Britain and the Arab Middle East Page 2
Fig. 5.3: Bell’s photograph of one corner of the Hall of Doric Piers at the Villa of Hadrian, Tivoli (Italy). (Album E_83, courtesy of the Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.)
Fig. 5.4: Map of the Near East, showing the route of Bell’s 1911 journey. (Map prepared by Stephen Batiuk.)
Fig. 5.5: Bell’s photograph of the tower of Manara Mujda, near Ukhaidir, in southern Iraq. (Album P_214, courtesy of the Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.)
Fig. 5.6: The caravanserai of Khan ‘Atshan, in the desert near Ukhaidir. (Album Q_005, courtesy of the Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.)
Fig. 5.7: Bell’s plan of the Palace of Khosrow at the site of Qasr-i-Shirin (modern western Iran). (Adapted from Bell, Palace and Mosque, pls. 53–4.)
Fig. 5.8: Hall 3 in the Palace of Khosrow, Qasr-i-Shirin, facing south-west. (Album Q_156, courtesy of the Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.)
Fig. 5.9: A view towards the chambers (iwan groups) at the western ends of open courts Q and S, near the back of the Palace of Khosrow at Qasr-i-Shirin. (Album Q_173, courtesy of the Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.)
Fig. 5.10: Bell’s plan of the Chehar Qapu at Qasr-i-Shirin. (Adapted from Bell, Palace and Mosque, p. 64.)
Fig. 5.11: A general view of the ruins of Chehar Qapu at Qasr-i-Shirin from the south-east. (Album Q_097, courtesy of the Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.)
Fig. 5.12: Corner squinch in Room 14, Chehar Qapu. (Album Q_134b, courtesy of the Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.)
Fig. 5.13: Room 31 in Chehar Qapu. (Album Q_130a, courtesy of the Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.)
Fig. 5.14: Hall 54 of Chehar Qapu from the south. (Album Q_111, courtesy of the Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.)
Fig. 5.15: Gertrude Bell’s camp in front of the ruins of the Temple of the Great Iwans, Hatra. (Album Q_236, courtesy of the Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.)
Fig. 5.16: The left side of the North Iwan of the Temple of the Great Iwans at Hatra. (Album R_017, courtesy of the Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.)
Fig. 5.17: Bell’s photograph of a group of three sculptured heads or masks on the interior wall of the South Iwan, in the Temple of the Great Iwans. (Album R_006, courtesy of the Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.)
Fig. 5.18: Andrae’s reconstruction of the Temple of the Great Iwans at Hatra, Parthian Era. (Courtesy of the Archive of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, Diapositiv S 50.)
Fig. 5.19: Interior of Qasr Kharana, an early eighth-century Islamic fort (in present-day Jordan). (Album Y_086, courtesy of the Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.)
Fig. 5.20: The beautifully carved façade of the eighth-century Umayyad castle of Mshatta, photographed by Bell in 1900. (Album A_233, courtesy of the Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.)
Fig. 6.1: Gertrude Bell with Faisal, King of Iraq. (PERS_ B_018, courtesy of the Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.)
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Gertrude Bell has held my fascination for many years. I became acquainted with her about three decades ago when, as an undergraduate student of Near Eastern archaeology, I bought a copy of her biography by H.W.F. Winstone and marvelled over her travels and political activities. A few years later, as a graduate student, I worked on an archaeological project in southern Iraq that was supported by the British Institute for the Study of Iraq (then the British School of Archaeology in Iraq). The fact that this institution had been established in memory of Gertrude Bell, Iraq's first Director of Antiquities, piqued my interest in her again, as did the prospect of taking a day trip to the west of the Euphrates River to see the ruined castle of Ukhaidir, which Bell had documented in 1909 and 1911. Regrettably, the excursion did not take place, but the allure of that desert castle had taken root in my imagination, and I longed to know more about it and what exactly Bell had achieved there.
The war in Iraq and the looting of the Iraq National Museum in April 2003 brought my focus back to Gertrude Bell, this time in a more substantive way. I gave several public lectures, both at my own institution of the University of British Columbia (UBC), in Vancouver, and at the Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Studies, in Toronto, on the life and archaeological activities of Gertrude Bell and her important connection to the Iraq Museum, as its founder in 1923. As I began to probe further into her archaeological work, however, I became aware that while Bell's biographers routinely referred to her as an archaeologist, they failed to report in any detail just what sort of activities she had undertaken, particularly in the years before World War I, and what kind of achievement in archaeology, if any, they amounted to. These omissions in Bell's otherwise well-documented life prompted my own research into this topic. The work was further encouraged in 2008 by funding from a Hampton Research Grant from UBC, and a Research Grant from the British Institute for the Study of Iraq. I am tremendously grateful for this generous support, which enabled me to carry out the bulk of my research over several years.
