Treasure Seekers: Edge of the Orient Page #3

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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,

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