In Our Time - Archaeology and Imperialism

Episode Date: April 14, 2005

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the link between archaeology and imperialism. In 1842 a young English adventurer called Austen Henry Layard set out to excavate what he hoped were the remains of the biblical city of Nineveh in Mesopotamia. On arrival he discovered that the local French consul, Paul Emile Botta, was already hard at work. Across the Middle East and in Egypt, archaeologists, antiquarians and adventurers were exploring cities older than the Bible and shipping spectacular monuments down the Nile and the Tigris to burgeoning European museums.What was it about the ancient cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia that so gripped the 19th century imagination? How did nationalism and imperialism affect the search for the ancient past and how did archaeology evolve from its adventuresome, even reckless, origins into the science of artefacts we know today?With Tim Champion, Professor of Archaeology, University of Southampton; Richard Parkinson, Assistant Keeper in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum; Eleanor Robson, Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in 1842, a young English adventurer called Austin Henry Layard set out to excavate what he hoped with the remains of the biblical city of Nineveh in Mesopotamia. On arrival, he discovered that the local French consul Paul Emile Botte was already hard at work.

Across the Middle East and Egypt, archaeologists, antiquarians and adventures were exploring cities older than the Bible and shipping spectacular monuments down the Nile and the Tigris to burgeoning European museums. What was it about the ancient cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia that so gripped the 19th century imagination? How did nationalism and imperialism affect the search for the ancient past? And how did archaeology evolve from its adventuresome,

even reckless origins into the signs of artifacts we know today? With me to discuss archaeology and demeanorses. imperialism are Eleanor Robson, lecturer in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University and a fellow of all souls college Oxford, Richard Parkinson, assistant keeper in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan in the British Museum, and Tim Champion, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton.

Tim Champion, although the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 is a critical moment in the history of Egypt holiday, Europe's fascination with Egypt goes back much further. We know it goes back to the Greeks, we know the Romans had obelisks everywhere, we know the medievalists were interested in it, But for our purposes, could we say even earlier start in the 18th century? How did they begin to generate this passion for, became a passion for the East?

Yes, indeed it was. I think it was a period in which knowledge of Egypt and attitudes towards Egypt changed a lot. At the end of the 17th century, knowledge was still very much based on the biblical tradition and the Greek writers such as Herodotus. But visitors from Western Europe were beginning to go to Egypt in larger numbers and beginning to publish accounts of the antiquities. And so the debate which had started in the end of the 17th century dealing with how to accommodate Egypt in biblical account of civilization and chronology

moved on to a discussion of the actual antiquities of Egypt for its own sake. So by the end of the 18th century, there were Egyptian antiquities beginning to be shown in museums, in Britain and elsewhere. and there was a completely different focus on Egypt for its own sake. The West crashed spectacularly into Egypt with Napoleon and his 30,000 troops and his hundreds, even thousands of scholars who went there. Why did he go there?

Can you tell us why he went there and then what he discovered? Yes. In retrospect, it's a spectacular disaster, but I think there were a lot of very good reasons. One, probably the strategic reason, to interrupt British communications with its growing interest in India. So there's a geopolitical reason. But there are a lot of other sort of cultural political reasons. There was the idea of the Ottoman Empire in decline

and France saving people from slavery under the empire. There was also the idea of Napoleon as Alexander, recreating a new empire in succession to the Greeks and the Romans. And frankly, I think there was also the idea of collecting objects for museums, just as Napoleon had done in Italy in 1796 when he sort of looting antiquities on a scale, very much like the Nazis. Yes, and Napoleon had the idea

that he was a leader of the most advanced country in the world, and they were going back to the greatest of what was thought of then, it might be the most mysterious, unexplored country of antiquity, and as it were claiming it. That's right, I think there's an idea of France as the legitimate successor of Rome, which was the successor of ancient Greece, which was an successor of ancient Egypt,

and therefore the things belong to them by rights of war, but also as a symbol of their cultural dominance in succession. And they discovered what became one of the keys was the Rosetta Stone. Richard, can I turn to you about how they found the Rosetta Stone and then how it went into British Hans? We'll talk about significance in a moment, but how they found it and how it came from, went from French to British Hand. It was very much in the heat of war. The stone in medieval times had been weused as a building block in a fortress to protect the town of Rashid. And this was occupied by the French, as the

