Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope was a British socialite, adventurer and traveller. Her archaeological expedition to Ashkelon in 1815 is considered the first modern excavation in the history of Holy Land archeology.
Background
Stanhope was born on March 12, 1776 in Chevening, England, the eldest child of Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope, by his first wife Lady Hester Pitt. Early in 1800, she was sent to live with her grandmother, Hester Pitt, Countess of Chatham, at Burton Pynsent.
Career
In August 1803, Stanhope became chief of the household of her uncle, William Pitt the Younger. In his position as British Prime Minister, Pitt, who was unmarried, needed a hostess. Lady Hester sat at the head of his table and assisted in welcoming his guests; she became known for her beauty and conversational skills. When Pitt was out of the office she served as his private secretary. On Pitt's death in 1806, the government granted her an annual pension of £1, 200.
After her brother's death, Stanhope went on a sea voyage. It is claimed that when she arrived in Athens, the poet, Lord Byron, dived into the sea to greet her. From Athens they traveled to Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire, and intended to proceed to Cairo, only recently emerged from the chaos following Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the international conflicts that followed.
En route to Cairo, the ship encountered a storm and was shipwrecked on Rhodes. A British frigate took Stanhope to Cairo, from where she continued her travels in the Middle East. Over a period of two years she visited Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionian Islands, the Peloponnese, Athens, Constantinople, Rhodes, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. She decided to visit the city of Palmyra, even though the route went through a desert with potentially hostile Bedouins. She dressed as a Bedouin and took with her a caravan of 22 camels to carry her baggage. Emir Mahannah el Fadel received her and she became known as "Queen Hester. "
According to Charles Meryon, she came into possession of a medieval Italian manuscript copied from the records of a monastery somewhere in Syria. According to this document, a great treasure was hidden under the ruins of a mosque at the port city of Ashkelon which had been lying in ruins for 600 years. In 1815, on the strength of this map, she traveled to the ruins of Ashkelon on the Mediterranean coast north of Gaza, and persuaded the Ottoman authorities to allow her to excavate the site. The governor of Jaffa, Abu Nabbut (Father of the Cudgel) was ordered to accompany her. This resulted in the first archaeological excavation in Palestine. While she did not find the hoard of three million gold coins reportedly buried there, the excavators unearthed a seven-foot headless marble statue. For political reasons, she ordered the statue to be smashed into "a thousand pieces" and thrown into the sea. She destroyed the statue to prove to the Sultan and the Ottamans that she undertook the dig to give them the treasure; not to steal relics to ship back to Europe as bragging rights as so many of her countrymen were doing. Her expedition paved the way for future excavations and tourism to the site.
Lady Hester settled near Sidon, a town on the Mediterranean coast in what is now Lebanon. Lady Hester moved to a remote abandoned monastery at Joun, a village eight miles from Sidon, where she lived until her death. Her residence, known by the villagers as Dahr El Sitt, was at the top of a hill.