Zermatt, August 31, 1904
It is very imposing, the Matterhorn . . . the great faces of rock are so enormous, so perpendicular. . . . It was beautiful climbing, never seriously difficult, but never easy, and most of the time on a great steep face which was splendid to go upon. . . . The most difficult place on the mountain is an overhanging bit above the Tyndall Grat and quite near the summit. There is usually a rope ladder there, but this year it is broken and in consequence scarcely any one has gone up the Italian side. There is a fixed rope which is good and makes descent on this side quite easy, but it is a different matter getting up. We took over 2 hours over this 30 or 40 ft. . . . At the overhanging bit you had to throw yourself out on the rope and so hanging catch with your right knee a shelving scrap of rock from which you can just reach the top rung which is all that is left of the ladder. That is how it is done. I speak from experience, and I also remember wondering how it was possible to do it. And I had a rope round my waist which Ulrich, who went first, had not. Heinrich found it uncommonly difficult.
Gertrude’s mountaineering career ended after the 1904 season, when she was becoming increasingly drawn to desert adventures.
THE ARCHAEOLOGIST
Gertrude had been fascinated by archaeology since a holiday in Greece in 1899, when she was thirty-one. With her father and her uncle, a classical scholar, she made an excursion to Melos, a six-thousand-year-old city, and was shown the excavation by Dr. David Hogarth, brother of her Oxford friend Janet. She was so interested that she stayed several days to watch and join the dig.
Two years later, she extended a holiday to join archaeological digs at Pergamos, Magnesia, and Sardis. She evidently enjoyed the excavation work more than the rather dull cruise that preceded it, chiefly memorable for a day’s sightseeing in Santa Flavia with Winston Churchill, who was staying in a villa there to paint.
By 1904, Gertrude was immersed in plans for an imminent journey through western Syria and Asia Minor, her first expedition after Jerusalem. To give substance to her archaeological credentials, she had written an essay on the geometry of the cruciform structure, which she wanted to place in an eminent magazine, the Revue Archéologique, whose offices were in Paris. She wanted to make herself known to the editor, Professor Salomon Reinach, the scholar who had proselytized for the East as the origin of civilization. He was also the director of the Saint-Germain Museum of National Antiquities.
When she called on Reinach, he welcomed her warmly, taking to her immediately and opening up his address book for her. Armed with his letters of introduction, she was gladly received in every library and museum that she had time to visit. Reinach also gave her what amounted to a crash course in archaeological history. Under his aegis she examined Greek manuscripts and early ivories, buried herself in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, spent a day in the Musée de Cluny, toured a new Byzantine museum not yet open to the public, and spent evenings poring over books in his library. She spoke to Reinach of her forthcoming journey, and he encouraged her to study Roman and Byzantine ruins and learn about the impact of these civilizations upon the region. From this point on, Byzantine culture would become Gertrude’s special field of study.
She was well aware that she lacked the qualifications of an archaeologist—for instance, a knowledge of epigraphy. Between her carefully planned expeditions, therefore, she set out to learn new practical skills, so that she would be able to pinpoint the sites, make maps, and finally recognize what she found and fit it into the historical and archaeological context as she recorded it. She attended courses that taught her how to measure and draw up her finds, she learned to make casts, and she became a skilled photographer and a member of the Royal Photographic Society—as such, she was able to have her film professionally printed.
Even without qualifications, she had great advantages: her energy and enthusiasm, her willingness to go into dangerous territories, and, not least, the financial freedom to follow her ends. No mountain was too high for her, no cave too full of snakes and spiders, no journey too far.
