HISTORY OF MIDDLE EAST ARCHAEOLOGICAL
RESEARCH
Middle
Eastern archaeology is characterized by beginnings rooted in the political
rivalries of Western European powers.
This resulted in a race for prestige in collecting magnificent artifacts
for their national museums. Included in
such items were texts in languages that could not originally be read. Their decipherment constitutes the other
chief thread of traditional Middle Eastern archaeology. When this looting was
controlled in the later 19th century emphasis remained on the large
sites and texts. This emphasis has
largely overshadowed interest in the social history of the culture although
this has changed to some extent in the later 20th century.
Background
1. At end of
18th century the whole region was under nominal rule of Ottoman Turkish
Empire. However, the Turks exerted very
loose control over the more distant provinces like Egypt and Iraq. In these areas the western European enemies
- France (under the Directory) and Britain (at war with France since French
Revolution 1789) had wide political interests.
Britain’s interest in Egypt lay in its strategic location along the
routes that connected the England with its Indian Empire (recently secured from
France by war) and its Turkish ally. France desired its domination because it
could then isolate Britain's eastern empire.
2. 1798. Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt as
commander-in-chief of the forces of the French Directory. The French rapidly dominated Egypt but was
defeated by joint Ottoman-British army in invasions of Levant. They were also cut of from France by
destruction of their navy at the Battle of the Nile, late 1798. Napoleon returned to France next year and
the French military presence ended in capitulation in 1801.
3. However,
French political and cultural influence remained a major factor in Egypt and
other parts of the Levant throughout the 19th and 20th century while the
opposing British interests also translated into direct and indirect political
and cultural influence throughout the region.
1. Among the
aims of French Revolution was desire to create a humanist society in which
people controlled their destiny - not superstition and religion - thus
scholarship, especially scientific, was encouraged as a goal of the new order.
2. Napoleon took a large number of scholars with him on
his military expedition to Egypt. The
so-called Savants were headed by Dominique Vivant Denon and engaged in
geographical, health, botanical study and a survey of the ancient monuments
that was later published in France.
3. The antiquities survey produced much drawing,
measuring, and description of Pharaonic Egyptian monuments (especially pyramids
and tombs), some of which were taken to France, but most of which were seized
by the British including the Rosetta Stone - found in the delta and bearing
multiple inscriptions in Greek (Ptolomaic period, Cursive, Hieroglyphic).
Jean-Francois Champollion in France and Thomas Young in England studied these
writings. Ultimately Chompollion was most instrumental in deciphering them by
1826 initiating further intensive study and interpretation in subsequent
decades.
4. Champollion’s
work stimulated other Europeans to use his research to further investigate the
Egyptian writing system and interpret the texts. From the 1820’s Sir Gardner Wilkinson (Britain) and a little
later Karl Lepsius (Germany) conducted philological work both in the growing
European collections and in the monuments of Egypt. Their work led to the establishment of Egyptology with its
emphasis on monuments and texts as the mainstream discipline that still
dominates study of ancient Egypt.
4. This episode opened Egypt from the mid-19th
century to a continuing flood of Western scholars and artists that lasted
through the century - largely describing and painting the great monuments
(David Roberts, Hector Horeau, Edward Hawker).
Continuing Trends in 19th-20th
Centuries.
1. The middle
part of 19th century saw untrammeled looting to feed the great
museums of the West:
- Giovanni Battista Belzoni in Egypt
- Henry Layard in Iraq - Nimrud
2. However, by
mid-century the growing reaction to this destructive process resulted in the
creation of government-linked departments of Archaeology.
3. First the
Egyptian Antiquities Service was founded in 1858 under the Frenchman August
Mariette. He stopped the looting, established the National Museum in Cairo and
prevented antiquities from leaving country except by license. He also engaged
in extensive excavation of the pharaonic and elite tombs using methods that,
although primitive by today’s standards, produced a great deal of careful
observation and documentation.
4. Mariette
received little help from the Egyptian ruler (Khedive) who insisted in giving
art away to his friends or using it as co-lateral for his immense debts, a
situation that ultimately led to the French political then British domination
of Egypt when he went bankrupt.
5. Under the
British regime the Egyptian Exploration Fund continued Mariette's work and also
sponsored the first pre-Pharaonic work under Sir Flinders Petrie. He used ceramic vessel forms from Naqada
cemeteries to form a relative chronology based on ceramic seriation. (He arranged pots in stylistic order and
assumed that one end of the order was early with the various stylistic changes
marking the passage of time.
6. Petrie and
his later colleagues initiated understanding of the real antiquity of the
pharaonic state by focusing on the pre-historic remains of Upper Egypt and the
delta and demonstrating a long evolution of Egyptian Neolithic and pre-dynastic
society.
