Backward Glance: Americans at Nippur

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The heat is oppressive, even in winter. You could get used to the fleas and the scorpions, but “the flies [are] the most terrible pests … The countless myriads of tickling, buzzing, biting things from which there [is] no escape from dawn to dusk, in house or field, in motion or at rest.” Your traveling companions are writing letters to your boss back home stabbing you in the back. You’re surrounded by “a half-savage people,” who are “vilely dirty,” “unprogressive and unlovely.”¹ Now, just as you’re packing to go back home, these same locals set fire to your camp, burning everything in sight and stealing several saddlebags full of money.

It’s April 17, 1889, you’re in Nippur, Mesopotamia, on the first American archaeological expedition to the Near East, and things aren’t going too well.

The expedition was the brainchild of John Punnett Peters, an Episcopal priest who received one of the first Ph.D.s granted in the United States—from Yale, in Semitic languages, in 1876. Peters manned a church for only a few months before deciding he preferred the academic life. By 1886, he was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. He also held an interest in Near Eastern archaeology. After the newly formed American Oriental Society led a tour of potential archaeological sites in the Near East in 1884, Peters took the lead in the drive for an American excavation in the area, stirring up interest in the popular press in New York and raising funds to underwrite an expedition.

His main backers were the brothers Clark—Edward White and Clarence—who were important benefactors of the University of Pennsylvania and, in the wake of Peters’s enthusiasm, founders of the Babylonian Exploration Fund (BEF), specifically set up to pay for Peters’s proposed expedition to Mesopotamia. Edward Clark had toured the Near East in his youth and had retained a fascination with ancient worlds. He and Clarence hoped that sponsoring an expedition would garner them a different kind of respect than they received by just being rich and powerful.

Popular interest in ancient cultures was high, sparked by discoveries made by European archaeologists. The French diplomat Paul Emile Botta and the English adventurer Austen Henry Layard had rediscovered the Assyrian Empire with their work at Sargon II’s palace near Khorsabad and in Nineveh in the 1840s. The massive sculptures and reliefs they found demonstrated to many people that the Assyrian Empire was as big and mighty as the Bible implied. But, to scholars, the more important find may have been the cuneiform tablets Layard unearthed at Nineveh. In 1872 archaeology took a second leap forward when another Englishman, George Smith, deciphered some of these tablets and found an Akkadian flood story similar to that found in the Bible.

That discovery opened the floodgates, so to speak, to interest in Assyria. For scholars concentrating on ancient history, Smith’s translations fueled the theory that the tablets from Nineveh simply retold even older stories, and that the Assyrians and Babylonians had not invented their writing system. In their minds, there must have been an older mother-culture that served as the source of all that came later. Tablets discovered in southern Babylonia in the early 1880s made the final connection: The original culture was Sumerian.

Enter Peters and the Clarks. The BEF would bankroll an expedition to the Sumerian city of Nippur, in southern Mesopotamia, but the University of Pennsylvania would coordinate the dig. Peters was named scientific 061director—he had no real archaeological experience, either in the field or in the lab, but then, neither did any other Orientalist in the United States in the late 1880s.

At the time, a conflict of interest existed between Assyriologists interested primarily in the texts recorded on tablets and archaeologists interested in the wider culture that field archaeology could reveal. There was also an inherent conflict in the expedition’s administration, divided between the BEF and the University of Pennsylvania. The two conflicts were personified by Peters, who saw himself as an archaeologist with his first duty to the Clarks and the BEF, and Hermann Hilprecht, a young German Assyriologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the expedition’s translator, who was tied to the University of Pennsylvania and its provost, William Pepper.

The conflict was exacerbated by the harsh conditions encountered in traveling to the dig site near what was then Niffur, Mesopotamia. The journey between the United States and Niffur took six months, including time spent buying supplies and negotiating the terms under which the Ottoman officials would allow the Americans to take home antiquities. After leaving the port of Aleppo, Syria, where they took off into the desert with a caravan of 61 camels, the troupe encountered blinding and suffocating sandstorms, rain and the resulting mud, scorpions, lizards and diseases—among them boils, ague, typhus, malaria and cholera. Conditions were so bad that John Dynely Prince, Peter’s secretary, didn’t even make it to the dig site; he had to be left behind in Baghdad because of illness.

Hilprecht sent a constant stream of letters to Provost Pepper in Philadelphia. He found the entire situation “beneath my dignity & that of my University.”² He complained that his horse was the slowest and weakest of the lot and that he had not been given a pistol when others on the trip had. Only a secret, regular income from Pepper, he insisted, would keep him from being shortchanged by the expedition’s photographer and business manager, John Henry Haynes. He also complained about scientific director Peters, saying he had mishandled the negotiations for the firman (the contract with Turkish officials), that he had made a poor choice in selecting Nippur as the dig site (Nippur was never a significant military or political center, but it was the religious capital of both Sumer and Akkad), and that he was generally incompetent. Hilprecht pressed Pepper to cancel the expedition.

