In December 1913, the English traveler and Orientalist Gertrude Bell set out from Damascus on a four-month journey that looped southeast through Arabia to the city of Hayyil, then north to Baghdad, and back across the Syrian desert to Damascus. The Syrian portion of the passage was already familiar to her, and she was not the first European to follow the caravan routes through Arabia. Charles Doughty and Wilfred and Anne Blunt, among others, had preceded her. Nor did her efforts significantly advance European knowledge of the region. But her willingness to undertake such an arduous and dangerous journey without European companions won her a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society and a reputation as an authority on the Middle East, subsequently reinforced by her role in intelligence for the Arab Bureau during World War I and in the establishment of the British-dominated Iraqi state afterward.