I undertook a trip to Syria in April 2009 to retrace the journey that Bell had made down the eastern bank of the Euphrates River almost 100 years before, and to visit and photograph the same archaeological sites and monuments that she had documented. I wish to thank Stephen Batiuk for accompanying me on that short but memorable trip. I shall not forget the kindness and hospitality shown to us in the hotels, taxis, buses and restaurants of Aleppo and Raqqa, the two bases of our excursions, and it pains me to think about the dire present predicament of the people of these two remarkable cities.
In the autumn of 2010, I travelled to the UK to visit the Gertrude Bell Archives in the Special Collections of the Robinson Library of Newcastle University. Thanks go to the librarians of the Special Collections, who were most helpful in expediting my access to Bell's papers, as well as to Mark Jackson of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastle University, then keeper of Bell's photographic archive, who provided digital copies of some of Bell's photographs and cheerfully answered numerous questions about her travels and archaeological activities. A short train ride up to Edinburgh University also brought me into contact with James Crow, the former keeper of Gertrude Bell's photographic archive, and I am grateful also to him for taking the time to share his knowledge about Bell, especially regarding her archaeological photography. Lastly, a visit to the Royal Geographical Society in London, where several of Bell's field notebooks are housed, was facilitated by Joy Wheeler of the RGS, who provided me with access to Bell's field notebooks and subsequently arranged for the reproduction of images from select pages.
In later stages of production, I wish to thank Vicky Manolopoulou of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastle University for providing me with numerous additional images from the Gertrude Bell Archive and granting me the necessary permissions. Ian Johnson, Head of Special Collections and Archives at the Robinson Library at Newcastle University, also helped me to secure permissions to reproduce excerpts from Bell's diaries and letters and miscellaneous works. In all, the Gertrude Bell Archive at Newcastle University is to be congratulated for making its online access to Gertrude Bell's diaries, letters and photographs so accessible and user-friendly, without which this distant researcher from Canada would not have been able to accomplish anything at all.
Other individuals who have assisted in some way with my research by directing me to useful sources or photographs include Joan Porter MacIver, Thomas Leisten, Jens Kröger, Josef Moradi, Ed Keall and Julia Gonnella. I am grateful to Antionette Harri of the Fondation Max van Berchem, Hannah Westall, Archivist at Girton College Cambridge, Kiersten Neumann of the Oriental Institute Museum, Irmgard Wagner of the Deutsches Archäologische Institut, Friedrich Polleroß of the Institut f?r Kunstgeschichte der Universität Wien, and Joachim Marzahn and Helga Vogel of the Deutsche Orient Gesellschaft, for their assistance in procuring images for this book and permitting their use. Henry and Emmanuel
le Ritson provided transcriptions and translations of two of Max van Berchem's letters (in French) to Bell. I am tremendously grateful for the lively and productive conversations I had with Marcus Milwright and Maya Yazigi on the topics of Islamic history, art and architecture. I also enjoyed talking to Leilah Nadir and getting her unique insights into Bell.
At UBC, student research assistants greatly helped me in my work over the years, namely Carrie Arbuckle, Christine Johnston, Alexandra Harvey and Chelsea Gardner. They combed through Gertrude Bell's diaries and letters for all references to her archaeological activities, researched past and contemporary individuals who figured in her writings, and organized and researched relevant archaeological photographs. I must also thank Alexandra Harvey and Lisa Tweten for their assistance in producing digital adaptations of Bell's plans of the Great Mosque of Samarra and the palaces at Ukhaidir and Qasr-i-Shirin. Transcriptions and translations of letters (in German) to Bell from Ernst Herzfeld and Walter Andrae were capably provided by Lydia Jones and Stephanie Revell of the Germanic Studies Program in the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies, at UBC.
