Britain and the Arab Middle East

by Cooper, Lisa;

  215. Winter, ‘Art as evidence’, p. 363.

  216. Irene Winter, ‘“Seat of kingship” / “A wonder to behold”: The palace as construct in the ancient Near East’, Ars Orientalis 23 (1993), pp. 33–4.

  217. Ibid., pp. 38–9.

  218. Bell, Palace and Mosque, p. 97. Bell was particularly influenced by the investigations of Rudoph-Ernest Brünnow and Alfred von Domaszewski, who had carried out an extensive survey of Roman remains in 1897–8, publishing their findings in their monumental Die Provincia Arabia, 3 vols (Strassburg, 1904–9). Bell appears also to have been in personal correspondence with Brünnow, as she acknowledges him for having provided her with a plan of Dumeir, which she included in her book. Bell had visited Dumeir, a Roman fort on the road between Damascus and Palmyra in present-day Syria, in February 1911, on her way across the Syrian desert to Ukhaidir.

  219. Bell, Palace and Mosque, pp. 114–17. Part of her interest in this castle stemmed from the fact that it had been recently visited by her friend Bernhard Moritz, who had, in the few hours that he spent there, discovered an inscription that argued for its Umayyad date; ibid., p. 111; B. Moritz, ‘Ausflüge in der Arabia Petraea’, in Mélanges de la Faculté Orientale de Beyrouth 3 (1908), p. 429; see also Stephen Urice, Qasr Kharana in the Transjordan (Durham, NC, 1987) pp. 10–11. Bell was also familiar with the earlier reports published by Alois Musil, who had visited Qasr Kharana three times and was responsible for the first detailed ground-plans of the building, one of which Bell reproduced; see A. Musil, Kusejr ‘Amra (Wien, 1907); Bell, Palace and Mosque, p. 114, Fig. 29. From her own diaries and letters, we know that Bell visited Qasr Kharana on 3–6 January 1914. She carefully examined the castle, taking photographs, drawing plans, copying Kufic inscriptions and overall doing ‘much more at it than anyone else’; GB letter to her family, 5 January 1914, Gertrude Bell Archive. Regrettably, Bell never published any of her data on Qasr Kharana, although her extensive photographs, plans and notes make it clear that her original intent had been to do so. Bell's 1914 photographs of Qasr Kharana are available through the Newcastle photographic archives: Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University, Album X_009–010, Album Y_077–132. Her field book containing her notes, measurements and plans of Qasr Kharana from 1914 are housed at the Royal Geographic Society in London (GLB 15).

  220. Bell, Palace and Mosque, pp. 117–18. While in Bell's time Mshatta was thought to be attributable to the Umayyad caliph Yazid II, who died in 724 CE, its construction is now generally equated with al-Walid II, around 744 CE. Ibid., p. 117; Hillenbrand, ‘Islamic art’, p. 64. Oleg Grabar, ‘The date and meaning of Mshatta’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 41 (1987), pp. 243–7.

  221. Cooper, ‘Archaeology and acrimony’, p. 166.

  222. Philip J. Dear, ‘Ukhaidir and its lessons’, The British Architect (11 June 1915), p. 292.

  223. Ibid.

  224. Anonymous, Review of Gertrude L. Bell, ‘Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir. A Study in Early Mohammadan Architecture’, The Athenaeum (30 May 1914), p. 767.

  225. K.A.C. Creswell, Review of Gertrude L. Bell, ‘Palace and Mosque at Ukhadir. A Study in Early Mohammadan Architecture’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 26 (October 1914), p. 35; Dear, ‘Ukhaidir’, p. 292.

  226. ‘Review’, The Athenaeum, p. 768; see also A., Review of Gertrude L. Bell, ‘Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir. A Study in Early Mohammadan Architecture’, Journal of Roman Studies 4 (1914), pp. 113–14, which expresses similar praise.

  227. Marcel Dieulafoy, Review of Gertrude L. Bell, ‘Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir. A Study in Early Mohammadan Architecture’, Journal des savants 12 (September–November 1914), pp. 393–5, and 397.

  228. Ibid., p. 398.

  229. Hillenbrand, ‘Creswell’, p. 26.

  230. A., ‘Review’, pp. 113–14.

  231. Creswell, ‘Review’, pp. 35–6. The same review is repeated by Creswell in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1914), pp. 784–8.

