Her governesses and teachers were exasperated by Bell and astonished by her quick mind and aptitude for learning. As her intelligence became increasingly apparent, the teenage Bell became more and more impervious to the monotony of her at-home schooling and restless with the insatiable drive that eventually came to define her. She was also argumentative and bossy, and her parents recognized that the normal sequence of events for a girl Bell’s age—the formal introduction to society, a time to court and spark, a wedding and children soon after—wasn’t going to fly. When she was fifteen they made the exceptional decision to send her to Queen’s College, an all-girls’ school in London. From there, Bell’s razor-sharp intellect and her professors’ persuasive recommendations that she continue her education allowed her to carry on her studies at Oxford in 1886. Once enrolled, she started attending the Oxford Archaeological Society meetings.
Bell was at Lady Margaret Hall, one of the two women’s colleges at Oxford, and while living on campus she was, as one of her biographers put it, “something of a social hand grenade.”8 No doubt she was frustrated by the restrictions placed on her because she was a woman: always required to have a chaperone to go anywhere, treated as an unwanted interloper in an almost exclusively male environment, often made to sit at the back of the room and told to hush. But she aired her thoughts freely and without a second’s hesitation and even told off her male teachers when she felt they deserved it. To her female counterparts, she was a hero. Her friend and fellow student Janet Hogwarth would later write in memory: “Gertrude Lowthian Bell, the most brilliant student we ever had at Lady Margaret Hall . . .—alive at every point, the vivid, rather untidy, auburn-haired girl of seventeen . . . took our hearts by storm with her brilliant talk and her youthful confidence in her self and her belongings.”9
By the time Bell completed her studies at Oxford, in a remarkable two years instead of the normal three, she was the only woman to have ever taken a First in Modern History. This was (and remains) the greatest academic achievement that could be awarded a student, male or female. Although her degree was never formally awarded—Oxford did not extend hard-earned degrees to female students until 1920—Bell’s own glee about her monumental accomplishment shines in a quick letter to her stepmother. Dated 1889 in London, it read: “Minnie Hope was sitting with an Oxford man. Presently he grabbed her hand and said ‘do you see that young lady in a blue jacket?’ ‘yes’ said Minnie lying low. ‘Well,’ said he in an awestruck voice, ‘she took a first in history!!’”10 She did, and soon afterward she was off to begin a series of journeys across uncharted, archaeologically rich lands that would eventually make her a significant figure in history herself.
THE EXTENSIVE TRAVELS that Bell would embark upon were possible not only because she had gumption but also because her family had money and influence. Florence’s relations and friends abroad allowed Bell to start a traveling career as the doors of all the French and British embassies were flung open wide in welcome.
It was in 1892, at the age of twenty-four, that she got her first taste of the Middle East. Persia, the place she had “always longed to see,” was to be hers for six months. Florence’s sister Mary and her husband, British Ambassador Frank Lascelles, had invited Bell to join them on a tour. In preparation, Bell tackled Farsi and achieved basic fluency. Mastering multiple languages became a trait of hers. She spoke French, German, Persian, Arabic, and enough Hindustani and Japanese to get by. Although she had an exceptional talent for learning languages, she still struggled when she started. Practicing Arabic, she complained to her father in a letter: “I thought I should never be able to put two words together . . . there are at least three sounds almost impossible to the European throat. The worst I think is a very much aspirated H. I can only say it by holding down my tongue with one finger, but then you can’t carry on a conversation with your finger down your throat can you?”11
In Persia, Bell stayed in Teheran, where she fell in love with scenes of stone and sand. The desert’s vastness thrilled her; she thought its miles of nothingness were wonderful. She must have seen something of herself in its stretch, aware that the desert was uniquely suited to absorb her boundless energy. She continued to travel around the world with her father or her brother Maurice for the next seven years, and it wasn’t until 1899 that she returned to the Middle East. Then she began to hear the siren’s song of archaeology and made it her lifelong passion.
