Ernst Herzfeld And The Development Of Near Eastern Studies, 1900-1950

ERNST HERZFELD AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES, 1900-1950 ERNST HERZFELD AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEAR EASTE...

Author: Ann Clyburn Gunter | Stefan R. Hauser

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ERNST HERZFELD AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES, 1900-1950

ERNST HERZFELD AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES, 1900-1950 edited by

ANN C. GUNTER and STEFAN R. HAUSER

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2005

Cover illustration: Ernst Herzfeld photographed in front of Persepolis reliefs by James Henry Breasted, Jr., February 23, 1933. By courtesy of the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ernst Herzfeld and the Development of Near Eastern Studies, 1900-1950 / edited by Ann C. Gunter and Stefan R. Hauser. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 90-04-14153-7 1. Herzfeld, Ernst, 1879-1948—Congresses. 2. Middle East—Study and teaching—Congresses. I. Gunter, Ann Clyburn, 1951- II. Hauser, Stefan R. DS61.7.H47E76 2004 956’.0072’02—dc22 2004058136

ISBN 90 04 14153 7 © Copyright 2005 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgements .............................................. Ernst Emil Herzfeld—Curriculum Vitae ................................ Note to the Reader ..................................................................

ix xiii xvii

Part I: Introduction Ernst Herzfeld and Near Eastern Studies, 1900–1950 ........ Ann C. Gunter and Stefan R. Hauser Ernst Herzfeld and Friedrich Sarre ........................................ Jens Kröger

3 45

Part II: Herzfeld and Key Archaeological Sites Ernst Herzfeld and Pasargadae .............................................. David Stronach Herzfeld in Persepolis .............................................................. Elspeth R. M. Dusinberre Ernst Herzfeld, Kuh-e Khwaja, and the Study of Parthian Art .............................................................................. Trudy S. Kawami Prismatic Prehistory: Ernst Herzfeld on Early Iran .............. Margaret Cool Root

103 137

181 215

Part III: Herzfeld and the Persian Empires Milestones in the Development of Achaemenid Historiography in the Era of Ernst Herzfeld .................................................. Pierre Briant Ernst Herzfeld and Sasanian Studies ...................................... Josef Wiesehöfer Ernst Herzfeld and Iranian Studies .......................................... Prods Oktor Skjaervø

263 281 295

vi

contents

Ernst Herzfeld and the Study of Graﬃti at Persepolis .......... Shahrokh Razmjou

315

Part IV: Byzantine and Islamic Art History Ernst Herzfeld und Samuel Guyer in Kilikien: Forschungen zur spätantik-frühbyzantinischen Architektur .......................... Gabriele Mietke Mshatta, Samarra, and al-Hira: Ernst Herzfeld’s Theories Concerning the Development of the Hira-style Revisited ...... Thomas Leisten Ernst Herzfeld, Samarra, and Islamic Archaeology ................ Alastair Northedge The One that Got Away: Ernst Herzfeld and the Islamic Architecture of Iran .................................................................. Robert Hillenbrand

345

371 385

405

Part V: Near Eastern Studies, Cultural Politics, and Archaeological Ethics Ernst Herzfeld and French Approaches to Iranian Archaeology ................................................................................ Rémy Boucharlat Ernst Herzfeld, Politics, and Antiquities Legislation in Iran .... Ali Mousavi Ernst Herzfeld in an Academic Context: The Historical Sciences of Culture at the University of Berlin during the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) ................................................ Rüdiger vom Bruch History, Races, and Orientalism: Eduard Meyer, the Organization of Oriental Research, and Ernst Herzfeld’s Intellectual Heritage .................................................................. Stefan R. Hauser Ernst Herzfeld in Context: Gleanings from His Personnel File and Other Sources ............................................................ Johannes Renger Ernst Herzfeld: Reminiscences and Revelations ...................... Elizabeth S. Ettinghausen

429 445

477

505

561 583

contents Bibliography ................................................................................ List of Contributors .................................................................... Index ..........................................................................................

vii 617 625 629

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume presents papers originally delivered at the symposium “Ernst Herzfeld and the Development of Near Eastern Studies, 1900– 1950,” held from 3–5 May 2001 at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. The idea for the symposium was born in 1998, when we began an unexpectedly extended discussion of mutual interests in the history of research in general and the enigmatic personality of Ernst Herzfeld in particular. The program received its ﬁnal form over the course of intense consultations in Washington, D.C., facilitated by Stefan’s tenure in 1999–2000 as Frese Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. The symposium’s aims were twofold: to reexamine the contributions of this pioneering and controversial ﬁgure in the ﬁeld of Near Eastern studies, and to place them in the broader intellectual, institutional, and political frameworks of his era. The results, we hoped, would contribute new information and perspectives on the development of Near Eastern studies and their various sub-disciplines, all of which were, not least, shaped by Herzfeld. All but one of the papers in this volume were originally delivered at the symposium. We regret that one paper has not been included here. Peter Machinist, professor of Bible and Near Eastern studies at Harvard University, who spoke on “German Immigrants and the Study of the Ancient Near East,” will publish his research elsewhere as part of a broader study. Elizabeth R. Ettinghausen, who attended the symposium and during the ﬁnal discussions presented a moving account of Herzfeld’s last years, kindly agreed to contribute a paper drawing on her personal acquaintance with Herzfeld as well as new research into archival sources. Both the symposium and its publication owe much to the eﬀorts, support, and encouragement of a variety of individuals and institutions. We are pleased to acknowledge that the symposium was organized in association with, and with ﬁnancial support from, the Iran Heritage Foundation. It was made possible by a generous grant from Marietta Lutze Sackler, M.D., who also supported the costs of the

x

preface and acknowledgements

publication. In addition, we are most grateful to the Fritz ThyssenStiftung, Cologne, whose critical support made possible the participation of the German speakers. A grant from the Ebrahimi Family Foundation enabled Ali Mousavi to carry out research in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers in Washington, D.C., in January 2001. In 1946, Ernst Herzfeld gave the bulk of his papers to the Freer Gallery of Art, and the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives remains the chief repository of Herzfeld’s scholarly estate. Thus there could have hardly been a location more appropriate and better suited for the symposium than the Freer Gallery of Art’s Meyer Auditorium. We gratefully acknowledge the encouragement of Milo C. Beach, then director of the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, and Thomas W. Lentz, then director of the International Art Museums Division, Smithsonian Institution, who made available the support of many staﬀ members for the myriad essential tasks that contributed so substantially to the symposium’s success. We owe special thanks to Dr. Hans Seidt, then head of the cultural aﬀairs department of the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, Washington, D.C., for the enthusiasm and support he showed for the project from its inception, and to the embassy, which hosted a garden reception for the speakers. During preparations for the symposium and the publication, the co-organizers as well as many speakers beneﬁted greatly from the eﬀorts of Colleen Hennessey, then archivist in the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives. We are all deeply indebted to her for her keen interest, generosity, and invaluable assistance. Indeed, more than half of the contributions published here draw speciﬁcally on the Ernst Herzfeld Papers. We hope that the symposium proceedings will encourage further research on the development of Near Eastern studies that draws on these and other rich resources housed in the museum’s archives. The publication of the proceedings owes much to Julian Raby, director of the Freer and Sackler galleries, and James T. Ulak, deputy director, who provided wholehearted support for Ann Gunter’s eﬀorts as well as for a variety of staﬀ members to devote both time and expertise to the project. Colleen Hennessey, David Hogge, and Linda Raditz provided essential help with requests for material in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers. John Tsantes and Michael Bryant, photography department, furnished their usual superb photographs as well as expert advice on the illustrations. Mariah Keller, Jennifer Alt, DeeDee

preface and acknowledgements

xi

Clendenning, and Angela Jerardi contributed editorial and organizational skills critical to bringing the publication to fruition. Trudy Kamperveen and Olaf Köndgen of E. J. Brill, Leiden, both expressed enthusiasm for this publication from the beginning, and have patiently continued to furnish encouragement and support. In addition, Ann owes special thanks to Julian Raby for reaﬃrming the privileged role of symposia and scholarly publications among the multiple intellectual functions of the Freer and Sackler galleries. She would also like to thank John A. Larson, museum archivist, Oriental Institute, Chicago, for assistance during her research there, and the curatorial and registrarial staﬀ of the Field Museum, Chicago, in particular Ben Bronson, Stephen E. Nash and William J. Pestle, for allowing access to the objects and records of material acquired from Herzfeld. Stefan would like to thank the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and its former dean, Henry A. Millon, for the amiable working atmosphere during the preparation of the conference program. Special thanks go to his wife, Christine, and his son, Robert, who for years of intense occupation with Herzfeld had to endure minute details of the life and thoughts of an “additional family member” they had never met. Like every symposium organizer, we were occasionally apprehensive about the success of the enterprise. In fact, the response to the program announcement was overwhelming. Although we knew the time was ripe for a symposium treating the history of research in the Near East, we were nonetheless surprised and gratiﬁed by the enormous interest in Herzfeld from individuals representing such a wide array of ﬁelds. The symposium was attended by up to two hundred participants, in addition to the speakers. We would very much like to thank them for their stimulating interest. Finally, but hardly least, we owe deepest appreciation to our speakers and authors, whose eﬀorts, learning, and innovative scholarship made the symposium both successful and enjoyable. They suﬀered cheerfully through the long process of preparing the papers and several rounds of editing for publication, and we hope that they share our delight in the exciting and fruitful exchange of information and ideas this volume represents. Ann C. Gunter Stefan R. Hauser

ERNST EMIL HERZFELD CURRICULUM VITAE

This vita, edited and reproduced here without its accompanying list of publications, was prepared by Herzfeld in 1935 for the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars, New York. Minor additions by the editors appear in brackets. Born 23 July 1879 (Celle, Hanover, Germany) [Son of Joseph (1836–1916), medical major in the Prussian army, and Margarethe Herzfeld (1853–1922), née Rosenthal] Education 1888–92 1893–97

Domgymnasium Verden, Hanover Joachimsthalsches Gymnasium, Berlin

University education University of Munich University of Berlin PhD 1907 magna cum laude Technische Hochschule, Degree [in structural engineering] 1903 Charlottenburg Academic career 1908–10 February 1909– 28 July 1909–

1 April 1917–

6 July 1920– End of 1922– 1927–

Volunteer assistant, Berlin Museums Predicate professor Lecturer (Privatdozent) for historical geography [Habilitation, venia legendi for historical geography and art history of the Orient] Associate professor (extraordinarius) for Orientalische Hilfswissenschaften, director of the seminar in historical geography, University of Berlin Full professor (ordinarius) and director of the seminar for Oriental countries and antiquities Mission to Persia, authorized by minister of public instruction Attached to German Legation, Tehran

xiv 1927–33 [1936–44

ernst emil herzfeld —curriculum vitae Member, Expert Commission of the State Museums, Berlin Member of the School of Humanistic Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey]

Excavations and ﬁeld expeditions September 1903–September 1905 Member of Assur excavations under direction of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft September 1905–January 1906 Expedition from Mosul and Baghdad through Luristan, Arabistan, and Fars Spring 1907 Expedition in Cilicia and excavations at Korykos and Meriamlik, with Dr. Samuel Guyer September 1907–May 1908 Expedition from Constantinople to Basra, with Professor Friedrich Sarre June–July 1908 Survey of Islamic monuments and inscriptions at Aleppo, Hama, and Hims (in Syria) with Dr. M. Sobernheim October 1910–February 1912 and October 1912–July 1913 Excavations of Samarra in Iraq, undertaken by KaiserWilhelm-Gesellschaft, with Professor Sarre and Dr. Guyer June 1911 and July–August 1913 Excavations in Kurdistan, Paikuli March–May 1914 Continuation of Syrian surveys at Aleppo and Damascus 1916 (during war) Surveys at Damascus 1916–17 Explorations in Persia and Kurdistan (Mosul, Sulamaniye, and Kirmanshah) February 1923–End of 1925 Explorations in Iran and Afghanistan, Baluchistan, with [funding provided by] James Loeb and Hugo Stinnes October–November 1926 Journey with H. M. the shah of Iran in Luristan April–June 1928 Excavations at Pasargadae, under [the auspices of the Notgemeinschaft der deutschen Wissenschaft, predecessor of the] Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft February–June 1929 Excavations at Kuh-i Khwaja, Sistan, with Joseph Upton [under the auspices of the Notgemeinschaft der deutschen Wissenschaft]

ernst emil herzfeld —curriculum vitae

xv

September 1930 Supplementary excavations at Samarra in Iraq April 1931–December 1934 Excavations at Persepolis, undertaken by the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago [Herzfeld died in Basel, Switzerland, on 21 January 1948]

NOTE TO THE READER

We oﬀer the acknowledgment of inconsistency in transliteration that appears in so many works devoted to the Near and Middle East, especially those whose multiple authorship and broad chronological scope resist the easy application of ﬁrm rules. Authors have been given discretion in the transliteration of Persian names, with editorial intervention only to encourage consistency within each contribution. Thus, there are variations among articles between the use of, for example, Naqsh-i Rustam and Naqsh-e Rostam. In general, “Persia” is used for the period preceding the country’s renaming early in 1934, but complete consistency in this respect has not been achieved; Iran and Persia may be used without rigid chronological parameters. Quotations that employ the term Persia have been left unaltered. References to frequently cited works by Ernst Herzfeld are given in abbreviated form. A list of these short titles is provided in the bibliography. Unless otherwise speciﬁed, all references to archival sources are to the Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

PART I

INTRODUCTION

ERNST HERZFELD AND NEAR EASTERN STUDIES, 1900–1950 Ann C. Gunter and Stefan R. Hauser

The name of Ernst Herzfeld is forever linked with key monuments of Near Eastern art and architecture—Mshatta, Samarra, Persepolis— and with pioneering contributions to ancient Iranian epigraphy, history, and philology. By any measure, his scholarly accomplishments encompassed an immense chronological and disciplinary range. Many of his publications were seminal works that often endure as standard references. “A list of his main ﬁelds of interest reads like the disciplines of a school of Oriental studies with an extensive faculty,” observed Richard Ettinghausen.1 Surely Herzfeld’s distinguished career and legacy as much as his controversial posthumous fame would suﬃce to earn him a thoughtful retrospective. But his overall role and far-ranging interests also made Herzfeld and his scholarship the perfect starting point for a more comprehensive reassessment of the development of Near Eastern studies between 1900 and 1950. New eras and ﬁelds of study, including prehistory and Islamic archaeology, joined philology and the archaeological investigation of historic periods. During the half-century of Herzfeld’s active professional life, signiﬁcant institutional expansion and elaboration took place in the allied disciplines of Near Eastern studies, both in Europe and the United States. Finally, a fundamental shift in approaches to the ancient Near East, from historical to cultural, occurred. As witness, participant, and pioneer, Herzfeld played a part in all of these developments. In the articles that follow, he serves as nodal point for the exploration of a dynamic area of studies. These institutional and intellectual developments took place against the background of—and were deeply enmeshed with—dramatic political changes in the host countries of research as well as in Europe. The disruption to research in the Near and Middle East that World

1 Richard Ettinghausen, “In Memoriam: Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948),” Ars Islamica 15–16 (1951): 262.

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ann c. gunter and stefan r. hauser

War I brought about was followed by the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of new states, partly under mandate by Great Britain and France. These developments fundamentally changed the conditions for research. During the 1920s, new laws concerning antiquities and newly created departments and museums for administering those laws further altered these conditions. Again, Herzfeld had a hand in these developments, particularly with respect to the Persian legislation, which was an expression of Persia’s growing political independence from European powers. Germany’s paramount position in Near Eastern studies before the war had been rooted in the political and economic interests of the Kaiserreich, a fascination with the supposed background to the Bible, a uniquely strong tradition in research in antiquity, and a highly developed web of humanities in the academic system. World War I and the economic conditions that ensued greatly diminished the signiﬁcance of the ancient Near East in Germany’s cultural life. The twenty years from the resumption of ﬁeldwork in 1919 to the outbreak of World War II instead saw the rise of American research institutions, a development further enhanced by the many German scholars who emigrated from Nazi Germany after 1933. One of them was Herzfeld, who had been forced to leave Iran and Germany in 1935, and was not to return to either country before his death in 1948. From their common source in Herzfeld’s activities and scholarship, the papers comprising this volume thus address a broad set of issues. The ﬁrst group reexamines his work at speciﬁc sites, and his role in individual areas of research and the development of various academic ﬁelds. The second approaches Herzfeld from a diﬀerent angle, elucidating the political, institutional, and intellectual frameworks that shaped him and that in turn oﬀered both opportunities and limitations. All contributions are in part inspired by—and in turn contribute to—recent works devoted to the histories of individuals and institutions engaged with Near Eastern studies, to which the following pages make frequent reference. With Herzfeld as the shared point of departure, a certain amount of repetition, especially of biographical information, is inevitable. Rather than regulate and homogenize the contents, we have opted to let individual contributors develop their narratives as they see ﬁt. Moreover, we envisage a diverse readership that mirrors the authors’ wide-ranging areas of expertise. This introduction seeks to steer the reader toward the papers’ speciﬁc topics, common themes, and areas of overlap. It also serves to introduce

ernst herzfeld and near eastern studies

5

Ernst Herzfeld both as a unique human being and as a product of his society and era, setting the stage for his entry on the Near Eastern scene and framing his activities within this broader setting.

