A rare presentation set of offprint first editions comprising the complete Notes on a Journey Through Cilicia and Lycaonia, with an autograph letter signed from Bell presenting the whole to Professor Ludwig Richard Enno Littman (1875-1958) laid in. The apparently unpublished letter, on Rounton Grange, Northallerton, stationery, is dated October 17 [presumably 1907], and contains four pages of lively archaeological discussion ("Your suggestion that all this series of castles is Islamic comes to me I confess as a new idea. It needs some consideration. Kal'at al Badya at any rate belongs to two periods, the Syrian tower in the fort being rebuilt of its materials. Your idea could not materially alter the kunst wissenschaftlicke importance of the buildings, nor could it alter, I think, one's conception of the artistic influences under which they were built"), after which Bell declares "I send you all the papers from the Revue archiologique [sic]. The Cilician churches, Guyer says, were mostly rebuilt by the Armenians. Concerning the Karaiagh churches Sir W. Ramsay + I will have much to add + to correct. We have, we think, got back with certainty to earlier dates than we could be sure of before." Littmann was a German scholar of Oriental languages who had studied at Princeton. In 1905 he lived among the Tigre people in Eritrea, and in 1906 directed the German Aksum Expedition in Ethiopia. In the same year he succeeded Theodor Noldeke as chair of Oriental languages at the University of Strasbourg. He went on to serve as professor of Oriental languages at Gottingen, Bonn and Tubingen. He is notable for having deciphered Palmyrene, Nabataean and Syriac inscriptions as well as historical texts of ancient Ethiopian monuments. He later published a translation of One Thousand and One Nights from Arabic into German. This early work by Bell relates her travels through what is now South-Eastern Turkey and Northern Syria, and represents her primary fascination with the archaeology for the Middle East (before, like Lawrence, she made the uneasy transition to foreign agent). It is rare - no other copies are traced at auction - and only six are listed by OCLC in institutions worldwide, one in France, two in the US, and three in the UK (and none listed at Oxford, where Bell studied History).
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