Darwin M. Gojoco

5 Informal Imperialism in Europe and the Ottoman Empire: The Consolidation of the Mythical Roots of the West ‘Informal colonialism’ and ‘informal imperialism’ are relatively common terms in the specialized literature. The term ‘informal colonialism’ was coined—or at least sanctioned—by C. R. Fay (1940: (vol. 2) 399) meaning a situation in which a powerful nation manages to establish dominant control in a territory over which it does not have sovereignty. The term was popularized by the economic historians John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson (1953), who applied it to study informal British imperial expansion over portions of Africa. The diVerence between informal and formal colonialism is easy to establish: in the Wrst instance, complete eVective control is unfeasible, mainly due to the impossibility of applying direct military and political force in countries that, in fact, are politically independent. They have their own laws, make decisions on when and where to open museums and how to educate their own citizens. Yet, in order to survive in the international world they need to build alliances with the main powers, and that comes at a price. Many countries in the world were in this situation in the middle and last decades of the nineteenth century: Mediterranean Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and independent states in the Far East and in Central and South America. A simple classiWcation of countries into imperial powers, informal empires and formal colonies is, however, only a helpful analytical tool that shows its Xaws at closer look. Some of those that are being included as informal colonies in Part II of this book were empires in themselves, like the Ottoman Empire and, from the last years of the century, Italy (La Rosa 1986), and therefore had their own informal and formal colonies. The reason why they have been placed together here is that in all of them there was an acknowledgement of a need for modernization following Western-dominated models. They all had the (northern) European presence in their lands—at Wrst primarily British and French, followed by Germans and individuals of other European states, mainly from other empires either alive such as that of AustriaHungary or in decline like Sweden and Denmark. Some of these Europeans were 100 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism trusted to provide advice on political and cultural matters, or even were appointed to Westernize their countries. The distinction between formal and informal imperialism, however, becomes blurred when some of them became quasi-protectorates of one of the main imperial powers, Egypt being a case in point (Egypt became under ‘temporary’ British military occupation in 1882 and a proper protectorate between 1914 and 1922). Informal empires could also have internal colonialism in their own territories. Some of these problems will be further analysed in Parts II and III of this book. Part II deals with informal imperialism, and Part III turns to the archaeology in the formal colonies. In 1906 one of the Wrst comprehensive histories of archaeology was published. Its author, the German professor Adolf Michaelis -), assessed, in eleven extensive chapters, what he considered to be the most outstanding events of the history of the discipline. Italy and Greece received the most attention with nine chapters. Chapter 10 was devoted to ‘single discoveries in outlying countries’, in which Egypt, Babylon, Northern Africa and Spain were included. The work Wnished with some comments on the application of science to archaeology. Very little of the archaeology in the colonial world, that is, beyond classical Italy and Greece and Europe’s imagined origins of civilization in Egypt and the Near East, formed part of Michaelis’ account. Antiquities in Asia (with the exception of its westernmost fringe), Australia, sub-Saharan Africa and America were ignored. Interestingly, the archaeology of the European continent beyond the classical lands was also overlooked. However, this chapter and part of the one that follows will focus on the archaeology examined by Michaelis. In both, the discussion will revolve around informal imperialism. Perhaps controversially, the discussion of informal imperialism will start with two less-politically powerful areas of Europe, Italy, and Greece, where the ancient remains represented a powerful symbolic capital for the European imperial powers during the period discussed in this chapter, from the 1830s onwards. I N F O R M A L I M P E R IA L I S M I N E U RO P E Informal imperialism in Europe until the 1870s After the Napoleonic venture ended in defeat a tacit agreement created an area which was protected from imperial conquest. This comprised all European countries, including those in the Mediterranean: Spain, Portugal, Italy, and, from 1830, Greece. For the remaining years of the nineteenth century the great powers had to look elsewhere for territories to exploit economically. But Europe and the Ottoman Empire 101 while overt control over Mediterranean Europe was considered unacceptable, political assistance and economic gain together with cultural predominance were more tolerable options. It is within the latter aspect that archaeology played an important role in Italy and Greece, where the Roman and Greek civilizations had developed in antiquity. The absence of similarly appealing remains in Spain and Portugal explains why in these countries, despite receiving some foreign archaeologists willing to study their ruins and some institutional attention (for example the Bulletin de la Société Académique Franco-Hispano-Portugaise which began in the 1870s), the scale of the intervention was noticeably more moderate. In these countries imperial archaeology only became modestly important when the dangers of undertaking research during the political instability in the east of the Mediterranean pushed some archaeologists who otherwise would have preferred to be in Greece towards the west (Blech 2001; Delaunay 1994; Rouillard 1995). The reason behind the diVerence in treatment between, on the one hand, Italy and Greece and, on the other, Spain and Portugal lay in the power that the classical model had in the national and imperial discourses. Rome and Greece—not Spain or Portugal—were now not only invested with a crucial role in the gestation of civilization, as was the case earlier in the century (Chapter 3), but also of the European empires themselves: each of the powers endeavoured to present their nation as the paramount inheritor of classical Rome and the ancient Greek poleis, and of their capacity for the expansion of their cultural and/or political inXuence. If in the early years of nationalism state-sponsored expeditionaries, patriotic antiquaries, and their societies and academies, and the Wrst antiquarians working in museums had been key players in the archaeology of the classical Great Civilizations, in the age of imperialism the indisputable novelty in the archaeology of Italy and Greece was the foreign school. The institutions created in the imperial metropolises—the museums, the university chairs (including Caspar J. Reuvens -), appointed in 1818, teaching both the classical archaeological world, and others)—served as a back-up to the archaeology undertaken in Italy and Greece. In Italy and Greece the foreign schools represented a clear break with the era of the pre-national cosmopolitan academies. In contrast, at the end of the nineteenth century the debate was to a degree restricted to groups of scholars of the same nationality who discussed learned topics in their own national languages. The eVect at the international level of having so many groups of scholars in the same city is still in need of analysis. Rivalries and competition, but also scholarly communication, must have all played a part. The middle decades of the century represented a period of transition for the institution in place, the Istituto di Corrispondenza Archaeologica (Corresponding Society for Archaeology) 102 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism founded in Rome in 1829, still had an international character. Its inspirer had been the then young Edward Gerhard -), who aimed to promote international cooperation in the study of Italian antiquity and archaeology, and to, as the statutes proclaimed, gather and make known all archaeologically signiWcant facts and Wnds—that is, from architecture, sculpture and painting, topography, and epigraphy—that are brought to light in the realm of classical antiquity, in order that these may be saved from being lost, and by means of concentration in one place may be made accessible for scientiWc study (in Marchand 1996a: 55). Membership of the institute was composed mainly of Italian, French, and German scholars (Marchand 1996a: 56). It subsidized Weldwork and gave grants, published its own journal, the Anali dell’Istituto, and printed other specialized studies (Gran-Aymerich 1998: 52–5). Yet, despite its international status, scholars from diVerent nationalities received unequal treatment. The reason for this was that the funding mainly came from a single source—the Prussian state, a benevolence consciously linked to the institute’s diplomatic function for the German country (Marchand 1996a: 41, 58–9). It should not, therefore, come as a surprise that after the uniWcation of Germany, the Istituto di Corrispondenza Archaeologica became an oYcial Prussian state institution in 1871, and was transformed into the German Archaeological Institute soon after, the Rome house being converted into one of its branches. In 1874 it was promoted to a Reichinstitut (an imperial institute) (Deichmann 1986; Marchand 1996a: 59, 92). Despite this, the oYcial language of the institute would remain Italian until the 1880s (Marchand 1996a: 101). The Istituto di Corrispondenza Archaeologica also organized foreign archaeology in Greece. However, those individuals subsidized to study Greek antiquities were, perhaps not surprisingly, of German origin (Gran-Aymerich 1998: 182). Despite this, scholars from Britain and France also travelled to independent Greece, undertaking projects such as the architectural studies of the Acropolis in the 1840s. After this, the protagonism went to the French, especially after the opening in 1846 of the French School in Athens (Étienne & Étienne 1992: 92–3; Gran-Aymerich 1998: 121, 146, 179). The School undertook further works on the Acropolis and, mainly during the 1850s, supported expeditions to several archaeological sites including Olympia and Thasos by archaeologists such as Léon Huzey -) and Georges Perrot -). Meanwhile, German researchers focused on analysing sculpture and producing a corpus of Greek inscriptions (Étienne & Étienne 1992: 98; Gran-Aymerich 1998: 147–8). SigniWcantly, the ideal of an international school was not pursued here. The French School in Athens would Europe and the Ottoman Empire 103 become the Wrst of many schools opened during the imperial period. At a colloquium organized to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the institution, Jean-Marc Delaunay (2000: 127) indicated that, in addition to the opposition against the Germans, the creation of the French School in Athens was also related to competition against the British, and, to a certain extent, the Russians who complained about its foundation. So powerful was its diplomatic role that even when the French monarchy was deposed in 1848, the French School was left unharmed. As Delaunay argues, in Greece the British had their merchants and sailors, the Russians the Orthodox clerics, and the Germans the Greek monarchy of Bavarian origin. The French only had their school. When the Germans thought of opening a rival branch in Athens, the traditional French antipathy for the British turned towards the Germans (ibid. 128). Turning to Russia, there was a Commission of Archaeological Finds in Rome operating at least from the 1840s, which employed Stephan Gedeonov, a future director of the Hermitage Museum. In the early 1860s he managed to acquire 760 pieces of antique art, mainly coming from Etruscan tombs. These had been collected by the Marquis di Cavelli, Giampietro (Giovanni Pietro) Campana (1808–80), known as the patron of nineteenth-century tomb-robbers (Norman 1997: 91). Other parts of the collection—not including antiquities—were bought by the South Kensington Museum, and another by the Museum Napoleon III—a polemic and ephemeral museum opened and closed in 1862 in Paris—and later dispersed in museums throughout France (Gran-Aymerich 1998: 168–78). In contrast to the situation in the Ottoman Empire, in Italy and Greece experts had to content themselves with studying the archaeology in situ owing to the ban on any antiquities leaving the country. In several of the Italian states this had been the case for a long time. Although the success of the regulations had been unequal, the Napoleonic experience had reinvigorated the determination to stop ancient works of art leaving the country: new legislation such as the Roman edict of 1820 had been issued in this context (Barbanera 2000: 43). In Greece the export of antiquities was also outlawed in 1827 (Gran-Aymerich 1998: 47), although the continued trade in antiquities made them partly ineVective. Given the impossibility of obtaining riches for their museums by oYcial means, together with opposition from local archaeologists to foreigners excavating in their own countries, most excavations in Italy and Greece were undertaken by native archaeologists. Examples of these were, in Italy, Carlo Fea -), Antonio Nibby -), Pietro de la Rosa and Luigi Canina -) at Rome (Moatti 1993: ch. 5), and Giuseppe Fiorelli at Pompeii. In Greece the main archaeologists were Kyriakos Pittakis, Stephanos Koumanoudis and 104 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism Panayiotis Stamatakis (Étienne & Étienne 1992: 90–1; Petrakos 1990). These are only a few names of an increasingly numerous group of local archaeologists working in the archaeological services and in an ever-growing number of museums. Although most of their eVorts focused on the classical era, other types of archaeology were being developed such as prehistoric, church and medieval archaeology (Avgouli 1994; Guidi 1988; Loney 2002; Moatti 1993: 110–14). Of special interest is the development of the so-called sacred archaeology, inspired by the interest of the Italian lawyer Giovanni Battista de Rossi (1822–94). On the basis of a study of the description of the Rome catacombs provided in documents, he was able to locate many of them starting with those of Saint Calixt in 1844. His eVorts received backing from Pope Pius IX, who in 1852 created the PontiWcal Commission for Sacred Archaeology.1 Under this institution the discoveries of other monuments related to the Christian Church in the past continued. Yet, the more general histories of archaeology are mute in describing the accomplishments of Italian archaeologists. Because of the ban on the export of antiquities, countries were unwilling to Wnance excavations, although there were some exceptions that will be discussed later on. This meant that most foreign archaeologists focused their studies on already excavated sites and on Wnds. It is interesting to note that the work of experts came together with that of other consumers of antiquities; in addition to painters and other artists in the 1860s another type of Westerner would be interested in antiquity: the photographer. Photographs increased the circulation of images of antiquity and facilitated the visual experience of the classical model (Hamilakis 2001): one in which the ancient monuments were isolated from their modern context, and emphasized in size and grandiosity, symbolizing knowledge, wisdom and, more than anything else, the origin of Western civilization. Positivism, the philosophy that raged throughout the academic world in the second half of the nineteenth century, resulted in this period in the production of catalogues. Positivists brought to extremes the eighteenthcentury empiricist understanding of knowledge. This should be empirical 1 In brackets it should be said that sacred archaeology would have an inXuence not only in other Catholic countries such as Spain, where members of the Church included the Catalan priest Josep Gudiol Cunill -), who organized museums and obtained the chair of sacred archaeology in the inXuential Seminary of Vic in 1898. In Britain a movement to study religious buildings had started in the 1840s (Piggott 1976) and continued for most of the century. Events in Britain had parallels in all Europe (De Maeyer and Verpoest 2000), and included other churches such as the Orthodox Church (Chapter 9). Members of the Church of England started studies on religious architecture in the 1840s (Piggott 1976) and throughout the nineteenth century the Church itself managed to avoid legislation imposing state control on the buildings it owned (Miele 2000: 211). Europe and the Ottoman Empire 105 and veriWable, and not contain any sort of speculation. Knowledge was, therefore, based exclusively on observable or experiential phenomena. This is why observation, description, organization, and taxonomy or typology took the form of large catalogues which reported the old and new Wnds although they went much beyond their eighteenth-century precedents. Examples of this were, in Italy, the inquiries into Roman copies of Greek sculpture, and research into the Etruscan world, where Greek inXuences in particular were investigated (Gran-Aymerich 1998: 50; Michaelis 1908: ch. 4; Stiebing 1993: 158). In 1862 Theodor Mommsen -) initiated and organized the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinorum (Moradiellos 1992: 81–90), an exhaustive catalogue of Latin epigraphical inscriptions. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century German academics took the lead in science as opposed to the French. Detailed study and criticism allowed archaeologists and historians of art to break the previously believed geographical unity of ancient Greek art (Whitley 2000). Empiricism and positivism did not mean that politics were left aside. Mommsen was very explicit about the political aim of his work. He argued that historians had the political and pedagogical duty to support those they had chosen to write about, and that they had to deWne their political stance. Historians should be voluntary combatants Wghting for rights and for Truth and for the freedom of human spirit (Moradiellos 1992: 87). Informal imperialism in Europe in the last four decades of the century From the 1860s important political developments took place in Italy. As in the case of Greece, these would not have been possible—at least in the way events evolved—outside the framework of nationalism. The uniWcation of Italy, although practically concluded by 1860, was only considered to be complete after the annexation of Rome in 1870. Italian Weld archaeology, organized from 1870 by a state archaeological service—the Sopraintendenza de Archeologia—became even more the province of Italians. There were exceptions, but the Italian state was not eager to accept them. This would be made clear to those who attempted to contravene the tacit rules. This was the experience, for example, of a member of the French School who had obtained permission to excavate an archaic cemetery in the 1890s. Soon after the Wrst discoveries had taken place, this work was suspended, only to be resumed under the supervision of the Italian Ministry (Gran-Aymerich 1998: 320). In some cases disputes between Italian and other experts—such as those with German archaeologists following the discovery of an archaic piece at the Roman 106 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism Forum—had some echoes in the press where the news acquired some nationalist overtones (Moatti 1989: 127). International occasions such as the meeting of the International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archaeology (CIAPP) in Bologna in 1871 were also used to foster nationalist sentiment by the Italian organizers, although these academic rivalries led to criticism by some of the Italian archaeologists (Coye & Provenzano 1996). Nationalism was also important to the way Greeks perceived their past. The expansion of the territory of Greece throughout the nineteenth century, acquiring areas such as the Ionian Islands in 1864, Thessaly and part of the Epeirus in 1891, led to a desire to erase the Ottoman past. One of the requests for change explained that it was necessary because, among other reasons, ‘barbaric and dissonant names . . . give ground to our enemies and to every European who hates Hellas to Wre myriad of insults against us, the modern Hellenes, regarding our lineage’ (in Alexandri 2002: 193). Emblems would also adopt ancient imagery. The local would only be one level in the collective formation of the national identity; there were others at regional, national and international levels. This building had its tensions that in themselves helped to reinforce the image of the nation (Alexandri 2002). At an academic level, the Wrst integral national history of Greece, the History of the Hellenic Nation written in Greek between 1865 and 1876 by Konstantinos Paparigopoulos (Gourgouris 1996: 252), accepted the classical past as the foundational period of the Greek nation. In this account ancient Greece was linked to a second and more deWnite major Golden Age, the Byzantine medieval era (Gourgouris 1996: 255–6). As in other European countries (Chs. 11 to 13), the medieval period was beginning to acquire a mightier presence through these accounts of the national Golden Ages (Gourgouris 1996: 259). Yet, the appeal of ancient archaeology would remain strong to the Greeks—as is still the case. At that time it was instrumental, for example, in Greece’s political claims to annexe other areas beyond the borders established in 1829. The Wrst independent state of Greece was only formed by a few Greek territories and had left aside many other territories inhabited by a predominantly Greek population. The Megale Idea, the ‘Great Idea’, as this project was called, came closer to reality through the following decades with the incorporation beginning in 1864 of the seven Ionian islands which were under British protection, of Thessaly in 1881, Crete in 1912, and Greek Macedonia in 1913 (Étienne & Étienne 1992: 104–5). In Greece the importance conferred on archaeology was such that it was even Wnancially backed by a generous source, the lottery, whose money was fully dedicated to antiquities from 1887 until 1904. After that date archaeology had to share the lottery funding with payments to the wartime Xeet (Étienne & Étienne 1992: 108–9). Europe and the Ottoman Empire 107 Classical Rome and Greece were attractive models, therefore, both for Italian and Greek nationalisms, and for European imperialism, and this was to remain so during the outburst of imperial folly the world experienced from 1870. Comparisons were regularly drawn between ancient Rome and the modern empires, these being, to begin with, Britain and France (Betts 1971; Freeman 1996; Hingley 2000; Jenkyns 1980 but see Brunt 1965). But if the model of Rome served as a rhetorical model of inspiration for politicians, the other side of the coin was also true. Several studies have highlighted the inXuence that contemporary events had on historians’ and archaeologists’ interpretations of the past (Angelis 1998; Bernal 1994; Hingley 2000; Leoussi 1998). The creation of the foreign schools led to further competition between empires. The new foundations by Germany and France in Greece were not viewed impassively by the British. In 1878 The Times published a letter by Richard Claverhouse Jebb -),2 then a professor of Greek at the University of Glasgow, in which he wondered why Britain was behind France and Germany in opening archaeology institutes in Athens and Rome (Wiseman 1992: 83). National prestige was at stake. Eventually, the British Academy in Athens would be set up in 1884 (Wiseman 1992: 85). It had been preceded by the creation of the Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1880. The British Academy would only have its own publication, the Annual . . . from the end of the century, but as an institution it remained generally under-funded well after the Second World War (Whitley 2000: 36). The American School of Classical Studies at Athens was opened in 1881, preceding, therefore, the British foundation (Dyson 1998: 53–60; Scott 1992: 31). Other foreign schools in Athens would be the Austrian in 1898 and the Italian in 1909 (Beschi 1986; Étienne & Étienne 1992: 107). A similar situation to that occurring in Athens was taking place in Rome. There, the German initiative of converting the internationally based Istituto di Corrispondenza Archaeologica into the German Archaeological Institute in 1871 was soon followed by the opening of the French School in 1873. Others would follow: the Austro-Hungarian Historical Institute (1891), the Dutch Institute (1904), the American (1894) and the British (1899) Academies (Vian 1992: passim). Large-scale excavations began with Olympia by the Germans, and later also included that of the French at Delphi and the Americans at the Athenian 2 Richard C. Jebb also pointed to the low proWle of the only chair of classical archaeology in Britain. The Disney Chair in Cambridge, then occupied by an obscure clergyman with some interests in antiquity, was later occupied by Percy Gardner, a Hellenist formerly from the British Museum and a scholar with direct knowledge of the excavations of Olympia and Mycenae. Later, in 1887, Oxford University instituted the Lincoln and Merton Chair of Classical Archaeology, occupied by Gardner for almost forty years (Wiseman 1992: 83–4). 108 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism Agora (Étienne & Étienne 1992: 107). It is important to note, however, that the number of excavations in Italy and Greece were less frequent, partly because potential sponsors—mainly the state and oYcial institutions—were not easy to convince of the value of excavating merely for the sake of widening the knowledge about the period. Professor Ernst Curtius (1814–96), for example, had to argue for twenty years before he succeeded in obtaining state funding from Prussia for his project to excavate the Greek site of Olympia. He had originally proposed to excavate the site in 1853. In his memorandum to the Prussian Foreign Ministry and the Education Ministry he explained that the Greeks had ‘neither the interest nor the means’ to do major excavations and that the task was too big for the French, who had already started to dig elsewhere. Germany had ‘herself inwardly appropriated Greek culture’ and ‘we [Germans] recognise as a vital objective of our own Bildung that we grasp Greek art in its entire, organic continuity’ (Curtius in Marchand 1996a: 81). The outbreak of a war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean War (1853–6), however, delayed his project. In 1872 Curtius tried again. He argued that in order to avoid decadence, Germany should ‘accept the disinterested pursuit of the arts and sciences as an essential aspect of national identity and a permanent category in the state’s budgets’ (in Marchand 1996a: 84). He failed again in his plea: to the instability in Greece, he had to add the opposition by the Prussian chancellor Bismarck, who saw the endeavour as fruitless given the ban on bringing back antiquities for German museums (Marchand 1996a: 82, see also 86). Finally, Curtius could countermand Bismarck’s opposition with the support received from the Prussian Crown Prince Friedrich. The prince appreciated the symbolic importance of excavating a major Greek site. As he explained in 1873, ‘when through such an international co-operative venture a treasure trove of pure Greek art works . . . is gradually acquired, both states [Greece and Prussia] will receive the proWts, but Prussia alone will receive the glory’ (in Marchand 1996a: 82). The prince’s negotiations resulted in the excavation treaty signed by the Greek King George in 1874 (Marchand 1996a: 84). Curtius’ archaeological campaign started the following year and continued until 1881. Unfortunately, no great discoveries were made, in contrast to the large quantity of Wnds resulting from the German excavations in the Greek city of Pergamon in Turkey in the same years (see below). Curtius’ eVorts, accordingly, received little public recognition (ibid. 87–91). Unlike the discoveries yielded by the excavations at Pergamon, those from Olympia were not suYciently useful for the imperial aspirations of Germany. Curtius would later bitterly remark that the bureaucrats ‘revel in this accidental mass of originals [coming from Pergamon] and feel they have equalled London’ (in Marchand 1996a: 96n). Europe and the Ottoman Empire 109 The diYculty in obtaining state sponsorship was not unique to Germany, but shared by all and it was related to the problems of acquiring collections. The limits to the export of antiquities meant that, to expand their collections with objects originating from Italy and Greece, the great museums of the European powers had either to buy established collections (Gran-Aymerich 1998: 167; Michaelis 1908: 76) or to acquire plaster copies of the major works of ancient art from Italy and Greece (Haskell & Penny 1981; Marchand 1996a: 166). As will be explained later in this chapter, works of art would be obtained in great quantities through excavation and/or plunder in other countries— mainly those under the rule of the Ottoman Empire—with less restrictive legislation regarding antiquities. In any case, the charm exerted by the Graeco-Roman civilization as an example to modern imperialism was also expressed by the increase in institutionalization of classical archaeology in the imperial metropolises in this period. In France the German-inspired reform of the universities during the early years of the Third Republic -) encouraged the creation of new chairs of archaeology at the Sorbonne and several provincial universities, these usually being taken by former members of the French School at Athens and Rome (Gran-Aymerich 1998: 206–27; Schnapp 1996: 58). In the United States, classical archaeology was initially the major focus of the Archaeological Institute of America created in 1879. Its foundation has been considered to represent the beginnings of the institutionalization of the discipline in the United States (Dyson 1998: chs. 2–4, esp. 37–53; Patterson 1991: 248). During the last decades of the nineteenth century and until the First World War, the peak period of imperialism, foreign archaeology in Greece and Italy became marked by the rivalry of the imperial nations in their research. This was demonstrated by the appearance of foreign schools in Athens and Rome. Germany and France were the Wrst to initiate the new trend. Germany not only transformed the Istituto di Corrispondenza Archaeologica into a Prussian institution in 1871 (and then into the German Archaeological Institute) but also opened a branch in Athens and began to publish Athenischen Mitteilungen. This move was observed with concern by the French, who in 1873 opened a French School in Rome and in 1876 the Institute of Hellenic Correspondence, and started to publish the Bulletin des Écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome (Delaunay 2000: 129; Gran-Aymerich 1998: 211). Members of the former were also responsible for organizing expeditions in Argelia (Chapter 9), building an imperial network that will be analysed below. The examination of the Xow of ideas between colonies—even between informal and formal colonies—will highlight interesting linkages between hypotheses that have hitherto been addressed separately. 110 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism The analysis of the connections between the political context of research and the archaeology of the Greek and Roman civilizations in this period needs also to consider the reasons behind the emphasis placed on language and race. As had happened in the archaeological studies of the northern and central European nations (Chapter 12 and others), the archaeology of Italy and Greece also became increasingly inspired by these topics. Together with liberal ideologies held by scholars such as Theodor Mommsen, the same authors often proposed the importance of the study of race and language in antiquity. For the latter, for example, philology provided the data needed to reconstruct its ancient history, which would in fact be read as a direct equivalent to the race history of Greeks and Romans. Racial discussions on Greek archaeology revolved around Aryanism. The belief of the existence of an Aryan race came from language studies, and in particular, the discovery made at the turn of the century of the linkage of most languages in Europe with Sanskrit in India, a linkage which could only be explained by the existence of a proto-language (Chapter 8). The spread of Indo-European languages from a primeval homeland could only be explained as the result of an ancient migration of a people—the Aryans. These were argued to have been the invaders of Greek lands who had created the prehistoric civilizations uncovered in Mycenae by Heinrich Schliemann and, from 1900, Knossos by Arthur Evans (McDonald & Thomas 1990; Quinn 1996; Whitley 2000: 37). The Aryan race was judged superior to any other. The perfection of the Greek body displayed in classical sculpture was interpreted as the ideal representation of the Aryan physique (Leoussi 1998: 16–19). Classical Greeks personiWed, therefore, the epitome of Aryanness, that was also found in their modern heirs, the Germanic nations, including Britain (Leoussi 1998; Poliakov 1996 (1971); Turner 1981). Initially, there were no such claims of purity regarding the ancient Romans. Yet, the Villanova cemetery, discovered in 1853, was interpreted as that of a population who had arrived from the north—the Indo-Europeans—responsible in the long term for creating the Latin civilization. Later, however, racial purity became an issue. THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE SUBLIME PORTE The Tanzimat years (1839–76) The nineteenth century was a period of extreme change for Turkey. As the centre of the Ottoman Empire, it endured a profound crisis in which Constantinople (today’s Istanbul), the capital of lands in Europe, Asia and Africa, saw its territorial power diminish dramatically until the Wnal collapse of the Europe and the Ottoman Empire 111 empire in 1918. Contrary to common European perception, the Sublime Porte (i.e. the Ottoman Empire) did not remain motionless throughout this process. The empire had reacted promptly to the political rise of Western Europe. A process of Westernization had started as early as 1789, overcoming the resistance by the traditional forces in Ottoman society. However, its military weakness in the face of its European neighbours, evidenced by disasters such as the loss of Greece and other possessions elsewhere, led the Sultan Abdülmecid and his minister Mustafa Reshid Pasha (Reşid Paşa) to start a ‘reorganization’ in what have been called the Tanzimat years (1839–76). New measures taken at this period were the promulgation of legislation in 1839 declaring the equality of all the subjects before the law—one of the principles of early nationalism (Chapter 3)—the creation of a parliamentary system, the modernization of the administration partly through centralization based in Constantinople, and the spread of education (Deringil 1998). Regarding antiquities, the most obvious result of the wave of Europeanization was the organization of the relics collected by the Ottoman rulers from 1846. The collection was Wrst housed in the church of St Irini. It was composed of military paraphernalia and antiquities (Arik 1953: 7; Özdogan 1998: 114; Shaw 2002: 46–53). The opening of the museum could be read as a counterbalance to the Western hegemonic discourse, making Graeco-Roman antiquities ‘native’ by integrating them into the history of the modern Ottoman imperial state. Thus, the empire claimed symbolically to civilize nature reinforcing the Ottoman right to the territories claimed by European philhellenes and the biblical lands (Shaw 2000: 57; 2002: 59). The small collection at St Irini eventually germinated into the Ottoman Imperial Museum, oYcially created in 1868 and opened six years later. In 1869 an order had been issued for ‘antique works to be collected and brought to Constantinople’ (Önder 1983: 96). Some sites such as the Roman Temples of Baalbek in Lebanon were studied by Ottoman oYcials displaced there as a result of the violence which had erupted between Druses and Maronites in 1860 (Makdisi 2002: para. 23). Baalbek was not used as a metaphor of the imperial decline, as Europeans had done until then referring to the Ottomans, but as a representation of the Empire’s own rich and dynamic heritage (ibid. para. 28). In 1868 the Education Minister, Ahmet Vekif Pasha, decided to give the post of director of the Imperial Museum to Edward Goold, a teacher in the Imperial Lyceum of Galatasaray. He would publish, in French, a Wrst catalogue of the exhibition (www nd-e). In 1872 the position went to the headmaster of the Austrian High School, Philipp Anton Dethier (1803–81). Under his direction the antiquities were moved to Çinili Köşk (the Tiled Pavilion), in the gardens of what had been until 1839 the Sultan’s Palace—Topkapi Palace. Dethier also planned the enlargement of the museum, created a school of archaeology and was behind 112 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism the promulgation of the Wrmer legislation regarding antiquities in 1875 (Arik 1953: 7). The authorities’ reaction was not strong enough to counter-alleviate the Europeans’ greed for classical objects. From 1827 Greece’s ban on the export of antiquities had left the Anatolian Western coast as the only source of classical Greek antiquities to furnish European museums. This would obviously aVect the provinces of Ayoin and Biga, as well as the Aegean islands then under Ottoman rule. The European endeavour centred on ancient sites such as Halicarnassus (Bodrum), Ephesus (Efes), and Pergamon (Bergama) on the mainland and on islands such as Rhodes, Kalymnos, and Samothrace. