing ambivalence about Ukhaidir's date – had already been submitted for publication. This explains why the mihrab discovery was not reported in that book.
145. Ramsay and Bell, Thousand and One Churches, p. 540, n. 1.
146. Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture, vol. 2, pp. 94–8.
147. Bell, Palace and Mosque, p. 168; Michell, Architecture, p. 33.
148. Bell, Palace and Mosque, p. 161 and fig. 35.
149. Ibid., p. 161. Bell had known Enno Littmann, a leading German scholar in Near Eastern languages and Semitic philology, for a long time, having first met him in Jerusalem in 1900 (see GB diary, 1 February 1900, Gertrude Bell Archive) and then seeing him again in her travels through Syria when he was working with the Princeton Expedition to Syria (GB letter to her mother, 3 March 1905, Gertrude Bell Archive). A professor of Arabic at Strasbourg, he had been living and lecturing (at the Cairo University) in Cairo in the winter of 1911, when Bell passed through en route to her second Mesopotamian journey, and he was a friend and colleague of Bernhard Moritz (see GB letter to her father, 13 January 1911, Gertrude Bell Archive).
150. Bell, Palace and Mosque, p. 165; E. Herzfeld, Erster vorläufiger Bericht über die Ausgrabungen von Samarra (Berlin, 1912), fig. 6.
151. Ibid., pp. 162, 168.
152. Ibid., p. 168.
153. Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture, vol. 2, p. 97.
154. Ibid., p. 98.
155. Ibid.
156. Ibid.
157. Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture, p. 144; Kennedy, Court, p. 137.
158. B. Finster and J. Schmidt, ‘Sasanidische und frühislamische Ruinen im Iraq, Tulul al Uhaidir, Erster vorläufiger Grabungsbericht’, Baghdader Mitteilungen 8 (1976), pp. 7–168.
159. W. Caskel, ‘Al-Uhaidir’, Der Islam 39 (1964), pp. 28–37.
160. B. Finster and J. Schmidt, ‘The origin of “desert castles”: Qasr Bani Muqatil, near Karbala, Iraq’, Antiquity 79 (2005), p. 347.
161. Caskel, ‘Al-Uhaidir,’ p. 37; Finster and Schmidt, ‘Sasanidische’, pp. 149–50; Finster and Schmidt, ‘Origin’, p. 347.
162. In his forward, Reuther (Ocheïdir, pp. 1–2) acknowledges Bell's study of Ukhaidir and thanks her for her photographs of the mosque's mihrab, which appear in Abbs. 22–3 of his publication. He also acknowledges her identification of the north-western sector of the palace as a mosque.
163. Herzfeld, ‘Genesis’, pp. 125–6.
164. The work was first published in 1940 (Oxford), revised for a second edition in 1969, and then reprinted in 1979. Creswell's discussion of Ukhaidir appears on pp. 50–100 of the reprinted 1979 edition.
165. Creswell's treatment of Ukhaidir is provided in Chapter 10 of the book (Harmondsworth, 1958). The work was revised and supplemented by James W. Allan in 1989 (Aldershot).
166. In parti
cular, see Creswell's inclusion of Reuther's sections, Early Muslim Architecture, vol. 2, Figs 36 and 60, and Reuther's beautiful reconstructions of Ukhaidir's main entrance, fig. 39, the Court of Honour, fig. 44, the central iwan on the south side of the Court of Honour, fig. 45, and the mosque's southern arcade, fig. 58. Reuther's detailed discussions of arch construction are also slavishly repeated, pp. 61–3.
167. Ibid., pp. 59, 96.
168. Ibid., pp. 62, 73, 89.
169. Ibid., pp. 74–6, 94–5.
170. Ibid., pp. 88–9, 96.
171. See, for example, Creswell's discussions of pendentives, ibid., vol. 1, chapter 14.
172. For recent studies of architectural space, several of which use computational analyses to understand issues related to experience and human interactions within a furnished space, and the effects of access, visibility and lighting, see David L.C. Clark, ‘Viewing the liturgy: a space syntax study of changing visibility and accessibility in the development of the Byzantine church in Jordan’, World Archaeology 39 (2007), pp. 84–104; Kevin Fisher, ‘Placing social interaction: An integrative approach to analyzing past built environments’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 28 (2009), pp. 439–57; C. Papadopoulos and G.P. Earle, ‘Formal three-dimensional computational analysis of archaeological spaces’, in E. Paliou, U. Lieberwirth and S. Polla (eds), Spatial Analysis and Social Spaces: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Interpretation of Historic and Prehistoric Built Environments (Berlin, 2014), pp. 135–65.
