Archaeologists, Tourists, Interpreters by Mairs Rachel. Muratov Maya

Author:Mairs, Rachel.,Muratov, Maya.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2015-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

4

Americans in the ‘Land of the Bible’

The Wolfe Expedition

There are also at Baghdad the men … who still collect, by means of Arabs digging in graves, the gold, tablets, cylinders, and other objects to be found in the mounds. A considerable quantity of these objects find their way from Baghdad to Europe every year, and we are fortunate in being able to bring home a collection of them. (Ward 1885: 57)

The country today has all been uncultivated and barren, and yet this is the site of the Garden of Eden, and this is of unsurpassed fertility, and would be teeming with population if there were a good government. What a region for colonization! (Ward 1898: 351)

In the second half of the nineteenth century American academia saw a rapidly growing interest in the languages and archaeology of the Ancient Near East. Exciting accounts of travels and ruins in Babylonia, Nineveh and Nimrud, published in the early 1850s by Sir Austen Henry Layard, a great traveller, romantic archaeologist and cuneiformist, gave Americans a taste for exploring the mystical land of the Bible.1 Correlations made between the archaeological remains and the passages from the Old Testament, in the words of Hermann V. Hilprecht, a German-born professor of Assyriology and Semitic Philology at the University of Pennsylvania, ‘appealed at once to the religious sentiment and to the general intelligence of the people’ (Hilprecht 1903: 290). The Ancient Near East was becoming even more tangible, as Mesopotamian antiquities were beginning to trickle into the country. American missionaries who resided throughout the Near East were sending assorted archaeological items to their almae matres, such as Andover Theological Seminary, Bowdoin College, Middlebury College, Yale, to name but a few (Meade 1974: 21–2). In May 1859, it was announced that the ‘Nineveh Marbles,’ a selection of thirteen sculptures, given to the New York Historical Society by the ‘munificent’ James Lenox, a well-known bibliophile and philanthropist, had finally arrived and had been ‘placed in the Refectory’ (The Historical Magazine 1859: 146).

The bourgeoning fascination with ‘the lands of Ashurbanapal and Nebuchadnezzar’ manifested itself in the creation of a number of learned societies in the United States, such as the American Oriental Society (1842) and the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis (1880). The recently established Archaeological Institute of America (1879) shared these interests. ‘England and France have done a noble work in Assyria and Babylonia. It is time for America to do her part. Let us send an American Expedition,’ – such was the main idea put forward in the spring 1884 at the meetings of the American Oriental Society and the Society of Biblical Exegesis and Archaeology (Ward 1886: 5; Hilprecht 1903: 290). Hence, an expedition had been organized, which bore the name of Miss Catherine Lorillard Wolfe, of New York City, who singlehandedly contributed the $5,000 required for this undertaking (Ward 1886: 6).

The main purpose of the Wolfe Expedition was as a reconnaissance mission, including preliminary survey, photographing the ruins and the landscapes, as well as investigating ‘the practicability of further excavations there’ and finding promising sites (Ward 1886: 5).

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