National Geographic: Treasure Seekers - The Edge of the Orient (2000) Movie Script
It was the birthplace of civilization,
now a barren and exotic landscape,
alluring in its mystery.
For thousands of years,
the Middle East
had guarded its secrets.
But by the 19th century
it had become a battleground
for competing empires
eager for political control
and archeological treasure.
It was a time when archeology
was intertwined with espionage.
When politics was called
"The Great Game".
Into this arena stepped
two remarkable Britons
a young adventurer named
Austin Henry Layard,
who uncovered the treasures of
a fabulous lost civilization,
and a brilliant politician
named Gertrude Bell,
the "brains" behind
Lawrence of Arabia.
Both would follow their dreams into
the desert
changing it forever.
In the spring of 1840,
an intrepid young Englishman found
his way to the ancient land
between the Tigris and
Euphrates Rivers, now part of Iraq.
He was on his way towards India
to make his fortune.
But there was something about
this desert that caught hold of him
and wouldn't let him go.
More than 2,000 years ago,
two mighty empires had ruled
this land: Babylonia and Assyria.
Their cities were fabled
for their opulence.
Their power rivaled
only by each other.
The Assyrians were
fearsome warriors.
Eight centuries before Christ,
they had marched on the Israelites.
City after city fell before them.
Even Jerusalem was under siege.
Thousands of captives were taken,
immortalized as the
Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.
And all this was written
in the Bible.
But now almost all traces of these
great civilizations had disappeared.
There was nothing here but desert
as far as the eye could see.
Yet in this wasteland, Austin Henry
Layard saw the chance
of a lifetime.
In the decade to come,
he would uncover the secrets
of this barren desert,
and reveal the truth
in a Bible story.
When he saw the mounds and saw
this area, he saw opportunity.
He saw opportunity for fame,
and he was looking as a way
to make his name and his life.
From his earliest childhood,
Austin Henry Layard was
an unusual young man.
Most of his youth was spent
in Florence
where he fell in love with
that ancient city's history and art.
Formal schooling was not for him,
but he knew almost every painting in
the galleries and
churches of the city.
The rest of his time he spent
dreaming, lost in stories of adventure.
His favorite was a book only recently
translated into English.
The work in which I took the
greatest delight was the Arabian Nights.
My imagination became
so much excited by it,
that I thought and dreamt of
little else.
The Arabian Nights have had no little
influence upon my life and career.
To them, I attribute that love of
travel and adventure,
which took me to the East.
Ever since Napoleon rediscovered
the wonders of Egypt
at the turn of the century,
Europeans had been captivated by
the exoticism of the East.
From the time he was a boy,
Austin Henry Layard
fell under its spell.
His family tried to make
a lawyer of him.
Layard hated the law, but he stuck it
out and passed his exams at 22.
Casting about, he learned of a
possible job in Ceylon,
a British colony
halfway around the world.
It was the chance
he had been waiting for.
Layard found another traveler
to accompany him
in the overland route
through the Ottoman Empire.
In 1839, this was a journey
well off the beaten track,
which could take more than a year.
The two men wore Turkish dress
to assure safe passage,
and lived out of their saddlebags.
They made their way down into Turkey,
the gateway to another world.
This was my first glimpse
of Eastern life.
The booths in the covered alleys
of the bazaar;
the veiled women gliding
through the crowd;
the dim and mysterious light
of the place.
I felt myself in a new world,
a world of which I had dreamt
since my earliest childhood.
When Austin Henry Layard
reached the desert,
he was living
his deepest fantasy.
You know how sometimes you go to
a place, and it is you,
and you just fit,
and you feel comfortable?
I don't think Layard,
at that stage in his life,
was comfortable in
Victorian England.
But when he got to Petra,
in particular, where he was robbed
and had a terrible time,
he felt at home
because he felt a kinship
with these people
who were very volatile and friendly
and outgoing like he was.
Petra also satisfied Layard's
fascination with history.
The city's fading grandeur
carved from solid rock.
But there were other
even more ancient ruins,
and these proved
more intriguing still.
One day on his way through
the Tigris and Euphrates valley,
he caught sight of
something extraordinary
rising out of the flat desert plain.
I saw for the first time the great
Mound of Nimrud against
the clear sky.
The impression it made upon me was
one never to be forgotten.
Layard vowed that
some day he would return
to investigate the mysterious mound.
In the meantime,
the romantic young Englishman
lost all interest
in continuing on to Ceylon.
For a year, he lived with
the Baktiari nomads in Persia,
whose way of life had not changed
for 3,000 years.
And it was I think one reason
he became the archeologist he did.
He learned how to
improvise on the spot;
he learned how to
adjust circumstances,
how to live in discomfort;
and above all,
how to interact with these people.
His meager funds now growing short,
the enterprising Layard used his
facility with different cultures
to get a job with the British
ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.
For three years,
he served as a kind of roving reporter.
He was really a secret agent.
A lot of his work was very sensitive,
and negotiating with
these sorts of people.
And the skills he gained
were priceless,
but it is only a certain sort of
person who will gain those skills.
Very outgoing, very entrepreneurial,
in a way.
Never at a loss.
That's where Layard was brilliant.
Layard's new skills were just
the right mix for his next assignment.
A new kind of conflict was
heating up in the Middle East.
Ever since Napoleon had brought back
treasures from Egypt,
the great powers had been on the
lookout for archeological booty.
The idea of museums,
temples of the muses,
was one which was capturing the
imagination of 19th century Europeans.
The British, the French, the Germans
were all building these palaces
in which to place... well,
what are they going to place there?
Like Layard, the French recognized
the potential of the strange mounds
rising out of
the Middle Eastern desert.
Now they had begun to dig,
and at Khorsabad they were uncovering
some very interesting sculptures.
There was certainly a competition
between the French and the British
as to who could find
the biggest treasures
in order to stock the museums
in Paris and London.
And, in fact, newspaper articles
and magazines at that time
actually described these finds
as "Trophies of empire."
To catch up with the French,
Layard persuaded the British ambassador
to fund a trial excavation
at his mound at Nimrud.
Within weeks, he was ready to begin,
instructed to keep a low profile.
On the 8th of November 1845,
having secretly procured a few tools,
and carrying with me a variety of
guns, spears and other weapons,
I declared that I was going to hunt
wild boars in a neighboring village,
and floated down the Tigris
on a small raft.
It was dark by the time Layard
arrived at the mound.
Five years had passed
since he'd first laid eyes on it.
His head was filled with excitement.
He found it almost impossible
to sleep.
Visions of palaces underground,
of sculptured figures and endless
inscriptions floated before me.
After forming plan after plan
for removing the earth
and extricating these treasures,
I fancied myself wandering
in a maze of chambers
from which I could find no outlet.
At dawn the next morning,
the resourceful young Englishman
assembled his team and set to work.
He had no experience,
very little money,
and no guarantee of success.
