Page 127 - Life of Gertrude Bell

II I

MESOPOTAMIA 113
Babel. You know what it was? It was an immense Babylonian
temple dedicated to the seven spheres of heaven and the sun
god. There remains now an enormous mound of sun-dried
brick, with the ruins of a temple to the North of it and on top a
great tower of burnt brick, most of which has fallen down. But
that which remains stands up, like a finger pointing heaven­
wards, over the Babylonian plain ...

She went on to Hillah, where her rifle was confiscated by an
officious policeman, and then to Baghdad, where she was met by
the British Resident, Lt-Colonel J. G. Lorimer. ‘Mr Lorimer says
that he has never met anyone who is in the confidence of the
natives in the way I am/ she wrote, ‘and Mr Lorimer, I should
wish you to understand, is an exceptionally able man!’
Lorimer was, in fact, the last in a line of British representatives
in Baghdad who left behind them an illustrious record and a
heritage without compare in the imperial history of their country.
Europeans had, of course, gone to Baghdad through the centuries
to trade and to savour the atmosphere of a past enveloped in the
mists of time and dimly portrayed in the literature of Greece and
Rome. There was the Englishman John Eldred who went there
in the reign of Elizabeth I, and a German contemporary, the
physician Leonhart Rauwolflf, who was there in 1575; the rabbis
Benjamin of Tudela and Pethahiah of Ratisbon, who wrote
accounts of the place in Latin; and the Pope’s Vicar-General at
Babylon in the eighteenth century, l’Abbe de Beauchamp; the
Frenchman Tavernier; and perhaps the best informed of all the
early travellers, the Italian nobleman Pietro della Valle, the first
to write intelligentiy of Babylon and the mounds at Hillah and
Birs Nimrod. But it was to the British Residency, established in
1783 by the East India Company, that there came a procession of
men of unrivalled gifts and industry. In 1808, by which time the
Residency had assumed consular status, came Claudius James
Rich whose prodigious oriental attainments were regarded by his
superiors as the least of his merits. It was through his scholarship
and enterprise that serious archaeological research was started
among the ruins of Assyria and Babylon. It was through his
charm and personality that Britain’s place was established in this
important outpost of the Ottoman Empire. He entered Baghdad
in style, with a sepoy guard, his wife Mary carried on a palankeen
or mule-borne litter with a retinue of Armenian servants.