Ancient Near Eastern Studies, circa 1900 A century ago, when Ernst Herzfeld made his debut in archaeological ﬁeldwork at the site of ancient Assur, the decipherment of cuneiform and investigation of sites had established institutional frameworks for the study of the ancient Near East in both Europe and the United States. Academic study of the ﬁeld, begun in the 1830s chieﬂy as a result of Henry C. Rawlinson’s studies of Darius’s trilingual inscription at Bisitun, laid the foundations for deciphering languages written in cuneiform, especially Akkadian. Jules Oppert, born in Hamburg, became the ﬁrst professor of cuneiform studies at the Collège de France in 1869.2 While the cornerstones of cuneiform studies were laid in Britain and France, by the late nineteenth century Germany had become the center of Assyriology. In 1874, Friedrich Delitzsch received an appointment in cuneiform studies at the University of Leipzig, and in 1899 became professor in Berlin.3 Among Delitzsch’s many students was Herzfeld, who was therefore close to the so-called Babel-Bible controversy of 1902–3. This was ignited by public lectures

2 Svend A. Pallis, The Antiquity of Iraq: A Handbook of Assyriology (Copenhagen: E. Munksgaard, 1956), esp. 94–175, reviews the history of decipherment. See also Mogens Trolle Larsen, The Conquest of Assyria: Excavations in an Antique Land, 1840–1860 (London: Routledge, 1996). On the history of French archaeology in the Near East, see the magisterial study by Nicole Chevalier, La recherche archéologique française au Moyen-Orient de 1842 à 1947 (Paris: Édition Recherches sur les Civilisations, 2002), with extensive bibliography and documentation. Since this study, which had not been available until the ﬁnal revision of this introduction, also treats work by other foreign nations in much more detail than space admits here, we decided not to repeat the full list of excavations but to refer readers to this comprehensive work. For histories of exploration at individual sites and biographies of excavators mentioned in the text, see the relevant entries in Eric M. Meyers, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Richard Stillwell, ed., The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, 2d ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); EncIr ; and EI. 3 Manfred Müller, “Die Keilschriftwissenschaften an der Leipziger Universität bis zur Vertreibung Landsbergers im Jahre 1935,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der KarlMarx-Universität Leipzig, Gesellschafts- und Sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe 28, 1 (1979): 68–71, for Delitzsch’s 1893 professorship at Breslau. Johannes Renger’s contribution summarizes these developments and provides a rich bibliography.

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in which Delitzsch—initially with the approval of Kaiser Wilhelm II—contrasted historical information from the Old Testament with knowledge obtained from cuneiform sources, thereby casting doubt on the Bible’s historical and thus its theological value. As the extensive newspaper coverage demonstrates, the wider public eagerly followed the heated debate that ensued.4 Although the kaiser later sought to distance himself from Delitzsch, “Assyriology put the ﬁnal touches on the liberal Protestant critique of the integrity of the Bible, and especially of the Old Testament. Thus Assyriology played a crucial role in the de-universalizing and demotion of the history of the Hebrews, perhaps the most momentous and ominous shift in the occidental, and especially the German, understanding of the oriental past to occur in recent times.”5 Finally, the debate made Mesopotamian history a topic of general attention, and helped to increase the membership of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society), founded in 1898 by leading bankers, industrialists, and scholars in response to widespread interest in Near Eastern history and the Bible.6 One of those members was Herzfeld, who became involved with Near Eastern studies at the turn of the century when he decided to study Assyriology in Berlin in addition to his primary course of training in architecture. While we do not know precisely what aroused his curiosity about this ﬁeld, it might well have been the excavations at Babylon that began in 1899 under the auspices of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft. As the ﬁrst large-scale German excavations delving into the ancient Near East, they were greeted, supported, and closely followed by the kaiser as well as the general public, and they became the hallmark of Germany’s early dominance in Near Eastern

4 Reinhard G. Lehmann, “Der Babel-Bibel-Streit. Ein kulturpolitisches Wetterleuchten,” in Babylon: Focus mesopotamischer Geschichte, Wiege früher Gelehrsamkeit, Mythos in der Moderne, ed. Johannes Renger, Colloquien der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 2 (Saarbrücken: SDV, 1999), 505–21, with additional references. 5 Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 221. 6 On the founding of the society and its leading lights, see Marchand, Down from Olympus, 195–97, and Stefan R. Hauser, “German Studies in the Ancient Near East in Their Relation to Political and Economic Interests from the Kaiserreich to World War II,” in Germany and the Middle East, 1871–1945, ed. Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, Princeton Papers, Interdisciplinary Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 10/11 (2004), 155–80, both with further references. On founding member James Simon and his philanthropy, see Olaf Matthes, James Simon: Mäzen im Wilhelminischen Zeitalter (Berlin: Bostelmann & Siebenhaar, 2000).

ernst herzfeld and near eastern studies

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archaeology. But from their outset they also served nationalist and imperialist ambitions. It was felt that Germany’s rising political and economic status in the world and in the Ottoman Empire in particular should manifest itself in the German presence abroad as well as in museum collections at home that rivaled those of France and Britain.7 Between 1899 and 1914, therefore, under imperial patronage, the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft initiated more excavations in Assyria and Babylonia than all other foreign missions combined. The investigation of Babylon launched in 1899 under the direction of Robert Koldewey (1855–1925), which continued until 1917, was the ﬁrst of its excavations. Archaeological exploration of Mesopotamia had begun alongside the decipherment of cuneiform, taking a dramatic turn in the 1840s with the exploration of Assyrian palaces near Mosul.8 The Frenchman Paul Emile Botta’s investigations at Khorsabad, and those of Englishman Austen Henry Layard at Nimrud and Nineveh, uncovered miles of carved stone reliefs and thousands of clay tablets inscribed in Akkadian. The excavations generated enormous public interest, especially after some of the reliefs were brought to Paris and London.9 The success of these endeavors soon led to a ﬁerce French-British rivalry and prompted a race between French and British explorers in southern Mesopotamia, or Babylonia, where ancient mounds had likewise yielded clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform. Nevertheless, it was common opinion that Babylonian ruins were of limited merit, as the local mud-brick architecture made it diﬃcult to identify walls, and they yielded no carved stone reliefs like those of Assyria. The French consul Ernest de Sarzec’s excavations, launched in 1877 at Tello in southern Mesopotamia, produced impressive statues of the ruler Gudea and thousands of clay tablets inscribed in Sumerian, thereby helping to challenge this view. Finally, from 1884 to 1886, Marcel and Jane Dieulafoy extended French archaeological interests into Persia

7

See Hauser, “German Studies in the Ancient Near East.” Herzfeld, “Vergangenheit und Zukunft,” 314, ascribed the beginning of the resurrection of Assyria and Babylonia to James Claudius Rich, “venerabile nomen,” and declared Rich’s Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan (1836) “an unequalled master piece of all travel literature.” 9 Chevalier, La recherche archéologique française au Moyen-Orient, 21–60; For a detailed account of the European reception of the Assyrian discoveries, see also Frederick N. Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 8

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and began excavations at Susa, a site known from classical and biblical sources as one of the capitals of the Achaemenid Empire. At this time, European powers pressured the Persian government into granting monopolies on the exploitation of natural resources and trade in all kinds of commodities.10 The successful excavations at Susa helped France obtain a parallel monopoly on archaeological exploration for all of Persia that began in 1895 and lasted until 1927.11 While the French monopoly forestalled exploration by other nations in Persia, by the end of the nineteenth century Americans and Germans joined French and British archaeologists working in Mesopotamia. In 1888, the Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania launched the ﬁrst American excavation in the region at Nippur, a project that ended after four campaigns in 1900. Three years later, at exactly the time Herzfeld ﬁrst traveled to Assur, the second American expedition arrived in Mesopotamia. On Christmas Day 1903, the University of Chicago’s Oriental Exploration Fund began excavations at Bismaya (ancient Adab). With this project, the university began its long and active role in ﬁeldwork in the Near East and Egypt, a role signiﬁcantly expanded when James Henry Breasted (1865–1935) founded the Oriental Institute in 1919. Breasted, the ﬁrst American to receive a doctorate in Egyptology, had been obliged to go to Germany to earn a degree in this new ﬁeld of study. By the end of the nineteenth century, Berlin had already emerged as a major hub for all kinds of Oriental research. In February 1897, the Prussian Academy of Science declared research in Mesopotamia to be “one of the most important tasks of present times” and warmly endorsed Germany’s participation in “resurrecting a world lost in the memory of humankind,” especially since French and British excavations had revolutionized “our knowledge of the genesis of our culture.”12 Only three months later, a formal Kommission zur Erforschung der Euphrat- und Tigrisländer was founded. Probably mindful of the far-reaching British concession of

10 See Rouhollah K. Ramazani, The Foreign Policy of Iran: A Developing Nation in World Aﬀairs 1500–1941 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1966), 66–67, 243. 11 See Francine Tissot, “Délégation archéologiques françaises, i. Délégation Archéologique Française en Iran,” in EncIr 7, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 1996), 238–40; Chevalier, La recherche archéologique française au Moyen-Orient, 116–52, 515–16. 12 Olaf Matthes and Johannes Althoﬀ, “Die ‘Königliche Kommission zur Erforschung der Euphrat- und Tigrisländer,’ ” MDOG 130 (1998): 243.

ernst herzfeld and near eastern studies

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the 1880s and the French monopoly in Persia, the commission at ﬁrst envisaged ﬁfty-year concessions for large parts of Mesopotamia.13 But even without such a treaty, German archaeology in the Ottoman Empire in general became dominant within a few years. In addition to the excavations at Babylon that Koldewey launched in 1899, he also investigated the site of Borsippa. His assistant, Walter Andrae (1875–1956), excavated at Fara (ancient Shurrupak) and Abu Hatab before he was entrusted with the society’s second long-term project, the excavation of Assur, in 1903. When Herzfeld ﬁrst arrived in the Near East as Andrae’s assistant, eight expeditions were at work in the region (ﬁg. 1). Three were German (Babylon, Assur, and Megiddo) and one was German-American (Anau, in Turkestan).14 British archaeologists had resumed investigations at Nineveh (1903–5), French archaeologists continued at Tello (1903–9) and Susa (1897–1908), and a team from Chicago had just arrived at Bismaya (1903–5). Most of this work was still in a pioneering phase, unearthing previously unknown periods and cultures. At this juncture, three major gaps in knowledge can be identiﬁed. First, with the exception of Anau, no excavation had penetrated prehistoric periods. Second, no excavation devoted to an Islamic-period site had taken place within the Near East.15 And third, except for excavations at Susa and repeated descriptions of Bisitun, Persepolis, and the Achaemenid and Sasanian reliefs at nearby Naqsh-i Rustam, Persia was, archaeologically speaking, terra incognita.

13 Matthes and Althoﬀ, “Die ‘Kommission zur Erforschung der Euphrat- und Tigrisländer,’ ” 245; Nicola Crüsemann, Vom Zweistromland zum Kupfergraben: Vorgeschichte und Entstehungsjahre (1899–1918) der Vorderasiatischen Abteilung der Berliner Museen vor fachund kulturpolitischen Hintergründen, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen N.F., Beiheft 42 (Berlin 2001), 124. 14 In an American-German collaboration, Raphael W. Pumpelly and Hubert Schmidt had undertaken work at Anau, Turkestan, in 1904; their expedition remains best known for its pioneering concern with reconstructing environmental history through the collecting of botanical and faunal remains. See T. Cuyler Young, Jr., “Anaw, i. Prehistoric Period,” in EncIr, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 2:3–4, with bibliography. 15 Stephen Vernoit, “The Rise of Islamic Archaeology,” Muqarnas 14 (1997): 3, notes that Islamic-period sites were excavated in central Asia beginning in 1885, in Algeria beginning in 1898, and Spain in 1910. Additional sources are cited below.

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ann c. gunter and stefan r. hauser Herzfeld and German Near Eastern Studies, 1903–1914

This situation was to change within a decade, not least through Herzfeld’s initiative in putting these problems on his agenda. First he turned to Persia, its history and archaeology. After his term at Assur ended in 1905, he traveled extensively in Persia and reported on these travels in his ﬁrst major article in 1907. His Ph.D. thesis on Pasargadae completed in the same year was the ﬁrst of several important contributions on the Achaemenids and their capitals, as Pierre Briant’s review of scholarship in the Achaemenid Empire indicates. Herzfeld continued his work on Persia with his habilitation thesis on Iranian rock reliefs, which he published jointly with Friedrich Sarre. This was one of the many important results of their long-standing relationship that Jens Kröger describes in his paper. Together Herzfeld and Sarre also undertook excavations at Samarra (1911–13), which became a milestone in prehistoric as well as Islamic archaeology. While it was not an aim of the excavations, Herzfeld exposed prehistoric levels at Samarra. Coincidentally, this discovery took place during Max von Oppenheim’s equally important excavations at Tell Halaf (1911–13), which also unearthed early painted pottery.16 The problem of determining both relative and absolute dates for their respective ﬁnds, however, remained acute for another twenty years. Whereas ancient Near Eastern studies had from the outset enjoyed and proﬁted from universal Western interest in the biblical lands, Islamic art history and archaeology as disciplines developed more gradually, grounded in the collecting of portable works of art and slow to approach Islamic sites from a scientiﬁc perspective. Rayy, Fustat, and Raqqa, for example, were initially mined extensively for ceramic ﬁnds for sale to museums and private collectors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a series of exhibitions devoted to carpets, metalwork, and ceramics spurred wider interest in Islamic art, and surveys of Islamic art and architecture began to appear. Sarre organized one of the most important such exhibitions in Munich in 1910.17 By then, as Thomas 16 Gabriele Teichmann and Gisela Völger, eds., Faszination Orient: Max von Oppenheim, Forscher, Sammler, Diplomat (Cologne: DuMont, 2001). 17 See Vernoit, “The Rise of Islamic Archaeology,” 2–10; Stephen Vernoit, “Islamic Art and Architecture. An Overview of Scholarship and Collecting,

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Leisten reminds us here, the removal to Berlin of the Mshatta palace facade in 1904 had fueled debate about Islamic art and its origins, a controversy in which Herzfeld played a decisive role. Exploration, description, and documentation of surviving Umayyad and Abbasid palaces and other structures followed.18 Among these important contributions were the four volumes that Sarre and Herzfeld published on their travels in Syria and Iraq, a journey that Kröger reviews here. When the two scholars settled on the investigation of Samarra in 1911, they did not inaugurate the ﬁrst “systematic” excavation of an Islamic site; that distinction apparently belongs to Russian activity at Samarqand launched in 1885.19 But Sarre and Herzfeld did pioneer the scientiﬁc survey and excavation of Islamic sites in the Near East as Alastair Northedge points out in his contribution. Their work at Samarra exercised considerable, and almost immediate, inﬂuence on subsequent excavations both within and outside the region.20 When Herzfeld entered the Near East in 1903 as a member of Walter Andrae’s expedition to Assur, he was to participate in a golden age of German research that lasted until World War I. Seen in a wider perspective, Herzfeld’s research was part of an enormous extension of German archaeological activity in the Ottoman Empire before World War I. In addition to the work underway before 1903, members of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft expeditions to c. 1850–c. 1950,” in Stephen Vernoit, ed., Discovering Islamic Art: Scholars, Collectors and Collections, 1850–1950 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 19–20, 32. See also the thoughtful essay by J. M. Rogers, From Antiquarianism to Islamic Archaeology, Quaderni dell’Istituto italiano di cultura per la R.A.E., n.s., 2 (Cairo: Istituto italiano di cultura per la R.A.E., 1974), esp. 26–28, 46–61. 18 Key publications included Alois Musil, Kusejr 'Amra (Vienna: K. u. K Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1907); Louis Massignon, “Note sur le château d’al Okhaïdir,” CRAI (1909): 202–2; Max von Berchem et al., Amida: Matériaux pour l’épigraphie et l’histoire musulmanes du Diyar-bekr (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1910); Conrad Preusser, Nordmesopotamische Baudenkmäler altchristlicher und islamischer Zeit, WVDOG 17 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1911); Oskar Reuther, Ocheïdir. Nach Aufnahmen der Babylon-Expedition der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft, WVDOG 20 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1912); Walter Bachmann, Kirchen und Moscheen in Kurdistan und Armenien, WVDOG 25 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1913); Gertrude Bell, Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir: A Study in Early Muhammadan Architecture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914). 19 Rogers, From Antiquarianism to Islamic Archaeology, 51: “they were probably not systematic—the adjective is [V.V.] Bartol’d’s—but they did keep day books.” 20 Rogers, From Antiquarianism to Islamic Archaeology, 27, 58–60; Vernoit, “Rise of Islamic Archaeology.” For Ali Baghat’s work at Fustat, which the excavations at Samarra may have inspired, see Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), esp. 255–57.

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Assur and Babylon took on a number of projects. During visits from Assur, Andrae and his team completed an architectural survey of Hatra, and large-scale excavations of this Arsacid- (Parthian-) period site were planned, although not carried out.21 More importantly, Julius Jordan began the ﬁrst season of a long-term program at Uruk (Warka), Iraq’s largest pre-Islamic site, in 1912. Finally, from 1906 to 1913, the society supported excavations at Bo
21

Walter Andrae, Hatra nach Aufnahmen von Mitgliedern der Assur-Expedition der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft, WVDOG 9 and 21 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs 1908 and 1912). Walter Bachmann unearthed parts of Kar Tukulti-Ninurta across the Tigris from Assur. 22 Nicole Chevalier, “Un voyage dans le sud de la Mésopotamie il y a cent ans,” in Études Mésopotamiennes. Recueil de textes oﬀert à Jean-Louis Hout, ed. Catherine Breniquet and Christine Kepinski (Paris: Éditions Recherches sur les Civilisations, 2001), 79, speaks of a German “monopole.” See also Chevalier, La recherche archéologique française au Moyen-Orient, 99–112, for a detailed picture of archaeology in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of World War I.

