Britain and the Arab Middle East Read online

  In one of the few accounts of Bell’s life that outlines her archaeological work more substantively, Julia Asher-Greve perceptively notes that even in Bell’s own time, her contributions to archaeology tended to be downplayed by her contemporary male colleagues. Their recurring references to ‘Bell’s family wealth and connections, couture clothes, eccentricities, or alleged intelligence activities’ served to cast doubt upon her scholarly capacities, ‘emphasizing her gender and thus her outside status’.7 It is particularly surprising to read the comments of the archaeologist Walter Andrae, the German director of the excavations at Assur. Bell held him in such deep esteem for his archaeological activities in Mesopotamia and for his collegiality and friendship that she dedicated her 1914 Ukhaidir book to him.8 But in his autobiography, rather than commenting extensively on Bell’s archaeological career, Andrae noted that her ability to speak several foreign languages, including German, was the result of her family’s wealth and status, which provided her with good connections to European diplomatic circles and facilitated her wide travels.9 In addition, Andrae wrote that back in 1911, when she had visited him at Assur, he had already suspected she was ‘on a diplomatic mission in Mesopotamia’.10 This appears to be a tactful way of saying that he guessed she was a British spy. That Bell was engaged in official intelligence activities before the outbreak of World War I is at best debatable, but Andrae’s comments serve to further obscure Bell’s primary reason for journeying to Mesopotamia in those years: her genuine and intense interest in the antiquities of the region, and her wish to make a name for herself in archaeological circles.

  Finally, it may not have helped that Bell herself, when writing in her diaries or in her letters to her parents, tended to make light of her archaeological endeavours. She was self-effacing, often undervaluing her scholarly worth. This tendency, coupled with her youthful enthusiasm for her work, often gave the impression that she wasn’t to be taken too seriously. For example, in a letter to her parents during her investigations in Anatolia in 1905, she wrote, ‘I have had the most delightful day today playing at being an archaeologist.’11 In 1909, upon her discovery and recording of Samarra in Mesopotamia, she wrote, ‘Sometimes [...] I think I’m something of an archaeologist myself – but of course that’s going too far!’12 After the completion of her investigation at Ukhaidir, she wrote with almost school-girlish glee, ‘It’s the greatest piece of luck that has ever happened to me. I shall publish it in a big monograph all to itself and it will make a flutter in the dovecotes.’13 Bell’s rather romantic writing style may also have contributed to a general tendency to discount her as a genuine researcher. In a letter to her father during a visit to Babylon, she wrote, ‘I heard the Mesopotamian nightingale and remembered that these were the same sights and sounds that Nebuchadnezzar had known and even Hammurabi. Were they, I wonder, comforted and sustained by the eternal beauty of the earth and the simple country life of field and river that springs and dies and leaves no marks and never alters?’14 While these passages read as the lyrical musings of an individual deeply enamoured with the past and her own evocative surroundings, they have the tendency, like the other excerpts quoted, to cast Bell as a lightweight rather than as a serious and committed scholar. It is unfortunate that Bell’s biographers have most often tended to cite such passages, since they play up Bell’s romantic inclinations and presumed naiveté while ignoring the substance of her observations and conclusions.

  In undertaking the research for this work, I aim to compensate for other accounts’ superficial coverage of Bell’s archaeological activities and accomplishments by bringing them to the fore. I will demonstrate not only that Bell was passionate about the study of archaeology, and set herself to learn a great deal about it (especially the archaeology of Anatolia and Mesopotamia), but that in a short time, she became thoroughly proficient at it, producing a number of learned and valuable archaeological reports. Bell was particularly consumed with the pursuit of archaeology between 1905 and 1914, and she carried out her most significant investigations in the Near East during this period.

  At this point, it is perhaps important to discuss what exactly is meant by ‘archaeology’ as Bell practised it, especially since her work rarely entailed digging into the ground to recover ancient remains. Nor was she part of a larger, officially sanctioned archaeological project or team, with the exception, perhaps, of her collaboration with William Ramsay at Binbirkilise in Anatolia. She did not have the sponsorship of a university or archaeological institute; rather, all of her investigations were supported by her own funds and initiative. Her particular research focus and interests concentrated on ancient architectural forms and their presence through time and across space, and her approach, which entailed a comparative formal analysis, did not require stratigraphic observations through excavation. Nevertheless, there was a fieldwork aspect to Bell’s research: she visited all of the sites in which she was interested, and made concerted efforts to comprehend them on the ground through detailed plans and photographs. Moreover, her subsequent research – which entailed looking for comparable sites and structures and endeavouring to situate them according to their periodization, cultural milieu and influences – followed the same type of methodology employed by other archaeologists of her time. If her fieldwork didn’t actually include excavation, it was because most of the artistic and architectural forms in which she was interested were still standing above ground and could be documented without the need for more than a minimum of earth clearance around foundations to clarify structural dimensions and forms. Bell’s efforts to record other artefacts, such as pottery, terracotta objects, metal fragments, bones and palaeobotanical remains, were either non-existent or, at best, ephemeral or occasional, but it has to be remembered that these were still the early days of archaeological practice. Few of her contemporaries recognized for their archaeological pursuits were carrying out the kinds of systematic and comprehensive approaches to archaeological recovery that became common practice later in the twentieth century.15 In light of these considerations and the nature of Bell’s not inconsequential efforts to examine ancient material remains in the field, I am comfortable with calling her pursuit of the past ‘archaeological’ in its scope.

