This photograph is from a set of forty-two black and white topographical views of the ruins of Hatra, Iraq, presented to the Art Library at the V&A by the photographer Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell, CBE (1868 – 1926). Bell, an English travel writer and political administrator, took the photographs in her role as an amateur archaeologist. Through her extensive travels in Greater Syria, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and Arabia, where she built up an impressive knowledge and unique perspective on the Middle East through contact with tribal leaders, she explored, mapped and even advised British officials, including Winston Churchill, on the establishment and administration of the modern state of Iraq.

The Oxford-educated daughter of a wealthy industrialist, she had the financial support to embark on her independent travels, which allowed her to sidestep traditional female roles, and was ultimately rewarded with an immense amount of political power. When these photographs were taken in 1911, the courageous Bell was on her third major journey across the Middle East, she was 43, fluent in Arabic, had published several books and achieved many personal goals, including ten mountaineering first ascents in the Bernese Alps. She had learnt archaeological research from experts she met in the field, such as D. G. Hogarth and Sir William M. Ramsay, and became adept at analysing sites and accurately recording findings through notes, drawings and photographs using a plate camera; she was also a skilled cartographer.

At the time, London museums encouraged explorers and archaeologists to take papier mâché moulds of historic carvings and sculptures, as an accurate record from which plaster casts were generated for study in England. Bell also made papier mâché moulds while in the Middle East, several such casts survive in the V&A collection. Her papers and other photographs survive in the Gertrude Bell Archive at Newcastle University (GBANU). Gertrude Bell’s policies for the British colonialization of Iraq were short-lived, however, through these photographs, her role as witness of an ancient culture created by the the Hellenistic Seleucid dynasty (312-63 BCE) is invaluable and enduring, especially in light of the recent destruction of many Iraqi cultural sites.