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the project was “the beginning of Germany’s paramount position in Turkey’s economic and ﬁnancial aﬀairs.”23 In 1909, on his second visit to Jerusalem and Damascus, Kaiser Wilhelm II proclaimed himself protector of Islamic countries. Strengthening German cultural inﬂuence in the Orient, not least as a bastion against Britain and Russia, became an important goal.24 Moreover, to a large extent, institutional frameworks for Near Eastern studies were already in place. German universities, in particular the University of Berlin, had a long history of a broad and diversiﬁed interest in ancient cultures, as Rüdiger vom Bruch elaborates here. The Royal Museums had already acquired a useful collection of ancient Near Eastern artifacts, among them several reliefs that Layard excavated at Nimrud and sold in 1855 (ﬁg. 2). At the turn of the century, new museum departments were established, including one for the ancient Near East (1899) and another for Islamic art (1904).25 As Kröger here chronicles, Herzfeld ﬁrst met Sarre shortly after the latter was appointed to head the Islamic department, and he long maintained an aﬃliation there. Nevertheless, as Johannes Renger observes, archaeology was slow to establish itself in academia.26 Although a large number of scholars participated in ﬁeld research, they were usually trained as architects, and there were no academic positions at home. Research in the ancient Near East met with enthusiasm from the wider public, for some because it provided the background of the Old Testament, for others because of its exotic ﬂair. It even diverted attention from the dominant model of classical Greece. Generally it was agreed that Germany’s place among the leading nations in the world should also manifest itself in the collections of its museums in Berlin. Ancient Near Eastern archaeology thus became a major tool 23

Kurt Grunwald, “Pénétration Paciﬁque—The Financial Vehicles of Germany’s ‘Drang nach Osten,’ ” in Germany and the Middle East 1835–1939, ed. Jehuda L. Wallach, Jahrbuch des Instituts für Deutsche Geschichte, Beiheft 1 (Tel Aviv, 1975), 87. 24 Gregor Schöllgen, “ ‘Dann müssen wir uns aber Mesopotamien sichern!’ Motive deutscher Türkenpolitik zur Zeit Wilhelms II. in zeitgenössischen Darstellungen,” Saeculum 32 (1981): 139, 144. 25 On the Vorderasiatisches Museum, see Crüsemann, Vom Zweistromland zum Kupfergraben. On Islamic art history, see Annette Hagedorn, “The Development of Islamic Art History in Germany in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in Vernoit, Discovering Islamic Art, 117–27. 26 See Stefan R. Hauser, “Not Out of Babylon? The Development of Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Germany and its Current Signiﬁcance,” in Historiography in the Cuneiform World, Papers Read at the 45th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Harvard University, July 5–8, 1998, ed. Tzvi Abush et al. (Bethesda: CDL Press, 2001), 211–37.

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of foreign policy. Ancient Near Eastern studies had also become an important aspect of political and cultural life in Germany. Under imperial patronage, they “became the perfect ﬁeld for non-classical, in the sense of open-minded, modern investment in culture, by the state as by private philanthropists.”27

Near Eastern Archaeology after World War I: The Rise of American Institutions With a handful of exceptions, World War I halted archaeological ﬁeldwork throughout the Near East. As regional specialists skilled in languages and surveying, and knowledgeable about the terrain and its inhabitants, archaeologists were often employed by their respective armies in the Near Eastern theater (ﬁg. 3). After the war, Near Eastern studies faced a completely diﬀerent political situation both at home and abroad. On the former territory of the dismembered Ottoman Empire emerged several British or French mandated states that, except for Turkey, were dominated by European powers. Following the conquest of Iraq, (Trans-) Jordan and Palestine were governed under British mandate, and Syria with Lebanon were under French mandate. Of these countries, only Iraq became formally independent before World War II and a member of the League of Nations in 1932.28 The neocolonial situation of the mandates helped to fuel Arab nationalism in Syria and Iraq.29 Although Persia did not see territorial changes as a result of World War I, it sought increasingly to rid itself of the British and Russian

27

Hauser, “Not Out of Babylon?” 218. Joseph Sassoon, Economic Policy in Iraq 1932–1950 (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1987), 1–28, argues that the British nonetheless maintained inﬂuence and tight control over most sectors. 29 Among recent studies, see Philip S. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1987); Phebe Marr, “Die Entwicklung einer nationalistischen Ideologie im Irak 1920–1941,” in Der Nahe Osten in der Zwischenkriegszeit 1919–1939: Die Interdependenz von Politik, Wirtschaft und Ideologie, ed. Linda Schatkowski Schilcher and Claus Scharf, Veröﬀentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz, Beiheft 22 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1989), 390–419. See Elizabeth Picard, “Die arabischen Nationalisten im Fruchtbaren Halbmond und der Kemalismus,” in Schilcher and Scharf, Der Nahe Osten in der Zwischenkriegszeit, 374–89, on Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) as a model for many Arab nationalists. 28

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domination that had led to the country’s division in 1907 into two zones of interest.30 A week after the 1921 coup d’état by Reza Khan and others, the newly established Soviet Union decided not to enforce further domination, but rather to sign a treaty of friendship. The situation changed somewhat after the Majlis (Persian parliament) formally deposed the last Qajar ruler late in 1925 and proclaimed Reza Khan as shah. The struggle for political independence and economic and educational modernization was accompanied by, and rooted in, a growing Persian nationalism. One expression of the often muted, but growing, independence and nation-building was a gradually increasing awareness of the historical tradition in the Near Eastern countries, particularly in Persia, a topic that several contributors discuss here.31 Moreover, even the League of Nations’ treaties establishing the mandates stipulated that antiquities laws had to be passed. Herzfeld, who already in 1919 had advocated the founding of strong, self-governed antiquities departments in the newly emerging countries, with control over all ﬁeldwork, welcomed these developments.32 During the 1920s, he was closely involved in formulating a new law of antiquities and building a department of antiquities in Persia.33 The French monopoly ﬁnally fell in the wake of major political and judicial reforms introduced by Reza Shah. 30 On Persia’s interest in using Germany to counteract Britain and Russia, see the excellent summary by Bast, “German-Persian Diplomatic Relations,” 506–19. M. Reza Ghods, Iran in the Twentieth Century (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1989), 46, describes Persia’s secret agreement to join the war as a German ally and the thwarting of the plan by Russia and Great Britain. On the mission led by Oskar Ritter von Niedermayer, see Hans-Ulrich Seidt, Berlin, Kabul, Moskau: Oskar Ritter von Niedermayer und Deutschlands Geopolitik (Munich: Universitas Verlag, 2002). On the blacklist of Germans and Austrians forbidden in 1919 from entering Persia, which included Sarre, see Yair Hirschfeld, Deutschland und Iran im Spielfeld der Mächte: Internationale Beziehungen unter Reza Schah 1921–1941 (Dusseldorf: DrosteVerlag, 1980), 18–24. 31 See also Kamyar Abdi, “Nationalism, Politics, and the Development of Archaeology in Iran,” AJA 105 (2000): 55–59. 32 Herzfeld, “Vergangenheit und Zukunft,” 322: “Sie [die Stellen für die wissenschaftliche Erforschung] müßten Organe des betreﬀenden Unterrichtsministeriums sein und mit den Institutionen zur Erhaltung der Denkmäler und mit den Museumsverwaltungen aufs engste verbunden sein. Sie müßten die alleinige Exekutive für alle Forschungstätigkeit haben, die der ganzen Welt oﬀen stehen, aber nur im Namen dieser Organe ausgeführt werden dürften.” 33 Together with Professor Hesse and Mansur es-Saltaneh, Herzfeld was a member of the commission charged with drafting the new antiquities law. See Ahmad Mahrad, Die deutsch-persischen Beziehungen von 1918–1933, 2d ed., Europäische Hochschulschriften Reihe 3, Geschichte und ihre Hilfswissenschaften Bd. 37 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1979), 481. Chevalier, La recherche archéologique française au Moyen-Orient, 331–34, describes Herzfeld’s role as seen by French diplomats.

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Two contributions here take up the question of the French monopoly and the scientiﬁc and political orientation of the Délégation Archéologique Française en Perse. Ali Mousavi explicates the political background to the agreement that abolished the French monopoly on archaeological excavations, in which Herzfeld played an important role as ally and weapon in the hands of his friends, the ministers Teymurtash and Prince Firouz Mirza. Rémy Boucharlat discusses the delegation’s work and approach to archaeology, contrasting them with those of Herzfeld. It was only after the new law was passed in October 1927 that other nations could begin archaeological ﬁeldwork, and, indeed, the ﬁrst new permit issued was for Herzfeld to work at Pasargadae. From a historical distance, as Boucharlat observes, the end of the monopoly actually seems to have freed the delegation from its “Susa-centrism.” Appointed head of the French archaeological mission in Persia in 1931, Roman Ghirshman excavated the prehistoric sites of Tepe Giyan (1931–32) and Tepe Sialk (1933–37), both in western Iran, and later investigated Sasanian Bishapur, in western Fars province, on behalf of the Louvre Museum.34 In Syria and Iraq, the mandate powers began to set up departments of antiquity and national museums. In Syria and Lebanon, French archaeologists also initiated extensive ﬁeldwork in a hitherto largely neglected area.35 But after the war, the situation in this region had changed completely. Whereas the European powers had exhausted themselves in four years of war, the United States had proﬁted immensely from it, both economically and politically. Near Eastern archaeology evinced a parallel development. Before World War I, German scholars had dominated the ﬁeld. The 1920s and 1930s saw the return of British archaeologists to Iraq, but, most importantly, the rise of American institutions in ancient Near Eastern studies. Nevertheless, the ﬁrst to reopen excavations was H. Robert Hall, who in 1919 on behalf of the British Museum probed Ur, Ubaid, and Eridu, setting the tone for postwar interest in prehistoric periods.36 34

Tepe Giyan was the place “in the vicinity of Nehavend” from which large quantities of painted ceramics were shown and oﬀered to Herzfeld in 1925. To judge by the records he kept of his own collection and its disposition, Herzfeld acquired a substantial collection of material from Giyan, including pottery, bronzes, and stone tools; most was sold in 1944 to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. 35 Chevalier, La recherche archéologique française au Moyen-Orient, 223–321, documents and analyzes French activity in Syria and Lebanon in this period. 36 Richard L. Zettler, “Ur of the Chaldees,” in Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur, ed. Richard L. Zettler and Lee Horne (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1998), 9–14, on the history of exploration at Tell al-Muqayyar (Ur).

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Large-scale excavations resumed in 1922 with C. Leonard Woolley’s famous work at Ur and Ubaid. Woolley’s project was jointly sponsored by the British Museum and the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, which emerged as a key player among foreign institutions engaged in Near Eastern ﬁeldwork. In 1920, Gertrude Bell, the famous traveler-explorer, became Oriental secretary to the British high commissioner and honorary director of archaeology.37 In this position she was also responsible for drafting the ﬁrst Iraqi antiquities law. The British Museum, supported by the University of Liverpool, also reopened excavations at Nineveh in 1927, where the last season’s work in 1932 uncovered prehistoric levels. In 1933, Max Mallowan, formerly Woolley’s assistant, again dug sixth-millennium-B.C. layers at Tell Arpachiyya.38 A joint expedition from the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford and the Field Museum in Chicago revived the former French excavations at Kish in 1923 (to 1933) and extended its work to Jemdat Nasr in 1925 (to 1931). Despite Britain’s political mandate and Gertrude Bell’s support until her death in 1926, British excavations remained few. By and large, the end of British involvement coincided with Iraqi independence in October 1932. More important than the political situation, however, seems to have been the limited funds available, particularly after the Great Depression of 1929 to 1933. Expeditions undertaken jointly with American institutions already manifested these ﬁnancial problems. In addition to cosponsoring Woolley’s Ur excavations, the University Museum launched excavations at Beth Shean in Palestine. It also joined with Dropsie College and the Baghdad school of the American Schools of Oriental Research, founded in 1923, to support Ephraim A. Speiser’s excavations at Tepe Gawra (1927, 1931–38). In 1934, the University Museum funded Erich F. Schmidt’s excavations at Fara, a site that Walter Andrae ﬁrst touched in 1902. Finally, the Baghdad school and the University Museum again sponsored Speiser, this time in his work at Tell Billa (1931–37). The University Museum thus became far more active in Iraq than did Great Britain. Indeed, its only competitor became the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, established in 1919 by Egyptologist James 37 The many biographies of Bell include Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell, Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia (New York: Doubleday, 1996). 38 See M. E. L Mallowan, Twenty-Five Years of Mesopotamian Discovery, 1932–1956 (London: British School of Archaeology, 1956).

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H. Breasted with funding from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Immediately after the war, in August 1919, Breasted led a team through the Near East in search of antiquities to purchase and especially of archaeological sites for future investigation. In 1925, the institute launched work at Megiddo, and in 1928, at Khorsabad. From 1929 to 1938, Henri Frankfort directed ﬁeldwork for the institute in the previously unexplored plain of the Diyala River. His project sought to examine the transition from prehistoric to historical periods and the development of Sumerian culture in a regional sequence derived from excavations at several sites.39 Considering these developments, it is not surprising that in 1929 and 1930 the institutions competing for Herzfeld’s cooperation in launching excavations at Persepolis were those in Philadelphia and Chicago.40 Ultimately, Herzfeld decided to work with the Oriental Institute, although the University Museum seems to have made a better oﬀer.41 Breasted, on the other hand, whom Herzfeld himself approached, was a longstanding friend of Herzfeld’s mentor and model, Eduard Meyer; Breasted and Herzfeld had known each other since 1928. Herzfeld nevertheless advised the University Museum on Persian archaeology in general as well as on particular sites. Once Persia opened up to foreign missions, the University Museum began excavations at sites Herzfeld recommended. Frederick R. Wulsin undertook excavations at Tureng Tepe (1931–32), and Erich F. Schmidt excavated prehistoric graves and a Sasanian palace at Tepe Hissar, a 39 James H. Breasted, The Oriental Institute (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933), esp. 337–61. 40 Jay Gluck and Noël Siver, eds., Surveyors of Persian Art: A Documentary Biography of Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman (Ashiga, Japan, and Costa Mesa, Calif.: SoPA, 1996; distributed by Mazda Publishers), 216–20. 41 Herzfeld knew that Arthur Upham Pope pursued him for the University Museum, although the museum also communicated directly with the German scholar (Herzfeld to Breasted, 7 February 1930, Oriental Institute). Herzfeld complained that Pope had no charge from the university and had granted himself the title “professor.” See Mahrad, Deutsch-Persische Beziehungen, 482–83, for a letter dated 27 September 1929 from Herzfeld to Friedrich Grobba, head of the German mission to Iraq. See also Gluck and Siver, Surveyors of Persian Art, 225, for the University Museum’s eﬀorts to sideline Pope. These incidents also explain Herzfeld’s reluctance to contribute to Pope’s Survey of Persian Art, a project he had initially endorsed (Gluck and Siver, Surveyors of Persian Art, 299), and Herzfeld’s minor role in the grand exhibitions of Persian art that Pope staged in 1931 and 1940. In 1931, Herzfeld was listed as honorary vice-president; in 1940, he was no longer mentioned. See Persian Art: An Illustrated Souvenir of the Exhibition of Persian Art at Burlington House, London (London: Hudson and Kearns, 1931); Phyllis Ackerman et al., Guide to the Exhibition of Persian Art (New York: The Iranian Institute, 1940).

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site that Herzfeld had already praised in his 1926 travel report.42 In 1934, the same year he worked at Fara, Schmidt began excavations at Rayy, a site also mentioned in Herzfeld’s earlier report. A year later, Schmidt succeeded Herzfeld as ﬁeld director of the Oriental Institute’s excavations at Persepolis, bringing to an end the University Museum’s era of expansion. Now the Oriental Institute held sway. Its Persian Expedition, launched in 1931, continued investigations at Persepolis (until 1937), at Tal-i Bakun (1932–34), and at Istakhr (1934–39).43 Following this example, Schmidt began ﬁeldwork in Luristan in 1938.44 On the eve of World War II, in 1938 and 1939, the Oriental Institute was present throughout the Near East.

Herzfeld in Persia: Germany and the Near East, 1919–1933 Germany’s loss in World War I signiﬁcantly altered its international standing as well as its commanding role in Near Eastern studies. The victorious allies condemned Germany as guilty for the war, claiming reparations that exacerbated the disastrous economic situation there. Germany lost its colonies and inﬂuence in the Near East. Only after it was ﬁnally admitted to the League of Nations in 1926 could its archaeologists claim the ﬁnds from prewar excavations at Assur and Babylon and plan to resume ﬁeldwork. Even then, insuﬃcient funding and a lack of political and public support limited this progress. Whereas after the turn of the century the ancient Near East had enjoyed great popularity in Germany, after the war classical Greece re-emerged as the ideal and model for a new humanism. Public interest in the background of the Bible having been sated, membership in the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft plummeted. Likewise, construction of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, which was to house the ancient Near Eastern collection and especially the ﬁnds from Babylon and Assur, was repeatedly interrupted. From 1911 to 1930, the collection was housed in a small, temporary hut (ﬁg. 4).45 42

Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 280. Breasted, The Oriental Institute, 265–300, on the institute’s excavations in central Anatolia. 44 Erich F. Schmidt et al., The Holmes Expeditions to Luristan, OIP 108 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 45 Crüsemann, Vom Zweistromland zum Kupfergraben, describes in detail the problems of managing the collections and building the museum. 43

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Moreover, the scholarly specialization that manifested itself in Herzfeld’s professorship for Near Eastern archaeology in 1920 and in the founding of additional chairs for Assyriology made it diﬃcult for nonspecialists to follow the debates.46 Scholars from neighboring disciplines, in particular ancient historians, turned their backs on the Orient and again concentrated on Greek and Roman history and culture.47 The ﬁeld of Islamic studies experienced a parallel departure from German dominance. Before World War I, “German-speaking scholars had made an impact with archaeological and architectural investigations, but from the 1920s British and French historians came to the fore.”48 During the years of the Weimar Republic (1919–33), none of the governments sought to sever close political or economic ties to the mandate countries. A German mission in Iraq was only established after that country achieved its independence in 1932. Herzfeld, who embarked on a two-year trip through Persia in 1923, was the only one who seems not to have cared about political problems. Traveling via Basra and Baghdad, where he was warmly welcomed by Gertrude Bell and the high commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, he went to see the Babylon and Samarra excavations and Ctesiphon. On his way to Persia, Herzfeld stayed one week at Paikuli, where he unearthed thirty additional blocks of the important Parthian and Middle Persian inscriptions. In their contributions, Oktor Skjaervø and Josef Wieshöfer describe the vital importance of this monument for the study of Old and Middle Persian language, as for the history of the early Sasanian Empire. Another three years passed before Walter Andrae arrived for the division of ﬁnds from Babylon.49 The ﬁrst German expeditions at Uruk, led by Jordan, and at Ctesiphon, led by Oskar Reuther, worked over the winter of 1928–29. The Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (Emergency Association for German Science and Scholarship), founded in 1920 to fund research projects in Germany, pursued a kind of foreign policy of its own in strongly supporting

46 Bruno Meissner’s launching of the Reallexikon der Assyriologie in 1928 represented a signiﬁcant step forward; due to its slow progress, however, it failed to make a lasting impact. 47 See Hauser, “Not Out of Babylon?” 223–25. The concentration on prehistoric sites, as noted below, will have intensiﬁed this development. 48 Vernoit, “Islamic Art and Architecture,” 37. 49 Walter Andrae, “Reise nach Babylon zur Teilung der Babylon-Funde,” MDOG 65 (1927): 7–27.