No one really knew what to expect in Nippur. Peters hoped the site would yield new treasures that would demonstrate the greatness of Sumerian culture; Hilprecht was only interested in tablets that would flesh out Sumerian mythology, tablets he thought could be much more profitably obtained by simply buying them from the Turks in Istanbul and Baghdad. Once he arrived at the site in February 1889, Peters, who spoke no Arabic, hired 250 local workmen to do the actual digging, but the Americans, both because of their prejudice and because of their concerns about conflicts among the Arab groups, were afraid of the workers and treated them imperiously. The political situation didn’t help: The Ottoman Turks had only nominal control over the area, just enough to cause resentment, not enough to keep order.

By April the excavation had settled into an uneasy routine. The treasure-versus-tablets controversy was settled: It had become evident that no great sculptures were to be found in Nippur, so the BEF sent orders for the group to concentrate on tablets. In this they met with some encouraging success. Then, on the night of April 14–15, 1889, a Turkish guard shot one of the Arab workers. The Americans had already planned to leave by the end of April; the chants they heard coming from the Arab camps that night made them speed up their plans. Before they could leave, the Arabs set fire to the camp. According to one expedition member

half the horses perished in the flames, firearms and saddlebags and $1000 in gold fell into the hands of the marauders, but all the antiquities were saved.³

As Peters later said, “Our first year had ended in failure and disaster.”⁴

But the overall expedition didn’t. The BEF and the University of Pennsylvania funded three more seasons in Nippur. After the debacle of the first season, only business manager Haynes and Peters agreed to return to Mesopotamia. Peters was again made director. They—and 350 native diggers—were in the field from January to March of 1890. Hilprecht divided his time between Philadelphia, Germany and Constantinople, translating tablets and deciding which should be sent to Philadelphia and which could remain with the Turks. The second season was at least as arduous as the first, and negotiations with the Ottomans were complicated and drawn out. When the BEF decided to raise funds for a third season in 1892, and asked Peters to lead it, he replied: “Impossible! Let Haynes go it alone.”⁵

Haynes’s lack of training in ancient cultures and ancient languages did not stop the one-time photographer and business manager. Hilprecht stayed in Constantinople, negotiating a new firman and cataloguing the cuneiform tablets in the Ottoman museum. Working for the BEF, Peters and Edward Clark provided guidance from Philadelphia. During 1893 and 1894, Haynes flooded Hilprecht with tablets of varying degrees of historical interest; Hilprecht in turn started pressuring Haynes to dig up “the lowest strata” of Nippur, without really knowing what this meant. Haynes became interested in the contours of the city of Nippur and in its architecture; the BEF wanted artifacts. Peters and other BEF representatives harangued Haynes for weekly reports and gave him contradictory orders about how and what to dig.

The third expedition ended in March of 1895 with what appears to be Haynes’s mental collapse.

In the summer of 1898 the BEF assumed that Haynes, having had three years to recuperate, would lead a fourth expedition. 062Haynes, newly married at age 50, agreed, so long as he could take his wife. Since Peters and the Clark brothers thought that Haynes’s earlier problems had resulted from too much isolation, they agreed. In mid-January of 1900, Haynes literally hit paydirt. Digging a spot that years earlier had been nicknamed “Tablet Hill,” Haynes found what looked to be a library full of tablets, with piles and piles of clay “books.” The BEF was so excited by the samples Haynes sent that they pressured Hilprecht to go and join him at Nippur. He stayed for ten weeks, completing his work in May 1900.

Everyone assumed there would be a fifth campaign, led by Hilprecht. But tensions between him and Peters led to the dissolution of the BEF and the end of excavations at Nippur, until the University of Pennsylvania sent another group in 1948.

But did the first 12 years of effort and headaches produce anything of substance? Yes—but not as much as was first assumed. Peters, Haynes and their laborers found tens of thousands of tablets and fragments, ranging from the third millennium to the late first millennium B.C. These included economic documents and copies of almost all of the important Sumerian literary works. Haynes found a ziggurat, though nobody at the time was particularly interested. Though Haynes’s work was poorly documented, Peters’s notebooks and sketchbooks are still useful. Peters and Hilprecht wrote two separate popular accounts of their finds. Only one volume of a planned series of scholarly final reports appeared, however. In the end, despite the hardships, fights and mental breakdowns, the expedition’s results were, as The Oxford Companion to Archaeology says, “mediocre.”

The heat is oppressive, even in winter. You could get used to the fleas and the scorpions, but “the flies [are] the most terrible pests … The countless myriads of tickling, buzzing, biting things from which there [is] no escape from dawn to dusk, in house or field, in motion or at rest.” Your traveling companions are writing letters to your boss back home stabbing you in the back. You’re surrounded by “a half-savage people,” who are “vilely dirty,” “unprogressive and unlovely.”1 Now, just as you’re packing to go back home, these same locals set fire to your camp, […]