Mapping the Euphrates in 1909, Gertrude examined 450 miles of sites before arriving south of Baghdad. Not far from Karbala, at Ukhaidir, she found an immense and beautiful desert palace in a remarkable state of repair. For a time, when it was found that her plan of the palace was the first to be made, she believed that she had discovered an unknown citadel. The following year she published a preliminary paper on Ukhaidir. But returning to the site in 1911, she found to her bitter disappointment that the monograph she intended to publish, with its 168 pages of plans and 166 photographs, would not be the first. She discovered that German archaeologists had been to the site during the two years of her absence and were close to publishing their own book. Exhibiting much grace under pressure, she wrote in the preface to her monograph of her respect for the “masterly” German volume and even apologized for offering a second version:
. . . My work, which was almost completed when the German volume came out, covers not only the ground traversed by my learned friends in Babylon, but also ground which they had neither leisure nor opportunity to explore . . . with this I must take leave of a field of study which formed for four years my principal occupation, as well as my chief delight.
Gertrude’s entry in the Prolegomena, the Who’s Who of archaeology, names her as “the remarkable pioneer woman of Byzantine architecture.” After publishing The Thousand and One Churches about Binbirkilise in 1909, together with Professor William Ramsay, she concentrated on the high Anatolian plateau of Turkey, publishing the material she gathered there as her seventh book, The Churches and Monasteries of the Tur Abdin, in 1913.
Toward the end of her life, in Baghdad, she became increasingly worried about the wholesale looting of Iraq’s national treasures. She discussed with King Faisal the need for a law of excavations, to protect the many important sites in Iraq and also to prevent all the country’s treasures being exported to foreign museums. He made her the honorary director of archaeology and helped her to frame the writing of a law giving due weight to the rights of the nation and the excavators: these had proliferated after the war with scientific expeditions from many countries attempting to construct the history of the region. Once Gertrude had begun to think in terms of exacting the country’s rights to its own past, she was determined to establish a museum of Iraq. Zealous in claiming the prize objects from each dig, she soon acquired the richest collection in the world of objects representing the early history of Iraq. In cloche hat and 1920s short skirt, she became a dreaded figure at British, American, and German excavations, walking briskly from her office car to the table of finds to claim or bargain for the most precious objects. When discussions reached an impasse, she reverted to her favorite expedient: she tossed a coin.
In 1926, the year of her death, she turned her full attention to archaeology. Her object was to create a proper museum where her antiquities could be displayed. Her Babylonian Stone Room was opened by the king in June. As always, once she was committed to a project, she took on even the most uncongenial of tasks. Alone or with a clerk, sometimes with a Royal Air Force (RAF) officer who was a keen amateur, she laboriously cataloged the finds from Ur and Kish, sometimes getting up at 5 a.m. to do the work before the midday heat became overwhelming.
The descriptions and accounts below are taken from her letters home to her stepmother and father.
Athens, Spring 1899
Mr. Hogarth . . . showed us his recent finds—pots of 4000 B.C. from Melos. Doesn’t that make one’s brain reel?
On a Lecture by Professor Dorpfield About the Acropolis
. . . He took us from stone to stone, and built up a wonderful chain of evidence with extraordinary ingenuity, until we saw the Athens of 600 B.C. rise before us.
Pergamos, Turkey, March 1902
You should see me shopping in Smyrna—quite like a native, only I ought to have more flashing eyes. At Pergamos, I went all over the Acropolis and examined templ
es and palaces and theatres and the great altar of which the friezes are at Berlin.
Sardis, March 3, 1902
I’ve just succeeded in getting a second hand Herodotus* in French to my enormous delight. . . .
Sardis, March 7, 1902
I was delighted that I had Herodotus so fresh in my mind. . . . It’s a madly interesting place. . . .
Sardis, March 9, 1902
Some day I shall come and travel here with tents, but then I will speak Turkish, which will not be difficult. . . .
Paris, November 7, 1904
After lunch I drove out, left some cards and went to see Salomon Reinach, whom I found enthusiastically delighted to see me. There were 2 other men there. . . . We sat for an hour or more while Salomon and Ricci piled books round me and poured information into my ears. It was delightful to hear the good jargon of the learned. . . . But bewildering. This morning I read till 11 about Byzantine MSS, which I’m going to see at the Bibliothéque Nationale; then I went shopping with the Stanleys and bought a charming little fur jacket to ride in in Syria—yes, I did! Then I came in and read till 2 when Salomon fetched me and we went together to the Louvre. We stayed till 4.30—it was enchanting. . . . There is nothing more wonderful than to go to a museum with my dear Salomon. We passed from Egypt through Pompeii and back to Alexandria. We traced the drawing of horns from Greece to Byzantium. We followed the lines of Byzantine art into early Europe . . . while Salomon developed an entirely new theory about eyelids . . . and illustrated it with a Pheidean bust and a Scopas head. It was nice.