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries British, Germans, and others would divest this area of its best ancient classical works of art, an appropriation to which later in the nineteenth century its Islamic heritage would be added. Western intervention, however, was increasingly viewed with mistrust by the Ottoman government, and a growing number of restrictions were set to control it, backed by ever-tighter legislation. France had an early but short-lived interest in Anatolian archaeology that resulted in Charles Texier’s (1802–71) expedition funded by the French government in 1833–7 (Michaelis 1908: 92). During the central decades of the nineteenth century Britain became the main contender in Anatolian archaeology (Cook 1998). The sound political and economic relations between the Ottoman Empire and Britain constituted an ideal background for the intention of the British Museum Trustees to enrich the collection of Greek antiquities, enabling the organization of several expeditions (Jenkins 1992: 169). The Wrst, led by Charles Fellows -), a banker’s son who indulged in travelling, took place in the early 1840s (Stoneman 1987: 209–16). A permit was obtained to collect the antiquities at Xantos on the island of Rhodes for they were ‘lying down here and there, and . . . of no use’. It was granted ‘in consequence of the sincere friendship existing between the two Governments [Ottoman and British]’ (letter from the Grand Vizir to the Governor of Rhodes in Cook 1998: 141). It would only be after the next major excavation, that of Halicarnassus, that resistance would begin from the Ottoman government towards this European appropriation. Restrictions started with the dig excavations at Halicarnassus, and continued with that of Ephesus. In 1856 a permit was obtained to remove the sculptures suspected of belonging to the ancient mausoleum at Halicarnassus in the Castle at Bodrum. In this case the British Museum commissioned Charles Newton (1816–94) to undertake the Wrst work in the Weld, in the 1860s supported by others (Cook 1998: 143; Jenkins 1992: ch. 8; Stoneman 1987: 216–24). One of the Wrst clashes between the Ottoman government and the excavators sent by the European imperial powers happened here. In this Europe and the Ottoman Empire 113 case the coup de force was clearly won by the foreigners. In 1857, Newton managed to ignore the attempts made by the Ottoman War Minister who requested some of the Wndings—some sculptures of lions—for the museum at Constantinople (Jenkins 1992: 183). They were Wnally shipped to the British Museum. The uneasiness of the Ottoman authorities towards Western intervention became increasingly apparent in the 1860s and restrictions continued to grow. In 1863 the permit to remove sculptures from Ephesus (Efes) obtained by Sir John Turtle Wood (1821–90), a British architect living in Smyrna and working for the British Railroad Company, was granted only on the condition that if similar items were found, one should be sent to the Ottoman government (Cook 1998: 146). The excavation exhumed a large quantity of material for the British Museum, which arrived there during the late 1860s and 1870s (Cook 1998: 146–50; Stoneman 1987: 230–6). In 1871 the permission obtained by the German entrepreneur, Heinrich Schliemann (1822–90), for the excavation of Troy was even more restrictive: half of the Wnds had to be given to the Ottoman government. The subsequent events would later be interpreted in the Ottoman Empire as a proof of the extreme arrogance of the West. Schliemann did not comply with the agreement and decided instead to smuggle the best Wndings of his campaign at Troy—the Priam’s treasure—out of Turkey in 1873. He claimed that the reason was ‘instead of yielding the Wnds to the government . . . by keeping all to myself, I saved them for the science. All the civilized world will appreciate what I have done’ (in Özdogan 1998: 115). The ‘Schliemann aVair’ would have consequences not only for the Ottoman Empire but for Germany as well. The embarrassment of this diplomatic situation made the authorities in Berlin determine that, in the future, private individuals would be dissuaded from excavating abroad (Marchand 1996a: 120) (although Schliemann would be able to excavate again in Troy in 1878). Imperial archaeology was more than ever becoming a conscious state enterprise. In Turkey itself the ‘Schliemann scandal’ would have as a consequence the promulgation of the laws of 1874–5, whereby the excavator had the right only to retain one third of what was unearthed. The implementation of the law, however, had its problems, no less because it was overlooked by many including the state, for example in a secret treaty in 1880 between the German and the Ottoman governments related to Pergamon mentioned below. The Hamidian period -) The Ottoman Empire did not remain unaVected by changes in the character of nationalism in the 1870s. As with many other nations, it was mainly in this 114 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism period that Ottoman intellectuals started a search for the cultural roots of their national past, for the Golden Ages of their ethnic history. In this selfinspection not only were classical antiquities given more importance but the Islamic past became deWnitively integrated into the national historical account of Turkey. These changes occurred in the Hamidian period during the reign of Abdülhamid II (r-), and a key Wgure in them was Osman Hamdi Bey -), a reformist educated as a lawyer and as an artist in France (among others by the archaeologist Salomon Reinach). Hamdi took over Déthier’s post at his death in 1881. As the director of the Imperial museums (Arik 1953: 8) Hamdi Bey would encourage many changes: the promulgation of more protective legislation regarding antiquities, the introduction of European exhibition methods, he initiated excavations, and introduced the publication of museum journals and the opening of several local museums in places such as Tessaloniki, Pergamon, and Cos. Regarding the Wrst change mentioned, Hamdi Bey was behind the antiquities law passed in 1884 whereby all archaeological excavations were put under the control of the Ministry of Education. More importantly, antiquities—or at least those considered so at this time, for there was some ambiguity about whether Islamic antiquities were included—were deemed as the property of the state and their export was regulated. However, as Eldem (2004: 136–46) indicates, there still were many instances in which Europeans managed to smuggle antiquities out of the country. Under Hamdi’s guidance several excavations mainly of Hellenistic and Phoenician sites were undertaken throughout the empire. One of the Wrst excavations undertaken by him was one that he hurriedly excavated in 1883, knowing that the Germans were too interested in it. He also dug the tumulus of Antiochus I of Commagene on Nemrud Dagi. One of the key discoveries by Hamdi Bey was the Royal Necropolis of Sidon (nowadays in Lebanon) in 1887, where he located the alleged sarcophagus of Alexander the Great which he then had moved to the Constantinople museum (Makdisi 2002: para. 29). This resulted in an important enlargement of the existing collections in Constantinople which provided the excuse to claim for the need for a new accommodation for the museum. A new building with a neoclassical façade was constructed in the grounds of the Topkapi Imperial Palace, designed by Alexander Vallaury, a French architect and professor at the Constantinople Imperial School of Fine Arts. The new discoveries, together with other Greek and Roman collections, were moved there in 1891. This museum mimicked its European counterparts: the classical past still served as a metaphor of civilization. SigniWcantly, this past was physically separated from the more recent, Oriental antiquities, which were not moved to the new premises. The new museum was well received by Europeans; as Europe and the Ottoman Empire 115 Michaelis (1908: 276) stated, the museum was ranked ‘among the Wnest in Europe’. Despite restrictions and new legislation, foreign archaeology’s intervention on Turkish soil grew in the Hamidian period. Britain now shared her involvement with other rising imperial nations such as Germany (Pergamon, from 1878), Austria (Gölbasi, from 1882, Ephesus, from 1895), the United States (Assos from 1881, Sardis from 1910) and Italy (from 1913).3 Of these, Germany would be the nation to invest most eVorts in—and obtain more riches from—Anatolian archaeology. This can be contextualized in the favoured treatment that Abdülhamid II gave to the Germans, when he established a strong informal alliance between the Ottoman Empire and Germany in the decades leading up to the First World War. In archaeology, in the Wrst instance, Germany’s role owed much to Alexander Conze’s -) shrewdness regarding the settlement made for the excavation of Pergamon. From his post as director of the Berlin Royal Museums’ sculpture collection, Conze convinced the excavator, Carl Humann (1839–96), to downplay the potential of the site to be in a better negotiating position with the Ottoman government. Findings made from 1878 were not publicized until 1880, by which time the Ottoman government had not only sold the local property to Humann in a secret treaty, but also renounced its one-third share of the Wnds in favour of a relatively small sum of money—a deal partly explained by the bankruptcy of the Ottoman state (Marchand 1996a: 94; Stoneman 1987: 290). In 1880 Germany saw the arrival of the Wrst impressive shipment from Pergamon. Humann ‘was received like a general who has returned from the battleWeld, crowned with victory’ (Kern in Marchand 1996a: 96). As indicated earlier in this chapter, the success in Pergamon resulted in the lack of interest in excavations in Greece—Olympia— which, it was felt, only provided information for science and not objects of value to be displayed in museums (Marchand 2003: 96). For the idea of archaeology as history of art, however, the excavations of Pergamon came to form part of a trilogy that was to be the basis of the understanding of Greek archaeology. As the excavation of Olympia in Greece had provided a higher understanding of the sequence from the archaic to the Roman periods, and that of Ephesus provided information from the seventh century bce4 to the Byzantine era, the work on Pergamon reinforced knowledge of the urbanism, culture and art of the post-Alexandrine and Roman periods (Bianchi Bandinelli 1982 (1976): 113–15). 3 References for the imperial archaeology in the Hamidian period are for Britain (Gill 2004); Germany (Marchand 1996a); Austria (Stoneman 1987: 292; Wiplinger and Wlach 1995); the United States (Patterson 1995b: 64), and Italy (D’Andria 1986). 4 In this book bce [before common era] will be used instead of bc and ce instead of ad. 116 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism The numerous Wndings unearthed in the various campaigns of Pergamon— the Wrst one Wnished in 1886 but then continued in 1901–15 and from 1933 (Marchand 1996a: 95)—would also create in Germany the need for a large museum similar to the British Museum and the Louvre. The Pergamon Museum, planned in 1907, would eventually open in 1930 (Bernbeck 2000: 100). The excavation of Pergamon was also important on another level. In 1881 Alexander Conze became the head of the German Archaeological Institute. The campaign at Pergamon had taught him several lessons, not least that the institute had to be formed by salaried experts, following the directives of the main oYce of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin (Marchand 1996a: 100). Under his direction, the German Archaeological Institute became the Wrst fully professionalized foreign institute. Finally, the German excavations were very inXuential in several European countries.5 The successor to Conze’s Austrian chair from 1877 was Otto Benndorf -).6 After teaching in Zurich (Switzerland), Munich (Germany), and Prague (Czechia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), he was appointed in Vienna, founding the archaeology and epigraphy department. In 1881–2 he excavated the Heroon of Gölbasi-Trysa, in Lycia (a region located on the southern coast of Turkey), sending reliefs, the entrance tower, a sarcophagus, and more than one hundred boxes to the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Museum of Art History) in Vienna in 1882. He helped Carl Humann with his excavation in Pergamon and later in the century, in 1898, he founded the Österreichische Archäologische Institut (Austrian Archaeological Institute) and was its Wrst director until his death. The study of the past in the Hamidian period did not only diVer from the previous years in the greater control exerted by the Ottoman government regarding classical antiquities. It also contrasted with the Tanzimat era in the Wrm integration of Islamic history as part of Turkey’s past. This coincided with a renewed impulse given to national history (Shaw 2002: chs. 7–9). Although the best-known national history of Turkey, Necib Asim’s History of the Turks, was only published in 1900, publications similar to those produced by the European nations existed from the 1860s, such as that published by a converted Polish exile, Celaleddin Pasha, in 1869, Ancient and Modern Turks (Smith 1999: 76–7). These histories assisted in the formation of a new, modern identity for the Ottoman Empire. In them, the Islamic past 5 For American archaeologists in Turkey see Gates (1996). 6 There are many more German and Austrian scholars working on the Greek world whose scholarship was extremely inXuential in the development of the philological and art-historical approach in the last decades of the nineteenth century. To name a few, one can mention Franz WickhoV (Art History), Robert Ritter von Schneider (Greek Archaeology), Wolfgang Reichel (Homeric Archaeology), and Eugen Bormann (Ancient History and Epigraphy) (see also others in Marchand 1996a). Europe and the Ottoman Empire 117 was described. During the Hamidian period Islam was being used as one of the main reasons to hold the state together, although in practice diVerent religions and ethnic groups were tolerated as an integral part of the empire (Makdisi 2002: paras. 10–13). The Islamic past became worth researching, preserving and displaying. In the new landscape of the empire, religious and imperial sites—places that were somehow related to the history of the Ottoman ruling family—became national symbols (Shaw 2000: 66). In some of them monuments were erected as historical mnemonics, as objects to assist memory. Thus, in 1886 a mausoleum was built for the resting place of Ertugrul Gazi, the father of the Wrst sultan of the House of Osman and one of Turkey’s original heroes (Deringil 1998: 31). Yet, although the Islamic past was deWnitively becoming part of the nationalist agenda, the appeal of the archaeology of the Islamic period only increased gradually. There were signs pointing in this direction, such as the creation of a Wrst Department of Islamic Arts in the Ottoman Imperial Museum in 1889, that is, about twenty-Wve years after its opening. However, when the classical works of art were moved to the new museum premises in 1891, Islamic works of art were left behind, being taken from one venue to another until 1908, when they were eventually assembled in Topkapi’s Tiled Pavilion. Despite their apparent lesser importance, the very act of displaying objects hitherto vested with religious signiWcance marked in itself an important landmark and its signiWcance should not be underestimated. This was not the result of storing objects as a response to a threat of destruction of religious objects, as had happened in Paris a century before when the Museum of French Monuments was created (Chapter 11), but part of a conscious process of nation building. Religious objects were being converted into national icons. The importance of antiquities from the Islamic period also became apparent in 1906, when new legislation tried to put a halt to their rapid disappearance to the European market which was growing increasingly eager for exotic Oriental objects. The lateness in building a sound scholarly base for the historical and artistic understanding of the Islamic past may explain why archaeology was practically left aside in the construction of pan-Islamic nationalism, a movement that also had followers in the Ottoman Empire such as Egypt (Gershoni & Jankowski 1986: 5–8). Islamic antiquities would Wnally be given priority as secularized metaphors of the Golden Age of the Turkish nation after the constitutionalist Young Turk Revolution of 1908–10 (Shaw 2000: 63; 2002: ch. 9). Several commissions were organized, the Wrst one in 1910, to discuss the preservation of Islamic antiquities in the country. In the following years others would be organized, one in 1915 to take on researching and publishing works ‘of Turkish civilization, Islam, and knowledge of the nation’ (in Shaw 2002: 212). Finally, in the 118 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism same year the Commission for the Protection of Antiquities was set up to deal with the enforcement of the legislation protecting antiquities. A report on the deplorable state of the palace of Topkapi was issued acknowledging that ‘Every nation makes the necessary provisions for the preservation of its Wne arts and monuments and thus preserves the endless virtues of its ancestors as a lesson in civilization for its descendants’ (in Shaw 2002: 212). As these words make clear, the nationalist vocabulary had deWnitively been accepted in Turkey’s policy towards archaeological heritage. In addition to the re-evaluation of the Islamic past, at the start of the twentieth century a fresh interest in the prehistoric past emerged. Interestingly, it was promoted by a pan-Turkish ideology which proposed the union of all Turkish peoples in Asia in one nation-state (Magnarella & Türkdogan 1976: 265). The proponents of this ideology organized the Turkish Society (Türk Dernegi) in 1908, an association with its own journal, Türk Yurdu (Turkish Homeland). The society’s objectives were to study ‘the ancient remains, history, languages, literatures, ethnography and ethnology, social conditions and present civilizations of the Turks, and the ancient and modern geography of the Turkish lands’ (in Magnarella & Türkdogan 1976: 265). As in Europe, the search for a national prehistoric past became a quest for the racial origins of the nation identiWed in the Sumerians and Hittites. This would feature in the discourse on the past adopted by Kemal Atatürk -) after his rise to power after the First World War. POST-NAPOLEONIC EGYPT: PLU NDER AND NARRATIVES OF EMPIRE AND RESISTANCE The plunder of Egyptian antiquities There had been a long tradition of interest in Egyptian antiquities even before the studies undertaken in situ in the Napoleonic period (Chapters 2 and 3). After the power struggle which followed the French and British invasions, Muhammad Ali, an army oYcer of Macedonian origin, was conWrmed as Egypt’s ruler in 1805. Under him, Egypt acted with increasing independence from her Ottoman master. His period in oYce (r. 1805–48) was characterized by a state-led modernization towards the Western model. In this context, some native scholars travelled to Europe. One of these was Rifaa RaWi al-Tahtawi (1801–73), who spent some time in Paris in the late 1820s, where he became aware of the European interest in Egyptian (and classical) antiquities. One of his collaborators was Joseph Hekekyan (c. 1807–74), a Europe and the Ottoman Empire 119 British-educated Armenian engineer born in Constantinople who worked on the industrialization of Egypt (JeVreys 2003: 9; Reid 2002: 59–63; Solé 1997: 69–73). The situation al-Tahtawi found back in Egypt was deplorable compared to the standards he had learned in Paris. Antiquities were not only being destroyed by the local people, who saw the old temples as easy quarries for stone or lime, they were also being plundered by collectors of antiquities. These were led by the French, British and Swedish consuls—Bernardino Drovetti -), Henry Salt -) and Giovanni Anastasi -)—and their agents—Jean Jacques Rifaud -) and Giovanni Battista Belzoni -) as well as by professional looters.7 Later scientiWc expeditions had also taken part in the seizure of antiquities. The French expedition of 1828–9 headed by Champollion was by far the most modest. In addition to many antiquities, the expedition obtained a major piece of one of the obelisks at Luxor, which was erected at the Place de la Concorde in Paris in 1836. This was one of the many examples in which obelisks became part of the urban landscape of imperial Europe. The obelisk at the Place de la Concorde in Paris was the Wrst one to be removed in the modern era. Then, in 1878, another one—the so-called ‘Cleopatra’s Needle’— was erected on the Thames Embankment in London and in 1880 New York acquired its own obelisk at Central Park. As a result only four obelisks were left standing in Egypt (three in the Karnak Temple in Luxor and one in Heliopolis, Cairo), whereas Rome had thirteen, Constantinople had one, and Britain, France, and the US had one each. Other expeditions were not as modest as Champollion’s. Richard Lepsius, sent by the Prussian state between 1842 and 1845, in addition to recording many site plans and rough stratigraphic sections (later published in his multivolume Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien), managed to increase considerably the Berlin Museum’s collections (Marchand 1996a: 62–5). Lepsius advocated for Prussian involvement in Egypt as a way for Prussia to become a major player in the study of that civilization. As he put it: It seems that for Germany, for which above all other nations scholarship has become a calling, and which has not yet done anything to further scholarship since the key to the ancient land of wonders was found [Champollion’s decipherment of the hieroglyphs], the time has come to take up this task from her perspective and to lead on toward a solution. (Marchand 1996a: 62–3). 7 On the personalities dealing with archaeology in this period see Fagan (1975: 97–256); JasanoV (2005: chs. 7–9); Manley and Rée (2001); Mayes (2003); Vercoutter (1992: 60–82). On the French expedition of 1828–9 Fagan (1975: 97–256); Gran-Aymerich (1998: 79); JasanoV (2005: 287–99); Vercoutter (1992: 60–82). About the obelisks see Fagan (1975: 260); Habachi (1977: ch. 7); Iversen (1968–72); JasanoV (2005: 293). 120 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism One of Lepsius’ colleagues, Ernst Curtius, reported that Lepsius had always been proud ‘that he was allowed to be the one who unfurled the Prussian banner in a distant part of the world and was permitted to inaugurate a new era of science and art in the Fatherland’ (in Marchand 1996a: 63). Tahtawi’s protests against the lack of interest towards the ancient Egyptian civilization, together with Champollion’s pleas to the pasha, eventually resulted in the promulgation of an edict in 1835 forbidding the export of antiquities and making it illegal to destroy monuments (Fagan 1975: 262, 365; Reid 2002: 55–6). The ordinance also regulated the creation of an Egyptian Antiquities Service housed in the Ezbeqieh gardens of Cairo, where a museum was formed. The museum was to house antiquities belonging to the government and obtained through oYcial excavations. However, most of these measures came to nothing, for the pasha was not interested in creating mechanisms to enforce the law. Instead, he subsequently used the museum collections as a source of gifts for foreign visitors; the last objects dispatched in this way were sent to the Archduke Maximilian of Austria in 1855. European demand and Muhammad Ali’s lack of care for the past encouraged the development of a strong antiquities market. Antiquities were being shipped out of Egypt in great quantities, the most popular destinations being the great museums. As Ernest Renan (1823–92), perhaps chauvinistically, described the situation in the 1860s: Purveyors to museums have gone through the country like vandals; to secure a fragment of a head, a piece of inscription, precious antiquities were reduced to fragments. Nearly always provided with a consular instrument, these avid destroyers treated Egypt as their own property. The worst enemy, however, of Egyptian antiquities is still the English or American traveller. The names of these idiots will go down to posterity, since they were careful to inscribe themselves on famous monuments across the most delicate drawings. (Fagan 1975: 252–3). The antiquities market was also promoted by the appearance of a new type of European in Egypt. They were tourists helped, from 1830, by the publication of tourist guides starting with one in French and followed by others published in English and German (Reid 2002: ch. 2). Auguste Mariette Change would only come with the advent of the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette (1821–81). Mariette’s Wrst visit to Egypt took place in his role of an agent with the remit of obtaining antiquities for the Louvre. In 1850–1 he Europe and the Ottoman Empire 121 excavated the Serapeum at Sakkara, providing the Louvre with a large collection of objects. He returned to Egypt in 1857 to assemble a collection of antiquities to be presented as a gift to ‘Prince Napoleon’—Napoleon III’ cousin—during his planned (but never undertaken) visit to Egypt. Before Mariette returned to France in 1858 a good friend of the pasha, the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps (the builder of the Suez Canal between 1859 and 1869), convinced him to appoint Mariette as ‘Maamour’, director of Egyptian Antiquities, and put him in charge of a resurrected Antiquities Service. He was given funds to allow him ‘to clear and restore the temple ruins, to collect stelae, statues, amulets and any easily transportable objects wherever these were to be found, in order to secure them against the greed of the local peasants or the covetousness of Europeans’ (in Vercoutter 1992: 106). Mariette saw the beginning of a period of about ninety-four years of predominance of French archaeology over Egyptology, lasting even during much of the ‘temporary’ British military occupation of Egypt from 1882 (Fagan 1975; Reid 2002: chs. 3–5; Vercoutter 1992). Mariette managed to set up a museum in 1863 and to slow down the pace at which Egyptian monuments were being destroyed, partly by forbidding all archaeological Weldwork other than his own. To a certain extent he was also able to hold back the export of antiquities. In 1859 the news of a discovery of the intact sarcophagus of Queen A-hetep and the seizure of all Wndings by the local governor required Mariette’s strong intervention to stop this illegal appropriation of archaeological objects. The resulting treasure was presented to the pasha and included a gift of a scarab and a necklace for one of his wives. The pasha’s delight at both the Wndings—as well as, and as Fagan points out (1975: 281), at the discomWture of his governor,—led him to order the building of a new museum, which would eventually be opened at the suburb of Bulaq in Cairo. The Queen A-hetep Wnding was also important in a diVerent way. When the Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III’s wife, asked the pasha to receive this discovery as a gift to her, he sent the Empress to ask Mariette, who refused to handle it. This decision was not received happily by either of the sovereigns, but it was a landmark in the conservation of Egyptian archaeology (Reid 1985: 235). Mariette also ignored Napoleon III’s comment that the antiquities of the Bulaq would be better oV in the Louvre (ibid. 2002: 101). Mariette—as well as his successor to the post, Gaston Maspero—was merely able to reduce the destruction and illegal export of antiquities rather than stop it completely. There were even accusations of the Antiquities Service’s involvement in the illegal handling of works of art (Fagan 1975: passim). He had to be especially vigilant towards the agents of the great European museums. The craving for more antiquities had not halted, despite 122 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism the law that new museum acquisitions could now only be acquired through the legal export of antiquities. The continuation of illegal trade of antiquities indicates that the European governments were in practice disregarding Egyptian law. This disrespect was explained by Wallis Budge, assistant keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities in the British Museum, described by Fagan (1975: 295–304) as one of the major illegal looters of antiquities, in the following manner: Whatever blame may be attached to individual archaeologists for removing mummies from Egypt, every unprejudiced person who knows anything of the subject must admit that when once a mummy has passed into the care of the Trustees, and is lodged in the British Museum, it has a far better chance of being preserved there than it could possibly have in any tomb, royal or otherwise, in Egypt. (Fagan 1975: 304). The fear of losing the French control of Egyptian archaeology when Mariette’s health deteriorated fostered the creation of the Wrst foreign school in Cairo, the Mission Archéologique, the French Archaeological Mission of 1880, later transformed into the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology (Reid 1985: 236; Vernoit 1997: 2). Therefore, as already in Italy and Greece, in Egypt the French state funded an institution to deal with antiquities. In contrast, the similar British institution, the Egypt Exploration Fund (later called Egypt Exploration Society) founded in 1882, was a private initiative. The impetus for its creation came mainly from the English lady novelist and travel writer, Amelia Edwards (1831–92). Edwards had travelled to Egypt with her companion Kate GriYths in 1873–4 and then set out to popularize the Egyptian world through her publications and numerous talks as well as to denounce the extent of the looting of antiquities (Champion 1998: 179–82; Fagan 1975: 322; Moon 2006). In Britain she received the support of Reginald Stuart Poole (1832–95), the keeper of the Department of Coins and Medals at the British Museum. The objectives of the Egypt Exploration Fund were ‘to organise expeditions in Egypt, with a view to the elucidation of the History and Arts of Ancient Egypt, and the illustration of the Old Testament narrative, so far as it has to do with Egypt and the Egyptians’ (in Fagan 1975: 323). This emphasis introduces an important factor that will be further discussed in Chapter 6: the inXuence of the Bible in the archaeology of Egypt, as well as Mesopotamia, Palestine, and to a certain extent Lebanon and Turkey. Accordingly, the Fund promoted legal intervention in Egyptian archaeology by scientiWcally excavating promising sites and respecting the legislation regarding the destination of the Wnds. Amelia Edwards would also become important in Egyptian archaeology for her role in academic Egyptology. In her Will she endowed a chair of Egyptian archaeology at the University of London to be occupied by Europe and the Ottoman Empire 123 her protégé Flinders Petrie -). In addition to the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology and the Egypt Exploration Society, the Germans established a ‘general consulate’ for archaeology in 1899 which in 1907 became the German Institute for Egyptian Antiquity (Deutsches Institut für ägyptische Altertumskunde) (Marchand 1996a: 195). The imperial resistance against a native alternative Protagonism in nineteenth-century Egyptian archaeology had resided in foreign activities on Egyptian soil. This was not only caused by the interest of the imperial powers in appropriating the Pharaonic past, but also by their opposition to accepting native expertise in the study of antiquities. Mariette’s role—as well as those of his successors—in stopping antiquities leaving Egypt was not matched by an opening of the foundation of a national Egyptian archaeological institution. A generalized patronizing attitude prevailed towards Egyptians. Hekekyan’s geomorphological studies in the Cairo area, one of the earliest of this kind, was received in Britain with the criticism that the survey was not reliable because it had not been supervised by an authoritative scholar such as his sponsor, the President of the London Geological Society, Leonard Horner (JeVreys 2003: 9). Another case of Europeans’ patronizing attitude or prejudice towards Egyptians is that of the French archaeologist Mariette, who gave orders that no native would be allowed to copy inscriptions in the museum. Also Maspero’s description of the opening of the Archaeology Museum in 1863 years later is revealing. He said that the Pasha, Khedive (viceroy) Ismail (r. 1863–79), ‘being the true Oriental that he was . . . the loathing and fear which he had of death kept him from entering a building containing mummies’ (in Reid 2002: 107). Native would-be Egyptologists seeking careers in the Antiquities Service were denied entry during Mariette’s time, despite some being trained at the School of the Ancient Egyptian Language or School of Egyptology, created by his colleague (and friend) the German scholar Heinrich Brugsch in 1869 (ibid. 116–18). Despite Mariette’s eVorts against this, after his death some of Brugsch’s disciples were able to achieve positions of importance within oYcial Egyptian archaeology. One of them, Ahmad Pasha Kamal -), would become the Wrst Egyptian curator at the Cairo Museum. He was appointed to the museum after Mariette’s death, and in the Wrst few years organized a course on Egyptian hieroglyphs for a small number of students. Yet, following Maspero’s departure to France in 1886, a period of chaos resulted in which the museum was led by incompetent directors (Fagan 1975: 353) who disregarded native expertise. Kamal had to close his Egyptian hieroglyphs school. Few of his 124 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism students found jobs in the Antiquities Service, and Kamal himself was marginalized at the museum in favour of more junior French archaeologists. During this period, however, another Egyptian trained in Brugsch’s school, Ahmad Najib, became one of the two inspectors-in-chief (ibid. 186–90). Upon Maspero’s return from France in 1899 Najib was supplanted from his post. Although no Egyptian was given the directorship of any of the Wve provincial inspectorates, Ahmad Kamal was promoted to become one of the three curators of the museum (the others being of French and German origin). Kamal’s appointment acted as a precedent, and made possible the opening of other museums elsewhere in Egypt run by local staV (Haikal 2003; Reid 2002: 204). Kamal continued his eVorts to teach Egyptology, Wrst at the Higher School Club, then at a newly founded private Egyptian University in 1908–9,8 and Wnally from 1912 at the Higher Teachers College. His pupils, although they still experienced a chilly reception by the Europeans in charge and were denied entry to the Antiquities Department, would form the important second generation of native Egyptologists (Haikal 2003). Kamal retired in 1914, his post being Wlled by a non-Egyptian. When he again insisted on the need to train Egyptians shortly before his death the then director of the museum replied that only a few Egyptians had shown any interest on the subject. ‘Ah M. Lacau’, the answer came, ‘in the sixty-Wve years you French have directed the Service, what opportunities have you given us?’ (in Reid 1985: 237). Egyptians had also been denied the chance to study and preserve Islamic art—then called Arab art and archaeology (Reid 2002: 215). As might have been expected, given the situation described above, the initiative of caring for the Islamic period had come from Europeans—mainly from French and British citizens. This had come with the creation of the Committee for the Conservation of Monuments of Arab Art in 1881. Three years later the Museum of Arab Art was opened by this institution at the ruined mosque of al-Hakim with only one staV member—the doorkeeper (ibid. ch. 6, esp. 222). Although in most cases Egyptians outnumbered Europeans in the committee their inXuence was less powerful. They were oYcials who had other commitments and were not paid to serve in a committee whose discussions were, moreover, undertaken in a foreign language—French. In addition, the decisions made by the committee were taken on the basis of a technical section exclusively formed by Europeans who worked daily on the matters 8 The Egyptian University was created in 1908 under the inspiration of Khedive Abbas (Abbas Hilmi II), overcoming the opposition of the British Consul General in Egypt Lord Cromer who had previously vetoed the institution as a breeding ground for nationalists (Reid 2002: 248). Europe and the Ottoman Empire 125 under discussion. Not surprisingly, Egyptian attendance at meetings seems to have been poor, this being due to the resistance against European dominance or perhaps to reluctance in the face of foreign expertise. However, it was an Egyptian, Ali Bahgat -), who directed the excavations at the Islamic ruins of Fusat begun by the Museum of Arab Art in 1912 (Vernoit 1997: 5). Despite this, in this period, Islamic archaeology did not reach the importance that had been granted to Pharaonic Egypt. At the turn of the century new premises for the Museum of Arab Art were built, but their cost was only a quarter of that of the new buildings opened in 1902–3 for the Egyptian Museum displaying collections of Pharaonic Egypt. It may be worth noting that this imbalance in the importance given to each museum is paralleled in the number of pages the widely used Baedeker tourist guide assigned to them in its edition of 1908. Two and a half pages were devoted to Islamic art as opposed to twenty-eight on Pharaonic Egypt (Reid 2002: 215, 239). The obvious power that the classical model had in the Western world was epitomized by the publications of the British Consul General in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, Lord Cromer, who, for example, in Modern Egypt (1908), often included untranslated Greek and Latin quotations. He served as the president of the London Classical Association after his retirement and also had an eVect on Egyptian native scholarship. However, not only Europeans paid attention to the Graeco-Roman past. A few decades before Cromer, as Reid indicates, Al-Tahtawi’s Anwar (1868), which has been admired for its novel treatment of Pharaonic Egypt, in fact had twice the number of pages dedicated to the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine periods (Reid 2002: 146). Also in the mid 1860s excavations were undertaken in Alexandria, the town to the north of Egypt of Hellenistic origin, by another Egyptian savant, Mahmud alFalaki (1815–85). He was a naval engineer who had become interested in astronomy in Paris, and in combining it with geography and ancient topography. His excavations aimed at drawing a map of the city in ancient times, a work that scholars have used ever since (ibid. 152–3). Despite his expertise, Mahmud al-Falaki seems to have perceived Europe as the centre for ‘pure science’. He believed that scientists living elsewhere should assist European research by compiling data and resolving applied problems (ibid. 153). The examples of Al-Tahtawi and al-Falaki, however, seem to have been the exception. In spite of al-Falaki’s initiative most of those involved in the Institut égyptien (1859–80), the place in Alexandria where papers on GraecoRoman topics were read and articles published, were Europeans. Similarly few Egyptians participated in the discussions (ibid. 159). No Egyptian Muslims or Copts played a part either in the foundation of a Greco-Roman Museum in 1892 or a Société d’archéologie d’Alexandrie in 1893. In 1902 from the total membership of 102 members of the society, only four were 126 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism Egyptians. The bulletin of the society was published in the major European languages but not in either Arabic or Greek (ibid. 160–3). Yet, in addition to Europeans there was another group who showed an interest in the study of the Graeco-Roman past. These were Syrian Christian immigrants who had arrived in Egypt from the mid 1870s, undertook many translations and wrote about the classical period in many publications written in Arabic (ibid. 163–6). Unique to Egypt, of course, was its Pharaonic past. From the three possible types of nationalism existing in Egypt at the time, ethnic or linguistic nationalism, religious nationalism, and territorial patriotism, it was, to a certain extent, the second and, particularly, the third type that had a major inXuence at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century (Gershoni & Jankowski 1986: 3). This form of nationalism allowed the integration into the national discourse of the country’s most ancient past. The Pharaonic past became the original Golden Age of the nation in the early national histories of Egypt. Of special importance was the work of Tahtawi, now considered the most important thinker of Egypt, most notably the Wrst volume of his national history which was published in 1868–9 (Reid 1985: 236; Wood 1998: 180). The Pharaonic past became part of the secondary school curriculum in Egypt from at least 1874 (Reid 2002: 146–8; Wilson 1964: 181). In the midst of the nationalist ferment of the 1870s and early 1880s, local interest in ancient Egypt made possible the publication of books on the subject written in Arabic mainly by ex-students of Brugsch’s school. At least two appeared in the 1870s, three in the 1880s, and six in the 1890s (Reid 1985: 236). The emergent nationalism movement against British control over Egypt would eventually be led by a young lawyer, Mustafa Kamil -), the founder of the Nationalist Party (al-hizb al-watani) and by Ahmad LutW al-Sayyid, who created the Party of the Nation (hizb al-umma) (Gershoni & Jankowski 1986: 6). Although some alluded to the Islamic Golden Age of the Mamluks, for others the Pharaonic period was more appropriately native. In 1907 Kamal stated that: We do not work for ourselves, but for our homeland, which remains after we depart. What is the signiWcance of years and days in the life of Egypt, the country which witnessed the birth of all nations, and invented civilization for all humankind? (in Hassan 1998: 204). Nationalist sentiment for the Pharaonic past would prove a serious blow to the foreign hold on Egyptian archaeology. This mainly happened around the time Britain had conceded a greater degree of independence to Egypt in 1922, the very year of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Europe and the Ottoman Empire 127 CONCLUSION The nineteenth-century European powers inherited the practices established in the early modern period, such as the value given to the ancient Great Civilizations as the origin of the civilized world (Chapters 2 to 4). In the context of a Wrm belief in progress, historians set about to show how civilized their own nation was, by describing the inevitable steps that had propelled it to the summit of the civilized world in comparison with its neighbours. As seen in Chapter 3, early nineteenth-century imperial intervention, as a logical continuation of the Enlightenment and early modern imperialism, had resulted in the appropriation of archaeological icons from Italy, Greece (partly through the Roman copies of Greek works of art) and Egypt which were then exhibited in the greatest national museums of the imperial powers—the Louvre and the British Museum. An emerging group of quasi-professional pioneers had started the process of modelling the past of Italy, Greece, and Egypt into both Golden and Dark Ages. The end of the Napoleonic era would not halt their activities. On the contrary, archaeology, as a form of hegemonic knowledge, proved useful not only for producing and maintaining ideas commonly held in the imperial powers, but also in deWning the colonized areas and legitimizing their assumed inferiority. This was the context in which the events narrated in this chapter took place. Simplifying the situation to the extreme, one could propose that there were two types of archaeology: that undertaken by the archaeologists of the imperial powers and that carried out by local archaeologists. Regarding imperial archaeologists, imperialism fostered the remodelling of discourses about the past of areas beyond their boundaries. People beyond the core of imperial Europe were perceived as static, needing guidance from the dynamic entrepreneurial European classes to stimulate their development or to regain—in the case of the countries where ancient civilizations had occurred—their lost impetus. An exception was made originally with the modern inhabitants of those areas in which the classical civilizations had emerged. At Wrst they were imagined to be carriers of the torch of progress, a perception particularly strong in Greece, but also present in Italy. Direct contact with the realities of these countries soon resulted in a transformation of Western perceptions, equating them to a great extent with societies elsewhere. Locals were generally viewed either as having degenerated from their earlier ancestors, or as the descendants of the barbaric peoples who had provoked the end of the area’s glorious period. The role of the Western archaeologists coming from the most prosperous nations—mainly Britain and France to start with, 128 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism others subsequently—was supposedly to reveal either the past Golden Ages of these degenerated territories or to uncover the barbaric past which explained the present. As the nineteenth century wore on, the diVerence between core Europeans and the Others—including the countries of Mediterranean Europe—became rationalized in racial terms, the Wrst being seen as containing a superior, all-white, dolichocephalic, Aryan race (Chapter 12). In the imperial powers, the importance of the continuing re-elaboration of the mythical past for a nation resulted in increasing institutionalization. The initial individual ventures and isolated state projects were gradually substituted by larger archaeological expeditions directed by the major centres of archaeological power, some already in place—the great museums, the universities—and other new ones—the foreign schools. A growing number of scholars dedicated to the decipherment and organization of archaeological remains were recruited to the proliferating university and museum departments specializing in the study of classical antiquity. The exploration of the past was legitimized as a search that would support the advancement of science. But this aspiration was only understood in national terms. This is clear from the competition between archaeological expeditions from diVerent countries for the acquisition of works of art for their own national museum. There was, however, a major diVerence between Britain (and later also the US) and the other great powers’ archaeology—in particular that of France and Prussia/Germany—mainly before the 1880s: there was a lack of a conscious government policy regarding foreign excavations. In Chapter 1 a distinction was made between the Continental or State-interventionist model and the Utilitarian model of Britain and the US. In the former, expeditions were organized by the mother country and received government backing from the start. In Britain and the US, however, private initiatives continued to predominate until the last decades of the nineteenth century. In many cases, however, entrepreneurs were supported by their government in securing permissions to excavate and transport archaeological objects and monuments back home. Some even eventually obtained Wnancial backing from the Trustees of the British Museum or, especially in the case of America, private foundations. The diVerences between both models became more diluted during the period of greater impact of imperialism, especially from the 1880s, when Britain, and to a certain extent the US, inaugurated a state policy of actively encouraging foreign excavations and opened their Wrst foreign schools. It is important to note that the interest of the imperial powers in the antiquities of the countries analysed in this chapter was selective: it focused on the classical period and disregarded, to begin with, both prehistory and the Islamic past. A similar pattern will be analysed in the colonial world in Europe and the Ottoman Empire 129 Chapter 9. In fact, this lack of concern towards Islamic antiquities (with the exception, perhaps, of numismatics, epigraphy and paleography (Ettinghausen 1951: 21–3), and to a very limited extent also towards all other non-classical antiquities) became diluted in the late nineteenth century, when non-classical antiquities became a focus of Western curiosity (Ettinghausen 1951; Rogers 1974: 60; Vernoit 1997). From that period, Islamic antiquities became the target of both local nationalists and the prosperous classes in the Western imperial powers. Yet, whereas for local nationalists the Islamic past was a Golden Age explaining the origin of the nation, for Westerners it became equivalent to exoticism, and the representation of the Other (Said 1978). Thus, in the West, especially from the 1890s, Islamic art was taken as a whole. Funding for Islamic archaeology centred on monuments and coins and their aesthetic and commercial value. The fresh attention directed towards the Islamic past would eventually draw Western archaeologists to explore other areas under the power of Constantinople from Albania and Kosovo to the territories in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. These areas are not discussed in this chapter for this would take us beyond the chronological limits established for this work, although sporadic initiatives may have occurred in this period (see, for example, Potts 1998: 191). European hegemonic views of the past were contested in diVerent ways in each of the countries analysed in this chapter. In the southern European countries antiquities became, from early on, metaphors for the national past and icons of national prestige and, therefore, measures were taken to protect them from the imperial craving for them. Laws were passed to criminalize the export of antiquities. Societies were organized and archaeology was taught at university level. In this way, imperial archaeologists had to content themselves with studying antiquities in competition or collaboration with local archaeologists. (Yet, in the long term, the accounts from the imperial archaeologists were more successful. In widely read histories of archaeology produced in the post-imperial powers (still Britain, France, and North America) their names are spelled out, while similar treatment is not given to their Italian and Greek counterparts.) In the nineteenth century, the growing use of imperial languages—English, French, German and perhaps Russian—also nourished the creation of national academies with traditions separate from each other. The transformation of the ethos of foreign schools in Italy is a case in point. Italian was abandoned as a medium of communication shortly after the internationally inclusive Istituto di Corrispondenza Archaeologica was substituted by the nationally-led foreign schools from the 1870s. In this atmosphere the endeavours of local archaeologists were often met with contempt by archaeologists coming from more prosperous countries. However, it would be too simplistic to claim that in the archaeology of 130 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism nineteenth-century Italy and Greece there were two opposing accounts, that of the hegemonic imperial powers and the alternative local view. When examined more closely each of them encompasses a diversity of voices. Resistance against European informal colonialism and its lust for classical antiquities was more diYcult beyond Europe, and this chapter has discussed the cases of Turkey and Egypt. In the 1830s many of the provinces still under the political control of the Ottoman Empire contained ruins of a glorious past which had already been or were eventually to become incorporated as an integral part of the origin myth of the Western nations. The Greek remains found in Turkey, the impressive monuments located in Egypt, and, from the mid nineteenth century, those in Mesopotamia (Chapter 6), became a target of the Western lust for appropriation. The seizure of ancient works of art was enormous. During the second half of the nineteenth century the largest contingent of antiquities, and the most celebrated, were especially those coming from the Wrst two areas. They were received by the large imperial museums in Europe—the Louvre, the British Museum, the Munich Glyptothek, the Prussian Altes Museum, and the Russian Hermitage. The Ottoman Empire, however, did not remain impassive to the appropriation of its past by Westerners. The nineteenth century saw the formation, still timid, of a local scholarship with competing narratives about their national past. At the beginning of the century the obvious political decadence of the Ottoman Empire had encouraged politicians and scholars to approach Western thinking. Nevertheless, the formal and structural diVerences between Ottoman and Western knowledge were too large for a swift transition. The diversity of countries within the empire and their wide autonomy also explains how the transition occurred at a diVerent pace in the various parts of the Ottoman Empire. In Turkey a form of civic nationalism was imposed from above at the start of the nineteenth century and with it the Wrst museum was organized. Yet, it would only be later in the century that this ideology spread in earnest among intellectuals. From the 1870s more protective legislation regarding antiquities was passed: the museum in Constantinople was modernized and others were opened, scientiWc journals began to be published, and excavations started. Less Westernized than Turkey, Egypt also saw the early organization of museums, only to be dispersed as Egyptian rulers used them as a source for prestige gifts. Egypt being under European control, and European archaeologists in charge of archaeology, the chaos of plunder by treasure hunters was only partially halted from the 1860s. Under their direction, however, local archaeologists stood little chance of Wnding employment in this Weld, although a few did. A more extreme example would be archaeology in Mesopotamia. As will be seen in Chapter 6, this remained almost completely in the hands of imperial archaeologists and would only be developed by local archaeologists in the twentieth century. 6 Biblical Archaeology The increase of interest that the study of ancient monuments had raised, mainly from the eighteenth century, attracted many individuals to the classical lands. There, as explained in the last chapter, a search for the roots of Western civilization and of the Xourishing nineteenth-century empires took place. In addition, however, in some of those countries—mainly in Egypt and Mesopotamia—this concern would not be the only one which boosted scholars’ interests. These lands had witnessed some of the accounts related in the Christian Holy Book, the Bible,1 and therefore the search for classical antiquity came together with—and was sometimes overshadowed by—research on the biblical past. Work focused Wrst on Egypt, then on Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and parts of Iran), and then moved to other areas: Palestine, and to a certain degree Lebanon and Turkey. After the Wrst travellers who managed to overcome the diYculties of access imposed by the Ottoman Empire, there followed diplomats in the area working for the various imperial countries as well as more specialized explorers, including geographers and antiquarians. Later on, especially in Palestine, many of those who looked for ancient remains were in one way or another connected with religious institutions. Therefore, imperialism will not be the only factor to consider in the development of archaeology in the area described in this chapter, for religion also had an essential role. As explained in the following pages, these were overlapping, complementary forces. C H R I S T I A N I T Y A N D B I B L I C A L A RC H A E O LO G Y The inXuence of religion on the archaeology of the biblical lands can be seen both in the religious beliefs of those who undertook it, as well as, more 1 The Bible is comprised of the Old Testament, or Hebrew Tanakh, and the New Testament literature. The Jewish scriptures are known in Hebrew as the Tanakh, and they are equivalent to the Protestant Old Testament. Protestants and Catholics accept the New Testament as part of the Bible, and in addition Catholics accept as part of the Old Testament the books known to Protestants as the Apocrypha, which are a set of late Wrst millennium bc Jewish writings. Some 132 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism importantly, in how it had an eVect on research. The aim of most of the archaeologists working in the biblical land—especially in the core area of Palestine and Lebanon—was to illustrate, conWrm, or challenge the biblical account, and they were not interested in any period dated either before or after the events related in the Holy Book. Thus, an interest in the Islamic archaeology of the area would only appear at the end of the period dealt with in this book (Ettinghausen 1951; Vernoit 1997: 4–5), and pre-biblical archaeology would develop later. During the nineteenth century archaeology in the biblical lands was practised almost exclusively by Christians. Most archaeologists were attracted to the archaeology of the area by devotion and were explicit about their reverent intentions. The information provided by the Bible constituted an important element in their inquiries. Although the main connections between all the wide range of religious debates and developments in the Weld of archaeology are still to be investigated, it is clear, however, that there was a close engagement in religion experienced by some of the protagonists in this chapter— some of whom were employed by the Church as clerics, and others such as Petrie who took these religious debates very seriously (Silberman 1999b). Not surprisingly, most Catholics came from France whereas most Protestants came from Britain, the United States, and to a great extent from Germany. One could wonder whether the stronger tradition of reading the Bible among Protestants, and their willingness to illustrate texts in their many nineteenthcentury printings of the Bible, may have resulted in a higher interest in the Holy Land. Also, an issue in need of examination is whether the emphasis on pilgrimage, holy sites, and relics among Catholics might also have been an inXuence, and, Wnally, whether the Orthodox Church had its own interest in Palestine. The value of the ancient remains was Wrmly connected to their role in the history of Judeo-Christian religions. Obviously, this mainly referred to archaeology in Palestine, but the archaeology of Mesopotamia, and to a limited extent in Egypt and other areas such as Lebanon and Turkey, was also inXuenced to a great degree. The attraction exerted by biblical archaeology was intertwined with more general debates on the role of religion in nineteenth-century society. Biblical archaeologists worked in the context of a more general debate in contemporary society about the value of religious values and the role of religion in politics and society. The infallibility of the Church, which had Wrst received a serious blow with the rise in power of the Protestants (like the Church of England) regard the Apocrypha as useful but not authoritative. They would certainly have been known to Protestant scholars working in Palestine (Freedman et al. 1992). Biblical Archaeology 133 monarchy and the emergence of the modern state during the Reformation period (Chapter 2), was threatened by a novel increase of civil power and by the social upheavals resulting from nationalism—the late eighteenth-century novel impulse in the creation of the modern state—and industrialization. Religion was also aVected to a varying degree by the by-products of Enlightened rationalism: negatively by atheism, agnosticism and secularism; and positively by the growing importance of education and sociability in the creation of novel religious institutions. The former did not aVect archaeology directly, in the sense that we do not know of any atheist or agnostic undertaking archaeological work to disprove the Bible; in fact the opposite seemed to be the case. The positive outcomes of rationalism in religion are worth exploring. In accordance with the growing importance of education and sociability, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the founding of societies and, in the Evangelical world, there were several revivals. Among the newly founded religious societies one type would be important for biblical archaeology, especially that of Palestine. These were the Missionary societies, created as a way to evangelize the pagan peoples (as well as the poor in Western societies)2 that the imperial powers were encountering in their expansion around the world, including Palestine and Lebanon, which were mainly inhabited by non-Christians. Since the sixteenth century the territory of Palestine had been under Ottoman control and relatively closed to European inXuence. In the Wrst half of the nineteenth century a few Christian missions were allowed into the area. Their numbers grew during the second half of the century, an expansion which was partly related to the increasing number of pilgrims visiting the Holy Places. These mainly came from France, Russia and Germany. In this period colonies formed by members of several Christian sects also settled there. The missions to Palestine had an obvious signiWcance for Christians. One of the Wrst missions sent to Palestine was that of the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews, who settled in Jerusalem in 1823. A German religious brotherhood, the Bruderhaus, also formed a community in the same city in 1846 with the intention of evangelization. The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission started in 1847 to oVer Russian pilgrims spiritual supervision, provide assistance and sponsor charitable and educational work among the Arab population. Christian missions were supplemented by those of Jewish groups mainly from the 1870s. 2 Missions were also established in the towns of the imperial powers, for it was believed that the industrial poor would succeed in obtaining health, strength and wisdom only if they Wrmly believed in the Gospel and its message of hope. Some of these missions were the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804, to publish and disseminate the Bible), the Salvation Army (1865), and the Faith Mission (1886), to which initiatives such as the creation of Sunday Schools (1780) have to be linked (DitchWeld 1998). 134 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism The Missions would be one of the breeding places for biblical archaeologists in the nineteenth century. In contrast to other countries, therefore, religion was one of the main reasons why so many archaeologists lived locally. Unique to this part of the world were the members of religious colonies and missions who engaged in archaeology. A selection of these included Eli Smith (1801–57), Frederic Klein, Conrad Schick -), and Gottlieb Schumacher -). The Wrst of them, Smith, lived in Beirut. He was an American-born Presbyterian minister, a student of Andover Theological Seminary who pioneered the translation of the Bible into Arabic and helped Edward Robinson in his eVorts to chart the geography of the Bible (see below). Frederic Klein, who discovered the Moabite Stone, was in a similar situation, but cannot be said to have been an archaeologist: he had been preaching in Palestine for about seventeen years before he found it. The German Conrad Schick -) arrived in Jerusalem as a member of the German religious brotherhood, the Bruderhaus. In his Wfty years living in Jerusalem he made many contributions to archaeology supporting the work of the British Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF). Gottlieb Schumacher, who had been born in America, had moved to Palestine as a child with his family as a member of the Tempelgesellschaft (‘Temple Association’), a Swabian Protestant pietest sect which aimed to colonize Palestine with Christians. During the nineteenth century not many Jews lived in Palestine, or in any of the other countries under consideration in this chapter (although their numbers grew steadily throughout this period). Archaeology undertaken by Jews living in the area increased after the First World War, and especially after the founding of the Hebrew University from 1925 (Silberman, pers. comm-). INFORMAL IMPERIALISM AND RACISM IN THE BIBLIC AL LA N DS Informal imperialism in the biblical lands The major inXuence of religion in the archaeology of the biblical lands does not mean that politics did not have an inXuence. Indeed, in this area of the world it would be diYcult to separate the two. Imperialism was clearly a powerful force. Most of the territory was oYcially still under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, but during the nineteenth century Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Egypt came under the axis of the British colonial world in some capacity—Egypt only from 1881 and the Wrst two not oYcially until the First World War. With the control of the area, Britain sought to secure its trade and Biblical Archaeology 135 colonial links to India and the Orient. As in any other region of the British informal empire, archaeology represented one more tool of imperial domination, and as such the political elites became interested in it. Yet, this interest was also dominated by the religious overtones of the antiquity of the area. It is symptomatic that the oYcial establishment of the Palestine Exploration Fund was held in Westminster Abbey under the patronage of Queen Victoria and the Archbishop of Canterbury (Silberman 2001: 493). Britain was not the only imperial power in the region: to counterbalance its power, France guided Lebanon’s politics, especially from the 1860s, and was able to make a limited contribution to Egyptian archaeology even under British rule. Other countries, mainly Germany and the United States, would appear on the scene at the end of the century. To start with, the imperialist ambitions of Germany in her Drang Nach Osten—the surge towards the East—had an obvious eVect. Kulturpolitik, the theoretical apolitical neutrality on the basis of German foreign policy aimed at conversion to German interests without force, resulted in the creation of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society) in 1898 as well as the Deutsches Evangelisches Institut für Altertumswissenshaft des Heiligen Landes (German Evangelical Institute for the Antiquity of the Holy Land) in 1900. The American School of Archaeological Research was also founded in the same year. Archaeologists were not removed from the political situation. Nationalism provided the framework for imagining ancient peoples, i.e. as old nations, but it also had a strong inXuence on the way in which language and race issues were considered. Going back to the 1840s, the British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard (1817–94) explained in his popular book about his experiences in Mesopotamia: With these names [Assyria, Babylonia and Chaldaea] are linked great nations and great cities dimly shadowed forth in history; mighty ruins in the midst of deserts, defying, by their very desolation and lack of deWnite form, the description of the traveller; the remnants of the mighty races still roving over the land; the fulWlling and fulWlment of prophecies; the plains to which the Jew and the Gentile alike look as the cradle of their race. (Layard 1849 in Larsen 1996: 45). Imperialism also tainted archaeologists’ practice. Two examples will suYce to illustrate this. The Wrst refers to imperial rivalry, represented by the competition between Layard and Botta in Mesopotamia, an issue explained later on in the chapter. Secondly, it is only within the framework of imperial competition that the complications surrounding the publication of the inscription of the Moabite Stone can be understood. This was an aVair that occurred in 1870. It had been provoked by Clermont-Ganneau, a young French consul-archaeologist, who 136 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism published hurriedly a translation of a piece to which the Prussians claimed to have scientiWc rights, and which the Briton, Charles Warren -), had agreed with his French colleague to publish