< Back

Bell, Gertrude Lowthian.
The first printing of Gertrude Bell’s most significant archaeological work. Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir.
Publisher: Clarendon Press, Oxford;
Date of Publication: 1914
Stock Code: 13029
First Edition. Large quarto, pp., xix, [1], 180. With 93 photographic plates (including 6 fold-out architectural ground plans), 2 maps and 35 figures within the text, as called for. Publisher’s original beige cloth, titles gilt to spine and upper board, top edge gilt. Corners very slightly bumped, spine tips slightly worn, the lightest of scuffs to boards, upper hinge somewhat cracked and lower hinge starting. Some pages very slightly nicked to edges, minor foxing to fold-outs. A very good copy. The rare first printing of Bell’s archaeological study of the former Abbasid palace of Ukhaidir, south of Karbala, Iraq. The plates, figures, and maps provide a rich accompaniment to Bell’s account of this remarkably preserved example of early Islamic architecture. Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell CBE (1868-1926) was an explorer, archaeologist, spy, diplomat, and author. She was an expert Arabist; an advocate, along with her friend T. E. Lawrence, of Arab independence, and a participant in both the Paris Conference of 1919 and the Cairo Conference of 1921. Bell surveyed the palace (which she called ‘the little green palace’) on an expedition to Mesopotamia in 1911. The palace had first been explored by Louis Massignon in 1908-9, who published his preliminary findings in his ‘Mission en Mésopotamie’ (1910). Bell’s initial findings were published first in ‘The Hellenic Journal’ (1910), culminating in this volume, which is her most significant contribution to archaeology. Bell argued, for the first time, that the palace represented historical continuity between ancient Mesopotamia and modern Iraq. £9500.00