  232. Hillenbrand, ‘Creswell’, p. 26.

  233. GB letter to her mother, 18 November 1913, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  234. Bell was awarded the medal in 1918 ‘for her important explorations and travels in Asia Minor, Syria, Arabia and on the Euphrates’. See http://www.rgs.org/NR/rdonlyres/C5962519-882A-4C67-803D-0037308C756D/0/GoldMedalrecipents.pdf (accessed 18 June 2015).

  235. Janet Wallach, Desert Queen (New York, 1996), p. 136.

  236. Ibid., pp. 142–3.

  Chapter 6 Mesopotamia and Iraq – Past and Present Entwined

  1. Bell's political activities are described at length in several biographies of her. See especially H.V.F. Winstone, Gertrude Bell (London, 1978); Janet Wallach, Desert Queen (New York, 1996); Georgina Howell, Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations (New York, 2006); Liora Lukitz, A Quest in the Middle East: Gertrude Bell and the Making of Modern Iraq (London, 2008). For Bell's participation in the 1919 Paris peace talks, see Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919 (New York, 2003), pp. 398–400. For Bell's part in war-time and post-war activities in Mesopotamia and the wider Middle East, see also Penelope Tuson, Playing the Game: The Story of Western Women in Arabia (London, 2003), chapters 4 and 5; Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country (London, 2007); Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford, 2008).

  2. 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. 177.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Quoted in Howell, Queen of the Desert, p. 139.

  5. Howell, Queen of the Desert, p. 139, reports that when reading Milton in her schooldays, Bell wanted ‘to stand on her head for joy’. Bell's most serious engagement with poetry came with her English translations of poems by the mystical Persian poet Hafiz, which she completed in 1897, not long after her travels to Persia. See Gertrude L. Bell, Poems from the Divan of Hafiz (London, 1897); Lukitz, A Quest, p. 26; Howell, Queen of the Desert, pp. 56–9.

  6. Wallach, Desert Queen, p. 48; Howell, Queen of the Desert, p. 121.

  7. Billie Melman, Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918 (London, 1992), pp. 206–7; B. Hodgson, Dreaming of the East: Western Women and the Exotic Allure of the Orient (Vancouver, 2005), p. 172.

  8. Gertrude L. Bell, The Desert and the Sown (London, 1907), reprint, with a new introduction by Rosemary O'Brien (New York, 2001), p. 1.

  9. Chapter Six, entitled ‘Romance’, of an unfinished manuscript by Bell. Robinson Library Special Collections, Newcastle University, Gertrude Bell Archive, Miscellaneous, Item 20. The excerpt also appears transcribed in Lukitz, A Quest, p. 242, and partially in Magnus T. Bernhardsson, Reclaiming a Plundered Past: Archaeology and Nation Building in Modern Iraq (Austin, 2005), p. 64.

  10. GB letter to her mother, 11 April 1899, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  11. Bell, Desert and the Sown, p. 249.

  12. Gertrude L. Bell, Amurath to Amurath (New York, 1911), p. 180.

  13. ‘Romantic orientalism: Overview’, The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Norton Topics Online (2010–15), available at www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_4 (accessed 29 July 2015).

  14. F.N. Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 49–55.

  15. Ibid., p. 49.

  16. Quoted by E. Frahm, ‘Images of Assyria in nineteenth- and twentieth-century western scholarship,’ in S. Holloway (ed.), Orientalism, Assyriology and the Bible (Sheffield, 2006), p. 74.

  17. Ibid., p. 77.

  18. Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture, p, 147.

  19. A.H. Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains (London, 1849), vol. 1, p. 6; quoted by Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture, p. 147.

  20. Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, pp. 6–7.

  21. Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Cultu
re, p. 149.

  22. Eckart Frahm, ‘Images of Assyria’, p. 81.

  23. Howell, Queen of the Desert, pp. 63–4.

  24. Such historical figures are referred to, for example, in Bell's chapter ‘Romance’.

  25. David G. Hogarth, Accidents of an Antiquary's Life (London, 1910), p. 1; quoted in Bernhardsson, Reclaiming, p. 95.

  26. Bell, Amurath, p. 108.

  27. As discussed in Chapter 5 above, in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Amurath is a name for Murad I, a fourteenth-century sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Many other sultans named Murad ruled after him.