English troops were advancing across the Mediterranean, the fortifications were being strengthened. As they dug down to rebuild the walls, they discovered this strange block of granite lying underneath the earlier walls. As soon as it came out of the ground, they could see it had three areas of text. The top were Egyptian hieroglyphs. the bottom was Greek. And because every scholar, gentleman, could read Greek at that point. They could understand that part of the text. And they knew, from translating it,

they knew what initial view of the stone had made them suspect was that the hieroglyphs said the same thing as the Greek. And nobody had been able to read hieroglyphs for a millennia. They were one of the great mysteries of ancient Egypt. They contained supposedly all its philosophic truths. So it was instantly a very important item. It was almost more than that, wasn't it, if I may. I mean, hieroglyphs had come to represent almost divine secrets,

areas of mysticism. The secret of all knowledge would be illuminated if you could crack the hieroglyphs. It's the primal font of all European wisdom in some sense. No one can deal with them. No one can understand them. And suddenly this key comes out of the ground. So the French have it and the British win the Battle of the Narlane and Nelson and force the French to hand over a great number

of their big artefacts and let them take home a few collectibles, sort of thing. This is where it gets rather messy, and the French accounts are slightly different from the English accounts.

Anyway, we got the Reserdistone. That's, for the purpose of this programme, the Treaty of Alexandria. You can be messy, but not for long. Yeah, there was, the French general wanted to keep it, so he claimed it as his personal property, and the English

write very scornfully how they discovered it, hidden beneath his dirty laundry with his embroidered saddles, and they eventually prize it out legally with the full approval of the Ottomans. It's part of the Treaty of Alexandria with the other antiquities collected by the French scholars.

The French scholars negotiate so that they can keep the scholarly notes of the natural history specimens and these, of course, become the great description de jipht, which sparks a whole tide of Egyptamania. So back to what's on the Reserta Zone, briefly, before we move on here, there are these three languages, and again, as a Franco, what figures here has done so often, whether in Europe or in the Middle East or in America,

Franco-British, many-Franco-English rivalry. There's some work done by a man called Thomas Young, a brilliant young linguist and scientists from this country, who discovered some sort of alphabet. But the key to it, it was completion, was by a Frenchman, Jean-Francois Champonial. Yes, Thomas Young identifies some alphabetic signs, sound signs that write the names of the kings on the Rosetta Stone.

What Champolian does is to realize the same principle underlies the whole of Egyptian writing. Young thinks sound signs are simply used for foreign names and that most of hieroglyphs are really symbolic pictures, the old classical idea of them as great mystic truths. Champolian sees them as a mixed system for recording the sounds of the Egyptian language. Because he knows Coptic, the descendant of Egyptian, once he gets Young's alphabet, signs of his own, he makes a breakthrough and suddenly, almost overnight,

can start to read texts, which nobody has been able to read for thousands of years. It's quite a stunning intellectual breakthrough. Young makes a huge contribution, but Champolian remains the sole decipherer. The result, though, Eleanor Robson, is wonderful for understanding what was happening in Egypt, but for many people a great disappointment because it did not contain divine knowledge. It didn't contain all the secrets of the universe

that was hoped for. It was a fairly straightforward description. That's right. I mean, the text of the Rosetta Steyran is in fact very mundane. It's a document declaring honours on the Ptolemy the 5th from the temples of Egypt. It's a very routine document with no hidden wisdom. It's just a legal document.

But it does open up. the possibility of reading all sorts of other papyri and inscriptions on tombs and pyramids, etc. And so a much fuller picture of Egyptian thinking in life begins to develop from the Rosetta Stone, even though this stone itself is a disappointment in its context. We've talked about, I mentioned once or twice archaeology, it seems rather a dignified word to describe what was going on. It was a lot of looting and grave robbing, wasn't really. It was basically that it was a collection of objects for Western music, for private collections.

But it's at a time when nobody had really conceptualised archaeology as the study of people and places. It was simply for them the recovery of objects, not only as symbols of the ancient past, but as Tim has said as symbols of modern dominance over the ancient past and modern Western right to claim descent from the ancient past as well, I think. So when they were shipped back, after Nelson's victory at the Battle of the Nile,

how were they received in this country, these objects? Richard? I think in very nationalistic terms, they were put on display and they were advertised as the items captured from the French. And the Rosetta Stone added another language to its scripts, the English labels painted on the side, saying given by George III and captured by the British Army in Egypt in 1801.