November 11, 1904
I’ve seen all the ivories that concern me, and I find to my joy that I am beginning to be able to place them. . . . This happy result is a good deal caused by having looked through such masses of picture books with Reinach. Last night he set me guessing what things were—even Greek beads—it was a sort of examination—I really think I passed. Reinach was much pleased but then he loves me so dearly that perhaps he is not a good judge. He has simply set all his boundless knowledge at my disposal. . . .
On Her 1905 Expedition Through the Syrian Desert to Asia Minor Qallat Semaan, March 31, 1905
I have had the most delightful day today, playing at being an archaeologist.
April 3, 1905
I shall not forget the misery of copying a Syrian inscription in the drenching rain, holding my cloak round my book to keep the paper dry. The devil take all Syrian inscriptions, they are so horribly difficult to copy.
Anavarza, April 21, 1905
I got up at dawn and at 6 o’clock started out to grapple with my churches. . . . I took my soldier with me and taught him to hold the measuring tape. He soon understood what I wanted and measured away at doors and windows like one to the manner born. . . . One of the biggest of the churches is razed to the ground. . . . I looked round about for any scraps of carving that might give an indication of the style of decoration and found, after much search, one and one only—and it was dated! It was a big stone which from the shape and the mouldings I knew to have been at the spring of two arches of the windows of the apse, and the date was carved in beautiful raised Greek letters between the two arch mouldings—“The year 511.”
Two things I dislike in Anavarza. The mosquitoes and the snakes; the mosquitoes have been the most hostile of the two: the snakes always bustle away in a great hurry and I have made no experiments as to what their bite would be like. There are quantities of them among the ruins. They are about 3 ft long—I wonder if they are poisonous. . . . We dislodged the vultures who were sitting in rows on the castle top—they left a horrid smell behind them.
Karaman, May 7, 1905
I daresay it does not often occur to you to think what a wonderful invention is the railway, but it is very forcibly borne in upon me at this moment for I am going to Konia in 3 hours instead of having a weary two days’ march across a plain of mud. Yesterday I rode in here some 35 miles.
Binbirkilise, May 13, 1905
We . . . set off across the plain to Binbirklisse. The name means The Thousand and one Churches. . . . It lies at the foot of the Kara Dagh, a great isolated mountain arising abruptly out of the plain. . . . I fell in love with it at once, a mass of beautiful ruins gathered together in a little rocky cup high up in the hills—with Asia Minor at its feet. . . . It has made a delightful end to my travels. . . .
May 16, 1905
I . . . took the train and came back to Konia. The Consul and his wife met me at the station and dined with me at the hotel and I found there besides Professor Ramsay, who knows more about this country than any other man, and we fell into each other’s arms and made great friends.
This was Gertrude’s first meeting with the archaeologist Sir William Mitchell Ramsay, and it led to their collaboration on a book about the ruins of Binbirkilise. On this occasion, she showed him an inscription she had copied on her brief visit there. Professor Ramsay wrote in the preface to their book, “Miss Gertrude Bell was impelled by [Strzygowski’s] book to visit Bin Bir Kilisse; and, when I met her at Konia on her return, she asked me to copy an inscription on one of the churches, in letters so worn that she could not decipher it, which she believed to contain a date for the building. Her belief proved well founded and the chronology of the Thousand and One Churches centres round this text.”
They met again at Binbirkilise at the end of May 1907 for a month of excavations, worked together on the results at Rounton, and published the book, The Thousand and One Churches, in 1909.