  28. Bell, Amurath, pp. vii–viii.

  29. Bell, Amurath, pp. 144–5.

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

  31. Bell, ‘Romance’.

  32. Bell, Amurath, p. 226.

  33. Bell, ‘Romance’.

  34. Besides in her ‘Romance’ chapter, cited above, it also appears in her diary entry for 31 March 1914, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  35. Bell, Amurath, p. 226.

  36. 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. 10, 25, 44.

  37. Bernhardsson, Reclaiming, p. 94; Hill, Stepping Stones, pp. 44–5.

  38. Richard Hingley, Roman Officers and English Gentlemen: The Imperial Origins of Roman Archaeology (London, 2000), pp. 49–50; F. Haverfield, J.L. Strachan Davidson, E.R. Bevan, E.M. Walker, D.G. Hogarth and Lord Cromer, ‘Ancient imperialism’, The Classical Review 24 (1910), pp. 113–14.

  39. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979). Said makes particular reference to Hogarth as an agent of imperialism on pp. 197 and 223–4.

  40. See Chapter 4 above; 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. 139.

  41. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919 (New York, 2001), pp. 11–14.

  42. Ibid., pp. 399–400.

  43. Winstone, Gertrude Bell, pp. 214–5; Wallach, Desert Queen, pp. 230, 243–5; MacMillan, Paris 1919, p. 400; Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, p. 27.

  44. A.K. Bennison, The Great Caliphs: The Golden Age of the ‘Abbasid Empire (London, 2009), p. 5.

  45. Ibid.

  46. Ibid.

  47. Ibid.

  48. Howell, Queen of the Desert, p. 335.

  49. Lukitz, A Quest, p. 152.

  50. Ibid., quoting from G.L. Bell, ‘The fealty of the tribes, a chapter in the history of Iraq’, Robinson Library Special Collections, Newcastle University, Gertrude Bell Archive, Miscellaneous, Item 20. See also GB letter to her father, 31 July 1921, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  51. Lukitz, A Quest, p. 152.

  52. Bell, Amurath, pp. 181–3.

  53. GB letter to her father, 6 August 1921, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  54. GB letter to her father, 24 October 1922, Gertrude Bell Archive; Bernhardsson, Reclaiming, p. 117.

  55. Ibid., p. 123.

  56. Antiquities Law (Iraq) (Baghdad, 1924), Article 22, p. 9.

  57. Bernhardsson, Reclaiming, pp. 123–4.

  58. Ibid., pp. 121, 125.

  59. Antiquities Law, Article 19(i), p. 6.

  60. See, for example, Bell's misgivings about awarding the excavation permit to the Oxford expedition for the site of Kish, which consisted of only one individual; GB letter to her father, 30 January 1923, Gertrude Bell Archive. In another letter, Bell expresses her hopes that Yale University will ask for a permit to dig at Warka (Uruk), since it is a big mound and its excavations should be sponsored by a big, rich institution; GB letter to her mother, 31 March 1926, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  61. GB letter to her father, 1 March 1923; GB letter to her father, 4 March 1925; GB letter to her father, 6 March 1924, describes how one gold scarab was won by a toss of a rupee; GB letter to her father, 16 March 1926, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  62. GB letter to a parent, 24 March 1924; GB letter to her mother, 25 March 1925; GB letter to her mother, 31 March 1926, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  63. GB letter to her father, 13 October 1923; GB letter to her mother, 3 March, 1926; GB letter to her father, 16 June 1926, Gertrude Bell Archive; Bernhardsson, Reclaiming, pp. 152–3.

  64. Ibid., p. 152.

  65. Ibid., pp. 150–1.

  66. Ibid., p. 151.

  67. Ibid., pp. 142–5.

  68. Bernhardsson, Reclaiming, pp. 118–19, 152; J.F. Goode, Negotiating for the Past: Archaeology, Nationalism, and Diplomacy in the Middle East, 1919–1941 (Austin, 2007), pp. 198–9; W.L. Cleveland, The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of Sati' al-Husri (Princeton, 1971), pp. 61–5.