He really had no expertise in what he
was doing, except his natural talent.
And he was rushing
because the French were competing,
and their influence over
the Turks could mean that
his license to be digging
would quickly be cut off.
And he needed a good find quickly
because he knew that's what would
bring the support
from the British government,
or from the British Museum,
from the British community
to enable him to go on.
Amazingly, on the very first day of
digging, Layard hit pay dirt.
A piece of alabaster appeared
above the soil.
We could not remove it,
and on digging downward it proved
to be the upper part of a large slab.
The men shortly uncovered ten more.
It was evident that the top of
a chamber had been discovered.
Digging along the walls of the chamber,
within weeks the men uncovered
a series of splendid sculptured panels.
Layard was captivated by
their beauty.
But he knew they wouldn't be enough
to get the British Museum to fund him.
He was looking for
the spectacular sculpture,
which would dazzle the public,
and give him fame in London.
I say this not out of
a criticism of Layard.
He was penniless.
This was his way to fame and fortune.
And he knew it.
A few months later,
Layard was on his way
to visit a local sheik
when two horsemen caught up with him.
"Hasten, O Bey," they cried.
"Hasten to the diggers,
for they have found Nimrod himself."
Rising out of the earth was
a gigantic head.
The workmen were terrified of
this colossus they called Nimrod,
and ran off to spread the news.
But Layard was elated.
He'd only been digging a few months,
and here was treasure
the French would envy.
Unfortunately, the resulting uproar
gave the Ottoman Turks the excuse
they'd been looking for
to shut down the dig.
Layard suspected
the hand of the French.
Quietly he kept a few men on
who unearthed two gigantic sculptures
strange and awe inspiring.
With his knowledge of art history,
Layard knew that he had found
an entirely new style of art.
The British Museum agreed and finally
gave him the money he needed.
A year after he'd begun,
Turkish permission in hand,
Layard launched full scale
excavations at Nimrud.
Every day produced
some new discovery.
My Arabs entered with alacrity
into the work,
and felt almost as much interested in
its results as I did myself.
Tunneling along the walls of
what turned out to be a palace,
they found hundreds of
alabaster sculptures,
some disintegrating from
ancient fires.
Layard drew what he could,
working from dawn until dusk.
In the evening,
after the labor of the day,
I often sat at the door
of my tent and gave myself up
to the full enjoyment imparted to
the senses by such scenes as these.
I live among the ruins,
and dream of little else.
But still Layard had to face
his biggest challenge.
Somehow he had to transport
his treasures back to London.
It's quite one thing to dig up
these large human
headed lions or bas relief,
some of which weighed several tons.
And quite another thing
to take them back to London or Paris.
And this is where Layard was a genius
he had learned to improvise.
He acquired the loyalty of
the local people.
He got a cart built, and there were
wonderful pictures in his books
of luring these lions with ropes
down on to one of the carts,
and the famous occasion
when the ropes broke
and the lion fell like this.
And they thought it was broken,
but it wasn't.
And the workmen burst into
a wild dance.
And they towed this thing
to the river.
And they built a raft of timber and
supported it on inflated goatskins.
I watched the rafts
until they disappeared,
musing upon the strange destiny
of their burdens.
After adorning the palaces
of Assyrian kings,
they had been buried unknown
for centuries
beneath the soil trodden by
the Persians, the Greeks and the Arabs.
They were now to cross
the most distance seas
to be finally placed
in a British museum.
great revolutions in Europe
is the year when all of
the Assyrian stuff
that Layard had discovered was
first displayed in England,
and it was a sensation.
He was lionized by society.
He became a public figure.
A young man who had gone out East
and made good.
Look what he had bought
for Britain.
Layard wrote a best seller
about his adventures
uncovering the impressive
civilization of the Assyrians,
lost to history
for more than 2,000 years.
But he struggled to understand
the strange beasts he'd discovered,
and which had taken London by storm.
This creature stood to
either side of the doorway
of an important location in the
Assyrian world to guard the way in.
And that lion's body
will tear you apart,
and those wings of a bird of prey
will overtake you,
and that human head
will out think you.
And believe me, the Assyrians
believed that,
and would have been suitably
intimidated
just as the British were suitably
impressed
by this extraordinary exotic creature
that he brought back.
The treasures of Assyria
were trophies of Empire.
But to many people, they were more.
In the secular 19th century,
the historical validity of
the Bible was under attack.
Were its stories true,
or were they simply stories?
Perhaps the answer could be found
in the mounds of Mesopotamia.
With mounting public interest,
the British Museum decided to fund
a second expedition.
In 1849, Layard tackled a mound
the French had given up on,
near the banks of the Tigris River.
Tunneling deep inside,
he uncovered indisputable evidence
that would prove he had found Nineveh,
the biblical capital of Assyria.
Nearly two miles of
sculptured alabaster panels
proclaiming the bloody conquests
of its kings.
A great library which would unlock
the lost history of the Assyrians.
And most extraordinary of all,
evidence of the bloody siege
of the Israelite city of Lachish
that was depicted in the Bible.
To dig and dig and dig,
then to uncover what you come to
recognize both by the images
and then corroborated by the cuneiform
descriptions is the siege of Lachish,
The conquest of Lachish,
the carrying of captives from
of Lachish of Judean captives.
Judean, the word is there,
back to other parts of Assyria
must have been phenomenal.
Here is a site that is
mentioned in the Bible.
And, again, is it a real site?
Suddenly, it becomes real.
Suddenly, it is three dimensional.
Suddenly, it is tangible,
and that provoked an enthusiasm
that has lasted 160 years
until our own time for the archeology
of the Near East
with specific respect to its
relationship to the Bible.
Layard's remarkable discoveries
lifted Assyria from obscurity,
placing it firmly in the pantheon
of history's great empires.
He went on to a successful career
as a member of Parliament,
and ambassador to Constantinople.
And by the time this Victorian
statesman died in 1894,
the Middle East was no longer
a forgotten backwater.
The Ottoman Turks were
losing their grip on the region,
and it had become a pawn
in a game of empire,
veering dangerously out of control.
In the new century,
another British adventurer would help
forge an even bigger role
for the crown in the Middle East.
Her name was Gertrude Bell,
and she has often been called
the brain behind the exploits
of Lawrence of Arabia.
At the close of World War I,
it was she who redrew
the map of the Middle East.
She also championed
modern archeology,
and insisted that a country had
the right to keep its own antiquities.
Born in 1868, Gertrude Bell is
in many ways a tragic figure.
Despite a life of achievement,
unusual for a woman in her time,
she remained unsatisfied,
never convinced that
the treasure she was seeking
was truly the one she wanted.
As a teenager,
the red headed young woman spent
most of her time
surrounded by books.
Like Austin Henry Layard,
she was captivated by the mysterious
world of the Arabian Nights.
This was really the height of
British Imperialism in the East,
so that all of these images
of the Orient
were even far more prevalent than
during Layard's childhood.
