Britain and the Arab Middle East

by Cooper, Lisa;

  165. Also reported and photographed by Olmstead. See his History of Assyria, Fig. 60, opposite p. 106. Several visitors in the early twentieth century saw these items prominently exposed. See Julian Reade, ‘The early exploration of Assyria’, in Ada Cohen and Steven E. Kangas (eds), Assyrian Reliefs from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II: A Cultural Biography (Hanover, 2010), pp. 104–5. The colossi were originally excavated by Layard and are pictured in a watercolour from his time, leaning towards one another. See Austen Henry Layard, Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (London, 1853), p. 337.

  166. Bell, Amurath, p. 228; Bell, ‘First capital’.

  167. Gadd, Stones, p. 229.

  168. Faraj Basmachi, Treasures of the Iraq Museum (Baghdad, 1975–6), p. 239, Item 17, and pl. 142.

  169. Reade, ‘Early exploration’, pp. 103–5. Reports on the performative deliberate destruction of the Northwest Palace at Nimrud by IS include Michael D. Danti, C. Ali, T. Paulette, A. Cuneo, K. Franklin, L-A Barnes Gordon and D. Elitzer, ‘ASOR Cultural Heritage Initiatives (CHI): Planning for safeguarding heritage sites in Syria and Iraq, weekly report 36 – April 13, 2015’, available at www.asor-syrianheritage.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ASOR_CHI_Weekly_Report_36r.pdf (accessed on 30 July 2015), and Michael Danti, Scott Branting, T. Paulette and A. Cuneo, ‘ASOR Cultural Heritage Initiatives: Report on the destruction of the Northwest Palace at Nimrud’, available at www.asor-syrianheritage.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ASOR_CHI_Nimrud_Report.pdf (accessed on 30 July 2015).

  170. Asher-Greve, ‘Gertrude L. Bell’, p. 168 and n. 192.

  171. Gertrude L. Bell, ‘The churches and monasteries of the Tur Abdin’, in van Berchem and Strzygowski, Amida, pp. 224–62.

  172. Gertrude L. Bell, ‘Churches and monasteries of the Tur ‘Abdin and neighbouring districts,’ Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Architektur 9 (1913), pp. 61–112.

  173. Most valuable is a monograph that includes both of Bell's academic publications on the Tur-Abdin, with an introduction, notes and report on the current state of the sites in the region by the Byzantinist M. Mundell Mango. See Gertrude L. Bell and M. Mundell Mango, The Churches and Monasteries of the Tur ‘Abdin (London, 1982).

  174. See Mango's report of, for example, the Church of Mar Cosmas, the Monastery of Mar Tahmazgerd and the Basilica at Mayafarqin, which are now completely gone: Bell and Mango, Churches and Monasteries, pp. 106–7 and 121–4.

  Chapter 5 Further Travels and Archaeological Research, 1910–14

  1. The full title of the work is Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir: A Study in Early Mohammadan Architecture (Oxford, 1914).

  2. The meaning of the title of Bell's book, Amurath to Amurath, may be evinced from the book's preface, which quotes a passage from Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2 (Act V, Scene 2): ‘Amurath an Amurath succeeds’; Gertrude L. Bell, Amurath to Amurath (London, 1911), p. viii. In Shakespeare, Amurath is a name for Murad I, a fourteenth-century sultan of the Ottoman Empire. With the use of the quote, Bell is emphasizing the unchangeable quality of the East from ancient times to the present day, in which ‘conqueror falls upon the heels of conqueror, nations are overthrown and cities topple down into dust, but the conditions of existence are unaltered’; ibid., pp. vii–viii.

  3. Bell was in correspondence with several scholars to whom reference is made in Amurath to Amurath. The Gertrude Bell Archive at Newcastle University, Miscellaneous, Item 13 includes many of those letters, including those from Ernst Herzfeld, Max van Berchem, Walter Andrae, David Hogarth, Enno Littmann, Marcel Dieulafoy, L.W. King and Flinders Petrie.

  4. Evelyn Baring, first Earl of Cromer, was the British Consul-General in Egypt until 1907. Lord Cromer first met Bell in December 1906, when she made a trip to Egypt with her father and brother Hugo. Dining at Lord Cromer's Nile-side British residence in Cairo on New Year's Eve, she found him ‘the nicest person in the world, without doubt’ (GB letter to her mother, 1 January 1907, Gertrude Bell Archive). After that, and upon Cromer's return to England, Bell continued to see him on many occasions, finding that she shared similar views to his on a variety of subjects; this included their ardent opposition to the women's suffrage movement. See Roger Owen, ‘Lord Cromer and Gertrude Bell’, History Today 54 (2004), p. 37; Liora Lukitz, A Quest in the Middle East: Gertrude Bell and the Making of Modern Iraq (London, 2008), pp. 46–7, 51. Interestingly, while Bell unreservedly admired Cromer, Cromer himself did not always think so highly of Bell. On more than one occasion, writing to colleagues such as Lord Curzon and Arthur Balfour, he remarked that although he believed Bell to be clever, her judgement (especially on the broader issues of Near Eastern politics) was not always to be trusted, and that she had ‘a tongue’; see Penelope Tuson, Playing the Game: The Story of Western Women in Arabia (London, 2003), pp. 137–8; Asher-Greve, ‘Gertrude L. Bell’, pp. 161–2.

