Sometimes they rode camels, sometimes they rode horses, and they often affected native dress—the ominous Arabists of England. Their loyalty to Western civilization was suspect, and in the conspicuous cases of T. E. Lawrence and Harry St. John Bridger Philby their characters were, too. Beyond fancy dress and military fireworks, Lawrence’s main interests were literary and personal, while “Jack” Philby (Cambridge spy Kim Philby’s father) seems to have been hard-wired for betraying anyone and anything at all. Their grasp of politics was superficial; it was enough that Arab tribal rebellions against the Turks deserved support. But they all enjoyed meddling in the Middle East, or “kingmaking”, it was called back then—a deeply satisfying mixture of violence and intrigue.

Like many educated Englishmen of their time, Lawrence and Philby had a romantic conception of the world, and they tried to reshape their chunk of it accordingly. They certainly left geographical marks on the map. Both their names and greatest adventures are reasonably well known, in Lawrence’s case at least partly because of a classic Hollywood movie starring Peter O’Toole, with troops of men and animals rushing around Wadi Rum.

Yet Lawrence, Philby, Sir John Bagot Glubb, Gertrude Bell and scores of others were preceded by a man who out-romanced and out-adventured them all—Sir Austen Henry Layard (1817–94). Today his archaeological achievements are widely and properly recognized: The title of a 1962 biography, Layard of Nineveh, says it all, and in later years he became a renowned Victorian worthy. But his wild escapades among the Bakhtiari in Iran between 1839 and 1845 are little known. Vividly described in his autobiographical Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana, and Babylonia (1894) this period of his life epitomizes the contrast between romantic Western visions of the Orient and the raw and awkward facts of Middle Eastern society.

As Layard tells his story, by 1839 he had spent five years as an articled clerk in a solicitor’s office in London and wanted out. In his early twenties, he set off for the East with a companion ten years his senior named Edward Mitford. They planned a journey overland to India and then Ceylon. As they reached northern Italy, everything seemed to be going rather well. For Layard himself the trip south from Trieste ensured a decisive break with dull old England, his aunt’s social circle and the routine of copying legal documents. Free of all that, he was delighted with the beauty of the countryside in late summer, “and with the picturesque costumes of the peasantry, which seemed to increase in gorgeousness as we went south and approached the land of the Ottoman.”