The museums by then were stocked with
antiquities from Assyria and Babylon.
Gertrude was especially fascinated
by the politics of the East.
But she always felt as if she were
laboring under a handicap-her gender.
I wish I could go to
the National Gallery,
but there is no one to take me.
If I were a boy, I should go to
that incomparable place every week.
But being a girl,
to see lovely things is denied me.
Gertrude was an exceptional child.
As a girl in particular,
she was exceptional
because her father encouraged her
to read, to learn,
to be adventurous, to explore.
And then she was sent off
to Oxford University,
one of the first women
to attend Oxford.
And she left there with
the highest honors in her field.
Gertrude was 20 years old.
But now, instead of thinking about
a suitable career
for a person of her talents,
convention dictated that
she go about the business
of finding a suitable husband.
She had three chances.
Three seasons in which
she was presented to society.
And it was expected that she would
find a husband along the way.
She didn't.
Either she didn't like the men
who were attracted to her,
or the men she was attracted to
were not interested in her.
At the end of the three seasons,
she had no husband,
and in British Victorian terms,
no future.
For a wealthy young woman
like Gertrude,
there was only one solution.
Travel.
Gertrude prevailed upon her father
to allow her to visit a family friend
in the place she'd dreamed about
ever since she was a child.
When she arrived, she found it
everything she'd imagined and more.
"Persia," she wrote in her very
first letter home, "is paradise."
Gertrude Bell was 23 years old
when she arrived in the city of Tehran
in the spring of 1892.
She began studying
the language at once,
and within a few months was
translating Persian poems into English.
Soon, she was happier than
she'd ever been before.
She had finally met a man
worthy of her affections,
a young British diplomat
named Henry Cadugan.
It wasn't long before the two of them
fell quite madly in love.
He introduced her to the desert,
which took her breath away.
But when the two of them
wrote to her father
asking for his permission to marry,
the answer was slow in coming.
They waited and they waited
until finally the answer came.
And it was not
what they wanted to hear.
Gertrude's father was very upset.
He had checked out her fiance,
so to speak,
and discovered that he was a gambler,
and her father was afraid that
this was not a man who was steady
enough, secure enough for his daughter.
And so, as a Victorian daughter,
she did what her father told her.
She came home, and she gave
the romance time to cool.
For eight months the heartsick
Gertrude did everything she could
to change her father's mind.
Then a telegram arrived from Tehran.
Henry Cadugan had fallen into
an icy river while fishing,
had developed pneumonia and died.
At that moment,
Gertrude knew that she would have to
make a life on her own.
But it wasn't until she returned to
the Middle East
that she felt like herself again.
In November of 1899,
Gertrude arrived in Jerusalem.
I am extremely flourishing,
and so wildly interested in Arabic
that I think of nothing else.
I have not seen the moon shine
so since I was in Persia.
In England, she could barely
venture out without a chaperone.
Here, she could come and go
as she pleased.
Once Gertrude Bell arrived in
the Middle East,
she felt like a free spirit.
She could really soar, and she did,
and she absolutely loved it.
And the Arabs respected her.
They had no problem with
her being an independent woman.
From Jerusalem Gertrude began to
make a series of sorties
into the uncharted desert.
She learned to ride like a man,
comfortable in the saddle.
The barren landscape brought back
the happy times with her lost lover,
Henry Cadugan.
It was almost is if she was
searching for his soul,
searching for his spirit.
"Daughter of the Desert"
the Arabs began to call her,
or sometimes "The Desert Queen."
It was, as she gleefully informed
her parents,
her first taste of notoriety.
I am a person in this country.
One of the first questions everyone
seems to ask everyone else is,
"Have you ever met
Miss Gertrude Bell?"
The quest to be recognized
as a person would haunt Gertrude
for the rest of her life.
She sought recognition in a series of
fearless treks into the desert,
writing books about her travels,
and documenting the culture
and people of the Middle East
in thousands of photographs.
Along the way, she discovered
the excitement of archeology,
flourishing here in these years
before World War I.
It was like a banquet
open for the taking.
At site after site,
archeologists were unearthing
the priceless treasures
of humanity's
earliest civilizations.
Staking their claims to this booty
for their museums back home.
At the ruins of Babylon,
Gertrude marveled
as German archeologists brought
the imposing city back to life.
It is the most extraordinary place.
I have seldom felt the ancient world
come so close.
She stopped to visit English archeologists
at the ruins of Carchemish.
A dig strategically placed
near the construction of a new
German railroad through the desert.
One of the archeologists
was a promising young graduate
student named T.E. Lawrence.
In these uneasy years before wartime,
it wasn't surprising
to see the English doing double duty
digging and keeping watch over
the activities of the Germans nearby.
This complete separation between
archeology and politics
that we have today or at least
that we think exists today
was not true at that time.
Archeology and politics were
very closely interrelated.
Gentleman archeologist,
gentlewoman archeologist,
gentleman spy,
gentlewoman spy.
It was part of what in the 19th
century was called "The Great Game."
And there was this constant interplay
between archeology and intelligence
at a very informal level.
It is no coincidence
that a lot of archeologists became
intelligence officers in World War I,
because they had done it before
the war working at archeological sites.
Gertrude was intrigued
with archeology,
but she had other things on her mind.
In the spring of 1913,
at the age of 45,
she fell hopelessly in love
for the second time in her life.
His name was Richard Doughty Wiley,
and he was everything
she wanted in a man.
A soldier and a scholar
who was handsome and brave,
and radiated British pluck.
Unfortunately, he was also married.
She was completely intrigued
with this man,
and fell madly in love with him.
He was a bit of a callous man.
He was a man
who was a true womanizer,
and he even told her about
some of his other experiences,
which was kind of cruel,
I think.
But no matter, she was wildly
in love with him,
and he encouraged her and her work.
Secretly they met for a passionate
weekend at Gertrude's family home
in the English countryside.
Victorian to her core,
she resisted consummating their affair.
The situation seemed hopeless.
And then he was sent off
to the Balkans in 1913,
and it was a heartbreaking thing
for her,
but it also stimulated her desire
to show that she was as adventurous,
as intrepid, as indomitable
as Doughty Wiley.
So Gertrude Bell actually set off
on the journey of her life.
Her destination was Central Arabia,
the vast desert of the Nejd.
Gertrude embarked on
a private mission
to meet with two of the desert's
most powerful sheiks.
Men whose rivalries had kept the area
a no man's land for a generation.
Turkish and British authorities
forbade her to go.
But as usual,
Gertrude did things her way.
When Gertrude set off on her
big expeditions into the desert,
she would take with her
Wedgwood china, her crystal stemware,
the silver flatware,
her tweed jackets,
her linen clothes, her fur coats,
her fringed shawls,
her petticoats and her crinolines,
and she would use those to hide
her rifles and her guns
and her theadolite
and her compasses,
because she did not want the Turks to
know what she was doing in the desert.
