· Illustrations are taken from the
internet, unless otherwise noted.
·
For an earlier publication on this
subject, see: Charles Gates, "American Archaeologists in Turkey:
Intellectual and Social Dimensions," Journal of the American Studies
Association of Turkey 4 (1996): 47-68.
Let me start with an
anniversary. Fifty years ago this
summer, I first set foot in Turkey. I
had just finished my sophomore year, my second year in college; I had changed
my major to Archaeology; and I was in Beirut, enrolled in the summer school at
the American University of Beirut. Mid-summer,
I flew to Istanbul for one week, to see what it was like. I had never before
met a Turkish person, as far as I know; I couldn’t say “evet” or “hayır;” and I
stayed in a dreadful hotel in Eminönü – I remember having to prop up the window
with a book -- but I had a wonderful week, nonetheless. I could never have imagined, though, that
Turkey would one day become my home, and that I would take my place in a long
line of Americans active in archaeological research in this country.
(Photo: author)
It is about these American
archaeologists that I would like to speak this evening. Who were they? Why did they come here? What did they accomplish? I can’t mention each and every name, but I
would like to give a sampling, to show the diverse interests and approaches
American scholars have had, and to identify some notable contributions that
American archaeologists have made to the study of the ancient cultures of this
country.
I should state here that I
will concentrate on work done within the borders of today’s Turkish Republic,
with only passing reference to research in adjacent areas once held by the
Ottoman Empire.
American
archaeologists in Turkey before World War I
The first American project was
at Assos, in northwestern
Turkey. From 1881 to 1883, Architects
Joseph Clarke and Francis Bacon conducted excavations here, on behalf of the
Archaeological Institute of America. 1881
– a date easy for us to remember, because that’s the year Atatürk was
born. The photographer for the
expedition was John Henry Haynes, whose important career in Anatolia, and
Mesopotamia, long forgotten, has been rediscovered in recent years by Robert
Ousterhout.
For a first foray into
Classical archaeology, Assos seems a surprising choice. It was a remote town that figured little in
ancient history. But the interest of
Clarke and Bacon was Greek architecture, and Assos contains an early and
unusual temple of Athena, ca. 540-520 BC, spectacularly located on a hilltop
overlooking the Aegean and the island of Lesbos/Mitilini. In a region dominated by the Ionic order of
Greek architecture, this temple is a surprise: it’s built in the Doric order;
it has sculpted metopes, also a Doric trait; but it also has a frieze above the
columns, which is relief sculpture in the Ionic manner. The finds from these years are divided
between the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, and
the Louvre.
The
intellectual background
Why this choice? And why explore ancient remains at all? To answer these questions, let’s have a look
at the larger intellectual background of the 19th century.
Scientific archaeology began
in Turkey in the second half of the 19th century under the influence of
European scholarship. Coloring this was
a long-standing interest in the ancient Greeks and Romans. Classical culture had been known throughout
the Middle Ages, of course, with Latin as the liturgical language of Western
Christianity and as the common language of educated people. From the Renaissance on, Roman and indeed all
Classical culture continued to be valued for its moral and political
authority. As a result, Latin
especially, but also Greek were widely studied, even in Protestant areas, well
into the 20th century.
In addition to the
long-standing interest in ancient literature, chance finds of Roman sculpture
during the Italian Renaissance contributed to the growing fascination with the
material remains of antiquity. One thinks
especially of “Laocoon and his sons,” the dramatic Hellenistic-Roman statue
group discovered in Rome in 1506.
Collections of Classical objects were formed; and at Pompeii, organized
explorations began in 1748 and have continued to the present day.
The influence of Greek texts
reminds us of Heinrich Schliemann, a rich German businessman, who, fascinated
by the ancient stories of the Trojan War, set out to prove their veracity. Led to the site of Hisarlık by Frank Calvert,
a member of an expatriate British business family in Çanakkale, Schliemann
began excavations there in 1871 and achieved spectacular results. I wonder, can we claim him as an American
archaeologist? He had obtained US
citizenship by this point, and Calvert did serve as an honorary US consul. But this might be a bit of a stretch.
