Gods, Graves & Scholars: The Story of Archaeology by C.W. Ceram

Author:C.W. Ceram [Ceram, C.W.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307814272
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

Not quite a century later a book appeared in Germany (as similar works did in France and England) by Professor Bruno Meissner, entitled Könige Babylons und Assyriens (Kings of Babylon and Assyria).

The importance of this work lies least of all in its contribution to scholarship. But it was not intended as such. Its aim was merely to report, for the general reader, on rulers who flourished two to five thousand years ago. The real significance of this book, and of all books like it by scholars of other countries, for our story of the development of archæology lies in the fact that it could be written at all, and in a popular form at that. For, to cite the introduction: “Such a presentation requires historical data that will contribute rich color to the image of those great men and women, so that they will come alive for us.”

What about those historical data? Disregarding the mythicized material in the Old Testament, the fact was that “Not much more than a century ago, the history of Assyria was a sealed book, and only a few decades ago the Babylonian and Assyrian kings were hardly more than names to us. Can it be possible, so short a time afterwards, to recount the two thousand years of Mesopotamian history, including real character studies of the kings?”

Meissner’s book, among others, proved that this had become possible in our own century. It shows that in a matter of a few decades a number of obsessed excavators, scholars, and amateurs were able to lift an entire culture to the light. The book even offered an appendix with a chronological table giving, with few omissions, the names and dates of the Mesopotamian rulers. This table was put together by Ernest F. Weidner, one of the most peculiar among the often very peculiar Assyriologists. For twenty years Weidner sat as an obscure second-string editor in the offices of the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung. Here he edited serial stories and crossword puzzles. One day the modest man approached the managing editor most apologetically with an, for him, extraordinary request: there was some unavoidable business he had to attend to, could he have tomorrow morning off? Of course he could, said the managing editor; he was not to give it a thought. Next day Weidner was not at his desk, but a reporter came storming in waving a news item over his head. It seemed that Ernst Weidner, the nondescript colleague with whom they had been sitting desk-by-jowl for so many years without suspicion, had just won a high award at a special convocation of eminent scholars. For some time he had been quietly publishing on the side important articles about Assyrian chronology and editing an international scholarly journal with a press run of a few hundred copies that went only to universities and isolated scholars.

The office was still buzzing with the story when the distinguished Assyriologist turned up—a bit sheepish, not so much because he had been unmasked, but because he

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