Her articles for Hogarth’s Arabian Report and the famous Arab Bulletin ranked among “the best sources of information on the events in the Middle East during the war.” When the Turks lost Baghdad in early 1917, Bell engaged in Mesopotamia’s civil administration.
“Outstanding literary and linguistic skills” coupled with “determination, bravery, physical strength, and endurance” invigorated contributions to travel literature, translation, archaeology, and architecture, eventually evolving into engagement in the region’s socio-political currents.īy the First World War, Bell became “a voluntary agent of Britain’s interests in the Middle East” and assumed her defining role – as “a woman trying to break one of the most challenging barriers of her time: the physical conquest of the desert and the decoding of the moral and ethical code of its inhabitants.” (ODNB)Īfter joining the Arab Bureau in Cairo in 1916, Bell was annexed to the military intelligence department in Basrah and charged with gathering information on the movements of Bedouin tribes in central Arabia and in the Sinai Peninsula. By her mid-twenties the unmarried Bell discovered intellectual and emotional fascination with the Middle East. Raised amid the wealth of her industrialist grandfather, Bell lost her mother at age three, increasing a “sense of independence and self-reliance” perhaps already inherent to the “physically restless and intellectually gifted” child. “Lawrence of Arabia” did much to frame and shape the Middle East during and after the First World War. Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell, CBE (1868-1926) was the intriguing and influential adventurer, scholar, writer, and diplomat who, like her contemporary T.
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