Back to our larger
picture. The Ottoman Empire controlled
lands once key provinces of ancient Greek and Roman civilization. Because of restrictions and rigors of travel,
visitors from Western Europe were few before the later 18th century. When European travellers did make the trip
and report on their findings, the impact was tremendous. Italy was long familiar to westerners, but
now the specifically Greek component of the Classical world was being revealed.
In the 19th century, European
travellers continued to describe ancient sites in Anatolia, and make drawings
of the monuments. In addition, they
often took objects away, actual examples of Classical art, whether or not
official permits were granted. Ottoman
authorities had paid scant attention to such activities. This is not surprising, for the Latin and
Greek languages and Classical cultures naturally enough did not feature in the
Islamic-oriented education of Ottoman officials or resonate in their daily
lives. Only with the quickening of
interest in European culture from the 1850s on did the Ottoman intelligentsia
develop along with Europeans a curiosity toward the antiquities of their lands.
Sultan Abdulmejid and his
son-in-law Fethi Ahmet Pasha began a collection of antiquities in 1845, the
basis for the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul. With the appointment in 1881 – again, our
fateful year of 1881 -- of Osman Hamdi Bey as director, the museum moved into a
new era of expansion and activity, culminating in the opening of the present
museum building in 1891. Laws regulating
archaeological activities were issued first in 1874, then revised in 1884. This
last set, which included a prohibition on the export of antiquities, continued
in effect with minor revisions until 1973.
To return to the exploration
of Assos: What was the immediate American
context for these excavations? In the
United States, the institutional framework for the study of archaeology,
Classical and other, was being put into place at this very time. The Archeological Institute of America was
founded in 1879. Although its interests
were global, the Mediterranean basin would eventually become its focus. The two major research centers for Classical
Studies were soon to come: The American School of Classical Studies at Athens
(founded in 1881) and the “American School of Classical Studies” in Rome, in
1895, eventually to become the American Academy in Rome.
Note that Istanbul, although a
major historical center in the larger southeastern European region, was not yet
an important center for research into Classical or any other branch of
antiquity.
Other Old World civilizations
well represented within the territory of the Ottoman Empire were also much
studied, by Americans as well as others. Texts were always the key, just as
Greek and Latin texts had fueled interest in Classical cultures. The Bible stimulated archaeological exploration
in Palestine. Indeed, in 1899, the AIA
founded the American School of Oriental Study and Research in Palestine,
eventually to become the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR). In Iraq and Syria, the decipherment, in the
mid to late 19th century, of Akkadian and Sumerian allowed a deeper
understanding of Mesopotamian cultures. Although
the the rediscovery of the Hittites grew out of an interest in the Biblical
world and the Ancient Near East, French and then German explorations at
Boğazköy/ Hattusa, the Hittite capital, were given new impetus by the
decipherment of the Hittite language in the early 20th century. And in Egypt, whose ancient writing system
was deciphered in the early 19th century, the study of texts and well-preserved
architecture and art was well advanced by World War I. Each of these areas would become a
specialized field of study.
After Assos, the next American
project in today’s Turkey was at Sardis,
where Howard Crosby Butler of Princeton University, directed excavations from
1910-1914, at the invitation of Osman Hamdi Bey. Butler, an architectural historian, had
already investigated Late Roman sites in Syria.
Although Sardis was a major city in the Roman Empire, its earlier history
was well known from Herodotus and other ancient writers. During the Iron Age Sardis was the capital of
the Lydian kingdom. The Lydians were a
native Anatolian people, even if much influenced by their Greek neighbors and
subjects. Butler’s aim was to get
information about the contribution of such non-Greek Near Eastern peoples to
Classical art and architecture. But as
it so happened, his work focused on exposing the huge Hellenistic-Roman Temple
of Artemis, as well as over 1000 tombs in nearby cliffs. The project was stopped by the outbreak of
World War I. Butler returned briefly in
1922, but died later that year. American
research at Sardis would not resume until 1958.