simultaneously (Silberman 1982: ch. 11). Other examples illustrating the connection between imperialism and archaeology will be provided later in the chapter. Regarding whether national identity was superseded in the biblical lands by religious identity, there is no indication in the literature that this happened, leading, for example, to collaboration among members of the same faith in opposition to followers of another. Racism, anti-Semitism, and archaeology Another factor central to understanding the political and religious context of archaeology in the biblical lands is the growth of racism, and especially antiSemitism, i.e. racism against the Jews and other Semite peoples. Racism began to spread in the Western world mainly from the 1840s (Chapter 12). One of its manifestations was anti-Semitism, an issue that had a long history behind it, an issue beyond the limits of this book (Lindemann 2000; Poliakov 1975). Anti-Semitism, a term coined in the late 1870s, came to symbolize the antagonism towards the Jews that had grown steadily from the early years of the century. Semite was a term derived from the biblical name of Shem used from the 1780s to denote the languages related to Hebrew, which also included Phoenician. Following the laws of positivism, scholars tried to rationalize the place of the Semites in the evolutionist scheme of races by which all human races were graded from the least to the most evolved (Bernal 1987). The French scholar Ernest Renan (1823–92), the Professor of Hebrew in the Collège de France and excavator of several sites in the Levant in the early 1860s, considered the Aryans and the Semites the Wrst noble races (Liverani 1998: 8; Olender 1992: ch. 4), but comparing both would say that: The Semitic race appears to us as incomplete through its simplicity. It is, dare I say it, to the Indo-European family what drawing is to painting or plainsong to modern music. It lacks that variety, that scale, that superabundance of life that is necessary for perfectibility. (Renan 1855 in Bernal 1987: 346–7). Anti-Semitism inWltrated academia mainly from the later decades of the second half of the nineteenth century. A few examples from the Weld of archaeology will help to illustrate this. The British scholar Flinders Petrie would identify the levels excavated in Tell el-Hesi, in Palestine, as the diVerent episodes of racial domination in the area (Silberman 1999b: 73). He wrote: Biblical Archaeology 137 The invasion of the nomad horde of the Israelites on the high civilization of the Amorite kings must have seemed a crushing blow to all culture and advance in the arts; it was much like the terrible breaking up of the Roman empire by the northern races; it swept away all good with the evil; centuries were needed to regain what was lost. (Petrie 1891 in Silberman 1999b: 73–4). Anti-Semitism also had an impact on Mesopotamian archaeology. At the turn of the century, with the increasing opposition to Jews spreading all over the Western world, biblical archaeology was also used as a weapon against them. The German Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch -), for example, argued that the Mesopotamian origin of the biblical tradition released Christianity from its links with the Jewish heritage and converted it to the Wrst ‘true universal religion’ (Larsen 1987). Anti-Semitism also clearly aVected Phoenician archaeology. From a positive feeling about the industrious ancient Phoenician merchants (especially in favour in capitalist Europe, Britain, and Ireland in particular (Champion 2001)), at the end of the century things changed. Beyond the original Phoenician area archaeological remains were now described as Greek. Also, interest in the archaeology of Phoenicians in the core area of Lebanon and Syria clearly diminished (Liverani 1998: 13). BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOG Y I N E GYPT AND TURKEY The archaeology of Egypt and Turkey has been discussed in the previous chapter, although its connection with biblical archaeology needs further explanation. As argued in Chapter 6, the attraction exerted by the Pharaohs’ land was principally connected to its ties with the classical world—mainly the move of obelisks to Rome in the early centuries of the era—, the presence of spectacular remains like the pyramids and the romanticism of its association with the exotic. Although Egypt’s link with the biblical past was not a key issue for the earliest interest in Egyptian antiquities, scholars did not ignore the fact that Egypt had been mentioned in the Old Testament, mainly in Genesis and in Exodus. In Genesis it was explained how Joseph was sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers. Exodus narrated the adoption of Moses by an Egyptian princess as a baby, how as an adult he discovered his origin, Xed from Egypt and came back after God ordered him to save his people from slavery. It continued to describe how Moses had tried to convince the Pharaoh to let the Israelites worship in the desert, and how the Pharaoh’s refusal had led to the ten plagues that had devastated Egypt. The story ended with the Israelites’ Xight from Egypt. In contrast to archaeology in Mesopotamia and 138 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism Palestine, the biblical past of Egyptian archaeology seems to have attracted scholars inspired by a religious impulse only from the 1870s. In 1882 the aims of the British-based Egypt Exploration Fund included ‘to organise expeditions in Egypt, with a view to the elucidation of the History and Arts of Ancient Egypt, and the illustration of the Old Testament narrative, so far as it has to do with Egypt and the Egyptians’ (in Moorey 1991: 6). The fund invited Edouard Naville -), a Swiss scholar, professor at the University of Geneva who had studied in Berlin under Karl Richard Lepsius (also mentioned in Chapters 3 and 5), to excavate at Tell el-Maskhuta. He interpreted the unearthed ruins as the House of Atum, one of the store-cities built by the Hebrews in their period of enslavement in Egypt. Another such city was later uncovered by the Briton, Petrie, at the site of Ramses in Tel el-Retabeh in 1905–6. Petrie’s interest in Egyptian archaeology had had a religious background from the start. He had been attracted to it through Pyramidology—a pseudoscience which saw the pyramids as an act of God, which had inscribed his divinity in their proportions. Although he soon abandoned this theory as unreliable (Silberman 1999b), the appeal of the study of the Bible and its archaeology would remain and would eventually take him to Palestine. The mounting evidence of the Old Testament in Egyptian territory was strengthened in the last two decades of the century. Two more examples will be mentioned. First, in 1887 oYcial documents written on clay tablets in Akkadian in cuneiform script—the type of script used in Mesopotamia, then the language of international diplomacy—were found fortuitously at Tell elAmarna. Those tablets were acquired by the museums of Berlin and London. They told of the Levant’s rulers and their relations with the Egyptian administration and of life in Canaan (ancient Palestine) in the fourteenth century bce. They also mentioned a people, the Hapiru or Habiru, whom scholars identiWed as the Hebrews. In 1896 the stela of Merneptah was found by Petrie. On it was inscribed a victory hymn celebrating the Pharaoh’s campaign in Canaan in which a people called Israel had been destroyed. The second Wnding was discovered at the temple of Amun at Karnak, where a scene was identiWed with Pharaoh Shishak’s invasion of Palestine. It included a topographical list of cities that had been studied earlier in the century by Champollion (Elliot 2003; Moorey 1991: 4–6). Research into the Bible also took scholars to Turkey where the inquiry was related to both the Old and the New Testament. In 1865 the French scholar Ernest Renan undertook a visit to Turkey publishing St Paul (1869). His research was followed by that of William Ramsay -) (Shankland 2004: 23), the Regius Professor of Humanities at Aberdeen University from 1886, who again used Paul’s travels as the basis of his enquiries, traversing Turkey to study the ancient topography (Moorey 1991: 21). Regarding Biblical Archaeology 139 research into the Old Testament, one of the peoples mentioned in it, in Genesis 15:20 and 1 Kings 10:29, were the Hittites. In 1876 the British scholar Archibald Henry Sayce -) found some inscriptions carved on rocks in Turkey that he argued could demonstrate the presence of Hittites in the area. Ten years later, the discovery of clay tablets at a place called Boghazköy attracted the attention of the German scholar and cuneiform expert, Hugo Winckler -), who began his own expedition to the site in 1906. Boghazköy was identiWed as Hattusa, the capital of the Hittites, a powerful force in the Middle East from 1750 bce until 1200 bce. During the excavations thousands more tablets were recovered, most of them written in an unknown language: Hittite. This was deciphered in 1915 by the Czech Professor of Assyriology of the University of Vienna, Bedrich Hrozny -). The language proved to be Indo-European. Winckler’s excavations revealed the remains of a mighty capital city with temples, palaces, fortiWcations, and gateways. Tablets found in the temples conWrmed that the ritual ceremonies described in the Pentateuch (the Wve books composed by Moses, i.e., the Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), until then thought to be too complicated for the period in which they had been written, were similar to those described in the Boghazköy tablets (Zukeran 2000). The Hittite past would not only be acclaimed by Christians and by archaeologists investigating the archaeology of the Bible, it would also have a very diVerent type of appropriation later in the century when Kemal Atatürk began his search for a strong and uniWed Turkey (Magnarella & Türkdogan 1976: 256). M E SO P OTA M I A N A N TI Q U I T IE S A ND TH E OL D TESTAM ENT In this section nineteenth-century archaeology of the area of modern Iraq and Iran is discussed. European interest in the antiquities of the Pashalik of Baghdad, a province of the Ottoman Empire that roughly coincides with modern Iraq, had already started in the early modern era with the Wnding of Persepolis by Pietro della Valle -) and other followers. This line of scholarship led to the Danish Carsten Niebuhr -) (Simpson 2004: 194), and was partly connected with a search for remains linked to the biblical account. At the start of the nineteenth century the area was relatively closed to European inXuence and only a few Europeans lived there, of which some had an interest in the antiquities of the area (ibid. 194–5). One of them was the English traveller and scholar Claudius Rich -), from 1808 to 1821 appointed the East India Company’s resident in Baghdad (Lloyd 1947: chs. 3 and 5; Simpson 140 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism 2004: 198–201). Interested in antiquities, and knowing about the biblical past of the area, he visited the site of ancient Babylon, a city frequently cited in the Bible, and published two books on the information he gathered. In 1821, before he left Mesopotamia, he visited, among other sites, the mounds of Kuyunjik and Nebi Yunus, which together formed the site of Nineveh, near Mosul, in the north of Mesopotamia. He also copied the stone-cut cuneiform inscriptions at Persepolis in Iran, and this and Nineveh were published in 1836, more than ten years after his untimely death (Larsen 1996: 9). Regarding Iran, the foreign archaeologists visiting the area were mainly British and Russians. British travellers included the Scottish diplomat Sir John Malcolm (who visited the court in Tehran in 1800, 1808, and 1810) -), the diplomat James Morier (who stayed in Persia in 1808–9 and 1811–15) -), James Silk Buckingham (1816) -) and James B. Fraser (several journeys in 1821–34) -). In 1817–20 the Russian Academy of Fine Arts sponsored an expedition to Persia, headed by the British artist Robert Ker Porter -), who had been partly educated in Russia. He explored Persepolis and other sites, which he illustrated in drawings. Russian interest in Iran, connected to Russian imperialism (Nikitin 2004) (see also Chapter 9), was, however, challenged by Britain. Throughout the nineteenth century, the reigning house in Iran, the Qajar dynasty -), was able to play oV the imperial powers and convert Iran into a buVer state between the neighbouring Russian and British empires. The country had to adjust to the changes in the Western world, with the reigns of Fath Ali Shah (r-) and Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848–96) the most important ones in the process. During the rule of Fath Ali Shah an original use of the past could be seen in the 1820s and 1830s in the anachronistic creation of rock reliefs representing the Shah. These types of representations had their origin in pre-Islamic Iran, when they expressed royal power. The Shah had been acquainted with them through Persepolis during his time, in 1794–7, as prince-governor of the region where the ruins are. Contacts he established with some of the travellers (Morier, Ker Porter) may have made him appreciate them in a more Western-like fashion (Luft 2001). Some also see the revival of mural paintings mainly during his rule as an eVect of Western inXuence (Diba 2001). In Western Europe, after Rich’s death, his collection of antiquities was bought by the British Museum. Due to lack of enthusiasm only a small sum of money was paid for it. Despite the relative unimportance of the public display, in the 1830s the antiquities gathered by Rich would be of paramount importance for the future development of Mesopotamian archaeology. One of the visitors to the museum was the German-born Jules Mohl (1806–76), an Arabist who had decided to move to Paris, at the time the Mecca for European Orientalist scholars (McGetchin 2003). Mohl had become one of the secretaries Biblical Archaeology 141 of the Parisian Asiatic Society, an association that had been created in 1829 to promote the study of Oriental languages and cultures (Chapters 8 and 9). Mohl saw the potential of Rich’s collection and dreamt of making the Louvre the major European museum holding antiquities from Mesopotamia. He convinced the French authorities to send a consul to Mosul to undertake excavations and send sculptures and inscriptions back to the Louvre. In 1847, only four years after the arrival in the area of the consul-excavator, Paul Émile Botta (1802–70), the Louvre had managed to open the Wrst collection of Assyrian monuments to the public. The early Louvre collections came mainly from a palace unearthed in the Assyrian city of Khorsabad, a site about ten miles away from Nineveh, where excavations had proved diYcult (Larsen 1996; Moorey 1991: 7–14). The excavations were useful for biblical studies. The material brought to Paris was analysed by, among others, the French scholar Adrien de Longperier (1816– 82), who was able to read in one of the cuneiform inscriptions the name of Sargin and identiWed it with the name of Sargon, King of Assyria, mentioned in the book of Isaiah 20:1. The palace found by Botta was, therefore, that of the Assyrian King Sargon II (c. 721–705 bce), one of the Mesopotamian rulers mentioned in the Old Testament. Britain’s engagement in Mesopotamian archaeology had a very diVerent start. In Chapter 1 a distinction was made between the European Continental or State-interventionist model distinguished by the government Wnancial backing to archaeological expeditions as against the Utilitarian model followed in Britain and the US which relied on private funding. The archaeology in Mesopotamia was not an exception: despite the potential of the British Museum display of Rich’s antiquities there was no investment in a consulexcavator like the French Botta. Only private initiative, the insistence of a young English man, Austen Henry Layard, through the mediation of the Ambassador at Constantinople from 1844, Sir Stratford Canning, made the British Museum establish him as the representative of Britain at Mosul. The museum eventually sponsored Layard’s work in 1846, but only after he had spent one year digging at Nimrud, and with a sum of money far from that bestowed by France on Botta (Larsen 1996: 23, 109). The interest in the biblical account seems to have been one of the factors that spurred Layard’s interest in Mesopotamia. Yet, this was not believed by one of his friends, who in 1846 cynically commented to him: The interest about your stones is very great, I hear—and if you can as I said before attach a biblical importance to your discoveries you will come the complete dodge over this world of fools and dreamers; you can get some religious fellow to inspire you with the necessary cant, for which I won’t think a bit the worse of you. (Moorey 1991: 3). 142 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism Regardless of Layard’s actual purposes, whether religious or opportunistic, his discoveries, together with the transcriptions of texts by the British consul in Baghdad, Henry Rawlinson,3 made it possible to identify many kings and cities mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures within the Assyrian texts. Layard excavated in Nimrud, once Assyria’s second capital, known as Calah in Genesis. In Kuyunjik—Nineveh—among many other things, he unearthed some slabs depicting the siege of Lachish described in 2 Kings 18:13–14. Layard popularized his Wndings mainly with his 1849 publication of Nineveh and its Remains. In addition, in an attempt to excite the British public’s imagination with regard to the ancient civilizations of Assyria and, more generally, of Mesopotamia, the book was promoted by the Christian Evangelicals as a conWrmation of the divine punishment of Nimrud and Nineveh announced by the prophets in the Bible (Moorey 1991: 9). Links between the Mesopotamian texts and the Bible continued after Layard’s, and Botta’s, endeavours (Caygill 1992: 39, 46–8; Larsen 1996: 22, 68, 283, 309; Lloyd 1947: chs. 10–12). The names of Shalmaneser (mentioned in Kings 17:13), Hezekiah (2 Kings 18–19), Judah (Isaiah 36–7), and Menahem of Samaria on slabs commissioned by the Assyrian King ‘Pul’ (2 Kings 15–19) were all identiWed around the early 1850s. In his Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon of 1853, Layard was able to provide a list of some Wfty-Wve rulers, cities and countries in Assyrian and Hebrew that were both in the Old Testament and in the newly uncovered Assyrian texts (Moorey 1991). However, archaeology in Mesopotamia was not only about the Bible; there was much more to it. Layard’s extensive preserved writings are an invaluable source for investigating his intentions, a task which would otherwise be impossible (Larsen 1996; Reade 1987). They make it clear, for example, that Layard never considered Assyrian monuments to have achieved the supremacy reached by the Greeks; his view, shared by many others, was that Assyrian art was an inferior ancestor to classical art. His notes also make clear that he saw archaeology as something that would bring glory to his own nation, and the deciphering of the cuneiform inscriptions as a matter of national honour. The involvement of Britain and France in the archaeology of Mesopotamia was felt by him to be like a competition. ‘I think’, wrote Layard in a letter to Canning in 1845, ‘we might manage to transmit some sculpture to Europe as soon if not sooner than the French. This would be very important for our reputation’ (in Larsen 1996: 77). And in another letter written several months later he said, ‘if the excavation keeps its promise to the end there is much reason to hope that Montagu House [the British Museum] will beat the Louvre hollow’ (ibid. 96). The rivalry reached its peak when teams sent by both countries excavated at 3 On the decipherment of Persian cuneiform see Pope (1975: ch. 4) and Adkins (2003). Biblical Archaeology 143 the same sites in the early 1850s. The Wrst major pieces of sculpture staged at the British Museum arrived in 1852 and were soon perceived as serious competition to those housed in the Louvre. As with the archaeology of the classical world, including Egypt, in Mesopotamia archaeology had become an arena for imperial rivalry. The importance conferred by the heritage authorities was reXected in the creation of a new department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum in 1860 (Caygill 1992: 38). OYcial resistance to the imperial appropriation of the Mesopotamian heritage seems to have been minimal to begin with. Although permits had to be sought, the literature does not highlight impediments similar to those seen in the case of Turkey (Chapter 6). During the nineteenth century there is no information concerning an interest in archaeology being developed by local scholars. The only native archaeologist seems to have been Hormuzd Rassam -), of whom it has been said that he became ‘perhaps more English than the English themselves’ (Reade 1993: 59). As he once stated, his ‘aim was to discover unknown ediWces, and to bring to light some important Assyrian monument for the gratiWcation of the British public, especially those who valued such discoveries for their biblical or literary studies’ (in Reade 1993: 59, my emphasis). Hormuzd Rassam learnt the techniques of archaeological Weldwork—and the combatant attitude towards the French—from Layard. Rassam continued for a few years after Layard stopped his Weldwork. In the early 1850s he worked directly for the consul in Baghdad, Henry Rawlinson, the major decipherer of the cuneiform script (together with Edward Hincks (Adkins 2003: ch. 13; Larsen 1996: ch. 20; Pope 1975: ch. 4) and François Lenormant (1837–83)), making discoveries such as that of the palace of Ashurbanipal. Rassam would come back to archaeology in the 1870s, and the conXicts that arose then assist us in exploring the rise of racism in European archaeology. After a period of almost twenty years working elsewhere for the British government, in 1877 Hormuzd Rassam was asked to lead an archaeological expedition to Assyria and Babylonia. This was related to George Smith’s (1840–76) discovery of a clay tablet from Nineveh in which the Deluge was alluded to. In 1866 Smith had been employed in the British Museum as a ‘repairer’ with the aim of searching the tablet collections and Wnding joins between fragments. He was mainly self-trained in Assyriology, and perhaps the Wrst to admit the complexity of making correlations between the Old Testament and the Assyrio-Babylonian sources. As he said: I must confess that the view held by the two Rawlinsons and the German professors is more consistent with the literal statements of the Assyrian inscriptions than my own, but I am utterly unable to see how the biblical chronology can be so far astray here as the inscriptions lead one to suppose. (Moorey 1991: 12). 144 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism In 1872, George Smith gave a lecture to the recently founded Society of Biblical Archaeology in which he announced his reconstruction of a tablet in which the Great Flood was mentioned. This event greatly revived the interest in Mesopotamian archaeology. For Rassam this discovery would cause archaeology to occupy most of his latter active years. However, this time would be tainted by accusations by Wallis Budge, a Wgure already mentioned in Chapter 5, who at the time was an assistant at the British Museum. Budge charged Rassam with having stolen cuneiform tablets during the excavations to sell to dealers in Baghdad. The antiquities market was raging with this type of material. It has been calculated that in the 1880s the Baghdad antiquities market put on sale between 35,000 and 40,000 cuneiform texts (Andrén 1998: 46). Disbelieving Budge’s accusations, Rassam’s old supporter, Layard, wrote to a friend accusing Budge of having spread his lies to supplant Rassam, one of the most honest and straightforward fellows I ever knew, and one whose great services have never been acknowledged—because he is a ‘nigger’ and because Rawlinson, as his habit, appropriated to himself the credit of Rassam’s discoveries. (Larsen 1996: 355). Although Rassam’s name was cleared in court, he received a much smaller compensation than he had claimed. Budge, however, was promoted in the museum to help him pay his legal fees (Larsen 1996: 366). Parallel to this research, between 1877 and 1900 several French archaeologists excavated in sites in Iraq and Iran which were somehow connected to the Bible. The main scholars involved were Sarzec, Loftus, Dieulafoy, and de Morgan. In Iraq, the French vice-consul in Basra, Ernest de Sarzec -) excavated in Tello, ancient Girsu. This was one of the most important capital city-states in ancient Sumer, one of the oldest civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia. Sumer had several urban centres such as Eridu, Nippur, Ur and Uruk (Erech in the Bible) in the delta of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. In 1881, Sarzec sold a Wrst collection of Wgurines, cylinders, seals, and inscribed slates to the Louvre. Osman Hamdi Bey, nevertheless, would stop his excavations until an agreement was reached for the Wndings to go to Constantinople. French diplomacy, however, managed still to obtain favours from the Sultan Abdülmecid when excavations resumed in 1888 (Eldem 2004: 136). Some of the other archaeologists coming from France excavated in Iran. There, the reigning shah for most of the second half of the nineteenth century was Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848–96). He continued with his predecessors’ eVorts at controlled Westernization—for example, the telegraph was introduced in the 1860s—, but fears of its consequences led to extreme diYculties for Europeans in obtaining economic concessions. Nasir al-Din Shah even Biblical Archaeology 145 toured Europe in 1873, 1878, and 1889. Some changes became evident in urban development, dress code, health care, photography, luxury goods and painting. Several artists studied in Europe promoting a new Perso-European style (Amanat 1998). A European-style institution, the Dar al-Funun, was opened in Tehran in 1851, and in it art classes adopted the system which its director, Abu’l Hasan (1814–66), had encountered during his study trip to Italy in 1845–50. At his death in 1866 he was substituted by Ali Akbar Muzayyin al-Dawleh, who had studied at the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris. One of his best students was Kamal al-Mulk, who was sponsored to pursue his training in Paris, Florence and Rome for three years (Ekhtiar 1998: 59–61). The French archaeologists working in Iran at the end of the nineteenth century were the Dieulafoy couple and de Morgan, who excavated in Susa, in modern Iran. In 1881, Marcel -) and Jane - Dieulafoy excavated the palace of the Achaemenian King Darius I in Susa (sixth century bce). Years later Jacques de Morgan -) went back to the site and, after signing a treaty with the King MozaVereddin Shah, excavated there between 1897 and 1902. Susa was mentioned in Neh. 1:1, Esther 1:2 and Dn 8:2. De Morgan found the Code of Hammurabi at Susa, which dated to the eighteenth century bce. This provided information about the oldest law code known until then, remarkably similar in many elements to the Hebrew law code, notably to some of the customs referred to in Genesis. Its links with the Pentateuchal Mosaic Law were soon highlighted by the translators, the Wrst being Father Vincent Scheil -), a Dominican, Assyriologist and director of studies at the École pratique des hautes études. Around the mid 1880s Mesopotamian archaeology was a discipline being developed in most major European countries (Larsen 1987: 98). From the last decades of the century Britain and France’s involvement became supplemented by that of Germany and the US. Germany’s interest in Mesopotamian archaeology crystallized in 1898 with the creation of the German Oriental Society, an institution supported at the very highest level of German society (Larsen 1987: 99). Concerning German eVorts, Budge would say years later that: many shrewd observers have remarked that Germany only began to excavate seriously in those countries [Assyria and Babylonia] when she began to dream of 4 Jane Dieulafoy can be considered as one of the Wrst women archaeologists. Another of the pioneers who dealt with biblical archaeology was the British researcher Gertrude Bell -), who published The Desert and the Sown (1907) with her observations of the Middle East, and A Thousand and One Churches (1909) about her work with Ramsay in Turkey. In 1909 she visited the Hittite city of Carchemish (2 Chronicles 35:20, Jeremiah 46:2), found Ukhaidir and went to Babylon and Najav, the holy Shi’ite city of pilgrimage. Her knowledge of the area would lead to her recruitment by the British Intelligence during the First World War, after which she would become the Honorary Director of Antiquities in Iraq and would establish the Museum in Baghdad (Wallach 1997). 146 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism creating the German Oriental Empire, which was to be reached by way of the Baghdad Railway (Budge 1925: 293 in Larsen 1987: 100). Archaeology in Mesopotamia was encouraged by the German consuls in Baghdad. Consul Richarz repeatedly asked the Foreign Ministry to send an archaeological expedition to Mesopotamia. In 1896 he suggested the excavation of the ancient city of Uruk (Warka). As he explained: Frenchmen, Englishmen, and North Americans have overlooked it just as if by fate’s decree, the act of unearthing these cultural centres, these schools which produced thousands of years of ancient wisdom, were reserved for the nation of poets and thinkers, the docta Germania. (in Marchand 1996b: 307). One of the key German excavations at the turn of the century was that of Babylon (Iraq), conducted from 1899 to the First World War by the German Robert Koldewey -). Having been trained as an architect, he had early experience in the archaeology of Greece and the Near East. He introduced stratigraphic excavation methods and, as a consequence, he was able to observe the sun-dried clay walls that formed most of the Mesopotamian buildings. He also uncovered numerous tablets mainly of the neo-Babylonian period, including some alluding to the Jehoiachin of Judah mentioned in 2 Kings 25:29. He also found the Ishtar Gate, which he managed to move to Berlin, although due to the political situation it only went on display years later, in the 1930s (Bernbeck 2000). Another archaeologist who worked in collaboration with Koldewey, Walter Andrae -), excavated in Ashur from 1903 to 1913, a site that provided information about Assyria before its government moved to Nimrud and Nineveh (Moorey 1991: 45). In addition to Germany, the other country that became involved in Mesopotamian archaeology at the end of the nineteenth century was the US. The newly developed interest has been partly explained by German scholars who had emigrated to the US (Larsen 1987: 101; 1992: 128–9). At a meeting of the American Oriental Society in 1884, a resolution was adopted that explained that ‘England and France have done a notable work of exploration in Assyria and Babylonia. It is time for America to do her part. Let us send out an American expedition’ (in Cooper 1992: 138). Under the direction of William Hayes Ward, a Wrst exploratory expedition was immediately sent in that same year, 1884, with positive results. It Wnally led to the start of American involvement in the Near East with the excavations, in Iraq, of Nippur (identiWed as Calneh, Genesis 10:10), which led to the Wnding of the Sumerian archives as well as many artefacts. The components of the team show how Biblical Archaeology 147 professionalism had now started to be the norm. They were all attached to the University of Pennsylvania, the team being formed by Ward himself as well as John P. Peters -), a professor of Semitics, and the epigrapher Hermann Volrath Hilprecht -), the professor of Assyriology (Cooper 1992: 139, 149; Lloyd 1947: 184–5). The University of Chicago came to complement the eVorts of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1894 the Haskell Oriental Museum was opened at the University of Chicago. The museum was not the only one to receive large donations from the young magnate John D. Rockefeller, who in this way promoted an extreme version of the British/American model of funding that has been highlighted in Chapter 5. Rockefeller also funded the University of Chicago Oriental Exploration Fund’s expedition to Bismaya (Iraq, ancient Adab, one of the Sumerian states of Shinar), located south of Nippur, which ran from 1903–5. The site had a chronology of at least two millennia dating back to the Uruk period (mid fourth millennium bce), and a ziggurat was uncovered as well as several temples, a palace, an archive of tablets, houses, and a cemetery. Tablets, sculptures, and stone relief carvings constituted the main objects moved to Chicago (Meade 1974: 90–2; Moorey 1991: 45–53; Patterson 1995b: 64). As distinct from Italy, Greece, and Egypt, other foreign schools only started to make their appearance in the last years of the period under analysis. The American School of Oriental Research (ASOR) was founded in 1900 ‘to prosecute Biblical, linguistic, archaeological, historical, and other kindred studies and researches under more favourable conditions than can be secured at a distance from the Holy Land’ (in Moorey 1991: 35). It was created almost thirty years after the school in Athens (Patterson 1995b: 63). Britain would only open a British School of Archaeology in Iraq with private funding in 1932, the year in which the Mesopotamian area came under British mandate. Turning to France, there was a ‘deWcit’ of institutions in the area, according to Gran-Aymerich (1998: 268). The archaeology of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Iran all depended on the French School in Cairo. TH E S EARC H FOR TH E HOLY L AND: T H E A RCH AEOLOGY OF PA LESTINE Explorers, biblical topography, societies, and inscriptions (1800–90) There are some eighteenth-century precedents to scholarly interest in Palestine. One of them was that of Adrian Reland -). He was a Dutch Christian Hebraist and Orientalist, Professor of Oriental Languages at Utrecht 148 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism from 1699. He published, in Latin, Antiquitates Sacræ Veterum Hebræorum (1708) and Palæstina ex Monumentis Veteribus Illustrata (Palestine illustrated by Ancient Monuments) (1714) in which earlier sources were critically analysed. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt led him to Palestine, where he also seems to have dispatched explorers, but nothing important came out of it, perhaps due to the arrival of the British and to Napoleon’s retreat (Silberman 1982: 15). A British explorer, from 1808 Professor of Mineralogy at Cambridge, Edward Daniel Clarke -), arrived there in 1801, undertaking a search for the truly biblical sites (ibid. 18–20). In 1806, a German traveller, Ulrich Jasper Seetzen -), discovered Gerasa in Jordan, a town which was not named in the Bible, but referred to in the expression ‘country of the Gerasenes’ (Mk 5:1, Lk. 8: 26, 37). In 1812 the city of Petra, described in Obadiah 3, 4 and Jeremiah 49:16–18, had been located by the Swiss Johann Ludwig Burckhardt -), a disciple of Clarke. With Seetzen having been assassinated by poison by the Iman of Yemen and Burckhardt dead of malaria, the impetus for new explorations decreased (Silberman 1982: 27). However, Petra would later be studied further by two French travellers: Leon de Laborde (1807–69) and Louis Linant de Bellefonds -), who published their Wndings in 1828. Despite these precedents, modern scholarship reserves the title of ‘Father of Biblical Archaeology’ for the American Edward Robinson -). He was a Congregationalist from New England trained at the Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, a seminary where a conservative approach was taken in opposition to the revisionist approach supported at Harvard. In Andover he was taught by a brilliant Hebraist, Moses Stuart (Moorey 1991: 15). Between 1826 and 1830 he studied in Germany with Carl Ritter, once one of Humboldt’s protégés, and one of the instigators of the development of geography and the study of migrations (Chapter 11). Back in America he was appointed the Professor of Sacred Literature at Andover, and then the Wrst Professor of Biblical Literature at the new Union Theological Seminary in New York, yet he convinced his new masters to allow him to take three or four years for his own travels in Palestine. Robinson started the tradition of research in biblical topography. In his 1841 book he explained the reasons behind his attraction to the Holy Land: As in the case of most of my countrymen, especially in New England, the scenes of the Bible had made a deep impression upon my mind from the earliest childhood; and afterwards in riper years this feeling had grown into a strong desire to visit in person the places so remarkable in the history of the human race. Indeed in no country of the world, perhaps, is such a feeling more widely diVused than in New England. (Moorey 1991: 15). Biblical Archaeology 149 Robinson worked in Palestine for two-and-a-half months in 1838 and visited the area again in 1852, charting the geography of the Bible. In his travels throughout Palestine, Robinson was accompanied by one of Andover’s former pupils, the Reverend Eli Smith, who had become a missionary in the Levant and was Xuent in Arabic. Both set out to inspect the country for ancient biblical place names and were able to identify over a hundred sites. Robinson published Biblical Researches in Palestine in 1841 and Later Biblical Researches in 1856 (Moorey 1991: 14–16; Silberman 1982: ch. 5). Robinson’s work on biblical topography created an interest in ancient topography and the beginning of religious tourism in the area (Silberman 1982: 51). His work was later complemented by that of the American William Francis Lynch (1801–65), the Swiss doctor and politician Titus Tobler (1806–77) and by the Frenchman Victor Guérin (1821–90). Lynch’s aim was to examine the possibility of a new trade route through the Holy Land linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. He organized an expedition to the Dead Sea which was unsuccessful in its economic aims, but which raised enormous public interest in the area (Silberman 1982: ch. 6). Tobler visited the region in 1845–6, 1857, and 1865, producing many records of his travels. Guérin went there several times between 1852 and 1875 and published a multi-volumed Geography of Palestine (1868–75). During this period the French explorer Félicien de Saulcy (1807–80) undertook one of the Wrst excavations in the area of the so-called Tombs of the Kings in northern Jerusalem in 1850–1 and again in 1863 (Moorey 1991: 17–18; Silberman 1982: ch. 7). The Piedmontese engineer Ermete Pierotti also worked in Jerusalem in an atmosphere of Werce international antiquarian competition (Silberman 1982: ch. 8). Societies would be one of the novel players in biblical archaeology in Palestine in the second half of the nineteenth century. Despite this, some still gave preference to the other biblical areas. This seems to have been the case for Samuel Birch, a keeper of the British Museum, who forgot to mention the Holy Land in his inaugural lecture of the London-based Society of Biblical Archaeology: [The society’s] scope is Archaeology, not Theology; but to Theology it will prove an important aid. To all those it must be attractive who are interested in the primitive and early history of mankind; that history which is not written in books nor on paper, but upon rocks and stones, deep in the soil, far away in the desert; that history which is not found in the library or the mart, but which must be dug up in the valley of the Nile or exhumed from the plains of Mesopotamia. (Moorey 1991: 3). 150 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism The Society of Biblical Archaeology was not the Wrst learned association of its kind. There was another one already in existence from 1864, the Palestine Exploration Fund. In 1873 a prospectus explained that: No country should be of so much interest to us as that in which the documents of our Faith were written, and the momentous events they describe enacted . . . Much would be gained by obtaining an accurate map of the country; by settling disputed points of topography; by identifying ancient towns of Holy Writ with the modern villages which are their successors. (Shaw 2002: 60). In accordance with this, the aim of the fund was to provide ‘for the accurate and systematic investigation of the archaeology, topography, geology and physical geography, natural history, manners and customs of the Holy Land, for biblical illustration’ (in Moorey 1991: 19). As well as the production of a map of the country, research concentrated on Jerusalem mainly through excavations. Under the aegis of the fund, the Survey of Western Palestine was organized, covering Wrst Jerusalem (1865), then Sinai (1868–9), western (1871–7) and eastern Palestine (1881), by men such as Lt Claude Regnier Conder -), Lt Horation H. Kitchener -) and others. Their research was published between 1871 and 1878, with a map issued in 1880 on a scale of one inch to the mile. The latter included an area from Tyre to the Egyptian desert and from Jordan to the Mediterranean, with some nine thousand Arabic names recorded. The accompanying Memoirs contained a description of many sites. Although many imperfections were identiWed at a later stage, it obviously constituted a key step in the archaeological understanding of Palestine. In contrast, lack of appropriate techniques in the excavations undertaken in Palestine, as well as other sites such as Jerusalem, by Captain Charles Wilson (1865–6) and later by Captain Charles Warren (1867–70), led to conclusions of disputed usefulness (Moorey 1991: 19–20; Silberman 1982: chs. 9 and 10; 2001: 493–4). They were not unaware of the political signiWcance of their work. As Wilson said in a memo, ‘the map would be of great importance as a military map should . . . Palestine ever be the scene of military operations’ (in Abu El-Haj 2001: 23). Mapping and imperialism intersected, as happened in many other parts of the colonial world. Yet, mapmaking involved the production of knowledge, in this case not only of imperialist knowledge but also religious understanding of the territory. Local Arab populations were dispossessed of their own history by selecting from their place names those which suggested an older Judaeo-Christian topography. Arabic names were not recorded because of their intrinsic value, but because of their Hebrew and Christian roots (Abu El-Haj 2001; Silberman 1982: ch. 12). Biblical Archaeology 151 The British PEF had a short-lived American counterpart in the Palestine Exploration Society set up in New York in 1870. In the words of its organizers: The work proposed by the Palestine Exploration Society appeals to the religious sentiment alike of the Christian and the Jew . . . Its supreme importance is for the illustration and defence of the Bible. Modern skepticism assails the Bible at the point of reality, the question of fact. Hence whatever goes to verify the Bible history as real, in time, place, and circumstances, is a refutation of unbelief . . . The Committee feels that they have in trust a sacred service for science and religion. (in Shaw 2002: 61). Other societies of longer life were the Deutsche Palästina-Verein (the German Society for the Exploration of Palestine, 1877) founded by German Lutherans, the Russian Orthodox Palestine Society (1882) and the Catholic École Biblique (1890). The researches conducted by the British and Americans were complemented in this period by those of the French, mainly represented by Renan and Clermont-Ganneau. Ernest Renan, despite focusing his attention on ancient Phoenicia (see below), also travelled into Galilee and southern Palestine on his trip of 1860–1. Also, Charles Clermont-Ganneau -), a former pupil of Renan and, more importantly, the French Consul in Jerusalem from 1867, studied several important inscriptions. The most important was that of the Moabite Stone, an inscription found by chance which mentioned King Mesha of Moab, a monarch alluded to in 2 Kings 1:1, 3:4: 4–27 (Moorey 1991: 20; Silberman 1982: ch. 11). Clermont-Ganneau also translated a rock-cut inscription in the channel leading to the Pool of Siloam found in 1881 attributed to Hezekiah on the basis of 2 Chronicles 32:4, 30; a reused inscription in Greek in which Gentiles were warned against penetrating into the inner courts of the Temple as described in Acts 21: 28; and Wnally another inscription found at Tell el-Jazar which identiWed the site in which it was found as Gezer (cited in the Bible in Joshua 10:33; 12:12, etc.) (Moorey 1991: 20–1). A Wnal discovery of these years were some fragments of scrolls. Knowledge of their existence had been acquired by Moses Shapira (1830–84) in 1878. Shapira was a Russian Jew converted to Anglicanism, who had moved to Jerusalem as a young man and lived as an antique dealer. He had been cheated with a forgery in the past, so was cautious in his examination of the fragments he possessed. His translation revealed parts of the Deuteronomy with a diVerent version of the Ten Commandments but his announcement was received with disbelief, especially after Clermont-Ganneau declared them to be a forgery. Only the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 would show the academic world the possible authenticity of Shapira’s scrolls, although many still believe them to be a forgery. By then, it was too late for him (he had 152 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism committed suicide in 1884) and for the scroll fragments, which had most probably been burnt in a house Wre while in the possession of their Wnal private owner (Silberman 1982: ch. 13). Schools, journals, and controlled excavations -) In 1890, the French Dominican École Pratique d’Études Bibliques (The Practical School of Biblical Studies, shortened to École Biblique) in Jerusalem was founded by Father Marie Joseph Lagrange -) based at the Dominican Monastery of St Stephen, Jerusalem. Its aim was to assist the reading of the Bible within the physical and cultural context, and the landscape in which it had been written. It did not become involved in any major excavations at this time, but helped research through its learned journal the Revue Biblique of 1892; the monograph series Études Bibliques, launched in 1900; and the syntheses produced by its members, the Wrst of which was published in 1909 by Louis-Hugues Vincent -) with the title Canaan. Other members were the Semitic epigraphist Antoine-Raphaël Savignac -) and the geographer and historian Felix-Marie Abel -), as well as the Assyriologist Edouard-Paul Dhorme -) who was the Wrst to decipher Ugaritic (Gran-Aymerich 1998: 348). Many consider Flinders Petrie’s excavations at Tell el-Hesi in 1890 as a turning point in Palestinian archaeology. Petrie had no formal training in archaeology, but he had become interested in it through the inXuence of his family (his mother collected coins, fossils and minerals and his maternal grandfather had been an explorer in Australia). He went to Egypt in 1880 and was appointed an explorer for the British-funded Egypt Exploration Society from 1883 to 1886 (Chapter 5). In Egypt he excavated several sites at the Delta. InXuenced by the eugenics theories of Galton (Chapter 13), Petrie interpreted the presence of imported Greek pottery as proof of European and Middle Eastern racial contact and conquest in antiquity and published his ideas in his book Racial Types from Egypt (1887) (Silberman 1999b: 72–3). In 1890 he was brieXy employed by the Palestine Exploration Fund. He decided to excavate in Tell el-Hesi in the belief that it was Lachish (Tell el-Hesi was later identiWed as ancient Eglon). His excavations were of key importance for archaeology in Palestine. Petrie’s mastering of stratigraphy and typology, techniques which he had learned from Pitt Rivers, allowed him to establish a reliable sequence. This was based on the chronology provided by pottery of Egyptian origin, which he knew well. His recognition of tells as sites formed by the accumulation of several archaeological layers was also fundamental for later research in the area (Moorey 1991: 26–8; Silberman 1982: ch. 14). Biblical Archaeology 153 After Petrie the PEF funded the work of Bliss, Dickie, and Macalister. The American Frederick J. Bliss -) followed Petrie’s excavations in Tell el-Hesi. Bliss was the son of a Presbyterian missionary and had been raised in Lebanon. Although Bliss adopted the stratigraphic method he failed to integrate Petrie’s ceramic method into his chronology, and the inadequacies of his results—as well as those of Petrie—led to the dismissal of the method by biblical scholars (Moorey 1991: 30). In 1894–7 Bliss worked with the British architect Archibald Campbell Dickie -) (later Professor of Architecture at Liverpool) in Jerusalem contributing to the archaeological understanding of the city. Between 1898 and 1909 he collaborated with the Irish archaeologist Robert Armstrong Stewart Macalister -). Both excavated at several sites: at Tell-es-SaW, Tell Zakariyeh (the biblical ‘Azekah’), Tell el-Judeideh and Tell Sandahanna (the classical Marisa/Mareshah). Their excavations made it possible to build a stratigraphic sequence of Pre-Israelite, Jewish (Iron II) and Hellenistic-Roman periods (Moorey 1991: 30–2). Nonetheless, in 1900 Bliss was dismissed as the fund’s Explorer, supposedly because of his poor health. In fact, the fund was becoming anxious at the meticulous methods followed by Bliss which prevented the quick discovery of exciting new Wnds needed by the fund-raisers (www nd-g). In the early twentieth century, between 1902 and 1908, the interest of the PEF in the study of the Philistines (mentioned in the Bible for example in 1 Samuel 13:15–14:15) led Macalister to excavate Tell el-Jazar (Gezer). Macalister had in 1900 become the director of the PEF, and remained in the post until 1909. He worked on his own with two hundred untrained labourers and only one foreman, and as a result found it diYcult to have a proper control of the stratigraphy and the location of objects. He did not seem to be very worried about this, as he commented that ‘The exact spot in the mound where any ordinary object chanced to lie is not generally of great importance’ (Macalister 1912: ix). Despite all this, he was able to separate the Middle (second Semitic) and the Late Bronze Age pottery (Moorey 1991: 32–3). In 1911–13 the PEF’s interest in the Philistines led Duncan Mackenzie -) to excavate at Ain Shems (Beth-Shemesh, mentioned in Joshua 15:10– 11, 21:16; 1 Samuel 6:9–18; 1 Kings 4:9; 2 Kings 14:11–13; and Chronicles 28:18). His knowledge of Aegean archaeology (he had worked with Arthur Evans at Knossos in Crete) allowed him to recognize the painted ‘Philistine’ pottery (Moorey 1991: 36). Finally, the PEF also funded a survey of the Wilderness of Zin by Charles Leonard Woolley -) and Thomas Edward Lawrence -), work that provided cover for a British military mapping operation in southern Palestine in preparation for the First World War. The survey recorded multiple sites in the Negeb Desert and the Wadi Arabah, providing the most comprehensive account of the region at the 154 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism time. It concluded that Salomon (several mentions in 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles) had used routes from Aqaba to the Mediterranean for his trading enterprises, and not those from Suez to Pelusium (Silberman 1982: ch. 18). From the 1880s, and especially after 1900, the sponsorship of excavations provided by the British PEF was complemented by that of other societies such as the German Oriental Society, the German Society for the Study of Palestine (the Deutsche Palästina-Verein) and the American School for Oriental Study and Research. Between 1902 and 1914, the German Oriental Society funded the work of the Lutheran Ernst Sellin -), Professor of the Old Testament at the University of Vienna. His aim was to undertake archaeological research in order to conWrm the primary historical value of the Bible. He excavated Canaanite and early Israelite cultures in Shechem (mentioned in Jud. 9:46–9), and Taanach (in Jos. [Joshua] passim, 1 Ch. [Chronicles]; Jud. passim, 1 Kings). His work has been criticized for employing Weld methods which were primitive by the standards of the time (Moorey 1991: 33; Silberman 1999a: 4–5). His later work between 1907 and 1909, and in 1911 at Tell es-Sultan, ancient Jericho, was properly staVed and produced good results although some errors were introduced (Moorey 1991: 33–4). For its part, the German Society for the Study of Palestine (Deutsche Palästina-Verein), which had already subsidized some unsuccessful excavations on the south-east hill in Jerusalem in 1881 by the Leipzig Professor of the Old Testament, Hermann Guthe -), decided to fund excavations at a site considered to be as prestigious as others that were then being dug in Egypt and Mesopotamia. With this in mind, the site of Tell el-Mutesellim, ancient Megiddo, was chosen. In the years 1903–5, Gottlieb Schumacher and Immanuel Benzinger (the author of a book on Hebräische Archäologie, 1894) were selected to work on the excavations. Gottlieb Schumacher -), whose family background has already been mentioned above, had worked as an engineer surveying for a planned railway between Haifa and Damascus. In the 1880s he had mapped Transjordan and published his archaeological Wndings both in the journal (Zeitschrift) of the German Society for the Study of Palestine and in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement. During his excavations with Benzinger from 1903 to 1905 at Megiddo a seal was found bearing the name of King Jeroboam, a monarch mentioned in 2 Kings 14:23–5. Again, no stratigraphic control was undertaken and errors of interpretation were made (Moorey 1991: 34). The American School for Oriental Study and Research had been founded in 1900 and was backed by a coalition of twenty-one universities, colleges and seminaries. Thanks to the sponsorship of an American Jewish banker, Jacob SchiV, the school was able to send a team in 1908–10 to excavate Samaria. This team included Reisner, Fisher and Lyon. George Andrew Reisner -) was, Biblical Archaeology 155 like Petrie, an Egyptologist, well aware of typology, stratigraphy and the problems associated with excavating tells. In archaeological method he was selftaught. His methods matched the higher standards of the time but his involvement in Palestine archaeology was as limited as that of his British counterpart. The work was followed by Clarence S. Fisher -) and David Gordon Lyon -), the latter the director of the American School for Oriental Research in Jerusalem from 1906 to 1907. As a student, Lyon, like Reisner, had received some training in Semitic philology in Germany (in Leipzig between 1879 and 1882) after his studies in America. Lyon became the Wrst Professor of Assyriology in the United States in 1882 as the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard (from 1910 the Hancock Professor of Hebrew and other Oriental Languages). He had started to organize the Semitic Museum at Harvard University in the 1880s (Silberman 1982: ch. 16; www nd-h). Regardless of their nationality and despite all their eVorts, one of the major Wgures of the next generation, William Foxwell Albright -), summarized the situation years later in 1914, saying that: The dates given by Sellin and Watzinger for Jericho, those given by Bliss and Macalister for the mounds of the Shephelah, by Macalister for Gezer, and by Mackenzie for Beth-Shemesh do not agree at all, and the attempt to base a synthesis on their chronology resulted, of course, in chaos. Moreover, most of the excavations failed to deWne the stratigraphy of their site, and thus left its archaeological history hazy and indeWnite, with a chronology which was usually nebulous where correct and often clear-cut where it has since been proved wrong. (Moorey 1991: 37). In spite of such a pessimistic account, in the course of a century biblical archaeology had managed to revolutionize the landscape of the Bible. Yet, the power of the text—of the Holy text as well as that found in inscriptions—had prevented archaeology becoming institutionalized in isolation. The professional base of many of those who undertook archaeological work in Palestine was critical philology and theology (chairs of Oriental Languages, Old Testament, Divinity and Christian Literature have been mentioned in the preceding pages). Professionalism as such would only arrive after the First World War. PHOENICIA AN D THE BIB LE A Wnal area where biblical studies had an impact was in the old territory of Phoenicia, roughly located in modern Lebanon and parts of Syria. The Phoenicians were an ancient people mentioned in the Bible as the Canaanites 156 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism (a name now reserved in archaeology for the Bronze Age archaeological ‘cultures’ of the area), and by the Egyptians as the Phut. During the Iron Age, in the Wrst millennium bce, the Phoenicians had established colonies throughout the Mediterranean. Those established in the north of Africa with their centre in Carthage became known as the Carthaginians or Punic. In the Bible the Phoenicians were condemned in various passages by Ezekiel and Isaiah as the home of Baal and Astarte and the birthplace of Jezebel (Bikai 1990: 72). Iron Age Phoenicians spoke a Semitic language, and had developed an alphabetical script. Its decipherment was made possible after the discovery of some bilingual Graeco-Phoenician inscriptions in the Mediterranean islands of Cyprus and Malta. There, small columns of marble with inscriptions had been discovered in 1697, one of them being sent as a gift to the king of France. The discovery of two Palmyran inscriptions in Rome at the start of the eighteenth century had also intrigued scholars. The decipherment of the Phoenician script was the work of the Briton, John Swinton (1703–77), keeper of the University of Oxford archives from 1767, and the French Jean Jacques Barthélemy (1716–95), author of RéXexions sur l’alphabet et sur la langue dont on se servait autrefois à Palmyre (1754).5 Their success was helped by thirteen new bilingual texts copied at Palmyra by Robert Wood (c. 1717–71). Wood had travelled extensively in Europe and the Middle East between 1738 and 1755. In 1763 he became a member of the Society of Dilettanti (Chapter 2). As a result of his trip to the Levant he published The Ruins of Palmyra (1753), in which he described and presented measured drawings of the Roman imperial monuments of the ancient city located in present-day Syria, and, more importantly for this chapter, The Ruins of Baalbek (1757), a site located in Lebanon that had been occupied by Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans, which had been wrongly connected with the Baalgad mentioned in Joshua 11: 17. On his trip Wood was accompanied by James Dawkins (–1757), a Jamaicanborn scholar who also set out to see the world between 1742 and 51, and Giovanni Battista Borra (1712–86), a Piedmontese artist, architect, landscape designer and draughtsman. A later explorer was the French artist Louis François Cassas -), who visited Syria, Egypt, Palestine, Cyprus and Asia Minor, drawing ancient Middle Eastern sites such as Baalbek. During the nineteenth century Phoenician archaeology fell under the inXuence of French archaeology, especially during the second half of the century after the Civil War between the Muslim Druses and the Christian 5 Bernal (1987: 186) provides some light on Barthélemy’s image of the Phoenicians as not related to the route towards civilization ending with modern Europeans, and as simple in thought and art. Biblical Archaeology 157 Maronites, which ended in 1860 with Druse massacres of local Christians. This was used by France as an excuse to occupy Lebanon.6 It is within this context that Renan’s work took place. Ernest Renan (1823–92) was an expert on Semitic languages who came to archaeology through his interest in the study of the Bible and the Semitic languages. His Wrst celebrated book was Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (General History of Semitic Languages). At the time of the tensions between Druses and Christians he was sent by the French Emperor Napoleon III (r. 1848–70) to the area to write a report on the ancient sites of Phoenicia. For this he became part of the military expedition. He was not the Wrst to undertake excavations in the area, as in 1855 the chancelier of the General Consulate of France in Beirut, Aimé Péretié, had excavated in Magharat Tabloun, the ancient cemetery of Sidon. The sarcophagus he discovered and then sent to the Louvre had an inscription on the cover which was that of Eshmunazor II, a Wfth-century bce king of Sidon. The inXuence of Renan’s work would be further-reaching. Using soldiers as his workforce, he directed four digs in Aradus (Arvad, mentioned in 1 Macc. 15:23), Byblos (the city to which the Bible owes its name), Tyre (described by the Prophet Ezekiel) and Sidon (Gen. 10:15; 1 Ch. 1:13). He published his results—documentation on monuments, rock-cut tombs and inscriptions—in his monumental volume Mission en Phénicie (1864) (Moorey 1991: 17). Soon after his return from his travels to the Levant, Renan was called to the chair of Hebrew in the Collège de France. However, when in his inaugural discourse he denied the divinity of Christ, he fell out of favour and was forced to resign his professorship in 1864. He would be readmitted in 1870. The Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum was his second major work in archaeology and one that would occupy him for the rest of his life. This compendium aimed to reproduce all monuments and inscriptions, and translate them. It followed the scheme set by the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinorum that had started to be organized just a couple of years earlier by the German Theodor Mommsen (Chapter 5). In fact, there was a precedent, a project that had been undertaken in Germany: in 1837 Wilhelm Gesenius -), a German Orientalist and biblical critic, Professor of Theology at the University of Halle, had assembled and commentated on all the Phoenician inscriptions then known in his volume Scripturae liv quaeque Phoeniciae monumenta quotquot supersunt (1837). During the 1870s and 6 In 1864 a semi-autonomous Christian-dominated province was set up, governed by a nonLebanese Ottoman Christian responsible to Constantinople. French inXuence would be unoYcial until the First World War, but after the confrontation it crystallized in a French mandate being established in the area. 158 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism 1880s Renan combined his work on the corpus with works of erudition, following a trend he had started with his hugely controversial book a Life of Jesus (1863), in which he presented an animated and accurate picture of the New Testament’s landscape (Moorey 1991: 17). This would be the Wrst of a series of seven books, the last published in 1882, in which the history of the Christian Church was explained in chronological order. He then started to write a History of Israel (1887–91), producing three volumes. Phoenician historiography became enmeshed in the myriad of images developed by nineteenth-century scholars, some of which had much earlier roots (Liverani 1998). These were in a great part connected to the growth of anti-Semitism. Animosity against the Jews had been growing from the early nineteenth century, and increased in its last decades. The belief in the Aryans as the superior human race placed the others in an inferior rank. The Phoenicians were described as a Semitic people alongside the Jews and so considered inferior. The French historian Jules Michelet, for example, in his Histoire romaine of 1831 had described the Phoenicians as ‘a people who were hard and sad, sensual and greedy, and adventurous without heroism’, and whose ‘religion was atrocious and full of frightful practices’ (in Bernal 1987: 352). The Phoenicians were known to scholars as the enemies of both the ancient Greeks and the Romans (in the Punic Wars). They were also criticized due to the practice of infant sacriWce described in biblical (Jeremiah 7:30–2) and classical sources. Joseph-Arthur, count of Gobineau (1816–82), had written on them in his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (The Inequality of Human Races) (1853–5): Besides the reWnements of luxury, that I have just enumerated, human sacriWces—that sort of homage to the divinity which the white race has only ever practised by borrowing from the habits of other human species, and which the least new infusion of its own blood made it immediately condemn—human sacriWces dishonoured the temples of some of the richest and most civilised cities. In Nineva, in Tyre, and later in Carthage, these infamies were a political institution, and never ceased from being fulWlled with the most exacting formality. They were judged necessary to the prosperity of the State. Mothers oVered their infants to be disembowelled on altars. They took pride in seeing their suckling infant moan and struggle in the Xames of Baal’s hearth. (Count of Gobineau 1983 [1853–5]: 371–2). Renan’s 1855 consideration of the Semitic peoples as inferior to the Aryans was also popularized a few years later by writers such as Gustave Flaubert (1821–80) in his 1862 novel Salammbô, which was contextualized in Carthage, the North African colony founded by Phoenicians in the ninth century bce. Biblical Archaeology 159 Despite rejections on the basis of lack of data by the Louvre’s curator of antiquities, Guillaume Frœhner (Wilhelm Fröhner) -), the image of the cruel Phoenicians who practised infanticide was maintained in the popular imagination. Anti-Semitism, however, cannot by itself explain the rejection of Phoenician archaeology. The criticism found in the Bible against the Phoenicians also explains their rebuV in modern historiography. The Phoenicians were Semitic peoples, but not that much (‘Semiti, ma non tanto’), as Liverani aptly says (Liverani 1998: 6). Phoenicians were not as preoccupied with business, and importantly their religion was not monotheistic; in Phoenicians one could Wnd ‘a raw mythology, rude and ignoble gods, voluptuosity accepted as a religious act’ (Renan 1855: 173 in Liverani 1998: 7). Renan would even try to distinguish between race and language when in 1862 he talked about ‘the Semitic peoples, or at least those talking a Semitic language’ (ibid.). In Lebanon there were also Greek ruins to be excavated, which prompted the intervention of Ottoman as well as of German archaeologists. The growing interest in antiquities, which at the start was focused particularly upon classical antiquities, led Ottoman archaeologists to become interested in the archaeology of the area. The 1874 law of antiquities, issued in Turkey a year after Schliemann smuggled Priam’s treasure out of the country (Chapter 5), also restricted the export of antiquities from Lebanon. Constraints were increased with the law of 1884. From then on, being under Ottoman rule, legislation led to the most valuable pieces being sent to the museum in Constantinople instead of to the European and the new American powers. In 1887 the Ottoman archaeologist Hamdi Bey excavated in the royal cemetery of Sidon, Wnding twenty-six sarcophagi, including that of King Tabint, which he took to the Ottoman Imperial Museum, a gesture which was also interpreted—to a certain degree—as compensation for the Wrst sarcophagus found at Sidon and taken to the Louvre in 1855. The new arrivals prompted the construction of a new museum building, for which neo-classical architecture would be chosen (Shaw 2002: 146, 156, 159). German and French archaeologists would also work in Lebanon from the turn of the century until the First World War. In November 1898, the Kaiser Wilhelm II, during his visit to Germany’s ally, the Ottoman Empire, passed by Baalbek (known as Heliopolis during the Hellenistic period) on his way to Jerusalem. He was amazed by the ruins, which the Germans used to press (successfully) for further archaeological favours: within a month, an archaeological team led by Theodor Wiegand -), a scientiWc attaché to the German embassy in Constantinople and a specialist in ancient Greek art and sculpture, was dispatched to work on the site between 1900 and 1904. 