BELL’S WORK AS an archaeologist was more dangerous and more bug-ridden, unmapped, and exposed to harsh conditions and hazards than that conducted by any other woman before World War I—and, safe to say, by most men too.12 She normally traveled on horseback, occasionally by camel, and always alone except for the men she hired. It was often so scorching hot in the deserts that she wore full-length coats to ward off the white sun’s rays: “The sun was so hot it burnt one through one’s boots. I have gone into linen and khaki. The latter consists of a man’s ready-made coat, so big that there is room in it for every wind that blows, and most comfy; great deep pockets. The shopkeeper was very anxious that I should buy the trousers too but I haven’t come to that yet.”13 Unlike Jane Dieulafoy, Bell never wore pants. She refused. Although she was sometimes mistaken for a man or boy, greeted as Effendim! (my lord) by desert Druze and Bedouin men, once she spoke, unwrapped the veils from her face, and took off her coat, there was nothing manly about her.
ABOVE : One of Gertrude Bell’s field tents
Bell was a fashionista. Her wardrobe was all dressing gowns, velvet wraps, feathered felt hats, and crêpe de chine blouses. Her travel bags held porcelain china to dine on and crystal, delicate as her own English features, to drink from. Bell understood her power as a European woman abroad, and she never apologized for being a lady. She basked in her own sense of rarity and strode through even the most extreme field conditions in a skirt.
But she was practical too. In her post-Oxford, pre-archaeologist days Bell passed the time with a little mountaineering (she was a real hobby conqueror). She scaled icy ridges and high peaks in the Swiss Alps numerous times, had a particularly ferocious mountain named after her thanks to the glory of her ascent of it, and went down in the pages of climbing history as the unparalleled “prominent lady mountaineer” of her time, one who was venerated by the following praise: “of all the amateurs, men or women . . . [there were] very few to surpass her in technical skill and none to equal her in coolness, bravery and judgment.”14 In her coolness, she took off her cumbersome skirts while climbing and made her way up rocky overhangs in only her undergarments. Clothing, though adored by Bell, could be left behind as easily as pretense and convention when circumstances required.
But there’s no doubt she loved her pretty things. She always perused the Harrod’s catalog to keep up with trends, and as a young woman in 1899 she would write to her sister Elsa, “My new clothes are very dreamy. You will scream with delight when you see me in them!” Much later, as a woman of fifty, masterminding and maneuvering in high political circles, she would still write her stepmother to ask for the latest styles in fashion—for a silk evening dress to be shipped her way by post, for “a green silk woven jacket thing with silver buttons,” please. She used both her elegance and the polished manners she inherited from her stepmother to advantage.
Pearls and feathers aside, Bell was still resilient in an unfriendly field. Despite the luxuries she grew up with, she could happily forsake lamb suppers, cream scones, and tea for big bowls of milk, sour bread, and dibbis (a sweet date syrup) and, on special occasions, sheep. She didn’t flinch from drinking muddy water—only declining a sip from cisterns that were “full of little red animals swimming cheerfully about.” Most mornings she breakfasted on “dates, camels’ milk and the bitter black coffee of the Arabs—a peerless drink.” For a treat there was white coffee: hot water, sweetened and flavored with almonds. On some hard nights when starry darkness settled in on what Bell called “starvation camp”: only rice and bread to nibble and no charcoal for fire or barley f
or the horses. 15
Outfitted in her long coat, she would withstand days of travel, some ten or more hours long, after which she would feel “as if I had been sitting in my saddle for a lifetime and my horse felt so too.” Her face was whipped by blowing sand, rain, sun, snow, and ice and sometimes clouded in warm, eerie mists that made the landscape around her disappear. The terrain ranged from sloping dunes to a crumbling rock that made the horses slip and skid, to yellow mud the “consistency of butter”16 that threatened to swallow her team whole, pet dog included.
