Gertrude Bell's great Middle Eastern legacy

The female scholar behind Iraq's independenceThe LibrariansGertrude Bell (1868-1926) was the grand­daughter of British nobility and the daughter of an monied industrialist. Instead of seeking a life of cocktail part­ies, her brain actually required a high-class education. In 1884 Bell went to Queen’s College and Oxford Univ­ers­ity, gaining 1st Class Honours in Modern History. She spent the next 15 years in cons­tant travel including Persia, Egypt and Algiers.A “cause” arrived in 1899 when she met arch­aeol­ogist David Hogar­th and his world of Middle East ant­iquity. Already fluent in Persian, Fr­en­ch and German, Bell also studied Arabic and Hebrew, and in 1900 she completed the first of her desert travels through Pal­est­ine, Leb­an­on and Syria. She then began learning desert rul­es and the soc­ial prac­t­­ices of nomadic Bed­ouin, building val­uable friendships among sheiks, warr­iors and Mesopot­amian merchants. From 1900-12 her focus was on developing her skills as an…