Seven Pillars of Wisdom
autobiography of British soldier T. E. Lawrence
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is the autobiographical account of the experiences of British Army Colonel T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") while serving as a military advisor to Bedouin forces during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire of 1916 to 1918.
It was completed in February 1922 but first published in December 1926. It was originally published for the US market in 1927 as Revolt in the Desert and is the only version that was commercially released while he was alive. Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935) is a longer form of the book at almost double the page count and released to the international market.
Title
The title comes from the Book of Proverbs: "Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars" (Proverbs 9:1) (King James Version). Before the First World War, Lawrence had begun work on a scholarly book about seven great cities of the Middle East, to be called Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It was incomplete when war broke out and Lawrence stated that he destroyed the manuscript. He used his original title for the later work.
The book had to be rewritten three times, once following the loss of the manuscript on a train at Reading railway station. From Seven Pillars, "...
The public source identifies “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” as autobiography of British soldier T. E. Lawrence. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Seven, Pillars and Wisdom.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24323. VIAF identifies the subject as 184258629. The Library of Congress control number is no2018116309. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1916, 1918, 1922 and 1926.
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This entry incorporates text from “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.