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research in and about the Near East. Funds were limited, however, and further reduced by the 1929 depression. Although the excavations at Uruk continued annually until 1939, the second campaign at Ctesiphon had to be canceled; it ﬁnally took place with support from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1930–31. The only other German excavation in Iraq was Herzfeld’s unpublished campaign of 1930 at Samarra, in which he concentrated on the prehistoric levels. At about this time, Herzfeld, because of his general expertise in all periods of history, his experience in drafting antiquities laws, and possibly also his less colonial and more cosmopolitan outlook, was asked to be the new head of the antiquities department in Baghdad. For reasons unknown, he declined and returned to Tehran. Jordan, with whom he shared a long-standing animosity since their time together at Assur, was instead appointed in 1931; he was replaced in 1934 by the ﬁrst Iraqi director. The oﬀer to Herzfeld and the appointment of Jordan establish not only that German scholars still enjoyed a high standing in Iraq, but also that the Iraqi government endeavored to call upon non-British foreign expertise. While German contacts with Syria and Transjordan were even more limited than those with Iraq, relations with Persia seemed to hold greater promise.50 The ﬁrst German envoy to Persia, Count Werner von der Schulenburg, arrived in Tehran in 1923. In the same year, contacts with Persia were revived as result of short-lived joint ventures with the Soviet Union in a Soviet attempt to counter British dominance.51 In 1927, Germany’s inﬂuence reached an impressive level. Germany mediated between Persia and the Soviet Union, and also between Persia and Britain. German companies built railroads and provided airplanes, German teachers taught in vocational schools and the military, German geologists explored mineral deposits, and the director general of the National Bank of Persia was a German. Already in 1923, Herzfeld, in violation of the French monopoly but with support from local Persian dignitaries, conducted some “prospecting” at Pasargadae and Khurkha, and was entrusted with the task of describing the state of the ruins at Persepolis (Takht-i Jamshid)

50 Despite a lack of oﬃcial high-level contacts, Max von Oppenheim managed to revive his prewar excavations at Tell Halaf, now in Syria, between 1927 and 1929. They remained the only German excavations in Syria until Johannes Kollwitz began work at Rusafa in 1952. 51 Hirschfeld, Deutschland und Iran, 30–38.

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and making plans for their preservation.52 The monopoly hampered more extensive work, although Herzfeld was allowed to begin excavations at Pasargadae and Kuh-i Khwaja in 1928 and 1929 with support from the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, as David Stronach and Trudy Kawami describe here. He nevertheless failed to attract other German scholars to Persia, and Germany’s bleak ﬁnancial situation thwarted his plans for a German archaeological institute at Tehran and applications to excavate at Persepolis.53 In this volume, Kröger describes Herzfeld’s plans to excavate at Persepolis from the German point of view; and drawing on archives in Tehran and Paris, Mousavi shows how the Majlis awarded Herzfeld the excavation permit.54 Finally, Shakhrokh Razmjou’s discussion of Herzfeld’s study of graﬃti at Persepolis draws new attention to another aspect of the scholar’s meticulous, pioneering scholarship.

Herzfeld and New Areas of Near Eastern Research, 1919–1934 The pioneering phase of ancient Near Eastern studies, prior to 1900, had unearthed texts and artifacts of historic periods and numerous formerly unknown political and social entities in Mesopotamia. For various reasons, research now began to extend into earlier and later periods, and into areas previously unexplored. In his 1933 essay “The Task of the Orientalist and Its Place in Science and History,” James Henry Breasted deﬁned archaeology’s role as bridging the gap between the paleontologist and fossil man, and the historian and civilized man in Europe: “embracing the whole known career of man, the civilizations of the Near Orient are like the

52 Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 235 and 241, reports that he conducted some prospecting (Schürfungen) at Pasargadae and Khurka. 53 Marchand, Down from Olympus, 283–84, and Hauser, “German Studies in the Ancient Near East,” discuss the resumption of work in Turkey and the establishment in 1928 of the German Archaeological Institute’s Istanbul branch. 54 Jack M. Balcer, “Erich Friedrich Schmidt, 13 September 1897–3 October 1964,” in Through Travellers’ Eyes: European Travellers on the Iranian Monuments, ed. Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Jan W. Drijvers, AchHist 7 (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1991), 147, follows Charles Breasted’s later version, which asserted that J. H. Breasted had developed the plans for Persepolis which were “executed by Herzfeld between 1931 and 1934.” As Kröger and Mousavi point out, it was only because Herzfeld was unable to raise the necessary funds in Germany that the Oriental Institute became part of the enterprise.

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keystone of the arch, with prehistoric man on one side and civilized Europe on the other.”55 Near Eastern cultures were consequently understood as evolutionary stages, and in the 1920s and ’30s research accordingly concentrated in large part on preliterate or prehistoric periods. Much of it aimed to establish relative chronologies and regional sequences from historic to early prehistoric times (for example, at Nineveh, Tepe Gawra, and Tepe Sialk).56 Herzfeld also wrestled continuously with the problematic relationship of prehistory and history, as Stefan R. Hauser notes here. His return to Samarra in 1930 to explore prehistoric levels should be understood in this connection, along with his interest in prehistoric stamp seals, treated in the contribution by Margaret Cool Root. The Samarra investigations unfortunately remained unpublished, but they did change his mind concerning the date of Samarran pottery.57 An important new approach to Near Eastern ﬁeldwork was the concept of regional studies, in which a regional survey was combined with excavations at several sites.58 While the exploration of ceramic sequences established a much longer (pre)history for Mesopotamia, it could never arouse the same interest among the wider public or other academic disciplines as did cuneiform studies before World War I. Moreover, Western historians were more interested in another kind of study, one that beﬁtted the mandate situation: the search for Western inﬂuence, particular that of Rome, in the East.59 The excavations at Dura-Europos in eastern Syria, the easternmost city of the

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Breasted, The Oriental Institute, 11. Daniel T. Potts, “A Discourse on Time,” in Fluchtpunkt Uruk. Archäologische Einheit aus methodischer Vielfalt, Schriften für Hans Jürg Nissen, ed. Hartmut Kühne, Reinhard Bernbeck and Karin Bartl (Rahden: Marie Leidorf, 1999), 15–16, thoughtfully reviews the unhealthy process by which assemblages at type-sites became identiﬁed with pseudo-historical stages. 57 Before World War I, when few excavations had reached prehistoric levels, Herzfeld was at a loss to date the prehistoric pottery he found at Samarra in 1913, and assigned it to the fourth millennium B.C. After his 1930 campaign, he favored an earlier date. See Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 29–30. 58 Robert J. Braidwood and Linda S. Braidwood, Excavations in the Plain of Antioch, vol. 1, The Earlier Assemblages, Phases A–J, OIP 61 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), on their pioneering work from 1933–37. 59 Père Antoine Poidebard (in 1925–32) and later Sir Aurel Stein (in 1938–39) used aerial reconnaissance to ﬁnd Roman castella in order to establish the eastern Roman frontier. See Levon Nordiguian and Jean-François Salles, eds., Aux origines de l’archéologie aérienne. A. Poidebard (1878–1955) (Beirut: Presses universitaires SaintJoseph, 2000); David Kennedy and Shelagh Gregory, eds., Sir Aurel Stein’s Limes Report, BAR, Int. Ser. 272 (Oxford: BAR, 1985). 56

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Roman Empire thus far explored in the region, were particularly important in this connection.60 A Seleucid foundation and a Parthian fortress for three hundred years before it became Roman in A.D. 166, Dura opened the question of Parthian art and the multilingual and multicultural society of what was termed Hellenistic Mesopotamia. Before World War I, only Assur and Hatra had produced material of the Arsacid period. Now, research expanded to include the Parthian and Sasanian periods. In 1928, American institutions relaunched excavations at Dura-Europos and Seleucia-on-the-Tigris. German archaeologists explored Ctesiphon and Kuh-i Khwaja to ﬁll the gap in knowledge about post-cuneiform and pre-Islamic empires, as Kawami points out in her contribution on Herzfeld’s work at the latter site. And, as Skjaervø and Wiesehöfer describe, Herzfeld’s publication of the Paikuli monument and its inscription opened new possibilities of interpreting Sasanian history from a Sasanian perspective. Nevertheless, the unity of Near Eastern studies had given way to a multitude of specialized disciplines, which often ignored each other’s results. Finally, ethnic and racial explanations increasingly permeated all branches of research—historical, philological, and archaeological. In 1920, Bedrich Hrozny´ published his discovery that Hittite belonged to the Indo-European (Indo-Germanic) family of languages, and other scholars identiﬁed Indo-European features in the texts from Nuzi. This introduced a racist dimension to ancient Near Eastern studies, one that developed much more fully during the 1930s.

Archaeology, Nationalism, and Racism By the mid-1930s, archaeological interests grounded in nationalist agendas had emerged in Iraq and Persia (Iran). The rule by mandate had encouraged Arab nationalist sentiment in Iraq, which in turn fostered a gloriﬁcation of the Arab (and not speciﬁcally the Iraqi) past. Even with respect to the seventh-century Islamic conquest of Iraq, its Arab character was stressed over its religious aspect.61 An explicit interest in Arab history and archaeology—hitherto largely neglected 60 Already in 1912, Sarre and Herzfeld had discovered wall paintings at DuraEuropos, a site that was subsequently investigated by James H. Breasted, Franz Cumont, and an expedition led by Yale University. 61 Marr, “Die Entwicklung einer nationalistischen Ideologie im Irak,” esp. 408.

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by Western archaeologists—began to develop. The Iraqi department of antiquities’ ﬁrst excavations thus concentrated on Islamic-period sites, and by the end of the decade excavations were underway at Samarra, Wasit, and Kufah.62 Two British projects of the early 1930s, however, also concentrated on Islamic or Arab sites: David Talbot Rice’s excavations from 1931–33 at al-Hira, the former capital of the Arab Lakhmid kingdom; and Gerald Reitlinger’s survey west of Mosul.63 It was only during World War II, after the withdrawal of foreign missions, that the Iraqi department of antiquities developed a new agenda for ﬁeldwork that included all periods. This turn toward Islamic archaeology aﬀected neighboring countries as well. In 1934, excavations began at Khirbet al-Mafjar in (Trans-) Jordan, continuing until 1948; between 1936 and 1938, Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi in Syria was explored. Islamic-period sites also came into focus in Iran. At Rayy, Erich Schmidt directed excavations supported by the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston and the Mrs. William Boyce Thompson Foundation of the University Museum from 1934 to 1936. Charles K. Wilkinson and Joseph Upton, Herzfeld’s close colleague and friend, excavated at Nishapur under the auspices of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1935 to 1940, with a ﬁnal season in 1947. At least equally important for Islamic art history was the Architectural Survey of Islamic Monuments in Iran initiated by Arthur Upham Pope (1929–39), and the multivolume Survey of Persian Art, which he conceived and edited (1938–39). Nevertheless, as in Iraq, where archaeological studies in Arab history prompted research in Islamic-period sites, in Iran the main interest was in national history, and Pope’s Survey of Persian Art took full account of this fact. The interest in Persian national crafts and heritage was in step with Reza Shah’s politics from the early 1920s onward, but it took a new turn in 1934, when a campaign for the Iranization of Persia was launched.64 The vahdat-i melli (National Unity Campaign) involved the “puriﬁcation” of the Persian language of its

62 Vernoit, “Islamic Art and Architecture,” 39. The department of antiquities began its work at Samarra in 1932. For a recent reappraisal that includes bibliography on recent investigations at the site, see the papers in Chase F. Robinson, ed., A Medieval Islamic City Reconsidered: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Samarra, Oxford Studies in Islamic Art 14 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 63 Gerald Reitlinger, “Medieval Antiquities West of Mosul,” Iraq 5 (1938): 143–56. 64 Abdi, “Nationalism and Archaeology in Iran,” 57–64.

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Arabic, Turkish, and other loan words, the creation of national consciousness through school textbooks and mass publications, and the deliberate use of Iran’s gloriﬁed past.65 Even the country itself was renamed Iran on Newroz (12 March) 1934.66 Some of the leading intellectuals with strong nationalist feelings were close contacts of Herzfeld’s from the Anjuman-i Athar-i Melli (National Monuments Council of Iran).67 Moreover, his own research at Persepolis and on Zoroaster beﬁtted the new state ideology. In terms of research strategies or subjects in archaeology for foreign missions, the increased nationalistic policy had a minor impact, after the lifting of the French monopoly in October 1927 and the issuing of the new law on antiquities in 1930. French, American, and Swedish archaeologists often targeted prehistoric sites.68 Nevertheless, investigations of Sasanian-period sites, such as those at Qasr-i Abu Nasr (1932–35), Naqsh-i Rustam and Istakhr (1935), and Bishapur (1934–36) were certainly welcome. Only after the outbreak of World War II did Iranian members of the department of antiquities begin their own project; tellingly, it continued investigations at Persepolis, the pivotal reference point for Reza Shah’s (and later his son’s) invention of tradition.69 “The grand emphasis on nationalism and ancient Iran that characterized the reign of Reza Shah [nevertheless] left a deeper impact on Iranian historiography and the Persian language than the practice of archaeology.”70 Archaeology, on the other hand, left its impact in the modern architecture of Iran, in allusions to Achaemenid forms and decoration in such public buildings as the Bank Melli-i Iran and the National Police Headquarters in Tehran.71

65

Ghods, Iran in the Twentieth Century, 106–8. This happened as part of a nationalization campaign and increased gloriﬁcation of Persia’s Aryan past. See Ghods, Iran in the Twentieth Century, 106, for the repeated assertion that the idea for renaming the country came from Persia’s legation in Berlin. 67 Abdi, “Nationalism and Archaeology in Iran,” 56, mentions Hasan Pirnia, who published a widely read history of Iran in 1933 and provided the authoritative schoolbook on the same topic; and Mohammad-Ali Foroughi, who had been prime minister and Herzfeld’s ally in the drafting of the new antiquities law. 68 T. J. Arne worked at Shah Tepe in 1933. 69 Abdi, “Nationalism and Archaeology in Iran,” 68–69, summarizes this process, which culminated in 1971 in the celebration at Persepolis of the 2,500th anniversary of Cyrus the Great’s founding of the Achaemenid Empire. 70 Abdi, “Nationalism and Archaeology in Iran,” 63. 71 See Mina Marefat, “Building to Power: Architecture of Tehran 1921–1941” (Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1988). 66

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Iran’s ideologizing of Aryan history paved the way for closer relations with fascist Germany, where Aryan history gained unprecedented signiﬁcance. After initial disagreements, the governments established a number of far-reaching trade and exchange treaties.72 The oﬃcial economic and ideological German interest in Iran also led to a greater interest in, and thoroughly positive view of, Iran’s Achaemenid and Sasanian past. Historians stressed the Aryan character of the ancient Persians73 while modern Iranians were explicitly exempted from the racial Nuremberg laws as being “pure-blooded.”74 In 1938, a Deutsches Archäologisches Institut station was established in Isfahan, and Wilhelm Eilers was appointed the institute’s Referent for Iran. Nonetheless, after Herzfeld’s 1929 campaign at Kuh-i Khwaja, no German excavation took place in Iran until 1959.75 Nazi Germany’s concern for Iran’s Aryan past was only one facet of the all-encompassing ideology of the past. With the Nazi regime’s rise to power in 1933, ancient Near Eastern studies were attacked as being useless and of no value. While the search for Indo-European inﬂuence in the Near East during the 1920s was widespread, particularly in Britain, interest in Iranian history and the inﬂuence of IndoGermans in Near Eastern history soared with the encouragement of Nazi ideologues who heralded the Aryan race. During the Third Reich, research on “Indogermanen, Arier” became a priority for most scholars.76 Herzfeld, who had been profoundly critical of the role of race in history, was no longer in their midst, either in Germany or Iran.

72 Yair Hirschfeld, “German Policy Towards Iran: Continuity and Change from Weimar to Hitler, 1919–39,” in Wallach, Germany and the Middle East, 127–28. 73 See Josef Wiesehöfer, “Das Bild der Achaimeniden in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus,” in Method and Theory, ed. Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Amélie Kuhrt, AchHist 3 (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1998), 1–14, and Hauser, “German Studies.” 74 Miron Rezun, The Iranian Crisis (Köln/Wien: Böhlau, 1982), 29. 75 Wolfram Kleiss, “Deutsches Archäologisches Institut,” in EncIr, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 1996), 7:332, erroneously assumes that Herzfeld’s work at Persepolis was a German excavation. For a more accurate history of the institute, see Dietrich Huﬀ, “Germany ii. Archaeological Explorations and Excavations,” EncIr, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2001), 519–30. 76 See Hauser, “German Studies in the Ancient Near East.”

