Oriental Societies and Societal Self-Assertion: Associations, Funds and Societies for the Archaeological Exploration of the ‘Ancient Near East’

Abstract

With the rapidly increasing economic importance of the bourgeoisie beginning ca 1870, Europe and America witnessed the creation of private associations, funds, and societies to finance archaeological expeditions in the ‘Lands of the Bible’, complementing state-run institutions such as universities, museums, and academies of sciences and the humanities.

From the very first, research into the history of the ancient Near East served to reflect ‘Western’ self-perception and provided the foundation for the projection of Weltanschauung. Against the background of increasing professionalization of archaeological disciplines, learned societies also enabled laypersons, amateurs, and dilettantes to participate in scholarly debate and to promulgate certain conceptual frames of what was perceived as the ‘Ancient Orient’.

Behind the movement lay different motivations but also respective ‘national’ cultures in academia. In fact, while economic and strategic interests during this ‘Age of Empire’ played a pivotal role, the historian should not be blind to other factors. Given the central importance of the ancient Near East as the ‘cradle’ of no less than three world religions, as well as the earliest states, even empires, in world history, it became a matter of prestige for European and other ‘Western’ nations to fill their museums with objects from that distant past era – objects which were related to the origins of their ‘own’ culture, as they perceived it.

Furthermore, the exotic appeal of ‘the Orient’ must not be forgotten, for it served as means of self-affirmation in contrast to the Oriental ‘other’, legitimizing the colonial exploitation and semantics of a ‘white man’s burden’ or a civilizing ‘mission’, but also defining a cultural responsibility. After the many political upheavals resulting from World War I, new forms of associations evolved to compensate for the loss of state-funding but also to remedy the loss of previously firmly established world views.

A systematic and transnational study of these associations remains a desideratum. This volume, with contributions by historians and archaeologists, along with representatives of other disciplines from different countries, provides the basis for a truly interdisciplinary discourse, focusing on Oriental Societies as a means of societal self-assertion.