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The Conquest of Assyria: Excavations in an Antique Land

Mogens Trolle Larsen

(New York: Routledge, 1996) 390 pp., $35.00

Puritans in Babylon: The Ancient Near East and American Intellectual Life

Bruce Kuklick

(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996) 253 pp., $29.95

At a time when Saddam Hussein’s continuing reign of terror has placed the major sites of ancient Mesopotamian civilization beyond the reach of most western scholars and tourists, and when looted Iraqi antiquities are reportedly flooding the world’s major art markets,^a two new books describing the early history of western interest in ancient Mesopotamia have special significance. In examining why and how western scholars, diplomats, military men and adventurers became fascinated with the “Land Between the Two Rivers,” these books offer readers introductions to the archaeology of ancient Mesopotamia and to the political history of the Ottoman province that became modern Iraq.

In The Conquest of Assyria, Mogens Trolle Larsen, professor of Assyriology at the University of Copenhagen, relates the vivid, poetic and ultimately bittersweet story of the discovery of the antiquities of Assyria in the 1840s and 1850s by representatives of England and France. The book focuses on three men in particular: Paolo Emilio Botta, the opium-addicted French consul at Mosul, who uncovered the spectacular reliefs from Sargon’s palace at the mound of Khorsabad; Austen Henry Layard, English political idealist and adventurer, who discovered and supervised the removal of reliefs and statuary from the palaces of Nimrud (ancient Calah) and Kuyunjik (ancient Nineveh); and Major Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, the phlegmatic and egotistical British political agent in Baghdad whose single-minded obsession with deciphering ancient cuneiform inscriptions ultimately provided the key to centuries of Mesopotamian history, events and personalities only hinted at in the Bible and Greek literature.

Set in the then remote Tigris and Euphrates valley and the royal courts and capitals of 19th-century Europe, where the intensifying competition between western nations over the lands of the Ottoman Empire spilled over into a mad scramble for ancient monuments, Larsen’s tale examines why Mesopotamia was so important. As the main overland route from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, its thorough exploration and mapping was a matter of supreme strategic importance. And, as the birthplace of one of the world’s earliest and most complex civilizations, it offered modern states tangible trophies of architectural splendor and imperial grandeur. Larsen’s narrative of the initial period of exploration skillfully reconstructs the political currents, scholarly jealousies and psychological motivations that lay behind the European “conquest of Assyria.”

In Puritans in Babylon, Bruce Kuklick, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzes a later stage of the same story—the efforts of American museums and universities from 1880 to 1930 to claim a share of the archaeological and intellectual legacy of ancient Mesopotamia. In the first half of the book, Kuklick presents a highly detailed account of the Nippur expedition of the University of Pennsylvania; in the second half, he offers a wider examination of the development of distinctive varieties of Near Eastern studies at institutions of higher learning throughout the United States. Kuklick’s narrative is filled with meticulously collected archival records of fund-raising, recruitment of expedition members, and academic life in turn-of-the-century America, but the sheer volume of detail often obscures the distinctiveness of the characters and the larger implications of the main themes.

Unfortunately, Kuklick tumbles into the 019literary pitfalls he warns readers about in his concluding essay on method and sources. His book, like many scholarly accounts of archaeological excavation and discovery written by (and primarily for) professional archaeologists—which he derisively dubs “practitioners’ histories”—often suffers from an uncritical use of memoirs and narrative accounts that artificially segregate archaeology from wider trends of intellectual history. While his reconstruction of the Nippur expedition will remain the definitive historical examination of that massive undertaking, he does not follow the trail of money and ideas about the ancient Near East beyond excavation trenches, expedition headquarters or ivy-covered walls. The period covered by Kuklick’s book was the era of America’s greatest imperial undertakings, yet in the Near East the United States was far behind the other world powers. I would like to have read more about the diplomatic and economic dimensions of the American intellectual endeavor and their ideological implications for subsequent American policy in a region where national interests in oil deposits and in the Bible have proven a highly flammable mix.

Both The Conquest of Assyria and Puritans in Babylon offer readers fascinating background material about the exploration of Mesopotamia. I highly recommend them to anyone who hopes to understand the process and context of archaeological discovery. Larsen offers a sweeping Victorian drama; Kuklick, a meticulous turn-of-the-century intellectual history. Yet perhaps both books would have been even more powerful if they had somehow—even in an epilogue—linked the story of the 19th-century exploration of Mesopotamia with the present epoch of Saddam. For the western antiquarian, both books describe in great detail achievements that have profoundly shaped our understanding of the nature of civilization. They also show that the imperial competition that fueled those pioneering explorations in Mesopotamia was the crucible in which the modern Middle East was formed.