Come bedtime she endured a variety of makeshift camps. Some were pleasantly tucked into flowered hillsides, quaint villages close, running streams nearby; others were thick with black beetles or rocky affairs where a mattress was mere thistles and her bed fellows stinging flies. Most of her experiences seem to have kept her in high spirits, though, and were preferable to some stifling social event with English ladies. As she put it, “This sort of life grows upon one. The tedious things become less tedious and the amusing more amusing . . .”
Bell received an allowance from her father that financed each of her excursions. Although she was in charge of most aspects of her life, she never held her own purse strings. Without Hugh Bell’s support, Gertrude Bell’s legacy would never have been realized. His support, permission, and financing is what allowed her to travel. Today a young woman can travel independently and on the cheap—by teaching English abroad, working as an au pair, backpacking, being an exchange student—but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to travel at all was pure luxury. Even if that luxury included bug-infested tents, fevers, and meals of sour milk, the whole lot required a sizable investment. Horses had to be purchased, guides hired, cooks and servants employed, sheiks paid with handsome gifts, officials bribed, villages wooed, postage on a thousand letters home paid, and all the equipment a rigorous desert journey required—from pistols to bedding—purchased and packed. The Dieulafoys had a similar shopping list.
ABOVE : Bell picnicking with Iraq’s King Faisal and company, 1922
All this effort was driven by archaeology. Bell was passionate about it. A visit to Petra in 1900 introduced her to the grandeur of history. Located in Jordan, the “rose-red city half as old as time” was carved entirely out stone. Its beauty caught hold of her:
. . .we rode on and soon got into the entrance of the defile which leads to Petra . . . oleanders grew along the stream and here and there a sheaf of ivy hung down over the red rock. We went on in ecstasies until suddenly between the narrow opening of the rocks, we saw the most beautiful sight I have ever seen. Imagine a temple cut out of the solid rock, the charming facade supported on great Corinthian columns standing clear, soaring upwards to the very top of the cliff in the most exquisite proportions and carved with groups of figures almost as fresh as when the chisel left them, all this in the rose red rock, with the sun just touching it and making it look almost transparent . . . It is like a fairy tale city, all pink and wonderful.17
This was the city of later Indiana Jones fame (the backdrop to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), and today Petra is a popular tourist destination and designated UNESCO World Heritage Site. But in Bell’s day it was empty—quiet and, for those who ventured so far to see it, all theirs to enjoy. After falling in love with Petra, Bell always “wished to look upon the ruins.” Between 1905 and 1914 her work and desert travel were structured, even dominated, by archaeological study. She carefully recorded the ancient sites and remnants of buildings scattered throughout the Middle East, and she was often the first European, man or woman, to see an ancient site and to announce its existence to scholars back home. In archaeology, all her talents found a unique point of intersection. Her study of history at Oxford, all the languages she spoke (including myriad dialects of Arabic), and her high taste for adventure all merged into a single, passionate pursuit. For the rest of her life, archaeology would remain her biggest joy. As she once said, “I always feel most well when I am doing archaeology.” 18
ABOVE : Unlike Jane Dieulafoy, Bell never preferred to wear trousers in the field
AMELIA EDWARDS TOOK a life-changing trip, the Dieulafoys tackled the world together, and Zelia Nuttall eventually settled in her favorite place, becoming deeply enmeshed in its culture and history. Gertrude Bell simply rode and rode and rode. Bell’s life was more about the journey than about getting there, and she grew to be as nomadic as the Bedouins who shared fire and food with her.
The maps Bell made as she traveled uncharted deserts became lifelines for those who would later follow in her footsteps. In addition, she had two great and lasting credits: the first was her work in the field, and the second her role in establishing the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad, where she also wrote the country’s first antiquity laws.
Bell carried an early Kodak camera on her travels and took nearly seven thousand photographs between 1900 and 1918. Most of them feature archaeological ruins and desert tribes.19 To this day, these black and white images are consulted for their accuracy and rare glimpse into a time untouched by Western influence. As a field archaeologist, Bell’s most significant contribution was this incredible visual record of archaeological sites, inscriptions, cultural landscapes, and sundry features of architectural and artistic value.