With her imperious manner,
Gertrude had a way of
ensuring an audience
with even the most elusive sheiks.
She impressed them with her command
of Arabic and her passion for politics.
When she would present herself
to a sheik
or to a tribal leader
or to a dignitary,
the way that she spoke
and the way that she held herself
was of such import
that they saw her not as a woman,
but as a figure of authority.
And so her gender was forgotten about.
It was completely ignored.
In fact, they saw her as a person
with a capital P.
And that was something that
Gertrude Bell aspired to
to be seen as a person
wherever she went.
I think by paradox, in the Arab world,
she was so exotic,
both because she dressed
every bit the Victorian
Englishwoman, and because at the same
time she spoke Persian,
she spoke Arabic, she could
deal with them man to man,
and yet she looked
very much the woman
yet not one of theirs, but a foreign,
exotic, other woman
made her such a fascinating creature
that she gained entry,
paradoxically, into their world as a
man from Britain could not have done.
To Bell it was clear that
the power of the Ottoman Turks
was fading in the Middle East.
To be replaced, she believed,
by British influence.
Some Arab sheiks favored the British,
others the Turks.
On this trip in 1913, tensions
were too high even for Gertrude.
She headed home and wrote up her
impressions for the British government.
Just a few months later,
World War I broke out.
And the report that she had written
became vital to the British.
She was the person
who knew the balances of powers,
the shifting alliances.
She had contacts which were
truly awesome in the desert,
and the respect of the chieftains.
Gertrude's report reflected
her keen understanding
of the opportunity
in the Middle East.
The time had come, she wrote,
to organize the Arabs
in a revolt against the Turks.
In wartime,
the strategy was irresistible
as the Ottoman Turks had sided with
the Germans against the British.
The same British who had forbade her
to go into the desert,
turned around and drafted her as a spy
for the British in the Middle East.
Working closely beside Gertrude
in intelligence in the Cairo bureau
were several ex archeologists,
including T.E. Lawrence,
A.K.A. Lawrence of Arabia.
Gertrude Bell was actually the brains
behind T.E. Lawrence.
He had actually never been to Arabia.
It was Gertrude Bell
who had been there,
and so she was the one
who was able to tell Lawrence
which sheiks he should contact,
and who was reliable and who was not.
She was as essential or more so
than Lawrence, I think,
in convincing Arab leaders
to side with the British.
She had their trust in a way that
I think no Western man
could quite accomplish.
But, of course,
when it came time to
go off to the desert
and become the liaison with
the Arabs,
the British said,
Lawrence is going,
and when Gertrude Bell said,
I want to go,
they said, Don't be ridiculous;
it is much too dangerous for a woman.
Now, of course, she was the one
who had been there originally.
But the British being the British,
that was their attitude,
and they would not let her go.
Gertrude remained desk bound, feeding
information to Lawrence at the front.
She knew every important oasis
in the Arabian desert,
every Arab sheik who might be
persuaded to rise against the Turks.
Slowly, the tide of the war turned.
In January of 1917,
Lawrence led his famous charge
against Ottoman forces in Aqaba,
one of the finest moments
of the Arab revolt.
Two months later,
British forces occupied Baghdad.
Gertrude Bell wasn't far behind.
When the Armistice came
in January 1918,
she was exactly where
she wanted to be.
There was always this sense of
ownership in her attitude towards Iraq.
And she loved it in a very
paternalistic way,
with this attitude that she, herself,
could control the area
that she could decide
what was going to happen to it.
There was one letter that
Gertrude Bell wrote home
where she said,
"I feel like God in his creation."
She was so aware that the British
were creating countries,
Puppet states, if you will,
for the British.
But starting from scratch.
There had never been
a state of Iraq before.
There had never been
any such thing.
In this great expanse of empty desert
and disparate tribes,
Gertrude Bell drew the lines,
creating the modern state of Iraq.
Defining the contours of
the contemporary Middle East,
still in contention today.
In 1919, nationalism seethed
as the British and French divided
the area into protectorates.
At first, Gertrude believed that
the British should govern Iraq.
But T.E. Lawrence helped change
her mind.
He argued that the throne belonged to
this man, Faisal,
the charismatic leader
of the Arab revolt.
At a conference in Cairo in 1921,
Gertrude Bell took her place between
Lawrence and Winston Churchill.
There were these famous pictures
of her at conferences
where she is the only woman.
This must have been incredibly hard,
and she carried it off.
She was a woman in a world
dominated by men.
Surprisingly,
Gertrude Bell preferred it that way.
Back in England, she had campaigned
against a woman's right to vote.
In her gut,
she really never did believe that
women were the equal of men.
She believed that
she was intellectually,
but of course, if all women were
treated as the equal of men,
that would also have made her
less special.
It would have made her
just another woman
who happened to be an extraordinary
one, but just another woman.
Now, this extraordinary woman prepared
for the coronation of King Faisal.
She made sure he couldn't do
without her,
hosting a series of teas and dinners
for him in the garden of her home.
These were some of the best years
of Gertrude Bell's life.
She was very close to the King,
King Faisal.
In fact, she had an almost
school girl crush on him,
and he was very fond of her.
And everybody relied on her,
so she had a great sense
of importance, of power.
On pleasant afternoons,
Gertrude would take Faisal
to view the ancient ruins
in the desert.
"We shall make Iraq as great as
its past," she promised the new king.
But it wasn't long before Faisal had
his own ideas, his own set of advisors.
To occupy Gertrude's time,
he appointed her honorary director
of antiquities.
She took the position seriously,
insisting that her British
and American colleagues
turn over 50 percent of the treasures
they found in Iraq
to form the nucleus of
a new museum in Baghdad.
Gertrude Bell wrote some of the first
laws protecting the rights of a country
to safeguard its ancient treasures.
Yet her letters home were
sounding plaintive.
Except for the museum,
I'm not enjoying life at all.
The role of the British
in Iraq was waning,
and with it, Gertrude's power.
As time went by,
there were no more dinner parties
in her garden.
And so she found herself there
more and more on her own,
with less and less to do.
She became sadder and sadder,
until she felt as if a great black
cloud had come over her.
She felt that there was nothing left
for her in Baghdad,
and certainly nothing left
for her in England.
One has the sharp sense of being
near the end of things,
with no certainty as to what,
if anything, one will do next.
It is a very lonely business
living here now.
In her mind she felt that
she had failed in her lifelong quest
to be recognized as a person.
She was tired, ill, and alone.
Haunted by doubts about the choices
she had made.
On July 11, 1926,
three days before her 58th birthday,
Gertrude Bell took an overdose
of sleeping pills and died.
She was buried the next day
in a full military funeral
attended by thousands of people.
One of her colleagues paid tribute:
Hers was the brightest spirit that
shone upon our labors in the East.
Gertrude's dream of the East
had sustained her
through a life of public achievement
and personal heartache.