The City in Ancient Israel

Volkmar Fritz

(Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995) 197 pp., 60 figs., $25

When the Israelite monarchy arose in the 10th century B.C.E., life changed significantly: Small pastoral and agrarian villages became towns or, in a few cases, cities. Understanding how political change brought about this shift in population and development of towns and cities is the subject of The City in Ancient Israel, written by Volkmar Fritz, the director of the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology in Jerusalem.

The book’s ten chapters assemble a great deal of information. We learn about the nature of the Israelite city and the reasons for its development, what was happening in the area before the Israelites’ arrival, pre-urban Israelite settlements during the Early Iron Age and cities built and occupied by the Israelites during Iron Age II, the period of the monarchy. The final chapters describe what it was like to live in the cities, how homes were built and water supplied, and how the administration and economy were set up.

The book’s format, language and general style strongly suggest that it is meant for the lay public and for undergraduates rather than for specialists. Unfortunately, if this was its intent, it would have benefited from better editing and fewer obscure German bibliographic references.

The title suggests that the book deals with Israelite-period cities. However, it devotes three chapters to the Canaanite cities and Israelite villages that preceded these Israelite cities, 020without making a clear connection between them. Fritz should have accompanied some of his assertions with supporting evidence or arguments. In describing Canaanite Megiddo, for example, he states that “the breakdown of political order is reflected in the abandonment of planned construction in individual parts of the city,” but he does not explain in any more detail how the breakdown is reflected in the excavated evidence. Nor does he explain, in discussing Stratum IX at Tel Beersheba, why “it is probable that they [the pits] were occupied by members of a nomadic society over a long period of more than one hundred years.” His statement “The pottery found here [at Samaria] indicates that the building had an official function” doesn’t provide enough information about the type of pottery or other evidence to support this conclusion.

Fritz also neglects to mention some previous scholarship. He labels the tripartite, or pillared, buildings at Megiddo as barracks without presenting any of the alternatives (stables, storehouses) other scholars have argued fit the evidence.^b The tripartite building at Tel Beersheba he calls “quarters for the troops, who were connected with the military security of the kingdom,” but he never tells us how these soldiers cooked without fireplaces or ovens.

When Fritz finally discusses other possible functions for the Beersheba buildings, he says their “designation as a market hall is to be rejected, since the inhabitants of the city were self-supporting farmers.” His reasoning seems to be that farmers here produced no surplus, so there was no need for a farmers’ market, and therefore the tripartite buildings were not a market. It is hard to believe that everyone in the city was self-sufficient. Fritz himself mentions the region’s surplus economy two chapters later. If there was surplus, there probably was a market. Where the market was held and how the building could be identified is a whole other matter. Does Fritz have some other reason for saying the buildings weren’t a market? We don’t know.

Fritz inaccurately describes the water systems of Gezer and Tel Beersheba. The system at Tel Beersheba was not intended to reach groundwater, as he claims, and the one at Gezer was not built for the collection of rainwater. Also in error is his claim, when discussing Iron Age II, that “only at the royal court and among large landowners who possessed the appropriate wealth was it normal for money to change hands; when there was a shortage of minted coins, chopped-up silver pieces were weighed and used.” But at this time coins were not yet in use.

Lastly, the book has some technical problems. Sites, such as Tell Mubarak and Tell Qemun, are mentioned without giving any hint of their location. There are inconsistencies in name spellings: Far’a versus Far’ah, Tel Mubarak versus Tell Mubarak, Bel-El versus Beth-El versus Bet-El. The identification of Tell Sheva as Biblical Beersheba is briefly questioned and not accepted, while that of Tell el-Fûl as Saul’s Gibeah is accepted without argument. Furthermore, the use of Arabic place-names leaves the impression that identifying sites this way is more accurate than using the modern Hebrew names (which could help to locate the sites on a modern map). Whether the book is for the specialist or the layperson, standard name spelling should have been employed—Tell el-Kheleifeh, not Tell el-Helefeh; Shephelah, not Shefela; Jezreel, not Jesreel; Nineveh instead of Niniveh or Ninive; and Hezekiah, not Hiskia.

The City in Ancient Israel needed better writing, translating, editing and proofreading.

The Conquest of Assyria: Excavations in an Antique Land