She never participated in a true season of excavation, partly because of her love of independence and partly because she was never invited to join a team. Single women were simply not included in respectable field crews in the Middle East at that time.
Nevertheless, no one could deny her knowledge of archaeology, and she also helped to finance some projects, earning her a bit of an “in.” It is most accurate to say that Bell focused her efforts on archaeological expeditions—visits to survey, map, and record sites—rather than archaeological excavations, where she would have unpacked and stayed put to dig in.
ABOVE : Bell’s field tent pitched in the shadow of ancient ruins
In 1905, at the age of thirty-seven, Bell romped through Syria in a state of bliss, visiting with the Druze people and writing of her adventures in The Desert and the Sown, a book so well loved that it is still in print today. Like Bell’s own field journeys, this book invited the reader to gaze upon those ruins with her, illustrated as it is with scattered photographs of statues and sphinxes, ornate column fragments, and pots. The same year The Desert and the Sown was published, 1907, Bell also authored a series of important articles in the journal Revue Archéologique about her findings during an excursion from northern Syria through Turkey, where she examined early Byzantine architecture. She was becoming increasingly prolific in her archaeological writing.
In the field, Bell’s greatest distinction came from her work at a site called Binbir Kilise in south-central Turkey. Her archaeological investigations at this site and surrounding areas included “churches, chapels, monasteries, mausoleums, and fortresses that had never been previously described or mapped.”20She collaborated with William Ramsay on this project, and in 1909 they published a book on their findings called The Thousand and One Churches. Although Bell had contributed 460 pages and Ramsay 80, the book still listed Ramsay as the primary author.
Bell’s love of archaeology took her to Greece, Paris, Rome, and beyond, as well as through the deserts of the Orient and eventually to Mesopotamia, the future home of Iraq. Through it all she was attuned to the archaeological essence of the landscape, to its potential for containing lost histories, and was distressed when corn was planted on tells because the harvested roots might disturb the stratigraphy. She was also becoming ever more attuned to archaeological nuance. A scattering of stones that might represent an old wall, a shift in soil color that might signify disturbance to an area, a hill-like mound that might contain a buried fortress—Bell was on the lookout. Her appetite for archaeological discovery was never sated. Even at dinner parties her archaeological prowess would spill forth like the amply poured wine. She would speak of this or that new site, a fresh argument made in an excavation report, or d
elight in new theories explaining how the first people crossed over to North America via the Bering Strait leaving a trail of stone tools and bison bones behind them.
In 1917 she arrived in Baghdad, and it was here that her life took a new course, culminating in a line of work she found vital, essential, absolutely critical: the creation of an autonomous Arab state. Her knowledge of Arabic language, desert tribes, factions, leaders, and geography was of strategic importance to the British military, and she was invited to work in Baghdad for the Arab Bureau—the only woman in a cabinet of men. The High Commissioner of Iraq, Sir Percy Cox, appointed her Oriental Secretary.
In Baghdad it was so hot that “the days melt[ed] like snow in the sun.” She bought her first house, filled it with potted jasmine and mimosa, with woven carpets and pet dogs, and got comfortable, but she soon began to run bad fevers and write letters home in which she tried her cheerful best to shrug off any concern for her latest cold or flu. Outdoor temperatures reached 120 degrees Fahrenheit every day, cooling only slightly just before dawn broke. She went from lean to thin, from inexhaustible in the saddle to fatigued at her desk, and though she clearly found her work in Baghdad thrilling and momentously important, the gaiety of her field days was replaced by a slightly stressed tone. Vita Sackville-West visited Bell in 1926 and wrote:
I had known her first in Constantinople, where she had arrived straight out of the desert, with all the evening dresses and cutlery and napery that she insisted on taking with her on her wanderings; and then in England; but here she was in her right place, in Iraq . . .
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