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| Billie Silvey |
| 3 Women in Archeology |
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| Gertrude Bell was the daughter of a wealthy British family. By the age of 19, she had gained a first class honors degree at Oxford. A visit to an uncle, who was British minister in Tehran, led her to write a book called Persian Pictures. Over the next decade, she traveled around the world, learning a number of languages and developing a passion for archeology. Travels in the Middle East led to her book |
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| Sophie Schliemann (1852-1932) |
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| Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) |
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| Teresa Goell (1901-1985) |
| Sophie Engastromenos was a bright and beautiful 17-year-old Greek student when she met and married the German businessman and amateur archeologist Heinrich Schliemann. He was 47, a wealthy man who spoke many languages. Sophie became his perpetual student, learning history and archeology, working with him in his dig at Hissarlik where he searched for the ruins of ancient Troy. |
| Sophie went into the archeological trenches, directed a crew of Turkish workmen, and helped her husband smuggle the gold treasure they discovered out of Turkey. She is pictured above wearing some of it. Returning to Greece, they excavated tombs they assumed were those of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, their bodies covered with gold and jewels, in the agora at ancient Mycenae. Their greatest find, they dubbed “the mask of Agamemnon." Unfortunately, in their haste to reach what they assumed was Troy at the second and third level above bedrock, they had cut right through the sixth level, where it actually lay. The same thing happened at Mycenae, where the tomb they found was many centuries older than Agamemnon’s. But, despite their errors, their courage and determination helped feed public interest in history and archeology and preserve their findings for later scholars to study. In 1877, the Royal Archeological Institute of London honored Heinrich and Sophia. She gave the address, and was praised by Lord Talbot as “the first lady who has ever been identified in a work so arduous and stupendous.” She received a standing ovation. (Daniel J. Boorstein, The Discoverers, 1985). |
| Syria: The Desert and the Sown. Her vivid descriptions introduced the Arabian deserts to the western world. She chronicled her excavations with archeologist and New Testament scholar Sir William M. Ramsey in A Thousand and One Churches.
Next, she went to Mesopotamia where she mapped and described the Hittite city of Carchemish, consulting with T.E. Lawrence, one of the archeologists there. Denied a request for a Middle East posting at the outbreak of World War, she volunteered with the Red Cross in France. She opposed women’s suffrage, feeling that most women at the time were unprepared to decide how a nation should be ruled. In 1915, she was summoned to Cairo to work in the Arab Bureau, organizing information about Arab tribes collected by herself and other archeologists in the area, to be used by the British against the Turks. The next year, Gen. Clayton sent her to Basra to advise officials and draw maps to help the British reach Baghdad safely. There she rose to the title of Oriental Secretary. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1919, Bell was assigned to analyze the options for leadership in Iraq. She helped create a country with a Shi’ite majority in the south and Sunni and Kurdish minorities in the center and north. Bell felt that final authority should rest with the Sunnis to avoid a religious state. She advised King Faisal, the king of Iraq, formed the Iraqi Archaeological Museum in Baghdad from her own collection of artifacts and established The British School of Archeology, Iraq, to endow excavation projects from her will. Bell insisted that antiquities remain in the country where they were discovered. |
| Theresa Goell was born in New York City and grew up in Brooklyn, spending summers at the family’s house in the Catskills. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe in 1923. While at Radcliffe, she experienced a permanent hearing loss and learned to |
| read lips. As the technology advanced, she began wearing hearing aids. During her junior year, she married Cyrus Levinthal. After her graduation, they both studied at Cambridge. They had one son and then divorced. Goell did archeological field work in Jerusalem and Gerasa, Trans-Jordan, under the auspices of the American School of Oriental Research. She also made drawings of ceramics and restored terra cottas in Jerusalem. Returning to New York in the late 30s and remaining through the war, she worked and took classes, returning to the Middle East when her professor suggested she study the finds at Mt. Nimrud on the Anatolian plateau of southeastern Turkey. She spent her life excavating the site, now known as Nemrud Dagh, supported by the Bollingen Foundation and the National Geographic Society. In March 1961, The National Geographic published an article and the National Geographic Society produced a film about her work. She became Director of Excavations at Samosata, the city of Antiochus I. On the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic, the Cultural Ministry of Turkey recognized her contributions to Turkish culture and art. |
| March, 2009 |