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ann c. gunter and stefan r. hauser Herzfeld’s Farewell to Persia and Berlin

Herzfeld’s departure from Persepolis in November 1934 had been planned for some time, as he had been invited to give the Schweich Lectures at the British Academy in London. As it happened, however, he never returned to the site or to Iran.77 In December 1934 and January 1935, Herzfeld traveled to the United States to meet with James H. Breasted and others at the Oriental Institute, and to lecture in Chicago and New York. It was at this point, apparently, that Herzfeld decided not to return to Persepolis for the following season, and Friedrich Krefter was named acting ﬁeld director in his absence. Herzfeld returned to London. Why did Herzfeld leave Persepolis? Correspondence between Herzfeld and Breasted establish that internal expedition troubles as well as problems with the Iranian government over the division of ﬁnds had been brewing for many months. Disagreements between Herzfeld and Friedrich Krefter reached a serious point during the summer of 1934, and as a result both James H. Breasted and Charles Breasted became increasingly impatient with Herzfeld.78 Tensions also grew over the Oriental Institute’s share of ﬁnds, which Breasted pressed Herzfeld to resolve satisfactorily following the discovery of thousands of cuneiform tablets in the Persepolis Fortiﬁcation. Breasted was also distressed with Herzfeld’s tardiness in publishing the results of the excavations. On more than one occasion, Herzfeld communicated his pessimism about the future success of the Persepolis expedition, and expressed interest in stepping down as ﬁeld director.79

77 Ominously, Herzfeld’s departure from Persepolis was fraught with accidents and mishaps, as Donald E. McCown told the American artist Joseph Lindon Smith a few months later. See Ann C. Gunter, “Joseph Lindon Smith at Persepolis, 1935,” in A Persian Perspective: Essays in Memory of Heleen Sancis-Weerdenburg, ed. Wouter Henkelmann and Amélie Kuhrt, AchHist 13 (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut vor het Nabije Oosten, 2003), 63. 78 After Herzfeld’s departure, Krefter (1898–1995), who had already worked with him at Pasargadae in 1928, became acting ﬁeld director at Persepolis until Erich Schmidt took over in May 1935. On his memories on his work with Herzfeld, see Friedrich Krefter, “Mit Ernst Herzfeld in Pasargadae und Persepolis 1928 und 1931–1934,” AMI N.F. 12 (1979): 13–25. Later Krefter provided marvelous reconstruction drawings of Persepolis. See Friedrich Krefter, Persepolis Rekonstruktionen: Der Wiederaufbau des Frauenpalastes, Rekonstruktionen der Paläste, Modell von Persepolis, Teheraner Forschungen, Bd. 3 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1971). 79 Among other letters, see C. Breasted to Herzfeld, 23 August 1934; J. H. Breasted to Herzfeld, 17 October 1934; Oriental Institute.

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Yet the reason most often given for Herzfeld’s departure, and which both Elspeth Dusinberre and Ali Mousavi discuss here, concerns the report that Herzfeld gave Sweden’s crown prince two pieces of Persepolis sculptures at the time the latter visited the site in 1934. Sources referring to this incident continue to emerge.80 Just before this volume went to press, Kröger kindly informed us that he had discovered three letters that Herzfeld exchanged with Ernst Kühnel in July 1935.81 In the ﬁrst, dated 24 July 1935 from London, Herzfeld asked Kühnel to provide an oﬃcial receipt for a number of objects he had ﬁrst lent and subsequently donated to the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin. He then mentioned that accusations concerning him smuggling objects out of Iran in the luggage of Sweden’s crown prince were baseless. In fact, in answer to an inquiry by the prince, Iranian authorities had no objections whatsoever against Herzfeld continuing his work. On 27 July 1935, Kühnel replied that he had only been waiting for an address to send the receipt, and that he had personally never believed the rumors. Nevertheless, it would have been careless of Herzfeld to publish four Achaemenid silver bowls in his possession while working at Persepolis, since this would have led those Iranians who wished him ill to believe he had acquired them illegally.82 In addition, Kühnel wrote, he had heard repeatedly that Herzfeld had been stopped at the Iraqi border and that although

80 Mohammad Gholi Majd, The Great American Plunder of Persia’s Antiquities, 1925–1941 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2003), esp. 195–206. Drawing on United States diplomatic records and highly selected correspondence with the Oriental Institute, he argues that Herzfeld’s problematic reputation as a seller of antiquities long antedated the 1934 incident. 81 Jens Kröger very kindly brought the letters to our attention and provided a typescript. We would like also to thank the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Orient-Abteilung, and in particular Margarete van Ess, for permission to refer to this correspondence in the Ernst Kühnel archive, Berlin. 82 On these bowls, see Ann C. Gunter and Margaret Cool Root, “Replicating, Inscribing, Giving: Ernst Herzfeld and Artaxerxes’ Silver Phiale in the Freer Gallery of Art,” ArsOr 28 (1998): 2–38. At that point, the authors were led to believe that Herzfeld himself owned the phialai. Despite Herzfeld’s protestations, it remains to be explained why Persepolis excavation notebooks dated 7 July 1934—when Upton was apparently nowhere near the site—preserved measured drawings of the bowls, and why Herzfeld’s 1935 and 1937 articles on the bowls mentioned only four of them. Nevertheless, charges of smuggling antiquities seem to have played no part in the Oriental Institute’s internal deliberations over Herzfeld’s continued association with the Persepolis project. See “Conﬁdential Memorandum of Agenda in Anticipation of Professor Ernst Herzfeld’s Visit to Chicago,” 9 November 1934, Oriental Institute.

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he had protested his innocence, the customs oﬃcials had found several antiquities in his luggage. Only two days later, Herzfeld again replied, declaring that the six silver bowls had never been in his possession, and that he had seen them with Joseph Upton. Concerning the search at the border, Herzfeld explained, the Iranian customs chief claimed to have been blackmailed by the head of the Persepolis excavations. Herzfeld informed Kühnel that he had acquired the two objects outside Iran, many years previously: a seal, twenty-ﬁve years earlier in Iraq, and the pen case, nine years earlier in Moscow. After a while, Herzfeld concluded, the Iranian government had returned the objects to him, with apologies.83 In correspondence with Kühnel and also with Charles Breasted, Herzfeld replied to accusations not only heard in Iran, but also oﬃcially raised in a letter of denunciation written by his former assistant, Alexander Langsdorﬀ, dated 20 June 1935.84 Langsdorﬀ (1898– 1946) had participated in Hitler’s attempted coup d’état in Munich in 1923. Later he studied with Paul Jacobsthal in Marburg and received his doctorate in 1927. In 1932, at Herzfeld’s suggestion, Langsdorﬀ joined the Persepolis expedition and worked with Donald E. McCown at Tal-i Bakun, the prehistoric site located near the Persepolis platform (ﬁg. 5). He resigned on 30 September 1933, joining the SS and the staﬀ of the Museum for Prehistory in Berlin. He soon became an important arbiter for the SS-Ahnenerbe, curator at the museum in 1935, and professor at the university.85 Langsdorﬀ ’s departure from Persepolis in 1933 was clouded by problems concerning his claims for medical compensation and, far more troubling, over his professional conduct. He had traveled to Baghdad, Herzfeld informed Breasted on 23 June 1933, taking without permission the ﬁeld catalogue of ﬁnds from Tal-i Bakun and other expedition records. He had also corresponded about the excavations and sent pho83 Majd, American Plunder of Persia’s Antiquities, 196–204, however, citing correspondence with the American diplomats in Iran, suggests that the Iranian government chose to overlook Herzfeld’s transgression. 84 Ahmad Mahrad, “Intrigen während der NS-Zeit gegen deutsche Orientalisten jüdischen Glaubens,” Hannoversche Studien über den Mittleren Osten 28 (1999): 31–38, quotes the letter at length. Mahrad is interested in the denunciation as such, but ignorant about the persons involved or mentioned in the letter and draws mostly false conclusions. Johannes Renger kindly brought this reference to our attention. 85 Langsdorﬀ was later implicated in looting art from Jews. He died on 10 March 1946; whether he committed suicide or was murdered was never established. See Michael H. Kater, Das “Ahnenerbe” der SS: 1935–1945, ein Beitrag zur Kulturpolitik des Dritten Reiches (Stuttgart: DVA, 1974), 21.

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tographs to others, again without Herzfeld’s knowlege. “I consider this incorrect and it gave me the impression that he was trying to make other people think that the excavating was his own personal work,” wrote Herzfeld. The intention not to return he apparently had had before he left and acted accordingly, for in reality he has not worked for us since December. Hence I do not ﬁnd it quite decent [of him] to demand his complete pay up to and including October, 1933.86

It is not diﬃcult to imagine that a desire to retaliate contributed a motive to Langsdorﬀ’s later move against Herzfeld. In his denunciation, Langsdorﬀ claimed that there had been several boxes ﬁlled with objects found in the luggage of the Swedish crown prince on his departure from Iran, and that Herzfeld had smuggled them into the luggage.87 He also stated that Herzfeld, “a typical international Jew,” with support from friends in the diplomatic service, had not only shipped his library to Tehran at public expense, but also had abused the German mission by sending forty-three boxes of precious Persian objects to the United States and by possessing a collection of other artifacts himself. Illegal conduct was implied. Furthermore, he asserted that Herzfeld was illicitly trading works of art and was guilty of highly suspicious scientiﬁc enterprises.88 Herzfeld must have been aware of the seriousness of these accusations with respect to his professorship. Scholars of Jewish descent were forced to leave their positions under a law passed only sixty-eight days after Hitler came to power. The Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums stipulated that Beamte of non-Aryan descent had to be forced into retirement. On 13 April 1933, only a week later, the ﬁrst sixteen scholars were removed from their positions in Berlin. Many followed in September 1933. Exceptions such as those for scholars with special war records—including Herzfeld, who had been awarded the Iron Cross during World War I—were terminated late in 1935. 86

Herzfeld to James H. Breasted, 23 June 1933, Oriental Institute (from Breasted’s translation of Herzfeld’s letter of the same date, which was, as usual, written in German). 87 Langsdorﬀ mentioned as his source Roman Ghirshman—if this was not an evasive defense—who had visited him in April 1935 in his oﬃce in Berlin. 88 Quoted after Mahrad, ibid. These were probably the boxes containing material from the Persepolis excavations sent to the Oriental Institute, which, as Dusinberre mentions, Breasted wanted to receive as soon as possible. If they were sent via the German embassy, it shows that Herzfeld still had very good contacts there and was indeed transgressing use of the diplomatic post.

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In Berlin alone, approximately 230 faculty members had to leave.89 As part of a curriculum vitae prepared in London in August 1935, Herzfeld summarized his academic career, ending it with the following account (written in slightly imperfect English): In middle of July 1935 I have been informed by friends in high oﬃcial position that a political denunciation had been handed to the Ministry of Public Instruction by a former pupil of mine a few weeks earlier, and they advised me better not to return. But the only consequence has been, til now, that my diplomatic passport has been recalled; I was able to get a normal one. But my professorship has so far not been touched, nor the term of my mission to Persia been altered.90

Despite Herzfeld’s optimism, he was stripped of both within a couple of months. In September 1935, about two weeks after Herzfeld wrote this account, he was dismissed from active service at the University of Berlin, as Johannes Renger and Rüdiger vom Bruch review. About a month later, Walter Adams, general secretary of the Academic Assistance Council in London, sent Herzfeld’s vita to Dr. Alfred E. Cohn of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars. He asked Cohn to pursue negotiations concerning support for Herzfeld’s publications, which the scholar had apparently launched earlier with Abraham Flexner, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. “He has an oﬃcial connection with the Oriental Institute at Chicago but there seems to be some personal problems which may preclude the possibility of an appointment there,” Adams wrote. There is nothing which we can do in this particular matter since he has already enlisted the support of certain English scholars, such as Sir George Hill, in the Chicago negotiations. Nor can we assist him in his second problem of selling the archaeological specimens which are his legal property and which are worth approximately £5,000. He has, however, asked us whether we can help him in a third problem, namely the negotiations he has started with Dr. Flexner of Princeton about the publication of the results of his recent excavations and discoveries.91

89 Rudolf Schottlaender, Verfolgte Berliner Wissenschaft: Ein Gedenkwerk (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1988), 8–9. 90 Curriculum vitae dated 25 August 1935, apparently prepared by Herzfeld in London for the Academic Assistance Council; Herzfeld ﬁle, Papers of Emergency Committee. 91 Adams to Cohn, 17 October 1935, Herzfeld File, Papers of Emergency Committee.

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Herzfeld must himself have immediately begun to contact colleagues in the United States about prospects for a teaching appointment. Walter W. S. Cook, chair of the Committee on Graduate Studies of the Department of Fine Arts, New York University, wrote to the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars that Herzfeld had been dismissed from his teaching position “on the ground of non-Aryan birth” and would be “very glad to accept a position” as professor of ﬁne arts at New York University. “Dr. Herzfeld is the greatest living authority in the ﬁeld of Near Eastern archaeology,” wrote Cook.92 This letter launched an energetic eﬀort to obtain funds from the committee to obtain an appointment for Herzfeld in the United States. Cook initially appealed to the committee for support in bringing Herzfeld to New York University for the following semester (spring 1936). Cook delivered his letter, dated 5 November 1935, in person, and not the least impressed with his prospective appointment was Betty Drury, administrative assistant at the Committee’s oﬃce on West 45 St., New York City. Drury immediately wrote to Dr. Alfred E. Cohn of the Rockefeller Institute, the committee’s chair. A new application for a grant was made today, and I thought it interesting enough to write to you about it. . . . Once here, says Professor Cook, Herzfeld will be in demand at a number of universities and hence is not at all worried about the prospect of a permanent place for him. In fact Dr. Cook goes so far as to say that if he can only get Herzfeld here, it isn’t likely that NYU will be inclined to part with him! . . . This proposal seemed one of the most brilliant presented to us lately, and worth about four or ﬁve ordinary applications. I guess Herzfeld is just about the authority in his ﬁeld, isn’t he?—along with Professor Sarre, anyway. I know you see the two of them cited all the time as references.93

Drury also reported Cook’s visit about Herzfeld to the committee’s executive director, Dr. Stephen D. Duggan. “The proposal seemed particularly exciting to me—Herzfeld is such an important man. (I’ve been studying the very ﬁeld in which he specializes—Near Eastern Art—this semester with Professor Riefstahl, and Herzfeld’s publications, particularly on Samarra, seem to be treated like so many Bibles.)”94 92 Walter W. S. Cook to Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars, 5 November 1935; Herzfeld ﬁle, Papers of Emergency Committee. 93 Betty Drury to Alfred E. Cohn, 8 November 1935; Herzfeld ﬁle, Papers of Emergency Committee. 94 Drury to Stephen D. Duggan, 9 November 1935; Herzfeld ﬁle, Papers of Emergency Committee.

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That same week, Abraham Flexner also wrote to Cohn: “Herzfeld is, I am told, the most distinguished person in his ﬁeld, and if the Institute were ﬁnancially able to do it we should take him on at once.”95 Letters arrived from distinguished art historians at New York institutions: Rudolf M. Riefstahl, associate professor, New York University; M. S. Dimand, curator of Near Eastern art, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Meyer Schapiro, professor, Columbia University; and Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Felix Warburg, and Percy Straus.96 “The letters in support of Herzfeld for New York University continue to come in,” Betty Drury reported to the committee’s secretary, E. R. Murrow. “Dr. Cohn, I believe, favor[s] the application from the Institute for Advanced Study for Herzfeld. I don’t want to appear to be pulling too strongly for the ‘home team’ in this matter, but wanted to let you know of the volume of letters, like fan mail.”97 In the end, the committee awarded a grant for Herzfeld’s salary to the Institute of Advanced Study; at the height of the Great Depression, New York University was unable to guarantee a permanent position after two years, as the committee’s governing principles required. Thus Herzfeld joined the sizeable group of German scholars who ﬂed the Nazi regime. In his paper delivered at the Herzfeld symposium in May 2001, Peter Machinist pointed out that a strong drift of German scholars in all ﬁelds of research was in fact already well established, having begun in the nineteenth century. As in more recent years, the disproportionate number of highly qualiﬁed scholars and the limited number of positions available in Germany brought about this trend. Entire ﬁelds of research, such as Assyriology in the nineteenth century and art history in the 1920s and 1930s, were mainly introduced and nurtured by German émigrés. This trend peaked in the 1920s, when many privately funded American universities were in search of faculty, while German state-supported universities had to survive under greater ﬁnancial constraints. Therefore, as Machinist

95 Abraham Flexner to Alfred E. Cohn, 8 November 1935; Herzfeld ﬁle, Papers of Emergency Committee. 96 Felix M. Warburg, a member of the famous German Jewish banking family (and brother-in-law of Herzfeld’s former supporter, James Loeb), was well known for his support for Jewish refugees. See Ron Chernow, The Warburgs: The TwentiethCentury Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family (New York: Random House, 1993), esp. 388–89, 446–48. 97 Drury to Murrow, 18 November 1935; Herzfeld ﬁle, Papers of Emergency Committee.

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observed, although the emigration forced by the Third Reich sent many established scholars from Germany to the United States, the number of scholars entering the American academic system remained very large, but not exceptionally so.98 Although he was praised as the greatest living authority on Iranian history and archaeology in the United States, Herzfeld’s departure was not much regretted in Germany. One of the primary reasons for Herzfeld’s unpopularity in his native country was his deep mistrust of the notion of races as agents in history (and in the present). Yet, as Hauser elaborates, ethnic and racial explanations for historical developments, diﬀerences in material culture, and various evolutionary stages were at the core of much of ancient Near Eastern studies in the 1920s and 1930s. Herzfeld had to observe from Princeton how Persian studies, albeit within the fold of Aryan history, became a priority in German research. In 1938, three years after Herzfeld’s dismissal, Wilhelm Eilers was sent to Isfahan to establish a German institute that would include archaeological research among its pursuits. With Iran now high on the agenda, and with Germany’s strong political and economic interests, Herzfeld ﬁnally could have received the political and ﬁnancial support for his studies that he had needed a decade earlier. Instead, he had diﬃculty claiming his own pension. Drawing again on Herzfeld’s personnel ﬁle, which often allows the reconstruction of minute biographical details, Johannes Renger describes the scholar’s fruitless attempts to receive his pension outside Germany. As a former state employee, he was even obliged repeatedly to request permission to stay outside Germany as long as the state paid his pension into his Berlin account. Since currency transfer was illegal, Herzfeld decided to use his pension to ﬁnance his own publications, which he still wrote in German and published with German publishers, as Renger and Elizabeth R. Ettinghausen elaborate. 98 We very much regret that we cannot include here a written version of Machinist’s paper. See Henry Geitz, Jürgen Heideking, and Jürgen Herbst, eds., German Inﬂuences on Education in the United States to 1917, Publications of the German Historical Institute (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). On the German refugee scholars, see Colin Eisler, “Kunstgeschichte American Style: A Study in Migration,” in The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 544–629, which concludes with a list of European (chieﬂy German) émigré art historians. See also Ulrike Wendland, Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler (Munich: Saur, 1999).

