A north woman was responsible for drawing up the boundaries of the modern state of Iraq, now seething with tension between conflicting ethnic groups.
Gertrude Bell can be seen in a grainy photograph - sitting bestride a camel - with TE Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) and Winston Churchill (in sunglasses) beside her.
The picture shows delegates invited to determine the future of the region at the Cairo Peace Conference of 1921. Bell, one of the most famous women of her time, was a scholar, historian, kingmaker, archaeologist and spy.
She successfully managed to break away from the rigid Victorian constraints of her age.
She was also responsible for the state first known as Mesopotamia - formed from the Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra - and now known as Iraq.
In a letter home Bell, the daughter of Teesside steel magnate Hugh Bell, describes walking through the desert trailing a walking stick in the sand. Behind her Arab boys put up cairns marking the boundary between what would become Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
The lines Bell and her contemporaries drew in the sand rarely corresponded to existing historical, tribal, cultural or geographical reality. The nations they created were arbitrary, their borders thrown across dozens of warring local sheikdoms.
Purely British creations, these fictional states were given kings and elegant written constitutions. Churchill installed the first King of Iraq, Faisal I, in 1921. The new monarch had no connection with Iraq and, as a Hashemite Sunni, little in common with its people.
But Faisal had helped Lawrence against the Turks during the First World War, and his reward was the Baghdad throne.
Bell stood by his side, and became known as the "uncrowned Queen of Iraq".
She loved the Arabian peninsula, yet Bell and her superior as British High Commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, laid down policies of state in Iraq that were taken up by Saddam Hussein's Arab Ba'ath socialist party. These include to retain, if necessary by violence, the Kurdish mountains as a buffer against Turkey and Russia; to buy off big landowners and tribal elders; to deploy air power for political control; to promote Sunni Muslims and other minorities over the Shia majority and to repress the Shia clergy or expel them to Iran. Gertrude Bell was born in 1868 at the Hall in Washington (not to be confused with nearby Washington Old Hall) and allowed to travel unchaperoned - unheard of for a woman at the time - by her enlightened parents. She was the first woman to graduate from Oxford with first-class honours in modern history and while still young climbed 11 new routes or peaks in the Alps and travelled deep into the Arabian interior.
The knowledge she gained was to make her of great importance to British intelligence in the First World War, while a handbook she wrote on war with the Arabs was still in use in the 1960s. While she never married, she had a long affair with married Lieutenant-Colonel "Dick" Doughty-Wylie, VC, who died at Gallipoli. Her letters to her father and stepmother - many held by Newcastle University along with 7,000 photographs - pass easily from orders for cotton gowns to the new-fangled British air warfare being tried out on troublesome Iraqi Arabs and Kurds. Bell also founded Iraq's antiquities department in Baghdad and is still revered nearly 80 years after her death.
A plaque reading `Gertrude Bell, whose memory the Arabs will ever hold in reverence and affection,' hangs in the national museum in Baghdad, which this week was overrun by US troops.
