According to a picture published in Lisa Cooper's "In Search of Kings and Conquerors, Gertrude Bell and the Archaeology of the Middle East," Bell was recording Ukhaidir’s walls in her field notebook. Her travelling companions are holding her measuring tape, rifles slung over their shoulders. Bell noted: ‘nothing will induce them to leave their rifles in the tents.
They are quite intolerably inconvenient; the measuring tape is forever catching round the barrel or getting up in the stock, but I can’t persuade them to lay the damnable things down for an instant’ (GB letter to her family, 29 March 1909).
Description of Ukhaidir Bell provided descriptions of the location, layout and architecture of the palace and mosque of Ukhaidir in various publications, but her final report on the site, published in 1914, was the longest and most detailed. Because the palace is made up of many interior rooms, corridors and open spaces, it was necessary for her to devise a system for distinguishing individual spaces and thus facilitate the matching of text descriptions of these spaces with associated plans and photographs. Bell appears to have abandoned her earlier, lettered room designations in favour of the numbered spaces employed by Oskar Reuther after he had visited Ukhaidir and published his own report in 1912.
Reuther's numbering system was also later adopted by K.A.C. Creswell,39 and it is the system used here to locate and describe various spaces within the palace Given that Bell, Reuther and Creswell have all provided thorough, reliable descriptions of Ukhaidir's extensive architecture, mine is a much abbreviated report based mainly on Bell's description and plans. It is intended to highlight the palace's complexity and underscore Bell's remarkable achievement in recording it as accurately as she did in the few days she spent at the site. Creswell's own account of Ukhaidir, based on visits he made 21 years or more after Bell, does little to augment her architectural observations and descriptions, and his photos duplicate, sometimes to lesser effect, her detailed and informative shots.
The description of the layout of the complex provided here, along with its accompanying plan, should also help to place Bell's architectural analyses, partially described later in the chapter, within a more comprehensible context.
Source:
In Search of Kings and Conquerors, Gertrude Bell and the Archaeology of the Middle East - Lisa Cooper
[Pg. 111-112].
