Bell studied at the universities of both London and Oxford, and was the first woman to gain an Oxford first class degree in modern history, when still not quite twenty years of age.
Bell studied at the universities of both London and Oxford, and was the first woman to gain an Oxford first class degree in modern history, when still not quite twenty years of age.
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servant translator traveler author scholars archeologist
Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell was born in Washington Hall, County Durham, United Kingdom in 1868 to Mary Shield and Sir Thomas Hugh Bell. While she lost her mother in infancy, her father’s second marriage afforded her intimate access to the Lascelles family, then at the peak of its influence in British society, politics, and diplomacy.
Bell studied at the universities of both London and Oxford, and was the first woman to gain an Oxford first class degree in modern history, when still not quite twenty years of age.
For the next sixteen years, until about 1904, her life was a busy round of social occasions, private study, strenuous Alpine climbing, and lengthy visits to her diplomatic relatives in Bucharest, Tehran, and Berlin. Her Iranian stay, 1892 - 1893, led to the publication of her aptly titled "Safar Nameh. Persian Pictures. A Book of Travel" (1894). As was often the fashion at the time, the work appeared anonymously, but it was reissued posthumously under her own name in 1928 with its shorter title "Persian Pictures", and with a preface by E. Denison Ross. It was reprinted in a third edition in 1947 in The Bouverie Library with a preface by A. J. Arberry.
In Tehran she began to study Persian with a certain Shaikh Ḥasan, whose students included Friedrich Rosen — a cultural and esthetic interest maintained throughout her life — and by 1897 her mastery of the language had reached the point where she was able to publish some remarkable verse translations entitled "Poems from the Divan of Hafiz." The translation is done in a free style, with little attention paid to the order of the lines, so that it is not always easy to identify a particular verse. Rosen, who knew Bell quite well and kept in close contact with her, though praising the work as “exquisite”, remarked that she had made free use of the German translation by Vincenz Rosenzweig von Schwannau without acknowledging the fact.
E. G. Browne compiled a concordance of her translation and the odes (ḡazals) in the Rosenzweig-Schwannau edition of Ḥāfeẓ while Q. Ḡanī, an authority on Ḥāfeẓ, carried the task farther in his notes on the margin of the 1928 edition of the Poems, and identified almost all the original verses, made explanatory remarks, and pointed out some lapses and where spurious verses had been translated. Nearly a century later, Bell’s work remains highly esteemed by both the learned and the laity, for both its subtle insights and its confident and delicate artistry. Around the turn of the century, she was resident in Jerusalem for a while, studying Arabic (for the sake of which she discontinued her Persian studies), and visiting Petra and Baalbek.
From 1905 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Bell traveled widely and systematically — usually in primitive and isolated circumstances — throughout the whole Middle East and beyond. Her ride through Syria and Cilicia to Konya resulted in "The Desert and the Sown" (1907) and in some articles in the Revue archéologique. Exploration of Hittite and Byzantine sites was conducted and recorded (jointly with Sir William M. Ramsay) in "The Thousand and One Churches" (1909).
Next, she went from Aleppo down the Euphrates to Ukhaidir (Oḵayżer; then virtually unexamined in any serious way), returning to Asia Minor via Baghdad and Mosul. The account of this trip (with an interesting excursus on the Young Turks) appeared in 1911 as Amurath to Amurath. A carefully planned return visit to Ukhaidir led to Bell’s most important archeological publication of all, "The Palace and Mosque of Ukhaidir" (1914). Finally in this period, she made an ultimately abortive, but still useful, exploration of northern Arabia in 1913 - 1914.
In the first year of World War I, the restless Gertrude Bell was sidetracked into various worthy, but personally unsuitable activities (such as nursing on the western front), but by November, 1915, she had been recruited to do intelligence-cum-political work in the Middle East, where the Allied Powers were encouraging local insurrections against the Ottoman Empire. Here began her close association with the chief political officer, Sir Percy Cox, and his sometime successor Sir Arnold Wilson. At the beginning of her last decade of life, she had finally found her true métier.
In March, 1917, she arrived in Baghdad as “Oriental secretary”; and from 1920 onward, when Cox became British high commissioner in Mesopotamia, she played a key role in the establishment of the new state and government of Iraq and the installation of Amir (later King) Faisal. In 1917 she was awarded the decoration Commander of the British Empire, and her abilities were further recognized in her appointment as a delegate to the peace conference in 1919. To this period belong two important documents authored by her: "The Arab of Mesopotamia" (1917) and a British official report (White Paper) entitled "Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia" (1921).
Bell had long been absorbed in archeology and the proper care of antiquities, and she worked energetically, after 1918, for the establishment of an Iraqi national museum. This was inaugurated in 1923 and gained its first significant building and staffing in 1926. With the more or less parallel setting up of a national department of antiquities, Gertrude Bell’s lifework was consummated with every reason for deep satisfaction; she had in fact spent all her forces and began to think seriously of quiet retirement in Britain. Before this could be realized, however, she died suddenly in her sleep on the night of 11-12 July 1926, and was buried the next day, with considerable ceremony, in Baghdad.
She played a major role in establishing and helping administer the modern state of Iraq, utilizing her unique perspective from her travels and relations with tribal leaders throughout the Middle E. During her lifetime she was highly esteemed and trusted by British officials and exerted an immense amount of power. She has been described as "one of the few representatives of His Majesty's Government remembered by the Arabs with anything resembling affection." Gertrude Bell's work was specially mentioned in the British Parliament, and she was awarded the Order of the British Empire.
On so-called Arab nationalism under Turkish rule, she pointed out that “Islam is the bond that unites the western and central parts of the continent, as it is the electric current by which the transmission of sentiment is effected, and its potency is increased by the fact that there is little or no sense of territorial nationality to counterbalance it.”
From her point of view, political independence could not exit in a country that adhered to tribal laws and pledged alliance to ancient systems of resolution — for example, Bell had written of one tribesman who had ‘slashed the air defiantly with his tamarish switch as he proclaimed the liberties of the wilderness, the right of feud, the right of raid, the right of revenge — the only liberty which the desert knows.
In reality, she was a liberal, even a radical, thinker; often at odds with her own society and government; a serious scholar; and a sensitive admirer of the peoples and cultures of the region to which she devoted the second half of her relatively short life.
Quotations: “I’ve loved the reviews which speak of the practical men who were the anonymous authors, etc. It’s fun being practical men, isn’t it.”
Her personality was characterised by energy, intellect, and a thirst for adventure which shaped her path in life. Almost from the beginning, Bell was a very independent person and outwardly unconventional — she began smoking in her late teens, for example, in an age when such behavior was assumed appropriate only for actresses and women of ill-repute. An avid reader, she demonstrated intellectual interests and abilities at an early age.
Quotes from others about the person
She is a remarkably clever woman with the brains of a man.
Bell never married or had children.