Between
the two World Wars
After World War I, new
excavations on Greco-Roman sites were begun by American teams: short-lived
projects at Colophon, in the Aegean coastal territory briefly occupied by
Greece, and at Pisidian Antioch, near Yalvaç; and a major campaign in the 1930s
at Antioch-on-the-Orontes (today’s Antakya), then in the French-occupied Sanjak
of Alexandretta, under the sponsorship of Princeton University.
The aim of this last project was
to reveal the city of Antioch, one of the four great cities of the Roman
Empire, from Hellenistic to medieval times.
This goal was believed possible because in the 1930s, ancient Antioch
was overlain by only a small modern city – unlike Rome or Constantinople/Istanbul. It quickly became clear that very deep silt
deposits from the Orontes River concealed the ancient city. Quick and satisfying results were thus
difficult to obtain. In the end, after the villas of suburban Daphne began
yielding one fine mosaic after another, the excavators made a virtue of
necessity and, giving up on the vast deep soundings, concentrated on the
mosaics. Some of these spectacular
mosaics are on display in the Antakya Archaeological Museum, in the Louvre, and,
in the United States, in museums at Princeton, Baltimore, and Worcester, MA.
The inter-war period was
particularly notable, though, for the American entry into the prehistoric and
pre-Classical field.
At Troy, Carl Blegen of the
University of Cincinnati, taking a break from his prolific research in Greece,
excavated from 1932 to 1938, supplementing the earlier findings of Schliemann
and his assistant and successor, Wilhelm Dörpfeld. The Library at the American School of
Classical Studies at Athens and one of the main libraries at the University of
Cincinnati are named in his honor.
The Oriental Institute of the
University of Chicago was founded in 1919 – yes, this great research center is
celebrating its centennial this year – founded by the Egyptologist James
Breasted with financing from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to promote research into
the cultures of the Ancient Near East and Egypt. The Institute sponsored teams that conducted
important surveys in central Anatolia and excavations at Alişar Höyük (near Yozgat)
under the direction of a German archaeologist and adventurer, Hans Henning von
der Osten, and in the Amuq Plain, northeast of Antakya, by Robert
Braidwood.
In 1935, Hetty Goldman, soon
to be appointed professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, began
excavations at Gözlü Kule, the prehistoric settlement at Tarsus. The results proved seminal for the
understanding of Bronze and Iron Age cultures in Anatolia. Goldman, first at Colophon in 1922, then at
Tarsus, was the first American woman to direct an archaeological excavation in
Turkey. Much credit must to to Bryn
Mawr, Goldman’s alma mater, the small but distinguished women’s college whose
perennially strong programs in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology have
encouraged many to enter the field. The
Tarsus excavations were carried out from 1935 to 1938, with two post-war
seasons in 1947 and 1948. As we shall
see, those post-war seasons included staff members who would go on to direct
their own excavation projects in the 1950s and beyond.
By 1939, German archaeological
research in Turkey was active and influential.
In 1929, the German Archaeological Institute had established a center in
Istanbul to further its research projects.
The large projects at Pergamon, Miletos, and Boğazköy/Hattusha – to
which we might add (in the German-speaking world) the Austrian excavations at
Ephesus, which began in 1895 -- had already uncovered much and published
well. In addition, Istanbul and Ankara
Universities were organized on German models.
The relation with Germany had
another dimension as well, one that would affect the United States. In 1933, the Nazi regime expelled Jewish
academics. Many of these scholars,
together with non-Jewish dissidents, would be welcomed in Turkey and given
university appointments in Istanbul and Ankara.
Among them was Hittitologist Hans Güterbock, who joined the staff of
Ankara University. Like many, he began
by lecturing in German with translation into Turkish, but eventually was able
to give the lectures himself in Turkish.
After the war, this community dispersed, some leaving voluntarily,
others the victims of a nationalist reaction in 1948 that led to the dismissal
of these foreign professors. Several
eventually found positions in the United States. Güterbock, for example, after a short stint
in Sweden, was hired by the Oriental Institute.
He would eventually serve as ARIT president from 1969 to 1977, and remained
a dedicated board member for many years beyond.