Encouragement, guidance and research assistance were provided to me by my colleagues in the Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies. I am truly fortunate to have co-workers who possess not only wide learning but genuine interest in their colleagues’ research. James Russell was a fountain of knowledge about Bell's archaeological activities in Anatolia and was among the first to impress upon me the quality and importance of her archaeological observations, plans and photographs. Hector Williams, Toph Marshall and Susanna Braund alerted me to several sources pertaining to Gertrude Bell and her contemporaries. Roger Wilson provided helpful information about Roman tower tombs, while Leanne Bablitz and Charmaine Gorrie clarified details about Roman governors, brickwork, and the campaigns of Trajan and Septimius Severus.
During the writing stage, I owe a debt of gratitude to my husband, Richard, for reading many sections of the manuscript and making an effort to pare down my unwieldy and wordy prose. Lynn Welton acted as a valuable sounding board for some of my ideas and made useful suggestions to my manuscript in the eleventh hour. I was also exceedingly fortunate to have the highly capable editing skills of Dania Sheldon, who seemed to be able to get through each of my chapter drafts without losing her patience or good cheer. I am tremendously grateful for her effort in improving my work, particularly in the final stages of its production.
Richard and our daughter, Julianne, put up with the countless hours I required to work on this book, and I regret that I did not get to spend as much time with them as I wanted, especially on weekends. Through it all, however, they did much to preserve my sanity and good spirits, and provided me with constant, happy companionship and affection. My research on Gertrude Bell began the year that Julianne was born, and these two female persons – one growing up before my eyes and the other coming to life from her many writings and images – have, in a rather odd combination, greatly enriched my life over the past seven years, filling that time with wonder, fascination and delight.
INTRODUCTION
Arriving at Cairo’s Grand Continental Hotel in late November 1915, Gertrude Bell hurried down to dinner, anxious to hear the latest news of the East from her dining companions – among them David Hogarth and T.E. Lawrence – and weigh in with her own thoughts on the personalities and politics of the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces.1
It had been a difficult and sad year for Bell. The outbreak of war a year previously had put an end to her rollicking travels and stimulating archaeological projects. A man she had dearly loved had been killed in the Dardanelles. Her war work to this point had involved the heartrending job of tracing the missing and the dead lost in the battlefields of France. But now her life was charged with a new purpose and promise, and she brought a revived spirit and fresh energy to the mission with which she had been tasked.
The war would change the direction of Bell’s life and radically transform her relationship with the Middle East, where she found herself once again. She knew this part of the world very well. She had been to Egypt on multiple occasions, and she had travelled up and down the coastal regions of the Levant and through Anatolia. Recently, she had made an intrepid journey into Arabia. Her explorations had included the lands watered by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and she knew the deserts and mountains of Persia. The accounts of her travels had produced lively travelogues that, when published, were eagerly received by a public fascinated with this adventurous, resilient woman. Perhaps even more significant, however, was the aim that drove many of Bell’s trips to the Middle East. Her intense interest in the antiquity of these lands, and her desire to find, map, describe and understand the rich histories, peoples and settlements that had once existed, were often the motivations that inspired her long journeys into remote places.
Now in 1915, however, Bell’s engagement with the past had been pushed aside by present realities. In Cairo once again, her purpose was of a different character. No longer was she in the East to explore and identify ancient sites, plan monuments and trace the routes taken by long-ago kings and their armies; her task was to provide descriptions of the modern groups she had seen in the course of her travels. As part of a newly created office of British military intelligence that would soon be known as the Arab Bureau, she had been charged with listing the present location of Arab tribes and their sheikhs, estimating their numbers and judging their loyalties to the British and the Turks.2 This was to be Bell’s part in the British wareffort to defeat Germany and its ally, the Ottoman Empire.
One hundred years later, musing over that pivotal year in Bell’s life as she officially entered the arena of modern politics in the midst of a world war, I cannot help but reflect on my own relationship with the Middle East, and how my engagement with it up to this point has been, like Bell’s, primarily from the perspective of exploring its lands in pursuit of the rich past. Although three decades of archaeological fieldwork and research have been fascinating and productive, my engagement with the ancient Middle East has never been far removed from the current conditions of the countries in which I have worked. Calamitous developments – notably the wars in Iraq and now the violence and destruction that rage across Syria – have affected my own research, and more importantly, the lives of people I have known. Ancient settlements and artefacts that I have seen and explored have been severely damaged or destroyed, and many of the people who shared with me in uncovering Iraq’s and Syria’s ancient heritages have undergone unbelievable hardship and suffering.
