T.E. Lawrence
"Lawrence of Arabia" visited Tell Hesban during the Arab League’s campaign into Transjordan in February, 1918

     Thomas Edward Lawrence was born August 16, 1888 in Tremadoc, Wales. He was educated at Jesus College in Oxford, England and, upon graduation, began traveling in the Middle East. In 1911 he began archaeological excavations at Carchemish, in present-day Turkey, with Leonard Woolley.
      Early in WWI, Lawrence joined the British Army and was stationed in Cairo, Egypt drawing military maps. In 1916 he traveled to the Arabian Desert, met with Prince Feisal and committed to aiding the Arabs in their independence movement if they would fight alongside the British against the Ottoman Empire, which ruled over the Levant and Arabia, and which had sided with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the war. Lawrence fought a guerilla war against the entrenched Turkish troops of the Levant, using Bedouin forces and a mix of traditional desert warfare (camel cavalry, for example) and modern equipment provided by the British.
     In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence wrote that on February 19, 1918 he traveled from Hesban south to Tafileh and on February 21 arrived in Beersheba, in what is now Israel. Lawrence, according to other sources, was disappointed at the way the war was being fought, and made this trip to turn in his resignation to the British command. When he arrived at Beersheba, however, he was told of new plans for an attack on the Southern Transjordanian city of Ma’an and that the British command still needed him. Rather than resigning he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and fought the rest of the war in the Levant.
     The British and the Arab League defeated the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and Transjordan and Palestine became protectorates of the British Empire. T.E. Lawrence returned to England a hero, but was disappointed that he could not secure independence for the Arab tribes he had tried to help. His 1926 memoir of the war Seven Pillars of Wisdom was a success and is to this day a minor classic. Lawrence was in a motorcycle accident on May 13, 1935 and died on May 19.

 

 

 

 

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Malcolm Brown, T.E. Lawrence, (New York: New York University Press, 2003) 93

B.H. Liddell Hart, Lawrence of Arabia (USA: De Capo Press, 1989) 228

T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, (Hertforshire, England: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1997) 664

Harold Orlans, T.E. Lawrence: Biography of a Broken Hero, (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 2002)