173. GB letter to her father, 15 April 1925, Gertrude Bell Archive.
174. GB letter to her father, 3 January 1921, Gertrude Bell Archive.
175. Bell, Palace and Mosque, p. xii.
Chapter 4 Encounters in the Heart of Mesopotamia
1. Gertrude L. Bell, Amurath to Amurath (London, 1911), p. 172.
2. GB letter to her family, 2 April 1909, Gertrude Bell Archive.
3. Bell visited Babylon 9–11 March 1911 and 30 March to 2 April 1914, Gertrude Bell Archive.
4. GB letter to her family, 2 April 1909, Gertrude Bell Archive; Bell, Amurath, p. 172.
5. GB letter to her father, 5 May 1917, Gertrude Bell Archive.
6. GB letter to her family, 11 March 1911.
7. Irving L. Finkel and Michael J. Seymour (eds), Babylon: Myth and Reality (London, 2008), p. 39.
8. Joachim Marzahn, ‘Robert Koldewey – Ein Lebensbild’, in Ralf-B. Wartke (ed.), Auf dem Weg nach Babylon. Robert Koldewey – Ein Archäologenleben (Mainz, 2008), pp. 13–16.
9. Brian Fagan, Return to Babylon: Travelers, Archaeologists, and Monuments in Mesopotamia, revised edition (Boulder, 2007), p. 245; Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, p. 42.
10. Fagan, Return to Babylon, p. 247.
11. Joachim Marzahn, The Ishtar Gate (Berlin, 1995), p. 7.
12. For dating architecture according to brick inscriptions, see, for example, Robert Koldewey, The Excavations at Babylon (London, 1914), pp. 75–82.
13. Fagan, Return to Babylon, pp. 247–9; Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, p. 42; Gernot Wilhelm, ‘1898–1917: Babylon – Stadt des Marduk und Zentrum des Kosmos’, in Wilhem (ed.), Zwischen Tigris und Nil. 100 Jahre Ausgrabungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft in Vorderasien und Ägypten (Mainz, 1998), p. 23.
14. Seton Lloyd, Foundations in the Dust: The Story of Mesopotamian Exploration, revised and enlarged edition (London, 1980), pp. 175–6.
15. Bell, Amurath, p. 171.
16. Koldewey, Excavations, pp. 25–30.
17. Bell, Amurath, p. 171.
18. Bell makes no note of the presence of glazed brick fragments on the Ishtar Gate in 1909 (she only observes this decoration in the Processional Way; see Bell, Amurath, p. 171 and GB diary 2 April 1909, Gertrude Bell Archive). Many pieces had already been collected and shipped back to Europe by this time. See Beate Salje, ‘Robert Koldewey und das Vorderasiatische Museum Berlin’, in Wartke, Auf dem Weg nach Babylon, pp. 129–30. The process of reconstructing the bricks of the Processional Way and Ishtar Gate started soon after they were excavated, but World War I delayed the arrival in Berlin of much of the structures’ fragmentary brick material, and not until 1930 were these magnificently reconstructed edifices revealed to the public. See Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, p. 57. For a full description of the desalinization process and reconstruction of the brickwork, see Marzahn, Ishtar Gate, pp. 14–16.
19. Bell, Amurath, p. 168.
20. GB diary, 2 April 1909, Gertrude Bell Archive; Koldewey, Excavations, p. 68.
21. GB diary, 2 April 1909, Gertrude Bell Archive; Koldewey, Excavations, pp. 137–8.
22. GB diary, 31 March 1914, Gertrude Bell Archive.
23. Koldewey, Excavations, pp. 95–100; Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, pp. 108–9.
24. Koldewey, Excavations, p. 91.
25. Wilhelm, ‘Stadt des Marduk,’ p. 26; Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, p. 112.
26. Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, p. 109; Stephanie Dalley, ‘Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens: Cuneiform and Classical sources reconciled’, Iraq 56 (1994), pp. 45–58.
27. Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, p. 54.
28. Ibid., p. 55.
29. GB diary, 31 March 1914, Gertrude Bell Archive.
30. Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, p. 129.
31. Ibid., p. 55.
32. Ibid., p. 128. Wetzel's investigations in 1913 ascertained that the tower at its base originally measured some 91 m on each side and had a great staircase that led up to the tower from the south, along with two side staircases. See Koldewey, Excavations, pp. 183–4; Wilhelm, ‘Stadt des Marduk,’ p. 27; Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, p. 129. The number of storeys possessed by the ziggurat has been the subject of considerable debate, but based on the examination of ancient textual descriptions, it is believed to have possessed seven stages (the seventh being the temple) and stood over 70 m high. See Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, p. 126.