My experience with the current misfortunes of the Middle East is naturally different than the circumstances faced by Bell as she embarked on her official war work in Cairo in 1915, but it shares across the century the inseparable relationship between one’s search for the past and the inevitable confrontation with the often dramatic and tragic realities of the present. Moreover, the past and present are entangled, the present often being closely linked to the actions of the past, arising from it or replicating what has played out many times before. Bell was aware of this, and even as she optimistically played her role in the post-war effort to introduce a new order in the Middle East to replace the shattered Ottoman Empire, she knew of the many previous imperial powers that had taken control of these lands before her, stretching back millennia to the dawn of history. Their glories had been brief, however, and they had fallen time and time again, trampled into the dust by the feet of later kings and conquerors. Today, almost a century after the bold schemes ushered in by the European powers with which Bell was associated, there still has been no long-lived or peaceful resolution in the Middle East. We are forced to recognize once again the folly of imperial ambitions and ineffectual meddling which have plagued the peoples and nations that have forever been dismantled and refashioned anew.
While one can be critical of the role Gertrude Bell played in the politics of the Middle East, there is no question that this period of her life was
fascinating and eventful. Indeed, the majority of written accounts about her place a huge emphasis on this latter phase of her life, especially her part in the creation of the state of Iraq shortly after the end of World War I.3 The selection of the country’s first king and the drawing up of its modern political borders – in which Shi’ites, Sunnis, Kurds and Christians were all placed under a united flag – can be traced to the British colonial government in which Bell, as the administration’s sole female political officer, played an active and influential role.
But Bell’s biographers have not hesitated to report on other aspects of her remarkable life as well, among them mountain-climbing expeditions and intrepid travels into remote regions of the Middle East where few Europeans had previously ventured. Bell rubbed shoulders with colourful, prominent personalities, including Winston Churchill, Lord Cromer, Edward Grey, Mark Sykes, Ibn Saud and T.E. Lawrence. Even her love life, while ultimately tragic, was the stuff of high romance. Her engagement at a young age to a dashing but penniless lord amid the deserts of Persia was forbidden by her parents, and in any event, the suitor died of pneumonia within a year. Later in life, Bell had a clandestine affair with a highly respected, married military officer and diplomat whose death on the battlefield at Gallipoli cut short what had been an all-consuming passion. These sad affairs and Bell’s death, the cause of which appears to have been an overdose of sleeping pills on a stifling summer day in Baghdad in her 58th year, elicits a melancholy fascination for this remarkable woman who seemed to have everything and yet nothing.
What of archaeology, the subject that triggered her full engagement with the Middle East in the first place? To be sure, all accounts of Bell’s life have listed archaeology among her many accomplishments, but most have never pursued this topic very far, usually failing to describe in any detail the specific kind of archaeological work in which she was engaged, or the impact that her research made in the fields of Byzantine, Islamic and ancient Near Eastern studies. Attention is often paid to the travels that Bell undertook to visit archaeological sites and the written and photographic records she kept of these archaeological journeys. However, little has been done to assess the quality of this work and its significance both in her time and up to the present. Lacking, in particular, are any serious accounts of Bell’s 1909 and 1911 visits to, and study of, the magnificent Islamic-period castle of Ukhaidir. Not insignificantly, Bell’s work at Ukhaidir resulted in several scholarly publications, including her magisterial 1914 monograph Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir.4 Nevertheless, Bell’s biographers give short shrift to the site, and if her visit is mentioned at all, they simply prefer to describe her energetic measuring and photographing of the castle, and her clothing: a ‘white cotton shirt, petticoat and long patch-pocketed skirt, black stockings and laced-up shoes, a dark kafeeyah wrapped around her sun helmet’.5 Ukhaidir is sometimes also mentioned in the context of Bell’s disappointment at finding that German archaeologists had also been to the site, and that their report was to appear in print before hers.6 This emphasis on the Germans’ achievement at Bell’s expense has had the regrettable effect of overshadowing her work. The erroneous impression one gets from this superficial treatment of Bell’s research of Ukhaidir (as with the treatment of her other archaeological endeavours) is that she surveyed the ruins and took some good photographs, but her work was that of an interested dilettante.