160 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism Wiegand’s campaign produced a meticulously presented and illustrated series of volumes (Lullies & Schiering 1988). Parallel to the German excavations, the French, represented by the Orientalist George Contenau (b. 1877), excavated in Sidon. A RC H A E O LO G Y, B I B L I C A L L I TE R A RY C R I TI C I S M , AND THE CONSERVATIVE REACTION Why expend such energy in this far away, inhospitable, dangerous land? Why this costly ransacking of this millennia-old rubbish heap, all the way down to water level, when there is no gold or silver to be found? Why this international competition to secure as many as possible of these desolate mounds for excavation? . . . To these questions, there is but one answer, if not an exhaustive one; the major motivation and goal [of these endeavours] is the Bible. (Delitzsch, ‘Babel and Bible’, 1902: 1 in Marchand 1996b: 330). A century before these words were written, the Bible was still indisputably considered a major source—for some the main or even the only source—of intellectual and religious life in the Judeo-Christian world. However, contemporary intellectual trends were already threatening the unique position held by the Holy Book. The historicist impetus that had caused many to enquire about the past of Rome and Greece, as well as the national past, could not but aVect the way in which the Bible was comprehended. Was the Bible an exclusively religious book or should it also be seen as a historical source? The text-based historical analysis, which complemented the philological and epigraphical sources that had been applied to the study of the classical authors by Niebuhr and the modern sources used by Ranke (Chapter 11), was also adopted by European scholars specializing in other disciplines such as theology and Oriental languages. However, the critical analysis of the Bible was not something completely novel in the nineteenth century. It had precedents going back to the Reformation. In the sixteenth century, the wish to clarify the scriptures had led to a Wrst inquest into the nature of the Bible led by religious men like Luther -), an impetus further reinforced during the rationalist era in the eighteenth century. The linguistic analysis of parts of the Bible such as Genesis had been begun by authors such as the Dutch Jew and rationalist Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza -) and the Frenchman Jean Astruc -). The former began a translation of the Hebrew Bible and was one of the Wrst to raise questions of higher criticism. The work of the latter, Astruc, was not widely read or believed, but it unveiled the fact Biblical Archaeology 161 that Moses could not possibly have been its single author under the direction of God, as the examination clearly pointed to several hands. Biblical philology entered a new era with the work of the extremely inXuential Heinrich Ewald (1803–75). He produced a celebrated Hebrew grammar (1827). He also wrote Geschichte des Volkes Israel (A History of the Israeli People) (1843–59) in which he developed an account of Israel’s national history that, he argued, had begun with the Exodus and culminated (and at the same time practically ended) with the coming of Christ. For this history he examined critically and arranged chronologically all the available documents then known. The nineteenth-century discovery of the biblical cities of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Palestine and ancient Phoenicia attempted to corroborate dates provided by the biblical account—although, in fact, they often managed to highlight problems, with the result of creating more confusion. Tablets found in the excavations included the names of Assyrian, Babylonian and Israelite kings as well as events that were referred to in the Old Testament, and topographical study revealed sites mentioned in both the Old and the New Testament. However, scholars were divided on the extent to which the Bible could be taken as a historical text. Conservatives maintained that the Bible was infallible as a historical source. Critics, however, raised doubts. They argued that the archaeological evidence was incomplete and often hypothetical. Criticism was led by the German scholars such as Julius Wellhausen -) (Moorey 1991: 12–14, 54). Wellhausen had studied with Ewald (see introduction) and learnt from him the method he later developed and which became known as Higher Criticism. He was appointed Professor of Theology in Greiswald, then of Oriental Languages in Halle (moving later to Marburg and Gottingen). With his uncompromising scientiWc attitude, which brought him antagonism from the established school of biblical interpreters, he analysed the Bible from a philological and etymological angle. His output was substantial, and his most important books included a history of Israel Wrst published as Geschichte Israels (1878) and a book testing the Hexateuch—the Wrst six books of the Old Testament (Die Komposition des Hexateuchs und der historischen Bucher des Alien Testaments, 1889). In addition to Wellhausen, it is worth mentioning the work by Eberhard Schrader -), who had also studied under Ewald. Schrader was a Professor of Theology at Jena and then of Oriental Languages in Berlin. His book Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament of 1872 has been described as a model of nineteenth-century scholarship. In it, Schrader went book by book through the Old Testament, selecting the passages that could be related to results obtained by archaeological research. In England this tradition was observed by William Robertson Smith (1846–94), who occupied the chair of Hebrew at Aberdeen Free Church College in Scotland in 1870 and later 162 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism moved to the chair of Arabic in Cambridge. Smith introduced Higher Criticism to Britain in his books The Old Testament in the Jewish Church (1881), The Prophets of Israel (1882) and The Religion of the Semites (1889). Following Wellhausen’s method, he studied the Deuteronomy. Wellhausen was also followed by the Regius Professor of Hebrew and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, Samuel Rolles Driver -). Among the conservatives there was opposition to Higher Criticism. In particular, Wellhausen’s proposals were resisted by the Anglican clergyman and Professor of Assyriology at Oxford, Reverend Archibald Henry Sayce. As he said in 1894: The records of the Old Testament have been confronted with the monuments of the ancient oriental world, wherever this was possible, and their historical accuracy and their trustworthiness has been tested by a comparison with the latest results of archaeological research . . . the evidence of oriental archaeology is on the whole distinctly unfavourable to the pretensions of the ‘higher criticism’. The ‘apologist’ may lose something, but the ‘higher critic’ loses much more. (Sayce in Elliot 2003). In 1892, after a new discovery in Palestine, he argued: To dig up the sources of Genesis is a better occupation than to spin theories and dissect the scriptural narrative in the name of ‘higher criticism’. A single blow of the excavator’s pick has before now shattered the most ingenious conclusions of the Western critic . . . we doubt not that theory will soon be replaced by fact, and that the stories of the Old Testament which we are now being told are but myths and Wctions will prove to be based on a solid foundation of truth. (Sayce in Elliot 2003). Sayce argued that the Hebrews had been able to read and write even before Abraham, as they had lived in environments inXuenced by Egypt and Mesopotamia, societies that archaeology had proved to be literate. Moreover, cuneiform tablets had been unearthed in excavations undertaken in Palestine. The accuracy of the Book of Exodus had been proven by the excavations of the store-cities of Pithom and Ramses. The Pentateuch had not been composed during the Exile for it was inconceivable that the Israelite scribes would have borrowed the creation story from their Egyptian oppressors. Sayce maintained that the Hebrew scribes knew of Babylonian and Assyrian accounts, and that some parts of the Old Testament had been inspired by them (Elliot 2003). Sayce’s opponent and representative of Higher Criticism in England, Driver, warned about the ambiguity of the archaeological discoveries, pointing to Biblical Archaeology 163 questionable interpretations and illogical inferences. He argued that the date of the Pentateuch depended upon the internal evidence supplied by the Pentateuch itself respecting the elements of which it is composed, and upon the relation which these elements bear to one another, and to other parts of the Old Testament. The grounds on which the literary analysis of the Pentateuch depends may, of course, be debated upon their own merits; but archaeology has nothing to oppose them. (Driver 1899 in Elliot 2003). Driver’s words were echoed by an American scholar, Francis Brown, when he stated in an address given as President of the Society of Biblical Literature that One of the crudest mistakes in using Archaeology as a conservative ally is made when it is employed to win a battle in literary criticism. It is not equipped for that kind of Wghting. It has its proper place in the determination of historical facts, but a very subordinate place, or none at all, in the determination of literary facts. To attempt to prove by Archaeology that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, is simply grotesque. The question is not whether Moses could write, it is whether he did write certain books which there is strong internal and historical ground for holding he did not write; and on this point Archaeology has nothing to say, nor is it likely she will have anything to say. (Moorey 1991: 40–1). Driver argued that, although archaeological discoveries had conWrmed the existence of Israelite kings and Assyrian rulers, this did not prove the accuracy of the Bible. Before Shishak’s invasion, nothing discovered by archaeologists had supplied conWrmation of any single fact recorded in the Old Testament. Archaeology had neither been able to verify that there had been a person called Abraham as described in Genesis, nor prove the existence of Joseph. Driver dismissed Sayce’s arguments one by one, often adopting a contemptuous tone. He insisted that criticism did not go against religious faith, or against the articles of Christian faith. The Old Testament remained a text in which Christ’s arrival had been prophetically announced and was a rich source of prophetic and spiritual lessons. In his Modern Research as Illustrating the Bible published in 1909 he explained how archaeological evidence could be interpreted in relation to the Old Testament. Archaeology was able to provide data on the history and civilization of the ancient Near East and the place of Israel within it. Years later, the American scholar and main representative of biblical archaeology after the First World War (what has been called the Golden Age of biblical archaeology), Albright, praised this work as doing far more good in ‘warning students against the 164 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism dangers of ‘‘archaeology’’ than it did harm by discouraging those biblical scholars who were inclined to leap too hastily into the archaeological arena’ (Albright 1951 in Elliot 2003). C O NC LU S I O N The biblical lands were located in Palestine, Lebanon, and parts of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Turkey. In them archaeology represented the search not only for the classical past but, especially in Palestine and Lebanon, mainly for evidence supporting the biblical account. Early research related to the discovery of ancient documents. This obviously assisted philological studies, especially after the breakthrough in reading the various scripts and languages in which texts had been written in the biblical lands. Translations of Egyptian and cuneiform texts became a reality from the 1820s and the late 1830s respectively thanks to the eVorts of men such as the Frenchman, Champollion (Chapters 3 and 5) and the Briton, Rawlinson, both of whom, in addition to many others, provided the means to push back the frontiers of written history in the area. Later on, research also focused on physical monumental remains and the study of ancient geography. The antiquities unearthed started to Xesh out not only the philological knowledge but also the very physical image of the Judeo-Christian past with objects, works of art and monuments. Excavations helped to forge a historical imagination of the topography of the Holy Land. Archaeology thus assisted in the creation of a visual image for the religious accounts related in the Bible. The intention to illustrate the biblical narrative with material objects and sites was very much in the minds of the early archaeologists. However, it has been argued that the public preferred the image of an imagined Holy Land more than the facts oVered by the archaeologists, and this explained the Wnancial diYculties of societies such as the Palestine Exploration Fund (Bar-Yosef 2005: 177). Biblical archaeology had similarities with informal imperial archaeology elsewhere, where archaeology was used as one more tool in the imperialistic zeal of the main imperial powers. These similarities result from the area being divided between Britain and France, whose zones of inXuence resulted in Palestine and Lebanon respectively in the core biblical lands, and a power struggle in the others which resulted in Britain’s lead, ensuring a safe route towards British India, in the Wnal decades before the First World War. The tensions between the empires were felt in archaeology, and examples of this, Biblical Archaeology 165 given in the text, include the competition between Layard and Botta in Mesopotamia, and Clermont-Ganneau and Charles Warren in Palestine. However, the archaeology of the Bible diVered with respect to the other areas of informal imperialism. These mainly related to the important role of religion, both regarding the protagonists undertaking the job (many belonging to Christian institutions, others very much aware of the religious debates raging at the time), and regarding the aims of research which focused on the search for sites and events mentioned in the Bible. Because of the religious overtones of biblical archaeology, the professional base of archaeologists was formed not only by the usual philologists and the amateurs coming from the army or diplomacy as well as a few proper professional archaeologists such as Petrie. Importantly, and this is exceptional in comparison to other parts of the world, in addition to the groups just described archaeology was also undertaken by theologists and members of religious institutions. Furthermore, the religious associations of biblical archaeology also stopped local archaeologists such as the Ottoman scholar Hamdi Bey, or the various Egyptian antiquarians, from competing with the Europeans; the biblical past was not one of their concerns, a situation that contrasts with what was explained in Chapter 5 in respect to other types of antiquities. If Hamdi Bey became interested in Lebanese archaeology, this was not owing to its biblical topography but as a consequence of the discovery of the royal cemetery of Sidon, in which several Hellenistic sarcophagi of supreme artistic quality (among which, that so identiWed as the Sarcophagus of Alexander the Great) were discovered. A Wnal diVerence that separates biblical archaeology from other types of archaeology is the special twist that racism took in the area, for if racism aVected scholarship elsewhere, that against the Semites became particularly acute from the last decades of the nineteenth century. This aVected negatively particular Welds in biblical archaeology such as the study of the Phoenician archaeology: what had been deWned as Phoenician, both in Lebanon and around the Mediterranean shores from east to west, and even further into the Atlantic, was either ignored, believed not worthy of consideration, or interpreted as something else (usually Greek). As explained in this chapter, racism also aVected the professional integration of the only archaeologist of Mesopotamian origin, Hormuzd Rassam, in Britain, the country he had moved to after meeting Layard. Biblical archaeology, therefore, is a unique case in informal imperialism: religion provided a strong alternative interest beyond the search for the classical model. The religious interest inXuenced archaeology in many ways: in who was doing archaeology and who paid for it, in what was excavated and in how interpretations were well received in the Western world. The classical model, however, would be paramount in the archaeology of the rest of the world. It had 166 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism had, as seen in previous chapters, a positive inXuence on archaeologists in their studies of the antiquities of Italy, Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia. However, the reception of ancient monuments and works of art from the Great Civilizations of other parts of the world such as Latin America and Asia would provide a challenge, an issue to which we now turn in Chapter 7. 7 Informal Imperialism beyond Europe: The Archaeology of the Great Civilizations in Latin America, China, and Japan INFORMAL IMPERIALISM AND THE EXOTIC: ENCOUNTE RS AND DIVERGENCES This chapter examines two very diVerent examples of informal imperialism. The Wrst takes place in Latin America, an area colonized by the Europeans for three centuries and politically independent from the 1810s and 1820s (see map 1). There the ancient Great Civilizations were mainly concentrated in Mexico and Peru, extending to a limited extent to other countries such as Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, and Ecuador. These countries provide the focus for the following pages, whereas a description of developments in the others is reserved for the discussion of internal colonialism in Chapter 10. As mentioned in Chapter 4, after an initial use of monumental archaeology at the time of the Latin-American independence, the emergence of racism led to a process of disengagement: elites only extended their interest in the origins of the nation back to the period of the arrival of the Europeans in the area. The local scholarly pride for the preHispanic past re-emerged, mainly from the 1870s, timidly at Wrst but soon gained suYcient strength to allow indigenous elites a novel rapprochement with their native monuments. Only when this happened would the tension between the national past and the discourse of inferiority advocated by the informal colonial powers be felt. The latter had been formed by explorers, collectors and scholars from the Western world. These were, to start with, mainly French and British, and later also scholars from the US and Germany. A few of them would diverge from the line taken by the majority, and Mexico City was chosen, in the early twentieth century, to undertake a unique experiment: the creation of an international school to overcome the eVects of imperialism. The political circumstances, however, unfortunately led to the failure of this trial. The other case discussed in this chapter is located in East and Central Asia, in China and Japan and, by extension, in Korea. These countries had been able 168 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism to maintain their independence in the early modern era mainly through the closure of their frontiers. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, they were politically compelled to open up to the Western world. In these Asian countries, their antiquity had already acquired prestige and a tradition of study, which had developed independently to the West. In China, nineteenth-century Western explorers were able to undertake their expeditions partly because they took place on the margins of China, i.e., geographical and cultural margins, mainly inhabited by non-Han populations. The Confucian scholar-elite of Late Imperial China was not interested in their Wndings, which were largely of Buddhist character. This would only change after the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911. In Japan, as distinct from Latin America, racial homogeneity Wtted neatly with the racist trends developed in Europe and, in the process of nation-building, a strong ethnic component was included. This strengthened the interest in a search for origins that increasingly adopted Western methods of research. The search for origins also led to the easier acceptance of non-monumental archaeology, allowing, in Japan at least, the institutionalization of prehistoric archaeology. After the initial plunder of archaeological objects by foreign scholars for private and public collections, the East and Central Asian countries reacted in an eYcient manner against this situation. A greater control of their economy, relative stability and solid political roots led to a smoother process of institutionalization in these countries. Thus, foreign interest in their antiquities was controlled and managed in a more eVective way than in any of the Latin American countries until well into the twentieth century. The development of archaeology in both Latin America and East and Central Asia shared several similarities but also showed diVerences. With regard to the similarities, both were prey to the main European colonial contenders in the mid nineteenth century. These included Britain and France, later joined by Germany. In addition, however, each of these areas of the world was under scrutiny by a rising imperial power: the United States in the case of Latin America and Russia towards East and Central Asia. One moot issue, however, is how to understand the presence of Swedish and AustroHungarian explorers. It is diYcult to pinpoint the political context of their endeavours. In the Wrst case this is because most of the literature dealing with Scandinavian empires refers to the early modern period, in the second because the study of the connections between imperialism and informal empires seems to have escaped scholars’ attention. As both these countries were geographically closer to Russia, one wonders whether in the case of China the explorers were inXuenced by the Russian Empire in its desire to control Asia. (Yet, this argument does not work for the Swedes who were drawn towards Latin America!) Some scholars seem to indicate that the interest by Latin America, China, and Japan 169 Hungarian explorers in Asia is related to the search for the original land of their own people. To return to the similarities between the development of archaeology in Latin America and East and Central Asia, another aspect to note is that, being independent, Latin America and Asia were able to develop an internal elite, in many cases formed in the West, or in their own countries following Western standards. This assisted the adoption of the Western method of building discourses about the past. Local scholarship was able to engage—compete, contest, and participate—with the knowledge created in foreign countries. Exoticism was the main perspective adopted by the West. Despite the lesser cultural distance between the West and Latin America and, to a lesser extent, China, Japan, and Korea (especially when compared with the marked cultural diVerences with other areas of the world such as sub-Saharan Africa, see Chapter 10), the need to generate discourses about exoticism was strongly felt. Indeed, it could be said that the exotic was fetishized, and that this image was embraced by all of those involved with the imperial observation and the acquisition of the Other (cf. Hinsley 1993: 118). Discourses created for both Latin America and Asia permitted the consumption of their antiquities. The exoticism and monumentality of their ancient art was praised, although at times contradictorily, an attitude that was in direct contrast to the unfavourable Western opinions of the local populations, which tended to describe them as lazy and stupid. This ambiguity of sentiment was mixed with ambivalence: while criticizing the natives for not being civilized enough, at the same time the Westerners wished to maintain their diVerences with the colonized. As Bhabha said, the colonial Other had to be ‘almost the same, but not quite’ (Bhabha 1994: 86). The sense of superiority displayed by the Europeans and North Americans was reinforced by the stereotypes that were being created through exhibitions of art and antiquities, and by academic studies. Academics from the informal metropolises became absorbed in the classiWcation of the Xora, fauna, and antiquities of these continents in a process of discovery/ recovery that characterized the Western imperial attitude. Beyond similarities, there were also diVerences. One of the most striking disparities between the institutionalization of Latin American and Asian monumental archaeology is the diVerent disciplinary paths which they followed. Whereas Americanism was mainly discussed in terms of ethnology and anthropology, this was not so in the case of the archaeology of East and Central Asia, which was primarily examined through philology. There is a historical reason for this that is clearly linked to the existence (or not) of a previous colonial experience. The political independence of the countries in Asia during the early modern era had compelled traders and missionaries to become proWcient in the various native languages spoken in the area. This had 170 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism already led to the development of a philological tradition of oriental languages in several universities in Europe. It is not surprising, therefore, that it was within philology that the study of Chinese and Japanese antiquities Wrst developed in the nineteenth century. This was not the case in America: its eVective colonization had left the learning of the native languages redundant, at least for trade, and the imposition of the colonizer’s literacy meant the loss of the knowledge about certain ancient scripts that were still in use at the time of the European arrival. The institutionalization of Americanism, therefore, lacked a secure academic base and it was within the study of the exotic, within ethnology and anthropology, that it became anchored. Another major diVerence between Latin America and Asia relates to the nature of local traditions and the extent to which we can talk about hybridization. In the Wrst area, the development of archaeology, the European model fully followed European science, for European science had dominated scholars’ life since colonization and by the time of independence all local native scientiWc knowledge about the past that had originated in their own Great Civilizations—Aztec, Mayan, and Inca—had been lost. In China and Japan, however, there existed a long scholarly tradition of the study of ancient documents, and a liking for collecting and describing that tainted the reception of Western knowledge. Although this issue will not be developed further in this book, a Wnal disparity between the processes in Latin America and Central and East Asia can be indicated. This relates to artists’ reception of antiquities in modern art: whereas the art and archaeology of China, and especially Japan, inXuenced late nineteenth-century Western modernist artists, those of Latin America inspired, in the early twentieth century, local artists of the standing of the Mexican artist Diego Rivera. The archaeology of the Great Civilizations of Latin America, China, and Japan oVers a series of examples of connections between nationalism and internationalism. Although most of the scholars mentioned in this chapter are described as members of the country in which they were born and received scholarly education, for some of them their national identity was less clear-cut than may appear in the following pages. Some of them moved from their country of origin and even changed nationality. This was the case of Aurel Stein -). He was born in Hungary, educated in Germany and received university education in both Austria and Germany. He then moved to England and then India, from where he initiated his research on China. Stein became a British subject in 1904, and even before he became oYcially so, he appealed to the British nationalist feeling against the Swedes and Russians in order to obtain funding for his Wrst expedition to China (WhitWeld 2004: 10–11, 23). Another example of a trans-national scholar is Friedrich Max Uhle -). Born and educated in Germany, he Wrst visited Latin Latin America, China, and Japan 171 America when he was thirty-six. He started to work for the University of Pennsylvania three years later, and, in 1900, for the University of California. In 1905, he moved to Peru as the director of the National Archaeological Museum and then to Chile to organize the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Santiago in 1912 and to Ecuador in 1919 where he represented this country in several international congresses. Uhle Wnally retired in 1933 to live in Berlin (Rowe 1954: 1–19). Stein and Uhle were not the only examples, and the names of Chavannes, Klaproth and Przhevalsky could also be mentioned. The impact that their association to diVerent nation-states and empires had in their studies and interpretation is something still in need of attention. The development of novel, diVering approaches to understand the multi-layered and situational features of ethnicity can only enrich a critical study of trans-national scholars in the colonial world. THE LATIN AMERICAN GREAT CIVILIZATIONS F ROM TH E 1 84 0 s As seen in Chapter 4, at the time of their independence, the Great Civilizations of Latin America had been used as metaphors for a glorious past which could help the elites living in Mesoamerica and the Andean area to explain their rights to self-government. Yet, the rise in importance of the racial component in nationalism, and in particular the prestige conferred on the Aryan race (Chapter 12), soon led to a rejection of this early enthusiasm. The exception to this, although only to a limited extent as has been explained in Chapter 4, was the development of the Indianist movement in Brazil in the mid nineteenth century, in which the native was seen as a ‘good savage’ and celebrated as the embodiment of the Brazilian nation. In the new republics of Spanish America this discourse was largely unsuccessful until much later. This, and particularly the lack of legislation protecting antiquities, left the door open to foreign collectors and scholars. Colonizing Latin American antiquities The Latin American countries did not escape from the colonial aspirations of the Euro-American powers. From their independence in the 1810s and 1820s (see map 1), most Latin American countries endured a period of chaos that paved the way for the intervention of other powers. The political instability throughout the Wrst decades of independence had resulted in a rise in the 172 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism number of Spanish Latin American countries, from the eight newly created after independence to eighteen at the end of the century. Some eVective colonization took place in the heyday of imperialism: French attempts to control Mexico’s politics in the 1860s led to the conversion of the de facto British colony of British Honduras into a Crown Colony in 1862. The European presence was especially marked in the Caribbean Islands. In most of Latin America, however, direct colonization was not the option chosen by the external powers, and informal imperialism was practised instead. Economic historians have largely ignored the question of whether the imperial powers tried to obtain from their informal empires more than an economic gain.This is obviously a complex question whose answer may be attempted by looking at how antiquities were dealt with. Britain played a key role in the economy of countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, whereas France became one of the main players in Mexico. As seen in the two previous chapters, the antiquities of the Great Civilizations of Italy, Greece and Egypt had been understood as the physical remains of the early phases on a path towards civilization, and those of Mesopotamia and Palestine as those leading towards Christianity. Perceptions of Latin American antiquities, however, would generally be very diVerent. From the beginning the antiquities of Latin America remained in a diYcult position. They did not respond to the classical or religious canon and therefore could not be integrated into the past of the Western civilization. However, some comparisons were attempted. One with Egypt1 was made by William Bullock, a man who earned his living organizing exhibitions in his own museum in the Egyptian Hall in London. He brought casts from Mexico and set them up with great success in the Egyptian room on the second Xoor of his museum in London in the 1820s (Aguirre 2005: chs. 1 and 2; Alexander 1985; Fane 1993: 156–8; Graham 1993: 58–63). Also in the 1820s, the excavation of the Mayan site of Palenque by Antonio del Rı́o was published in London with drawings made by a Frenchman, Jean Frédéric de Waldeck -). SigniWcantly, this early attention from Britain towards Mexico would not continue. After the exhibition closed, the British Museum did not express any interest in buying its contents and preparations were made to sell it in France. Only its private purchase and subsequent oVer to the British Museum prevented it from crossing the Channel. A smaller selection of objects was then put on display in the Ethnographical Gallery, but no other exhibition similar to Bullock’s would be organized for another 130 years. According to the director 1 Later in the century August Le Plongeon would propose the Mayan area as the origin of the Egyptian civilization. His theories, however, were considered eccentric and resulted in Le Plongeon’s marginalization by other scholars (Desmond 1989). Latin America, China, and Japan 173 of the British Museum this was not a great loss, as he explained during a parliamentary inquiry in 1860 when he answered positively the question about whether the museum had stowed away in the basement Mexican and Peruvian antiquities (Graham 1993). If the British Museum was not interested, the British foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, seemed to be (but perhaps on a personal basis): he ordered his chargé d’aVaires in Guatemala to acquire a collection of Mayan ruins for the British Museum in 1851. Despite the fact that two scientists were eventually hired for this, the Austrian Karl Ritter von Scherzer -) and the German Moritz Wagner (1813–87), the attempt was unsuccessful (Aguirre 2005: ch. 3). In Britain, the archaeology of the Latin American Great Civilizations2 became mainly curated in ethnological museums. From the 1870s a few objects were exhibited in ethnographical museums such as the Cambridge Museum of Ethnology and Archaeology set up in the 1870s and the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford opened in the 1880s. Also, in 1886, the Mesoamerican collection bought by the British Museum from the collector Henry Christy (1810–65) in 1860 was put on display in Bloomsbury. The casts made by Alfred Maudslay, purchased by the British Museum in the late nineteenth century, were left in the basement of the South Kensington Museum until 1923 (Williams 1993). The origins of these collections showed that British interest in archaeology in Latin America followed a pattern already familiar in the case of the Western ancient Great Civilizations (Chapters 4 and 5).3 They were formed without state intervention by private adventurers and by wealthy individuals. Some of these were William Bollaert (1807–76), Henry Christy (1810–65) (a silk and towel manufacturer better known as a collector of French Stone Age material) and Alfred Maudslay -). The latter, an explorer of the Mayan world, wrote famous volumes such as Contributions to the Knowledge of the Fauna and Flora of Mexico and Central America -, vols. 55–9 on archaeology) and A Glimpse at Guatemala (1899), describing sites such as Yaxchillán and Palenque.4 SigniWcantly, the great economic investment in countries such as Argentina was not matched with a British state funding in the archaeology of the northwest of the country where Inca sites were located. 2 Information about non-monumental archaeology in Latin America, as well as in Central and Eastern Asia, is provided in Chapter 10. 3 This at least until the major excavation in the late 1920s paid for by the British Museum (Williams 1993: 134). 4 Alfred Maudslay’s attempt to work in Monte Albán was opposed by the Mexican archaeologist Leopoldo Batres, who tried to monopolize the archaeological work in the area (Schávelzon n.d.). 