And they are really seen as great symbols of, national triumph. And it's at a point where England in some ways is torn by war and at quite a low air, they do give a symbol that really Britain is going to come out on top. Yeah, we're in the middle of that long war with France, as everybody would know

sort of it. How did the British Museum cope with them? The initial problem was they were far too heavy for the floors. They had to be stored in the courtyard outside and they basically inspired the beginning of the current buildings of the museum. Old Montague House

simply couldn't cope. And so the townly galleries were built, and these gradually became the great smirk edifice that we still have today. It's the sheer size, the sheer physicality of the objects, really, that triggers a great expansion in the scope of the museum. But what about the town? What about the London public? Did they flock to it? Was it a carnival? They absolutely flocked. As well as the size, it's the sheer fact they are so old. Of course, nobody at this time knows exactly how old, but they come trailing these reports of huge antiquity. They have biblical resonance. They're strange, they're exotic. They really pull people in to the museum in a way, I think,

that only the mummies that were already in the collection had done before. And Anna Robson, can we turn to the cuneiform equivalent of the Rosetta stone, which is the Bissitun inscription in modern-day Iran? It's inscribed in three languages on the side of a cliff on a mountain pass, and it was cracked by Henry Rawlinson, a British diplomat. What is the significance of that inscription? and what did Rawlinson do to crack it? Well, that opened up the whole world of ancient Assyria and Babylonia.

Like the Rosetta Stone, but much more removable, because it's a huge monumental carving on a rock face. It's unlike the Rosetta Stone, it's two scripts but three languages. The first to be deciphered, that Rawlinson managed just by 10 years of climbing up this rock face with a small boy and very, very powerful. painstakingly copying the inscriptions, that the Persian inscription was the first to be deciphered, partly because as a good classical scholar, like all, gentlemen, he knew his Herodotus and Xenophon.

And some work had already been done on the very simple inscriptions at the Persian capital of Persepolis. So he could read the name of the king, Darius, and he knew the history of Darius from the Greek sources. He also knew some modern Persian and some Middle Persian as well. And so luckily for him too that Persian script was basically alphabetic. So he was able, much as astonishment, to read in this, a very detailed account of Darius' first year of his rule in the early 6th century BC in which he overcame 12 different rebels. And then again working on the same principles as Champ Polyon had done,

assuming that the text in or Persian paralleled the other texts, he was eventually able to decipher the Babylonian version of the text. Now that was a lot more complicated because Babylonian cuneiform, wedge-shaped writing, has about 600 different characters in. It's a mixture like Egyptian of phonetic syllables, and what we call logograms are signs representing whole words and also signs that tell you what sort of word is coming next. And even when words are repeated in the,

text they're not spelled consistently. So it was a huge problem. But by about 1846, he had to his own and other satisfaction, and with a lot of help from other people, managed to decipher Babylonian uniform. Tim Champion, it seems to be one massive revelation after another at this period because we have a rather attractively random young British adventurer who didn't want to take the job in the Faris, so he lingered around in the Middle East. And he made an extraordinary discovery at Nineveh. We're talking about Austin Lear. Can you explain what he found? This is about the middle of the 19th century. Yes, as you say, he'd originally set off to become a lawyer in Ceylon, but stopped in what's now Iraq, and was obviously

fascinated by the sites there. And there's a local tradition, and previous exploration, begun to do some of the mapping in the 1820s. So there's a tradition that the site of Nineveh, well known from the biblical tradition where it's described with such hatred in the Old Testament was there on the opposite bank of the Tigris by the modern city of Mosul. And there are the mounds there identified. And both Bota and Léard were hoping to find Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, which is the thing that they knew, but the only thing they knew physically about the empire. But Botto, they started digging on the site.

Bata gave up almost immediately and moved to another site because the returns were so poor. Léard started digging on another site further south as well. both really hoped and thought they were digging the real Nineveh. But what both of them were finding, whether Nineveh itself or not, were spectacular palatial architecture of a sort which had never ever been seen before. Unlike Egypt, there were virtually no upstanding monuments of this period. So it's not as though there were earlier records of standing ones. You actually had to dig and see.

And so for the first time, the architecture of the Assyrian palaces, and in particular their sculptures and the decorated wall reliefs, these huge animal gate sculptures, were revealed, something that the world had never ever seen before, quite astonishing, astonishingly different from anything. Can we come here to the library?