She may have died doubting it,
but to history
she was a person at last.
now a barren and exotic landscape,
alluring in its mystery.
For thousands of years,
the Middle East
had guarded its secrets.
But by the 19th century
it had become a battleground
for competing empires
eager for political control
and archeological treasure.
It was a time when archeology
was intertwined with espionage.
When politics was called
"The Great Game".
Into this arena stepped
two remarkable Britons
a young adventurer named
Austin Henry Layard,
who uncovered the treasures of
a fabulous lost civilization,
and a brilliant politician
named Gertrude Bell,
the "brains" behind
Lawrence of Arabia.
Both would follow their dreams into
the desert
changing it forever.
In the spring of 1840,
an intrepid young Englishman found
his way to the ancient land
between the Tigris and
Euphrates Rivers, now part of Iraq.
He was on his way towards India
to make his fortune.
But there was something about
this desert that caught hold of him
and wouldn't let him go.
More than 2,000 years ago,
two mighty empires had ruled
this land: Babylonia and Assyria.
Their cities were fabled
for their opulence.
Their power rivaled
only by each other.
The Assyrians were
fearsome warriors.
Eight centuries before Christ,
they had marched on the Israelites.
City after city fell before them.
Even Jerusalem was under siege.
Thousands of captives were taken,
immortalized as the
Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.
And all this was written
in the Bible.
But now almost all traces of these
great civilizations had disappeared.
There was nothing here but desert
as far as the eye could see.
Yet in this wasteland, Austin Henry
Layard saw the chance
of a lifetime.
In the decade to come,
he would uncover the secrets
of this barren desert,
and reveal the truth
in a Bible story.
When he saw the mounds and saw
this area, he saw opportunity.
He saw opportunity for fame,
and he was looking as a way
to make his name and his life.
From his earliest childhood,
Austin Henry Layard was
an unusual young man.
Most of his youth was spent
in Florence
where he fell in love with
that ancient city's history and art.
Formal schooling was not for him,
but he knew almost every painting in
the galleries and
churches of the city.
The rest of his time he spent
dreaming, lost in stories of adventure.
His favorite was a book only recently
translated into English.
The work in which I took the
greatest delight was the Arabian Nights.
My imagination became
so much excited by it,
that I thought and dreamt of
little else.
The Arabian Nights have had no little
influence upon my life and career.
To them, I attribute that love of
travel and adventure,
which took me to the East.
Ever since Napoleon rediscovered
the wonders of Egypt
at the turn of the century,
Europeans had been captivated by
the exoticism of the East.
From the time he was a boy,
Austin Henry Layard
fell under its spell.
His family tried to make
a lawyer of him.
Layard hated the law, but he stuck it
out and passed his exams at 22.
Casting about, he learned of a
possible job in Ceylon,
a British colony
halfway around the world.
It was the chance
he had been waiting for.
Layard found another traveler
to accompany him
in the overland route
through the Ottoman Empire.
In 1839, this was a journey
well off the beaten track,
which could take more than a year.
The two men wore Turkish dress
to assure safe passage,
and lived out of their saddlebags.
They made their way down into Turkey,
the gateway to another world.
This was my first glimpse
of Eastern life.
The booths in the covered alleys
of the bazaar;
the veiled women gliding
through the crowd;
the dim and mysterious light
of the place.
I felt myself in a new world,
a world of which I had dreamt
since my earliest childhood.
When Austin Henry Layard
reached the desert,
he was living
his deepest fantasy.
You know how sometimes you go to
a place, and it is you,
and you just fit,
and you feel comfortable?
I don't think Layard,
at that stage in his life,
was comfortable in
Victorian England.
But when he got to Petra,
in particular, where he was robbed
and had a terrible time,
he felt at home
because he felt a kinship
with these people
who were very volatile and friendly
and outgoing like he was.
Petra also satisfied Layard's
fascination with history.
The city's fading grandeur
carved from solid rock.
But there were other
even more ancient ruins,
and these proved
more intriguing still.
One day on his way through
the Tigris and Euphrates valley,
he caught sight of
something extraordinary
rising out of the flat desert plain.
I saw for the first time the great
Mound of Nimrud against
the clear sky.
The impression it made upon me was
one never to be forgotten.
Layard vowed that
some day he would return
to investigate the mysterious mound.
In the meantime,
the romantic young Englishman
lost all interest
in continuing on to Ceylon.
For a year, he lived with
the Baktiari nomads in Persia,
whose way of life had not changed
for 3,000 years.
And it was I think one reason
he became the archeologist he did.
He learned how to
improvise on the spot;
he learned how to
adjust circumstances,
how to live in discomfort;
and above all,
how to interact with these people.
His meager funds now growing short,
the enterprising Layard used his
facility with different cultures
to get a job with the British
ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.
For three years,
he served as a kind of roving reporter.
He was really a secret agent.
A lot of his work was very sensitive,
and negotiating with
these sorts of people.
And the skills he gained
were priceless,
but it is only a certain sort of
person who will gain those skills.
Very outgoing, very entrepreneurial,
in a way.
Never at a loss.
That's where Layard was brilliant.
Layard's new skills were just
the right mix for his next assignment.
A new kind of conflict was
heating up in the Middle East.
Ever since Napoleon had brought back
treasures from Egypt,
the great powers had been on the
lookout for archeological booty.
The idea of museums,
temples of the muses,
was one which was capturing the
imagination of 19th century Europeans.
The British, the French, the Germans
were all building these palaces
in which to place... well,
what are they going to place there?
Like Layard, the French recognized
the potential of the strange mounds
rising out of
the Middle Eastern desert.
Now they had begun to dig,
and at Khorsabad they were uncovering
some very interesting sculptures.
There was certainly a competition
between the French and the British
as to who could find
the biggest treasures
in order to stock the museums
in Paris and London.
And, in fact, newspaper articles
and magazines at that time
actually described these finds
as "Trophies of empire."
To catch up with the French,
Layard persuaded the British ambassador
to fund a trial excavation
at his mound at Nimrud.
Within weeks, he was ready to begin,
instructed to keep a low profile.
On the 8th of November 1845,
having secretly procured a few tools,
and carrying with me a variety of
guns, spears and other weapons,
I declared that I was going to hunt
wild boars in a neighboring village,
and floated down the Tigris
on a small raft.
It was dark by the time Layard
arrived at the mound.
Five years had passed
since he'd first laid eyes on it.
His head was filled with excitement.
He found it almost impossible
to sleep.
Visions of palaces underground,
of sculptured figures and endless
inscriptions floated before me.
After forming plan after plan
for removing the earth
and extricating these treasures,
I fancied myself wandering
in a maze of chambers
from which I could find no outlet.
At dawn the next morning,
the resourceful young Englishman
assembled his team and set to work.
He had no experience,
very little money,
and no guarantee of success.
He really had no expertise in what he
was doing, except his natural talent.
