No Woman In Recent Time Has Combined Her Qualities Her Taste For Arduous And Dangerous Adventure With

No woman in recent time has combined her qualities – her taste for arduous and dangerous adventure with her scientific interest and knowledge, her competence in archaeology and art, her distinguished literary gift, her sympathy for all sorts and condition of men, her political insight and appreciation of human values, her masculine vigour, hard common sense and practical efficiency – all tempered by feminine charm and a most romantic spirit.

- D.G. Hogarth on Gertrude Bell, explorer, archaeologist, diplomat.

No one was more qualified than distinguished Oxford archaeologist than David G. Hogarth to pass judgement on the life of Gertrude Bell.

D.G. Hogarth was Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (1909 -1927), but during the First World War as acting Director of the Arab Bureau during World War One he roped in both T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and Gertrude Bell to undertake arduous British intelligence missions in the desert.

Both Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence (of later Arabia fame) had attended Oxford and earned a First Class Honours in Modern History, both spoke fluent Arabic and both had travelled extensively in the Arabian desert and established ties with the local tribes before World War One. Hogarth recognised the value of Lawrence and Bell’s expertise and upon his recommendation first Lawrence, then Bell, were assigned to Army Intelligence Headquarters in Cairo in 1915 for wartime intelligence service.

Bell became the only female political officer in the British forces during the war. She was St. John Philby’s field controller, and taught him the finer arts of behind-the-scenes political manoeuvering - St. John Philby was a close supporter of the Ibn Saud family and the father of the future British spy traitor, Harold ‘Kim’ Philby.

After the war, Bell sought to help the Arabs. She wrote “Self-Determination in Mesopotamia,” a paper that earned her a seat at the 1919 Peace Conference in Paris. While Lawrence was frozen out, Bell became the architect of re-drawing the maps of the new emerging post-war Middle East.

Bell continued to explore related political and social issues in her 1920 work Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia. She was involved the 1921 Conference in Cairo with Winston Churchill, then colonial secretary, that established the boundaries of Iraq. Bell also helped bring Faisal I to power as Iraq’s new king. She is widely recognised as the founder of modern Iraq. For her work on their behalf, Bell earned the respect of the peoples of Mesopotamia. She was often addressed as “khutan,” which means “queen” in Persian and “respected lady” in Arabic.

Bell helped establish what is now the Iraq Museum. She wanted to help preserve the country’s heritage. In 1922, Bell was named the director of antiquities by King Faisal and she worked hard to keep important artifacts in Iraq. Bell aided in the crafting of the 1922 Law of Excavation. A few years later, the museum opened its first exhibition space in 1926. She spent the final months of her life working on the museum, cataloguing items found at Ur and Kish, two ancient Sumerian cities. Bell died on July 12, 1926, in Baghdad.

i love the phrase “you’re not wrong” because nowhere does it imply that you’re right either

sometimes i think about how constellations are an entirely man-made construct and don’t actually exhist inherently in nature. i mean, the universe just gave us stars, and we saw art and myths and stories in them. the capacity that humans have for seeing purpose in the incidental makes me realize just how lonely we are on this planet, desperately searching for meaning elsewhere in the universe.

Earthrise, Seen From the Moon (NASA, Moon, 6/16/09) by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center