  In tracking Bell’s archaeological efforts, one cannot help but be impressed by the sheer quantity of data with which she dealt, and the breadth and depth of her observations and conclusions. Although her intensive archaeological investigations only lasted about a decade, her scholarly output – which addressed an incredibly wide range of cultures, peoples and historical periods of the ancient Near East and beyond – was prodigious. Faced with this abundant dataset and yet still wishing to highlight her archaeological accomplishments in a meaningful way, I have chosen to focus on a smaller aspect of Bell’s work, in particular her investigations of the Sasanian and early Islamic periods in Mesopotamia, represented principally by archaeological sites visited and documented during the course of her 1909 and 1911 travels. Bell’s other probes into the past, such as her extensive investigations of the ecclesiastical architecture of Late Antiquity, known mainly from her study of early Christian churches in Binbirkilise and Tur-Abdin in Anatolia, are not extensively covered in this book. Scholars of Late Antiquity have already done an admirable job of presenting Bell’s study of Anatolian churches and assessing the merits of her work in that regard, so covering the same subjects would largely replicate these accounts.16 On the other hand, few have attempted to summarize and assess Bell’s work on Islamic and pre-Islamic art and architecture in Mesopotamia, making this subject more worthy of scrutiny here. Her expeditions in Mesopotamia are also significant in that they connect meaningfully with her later activities in the same region during and after World War I, both in her capacity as a political officer and as Iraq’s honorary Director of Antiquities.

  I aim not only to describe Bell’s archaeological work – her visits to ancient sites, the physical acts of planning and photographing ancient art and architecture, and her conclusions �
�� but also to situate her endeavours within the field of archaeological studies, assessing the degree to which her work was favourably received by her contemporaries and subsequent generations. It is difficult not to be impressed by the learned quality of Bell’s scholarship, particularly her capacity for finding comparable architectural forms through time and space and tracing their origins back to original Near Eastern sources. While this type of methodological approach is regarded today as flawed – it neglected other strands of artefactual evidence, paid little heed to stratigraphy, and excluded almost entirely issues such as social organization, economy, environment, agency and gender when attempting to understand how people lived and interacted within a particular ancient site or structure – Bell’s work was still quite ambitious in its breadth. Although not always correct, she showed a comparable or greater degree of insight to that of her scholarly contemporaries, as will be demonstrated. At the same time, Bell was engaged in archaeological studies precisely when archaeology was developing into a serious, scholarly discipline through the efforts of a number of extraordinary individuals who were pioneering a systematic, careful and controlled form of archaeological inquiry in the Near East. These individuals would shortly eclipse Bell in their own brilliant efforts. She met several of them, including the Germans Walter Andrae and Robert Koldewey, known for their excavations at the sites of Assur and Babylon. Even within Bell’s own field of the archaeology of the early Islamic period, there were rising stars like Ernst Herzfeld, whose brilliant insights into the source and inspiration of Islamic art and architectural forms were matching or exceeding her own interpretations of these topics. Bell was well aware of the abilities of these learned individuals, and even before she had left the field altogether, she had in some instances chosen to abandon further research on subjects, knowing that her own efforts would fail to match those of the other scholars.17

  Bell abruptly abandoned her archaeological work upon the outbreak of World War I, thus severing her ties to the scholarly community. Thereafter she engaged herself in the war effort and actions relating to the political affairs of Iraq, this constituting an altogether different direction and focus than her archaeological exploits. It is true that her role as honorary Director of Antiquities in Iraq in the 1920s re-engaged her in work related to archaeology, but with this new work, Bell acted more in an administrative capacity related to excavations and antiquities rather than as a researcher in her own right. People would henceforth remember Bell as someone involved in political activities, and who in some way was connected to archaeology, but they largely forgot her scholarly output in that field, as prodigious as it had once been.

  Bell’s turn into politics represented a complete change in the direction of her work, but the experiences she had acquired while travelling in the Near East and engaging in the study of its past did not count for nothing. On the contrary, Bell’s familiarity with the archaeology of the Near East, especially with the archaeology and history of Mesopotamia, gave her a special and unique understanding of this part of the world that in many ways influenced her ideas about how the region should be governed and her own place within that scheme. This background, coupled with her romantic sensibilities, as I will relate in the final chapter of this book, worked within Bell to create a very specific, inspired vision for Iraq’s present and hopeful future. The success enjoyed by that state upon its creation and the installation of its first king, Faisal, were in part fuelled by the vision of Bell, ever desirous to usher the country into a new and glorious chapter of its rich history. At the same time, the very knowledge of the past that inspired her also made her mindful of the transitory nature of empire. This awareness tempered her optimism, forcing her to recognize the futility of nation-making and the vanity of her own part in this enterprise. Gertrude Bell, for all of her energetic schemes and dreams, could not, in the end, emerge from the shadow of humanity’s unendingly tumultuous history.