174 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism In contrast to the lack of concern by the British state, France, following the continental model of dealing with antiquities of the Great Civilizations which was supported by state intervention, had already paid attention to preColumbian archaeology from the time of the Latin American independence. This attention was not independent of the French colonial aspirations in the American continent, including parts of Canada and the United States (Louisiana) in North America, during the eighteenth century which had already resulted in the organization of several scientiWc expeditions. As the Spanish Empire weakened, the French explored and mapped California as well as other parts of the continent. One of the Wrst demonstrations of French interest in Latin American archaeology was in 1825, when the Geographical Society in Paris organized a competition for the best contribution to archaeology or geography or the best account of a journey in Central America (Bernal 1980: 104). In 1826 the French state also paid a pension to Jean-Frédéric de Waldeck, who by then had visited Toltec and Aztec ruins after having worked as an engineer in Mexican silver-mines, to study Palenque and Uxmal. He published Voyage archéologique et pittoresque dans la Yucatan (Paris, 1837) and, with Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg (1814–74), Monuments anciens du Mexique, Palenque, et autres ruines de l’ancienne civilisation (1866). The work of Carl Nebel (1805–55) (born in Germany but often described as French) also belongs to the Wrst years of the newly independent Mexico: Picturesque and Archeological Journey through the most important part of the Mexican Republic from 1829 to 1834 (1836). France’s imperialistic interest in Latin America was matched by important scholarly attention towards the antiquities of the area. The Louvre opened a gallery of Latin American antiquities, mainly from Mexico and Peru, in 1850 (Bernal 1980: 132; Williams 1993: 132), and a catalogue—the Wrst of its kind—was published in the following year. In it the antiquarian Adrien de Longpérier explained that the pre-Columbian materials came from a ‘virtually wholly unknown’ civilization of a highly ‘peculiar character’ (in Williams 1993: 132). In 1857, France supported an expedition to Mexico and Central America by the explorer and photographer Désiré de Charnay -), that was directly inspired by that of the US Americans Stephens and Catherwood (see below). As a result Cités et ruines américaines (1863), with information and photographs of several Mayan sites, was published (Davis 1981). Contrary to their initial appearance, the aims of such contributions to knowledge produced by scientiWc commissions went further than science. This was demonstrated more than ever in 1864, when France invaded Mexico with the aim of establishing the Hapsburg Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian of Austria as Emperor of Mexico. Together with the army, a commission5 was organized 5 There is some debate on whether instead of one, two parallel commissions were organized at the time, one directed from France and another from the French already in Mexico. Latin America, China, and Japan 175 that explicitly wished to imitate the Wrst Napoleonic Egyptian expedition. The Artistic, Literary and ScientiWc Commission claimed its aim to be to ‘study the means necessary to exploit this country’s [Mexico’s] resources to activate its production, to increase its wealth and its prosperity’ (in Reissner 1988: 73). Archaeology was considered valuable in this respect, for it was included, together with ethnology and linguistics, in one of the subdivisions created in the commission. The commission counted among its accomplishments important publications on Mayan archaeology, which, despite the eVorts invested in its study, still continued to be described as inferior. The best archaeologist in the commission, Désiré de Charnay, would explain years later that ‘after all, we ought not to deceive ourselves about the beauty and real merit of the American relics. They are archaeological objects, nothing more . . . they call forth surprise, rather than admiration, everything is so badly done’ (in Bernal 1980: 126). In addition to Charnay, other inXuential works were published by the Abbé Brasseur, Edmond Guillemin Tarayre (Schávelzon 2003). Important work was also organized by a parallel Mexican scientiWc commission formed by well-known scientists of the time such as the engineer Ramón Almaraz, Francisco Jiménez and the geographer and writer Antonio Garcı́a Cubas -) who undertook important work in the site of Teotihuacán. In the International Exhibition held in Paris in 1867 a life-sized model of the pyramid of Xochicalco was exhibited together with drawings of other archaeological remains of the site as well as of Teotihuacán. Reproductions of the statue of Coatlicue and the Calendar stone were also included and Wgures were modelled from the engravings made by Charnay (ibid.). French interest in America continued after the Mexican débâcle of 1867, when the emperor favoured by France was deposed and executed by Wring squad. Americanism grew up from the shambles: the Société Américaine de France (American Society of France) was then founded in 1875 and the Wrst International Congress of Americanists held in Nancy was organized in that same year (Bernal 1980: 155).6 France continued to sponsor expeditions: in 1878 the state paid Alphonse Pinart -) to travel through Mesoamerica and the Andean area for Wve years and in 1875 a major collecting Information about the French ScientiWc Commission(s) to Mexico (1864–7) can be obtained from Bernal (1980: 107–8); Broc (1981); Reissner (1988); Schávelzon (2003); Williams (1993: 124). 6 The reason behind the Egyptologist Gaston Maspero’s involvement in the creation of the American Society of France is explained in Schávelzon (2004). Although this issue is not really explored in this book, it would be interesting to note that processes in the various parts of the world which are dealt with independently in diVerent chapters of this book may have been interconnected. 176 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism expedition led by Charles Wiener was sponsored by the Ministry of Public Education (Cole 1985: 51–3; Williams 1993: 125). In 1880–2, Charnay’s second expedition was supported by the state, and he published the sites of Popocatepetl, Ixtaccihuatl, and Tula in Central Mexico. In the 1890s, the journey to Mexico undertaken by the chemist and explorer Léon Diguet was also supported by the French. In 1880 Léon de Cessac (1841–91) was sent to Peru7 and Jules Crévaux (1847–82) received funds to gather together a collection from the Andean area (Williams 1993: 125). In 1905–9 Paul Berthon -) travelled to Peru paid by the Ministry of Public Education. In 1878 temporary exhibition of the collections brought to Paris mainly by Wiener led to the creation of a museum of ethnology, the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (later called Musée de l’Homme). From 1895, this museum would publish the Journal de la Société des Américanistes (Bernal 1980: 155; López Mazz 1999: 41). In 1903 the Wrst chair in American archaeology was created in the Collège de France and the Americanist Léon Lejeal was appointed, marking the start of professional Americanism in France. German interest in Latin American archaeology was also led by amateurs and was again institutionalized within an ethnological framework. Among the Wrst were the geologists Wilhelm Reiss -) and Alphons Stübel -), both sons from prosperous families and adventurers in many lands. The plans for their original trip in 1868, to study volcanoes together in Hawaii, changed for practical reasons in order to follow Alexander von Humboldt’s trail in South America. For eight years they traversed Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil, and this journey was continued by Stübel on his own through Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru Wnishing in the United States. Archaeology was only one of their interests, but their geological training helped them to reach high levels of precision for the time in their results. They excavated the cemetery of Ancón in Peru, Wnding mummies, textiles, and jewellery, a site later published thanks to the sponsorship of the Museum für Völkerkunde (Ethnology) in Berlin, in German and English, Das Totenfeld von Ancón in Peru / The Necropolis of Ancón in Peru (1880–7). This was the Wrst descriptive report of a scientiWc excavation in Peru. The Berlin museum, in turn, received the archaeological material. In Bolivia Stübel explored Tiahuanaco, later published thanks to Max Uhle as Die Ruinenstätte von Tiahuanaco im Hochlande des alten Peru (1891–2). Reiss’s interest in antiquities led him to write to the Ecuadorian president urging for the protection of the country’s antiquities: 7 Cessac had also been sent on a scientiWc expedition to California in 1877–9. Latin America, China, and Japan 177 Inca ruins and buildings are very interesting and it hurts to see these last vestiges of the culture of the past being destroyed . . . Ruins are not the property of the Hacienda owner but belong to the country . . . and even to the whole civilised world. It would be of extreme importance to rescue the little that still remains . . . There is no other solution for the rescue of these interesting ruins than for the government to assume their protection. (Reiss in Stüttgen 1994). Wilhelm Reiss eventually settled in Berlin and between 1879 and 1888 played a leading role in the development of German geological and ethnological studies. For a few years he led the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde (Geographical Society) of Berlin, and was the president of the Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte (Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory). He was also involved in the VII International Congress of Americanists held in Berlin in 1888. The Latin American collections gathered by Reiss and Stübel were acquired by the Museum für Völkerkunde (Ethnology) in Berlin and by the museum of the same name in Leipzig. Adolf Bastian -), a good friend of the anthropologist-archaeologist Virchow (Chapter 13), worked in the Wrst of these two museums. He was also a key link in the chain leading from Humboldt to geography and through to culture history. Bastian proposed the concept of the Elementargedanken, the particularities by which each culture employed and expressed culture, forming in this way culture-geographical provinces (Chapter 13). Bastian was interested both in diVusion and in independent invention. It was his concern to study culture history on a very wide scale that led him to acquire Latin American collections. Bastian also sent Max Uhle, one of his museum assistants, to South America. Uhle, despite having been originally trained as a Sinologist, was not new in the Weld of Latin American antiquities: he had already published on many aspects of Latin American archaeology and helped Stübel to study his collections. Uhle had also contributed to events such as the Congress of Americanists of 1888, for which he was secretary. His trip to America in 1892 to buy objects for the museum would result in the increase of the Berlin collections, but would also mean for him the start of a new life. This will be examined later in the chapter. Eduard Seler -), now considered by some to be the founder of German pre-colonial Mexican archaeology (www nd-c), was the director for the American Division of the Königlichen Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin (1904–22). He would combine archaeology not only with ethnography but also with aboriginal American linguistics and native history, becoming one of the few to approach Latin American archaeology from a philological base, an exceptional case in Latin American archaeology. 178 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism Other Western countries contributed to a limited extent to Latin American archaeology. Sweden, a former imperial power in the early modern era (Roberts 1979), was one of these. In Beni, in the lowland area of Bolivia, the Swedish scholar and aristocrat, Erland Nordenskjöld (also spelled Nordenskiöld), undertook several excavations of mounds and excavated some material from Ancón on his expedition of 1901–2 to Chaco and the Andean mountain chain (Hocquenghem et al. 1987: 180). On this expedition Eric Boman -), a Swede who lived most of his adult life in Argentina, assisted with the work (Cornell 1999; Politis 1995: 199–200). The United States of America exhibited a steady increase in its interest in Latin American antiquities throughout the nineteenth century. In 1823 President James Monroe, during his seventh annual State of the Union address to Congress, had argued that the new American nations were sovereign and should not be subject to colonization, and that the US should keep neutrality in any confrontation in wars between the European powers and their colonies. This doctrine was to dominate nineteenth-century US politics until the early years of the twentieth century, when the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine looked at the Latin American countries as a possible area for economic control. In the US the concern towards the Great Civilizations of Latin America evolved in parallel with the emergence of the imperialistic dreams of this young nation. To begin with, the remains of the American Great Civilizations were seen as representing a native past that distinguished the new continent from the old world. This was the view of John Lloyd Stephens (1805–52), an American who had managed to subsidize his stay in the Mayan area by holding a diplomatic mission in 1839 and 1841. Stephens argued that ‘The casts of the Parthenon are regarded as precious memorials in the British Museum . . . Would not the cast of Copan be similarly regarded in New York?’ (in Fane 1993: 146). He also declared that the so-called Governor’s Palace at Uxmal, one of the Mayan sites visited by him in 1840, ‘marks the Wnest achievement of Uxmal’s builders’ and added that: if it stood this day on its grand artiWcial terrace in Hyde Park or the Garden of the Tuileries, it would form a new order . . . not unworthy to stand side by side with the remains of the Egyptian, Grecian and Roman art. (Fisher 1995: 505). His book, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1841, 1843), enhanced by Frederick Catherwood’s drawings, became a bestseller. He argued for the link between modern and past native customs, and undertook some excavations in order to prove these views. He took some objects with him on his return with the aim of creating an American National Museum. The project, however, came to nothing because, once in New York, they Latin America, China, and Japan 179 perished in a Wre that destroyed various items that were going to form the nucleus of the museum (Bernal 1980: 124). Matters of trade, politics, and archaeology were fused together for US citizens travelling in Latin America, and Catherwood and Stephens were followed by many others. One of those was Ephraim George Squier (1821–88), a journalist trained as a civil engineer, who had acquired some archaeological experience in a survey of the mounds of the Ohio River. After his failure to obtain funding from the Smithsonian Institution, in 1850 Squier was appointed to Central America with the diplomatic mission of researching canal and railroad routes to cross the isthmus which would provide an alternative to those being built by the Europeans. In 1852 he published Nicaragua: Its People, Scenery, Monuments and the Proposed Interoceanic Canal, followed in 1855 by Notes on Central America in which he described Honduras and Salvador and in 1858 by his The States of Central America. Squier acquired antiquities that he then sent to the US. A ship containing ‘Wve large stone idols’ was sent to Washington to be the nucleus of the National Archaeological Museum (Hinsley 1993: 109). When his project failed, on his return to the US Squier was sent to Peru in 1862 as United States Commissioner. His experiences led to another book, Peru; Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas (1877) (Barnhart 2005). Squier was not the only one not to receive state funding. As in Britain, the state’s capitalism and philistinism in the US (as deWned in Chapter 1) led to an absence of state expeditions. Yet, as in Europe, the cultural intelligentsia showed an interest in Latin American monumental antiquities, and like in Britain, their study would be sponsored privately. The interest of some American tycoons (and of their wives) is exempliWed in the case of Allison Armour, the wife of a Chicago food magnate. For thirty years from 1883 she sponsored Edward H. Thompson’s -) work in Chichén Itzá, where land was even bought to facilitate the excavation, and in other places in the Yucatán peninsula (Hinsley 1993: 112). An earlier example of this support was the Chicago World Fair in 1893 (some of whose collections were the origin of the Natural History Museum of Chicago). At the Fair Mesoamerican archaeology became popular (Fane 1993: 159–62) through displays such as the moulds and casts of the portal of the Mayan sites of Labná and Uxmal made by Thompson. The public reaction, however, was still mixed. As the Massachusetts Board of World Fair Managers reported: Everyone who visited the Exposition will recall the weird eVect produced on the imagination by these old monuments of an unknown past standing in stately grandeur amidst all the magniWcence and beauty that landscape art and architecture of today could devise. (Hinsley 1993: 110). 180 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism From the last decades of the nineteenth century until the First World War, the interest in the American Great Civilizations in the US would proceed unmatched in Europe. This was parallel to the growing imperialist component of American nationalism, especially after the Spanish-American war of 1898 that resulted in the US appropriation of Puerto Rico and the independence of Cuba. US activities related to Latin American antiquities grew at this time. In the 1880s the Peabody Museum of Harvard University undertook largescale excavations in Copán (Honduras) and published on Latin American— especially Mesoamerican—archaeology in its publication series (Bernal 1980: 148, 154). These publications served as models to follow. Mexican archaeology was given special treatment in the American Anthropologist journal, whose Wrst issue saw light in 1888. A more modest contribution came from the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago in the last years of the nineteenth century (Bernal 1980: 149, 154). From 1904 the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania began to publish on Mesoamerican archaeology, and from 1914 the Carnegie Institution from Washington DC began organizing excavations in the Mayan area (Bernal 1980: 173). American universities and museums also sent archaeologists to the Andean area. Adolph Bandelier’s excavations, for example, were paid for by the American Museum of Natural History (Patterson 1995b: 48), whereas Phoebe Hearst personally subsidized Max Uhle through the University of California when German and Pennsylvanian money ceased after 1895. It may perhaps be necessary here to point out that interest in Latin American antiquities in Spain was almost non-existent. SigniWcantly, there was no teaching on American antiquities in the Spanish School of Diplomacy, where archaeology was taught in Spain from 1856. Most of the American collections amassed during the colonial period that had remained in Spain were still in the hands of the Spanish monarchy (Chapter 2), although the National Archaeological Museum created in 1867 had some in their displays. There were a few exceptions in this lack of concern towards the scientiWc study of Latin America. One of these was the Spanish scientiWc expedition to the PaciWc and Central and South America organized by the Museum of Natural Sciences of Madrid between 1862 and 1865. Marcos Jiménez de la Espada y Evangelista (1831–98), a polymath who participated in it, would later publish on the antiquities in Peru (1879) and elsewhere (López-Ocón Cabrera & PérezMontes Salmerón 2000; Pasamar Alzuria & Peiró Martı́n 2002: 334). He was also a member of the Unión Ibero-Americana de Madrid (Ibero-American Union of Madrid), a movement founded in 1884 that aimed at creating a Spanish– Portuguese–French front to oppose British interests in America that had been stimulated and inXuenced by the weakness shown by the Spanish delegates at the Berlin Conference of 1884–5 (Rodrı́guez Esteban 1998). It was in this context Latin America, China, and Japan 181 that the preparations for the celebrations related to the four-hundredth anniversary of the ‘discovery’ of America in 1892 took place in Spain (Peiró Martı́n 1995: 98). It was only with the re-emergence of a certain nationalist pride for the lost Spanish empire in the celebrations of 1892 that interest was raised. An American historical exhibition (Exposición Histórico-Americana) was organized. Yet, even here, Spanish frailty was put in evidence: instead of being a celebration of the glory of Spain, after several discussions the display became a sum of exhibitions by several countries consisting of Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina, as well as the US, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Portugal, Austria, Germany together with the representatives of the Spanish state formed by the City Council of Habana, the Body of Mining Engineers, the Archive of the Indies in Seville and the National Archaeological Museum (Marcos Pous 1993b: 69). The newly formed interest in Latin America by Spanish scholarship was, however, quickly forgotten in later years, especially after the loss of the last colonies, Cuba and Puerto Rico (as well as the Philippines), in 1898 (Marcos Pous 1993a; Vélez Jiménez 1997). The re-emergence of national pride in ancient Great Civilizations in Mexico, Peru, and Argentina The interest by the European powers and the US was contested and controlled by nationalist archaeology. In the last third of the nineteenth century the institutionalization of archaeology in Mexico and Peru experienced a renaissance. The presence of Aztec and Inca monumental ruins had been used to inspire national pride during independence in the 1820s. This had led to early institutionalization with the creation of museums and legislation, a surge that the global growth of racism in the 1840s provisionally annihilated, leading to the intellectuals’ temporary rebuV of their links with the native past in the central decades of the century. The alienation from the pre-Columbian past explains the inadequate institutionalization of native American archaeology at this time. The earlier work of the 1820s was lost. In Spanish America, nothing similar to the explorations propelled by Brazil’s Historic, Geographic, and Ethnographic Institute in the late 1850s and early 1860s, and the early research in museums in the 1860s and 1870s (Chapter 4), was initiated. Mexico was a partial exception to this. There, the mid nineteenth-century Indianist discourse seen in Brazil was echoed, if with some delay, by some of 182 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism its most important historians. Two of these were the liberal politician and general Vicente Riva Palacio (1832–96) and the historian and minister of education Justo Sierra -). They argued that the best feature of the colonial period was the emergence of the mestizo (i.e. the person of mixed Native-European blood) out of the union between Spaniards and Indians, for these people represented the most vigorous force in Mexican history (Brading 2001: 524). Once again, native monumental antiquities became acceptable. The old National Museum of Mexico was founded for the second time in 1865. It was now a public museum of natural history, archaeology and history, located in part of the building of the National Palace in the centre of Mexico City. Aztec motifs became acceptable for the architectural decoration of Mexico City, and an impressive monument to Cuauthémoc, the last free Aztec king, was built in the Avenue of Reforma. The pavilion representing Mexico in the International Exposition held in Paris in 1889 was also designed in neo-Aztec style. The National Museum of Mexico became the leading academic institution for the study of Mexican antiquities. From 1877 the museum published the Anales del Museo Nacional (Bernal 1980: 139, 154). A leading Wgure in the renewal of interest in archaeology was Captain Leopoldo Batres -), the Wrst Inspector of Archaeological Monuments from 1885, an amateur with contacts with the French anthropologist Paul Broca (Chapter 12) (Vázquez León 1994: 70). In 1897 new legislation was introduced which attempted to help protect antiquities (Bernal 1980: 140). In 1909 the function of the Inspección y Conservación de Monumentos Arqueológicos de la República Mexicana (the oYce for the inspection and conservation of archaeological monuments in Mexico) was legally established. This renewed interest towards the past would pave the way for the deWnitive inclusion of the pre-Columbian past as the foundation of national history after the revolution of 1910, for which a key role would be played by Manuel Gamio -). The development of archaeology in Peru was less marked. There was an increase of societies, associations and museums in the 1840s, to which the publication, in 1851, of two naturalists, the Peruvian Mariano Rivero (Mariano Eduardo de Rivero y Ustariz) -) and the Swiss Johann von Tschurdi’s (1818–89) Antigüedades Peruanas was perhaps related. Interestingly, Rivero had been educated in London and Paris, where he met Alexander von Humboldt, who would have a great inXuence on his future intellectual development (www nd-d). There also seems to have been a growth in the formation of collections and also in large-scale looting at this time together with a thriving market of fake antiquities. These factors were partly encouraged by both local collectors and European museums (Chávez 1992: 45; Hocquenghem et al. 1987). Examples of the Wrst were the collections of antiquities Latin America, China, and Japan 183 amassed by the physician José Mariano Macedo, and by a certain Marı́a Ana Centeno, who then sold their collections to the Museum für Völkerkunde (Ethnology) in Berlin in the 1880s. This degree of interest in antiquities was not shared by the Peruvian state. The rejection of the indigenous past may be explained by the diYculties derived from the political instability of the country. After Spain’s attempt to invade Peru in 1865, the country had been unsuccessfully involved in the War of the PaciWc (1879–83) between Peru, Chile, and Bolivia, and had been prey to military rule in the 1880s. Some of the local ideas on Inca society proposed at this time came, in fact, from Argentina, an interest spurred by the presence of Inca ruins in the northwest region of the country. These interests were not based on Weldwork, but on theoretical linkages between archaeology, linguistics, and anthropology, which were seen more clearly here than in other areas. In 1871 the Argentinian lawyer, historian, politician, and professor of ancient Roman law from 1872, Vicente Fidel López -), suggested that the Aryan race had been the builders of the Inca monuments in a book, published in French, Les races Aryennes du Pérou (The Aryan Races of Peru), basing his argument on linguistic arguments. López argued that the Quechua language was an archaic form of Aryan or Indo-European language and, therefore, those who spoke it could be considered Aryan. He saw the site of Inti-Huassi located in the north of Argentina as the second Inca capital. In this way the Inca past was turned into Argentina’s past, precisely at the time when the President Bartolomé Mitre had signed the law which led later, in the 1870s, to the extermination of thousands of Indians in the so-called ‘Conquest of the Desert’. Fidel López’s hypotheses did not fall into a vacuum. Elsewhere, they were well received, for example in the First Congress of Americanists in Nancy, and were subsequently adopted by José Fernández Nodal in Peru and by Couto de Magalhães in Brazil, although in Argentina they did not have much success (Quijada Mauriño 1996).8 At the start of the twentieth century, in Argentina, local archaeological research Xourished, and the work in the northwest thrived with scholars such as the Professor of American Archaeology of Buenos Aires from 1906, Juan Bautista Ambrosetti -), who pioneered stratigraphic research in the northwest in sites such as Tilcara, a site that he called the Argentinian Troy after its discovery in 1908. The following generation produced graduates such as the anthropologist Felix Faustino Outes -) and Ambrosetti’s main disciple, Salvador Debenedetti -) who wrote his thesis on the prehistoric pottery of the site of La Isla (Politis 1995: 199). 8 On López see also Schávelzon (2004). 184 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism Turning again to Peru, the pride towards the pre-Columbian antiquities seems to have only emerged in the 1890s, at the time of an increased eVort at local development (Patterson 1989: 38). In 1892 a Junta Conservadora (Preservation Committee) was created by Supreme Decree and put in charge of the care of monuments and the organization of excavations (Bonavia 1984: 110). In 1905 the Instituto Histórico del Perú (Institute for the History of Peru) was created, and in the same year the government approached the German archaeologist Max Uhle to form the core collection for a National Archaeological Museum. Uhle worked for the museum between 1906 and 1911, Wrst in the section of ‘Archaeology and Savage Tribes’ and from 1907 as director. The archaeological sequences of Peruvian archaeology devised by Uhle would form the basis for all subsequent work in the area. However, he never abandoned his diVusionist thesis for the development of the Andean civilization. This had already been proposed by the Argentinian Vicente Fidel López in the 1870s. However, instead of arguing, like López, for the Aryan descent of the Incas, Uhle claimed a Chinese origin for them (Quijada Mauriño 1996: 257–9; Rowe 1954). In this way, he managed to keep the Andean ancient culture apart from any connection with Western civilization. At the same time he maintained that the Inca civilization had arrived from outside the continent in a manner similar to the new wave of civilization that was being brought by the Europeans like him, who were in this way legitimized (Patterson 1989: 39; 1995a: 72). In 1911 the Wrst native archaeologist in Latin America, a medical graduate of the University of San Marcos in Lima, Julio Tello -), obtained a doctorate in anthropology at Harvard. His role in Peruvian archaeology falls outside the chronological framework of this book, but his work heralds what was to come, a deWnitive recuperation of the native heritage as part of the Peruvian national past. A Wnal note: the International School of Archaeology and Ethnology of Mexico A few years after the period under investigation would see the design of an experiment that aimed to overcome informal imperialism through its international character and anti-racist rationale. This was the International School of Archaeology and Ethnology of Mexico City formed in 1911. The school was international because teaching was undertaken by scholars from the United States, France, and Germany as well as from Mexico. Its aim was to provide training in research and publication for advanced students. Organized by Franz Boas -), its Wrst director was the German Eduard Seler Latin America, China, and Japan 185 - (Berlin), followed by Boas himself and then by the American Alfred Tozzer -) (Harvard), the French-born geologist, then Professor of Archaeology in the Museo Nacional de Arqueologı́a, Historia, y Etnologı́a (National Museum of Archaeology, History, and Ethnology), George Engerrand -) and the Mexican Manuel Gamio. Though conceived in 1904, it did not commence until 1911 and unfortunately had a short life as it was soon aVected by the turmoil created by the Mexican revolution. It would cease to exist in practice in 1914 and oYcially in 1920 (Bernal 1980: 160–7). T H E A RC H A E O LO G Y O F C H I NA AN D JAPAN Historical background In contrast to Latin America, during the early modern period both China and Japan remained closed to Europeans. Contact was possible to a limited extent from the Wfteenth century with the imperial powers of the time, Portugal and Spain. The search by the Iberian countries for new trade routes was prompted by the Ottoman control of those in use during the medieval period. Portugal established colonies in the Moluccan Islands (Indonesia) (map 3) and opened a route westwards back round Africa. Searching for an alternative itinerary, Spanish navigators discovered America. Spain eventually established a colony in the Philippines in 1565 and the route to Europe agreed with Portugal was that Wrst taken by the Galleon of Manila. This was a galleon route that functioned from 1571 until 1815 and linked Asia and Europe from east to west. From the Philippine capital, Manila, the galleon went to New Spain—Mexico—and from there goods continued their travel to Seville. One of the results of this encounter was hybridization: Mexican craftsmen copied Asiatic forms and Europeans imitated Chinese porcelain, for example, with the result of the white and blue pottery becoming popular in Italy and Spain and then exported to northern Europe. A wide range of merchandise arrived in Europe via Portugal and Spain. These included Arabian perfume, carpets and pearls from Persia, indigo and cotton from India, cinnamon from Ceylon, spices (pepper, cloves and nutmegs) from Indonesia, porcelain and silk from China, and lacquer, Satsuma wares and folding screens from Japan. Together with this trade, European missionaries landed in the East, the Jesuits being among them the Wrst. The Jesuits had an 9 Seler had started working for Boas in the Museum für Völkerkunde (Ethnology) in Berlin in 1884 and in it would reach the post of head of the Department of America (1903–18). 