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Herzfeld never became accustomed to his refugee situation, although he lived in far more comfortable circumstances than did most of those who were forced to leave. Personal anecdotes about Herzfeld in Princeton supplement the oﬃcial records of the Institute for Advanced Study and correspondence concerning his publications, and establish that he was welcomed (if not completely understood) in this rariﬁed scholarly community. Katherine and Myron Bement Smith, who had known Herzfeld in Iran, continued their acquaintance with him during his years at Princeton. In a letter to her husband written from Princeton in spring 1937, Katherine Smith brought him up to date on social news and on the activities of Near Eastern scholars. She described her ﬁrst meeting with the young Richard F. S. Starr, “who is spending the summer in the Einsteins’ house,” and whose account of Herzfeld reinforced the impression of a formal, absent-minded gentleman who was not quite at home in Princeton, either socially or intellectually. “Dick Starr likes Professor Herzfeld very much,” she wrote her husband. He says that Herzfeld has had great diﬃculty in keeping his social engagements. Leading citizens of Princeton would invite him for dinner and Herzfeld would fail to appear having forgotten the matter completely. When Herzfeld dined with the Starrs, they did not dare tell anyone else about it because everyone was so angry with Herzfeld; had they heard that he had dined with them, it would have made matters even worse. When Herzfeld was invited to have dinner at the home of the Flexners, he made a great eﬀort to remember the day and hour; he did this and arrived in tails to ﬁnd the Flexners already having a quiet family meal. He had arrived a week too soon.99

Even as he completed his formal academic training nearly thirty years earlier, as Kröger and Renger describe, Herzfeld’s professors recognized that he was ill suited to the teaching profession. Letters of support sent to the Emergency Committee stressed Herzfeld’s talents in communicating his work, and the text of a lecture on Sasanian art delivered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows that he could be a captivating, witty speaker. But he apparently found it diﬃcult to sustain the eﬀort of teaching at Princeton. “Dick Starr said that he is not getting much out of Herzfeld’s seminar,” Katherine Smith

99 Katherine Smith to Myron Bement Smith, 8 August 1937; Myron Bement Smith Papers, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

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reported to her husband. “Herzfeld usually takes one hour to answer the ﬁrst question. He is willing to discuss anything which is brought up. In so far as the students are concerned, it seems to be a matter of ﬁrst come ﬁrst served. One day it is Sassanian palaces. The next it is Persian politics, etc., etc. Teaching apparently irks the Professor.”100 It was in Princeton in 1943 that Elizabeth R. Ettinghausen ﬁrst met Herzfeld shortly after her arrival in the United States. Her husband-to-be, Richard Ettinghausen (1906–1979), who had left Germany in 1933, was one of Herzfeld’s closest contacts between 1935 and 1948. In her contribution based on the extensive correspondence between Herzfeld and Ettinghausen, and also generously drawing on her invaluable personal memories, she successfully recreates a vivid picture of Herzfeld’s later years. This is an exemplary study of the diﬃculties that a German scholar still rooted in the Kaiserreich faced in adjusting to life in a country where he never felt at home. Although revered at Princeton and in New York, Herzfeld harbored a genuine dislike of life in the United States. He retired at the age of sixty-ﬁve from Princeton in 1944. His pension from Princeton can hardly have been enough to sustain him in the way he was accustomed to living, and his German pension was out of reach. To supplement his income, Herzfeld ﬁnally sold his library, which was considered one of the best of its kind in the world.101 He also sold his collection of Near Eastern artifacts, along with his carpets and other household furnishings.102 As early as 1938, Herzfeld had sold Iranian bronzes, ceramics, and seals to the British Museum, but he retained most of his collection of antiquities until after World War II. Margaret Cool Root chronicles Herzfeld’s collection of prehistoric stamp seals, which he consigned to a New York gallery in 1945. 100 Katherine Smith to Myron Bement Smith, 8 August 1937; Myron Bement Smith Papers. 101 Notebooks N-93 and N-94, Ernst Herzfeld Papers, comprise a handwritten inventory of his library compiled in 1918; Herzfeld himself then estimated its value at about 20,000 German marks. In September 1943, when Herzfeld had oﬀered his library to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dimand reported that it consisted of about 4,000 books, many of which extremely rare and hard to come by (Herzfeld Archive, department of ancient Near Eastern art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). 102 The inventory catalogued as notebooks 89 and 90, Ernst Herzfeld Papers, preserves his annotations on the disposition of his collections until 1946, when he donated his papers to the Freer Gallery of Art. For sales of his furniture, carpets, and the like, see Sotheby Parke Bernet, Inc., catalogue of sale, 5–6 April 1945; 26–27 April 1945; for coins, see Numismatic Fine Arts, New York, catalogue of sale 25 March 1947.

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He sold most of his antiquities, however, to museums and other public collections, including the Field Museum of Natural History, the Oriental Institute, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The selling of his library and collection, aside from a personal need for money, might have also been a reaction to his retirement and his desire to leave the United States as soon as possible. We cannot know whether Herzfeld would have been willing to return to Germany, since he died before the political situation had cleared, but it seems doubtful. Until 1948, practically no scholars re-migrated. After 1948, of the approximately 2,400–2,500 scholars who had left Germany during the Third Reich, 26 percent of those born before 1913 (and, unlike Herzfeld, still alive in 1949) returned to Germany. Scholars in the humanities, arts, and social sciences (27 percent) were much more willing to return than those in the natural sciences (12 percent). Political refugees often re-migrated, while scholars of Jewish descent were understandably far more hesitant. In addition to those who decided to live in Germany again, 10 percent of all émigrés returned as visiting professors.103 Herzfeld’s correspondence demonstrates that this cosmopolitan individual who lived so much of his life outside Germany nonetheless had strong, positive feelings toward his native country, at least until World War II. We may speculate that his sentiment might have faded when he learned of the atrocities executed in Germany’s name. Certainly there were no obvious reasons for him to return to Germany. Beyond retirement age, he would have had no employment prospects; his only relatives, his sister and nephew, had emigrated to the United States in 1937. As Ettinghausen describes, Herzfeld was eager to return to the Near East as soon as possible. He went ﬁrst to Damascus and Aleppo, then moved on to Cairo. For one accustomed to traveling with plenty of books, it must have been diﬃcult to sell his library.104 But it helped him travel lightly, and the ﬁeld to which he now returned—his early work on Islamic monuments—was highly specialized. While in Cairo, he fell ill in the fall of 1947. He was taken

103 See Horst Möller, “Die Remigration von Wissenschaftlern nach 1945,” in Die Künste und die Wissenschaften im Exil 1933–1945, ed. Edith Böhne and Wolfgang Motzkau-Valeton (Gerlingen: Lambert Schneider, 1992), 601–14. 104 He repeatedly referred to books he read while traveling or carried while working. In Herzfeld, “ ‘Die Könige der Erde,’ ” 152, he explicitly states that he had all the pertinent literature on Qusayr ‘Amra with him in Persepolis.

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to Basel for medical treatment but never recovered, and he died on 20 January 1948. We could not, perhaps, much improve on M. S. Dimand’s assessment of Herzfeld’s accomplishments, communicated in 1935 to the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars: “His discoveries in Persia and Mesopotamia contributed entirely new material to our knowledge of Persian and early Islamic civilization. He is doubtless the greatest living authority in this ﬁeld, and there is hardly any branch of Oriental archaeology which does not owe him a great debt.”105 The highly spirited symposium from which this volume emerged and the various contributions to this book by scholars of so many diﬀerent academic disciplines vividly illustrate this appraisal. We hope that the book will contribute to a better understanding of this often controversial scholar and the history of scholarship on the Near East.

105 Dimand to Emergency Committee, 14 November 1935; Herzfeld ﬁle, Papers of Emergency Committee.

Fig. 1. The expedition to Assur, 1904–05. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 32, no. 113.

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Fig. 2. Relief of Ashurnasirpal, Nimrud. Limestone; height 2.23 m., width 1.65 m. Courtesy Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Vorderasiatisches Museum 943. Museum purchase, 1855.

Fig. 3. Ernst Herzfeld (center) at his command post in Kurdistan, World War I. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 10, no. 240.

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Fig. 4. Ancient Near Eastern galleries, Berlin Museum, 1911–30, as Herzfeld would have known them. Courtesy Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Vorderasiatisches Museum.

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Fig. 5. Alexander Langsdorﬀ, Ernst Herzfeld, and Friedrich Krefter at the Persepolis expedition house, ca. 1933. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 5, vol. 3, no. 65a.

44 ann c. gunter and stefan r. hauser

ERNST HERZFELD AND FRIEDRICH SARRE Jens Kröger

Die Erinnerung ist das einzige Paradies aus dem man nicht vertrieben werden kann. —Jean Paul, Impromptus

Ernst Herzfeld and Friedrich Sarre (1865–1945) were key ﬁgures in the ﬁelds of ancient Near Eastern and Islamic art and archaeology in Germany during the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century. Although best known for their collaboration on the excavations at Samarra, the Abbasid capital north of Baghdad (836–892), their professional relationship and friendship continued throughout their lives. This paper deals with their long and close relationship, from 1907 to 1945, and its implications for German scholarship on the Near East.1 Born in 1879, Ernst Herzfeld grew up in a rather typical German middle-class family in a conservative environment. In his ﬁnal school 1 For Herzfeld biographies, see Richard Ettinghausen, “In Memoriam: Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948),” Ars Islamica 15–16 (1951): 261–67; Neue Deutsche Biographie, s.v. “Herzfeld, Ernst Emil.” On Herzfeld in the context of European scholarship, see Robert Hillenbrand, “Creswell and Contemporary Central European Scholarship,” Muqarnas 8 (1991): 23–35. A curriculum vitae written by Herzfeld on 8 February 1915 in Asfeld-la-Ville during World War I is among the Ernst Herzfeld Papers, notebook 131, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as Ernst Herzfeld Papers). This article draws mainly from letters preserved in the Friedrich Sarre archive as well as in the Samarra excavations archive, both of which are housed in the Museum für Islamische Kunst in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz; unless otherwise speciﬁed, citations of archival sources refer to these records. It could not have been written without the help of Volkmar Enderlein, who read the letters in the diﬃcult handwriting of Sarre and Eduard Meyer. I was fortunate that he developed a keen interest in this topic, and I would like to acknowledge his help. This unique opportunity allowed me to use the correspondence extensively. This paper is a ﬁrst result of my research for a biography on Friedrich Sarre. I would like to thank Colleen Hennessey, archivist of the Ernst Herzfeld Papers, who was extremely helpful with my questions concerning the archives in Washington. I wish to thank both Stefan R. Hauser and Ann C. Gunter for their interest in the subject from the very beginning, for their questions, comments, numerous helpful suggestions, and editing. I am also grateful to Elke Niewöhner for her reading of the Anjuman logo. Annette Hagedorn was a constant help with her criticism; this paper would not have been written without her encouragement.

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papers he mentioned that he wanted to study medicine and become a medical doctor, just like his father.2 After completing school in 1897, however, he went to the Technische Hochschule, ﬁrst in Munich and then in Berlin-Charlottenburg, to become an architect. Yet, at the same time, he studied philosophy, art history, and Assyriology at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin and therefore must have had an interest in the ancient Near East from the very beginning. By June 1903, he had ﬁnished his architectural studies and earned the title of Königlicher Regierungsbauführer. A talented draftsman, he was asked to take part in an archaeological excavation of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, or German Oriental Society, at a site on the upper Tigris River later identiﬁed as ancient Assur. This experience opened up a whole new world for Herzfeld (ﬁg. 1). From Assur he visited the ruins of Samarra and, before returning, traveled to Pasargadae and Persepolis and from there through Persia and the Caucasus to Berlin.3 His ﬁrst journey through the Near East thus already took him to most of the places in which he developed and maintained an interest throughout his life.

The Beginning of Their Relationship Back in Berlin late in January 1906, Herzfeld worked on a manuscript devoted to the city of Samarra. His study consisted of a survey of Samarra drawn from the works of Islamic historians and geographers and thus along the lines of a book by his professor, Paul Schwarz, whom Herzfeld speciﬁcally mentioned.4 When the manuscript was 2 Herzfeld to Samuel Guyer, 14 May 1909, Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie, Freiburg. I owe a copy of this letter and further insight into the important HerzfeldGuyer correspondence to the kindness of Gabriele Mietke, whose contribution to this volume treats the subject in detail. 3 Herzfeld must have made plans for this trip before going to Assur. This does not seem unusual for someone who read during long nights as a student such works as Josef Markwart, Èrànsahr nach der Geographie des Ps. Moses Xorenac’i: Mit historischkritischem Kommentar und historischen und topographischen Exkursen (Berlin: Weidmann, 1901). On the journey homeward, see Margaret Cool Root, “The Herzfeld Archive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” MMJ 11 (1976): 124; and Ettinghausen’s contribution, this volume. 4 Paul Schwarz, Iran im Mittelalter: nach den arabischen Geographen (Leipzig: O. Harrassowitz, 1896–1921), the ﬁrst part of which had been published as his habilitation at the University of Leipzig in 1896. Herzfeld’s Samarra. Aufnahmen und Untersuchungen zur islamischen Archäologie appeared in Berlin in 1907.

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completed later the same year, Herzfeld presented it to Bruno Güterbock, then Schriftführer of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, hoping that it might be published in the society’s journal. Güterbock passed the manuscript on to Friedrich Sarre, an authority on Islamic art and archaeology (ﬁg. 2). Güterbock and Sarre were acquainted through their common membership in the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft. On 7 November 1906, Sarre wrote the ﬁrst of his letters to Herzfeld that is preserved in the archives of the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin. He told Herzfeld that Güterbock had asked him for an opinion on the manuscript, and that both he and Güterbock had reservations about publishing it in the Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft. Furthermore, Sarre thought the study would have to remain a preliminary eﬀort until extensive research on the site had been completed. He asked Herzfeld to be cautious, as the publication could prompt others to ﬁnd Samarra a place of great interest and invited him to come to the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum on one of the following Mondays to discuss his research.5 As this letter criticized his work instead of oﬀering instant approval, Herzfeld seems to have been upset by it. A ﬁrst meeting does not seem to have taken place in 1906, because in a second letter, dated 14 February 1907, Sarre was very careful. He informed Herzfeld that Eduard Meyer, the famous scholar of ancient history at the University of Berlin, had spoken to him about Herzfeld’s research. Meyer had also notiﬁed him that the book on Samarra would be published with funds provided by the Königlich-Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Sarre again asked Herzfeld to come to the museum on a Monday, when he was usually there, to discuss matters of mutual interest. It is not known when the ﬁrst meeting actually took place.

5 “So sehr ich mich über Ihre Ausführungen gefreut habe, um so mehr bedaure ich, daß Ihre Folgerungen nur auf einem sehr kurzem Studium der betr. Denkmäler basieren; Sie haben, so viel ich mich aus Ihrer Einleitung erinnere, kaum alle verschiedenen Ruinenplätze besucht und der Moschee und dem Minarette auch nur einen Tag, wenn ich nicht irre, gewidmet.—Was uns vor allem nottut, sind jedoch möglichst sorgfältige und eingehende Aufnahmen der früh-islamischen Denkmäler.— Sie setzen sich bei Ihren Ausführungen oft in Gegensatz zu Strzygowski und anderen verdienten Forschern; ob Sie oder er im Recht sind, kann ich nicht entscheiden, aber man wird jedenfalls von Ihnen ein mehr durchgearbeitetes Beweismaterial, das sich auf eingehendere Aufnahmen stützt, verlangen müssen.—Ich sehe Ihre Arbeit als eine wertvolle Vorarbeit für ein eingehendes Studium und eine genaue Aufnahme aller Denkmäler von Samarra an.” Sarre to Herzfeld, 7 November 1906.

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In the conversation that ensued, Sarre must have asked Herzfeld to publish the Old Persian material from Pasargadae and Persepolis that he had collected during his journey in a joint publication, to which Sarre would contribute his studies of Sasanian rock reliefs. Sarre had traveled extensively in Persia during the years 1897 and 1900 and collected material on Achaemenid, Parthian, and Sasanian art. The meeting eventually resulted in the ﬁrst joint book of their long career, Iranische Felsreliefs, which appeared from the Berlin publisher Ernst Wasmuth in 1910.6 A second topic of this meeting must have concerned future plans, as Sarre was anxious to recruit Herzfeld for his journey through Mesopotamia. Sarre must have proposed to pay Herzfeld for his contribution to the Iranische Felsreliefs as well as for the Mesopotamian trip. On 8 August 1907, Sarre agreed to pay Herzfeld the sums he had requested for both undertakings. In July 1907, Sarre proposed the title and subtitle of the joint publication, Iranische Felsreliefs.7 It was already evident that Herzfeld would write the major chapters of the book, and Sarre was therefore anxious to acknowledge that he himself had assembled the plates.8 This, then, was the beginning of their long relationship, which lasted until Sarre’s death in 1945.

Herzfeld, and Friedrich and Maria Sarre When they ﬁrst met, Herzfeld was twenty-eight and Sarre forty-two. Although they were thus fourteen years apart, their diﬀerence in age

6 Wasmuth had already published Sarre’s Denkmäler Persischer Baukunst, which appeared in fascicules beginning in 1901. 7 Only the main title ﬁnally remained unchanged. Sarre initially proposed the title Iranische Felsreliefs. Original-Aufnahmen und Beschreibung persischer Felsreliefs und Denkmäler aus der Zeit der Achämeniden und Sassaniden von Friedrich Sarre unter Mitwirkung von Ernst Herzfeld. Sarre to Herzfeld, 25 July 1907. 8 Sarre acquired photographs during all of his journeys, but never mentioned the photographers by name. Many of the plates published in Iranische Felsreliefs consist of photographs by Antoin Sevruguin, which are reproduced without acknowledgement. See Corien J. M. Vuurman and Theo H. Martens, “Early Photography in Iran and the Career of Antoin Sevruguin,” in Sevruguin and the Persian Image: Photographs of Iran, 1870–1930, ed. Frederick N. Bohrer (Washington, D.C.: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 25–26. In one letter, Sarre mentions photographs of Achaemenid ruins that had been taken by him, that he had bought, or that had been given to him by Hermann Burchardt and Oskar Mann. Sarre to Herzfeld, 24 June 1907.