7. Later 19th
and 20th century saw development of this systematic approach to the extensive
excavation of tombs and (Tutankhamen, Memphis area and Upper Egyptian Royal
Tombs etc) and some lesser work on the pre-historic (Hierankonpolis, Abydos)
and Palaeolithic periods.
8. However, the
chief focus of Egyptian archaeology remained, and still to a large extent still
remains, discovery of the central monuments of the Egyptian Pharaonic State and
interpretation of the prolific texts.
This has led to an unbalanced knowledge of Egyptian society with
relatively little known to this day about the settlements and life of the
common people who made up the vast majority of Egyptians.
1. The same trends developed slightly later in
Mesopotamian. In the early 19th century
in Turkish Mesopotamia, the same Anglo-French rivalry played out for political
and cultural preeminence. The earlier French Egyptian acquisitions of monuments
and art to grace the emerging national museums of the West stimulated a race to
loot the sites of the Tigris/Euphrates region.
2. French and
British consuls (Claudius Rich is most prominent in this activity) sponsored
this race on behalf of their growing national museums. These were later joined by the Germans, who,
with the other interests, effectively carved their own archaeological zones out
of Mesopotamia north of Baghdad. The Turks were too weak to effectively control
it, and in any case had little wish to stop it given the fact that Mesopotamian
culture was alien to them.
3. As in Egypt
the emphasis was on the great buried monuments (tells, or cities in this case)
and written record where thousands of small seals covered in cuneiform script
were known and rock art like the Behistan (Iran) inscriptions in Babylonian,
Elamite, and Old Persian allowed Henry Rawlinson to decipher these languages by
mid century.
4. By the end of century the northern civilizations of
Assyria, Neo Babylon and Persia were well-known but the Sumerian awaited the
work of the French excavator (and vice consul) Ernest de Sarzec working at
Telloh. It was not until the early 20th
century that partial identification of the Sumerian culture occurred.
Continuing Trends in 20th Century
1. Paralleling the earlier pattern of Egypt Iraq, in the
1920, established its first antiquities laws under the British occupation. This was followed by the founding of the
National Museum 1926 with Gertrude Bell as first director. From this time excavations were firmly
controlled and the use and export of antiquities restricted.
2. A series of large-scale excavations at major
Mesopotamian sites characterize subsequent period. Examples are the Germans at Uruk, Sir Leonard Woolley at Ur, Max
Mallowan at Nimrud (Agatha Christie's husband). Excavation emphasized architectural recovery and great art (Royal
tombs of Ur).
9. In the first half of the 20th century work
in the south (as at Ur) finally recovered the Sumerian civilization, first
through it’s writing, then its cities.
The civilization of the Sumerians was then established as having
developed the earliest writing in the world and the earliest truly urban
society located in the southern alluvium of the Tigris/Euphrates.
10. Only in the
last 25 years some emphasis has turned from large monuments and texts to the
social life of ancient Mesopotamia.
With the multi-disciplinary work of Robert Braidwood and his followers
on the pre-urban period of the Neolithic and the extensive settlement pattern
surveys of Robert McCormick Adams, Hans Nissen, Henry Wright and Gregory
Johnson, much has been recovered of the pre-history and social origins and
evolution of the area. This continues
where possible today.
Indus Valley Civilization (Harrapan)
Indus
1. There was little formal archaeology under the British
in India until the creation of the Indian Archaeological Survey 1861.
2. The Survey generally continued the work of earlier
explorers in describing and listing sites until 1922 onward when Sir John
Marshall "discovered" the Indus Valley Civilization in what is now
Pakistan.
3. The Indus Valley Civilization with its great cities
spreading from Arabian Sea to Himalayas and a writing system (still not
deciphered) constituted the third great civilization of the Middle East.
4. Subsequent
work under Marshall and his successors (especially Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Indian
Director of Antiquities) has emphasized the great centers of Harrappa and Mahenjo-Daro
while there are ongoing attempts to decipher its language.
Central Asia
1. The area north of the Kopet Dagh Mountains of
northern Iran and present-day Turkmenistan is the location of the Central Asian
(or Oxus) Civilization, the fourth Middle Eastern civilization which like the
others originated in the cirum-regional Neolithic.
2. The American, Raphael Pumpelly, visited the site in
1904. He identified a large urban site at Anau and excavated there
extensively. His work was ignored and
virtually lost during the Soviet period.
However, from the 1960s, first Soviet, now Turkmeni and foreign
archaeologists, have returned and revealed a succession of cultures originating
in the urban settlements of the mountain foothills and evolving into the great
cities of specialized form - the Bactriana-Mariana Archaeological Complex –
located in the Kara-Kum Desert oases.
The BMAC is possibly the ancestor of the more recent Khanate centers
surrounding their qalas (fortified great houses).