  69. Goode, Negotiating, p. 216; Bernhardsson, Reclaiming, p. 202.

  70. Goode, Negotiating, p. 216; Bernhardsson, Reclaiming, p. 202.

  71. Ibid., pp. 120–1.

  72. GB letter to her father, 12 December 1921, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  73. Bell seems to have found the division of the finds at Ur particularly challenging, as related in her letters to her parents. See GB letter to her father, 1 March 1923; GB letter to her father, 6 March 1924; GB letter to her father, 4 March 1925, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  74. Bernhardsson, Reclaiming, p. 153. See especially Bell's letters to her parents in 1926, in which she admits to her lack of knowledge in arranging a museum – GB letter to her father, 24 February 1926; GB letter to her mother, 23 March 1926; GB letter to her mother, 7 July 1926 – and that her museum work would include many mistakes: GB letter to her mother, 6 April 1926, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  75. Rory Stewart, ‘The queen of the quagmire’, The New York Review of Books (25 October 2007).

  76. Ibid.

  77. GB letter to her mother, 5 September 1920, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  78. GB letter to her family, 23 August 1920, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  79. GB letter to her family, 27 April 1909, Gertrude Bell Archive.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Primary Sources/Documents

  Gertrude Bell Archive, Robinson Library, Special Collections, Newcastle University (Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom):

  Letters from Gertrude Bell to members of her family.

  Diary entries.

  Photographs (administered by the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, Newcastle University).

  Miscellaneous Items from the Gertrude Bell Archive:

  Miscellaneous Item 4: Lecture by Lady Elsa Richmond entitled ‘Memories of Gertrude’.

  Miscellaneous Item 13: Letters to Gertrude Bell from Walter Andrae, Marcel Dieulafoy, Ernst Herzfeld, Max Van Berchem and Esther Van Deman.

  Miscellaneous Item 20: Chapter by Bell entitled ‘Romance’, from an unfinished manuscript; Essay by Bell, ‘The fealty of the tribes, a chapter in the history of Iraq’.

  Miscellaneous, Item 41: Letter from Gertrude Bell to Ernst Herzfeld.

  Papers of Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell, Royal Geographical Society (London): Field notebooks, GLB 9, 11, 14 and 15.

  Publications

  ‘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).

  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).

  Ainsworth, W.F., A Personal Narrative of the Euphrates Expedition, 2 vols (London, 1888).

  Akkermans, Peter and Glenn Schwartz, The Archaeology of Syria (Cambridge, 2003).

  Anderson, Scott, Lawrence in Arabia (Toronto, 2013).

  Andrae, E. Walter, Hatra nach Aufnahmen von Mitgliedern der Assur Exp
edition der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1908 and 1912).

  ——— Die archaischen Ischtar-Tempel in Assur (Leipzig, 1922).

  ——— Die jüngeren Ischtar-Tempel in Assur (Leipzig, 1935).

  ——— Das wiedererstandene Assur (Leipzig, 1938). Revised edition with additional notes by B. Hrouda (Munich, 1977).

  Andrae, E. Walter 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).

  Andrae, E. Walter and H. Lenzen, Die Partherstadt Assur (Leipzig, 1933).

  Anonymous, Review of Gertrude L. Bell, ‘The Desert and the Sown’, The Spectator (16 February 1907), p. 17.

  ——— Review of Gertrude L. Bell, ‘Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir. A Study in Early Mohammadan Architecture’, Journal of Roman Studies 4 (1914), pp. 113–14.

  ——— Review of Gertrude L. Bell, ‘The Desert and the Sown’, The Academy (2 March 1907), pp. 210–11.

  ——— Review of Gertrude L. Bell, ‘Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir. A Study in Early Mohammadan Architecture’, The Athenaeum (30 May 1914), pp. 767–8.

  Antiquities Law (Iraq) (Baghdad, 1924).

  Ashby, Thomas, The Aqueducts of Ancient Rome (Oxford, 1935).

  Asher-Greve, Julia M., ‘Gertrude L. Bell (1868–1926)’, in Getzel M. Cohen and Martha Sharp Joukowsky (eds), Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists (Ann Arbor, 2004), pp. 142–97.

  Baird, Jennifer A., ‘Photographing Dura-Europos, 1928–1937: An archaeology of the archive’, American Journal of Archaeology 115 (2011), pp. 427–46.

  Ball, Warwick, Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire (London, 2000).

  Bär, Jürgen, Die älteren Ištar-Tempel in Assur. Stratigraphie, Architektur und Funde eines altorientalischen Heiligtums von der zweiten Hälfte des 3. Jahrtausends bis zur Mittes des 2. Jahrtausends v. Chr. (Saarbrücken, 2003).