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was certainly less important than their respective places in the German social hierarchy. Born in 1865, Sarre came from a family of French Protestant descent and was able to live the life of a wealthy individual. As his parents died early, his aunt, Elise Wentzel-Heckmann (1833– 1914) took their place. The heiress of the steel magnates Heckmann, she could provide Sarre with the funds he needed for his projects.9 In 1900 Sarre married Maria Humann, daughter of Carl Humann, the excavator of Pergamon (ﬁg. 3). She was not only ten years younger but from an entirely diﬀerent background, having been raised in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Mediterranean city of Smyrna in the late years of the Ottoman Empire. She often spoke French or Greek and mixed both into her German. A high-spirited individual, she loved to entertain guests in the neo-Renaissance-style house built for the couple (and, later, their four children) in the “Villenkolonie” of Neubabelsberg, Berlin. As Herzfeld himself later recalled in his obituary of Friedrich Sarre, it “was a distinction to be admitted to the house which under Maria Sarre’s guidance, became a center of hospitality, known and admired by many people. . . .”10 Herzfeld was ﬁrst invited to Neubabelsberg on 18 August 1907, and it was here that he met scholars and members of society over the years. He was always among Maria Sarre’s many admirers and dedicated his book, Am Tor von Asien, to her, giving her the title Shirin-i Zaman.11 Only four years older than Herzfeld, Maria Sarre may have very much been the feminine ideal for him. His fondness for her found expression in a collection of small animals that he acquired especially for her and presented to her after returning from his travels.12 The only known photograph of Maria Sarre and Ernst Herzfeld was taken in April 1908, when Herzfeld and Moritz Sobernheim were on their way to record monuments in the Syrian cities of Aleppo, Hama, and Homs for the corpus of Arabic inscriptions. Maria Sarre was traveling to

9 She was the only woman to become an honorary member of the Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften and was much involved in philanthropy. See Friedrich Sarre, “Elise Wentzel-Heckmann zum Gedächtnis, zum 100. Geburtstage am 20. März,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 19 March 1933. 10 Ernst Herzfeld, “Friedrich Sarre,” Ars Islamica 11–12 (1946): 211. 11 Herzfeld, Am Tor von Asien, viii. 12 Many of these animals were shown in an exhibition in 1932: Sammlung F. u. M. Sarre, Katalog der Ausstellung im Städelschen Kunstinstitut (Frankfurt am Main: n.p., 1932). After 1945, Maria Sarre reminded Herzfeld that they had intended to write a catalogue of this collection.

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Egypt on the same boat (ﬁg. 4). After the end of World War II, and after Sarre’s death, she wrote very moving letters to Herzfeld.13

Ernst Herzfeld Herzfeld never married, although he was very fond of some of the women he met. At an early age he found it diﬃcult to make conversation with women because he was apparently very shy in their company, thus hindering a deeper relationship. He always maintained an extremely close relationship with his family. Next to nothing is known about his older sister, Elizabeth, except that she died in 1934. Charlotte Brodführer (later Bradford), his younger sister, was born in 1887. She was unhappily married to the architect and Kgl. Regierungsbauführer Carl Theodor Brodführer and divorced him in 1923. During World War I, Brodführer drew a number of reconstructions of Islamic buildings in Baghdad, Mosul, and Nisibis, which Herzfeld published in 1920.14 Charlotte always maintained close ties with her brother Ernst and even visited him in Iran in 1930. She knew both Friedrich and Maria Sarre and corresponded with Maria at least until her brother’s death in 1948. In 1937, she emigrated to the United States. Aside from his family, Herzfeld had a close relationship with the Georg Hahn family in Tiergartenstrasse and with Moritz Sobernheim. Both of these men were friends and collectors. Herzfeld’s parents had probably moved from Celle to Berlin at a date not known and, beginning at least from 1905, lived at 37 Schaperstraße, in the center of the western part of the city. Herzfeld found an apartment for himself not far away, in a house at 5 Nürnberger Platz. He kept this apartment from 1909 until he was forced to leave Berlin in 1935. It always remained a sort of base camp for him (ﬁg. 5). When in Iran during the 1920s, he often complained about the high cost of maintaining his Berlin apartment. Herzfeld completed his dissertation on Pasargadae in 1907. The defense, or Disputatio, was held on 21 February 1907, and Herzfeld was presented with his doctoral degree on 5 August 1907. Eduard Meyer was head of the Ph.D. advisory board and also wrote the opinion. Reinhart Kekulé von Stradonitz, the classical archaeologist, agreed 13 14

These are preserved in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers, notebook 131. Sarre and Herzfeld, Archäologische Reise, vol. 2.

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with Meyer’s opinion without adding further comments. In 1909 Herzfeld qualiﬁed as a university teacher.15 Eduard Meyer, with whom Herzfeld always remained in contact, was of major importance for his career. Until his death in 1930, Meyer was inﬂuential not only in university matters, but also as an adviser to German institutions in fostering scientiﬁc research. Sarre and Meyer, of course, knew each other well, and a letter from Meyer to Sarre in 1911 concerning the Samarra project shows the very special importance of this connection. Herzfeld had asked Meyer about obtaining a leave from the university. Meyer told him, and also wrote to Sarre, that it mattered little whether Herzfeld taught historical geography at the university; since the young scholar did not represent a major ﬁeld, he could not hope to obtain a good university position. Instead, Meyer suggested, Herzfeld should write substantial publications on monuments and excavations as he had already begun to do. This is what Herzfeld himself most enjoyed, and it was primarily due to Meyer’s support that Herzfeld was able to travel, excavate, and publish as he did until 1931, although from 1919 he was paid as a university teacher by the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität. This letter clearly demonstrates Meyer’s insight into Herzfeld’s special abilities, what a perceptive scholar he was, and how inﬂuential he was in Herzfeld’s life.16 15 Although a habilitation thesis is never mentioned, either by Herzfeld or his bibliographers, his personnel ﬁle in Berlin provides information on this subject. See the contributions by Hauser and Renger, this volume. 16 “Wenn Herzfeld ein Hauptfach verträte, in dem er streben müßte bald eine Berufung oder ein Ordinariat zu erhalten, so würde ich gegen eine so lange Unterbrechung seiner Lehrthätigkeit Bedenken tragen. Aber sein Fach ist ja in der regulairen Organisation der Universitäten überhaupt nicht vertreten, und die Aussichten auf irgend welche Beförderung an der Universität sind ansonst gering—darüber habe ich vor seiner Habilitation eingehend mit ihm gesprochen. So kommt m.E. wenig darauf an, ob er hier ein Semester weniger oder mehr liest; die Aussichten für sein Vorwärtskommen liegen doch ausschließlich in seinen literarischen, an die Denkmäler und Ausgrabungen anschließenden Productionen und in dieser Forscherthätigkeit an Ort und Stelle selbst. Ich meine daher, er soll den Orient jetzt nicht verlassen, ehe er alles Material, das er zur Verarbeitung braucht, gesammelt hat, und lieber länger als kürzer dort bleiben; die Gefahr der Überstürzung ist die, die ihm am meisten droht und die nachher seine literarischen Veröﬀentlichungen und deren Wirkung schädigen kann. Ich habe überhaupt Besorgniss, dass er sich leicht oder vielleicht gerade in der Folge seiner starken Arbeitskraft und seines raschen Urtheils zu viel aufbürdet und nachher der Sachen nicht völlig Herr wird; da muss er im Orient doppelt alle Überhastung vermeiden. . . . Die Hauptsache für ihn ist, dass er gute Publicationen liefert, die allgemein als solche anerkannt werden; dagegen muss die Lehrthätigkeit gegebenenfalls in den Hintergrund treten.” Meyer to Sarre, 5 August 1911; Meyer’s emphasis.

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When Herzfeld and Sarre met in 1907, Sarre was already a wellknown ﬁgure in Berlin’s scholarly community, especially within the small group concerned with Near Eastern art. He was head of the Islamic department at the Royal Museums, serving without a salary, and thus could decide freely how to spend his time. Sarre had traveled widely in the Near East between 1895 and 1899, and as an art collector had assembled a collection of Islamic art, part of which had been on loan to the museum since 1904.17 Since 1894, he had been searching for a worthwhile place to excavate with the funds at his disposal. Having considered Samos and what was later to be known as Hittite Bo
The Excavations at Samarra on the Tigris Upon returning from the Euphrates and Tigris journey, Sarre began preparations to excavate at Samarra. After personal negotiations with Osman Hamdy Bey in Istanbul, Sarre ﬁnally sent a formal request to the Ottoman administration for permission to excavate in Samarra. The request was forwarded to the Ottoman authorities in Baghdad and in Samarra. Both Herzfeld and Sarre knew Osman Hamdy Bey personally. Herzfeld had ﬁrst visited him in his atelier in Istanbul with Theodor Wiegand and Adolf Freiherr Marschall von Bieberstein

17 His collection embraced not only Near Eastern and Islamic art but also Greek and Roman art, European paintings, and especially Far Eastern art. 18 Friedrich Sarre, “Reise in Mesopotamien,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin (1909): 423–29. On this trip Herzfeld sketched the maps and made drawings, took squeezes, and read the inscriptions while Sarre took photographs and notes. 19 Sarre and Herzfeld, Archäologische Reise, 1:52–109.

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on the return journey from Iran in 1906.20 On 1 February 1910, Sarre and Herzfeld received the news that the local political—not the military—authorities in Samarra had no objections to the excavations. As this did not constitute the oﬃcial ﬁrman required, long months of waiting followed. Osman Hamdy Bey died on 2 February 1910. His brother Halil Edhem Bey, who succeeded him, pursued the Samarra request. Permission to excavate was ﬁnally granted to Friedrich Sarre as a private person on 5 August 1910. As had been earlier arranged between Sarre and Wilhelm von Bode of the Royal Museums, a formal agreement was set up with the Royal Museums as a state institution.21 Already on 29 November 1909, the Royal Museums had agreed with Sarre that funds would be raised by the museums should Sarre be unable to secure adequate private funds for the Samarra excavations. On 7 June 1910, Sarre obtained through his acquaintance with Arthur von Gwinner the ﬁrst ten thousand Reichsmarks from the Deutsche Bank. Two months later, on 3 August 1910, Sarre’s cousin Georg Heckmann added ﬁve thousand Reichsmarks to the funds. An agreement between the Royal Museums and both Sarre and Herzfeld was signed on 1 October 1910, naming Sarre as head of the excavations and Herzfeld as ﬁeld director.22 The agreement included detailed paragraphs concerning all key issues. Finds from the excavations were to be secured for the Royal Museums. In addition to responsibility for ﬁnancial matters, Herzfeld’s duties in Samarra included a weekly report to Sarre and the publication of the results. Diaries, notebooks, photographs, and drawings of the excavations were to be handed over to the Royal Museums in Berlin.23

20

Ernst Herzfeld Papers, notebook 82, 127–28. Both Bode and Sarre were of the opinion that this should be a private enterprise on Sarre’s part. The reason for this somewhat unusual procedure probably was due to the Mschatta aftermath. See Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 203–6. 22 Herzfeld worked as a volunteer at the Royal Museums in September 1908, probably in preparation for Samarra and so that Bode could become acquainted with him. 23 Leaving aside the glass negatives, the diaries, notebooks, and drawings were never completely handed over to the State Museums. Beginning in 1945, Herzfeld tried to proﬁt from the Samarra excavations and wrote letters along these lines to the State Department in Washington, D.C., to Ernst Kühnel at the State Museums in Berlin, and to Maria Sarre in Ascona. He claimed for himself half of the value of the objects appropriated by the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, which he put at US$40,000. See the undated statement on the Samarra excavations; letters from Maria Sarre to 21

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Herzfeld was able to leave for Baghdad a mere ten days later, on 10 October 1910, because he had been in constant touch with Sarre and thus was well informed of progress on all aspects of the excavations; he had also arranged for the expedition equipment to be sent ahead to Baghdad in August 1910. Many arrangements had been made before either the funds or the excavation permit had actually arrived. As one of the principal organizers of the “Ausstellung von Meisterwerken Muhammedanischer Kunst” in Munich, Sarre was absent from Berlin for long periods during 1910 and could not himself make arrangements for the excavations. During the ﬁrst campaign, Herzfeld remained in Samarra from January 1911 until 1 January 1912 (ﬁg. 6). Sarre admired Herzfeld for what he accomplished in the summer of 1911 despite many instances of sabotage against the excavations by means of the Ottoman provincial authorities in Samarra. These troubles nearly caused both the end of the ﬁrst campaign and a nervous breakdown on Herzfeld’s part. Sarre was in Samarra only very brieﬂy, from 23 November until 28 December 1911, and dealt with the ceramic ﬁnds.24 He urged Herzfeld to take a longer break. The second campaign began on 1 December 1912, and the excavation closed on 7 July 1913 without any intention of continuing. Sarre was in Samarra with Ernst Kühnel, his assistant at the museum, in May 1913; Kühnel remained until June 1913. For reasons unknown to me, Herzfeld and Kühnel did not like each other; therefore it was not Kühnel but Samuel Guyer who accompanied Herzfeld on the ﬁrst campaign in 1911. While some of the ﬁnds from both campaigns were sent to Istanbul and to Berlin, a large portion remained in Samarra and was stored in a government building before negotiations with the Ottoman government were to begin. The Ottoman authorities had not yet decided whether to send the ﬁnds to Istanbul or to install a provincial museum in Baghdad. World War I, however, changed all of these plans. After the end of the excavations in 1913, arrangements were made for Herzfeld to publish the results. As initially agreed, Herzfeld was to Herzfeld, 7 November 1945 and 24 January 1946; and letters from Herzfeld to Maria Sarre, 14 December 1946, in Ernst Herzfeld Papers, notebook 131. Maria Sarre, who was skeptical from the outset, told Herzfeld that it would not work because there was no one to whom one could present any claims. 24 Friedrich Sarre, Die Keramik von Samarra, vol. 2, Die Ausgrabungen von Samarra, Forschungen zur islamischen Kunst, no. 2 (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1925).

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publish the topography and architecture of the site, while Sarre was to publish the small ﬁnds, especially the ceramics. Herzfeld received a ﬁrst payment of six hundred Reichsmarks of the annual amount of twelve hundred Reichsmarks agreed upon in 1914 for publishing the results, but the outbreak of World War I halted plans for future payments.25 The excavations at Samarra proved to be a great success for the museum’s Islamic department. A signiﬁcant number of ﬁnds had been transferred to Berlin and were to be displayed in a special Samarra gallery in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum.26 Preliminary work had been ﬁnished, and the gallery was scheduled to open in August 1914; however, due to the outbreak of the war, this had to be postponed until a later date. The Samarra ﬁnds were eventually shipped to London in eightyﬁve cases, and in 1921 the British government proposed a partition of the ﬁnds. Herzfeld, who was in touch with the distinguished Persian scholar Edward G. Browne, was invited to London in 1921 both to study the ﬁnds for his publications and to take part in partitioning the small ﬁnds, as it had been agreed that a number of diﬀerent museums should each receive a share.27 At the end of his stay in London, he prepared a very detailed report on his work in the British Museum and the importance of the Samarra ﬁnds and sent it to Winston Churchill, secretary of state for the colonies, in Downing Street.28 Eight cases arrived in Berlin in June 1922, their shipping costs paid by Herzfeld’s friend Georg Hahn. The Samarra gallery 25 Herzfeld returned to Samarra for a short campaign in September/October 1930 and was shocked by the destruction to the site. In 1921 he spent a considerable time in London studying some of the ﬁnds that had ﬁnally arrived there. His and Sarre’s main goal in these years was to get some of these ﬁnds to Berlin; they ﬁnally succeeded in 1922. 26 Friedrich Sarre, “Die Aufstellung der Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen von Samarra im Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, Berliner Museen,” Berliner Museen. Berichte aus den preussischen Kunstsammlungen 43:5–6 (1922): 49–60. 27 “I would be glad if you would write privately and encourage him to come, of course. If he won’t come we must try Sarre.” Lawrence “adopts the curious way of asking me to intervene and endeavour to persuade you to come.” Browne continued: “I am sure, that the Middle East Department, the Museum, Sir Thomas Arnold, Sir Denison Ross, and of course myself, would do all in our power to make your stay in England pleasant if you decided to come.” Herzfeld was invited to give lectures on Paikuli. Browne to Herzfeld, 6 June 1921, quoting a letter from Colonel Lawrence of the new Middle East department. 28 Herzfeld to secretary of state for the colonies, 12 September 1921; receipt acknowledged by the secretary of state for the colonies, 5 October 1921.