  5. Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia, p. 35.

  6. Bell, Amurath, p. viii.

  7. Bell, Amurath, p. ix.

  8. Ellsworth Huntington, Review of Gertrude L. Bell, ‘Amurath to Amurath’, Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 44 (1912), p. 135.

  9. David G. Hogarth, ‘Gertrude Lowthian Bell’, p. 366; 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. 157.

  10. Gertrude L. Bell, ‘The east bank of the Euphrates from Tel Ahmar to Hit’, The Geographical Journal 36 (1910), pp. 513–37.

  11. Gertrude L. Bell, ‘The churches and monasteries of the Tur Abdin’, in Max van Berchem and Josef Stryzgowski, Amida. Matériaux pour l'épigraphie et l'histoire musulmanes du DiyarBekr par Max van Berchem. Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte des Mittelalters von Nordmesopotamien, Hellas und dem Abendlande von Josef Strzygowski (Heidelberg, 1910), pp. 224–62.

  12. Gertrude L. Bell, ‘The vaulting system of Ukhaidir’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 30 (1910), pp. 69–81.

  13. GB letter to her mother, 27 February 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  14. See above, n. 12. Bell's letters from August 1909 mention her drawing out the castle (GB letter to her mother, 17 August 1909, Gertrude Bell Archive); she then gave a lecture for the Hellenistic Society in November 1909, probably on the same topic as the journal article.

  15. Bell related that her father was ‘in his element’ with the archaeologists they met, asking them intelligent questions. Bell humorously observed that when he was around, they all seemed far more interesting. See GB letter to her mother, undated February 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  16. GB letter to her mother, undated February 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  17. Robert B. Todd (ed.), ‘Strong, Eugénie (née Sellers: 1860–1943)’, The Dictionary of British Classicists (Bristol, 2004), p. 930.

  18. Stephen L. Dyson, Eugénie Sellers Strong: Portrait of an Archaeologist (London, 2004), p. 76; Todd, ‘Strong’, p. 930.

  19. Dyson, Sellers Strong, pp. 65–7; Todd, ‘Strong’, p. 930.

  20. Dyson, Sellers Strong, pp. 111–94; Todd, ‘Strong’, pp. 930–1.

  21. Not only was Eugénie friends with Gertrude, but she also became well acquainted with Gertrude's father, Hugh, and her step-mother, Florence; Dyson, Sellers Strong, p. 88. Correspondence between Eugénie and Florence Bell can be traced back to January 1900 and continued at least until late 1926, shortly after Gertrude's death; ibid., pp. 44–5, and note 70 on p. 222; p. 136 and note 29 on p. 230. In the 1926 letter, Strong wondered whether the cooling of her friendship with Gertrude was possibly due to Strong's conversion to Catholicism, which Florence denied.

  22. Ibid., p. 84; GB letter to her mother, 22 February 1892, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  23. Several letters of Bell's refer to ‘Mr Strong’ whom she also called ‘my Pundit’. Strong was apparently quite impressed with Bell's proficiency in Arabic. See GB letters to her family, 13–14 February, 22–23 February, 1896, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  24. Bell mentions the Strongs in a letter to her
mother from London on 17 March 1899, and in another letter to her mother on 13 August 1902, Gertrude Bell Archive. The latter reports the following: ‘I lunched yesterday with the Strongs. You know I do rather love that little rat – if it were only for a very genuine regard that I believe he has for me. He wants me to write a book for him, in a series on art he is bringing out for George Duckworth.’

  25. Robert B. Todd (ed.), ‘Ashby, Thomas (1874–1931)’, The Dictionary of British Classicists (Bristol, 2004), pp. 29–30.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Dyson, Sellers Strong, pp. 111–27.

  29. GB letter to her mother, undated February 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  30. GB letter to her mother, 9 (?) March 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  31. GB letter to her mother, undated February 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  32. Ibid; Katherine A. Geffcken, ‘Esther van Deman and Gertrude Bell (1910)’, in K. Einaudi (ed.), Esther B. Van Deman: Images from the Archive of an American Archaeologist in Italy at the Turn of the Century (Rome, 1991), p. 25.

