The Woman Who Destroyed Her Own Discovery

Lady Hester Stanhope ran 10 Downing Street. Not officially — her uncle William Pitt the Younger was Prime Minister — but she managed his household, hosted his dinners, and operated as the most powerful woman in British politics without holding any title at all. When Pitt died in 1806, Parliament granted her a pension of £1,200 a year.

She used it to leave England forever.

A shipwreck off Rhodes in 1810 destroyed every piece of clothing she owned. She borrowed Turkish male robes and a turban, and simply never changed back. She rode astride through the Ottoman Empire, entered the ancient city of Palmyra dressed as a man — the first European woman to do so — and was crowned "Queen of the Desert" by Bedouin tribes. Lord Byron met her in Athens and was intimidated. She dismissed him as a great poet but a very bad man.

In 1815, she led what is now considered the first organized archaeological excavation in Palestine, at Ashkelon. Her team unearthed a massive headless marble statue — exactly where a medieval Italian manuscript said it would be.

She ordered it smashed to pieces and thrown into the sea. She wanted the Ottoman authorities to know she was there for knowledge, not plunder.

When Britain cut her pension in 1838, she bricked up the gates of her Lebanese fortress and never came out.