  CHAPTER 1

  EARLY LIFE AND FIRST STEPS IN ARCHAEOLOGY

  Gertrude Bell’s interests in history and archaeology were very much propelled by her fortunate upbringing. She came from a life of privilege, this allowing her to pursue a higher education and exposing her to the wider world through travel. Further encouragement from a number of key scholars, and Bell’s own love of ancient ruins and the remote, desert landscapes in which they were often located, gradually led to her sole focus on the archaeology of the ancient Near East. As her knowledge of this field grew, so did her confidence, and she began to pursue the field as a serious scholar. This activity would absorb much of her attention for several years and lead her further and further into the unknown, unexplored parts of the Near East and its fascinating past.

  Born in 1868 in northern England, Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell was the daughter of Hugh Bell and the granddaughter of the famous Isaac Lowthian Bell. Lowthian Bell, as he liked to be called, was one of England’s leading industrialists during the Victorian era.1 At a young age he had joined his father’s ironworks in Newcastle, shortly afterwards pioneering the use of blast furnaces and rolling mills for iron production and operating a chemical factory used to manufacture aluminium.2 By 1844, Lowthian and his brothers had established a company known as Bell Brothers, and by the 1870s, this firm had become one of the leading ironworks in the English north-east.3 The company also had colliery properties, steel mills, quarries and mines, and built a railway to convey raw materials, enabling Lowthian to control his own supplies of coal, ironstone and limestone.4 Not only was Gertrude’s grandfather a successful businessman, but he was well educated and a gifted scientist. He had studied physics, chemistry and metallurgy in Germany, Denmark, France and Britain before the age of 24, and had gone on to win many medals over the course of his life for his scientific work, especially in the fields of engineering and industry.5 He was, for example, recognized as a world authority on blast-furnace technology.6 As a man with a deep interest in his community, Lowthian Bell also entered into politics. He was elected twice as the mayor of Newcastle, served as high sheriff of the county of Durham, and held a Liberal seat in Parliament for five years. This great man, with his exceptional mind, natural curiosity and limitless vitality, had a tremendous influence on his offspring, and it is to him that we may attribute some of the same qualities seen in his granddaughter.7 Of course, Gertrude also had the advantage of inheriting much of Lowthian Bell’s fortune, and this wealth would contribute significantly to her pursuit of a higher education, her extensive travels around the world and her archaeological endeavours.

  In her youth, Gertrude Bell had demonstrated a passion for literature and the arts as well as world affairs and history, and so it was decided that she would be sent up to Oxford University in 1886 to continue her studies. Although Oxford was for men only, a women’s college (Lady Margaret Hall) had recently opened, and it allowed a small number of women, including Bell, to attend the university’s lectures and sit for its examinations. Despite being one of only a handful of women in lecture halls filled with hundreds of men, Bell flourished in the academic environment. By the end of her second year, in 1888, she had succeeded in receiving a ‘first’ in Modern History, the first woman at Oxford to achieve that honour.8

  Travel featured heavily in Bell’s young adult life, particularly in the years following university. Her academic pursuits and her interest in history filled her with a desire to journey to the places that she had studied and whose pasts had come alive for her in books and the lecture halls of Oxford. Many early trips, often with family members, featured European destinations such as Germany (1886, 1896), France (1889, 1894), Romania (1888), Italy (1894, 1896) and Switzerland (1894, 1895, 1896). She even travelled as far as Constantinople on one occasion (1889).9 It was also in Europe that Bell became enamoured with mountains, the Swiss and Austrian Alps holding a particular fascination for her. Lured by the snow-capped peaks and her sense of daring and adventure, she actually established herself as a capable mountaineer. Between 1897 and 1904, Bell climbed no fewer
than ten mountain peaks or ranges, each of them more challenging than the previous. These mountains included Mont Blanc (in France), the highest summit in the Alps. This was followed by the Schreckhorn, one of the more rugged and difficult of the 13,000-foot peaks in the Alps, and the seven peaks of the Engelhörner range, none of them having been climbed before. To her tremendous pleasure, one of these peaks was christened after her, and it remains Gertrudespitze – Gertrude’s Peak. She also climbed the Matterhorn (1904), but her most death-defying climb was the Finsteraarhorn (1902). Rising to 14,022 feet, it is notorious for bad weather and frequent avalanches. She and her male climbing companions actually got within the final few hundred feet of the peak when terrible weather – a blizzard, a violent electrical storm and blinding mist – forced them to turn back. By the end of their ordeal, they had spent 53 hours on the rope, and Bell suffered frostbite in her hands and feet. Although this ascent was a failure, it earned her tremendous respect within the climbing community.10