And he was rushing
because the French were competing,
and their influence over
the Turks could mean that
his license to be digging
would quickly be cut off.
And he needed a good find quickly
because he knew that's what would
bring the support
from the British government,
or from the British Museum,
from the British community
to enable him to go on.
Amazingly, on the very first day of
digging, Layard hit pay dirt.
A piece of alabaster appeared
above the soil.
We could not remove it,
and on digging downward it proved
to be the upper part of a large slab.
The men shortly uncovered ten more.
It was evident that the top of
a chamber had been discovered.
Digging along the walls of the chamber,
within weeks the men uncovered
a series of splendid sculptured panels.
Layard was captivated by
their beauty.
But he knew they wouldn't be enough
to get the British Museum to fund him.
He was looking for
the spectacular sculpture,
which would dazzle the public,
and give him fame in London.
I say this not out of
a criticism of Layard.
He was penniless.
This was his way to fame and fortune.
And he knew it.
A few months later,
Layard was on his way
to visit a local sheik
when two horsemen caught up with him.
"Hasten, O Bey," they cried.
"Hasten to the diggers,
for they have found Nimrod himself."
Rising out of the earth was
a gigantic head.
The workmen were terrified of
this colossus they called Nimrod,
and ran off to spread the news.
But Layard was elated.
He'd only been digging a few months,
and here was treasure
the French would envy.
Unfortunately, the resulting uproar
gave the Ottoman Turks the excuse
they'd been looking for
to shut down the dig.
Layard suspected
the hand of the French.
Quietly he kept a few men on
who unearthed two gigantic sculptures
strange and awe inspiring.
With his knowledge of art history,
Layard knew that he had found
an entirely new style of art.
The British Museum agreed and finally
gave him the money he needed.
A year after he'd begun,
Turkish permission in hand,
Layard launched full scale
excavations at Nimrud.
Every day produced
some new discovery.
My Arabs entered with alacrity
into the work,
and felt almost as much interested in
its results as I did myself.
Tunneling along the walls of
what turned out to be a palace,
they found hundreds of
alabaster sculptures,
some disintegrating from
ancient fires.
Layard drew what he could,
working from dawn until dusk.
In the evening,
after the labor of the day,
I often sat at the door
of my tent and gave myself up
to the full enjoyment imparted to
the senses by such scenes as these.
I live among the ruins,
and dream of little else.
But still Layard had to face
his biggest challenge.
Somehow he had to transport
his treasures back to London.
It's quite one thing to dig up
these large human
headed lions or bas relief,
some of which weighed several tons.
And quite another thing
to take them back to London or Paris.
And this is where Layard was a genius
he had learned to improvise.
He acquired the loyalty of
the local people.
He got a cart built, and there were
wonderful pictures in his books
of luring these lions with ropes
down on to one of the carts,
and the famous occasion
when the ropes broke
and the lion fell like this.
And they thought it was broken,
but it wasn't.
And the workmen burst into
a wild dance.
And they towed this thing
to the river.
And they built a raft of timber and
supported it on inflated goatskins.
I watched the rafts
until they disappeared,
musing upon the strange destiny
of their burdens.
After adorning the palaces
of Assyrian kings,
they had been buried unknown
for centuries
beneath the soil trodden by
the Persians, the Greeks and the Arabs.
They were now to cross
the most distance seas
to be finally placed
in a British museum.
great revolutions in Europe
is the year when all of
the Assyrian stuff
that Layard had discovered was
first displayed in England,
and it was a sensation.
He was lionized by society.
He became a public figure.
A young man who had gone out East
and made good.
Look what he had bought
for Britain.
Layard wrote a best seller
about his adventures
uncovering the impressive
civilization of the Assyrians,
lost to history
for more than 2,000 years.
But he struggled to understand
the strange beasts he'd discovered,
and which had taken London by storm.
This creature stood to
either side of the doorway
of an important location in the
Assyrian world to guard the way in.
And that lion's body
will tear you apart,
and those wings of a bird of prey
will overtake you,
and that human head
will out think you.
And believe me, the Assyrians
believed that,
and would have been suitably
intimidated
just as the British were suitably
impressed
by this extraordinary exotic creature
that he brought back.
The treasures of Assyria
were trophies of Empire.
But to many people, they were more.
In the secular 19th century,
the historical validity of
the Bible was under attack.
Were its stories true,
or were they simply stories?
Perhaps the answer could be found
in the mounds of Mesopotamia.
With mounting public interest,
the British Museum decided to fund
a second expedition.
In 1849, Layard tackled a mound
the French had given up on,
near the banks of the Tigris River.
Tunneling deep inside,
he uncovered indisputable evidence
that would prove he had found Nineveh,
the biblical capital of Assyria.
Nearly two miles of
sculptured alabaster panels
proclaiming the bloody conquests
of its kings.
A great library which would unlock
the lost history of the Assyrians.
And most extraordinary of all,
evidence of the bloody siege
of the Israelite city of Lachish
that was depicted in the Bible.
To dig and dig and dig,
then to uncover what you come to
recognize both by the images
and then corroborated by the cuneiform
descriptions is the siege of Lachish,
The conquest of Lachish,
the carrying of captives from
of Lachish of Judean captives.
Judean, the word is there,
back to other parts of Assyria
must have been phenomenal.
Here is a site that is
mentioned in the Bible.
And, again, is it a real site?
Suddenly, it becomes real.
Suddenly, it is three dimensional.
Suddenly, it is tangible,
and that provoked an enthusiasm
that has lasted 160 years
until our own time for the archeology
of the Near East
with specific respect to its
relationship to the Bible.
Layard's remarkable discoveries
lifted Assyria from obscurity,
placing it firmly in the pantheon
of history's great empires.
He went on to a successful career
as a member of Parliament,
and ambassador to Constantinople.
And by the time this Victorian
statesman died in 1894,
the Middle East was no longer
a forgotten backwater.
The Ottoman Turks were
losing their grip on the region,
and it had become a pawn
in a game of empire,
veering dangerously out of control.
In the new century,
another British adventurer would help
forge an even bigger role
for the crown in the Middle East.
Her name was Gertrude Bell,
and she has often been called
the brain behind the exploits
of Lawrence of Arabia.
At the close of World War I,
it was she who redrew
the map of the Middle East.
She also championed
modern archeology,
and insisted that a country had
the right to keep its own antiquities.
Born in 1868, Gertrude Bell is
in many ways a tragic figure.
Despite a life of achievement,
unusual for a woman in her time,
she remained unsatisfied,
never convinced that
the treasure she was seeking
was truly the one she wanted.
As a teenager,
the red headed young woman spent
most of her time
surrounded by books.
Like Austin Henry Layard,
she was captivated by the mysterious
world of the Arabian Nights.
This was really the height of
British Imperialism in the East,
so that all of these images
of the Orient
were even far more prevalent than
during Layard's childhood.
