«He [the oriental] is as we are». Gertrude Bell’s Geography of Arabic Culture in The Desert and the Sown

The Desert and the Sown, an early Twentieth Century English travel account written by Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), writer and archaeologist, has long been esteemed as a source of inspiration for scholars who were working on travels and travellers in the Mediterranean. Bell was a multifaceted figure «she wrote extensively on the ancient cultures of the region, and documented the daily experience of her travels as a prolific letter writer». She began The Desert and the Sown in the early 1900s and published it after she returned to Great Britain in 1907. Her greatest wish was «to write not so much a book of travel as an account of the people whom [she] met or who accompanied [her] on [her] way, and to show what the world is like in which they live and how it appears to them».