Lake of Egerdir, on the Journey to Binbirkilise, May 1, 1907
There was a place which Ramsay had begged me to try and visit on the eastern shore of the lake . . . a holy site long before the Christian era, sacred to Artemis of the Lake who was herself a Psidian deity re-baptised by the Greeks. . . . The rocks drop here straight into the lake and at their foot there is a great natural arch some 15 feet wide through which glistens the blue water of the lake. In the rock above is a small rock-cut chamber into which I scrambled with some difficulty and found a slab like a loculus in it . . . probably the slab was sacrificial. . . . So we rode back. . . . Almost joined to the shore by beds of immensely tall reeds there is a little island which no one had yet succeeded in visiting. I, however, found . . . a very old and smelly boat, so I hired the three fishermen for an infinitesimal sum and rowed out to the island. . . . It was completely surrounded by ruined Byzantine walls dropping into the water in great blocks of masonry; here and there there was a bit of an older column built into them and they were densely populated by snakes. There was only one thing of real interest, a very curious stele with a female figure carved on it, bearing what looked like water skins, and two lines of inscription above . . . unfortunately the whole stone was covered by 18 inches or more of shimmering water. It had fallen into the lake and there it lay. I did all I knew to get the inscription. I waded into the water and tried to scrub the slime off the stone, but the water glittered and the slime floated back and finally I gave it up and came out very wet and more than a little annoyed.
Maden Sheher (The Lower Town of Binbirkilise), May 21, 1907
The habit of building everything on the extreme top of hills is to be deprecated. It entails so much labour for subsequent generations. . . . I had found . . . a ruined site with a very perfect church on the top of a hill near my camp, and in the church was a half-buried stone which I thought was probably the altar. So I took up some of my men with picks and crowbars and had it out and it was the altar. . . . My Cast! oh my Cast! it’s more professional than words can say.
Maden Sheher, May 25, 1907
The Ramsays arrived yesterday. I was in the middle of digging up a church when suddenly 2 carts hove into sight and there they were. . . . They instantly got out, . . . Lady R. made tea (for they were starving) in the open and R. oblivious of all other considerations was at once lost in the problems the church presented. . . .
Now I must tell you something very very striking. T
he church on the extreme point of the Kara D., at which I worked for 2 days before R. came, has near it some great rocks and on the rocks I found a very queer inscription. The more I looked at it the queerer it became and the less I thought it could be Christian . . . I took it down with great care, curious rabbit-headed things and winged sort of crosses and arms and circles, and with some trembling I showed it to R. The moment he looked at it he said, “It’s a Hittite inscription. This is the very thing I hoped most to find here.” I think I’ve never been so elated. We now think of nothing but Hittites all the time. . . .
I haven’t told you half enough what gorgeous fun it’s being! You should see me directing the labours of 20 Turks and 4 Kurds!
May 29, 1907
I get up at 5 and breakfast before the Ramsay family have appeared and go off before 6 to wherever we are digging, and stay there till 12 superintending and measuring as we uncover. . . . After lunch I go back to the diggings and stay there till 5 or later. R. generally appears on the scene about 7 or 8 in the morning and about 3 in the afternoon . . . he can’t physically do more. I shall have all the measuring and planning to do and I’m at it some 12 hours a day on and off. Nor can it be otherwise for that’s the part that I have undertaken.
Daile, June 14, 1907
You would be surprised to see the scene in the middle of which I am writing. Thirty-one Turks are busy with picks and spades clearing out a church and monastery. At intervals they call out to me “Effendim, effendim! is this enough?”
July 5, 1907
We spent the whole morning going from village to village along the side of the Karajadagh looking for ruins and inscriptions. The manner of proceeding is this: you arrive in a village and ask for inscriptions. They reply that there are absolutely none. You say very firmly that there are certainly inscriptions and then you stand about in the hot sun for 10 minutes or so while the villagers gather round. At last someone says there is a written stone in his house. You go off, find it, copy it, and give the owner two piastres, the result of which is that everybody has a written stone somewhere. . . .
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