For all its troubles in recent months, Baghdad's Iraq Museum remains one of the world's great repositories of antiquities. Like so many other major museums, it owes its existence to the vision and drive of an inspired archaeologist, in Baghdad's case the indefatigable Gertrude Bell. Born in 1868, the daughter of a wealthy English industrialist, Bell was accustomed to having her way. She entered Oxford at the age of 18 at a time when female students were not allowed outside the college precincts unchaperoned. It is said that she had the un-heard-of temerity to disagree with her examiners during her orals, a portent of things to come.

After leaving Oxford in 1892, she set out on the first of her many travels, which included a seven-month stay in Jerusalem. The literary reviews were quick to take notice of her writings, among them some poetry and a travel book on Persia. She had the luxury of ample means and could afford to take her time. In Jerusalem, she improved her Arabic and had her first taste of desert travel, enduring "tents with earwigs and black beetles, and muddy water to drink." She acquired an addiction to the desert and the Near East. "One doesn't keep away from the East when one has got into it this far," she wrote prophetically. It was while she was in the Holy Land that she developed a passion for archaeology, taking more than 600 photographs of monuments near Jerusalem. Inspired by the beauty of these ancient sites, she spent the next few years studying archaeology in Rome and Paris. Although she initially concentrated on the Byzantine period, publishing a major work on the Thousand and On Churches at Birbinkilise in Turkey in 1909, her mind always turned toward her first love, the desert.

When Gertrude told friends she planned a journey to the walled, eighth-century Abbasid palace of Ukhaidir in the central Arabian desert, they were horrified. Sweeping their objections aside, she set off through the territory of the hostile Deleim Arabs. For four days, she photographed and surveyed the huge castle with its walled enclosure, tripping over her soldier escorts, who never let their rifles out of their hands as they held her measuring tapes. "I can't persuade them to lay down the damnable things for an instant," she complained. Her account of this extraordinary journey, Amurath to Amurath, established Gertrude as a traveler and archaeologist of the first rank. By this time, she was literally intoxicated by desert travel, as much by the people as by the fascinating archaeological sites. She often traveled at night. "Can you picture the singular beauty of these moonlit departures?" she wrote. "The frail Arab tents falling one by one, leaving the camp fires blazing into the night; the dark masses of the kneeling camels, the shrouded figures binding up the loads, shaking the ice from the water skins, or couched over the hearth for a moment's warmth before mounting." She spent hours talking with the local sheikhs and nomadic tribesmen and was one of the first Europeans to detect the stirrings of deep-felt Arab nationalism. Her strong opinions gained her some enemies. As one contemporary wrote:

From Trebizone to Tripolis
She rolls the Pashas flat
And tells them what to think of this
And what to think of that.

In 1911, she visited the Hittite excavations at Carchemish, on the Turkish-Syrian border, hoping to catch the irascible but competent David Hogarth, legendary for his expertise in Minoan archaeology and for his bad temper before breakfast. He had already gone home, so her host was the young T. E. Lawrence, soon to become the legendary Lawrence of Arabia. Soon after her arrival, Bell informed the Carchemish archaeologists that their methods were "prehistoric" compared to those of the Germans. She was probably right, but the archaeologists counter-attacked with what Lawrence called "a display of erudition." According to Lawrence, she was "taken (in five minutes) over Byzantine, Crusader, Roman, Hittite, and French architecture." Lawrence and his colleagues discoursed on "prehistoric pottery, telephoto lenses, Bronze Age metal techniques, Meredith, Anatole France, and the Octobrists." They even told her about German excavation methods on the Baghdad railroad, being built only a few miles away. By all accounts Gertrude retreated in some disarray. "Gerty has gone back to her tents," Lawrence wrote to Hogarth with glee. As gifted an archaeologist as the opinionated Gertrude was, she was not beloved.

Bell might have gone down in history as little more than a bold desert traveler had World War I not broken out. Her knowledge of the Arabian desert was invaluable to British intelligence in 1914. The only female political officer in an all-male establishment, she became a power broker in Baghdad when the war ended and the British ruled over a former province of the Ottoman Empire that was soon to become Iraq. She flattered tribal leaders, interviewed them, and gave them presents. These actions gained her the reputation of being pro-Arab, which she undoubtedly was, for she shared with Lawrence and a few others the gift of being able to communicate with desert people. "When they talk of tribes of sheikhs, or watering places, I don't need to ask where they are," she wrote. "I know … I see again the wide Arabian horizon." She lived a hectic but lonely life, where the respect and companionship of her colleagues were paramount. She was eclectic in her interests: dogs, photography, mountaineering, languages, and, above all, people. She became a champion of Arab independence, and of their cultural heritage.

The early 1920s were heady days in Baghdad, a time of makeshift government and individual initiative. One priority was antiquities legislation. The first law to control excavation and regulate the export of archaeological material was passed in 1922. There were many foreign expeditions anxious to work between the Tigris and the Euphrates and eager to export their finds. The Germans wanted to take the remains of the Ishtar Gate, which they had excavated at Babylon before the war. The gate was eventually taken to Berlin, where it was put on display. The Americans and the British were pressing for excavations at Ur. With these requests, and many others on her desk, Gertrude sat down to organize the Department of Antiquities and the Iraq Museum. The museum's first home was a shelf in her house, the second a few humble rooms near the palace of King Faisal I. In 1926, however, the government gave her "a real museum like the British Museum only a little smaller." Within her new quarters, Bell busied herself ordering shallow pottery drawers and negotiating with foreign expeditions.

Her most formidable adversary was Leonard Woolley, who presided over the joint University of Pennsylvania-British Museum expedition to Ur of the Chaldees. "He's a tiresome little man, but a first class digger and an archaeologist after my own heart," she wrote. Her visits to Ur at the end of each season were dreaded for their long hours and epic bargaining. "We had to claim the best things for ourselves," she wrote. Woolley fought hard, but she always took an impartial referee along to arbitrate over prize objects. Sometimes the arguments were ferocious, "but we have no cause for complaint," wrote Woolley, after his second season in 1924, "though I would not say that to Miss Bell …" "Who decides if we disagree?" another archaeologist once asked. "I do," Gertrude Bell promptly replied—and she did.

More than 60 years later, it is hard for us to imagine what it must have been like administering archaeology in a country that was really on the frontier in 1925. In addition to working with numerous foreign expeditions, each conducting large-scale excavations, Gertrude was overseeing pre-Sumerian, Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and spectacular later sites, all with a limited budget. In the end, the burden and the pitiless summer heat undermined her health. Lonely and politically discredited by the British as pro-Arab, she committed suicide in 1926 at the age of 58.

Bell's reputation in Iraq is somewhat tarnished today, for many Iraqi scholars believe that she gave away too much. This remarkable woman, however, trod an intellectual and moral tightrope in Iraq. On the one hand, she strove to preserve the interests of the new nation and its patrimony. On the other, Bell the intellectual wanted to place the interests of science, and its wealthy backers, above those of pure nationalism. Her vision and drive, combined with a dedicated and honest outspokenness, are qualities that often seem lacking today.