  33. GB letters to her parents, undated February 1910; 8, 9, 10 and 18 March 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  34. Katherine Welch, ‘Esther B. Van Deman (1862–1937)’, in Cohen and Joukowsky (eds), Breaking Ground, pp. 75–6.

  35. Esther B. Van Deman, The Atrium Vestae (Washington, 1909).

  36. Welch, ‘Van Deman’, p. 80; Esther Van Deman, ‘Methods for determining the date of Roman concrete monuments’, American Journal of Archaeology 16 (1912), pp. 230–51, 387–432.

  37. Welch, ‘Van Deman’, pp. 82–3.

  38. Ibid., p. 84. This field-intensive project required the pair to venture out into the countryside of Rome to trace the ruined aqueducts along hillsides and cliffs and through fields and valleys, and to distinguish the different aqueduct courses by their construction materials, quality of workmanship and mineral deposits. Two separate monographs on aqueducts appeared at the end of their collaboration: Esther Van Deman, The Building of the Roman Aqueducts (Washington, 1934); Thomas Ashby, The Aqueducts of Ancient Rome (Oxford, 1935). Both works were exceptional for their detailed plans, technical drawings and photographs. They are still considered valuable today, especially since much of the physical evidence for the aqueducts has since disappeared under the ever-expanding city of Rome; Welch ‘Van Deman’, p. 84.

  39. See Welch's note from one of Van Deman's letters: ‘I like Mrs. S. very much […] She is simple and sensible’; ibid., p. 98, and note 120 on p. 108, in a letter to Randolph, 2 April 1908 (Mt. Holyoke College Archives).

  40. Letter to Gertrude Bell from Van Deman, 15 July 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive; Gertrude Bell Archive at Newcastle University, Miscellaneous, Item 13.

  41. GB letter to her mother, undated February 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  42. GB letter to her mother, 10 March 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  43. Ibid.

  44. Geffcken, ‘Esther Van Deman’, p. 26.

  45. Letter from Esther Van Deman to Gertrude Bell, 1 May 1910. Gertrude Bell Archive at Newcastle University, Miscellaneous, Item 13.

  46. See especially Bell's careful description of the vaulting systems at Hatra: Palace and Mosque pp. 70–2; also her brick dimensions for Mudjdah and ‘Atshan, ibid., pp. 39, 41.

  47. Ibid., pp. 12–13, 15.

  48. Bell's 1911 photographs, which reveal details of brick and stone architectural features, are invaluable for demonstrating techniques of construction at Ukhaidir. Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University, Album P_143, P_150, P_167, P_169, P_195, P_201.

  49. Letter from Esther Van Deman to Gertrude Bell, 15 July 1910. Gertrude Bell Archive at Newcastle University, Miscellaneous, Item 13.

  50. Letter from Esther Van Deman to Gertrude Bell, 1 May 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive at Newcastle University, Miscellaneous, Item 13.

  51. Ibid.

  52. Letter from Esther Van Deman to Gertrude Bell, 15 July 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive at Newcastle University, Miscellaneous, Item 13.

  53. For a good biographical coverage of this scholar, see Heinrich Drerup, ‘Richard Delbrueck’, in Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassischen Archäologen deutscher Sprache (Mainz, 1988), pp. 188–9. Delbrück's later volumes on ivory consular diptychs (1929) and on ancient works carved in porphyry (1932) are still widely used and consulted. His work Hellenistiche Bauten in Latium (Strasbourg, 1907) is still quoted from time to time, but it has been overtaken by fresh discoveries that have not affected the other two topics in anything like the same degree; Roger Wilson, pers. comm. Even before her trip to Rome, Bell had been aware of the German archaeologist's expertise, having referenced Hellenistiche Bauten in Latium on the earliest use of the groined vault during the Republican period in Rome (in the Tabularium) in her article on Ukhaidir's vaults (which she submitted to The Journal of Hellenic Studies shortly before her trip to Rome, in either late 1909 or early 1910); Bell, ‘Vaulting system’, p. 75 footnote 7.

  54. GB letters to her family, undated February 1910; 27–8 February 1910; 9–10 and 27 March 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  55. GB letters to her mother, 29 March and 1 April 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  56. GB letter to her mother, 9 March 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  57. Dyson, Sellers Strong, p. 89, who writes: ‘In 1910 Gertrude spent a prolonged period of time with Eugénie in Rome, where she developed a serious romantic attachment to Richard Delbrück, the director of the German Archaeological Institute. Indeed her father thought that she might settle there. However, personal and professional interests drew Gertrude to the Near East.’