With you, Alan, about the library, what he found, and why it was so significant? It's a collection of several thousand clay tablets, baked in antiquity, collected by the Assyrian kings in the 7th century BC, often looted from other places, particularly in Babylon in the south of Iraq. And it together gives an incredibly detailed picture not only of the day-to-day running of the palaces,

but also of the intellectual culture at the time. So there's a lot of literature, myths, instructions on how to perform various sorts of divination. There's astronomy and astrology, a little bit of mathematics. There's a whole world. and of the Assyrian way of thinking in those tablets. They're also incredibly, luckily, very well preserved and very easy to read. A lot of cuneiform writing is much more obscurely written,

but the tablets from Ninevei are very clearly, almost as if they're written, almost as if they're printed, which made it very easy for the first decipherers. So this was recognised as very significant, and again shipped back in smart order. Yes. back into the British Museum it came. I mean the biggest collection imaginable, isn't?

It's a huge collection of tablets and is still being sort of worked on, studied and published. It's an immensely valuable resource. The thing that caught the public imagination initially were the great sculptures, the bulls that come back in 1847, and the trustees were slightly suspicious that they weren't proper Greek art. The London Illustrated News made a big feature of them being shipped back

and people flocked in and absolutely overwhelmed the curators by demand to see them. And you get the same attitudes dealing with texts from the ancient Near East. Everybody comes expecting the ancestors of classical wisdom, the ancestors of the biblical texts, real proper civilization, European civilization. And they have great difficulty understanding the style of the texts. They come across as exotic and primitive. With Egyptian texts, you've got poetry,

as fine as sophisticated as Shakespeare, and people are looking at it and thinking, well, these are popular stories. And the dreadful judgments about the educated Egyptian of the pharaonic period was as sophisticated as a modern English schoolboy of 15, or possibly a local labour a century ago. And this is the attitude,

because it's so different, because it's so strange, I think people have to try really hard to see these texts in their own light, in their own terms. I think this is absolutely right. There's the idea that not only, as Richard's saying, they couldn't be as successful or as cultured as us, but also I think there's still an idea of the Orient as different and inferior, which we get from Greek literature reinvented over and over again,

and I think, especially towards the end of the 19th century, there's a sort of racial superiority. Yeah, I think also, too, that it was still very much, firmly attached to the Ottoman Empire, whereas the French and British wars had basically broken Egypt away from it, so it had become, if you like, sort of moved closer to Europe in a way, just as Greece, the interest in Greece had been very much associated with the Greek wars of independence. But the area around Mosul was very much the heartland of the Ottoman Empire. Also, people were still very heavily influenced by biblical images, so the idea of Nineveh and Babylon

and sinful cities. And so what happened was that Assyria and Babylonia were constructed as something that we can identify as the opposite of what we are now. Right. So they're the antithesis of our aspirations as empire, whereas Egypt and Greece, I think, were role models. For Nineveh and Babylon, they were the anti-roll models, if you like. They were the corruption and the decadence of Empire-Gorn role. Very much so, yes, if you think of. about Delacroix's picture of the death of Sardinapolis,

where he is... Sardinapolis is a Greek construction of a typical Assyrian king. He's effeminate, he's highly sexualized, he's lazy, and he's shown sort of flopping around on his deathbed with a lot of maidens in Syria's states of undress. It's a way of being very prurient and gulping at naked flesh in the name of history. It's interesting that the Bible is still playing such

a powerful part in this that because it's Babylon and Nineveh, things which come out of Babylon and Nineveh are sinful and bad and therefore have to be degraded in art and in appreciation. And the Exodus. I think we forget how deeply embedded in our British life the Bible was, even

until a couple of generations ago. And everybody knew their Bible by heart practically. I mean, the Old Testament was more real to them than a lot of 19th century fiction. And it took a very long time for archaeology to establish yourself as a discipline which could present an alternative vision of chronology and cultural achievement and that's probably not until well into the 20th century that you actually get to that

level of confidence and detail in the archaeological interpretations. The historical record didn't say what people were expecting it to say or wanting it to say and so there was I think great resistance to this sort of scientific development. So before we move on finally to talk about the development of archaeology itself we are talking about these one of the aspects of bringing back this stuff and looking at this is to find ways to express ideas of nation and ideas of imperialism. Yes, I think that's right. I think you could obviously construct myths of national identity or national origin

in a wide variety of ways, but many of which appeal to the past. And one of these is by claiming actual descent. So one of the great strands in the Greek independence movement in the early 19th century was that they were the legitimate descendants of the classical Greeks of the 5th century. But another one is sort of to regard yourself as the legitimate successor. So both France and Britain

have at various times posed as the successor of the Roman Empire. Can I... And as to you, I was just like to ask you, can we just concentrate for a few months on Flindus Petrie and how he, among others, but how he was very instrumental in changing the way in which archaeology in those areas was practiced?