The museums by then were stocked with
antiquities from Assyria and Babylon.
Gertrude was especially fascinated
by the politics of the East.
But she always felt as if she were
laboring under a handicap-her gender.
I wish I could go to
the National Gallery,
but there is no one to take me.
If I were a boy, I should go to
that incomparable place every week.
But being a girl,
to see lovely things is denied me.
Gertrude was an exceptional child.
As a girl in particular,
she was exceptional
because her father encouraged her
to read, to learn,
to be adventurous, to explore.
And then she was sent off
to Oxford University,
one of the first women
to attend Oxford.
And she left there with
the highest honors in her field.
Gertrude was 20 years old.
But now, instead of thinking about
a suitable career
for a person of her talents,
convention dictated that
she go about the business
of finding a suitable husband.
She had three chances.
Three seasons in which
she was presented to society.
And it was expected that she would
find a husband along the way.
She didn't.
Either she didn't like the men
who were attracted to her,
or the men she was attracted to
were not interested in her.
At the end of the three seasons,
she had no husband,
and in British Victorian terms,
no future.
For a wealthy young woman
like Gertrude,
there was only one solution.
Travel.
Gertrude prevailed upon her father
to allow her to visit a family friend
in the place she'd dreamed about
ever since she was a child.
When she arrived, she found it
everything she'd imagined and more.
"Persia," she wrote in her very
first letter home, "is paradise."
Gertrude Bell was 23 years old
when she arrived in the city of Tehran
in the spring of 1892.
She began studying
the language at once,
and within a few months was
translating Persian poems into English.
Soon, she was happier than
she'd ever been before.
She had finally met a man
worthy of her affections,
a young British diplomat
named Henry Cadugan.
It wasn't long before the two of them
fell quite madly in love.
He introduced her to the desert,
which took her breath away.
But when the two of them
wrote to her father
asking for his permission to marry,
the answer was slow in coming.
They waited and they waited
until finally the answer came.
And it was not
what they wanted to hear.
Gertrude's father was very upset.
He had checked out her fiance,
so to speak,
and discovered that he was a gambler,
and her father was afraid that
this was not a man who was steady
enough, secure enough for his daughter.
And so, as a Victorian daughter,
she did what her father told her.
She came home, and she gave
the romance time to cool.
For eight months the heartsick
Gertrude did everything she could
to change her father's mind.
Then a telegram arrived from Tehran.
Henry Cadugan had fallen into
an icy river while fishing,
had developed pneumonia and died.
At that moment,
Gertrude knew that she would have to
make a life on her own.
But it wasn't until she returned to
the Middle East
that she felt like herself again.
In November of 1899,
Gertrude arrived in Jerusalem.
I am extremely flourishing,
and so wildly interested in Arabic
that I think of nothing else.
I have not seen the moon shine
so since I was in Persia.
In England, she could barely
venture out without a chaperone.
Here, she could come and go
as she pleased.
Once Gertrude Bell arrived in
the Middle East,
she felt like a free spirit.
She could really soar, and she did,
and she absolutely loved it.
And the Arabs respected her.
They had no problem with
her being an independent woman.
From Jerusalem Gertrude began to
make a series of sorties
into the uncharted desert.
She learned to ride like a man,
comfortable in the saddle.
The barren landscape brought back
the happy times with her lost lover,
Henry Cadugan.
It was almost is if she was
searching for his soul,
searching for his spirit.
"Daughter of the Desert"
the Arabs began to call her,
or sometimes "The Desert Queen."
It was, as she gleefully informed
her parents,
her first taste of notoriety.
I am a person in this country.
One of the first questions everyone
seems to ask everyone else is,
"Have you ever met
Miss Gertrude Bell?"
The quest to be recognized
as a person would haunt Gertrude
for the rest of her life.
She sought recognition in a series of
fearless treks into the desert,
writing books about her travels,
and documenting the culture
and people of the Middle East
in thousands of photographs.
Along the way, she discovered
the excitement of archeology,
flourishing here in these years
before World War I.
It was like a banquet
open for the taking.
At site after site,
archeologists were unearthing
the priceless treasures
of humanity's
earliest civilizations.
Staking their claims to this booty
for their museums back home.
At the ruins of Babylon,
Gertrude marveled
as German archeologists brought
the imposing city back to life.
It is the most extraordinary place.
I have seldom felt the ancient world
come so close.
She stopped to visit English archeologists
at the ruins of Carchemish.
A dig strategically placed
near the construction of a new
German railroad through the desert.
One of the archeologists
was a promising young graduate
student named T.E. Lawrence.
In these uneasy years before wartime,
it wasn't surprising
to see the English doing double duty
digging and keeping watch over
the activities of the Germans nearby.
This complete separation between
archeology and politics
that we have today or at least
that we think exists today
was not true at that time.
Archeology and politics were
very closely interrelated.
Gentleman archeologist,
gentlewoman archeologist,
gentleman spy,
gentlewoman spy.
It was part of what in the 19th
century was called "The Great Game."
And there was this constant interplay
between archeology and intelligence
at a very informal level.
It is no coincidence
that a lot of archeologists became
intelligence officers in World War I,
because they had done it before
the war working at archeological sites.
Gertrude was intrigued
with archeology,
but she had other things on her mind.
In the spring of 1913,
at the age of 45,
she fell hopelessly in love
for the second time in her life.
His name was Richard Doughty Wiley,
and he was everything
she wanted in a man.
A soldier and a scholar
who was handsome and brave,
and radiated British pluck.
Unfortunately, he was also married.
She was completely intrigued
with this man,
and fell madly in love with him.
He was a bit of a callous man.
He was a man
who was a true womanizer,
and he even told her about
some of his other experiences,
which was kind of cruel,
I think.
But no matter, she was wildly
in love with him,
and he encouraged her and her work.
Secretly they met for a passionate
weekend at Gertrude's family home
in the English countryside.
Victorian to her core,
she resisted consummating their affair.
The situation seemed hopeless.
And then he was sent off
to the Balkans in 1913,
and it was a heartbreaking thing
for her,
but it also stimulated her desire
to show that she was as adventurous,
as intrepid, as indomitable
as Doughty Wiley.
So Gertrude Bell actually set off
on the journey of her life.
Her destination was Central Arabia,
the vast desert of the Nejd.
Gertrude embarked on
a private mission
to meet with two of the desert's
most powerful sheiks.
Men whose rivalries had kept the area
a no man's land for a generation.
Turkish and British authorities
forbade her to go.
But as usual,
Gertrude did things her way.
When Gertrude set off on her
big expeditions into the desert,
she would take with her
Wedgwood china, her crystal stemware,
the silver flatware,
her tweed jackets,
her linen clothes, her fur coats,
her fringed shawls,
her petticoats and her crinolines,
and she would use those to hide
her rifles and her guns
and her theadolite
and her compasses,
because she did not want the Turks to
know what she was doing in the desert.
