The Desert and the Sown Travels in Palestine and Syria

Passionate about Arabia, then an inhospitable land of nomadic and warring tribes under Turkish control, Bell wrote this account of her extraordinary 1905 trip across the Syrian Desert from Jericho to Antioch.

Gertrude Bell was a British writer, archaeologist, and political analyst who left a privileged life in Victorian England to become a citizen of the world. One of the first women to graduate from Oxford, she traveled to Persia, where she was passionately drawn to the Arab people, their language, and their architecture. Bell's achievements there were stunning: she established an archaeology musem and was one of the people responsible for creating the Iraq that exists today.