Well, he's a fascinating. fascinating character because he doesn't belong to the class of gentlemen, scholars or diplomats. He's really a self-taught surveyor whose only university education was a little bit of mathematics as an extension course. But again, it started off with a fascination for Stonehenge and then moving on to really try to debunk some of the more fantastical myths about the pyramids by actually going out and measuring them and making some sense of them. And so what's interesting about Petri from the 1860s and 70s onwards is that he applies, he mathematicises archaeology in a way. He records, he measures, he makes plans. He's one of the first people to systematically acknowledge the fact

that the evidence from the past accrues in layers in strata, like geology, and that if you're excavating a site, particularly in the Middle East, you can cut through it like a layer cake, if you like, and you can see the different periods of history one on top of another, but also that things like pottery styles in particular. Pottery is very important because once it's baked, it's virtually indestructible. But fashions in pottery change just as they do today, that people get bored of their table wear and replace it,

and different styles come in. And that by carefully recording different fashions in pottery, so it may be the materials they're made of, or the shapes, or the colors or the ways in which they're decorated, you have a very good index of chronology. And so even when you have a site with very disruptive and stratigraphy, you can look at the pottery styles and compare them with pottery series from well-stratified sites and be able to date them like that.

So it becomes a very important dating tool. And so you're no longer just rescuing big, glorious trophies to put in museums, but you're starting to understand the texture of ancient life. And you're also looking and recording absolutely everything for its significance. Yes, that's true. Yeah, so that tiny little things like jug handles become important. Its settlement sites as well as the great palaces, the great temples. And that's, I think, it's a huge shift in attitude and a huge progression. And what, excuse me, what effect does this have on the British Museum, Richard,

on the way it displacements and the way it begins to treat a regard, is better word, these ancient civilisations? There'd always been a fascination with the objects of daily life, which had come out in the early 19th century, with Flindus Petrie, we begin to get an ability to date precisely and to show settlement sites, not just objects that were placed in tombs,

but objects of daily life that have come from living areas of the valley, not just from the great pyramid complex of the great tombs. And this whole typology approach becomes much more scientific. We're not so much concerned with great works of art in splendid isolation. It's the beginning, a very slow process of putting things back in context.

We begin to have a recorded context, a recorded provenance, and that allows people to reimagine the past much more accurately, much more sympathetically in many ways. I'm still at Petrie Museum in this... In University College London. It's a fabulous collection. Tim, Jeremy, can I ask you, did the great looters, and plundering, let's say, just from Napoleon onwards.

And the Germans came and the Americans muscled in and so on and so forth. They all wanted to be there and take stuff back. Was it, in the long, would you say it was rather damaging to the advance of knowledge? I think this is one of the questions we argue about all the time. On one hand, you can look at it as looting. and a lot of the objects were extracted with no record of what we would now call their context. On the other hand, the provision of those objects was what fuelled the early studies of Egyptology. Without that material, the basis of scholarship wouldn't have been laid.

With hindsight, one would say we wish they'd done it differently. But yes, undoubtedly a lot of damage was done. A lot of damage was done by other reasons. in early 19th century in Egypt, there was a great modernisation in industrialising process. A lot of monuments were being destroyed, not by archaeologists, but by the process of modernisation. Monuments being used to provide limestone for building and industrial purposes. But it was in the course of that, that for instance,

large numbers of burials became available for study. So just like now, archaeology has to deal with development. You have to deal with the fact that you can only study the material as it's being destroyed. It's easy to see them operating in an imperial context, but we have also to respect the ideals they had. They were seeking what was exotic. They were seeking legitimation for themselves,

but they were also seeking the history of a common humanity. And that's something I think we still relate to, we are the natural heirs, and it's a very lofty ideal, compromised by their context, but we will be compromised by ours in a hundred years time too. We shouldn't judge them too hardly. Thank you all very much. Thank you, Eleanor Robson, Tim Champion and Richard Parkinson.

And I have to have a few seconds for now to the winner of our website quiz. It is Sarah Thomas from Cambridge, an unstinting as ever, a paperback version of Descartes' Discourse on Method and his meditations is on the way to Cambridge. Paperback is what we do here. Next week of the Aeneer. Thank you very much. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, Science and Philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.com.

forward slash Radio 4.