With her imperious manner,
Gertrude had a way of
ensuring an audience
with even the most elusive sheiks.
She impressed them with her command
of Arabic and her passion for politics.
When she would present herself
to a sheik
or to a tribal leader
or to a dignitary,
the way that she spoke
and the way that she held herself
was of such import
that they saw her not as a woman,
but as a figure of authority.
And so her gender was forgotten about.
It was completely ignored.
In fact, they saw her as a person
with a capital P.
And that was something that
Gertrude Bell aspired to
to be seen as a person
wherever she went.
I think by paradox, in the Arab world,
she was so exotic,
both because she dressed
every bit the Victorian
Englishwoman, and because at the same
time she spoke Persian,
she spoke Arabic, she could
deal with them man to man,
and yet she looked
very much the woman
yet not one of theirs, but a foreign,
exotic, other woman
made her such a fascinating creature
that she gained entry,
paradoxically, into their world as a
man from Britain could not have done.
To Bell it was clear that
the power of the Ottoman Turks
was fading in the Middle East.
To be replaced, she believed,
by British influence.
Some Arab sheiks favored the British,
others the Turks.
On this trip in 1913, tensions
were too high even for Gertrude.
She headed home and wrote up her
impressions for the British government.
Just a few months later,
World War I broke out.
And the report that she had written
became vital to the British.
She was the person
who knew the balances of powers,
the shifting alliances.
She had contacts which were
truly awesome in the desert,
and the respect of the chieftains.
Gertrude's report reflected
her keen understanding
of the opportunity
in the Middle East.
The time had come, she wrote,
to organize the Arabs
in a revolt against the Turks.
In wartime,
the strategy was irresistible
as the Ottoman Turks had sided with
the Germans against the British.
The same British who had forbade her
to go into the desert,
turned around and drafted her as a spy
for the British in the Middle East.
Working closely beside Gertrude
in intelligence in the Cairo bureau
were several ex archeologists,
including T.E. Lawrence,
A.K.A. Lawrence of Arabia.
Gertrude Bell was actually the brains
behind T.E. Lawrence.
He had actually never been to Arabia.
It was Gertrude Bell
who had been there,
and so she was the one
who was able to tell Lawrence
which sheiks he should contact,
and who was reliable and who was not.
She was as essential or more so
than Lawrence, I think,
in convincing Arab leaders
to side with the British.
She had their trust in a way that
I think no Western man
could quite accomplish.
But, of course,
when it came time to
go off to the desert
and become the liaison with
the Arabs,
the British said,
Lawrence is going,
and when Gertrude Bell said,
I want to go,
they said, Don't be ridiculous;
it is much too dangerous for a woman.
Now, of course, she was the one
who had been there originally.
But the British being the British,
that was their attitude,
and they would not let her go.
Gertrude remained desk bound, feeding
information to Lawrence at the front.
She knew every important oasis
in the Arabian desert,
every Arab sheik who might be
persuaded to rise against the Turks.
Slowly, the tide of the war turned.
In January of 1917,
Lawrence led his famous charge
against Ottoman forces in Aqaba,
one of the finest moments
of the Arab revolt.
Two months later,
British forces occupied Baghdad.
Gertrude Bell wasn't far behind.
When the Armistice came
in January 1918,
she was exactly where
she wanted to be.
There was always this sense of
ownership in her attitude towards Iraq.
And she loved it in a very
paternalistic way,
with this attitude that she, herself,
could control the area
that she could decide
what was going to happen to it.
There was one letter that
Gertrude Bell wrote home
where she said,
"I feel like God in his creation."
She was so aware that the British
were creating countries,
Puppet states, if you will,
for the British.
But starting from scratch.
There had never been
a state of Iraq before.
There had never been
any such thing.
In this great expanse of empty desert
and disparate tribes,
Gertrude Bell drew the lines,
creating the modern state of Iraq.
Defining the contours of
the contemporary Middle East,
still in contention today.
In 1919, nationalism seethed
as the British and French divided
the area into protectorates.
At first, Gertrude believed that
the British should govern Iraq.
But T.E. Lawrence helped change
her mind.
He argued that the throne belonged to
this man, Faisal,
the charismatic leader
of the Arab revolt.
At a conference in Cairo in 1921,
Gertrude Bell took her place between
Lawrence and Winston Churchill.
There were these famous pictures
of her at conferences
where she is the only woman.
This must have been incredibly hard,
and she carried it off.
She was a woman in a world
dominated by men.
Surprisingly,
Gertrude Bell preferred it that way.
Back in England, she had campaigned
against a woman's right to vote.
In her gut,
she really never did believe that
women were the equal of men.
She believed that
she was intellectually,
but of course, if all women were
treated as the equal of men,
that would also have made her
less special.
It would have made her
just another woman
who happened to be an extraordinary
one, but just another woman.
Now, this extraordinary woman prepared
for the coronation of King Faisal.
She made sure he couldn't do
without her,
hosting a series of teas and dinners
for him in the garden of her home.
These were some of the best years
of Gertrude Bell's life.
She was very close to the King,
King Faisal.
In fact, she had an almost
school girl crush on him,
and he was very fond of her.
And everybody relied on her,
so she had a great sense
of importance, of power.
On pleasant afternoons,
Gertrude would take Faisal
to view the ancient ruins
in the desert.
"We shall make Iraq as great as
its past," she promised the new king.
But it wasn't long before Faisal had
his own ideas, his own set of advisors.
To occupy Gertrude's time,
he appointed her honorary director
of antiquities.
She took the position seriously,
insisting that her British
and American colleagues
turn over 50 percent of the treasures
they found in Iraq
to form the nucleus of
a new museum in Baghdad.
Gertrude Bell wrote some of the first
laws protecting the rights of a country
to safeguard its ancient treasures.
Yet her letters home were
sounding plaintive.
Except for the museum,
I'm not enjoying life at all.
The role of the British
in Iraq was waning,
and with it, Gertrude's power.
As time went by,
there were no more dinner parties
in her garden.
And so she found herself there
more and more on her own,
with less and less to do.
She became sadder and sadder,
until she felt as if a great black
cloud had come over her.
She felt that there was nothing left
for her in Baghdad,
and certainly nothing left
for her in England.
One has the sharp sense of being
near the end of things,
with no certainty as to what,
if anything, one will do next.
It is a very lonely business
living here now.
In her mind she felt that
she had failed in her lifelong quest
to be recognized as a person.
She was tired, ill, and alone.
Haunted by doubts about the choices
she had made.
On July 11, 1926,
three days before her 58th birthday,
Gertrude Bell took an overdose
of sleeping pills and died.
She was buried the next day
in a full military funeral
attended by thousands of people.
One of her colleagues paid tribute:
Hers was the brightest spirit that
shone upon our labors in the East.
Gertrude's dream of the East
had sustained her
through a life of public achievement
and personal heartache.
She may have died doubting it,
but to history
she was a person at last.