33. Article 19 i, Antiquities Law, 1924 (Baghdad, 1924).
34. Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, p. 43; Magnus T. Bernhardsson, Reclaiming a Plundered Past: Archaeology and Nation Building in Modern Iraq (Austin, 2005), p. 138; E. Walter Andrae and R.M. Boehmer, Bilder eines Ausgräbers. Die Orientbilder von Walter Andrae 1898–1919/Sketches by an Excavator, second enlarged edition, English translation by Jane Moon (Berlin, 1992), pp. 141–3 and notes 65–8. Bell rightly realized that the Babylon finds could only be properly treated and preserved if they went to Berlin. See also 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. 176.
35. GB letter to her father, 18 January 1918, Gertrude Bell Archive.
36. E.J. Keall, ‘Parthians’, in E.M. Meyers (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East (New York, 1997), p. 249; Edward Dąbrowa, ‘The Arsacid Empire’, in Touraj Daryaee (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Iranian History (Oxford, 2012), p. 164.
37. Jens Kröger, ‘Ctesiphon’, Encyclopaedia Iranica VI/4 (1993), pp. 446–8; an updated version is available online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ctesiphon (accessed 29 July 2015).
38. E.J. Keall, ‘Ayvān-e Kesrā’, Encyclopaedia Iranica III/2 (1987), pp. 155–9; an updated version is available online at www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ayvan-e-kesra-palace-of-kosrow-at-ctesiphon (accessed 29 July 2015).
39. Kröger, ‘Ctesiphon.’
40. Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture (New York, 1994), p. 391.
41. Keall, ‘Ayvān.’
42. Ibid.
43. Oscar Reuther, ‘The German excavations at Ctesiphon’, Antiquity 3 (1929), p. 441; ‘Activities of the Institute of Archaeological Sciences and of the Centre for the Restoration of Monuments in Baghdad: Ctesiphon’, Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi di Torino Projects (Torino, 2006), available at www.centroscavitorino.it/en/progetti/iraq/istituti-ctesifonte.html (accessed 29 July 2015).
44. Ibid.; see also T. Madhloom, ‘Mada'in (Ctesiphon), 1970–71’, Sumer 27
(1971), pp. 129–46, in Arabic; T. Madhloom, ‘Al-Mada'in’, Sumer 31 (1975), pp. 165–70, in Arabic; T. Madhloom, ‘Restorations in al-Mada'in, 1975–1977’, Sumer 34 (1978), pp. 119–29, in Arabic.
45. Agence France-Presse, ‘Iraq to restore ancient Arch of Ctesiphon to woo back tourists’, The Raw Story (30 May 2013), available at www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/30/iraq-to-restore-ancient-arch-of-ctesiphon-to-woo-back-tourists (accessed 29 July 2015).
46. Bell, Amurath, p. 180.
47. Ibid., p. 153 and Fig. 109, which shows the vault at Ctesiphon. This small architectural detail, insignificant to most, became the source of antagonism between Bell and the German scholar Ernst Herzfeld, who had argued previously that such inwardly projecting vaulting systems did not exist before the Islamic period. Bell's own observation at Ctesiphon, confirmed by one of her photographs, clearly showed that this architectural feature could have existed in the earlier Sasanian period. For a full discussion, see Lisa Cooper, ‘Archaeology and acrimony: Gertrude Bell, Ernst Herzfeld and the study of pre-modern Mesopotamia’, Iraq 75 (2013), pp. 157–62.
48. See Bell, Palace and Mosque, pp. 130–6. Bell assumes that such features were simply an Oriental interpretation of the Hellenistic style already well known in the Near East long before the Byzantine Era, and observable in Parthian architecture of the second century CE at Mesopotamian sites such as Hatra; ibid., pp. 130, 136–7. This is an argument Herzfeld would himself later make in a critical review of Reuther, and it still finds some acceptance among scholars today. See E. Herzfeld, ‘Damascus: Studies in architecture: II’, Ars Islamica 10 (1943), pp. 60–1. See also Keall, ‘Ayvān’. Keall uses this argument to advocate for a third-century CE date for the construction of the Taq-i Kisra instead of the later sixth-century date accepted by Reuther and others. Whatever the case, this example demonstrates how Bell's own observations were often in line with other scholars’, both past and present.
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