186 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism important role for they wrote missionary reports that provide key information about life then and, more importantly for the issue under discussion, started the learning of the local languages. Also, the Wrst expeditions were organized and the Wrst maps of the area were drawn. An early map of China was sent by the governor of the Philippines to the king of Spain in 1555 (Alfonso Mola & Martı́nez Shaw 2003; Checa Cremades 1998). The Iberian monopoly would be broken in the seventeenth century with the East India Companies that were founded in 1600, starting with the British (1600) and the Dutch (1602). These were followed in the second half of the century by the French (1664), Danish (1670) and in the eighteenth century by the Swedish (1731) companies. They obtained the monopoly of trading with Asia in each of their respective countries (Chapter 8). These corporations continued with the introduction of Oriental objects into Europe. One of those most in demand was porcelain, a type of pottery produced exclusively in China (a technique that was not discovered by Europeans until the early 1700s). From the early seventeenth century, tin-glazed Ming pottery with blue decorations on a white background was mainly imitated at Delft—where the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company were located and where the process had been learned from the Italians—and at other Dutch towns. In the royal and aristocratic palaces of Europe whole rooms were decorated with tile panels, and mahogany furniture inspired by Oriental—particularly Chinese—taste. This popularity of Rococo Chinoiserie peaked between 1740 and 1770. The style imposed by the new ruling dynasty in China from 1644, the Qing of Manchu origin, was also emulated. Increasingly, Japanese inXuences were added and chinoiserie included ‘japanned’ ware, imitations of lacquer and painted tin (tôle) ware that imitated japanning and ceramic Wgurines and table ornaments. This fashion, as well as everything with Oriental Xavour, was eventually overshadowed by the sober neo-classicism movement and its obsession towards the classical in the later part of the eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century, during the reign of Chien-lung (1736–95), China expanded into Xinjiang (then called East Turkestan) and imposed the payment of tribute on Burma, Tibet and Nepal (which had only acknowledged Chinese sovereignty in a formal way). One of China’s key imports from Turkey and India was opium. From its initial use to stop diarrhoea, in the seventeenth century opium became used as a recreational stimulant. In 1800 the economic problems caused by opium led the Chinese authorities to forbid this trade. This, however, only led to illegal trading in which many Western countries became involved. China was also aVected by the nineteenth-century ‘Great Game’, a competition mainly between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia over control of Afghanistan and Central Asia, which led to the British Latin America, China, and Japan 187 occupation of Kabul in 1839 and to continuous rivalry between the two empires throughout the nineteenth century (Hopkirk 1994; Meyer & Brysac 1999). The conWscation by the Chinese authorities of a cargo of opium in 1839 was the excuse Britain needed to declare war (the so-called Wrst Opium War 1840–2) and force the Chinese to allow her to expand her trade. The result for Britain was favourable. Its technological superiority led to the cession of Hong Kong in the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 and to some Chinese ports, including Canton, to be opened to British residence and trade. Soon afterwards, the French and the Americans obtained similar advantages. China was again defeated in 1856 in a second opium war and the Treaty of Tianjin (1858) opened new ports to trading and allowed foreigners including missionaries with passports to travel in the interior. The US and Russia—whose expansion into Turkestan in the 1860s would represent a threat to China and the other imperial powers in Asia10—also signed separate treaties to obtain similar privileges. This situation weakened the Qing dynasty and in 1911 it collapsed, plunging China into chaos (Wakeman 1975). In Japan the Tokugawa, the military overlords ruling from Edo (modern Tokyo), had governed the country from 1600. In the nineteenth century foreign ships attempted to break Japan’s isolation and gain access to the Japanese market without success. Europeans could only trade through Dejima, an artiWcial island oV the coast of Nagasaki. The last decades of the Tokugawa were marked by conservatism and corruption, but the political crisis forced the ruler to resign and in 1868 Emperor Meiji took control. Westernization and industrialization were quickly introduced, including the declaration of a Western-style constitution in 1889. The Japanese, who had already been trading on their own with Europe from the early seventeenth century with expeditions such as that of Hasekura Tsunenaga -) organized companies to compete with Westerners in the maritime trade. Pressured by the Russians, China and Japan turned upon Korea, which resisted until Japan forced a series of agreements from 1876. Taiwan, where the Japanese had attempted to create colonies from the mid 1870s (Eskildsen 2002), was occupied by Japan in 1895. Control over Korea led to the SinoJapanese War (1894–5), with a favourable result to the Japanese. Eventually Japan occupied Korea during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 and annexed it in 1910. As a result, Koreans were assigned Japanese names, converted to the 10 Fighting against Russian ambitions to invade the Chinese Xinjiang and Tibet, in 1904 Britain invaded the latter, although in the 1907 Anglo-Russian convention Britain agreed to refrain from interfering in Tibet’s internal aVairs. The convention, which aimed to limit the rivalry between Russia and Britain, deemed essential to India’s defence, also included agreements on Afghanistan and Persia. Thus, the Wrst passed to the British sphere of inXuence as well as the southern part of Persia, whereas the northern part of Persia became Russian, leaving a neutral zone in between (Leach 2003: 13). 188 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism Japanese religion, Shinto, and required to speak Japanese in schools and in business. Manchuria would also be at the heart of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5, a war related to the Japanese opposition to Russia’s permission, granted in 1898, to use the ports with warm waters in winter of Port Arthur and Dairen, a permission denied to the Japanese. This eventually led to the above war won by Japan. In 1914, under the son of the Meiji Emperor, the Taishi Emperor, Japan sided with the Allies led by Britain and France in the First World War. Antiquities in ancient China and Japan Throughout their history China and Japan had not been ignorant of their past. It is even possible to see a certain resemblance between the way in which both countries related to antiquities and ancient Rome. In the late Roman Republic and during the Roman Empire, history had been used as a way of providing useful examples for educating, and preserving the Roman virtues and mores from erosion.11 Around the same time in China a few antiquities were also passed around and preserved. As far back as 200 bce an Eastern Zhou Dynasty philosopher, Feng Hu Tzu, described a three-age system similar to that used centuries later by Thomsen in Denmark, for it also divided periods into those in which the main artefacts in use were made of stone, bronze and iron (Bleed 1986: 59; Chang 1986: 4–5). About 100 bce Sima Qian, a historian at the court of the Western Han, visited and recorded the reliable information about ancient monuments in his Shiji (Historical Records). The Sung dynasty - ce) paid great attention to history. It was considered that past events could provide models, and be a source of inspiration. During their period in oYce excavations were undertaken at the site of Anyang, the last Shang capital of the fourteenth to eleventh century bce, and treatises, such as the Kaogu tu (An Illustrated Study of Ancient Things) written by Lü Dalin in 1092, were produced. In its ten volumes two hundred and eleven bronzes and thirteen jades from the imperial palace, as well as from private collections, were described. In 1123 a catalogue of the antiquities collection of the Sung court, the Bogo tulu, was published. The prestige of the antiquities was, however, surpassed by that of the texts, which were sought as the main reference (von Falkenhausen 1993: 840). After an impasse, during the late seventeenth century a certain renaissance of epigraphical studies emerged 11 In Rome, the writing of history was a task for men of the highest social strata. Ancient relics were stored in temples and some inferences about antiquity were occasionally made for objects as well as ruins (Lintott 1986; Schnapp 1993: ch. 1). Latin America, China, and Japan 189 which was still in place at the time of the opening of the country to the Europeans (Barnes 1999: 28–9; Debaine-Francfort 1999: 14–16). In the nineteenth century, scholarship led to a renewed interest in the study of objects. One of the epigraphers in the Chinese tradition was Chen Jieqi (1813–84), whose research led him to compile several hundred rubbings of various terminal roof tiles from the Warring States throughout the Han. He also amassed a collection of antiquities (Debaine-Francfort 1999). China’s perspective on antiquity was inXuential in both Korea and Japan. In Korea during the kingdom of the Yi dynasty -) the search for the past was based on information gathered from inscriptions (Pai 1999: 360). In Japan, Chinese inXuences were marked especially during the Nara (646–794 ce) period. During the Tokugawa period -) frequent regular research into the history of the country included the excavation of two tombs in order to research a stone inscription (Barnes 1999: 28–9). Some authors have seen this partly as a result of Western inXuence through trade contact, perhaps by the transmission of European trends from Dutch traders, whose movements in the country were conWned to an artiWcial island in the port of Nagasaki (HoVman 1974), but others link it to internal developments within the Japanese scholarly community (Winkel 1999). During this period, the scholar Arai Hakuseki -) criticized Japan’s ancient chronicles and argued that there was little evidence for a mythical ‘Age of the Gods’. He identiWed ancient stone arrowheads as belonging to an ancient people of Manchuria who were described in Chinese records known in Japan as the Shukushinjin. A later scholar was To Teikan (1731–98), who studied ancient Japanese history and customs through antiquities and drew parallels between ancient Korea and Japan. By the eighteenth century travel turned into a leisure activity for the prosperous classes and the writing of travelogues became popular. In some, archaeological remains were described, one of the more relevant examples of this being that written by Sugae Masumi -) in his Masumi Yuranki (Masumi’s travelogue), which included illustrations of Jomon pottery. Masumi wrote an even more specialized short volume with the title Shinko shukuyohin-rui no zu (Illustrations of old and new ceremonial vessels). One of the other hobbies of the period, rock collecting, also led scholars such as Kinouchi Sekitei -) to archaeology. Several Japanese scholars were also interested in numismatics. One of those was the lord of the Fukuchiyama Wef, Kutsuki Masatsuna -), who published his own collection of Japanese and Chinese coins in twelve volumes, as well as the Wrst Japanese book on European coins (Cribb et al. 2004: 268–9). In Edo there was even an association dedicated to ephemera, the Tankikai (the Oddity Addicts Club) that met from 1824 to 1825 and discussed archaeological artefacts (Bleed 1986; Ikawa-Smith 1982). 190 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism Philological research and comparative religions First the Christian missions and then trade with the Orient inspired a tradition of learning Oriental languages and, to some extent, travel writing. The most important in the latter category was the work published by a German physician working for the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Japan at the end of the seventeenth century, between 1690 and 1702, entitled History of Japan, Together with a Description of the Kingdom of Siam (Engelbert Kaempfer, 1727–8) (Cribb et al. 2004: 268). At the Athenaeum Illustre (university) of Amsterdam in The Netherlands, the teaching of Oriental languages started in 1686 with the appointment of Stephanus Morinus -) to a chair. To begin with, this teaching was connected with biblical studies (Chapter 6).12 The languages known by Morinus were Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic and Ethiopic. It is unclear, therefore, when the term ‘Oriental languages’ started to include those of East and Central Asia. In the eighteenth century the Collegio dei Cinesi (the Chinese College) was founded by Father Matteo Ripa -) in Naples in 1732. This enjoyed a long existence, and was transformed into the Real Collegio Asiatico (Royal Asian College) in 1869, which after further changes to its name has become today’s Istituto Universitario Orientale in Naples (Taddei 1979: vi). In France, during the eighteenth century, some translations were undertaken by Chinese and Japanese scholars who had moved to Europe after undergoing religious conversion to Catholicism. One of them was Huang Jialü -), sent to France by the Jesuits. In Paris he served as the Chinese-French interpreter at the Royal Library. His follower in the post, Rémusat, would be the Wrst academic to teach Asian languages in France. In 1814 he became the Wrst professor of Chinese language at the Parisian Collège de France. The chair created in the Collège de France was obtained by Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat -). He was a doctor who had taught himself Chinese, and who had also learned Tibetan and Mongolian. He was the Wrst secretary of the Asiatic Society of Paris, a learned association set up in 1822 that, as seen in Chapter 6, had an important role in the birth of the study of Mesopotamian archaeology in France. The society’s aims were to promote Oriental languages including the translation of texts and to assist in publishing research by Orientalists (McGetchin 2003). From the very year of its foundation, the society published the Journal Asiatique. Rémusat laid the foundations for French Sinology’s focus on systematic bibliography with his translation of the bibliographical sections of Ma Duan-lin’s Wenxian tongkao, 12 A much earlier precedent seems to have been the decision taken in 1311 by the Council of Vienna that Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldean (i.e. Aramaic) should be taught at Wve Christian universities (Hagen 2004: 146). Latin America, China, and Japan 191 though antiquities would not yet be the focus of academic interest. AbelRémusat was succeeded by Stanislas Julien -), who published on Chinese ancient industries (1869) among other subjects. As with Rémusat, the main interest of Heinrich Julius Klaproth -), the Wrst Professor of East Asian studies at Bonn in 1816, was philology. The beneWt for Bonn, however, seems to have been little, given that he was allowed to stay in Paris on the grounds of the lack of resources for his studies in Bonn. Following Humboldt’s tradition, he also had an interest in geography and cartography. Nevertheless, he apparently paid more attention to Egyptian hieroglyphs than to Asian antiquities, arguing with Champollion on the subject (Walravens 1999). Nor was the Briton James Legge (1815–97) interested in antiquities. Legge was a Scottish Congregationalist who in 1839 had been appointed by the London Missionary Society to China. As the country was still closed to Europeans, he remained at Malacca for three years before moving to Hong Kong, where he lived for thirty years. Legge learned Chinese and started to translate the Chinese classics in 1841 in order to help missionaries to understand Chinese culture. Several gentlemen involved in trade with China suggested that the University of Oxford create a chair of Chinese Language and Literature and proposed that Legge should be oVered it. In 1876 he was appointed Professor of Chinese at the University of Oxford, and held this position until his death. In addition to his work as a translator, Legge would take Sinology into the Weld of Comparative Religions, with his comparative research on Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism and Christianity, and into anthropology through his relationship with the German Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, Max Müller -). Despite the disinterest towards antiquities shown by Rémusat, Klaproth, and Legge, it was the thread of philology that led scholars to them, something that, as we have seen, did not happen in Latin America, but had occurred in the classical and biblical lands. In the case of China and Japan, however, their relative isolation meant that it was only possible for this interest to develop from the 1860s. The scholastic connection between the philologists and the explorers would be through the French philologist Edouard Chavannes -). He was the Wrst European to study Chinese funerary and Buddhist monuments. Chavannes had been trained in the Parisian Collège de France and lived in China from 1889, working at the French Legation in Beijing. He undertook his Wrst exploration in 1893, when he visited various archaeological sites in Northern and Central China. In the same year he was appointed professor at the Collège de France. His early years in the post were occupied with philology. In 1905, however, he gave up what he described as ‘this interminable business’ referring to the translation he was involved in, and turned his interest towards Chinese epigraphy. Accompanied by the 192 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism Sinologist Vasily Alekseev, in 1907 he travelled again to China, photographing and documenting antiquities and recording many ancient inscriptions by collecting rubbings of them, a practice invented by Chinese epigraphers in the Sung period -). His last work was a monograph on the Tai-shan mountain (1910) as a focus of state ritual and local belief. Chavannes had not been the Wrst explorer to visit sites in China, although his interest was certainly more focused than that of his predecessors, mainly explorers, who combined ancient art with geography, cartography, Xora, and fauna. Antiquities in the Age of the Explorers: the Silk Road, Dunhuang, and the Khotan area The treaties signed in Beijing in 1860 had opened China to Europeans. The Wrst visits in the area were undertaken by individuals supported by the imperial powers: Russia, Britain, France and Germany, followed later by the US. They would compete with each other to bring back to Europe as many antiquities and documents as they could which would then be bought by various museums and libraries. The sites of Khotan and the Cave of the Thousand Buddhas in Dunhuang would be of key importance in the Wrst years of Western exploration into China’s antiquities. Both were connected to the Silk Road and had manuscripts, which enabled a link to be made between philology, the study of comparative religions (mainly Buddhism) and antiquities. The Silk Road, a term coined by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen13 -), had been a network of trade routes mainly operative in the Wrst millennium ce in which silk, as well as many other goods, on some occasions travelled great distances. The route linked together China, India, Persia, and had reached into Europe since antiquity. Most merchants only moved short distances and those who travelled its whole length were very rare. At one end the Silk Road reached the western frontier of China. To the south it crossed the wasteland of the Tarim basin and joined with several other branches at the city of Kashgar, in the region of Khotan, the entry to Kashmir towards India (map 2). Khotan occupied the southern part of the Silk Road in an oasis of the Taklamakan Desert, in Xinjiang. It was located in the east–west corridor connecting China with Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Wrst Westerner to arrive in the area, in 1865, was a writer, William Johnson, who, despite mentioning 13 From 1868 von Richthofen crossed China in a series of seven journeys studying its geological structure. His research would be key in Ding Wenjiang’s Wrst years as head of the Geological Survey of China (Furth 1970: 39–40). Latin America, China, and Japan 193 the ruined sites nearby in a report of his trip, did not consider them important enough to photograph. It was not until the Wnding of ancient documents in the area that the site became a main focus of attention. This discovery happened in 1889, when a British captain based in Kashgar, a certain Bower, bought a Buddhist manuscript in Khotan. The manuscript had been written in Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, which supplied the material for debates concerning Indo-European languages and Aryan races (Chapter 8). The experts’ interest in this discovery drew the attention of the consuls at Kashgar, who were in the midst of their particular ‘Great Game’ (see above), the Russian consul Nikolai Petrovsky -) (Wood 2004: 167–9) and his British rival George Macartney. This event supplied a proWtable source of income for a local, Islam Akhun, who was able to forge numerous Sino-Indian manuscripts on birch bark and sell them as ancient Khotanese manuscripts, many of which ended up in the British Museum and the Hermitage (Baumer 2000; Hopkirk 1980). Other manuscripts were bought by the French cartographer Jules Dutreuil de Rhins (1846–94) and the Orientalist Fernand Grenard (b. 1866) in an expedition undertaken in 1890–3 (Hopkirk 1980: 47–8). The most important explorers in Khotan were the Swede Sven Hedin -) and the Hungarian-born Aurel Stein, though a British subject by the time of his travels (Meyer & Brysac 1999: chs. 13–15). Hedin had started to journey in Asia in 1885, exploring and mapping large, but mainly unknown areas in Xinjiang, Tibet, and northwest China (map 2). While crossing the Taklamakan desert, he was constantly on the lookout for archaeological sites and remains. He believed these could provide a timescale for changes in the natural environment, a subject in which he was interested. Hedin arrived in Khotan in 1896, learning from the locals about deserted cities whose decorated house beams still protruded from the sand. Within a few months he had examined several sites and undertaken excavations in Khotan and Niya, Wnding carvings, paintings, documents, and other items preserved by the desert sand. Hedin’s most important discoveries were made in 1895, when he visited Tumshuk (Tum’uk), later excavated by Pelliot, and in 1896, when he discovered two important sites on the southern Silk Road, deep into the desert: Dandan Uiliq and Karadong (Håkan Wahlquist, pers. comm. 2.1.2005). In his expedition of 1899 he also discovered Loulan (Wood 2004: 169–79, 195). It was not until 1900 that Aurel Stein was able to reach Khotan. Stein had inherited a tradition developed in Hungary from the time of Alexander Csoma de Körös, who had begun his travels in 1820 in the search for clues to Hungary’s own national origin and eventually became the founder of Tibetology (Mirsky 1977; www nd-f). Stein had been acquainted with Bower’s manuscript for years and also knew about the texts with ‘unknown characters’ 194 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism arising from the fakes that were intriguing philologists such as the AngloGerman Orientalist Augustus Rudolf Hoernle -), the Secretary to the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Wood 2004: 192–3). At the time of the discoveries in Khotan Stein was in Austria, where he discussed this problem with a philologist who specialized in Sanskrit, the Professor at the University of Vienna, Georg Bühler (1837–98). In 1887 Stein was oVered the joint post of Principal of the Oriental College of Lahore and Registrar of Punjab University in India (WhitWeld 2004). In 1900 he was Wnally able to reach Khotan, on the Wrst of four expeditions into Xinjiang, in 1900–1. Stein mapped the ancient sites along the western end of the southern Silk Road, excavated at DandanUiliq in the Taklamakan desert, northeast of Khotan, at the abandoned site of Niya and a ruined temple in Endere. Having found many inscriptions and documents, he interviewed Islam Akhun, discovering the production of his fakes (Baumer 2000; Hopkirk 1980; WhitWeld 2004; Wood 2004: ch. 13). In addition to Khotan, the exploration of the Cave of the Thousand Buddhas in Dunhuang would also be of crucial signiWcance for European archaeologists in China. The site is one of the greatest and most extensive of the rock complexes in Gansu Province. Dating from the early eighth to the eleventh centuries, its whereabouts had been concealed for almost a millennium. The Library Cave at the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang was found by a resident monk in 1900. It was a Buddhist library containing tens of thousands of manuscripts, paintings and printed documents on paper, hemp and silk dating from- ce. Despite its religious purpose, the library also contained many secular documents reused for scriptures. These provided information about ordinary life on the Silk Road that would otherwise be unknown to modern scholars. The ornamentation both in the documents and also in the many fragments of silk hangings and other cave decorations provided rich data for art and textile history, complementing those known from surviving paintings and sculptures in other Dunhuang cave temples. They demonstrated that Chinese art styles had extended to Central Asia and even to Europe. The Wrst to describe the site was the Russophile Pole, soldier and explorer Nikolai Mikhailovich Przhevalski (1839–88), whose Wrst expedition (1870–3) had partly been Wnanced by the Russian War Department, and his second (1876–8) had a political aim (Wood 2004: 167). He was also supported by the Imperial Geographical Society (on Przhevalski also see Meyer & Brysac 1999: ch. 9). Another key scholar for the study of the Dunhuang caves was Stein. He reached Dunhuang in his second expedition of 1906–7,14 unearthing thousands of manuscripts written in Chinese, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Tibetan, Runic Turki, and Uighur. There were also prized 14 In his second expedition (1906–8), in addition to the Cave of the Thousand Buddhas near Dunhuang, Stein also excavated at Khadalik and Niya, spent Wve days in Loulan gathering many Latin America, China, and Japan 195 Buddhist paintings on silk and the world’s oldest printed document, the Diamond Sutra, dating to 863 ce. He was apparently able to smuggle all these documents away by bribing the Abbot, Wang Yuanlu, the leader of the monastic group in charge of the caves, and carried away thousands of manuscripts back to Britain (Hopkirk 1980: ch. 12; Wood 2004: 199–200). The study of the Dunhuang manuscripts would begin in earnest with the French Sinologist Paul Pelliot -) (Debaine-Francfort 1999: 20–4). Having learned Chinese under Chavannes at the École des langues orientales, in 1900 he arrived as a research scholar at the École Française Extrême-Orient in Hanoi, where he was put in charge of forming the Chinese collection in the library. As early as 1901 he had risen to the rank of Professor of Chinese. He returned to France to represent the École at the fourteenth International Congress of Orientalists held in Algiers in 1905, where he was selected to direct an expedition to Xinjiang. Pelliot studied several archaeological sites on this expedition but the most important part of his trip was his work in Dunhuang. In 1910 he stayed there and systematically examined the cave of Mogao. With his permission he entered Wang Yuanlu’s secret chamber. After three weeks of analysing the manuscripts he was able to convince the Abbot to sell him a selection. Wang’s plans for the refurbishment of his monastery impelled him to agree. The documents, now in the Collection Pelliot at the Bibliothèque Nationale, were not the only purchase. About 230 paintings on silk, cotton, and hemp cloth and about Wfty sculptures from the cave were deposited in the Musée Guimet. In 1911 a special chair in Languages, History, and Archaeology of Central Asia was created for Pelliot at the Collège de France. With his works, Pelliot greatly contributed to the study of the languages and the history of religions and cultures of that area. His attention mainly focused on Manicheism, Nestorianism and the history of the Mongol Empire and he paid particular attention to the analysis of Iranian inXuences on Central Asia (Giès 1996; Hopkirk 1980; Walravens 2001; Wood 2004: ch. 14). Pelliot was not the only one to send many objects back to Europe. The Russian explorer, Kozlov, sent about 3500 objects he found in 1908 to St Petersburg, all dating from before 1387. These were found in the excavations of a Buddhist stupa in the lost city of Khara Khoto, the ‘Black City’ on the Edsin-Gol river delta, near the border between China and Mongolia. Once in Russia the Wnds were divided: the art works went to the Russian Museum, and from there to the Hermitage, and the books and manuscripts to the Asiatic Museum of the Russian Academy of Science (Norman 1997: 97–9). The number of objects obtained by other scholars, however, was much higher. It has been calculated that Stein sent to museums—the British documents, and studied the frescoes at Domoko (Wood 2004: 198–203). Stein would undertake two more expeditions, the third in 1813–16, in which he visited Dunhuang once again, and the fourth, now Wnanced by Harvard University, in 1930. 196 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism Library, the National Museum, New Delhi, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert—a total of about 40,000 relics from his explorations. His success, as well as that of Hedin, led many countries to send their own explorers to unearth riches from the area. The most important were the Russians Dimitri Klementz and Sergei Oldenburg, the Finn Baron Carl G. Mannerheim, the French Charles-Étienne Bonin and Victor Segalen -), the Japanese Kozui Otani -) and his men (see next section), and the Germans Albert Grünwedel -) and Albert von Le Coq -) (Wood 2004: ch. 14). At the start of the twentieth century another scholar who contributed to the study of the epigraphy and languages of China was Berthold Laufer, who led an ethnological expedition to China from 1901 to 1904 on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In this expedition, in addition to acquiring ethnographic collections, he took inspiration from Chinese scholarship and made many rubbings of inscriptions (Walravens 1980). Thus, the ‘Great Game’ for the ancient Buddhist treasures that had initially been led by Britain and Russia (and by a Swedish independent) was later joined by France, Germany, Japan and the United States. The results were received by more than thirty museums across Europe, America, Russia, and East and Central Asia. To the collections stored in oYcial institutions, private collections would also be added. Private collections had started early in the nineteenth century, the Wrst having been based on Chinese goods—tea, silk, china, rugs, and other commodities—sometimes housed in Chinese-like structures, and then later centred upon antiquities. One example of these was that formed by the American merchant Nathan Dann -) that was Wrst shown in Philadelphia in 1838 and then exhibited in London for many years from 1842. Chinese people were also featured to complement the exhibits (Pagani 1997). The collection formed by Émile Guimet -) had a diVerent character. He was a French industrialist from Lyons (France) who journeyed around the world in 1876, stopping in Japan, China, and India. In his travels he was able to amass a collection of objects large enough to display in a single museum which opened in Lyons in 1879 and then moved to Paris in 1899. This museum was initially focused on the religions of ancient Egypt, but became increasingly devoted to the past and present of Asian civilizations. Hybrid archaeology?: the institutionalization of archaeology in China and Japan In post-colonial studies the concept of hybridity involves the creation of transcultural forms, in this case forms that fall between those of the West and Latin America, China, and Japan 197 those of the East. One of the most eVective ways to oppose cultural imperialism is to mimic the institutions created in the West. In doing so, however, the unequal balance of power soon became evident. In nineteenth-century archaeology it was the East which imported the institutions of the West and not the other way round. However, the transmission did not Xow unidirectionally. In the case of the interpretation of monuments, Western Sinologists and Orientalists could not but absorb the knowledge accumulated in the East and employ this as a basis for the development of their discipline. Paul Pelliot and other historical archaeologists drew upon centuries of work undertaken by Chinese scholars. Prehistoric archaeologists nowadays still use the nomenclature of ancient artefacts devised by the Sung antiquarians (Chang 1986: 9). Changes in China in the late seventeenth century seem to have enabled an easier introduction of Western empiricism. In the case of Japan, Barnes suggests that in addition to this, there were three traditions of scholarly enquiry which facilitated the introduction of prehistoric archaeology: the Naturalist tradition of collecting and describing; a tradition focusing on the collection of rocks, fossils and artefacts; and the yosoku-kojitsu which gave importance to precedence throughout time, and developed within history (Barnes 1990: 932). Thus, the situation was already prepared to accept change when both China and Japan were compelled to open their frontiers to the West. In their confrontation with the West, China and Japan followed diVerent strategies. China broadly resisted Westernization until the First World War. Japan’s tactics, however, were very diVerent. Japan tried to become an imperial power like its Western counterparts, and to a great extent these eVorts were successful. Both in China and in Japan, historic archaeology showed a certain reluctance to accept Western-style historical writing until the First World War. This contrasted with developments in prehistoric archaeology in Japan. There, the rapprochement with the West, encouraged by the Meiji government from 1868, led to early measures related to antiquities: the edict of 1871 to protect historical records, collections, and objects, and the opening of museums. The core of the institutionalization of historic archaeology in Japan was the Imperial Museum, whose curators had a historical training. In 1895 they formed the Archaeological Society ‘for the study of archaeology in our country, with the view to throwing light on customs, institutions, culture and technologies in the successive periods of our national history’ (in Ikawa-Smith 1982: 301). Historical archaeology maintained many links with pre-Meiji scholarship and therefore with antiquarianism. Only in 1916 would the situation start to change. Of key importance in this process was Hamada Kosaku -), who had studied in England under the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, and who, on his 200 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism ‘scientiWc reasoning provides the sole guide to truth in all matters about which human beings may reliably know anything’ (Furth 1970: 27). Ding was given responsibility for the Geological Survey of China formed in 1913, which began as a geological department under the Bureau of Mines of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. With Ding, and a team of Chinese and foreign geologists including the Swedish geologist, Johann Gunnar Andersson and the French archaeologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a new chapter in the history of research in palaeontology and prehistoric archaeology would begin in China, mainly after the First World War (Debaine-Francfort 1999; Fiskesjö & Chen 2004; Furth 1970). After the war, training in modern archaeological methods was introduced in China (Chang 1986)15 and only in the mid 1920s would the authorities forbid any further uncontrolled archaeological explorations in Chinese territory. Japanese rapid Westernization would clearly become visible in an analysis of archaeology beyond the country’s frontiers. The two examples provided here are located in Nepal and in Korea. They are very diVerent in nature. The Wrst refers more to an antiquarian pursuit with parallels to that of foreigners such as Stein and Hedin, but with a religious background similar to that found in the archaeology of the biblical lands described in Chapter 6. The second is more related to imperialism. One of the issues that aVected historical archaeology before the First World War in Japan was the rapid decline of Buddhism, partly as a result of the many changes to Japanese society brought about by the Meiji Restoration. This situation was at the heart of some Buddhist monks’ wish to acquire original Buddhist sutras. Here Kozui Otani -) would be a key Wgure. He was the son of the Abbot of the West Hongan Monastery or Nishi Honganji Temple, the headquarters of the Jodo Shinshu (Pure Land sect of Buddhism) in Japan. At the age of fourteen he had been sent to be educated in London, and there he became familiar with the European expeditions to Central Asia. He also read about the discoveries made by Sven Hedin and Aurel Stein, and became a member of the Royal Geographical Society. He then decided to organize his own expedition accompanied by several Japanese monks from the monastery. Despite Kozui Otani’s eVorts his adventure could not conclude, for his father’s death compelled his return to fulWl his role as abbot. His companions, however, continued the work. Thus Shimaji Daito undertook archaeological research in Nepal, on the Buddha in Tarai, and Shimizu Mokuji, Honda Eryu, and Inoue Koen entered Tarai, travelled to Araurakot, Tilaurakot, and Lunmindi 15 From the 1870s foreign specialists were brought to the country and some young men were sent to be educated to the US, England and France as well as to Japan (Debaine-Francfort 1999: 16), but this did not aVect archaeology.