  58. See, for example, Palace and Mosque, p. 68 and notes 6 and 7; p. 69 and note 1; p. 70 and note 5; p. 73 and note 3; p. 123; p. 124 and notes 1, 5 and 7; p. 125 and notes 2–5; p. 136 and note 1; and p.166 and note 2.

  59. Hedwig Kenner, ‘Emil Reisch’, in Archäologenbildnisse, pp. 150–1. Bell first met Dvořák on 31 March on a trip to Šibenik with other German professors: ‘one was Professor Dvorjak, Strzygowski's colleague in Vienna and chief foe. I feel in hate with him at once – not on that account. He is young, fat and oily. I think him detestable’; GB letter to her family, 1 April 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive. She also lunched with Dvořák on 3 April in Split, as we know from another letter written on that day. Bell met Reisch on 2 April and went on a trip to Solin with him on 3 April; GB letter to her family, 3 April 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  60. Jürgen Borchhardt, ‘Georg(e) Niemann’, in Archäologenbildnisse, pp. 80–1. Bell met Niemann on 1 April 1910 and saw a ninth-century chapel at Diocletian's Gate in Split with him on 2 April; GB letters to her family, 1–2 April 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive. A letter from Bell to Esther Van Deman, written on the boat from Zara to Pola (5 April 1910), mentions meeting Niemann and knowing about his book on Diocletian's Palace, and the fact that she got from him whatever she could; Geffcken, ‘Esther Van Deman’, pp. 26–7. Bell also lunched with Niemann in Split on 3 April and journeyed with him and his daughter on 4 April to Zadar by boat up the coast, stopping to see Šibenik and Trogir; GB letters to her family, 4–5 April 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive. Bell was rather disparaging of Niemann in her letters, describing him as ‘a sort of little gnome but very polite. He has with him a yet more gnome-like daughter, unspeakably clad’ (GB letter to her family, 1 April, Gertrude Bell Archive), or in another letter ‘insect-like’ (GB letter to her mother, 2 April, Gertrude Bell Archive). She calls Niemann's son and daughter ‘curious little gnomes, looking as if they had never come out into any light except that of the midnight oil’ (GB letter to her family, 3 April 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive). Bell seemed to warm to Niemann on their trip up the coast, remarking that he became quite human when speaking about his diggings in Anatolia, and that she enjoyed his company; GB letter to her family, 5 April 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  61. Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University, Album E_153– 88 are all photos from the Dalmatian Coast.

  62. GB
letter to her family, 1 April 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  63. GB letter to her family, 5 April 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  64. Ibid.

  65. GB letter to Van Deman, 5 April 1910; Geffcken, ‘Esther Van Deman’, p. 27.

  66. GB letter to her mother, 29 March 1910, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  67. GB letter to her father, 13 January 1911, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  68. Ibid.

  69. 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), p. 140.

  70. GB diary entries and letters to her family, 17 January–9 Feburary 1911, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  71. GB diary, 3 March 1911; GB letter to her family, 3 March 1911, Gertrude Bell Archive. The site had also been visited by Louis Massignon in 1907; Massignon, Mission en Mesopotamie (Cairo, 1910), vol. 1, p. 21.

  72. Bell, Palace and Mosque, pp. 38–9.

  73. ‘Kirche A’ and ‘Kirche B’; see also Barbara Finster and Jürgen Schmidt, ‘Sasanidische und frühislamische Ruinen im Iraq’, Baghdader Mitteilungen 8 (1976), pp. 27–39.

  74. One can note especially her detail of a squinch in the back apse of ‘Kirche A’ – referred to in Bell's description as the ‘little castle’ – in which the archivolt had been decorated with a distinctive zigzag ornament in plaster, this repeating the same decoration at the base of the apse above. Overall, the ruined state of ‘Kirche A’ seems not to have altered significantly between Bell's visit in 1911 and Finster and Schmidt's later survey in 1973, although in the latter, one can note the complete absence of that plastered decoration of the squinch's archivolt due to the further crumbling of the very thin back wall of which it was a component. Compare Bell, Palace and Mosque, pl. 45 Fig. 2 (Gertrude Bell Archive, Album P_207) with Finster and Schmidt, ‘Sasanidische’, Taf. 18b. Finster and Schmidt's Taf. 15a is a general view of the back of the church, whose slightly more crumbled condition can be compared to Bell, Palace and Mosque, pl. 45, Fig. 1 (Gertrude Bell Archive, Album P_206). Bell notes that this crenellated plaster motif was observable on the archivolts above the doors at the ends of Corridors 5 and 6 at Ukhaidir; ibid., p. 38 n. 2.