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of the Islamic department was eventually inaugurated in 1922 and remained open until 1931 in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum (ﬁg. 7). It was only after the proofs for the ﬁrst two volumes of the Archäologische Reise im Euphrat- und Tigrisgebiet had already been printed in 1911 that Sarre conceived the idea of publishing them and the results of Samarra in a series.29 He proposed the series title Forschungen zur islamischen Kunst. The idea came about because in 1911 Elise Wentzel-Heckmann promised an annual sum of ten thousand Reichsmarks for the study and publication of Islamic art and archaeology. Less than a month later, this amount was transferred to the KaiserWilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften as a fund to be used for Sarre’s projects. A special committee to approve the projects, the Kuratorium für Islamische Archäologie, was set up under the chairmanship of Adolf von Harnack. As Sarre observed in a letter in 1912, “Had it not been for my aunt and additional contributions by private sponsors, Samarra could not have been excavated.”30 A note gives the total amount for excavations and publications as one hundred forty-ﬁve thousand Reichsmarks, of which eighty thousand came from the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften.31 The series Forschungen zur islamischen Kunst proved to be the most inﬂuential vehicle in Germany in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century for publications devoted to Islamic art. It did not exclusively publish works on Islamic art, as Herzfeld’s second volume on the Paikuli monument and Spanner’s and Guyer’s volume on Rusafa also appeared in the series.32 With respect to the relationship between Herzfeld and Sarre, the series generated a lifelong correspondence concerning funds (in connection with the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft) and manuscripts (with the Berlin publishing house of Dietrich Reimer).33

29

Sarre to Herzfeld, 26 April 1911. Sarre to Wiegand, 4 April 1912. 31 Sarre to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, 5 May 1919; Aktennotiz über Förderung der islamischen Archäologie durch die Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, 8 July 1932. 32 Herzfeld, Paikuli (1924); Harry Spanner and Samuel Guyer, Rusafa: Die Wallfahrtsstadt des Heiligen Sergios, Forschungen zur islamischen Kunst, no. 4 (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1926). 33 The driving force behind this publishing house was Ernst Vohsen, who died in 1919 and whom Sarre had known for twenty-ﬁve years. Herzfeld’s foreword to Paikuli (1924) also paid tribute to his publisher. 30

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The Disaster of World War I On 4 August 1914, Herzfeld was ordered to war in France, and he even took with him on this campaign the large plans of Samarra. Sarre was in charge of supplies on the eastern front. In 1915 both Herzfeld and Sarre received orders to go to the Near East.34 In February 1916, Herzfeld was commanded to the staﬀ of Fieldmarschall von der Goltz for special assignment in eastern Turkey and later for a special mission in Iran. On 8 February 1917 he was with the cartographic mission until the retreat from Baghdad at the end of the same month; on 11 March 1917, the British captured Baghdad. Herzfeld was Etappenoﬃzier and Standortkommandant in Samarra until 13 February 1917. Having been appointed Rittmeister on 30 March 1917, he returned to Berlin, suﬀering from malaria. In September 1917 he was again assigned to the army’s cartography section.35 In 1918 Sarre became ill and thus could not be sent to the Caucasus. During the war, both Herzfeld and Sarre looked after the storage of excavation ﬁnds in Samarra. Sarre was at the site in the summer of 1916 and found everything unchanged; Herzfeld did the same when he was in Samarra in the spring of 1917. In the autumn of 1918, Herzfeld assumed responsibility for additional chapters of the last volumes of the Archäologische Reise im Euphrat- und Tigrisgebiet as they had originally been planned. During the war years he had been able to work on the Samarra material, and he had also used his time in Iraq to renew study of the buildings of Baghdad and Mosul. Thus he was able to add to the material he had already collected in 1907–8, which allowed him to write his unsurpassed chapters on these towns.36 In western Iran he carried out research

34 For both Herzfeld’s and Sarre’s activities during the war, see Friedrich Sarre, “Kunstwissenschaftliche Arbeit während des Weltkrieges in Mesopotamien, OstAnatolien, Persien und Afghanistan,” in Kunstschutz im Krieg, ed. Paul Clemen (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1919), 2:191–202. 35 See the handwritten curriculum vitae in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers, notebook 131. 36 Sarre and Herzfeld, Archäologische Reise, 2:94–205, esp. 205 n. 1: “Ich habe 1916 eine Karte von Mosul und Umgebung aufgenommen, die in der Kartographischen Abteilung des Stellvertretetenden Generalstabes der Armee 1917 im Maßstab 1:20000 unter Hinzufügung der Trace der geplanten Baghdadbahn erschienen ist.” He was in Mosul from June until mid-September 1916 with Herzog Adolf Friedrich von Mecklenburg. Some of the material he collected in 1916 was lost. Ibid. 2:203–304.

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at several diﬀerent sites, including Taq-i Bustan and Bisotun, which enabled him to publish his book Am Tor von Asien in 1920. The end of World War I and Germany’s defeat resulted in numerous diﬃculties. Sarre and Herzfeld became deeply pessimistic about Germany’s situation. The demise of the German Kaiserreich was a complete disaster for both men, and they could not imagine how a good future would be possible. For Sarre it also meant ﬁnancial problems, which forced him to become a state employee as head of the Islamic department in 1921. On this occasion, he presented the major part of his collection as a gift to the State Museums. Herzfeld became a Professor Ordinarius at the Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversität in 1920.37 In 1919 and 1920 Herzfeld spent several months in the Schloßhotel in Linderhof in the Bavarian Alps, where he found the tranquility he needed to work on his publications. Linderhof ’s chief attraction is a palace built for the Bavarian king Ludwig II and a Moorish kiosk in its park. Perhaps the romanticism of the Orientalist atmosphere situated in the Bavarian Alps charmed him. During this period Linderhof was the only place Herzfeld could ﬁnd the necessary calm to work, and his letters to Sarre have a more personal tone. A letter dated 31 May 1920, written while he was working on the manuscript of Am Tor von Asien, gives a good idea of his state of mind. Like Sarre, Herzfeld was melancholy and pessimistic about the future. He believed that the Allied Orientalist societies wanted Germany to be expelled from archaeological work in the Near East. Like Sarre, however, he also saw that it would be a mistake to cut all ties because it would be impossible to work without international connections. “Our dignity is the only thing that remains, and that can only be maintained with the greatest caution,” he wrote.38

37 “Meine Professur, die mich natürlich sehr erfreut hat, und auf die ich gar nicht gerechnet hatte, ist wohl eine ordentliche, aber eine persönliche natürlich, und es ist mit ihr keine materielle Aenderung meiner Lage verknüpft. Ich sage das nicht um zu klagen, sondern nur, weil man meist glaubt, dass ich nunmehr ein Riesengehalt bekäme, was nicht der Fall ist. Die Bedeutung liegt darin, dass ich damit auf manche Dinge an der Universität und rein wissenschaftlicher Art Einﬂuss bekommen kann, die mir sonst verschlossen geblieben wären. Und zusammenhängen thut die Ernennung mit der “Entgreisung” der Universitäten, und war natürlich ein Ueberraschung Beckers für mich, begründet mit dem Erscheinen des Reisewerks. So sind Sie selbst wieder indirect mit an dieser Ernennung ursächlich beteiligt.” Herzfeld to Sarre, 9 August 1920. 38 Herzfeld to Sarre, 31 May 1920.

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Their Personal Relationship From the very beginning, Sarre displayed the ability to work well with other scholars. These included architects such as Bruno Schulz and the Islamic scholars Max van Berchem, Bernhard Moritz, and Eugen Mittwoch. His relationship with Herzfeld, however, was much more intense, though not always entirely harmonious. Sarre was modest, at times shy, a person who kept himself in the background; he was thus predestined to work with other scholars. Herzfeld was the opposite, bursting with energy and full of ideas. He had a sharp tongue and thus easily made enemies. As early as 1905, when he left Assur, he already had many of the members of the Deutsche OrientGesellschaft against him, including Walter Andrae, Julius Jordan, and Robert Koldewey. Letters Herzfeld wrote to Samuel Guyer in 1909 show that initially he thought himself much superior to Sarre. He wrote to Guyer that he “had a number of quarrels with Sarre but later on ties were always closer. He couldn’t write in detail because it would make a book.”39 Sarre, for his part, wrote about Herzfeld to Theodor Wiegand in 1910: “Conﬁdentially, I would like to ask you the favor of sending all matters concerning Samarra to my address and not to Herzfeld. He tends to overstep his authority, and he makes himself important. He is extremely ambitious and active. The Samarra excavations are my plan and I would like to keep my hands on this project; and due to my wish the museum administration has allowed me to look for the architect.”40 After a scholarly clash between Herzfeld and the art historian Josef Strzygowski, Sarre wrote to Strzygowski: “I personally have come to know Herzfeld on a long expedition, and later on during the publication, as a very decent, industrious, precise, and very intelligent man. I am very glad that I have found Herzfeld as a colleague, and you will ﬁnd it only natural that I will protest against any attacks on his person, should they be unjustiﬁed.”41 In later years, however, especially beginning in the 1920s, Herzfeld was more favorably disposed toward Sarre and realized that he beneﬁted

39 Herzfeld to Guyer, 24 October 1909, Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie, Freiburg. 40 Sarre to Wiegand, 2 February 1910. 41 Sarre to Strzygowski, 5 October 1910. Herzfeld copied this passage from Sarre’s letter.

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considerably from him; this is demonstrated by his preface to Am Tor von Asien.42 In a letter to Sarre written from Linderhof, Herzfeld also communicated about a personal topic: “It seems much better not to marry when I see all the couples of my age around me. I am telling you this only that you may not believe that the purpose of my constant journeys is nothing but pleasure-seeking. I cannot live at home anymore and cannot work there. Here in Linderhof I can ﬁnd inner and outer calm and it is wonderful.”43 During the years in Iran, especially toward the end, Sarre became practically the only person who kept Herzfeld informed about what was happening in Germany.44 As Sarre often complained about museum matters, Herzfeld was grateful to Sarre for having advised him in earlier years not to work in a museum.45

The Years in Iran: Part I, 1923–25, The Gesellschaft zur Förderung von Ausgrabungen und Forschungsreisen GmbH Sarre (but not Herzfeld) found himself on the so-called “Black” or Persian List drawn up in 1919, which banned those listed from visiting Iran for ten years.46 It was, of course, clear to both that the

42 “Seit vielen Jahren, in gemeinsamer wissenschaftlicher Arbeit, auf gemeinsamen Reisen und bei Grabungen, sind unsere Beziehungen immer engere geworden.” Herzfeld, Am Tor von Asien, viii. 43 Herzfeld to Sarre, 31 May 1920. 44 “Ihr Brief vom 14 Mai war mir eine große Freude. Sie sind der einzige, der mir noch schreibt. Allmählich hören alle Verbindungen mit zu Hause auf. Da die meisten, auf deren Urteil es einem ankam, nicht mehr leben, ist das weniger schlimm.” Herzfeld to Sarre, 6 June 1931, from Persepolis. 45 “Wissenschaftliche Arbeit bringt nie Ärger mit sich, nur Freude, und ich bin mir täglich bewußt, wie gut ich es habe. Ich denke auch oft, wie richtig Sie mir vor Jahren, als ich nicht wusste was ich anfangen sollte, vom Museum abrieten!” Herzfeld to Sarre, 21 May 1925. 46 Wilhelm Litten, Persien von der “pénétration paciﬁque” zum “Protektorat.” Urkunden und Tatsachen zur Geschichte der europäischen “pénétration paciﬁque” in Persian 1860 –1919, Veröﬀentlichungen der Deutsch-Persischen Gesellschaft e.V. (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1920), 197. See also the foreword to Friedrich Sarre, Die Kunst des alten Persien, viii. The Revue du Monde Musulman 54 (1923): 196–99, gives a complete list of names (“Une liste noire de 104 interdits de séjour”), and 199 n. 1 mentions Herzfeld: “L’archéologue Herzfeld, qui n’y ﬁgure pas, alors qu’on y trouve ses deux compagnons de voyage, von Oppenheim et F. Sarre, vient d’être nommé par le Gouvernement britannique à la direction des fouilles de Samarra (1923) en Mésopotamie.” I am grateful to Hans-Ulrich Seidt for providing this reference. In his 1921 report to the secretary of state for the colonies, after describing the importance of Samarra, Herzfeld wrote:

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Iranians had not initiated the list. In any case, the ban was already lifted in 1921, providing an opportunity for Sarre and Herzfeld to pursue goals that ﬁt their views about engaging German archaeology in Iran and Afghanistan. On 12 November 1922, the German embassy in Tehran informed Sarre that Afghanistan and France had signed a treaty securing the French an excavation monopoly, thus creating a pendant to the monopoly already in eﬀect in Iran.47 Nevertheless, Herzfeld and Sarre proceeded with their plans. Herzfeld’s years in Iran from 1923 to 1925 were made possible by a private company with limited liability called the Gesellschaft zur Förderung von Ausgrabungen und Forschungsreisen GmbH, which was founded in 1923. Its aim was to foster excavations and scientiﬁc expeditions in Asia and to publish the results.48 Herzfeld’s idea was that of a mobile excavation team. He was to travel to Iran and Afghanistan, carry out research there, and search for a future excavation project. The major shareholder was trustee Karl Fehrmann for Edmund Stinnes, a son of the German industrialist Hugo Stinnes, with the major sum of four hundred and ﬁfty Goldmark and Friedrich Sarre with a minor share of ﬁfty Goldmark. At the time, Hugo Stinnes was one of the most inﬂuential industrialists in Germany. His son Edmund occupied a junior position in the Stinnes Company. Karl Fehrmann was one of the directors of Stinnes and was in charge of the Russian department.49 This unusual company came into existence through Sarre family connections. Hans Humann, a brother of Maria Sarre, had been a naval oﬃcer and attaché in Turkey; at the end of World War I, he joined the Stinnes Company to become head of the inﬂuential Stinnes newspaper, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. Humann, Sarre, Herzfeld, and Stinnes were liberal conservatives whose political roots lay in the Kaiserreich prior to World War I. They experienced enormous diﬃculties in coping with the reality of the lost war and the situation

“Therefore I shall be allowed to express the hope, that the work which we began in 1910–13 might be carried on, if times are more propitious to scientiﬁc research than the present one.” 47 Sarre received clips from the Times from Rudolf Said-Ruete in London on the relevant news about archaeological plans in Afghanistan. 48 It was founded speciﬁcally for Ernst Herzfeld and Friedrich Perzynski, who later resigned. Perzynski, an art historian and collector of Far Eastern art, was also a founding member in 1917 of the Deutsch-Persische Gesellschaft. 49 Gerald D. Feldmann, Hugo Stinnes. Biographie eines Industriellen 1870–1924 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998), 929–31.

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that ensued. It must have been through Humann that both Hugo and Edmund Stinnes became acquainted with Sarre and Herzfeld and with their plans for excavations in Iran and Afghanistan. In those diﬃcult times, the businessmen decided, German industry should support scientiﬁc projects so as not to abandon those regions solely to French and British interests. They were not alone in advocating this approach and had a number of supporters, among them members of the Deutsch-Persische Gesellschaft and especially of the Auswärtiges Amt, the German Ministry of Foreign Aﬀairs. Among those in the latter group must be mentioned Fritz Grobba, who was with the German embassy in Afghanistan in 1924 when Herzfeld tried to visit there; later on, Grobba was in Berlin. The Auswärtiges Amt was naturally of prime importance for all logistical matters, such as telegrams from Herzfeld in Tehran to Sarre in Berlin and vice versa. The Deutsch-Persische Gesellschaft was founded in Berlin in 1917. Herzfeld was among the founding members, along with other scholars such as Enno Littmann, Josef Marquart, Eduard Meyer, and Eugen Mittwoch. Additional members included the journalist Willy Haas, and politicians or diplomats such as Prince Heinrich XXXI Reuss, H. von Hentig, Frh. von Richthofen, Frh. von Thielmann, and the former ambassador to Iran. Numerous Iranian diplomats also belonged to this group. The banker Herbert M. Gutmann, also a well-known collector of Islamic and Far Eastern art, was treasurer.50 Sarre was not in Berlin at the time the society was established, but later became chairman in the 1920s. This society proved inﬂuential in Herzfeld’s projects, and both he and Sarre gave lectures to the group and reported on recent archaeological events in Iran. A second aim of the private company Gesellschaft zur Förderung von Ausgrabungen—one not mentioned oﬃcially and not found in Herzfeld’s “Reisebericht”—was to acquire works of art.51 For this reason a consortium was established, which gave the company a credit of US$20,000. Ten thousand dollars came from James Loeb, a relative of the American branch of the Warburg family and ten thousand from Hugo Stinnes and his son Edmund.52 In a letter to the company, Herzfeld was desperate not to be known as an art dealer.53 50 Declaration of the Aims of the Deutsch-Persische Gesellschaft e. V. (undated, but probably 1917). 51 Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 225. 52 Karl Fehrmann to Dr. Hoeck (in Hamburg), 8 January 1926. 53 Karl Fehrmann to the lawyer W. Unger, 24 March 1926, quoting Herzfeld.

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His ﬁrst major success consisted in ﬁnding, on his third journey to Paikuli in June 1923, an additional thirty inscribed blocks.54 By this time he had already completed the manuscript on the inscription blocks found during the ﬁrst two visits to the site.55 Three months later, in September 1923, he had already completed three-quarters of the work of deciphering and rearranging the text, but this was too late for the publication as the Paikuli volumes were already in print. In those years it was possible to purchase antiquities in Iran, but Herzfeld seems primarily to have assembled study material. The way in which he characterized Sarre’s collection was very much the same way in which he himself collected: “It was guided by knowledge and research, it was the collection of a scholar and connoisseur of art, and hence was one intrinsic unit. With his exploring and collecting he had opened a new way, which has been followed since by public museums and institutions of learning”56 The objects Herzfeld acquired thus comprised the scientiﬁc collection of a scholar or museum. Among the objects were numerous sherd collections from diﬀerent ﬁndspots and many coins and seals. The Münzkabinett of the State Museums later acquired a number of the coins.57 While some of the pre-Islamic works are outstanding, hardly any of the Islamic department’s objects acquired by Herzfeld is of superior quality.58 As planned, he bought for Mrs. Stinnes, for James Loeb, and for the Hahn family in Berlin, but little is now known about these collections. Herzfeld’s system of collecting was to number the objects and inventory them, just as with any museum collection. For more than one object, he had small bags made in Iran, which he ﬁlled with one or more objects and then numbered. For example, one bag bears the number 1840 and its contents are from the “Persepolis Terasse,” as

Casts of amulets in the Museum für Islamische Kunst demonstrate that Mrs. Hugo Stinnes in Mülheim/Ruhr received some genuine artifacts acquired by Herzfeld in Iran and thus proﬁted from the original plan to acquire antiquities. The objects seem mainly to have consisted of Islamic metal amulets. 54 Herzfeld to Sarre, 12 May 1923. 55 Herzfeld to Sarre, 6 March 1923, from on board the SS Mantua outside Port Said, in which he states that he has ﬁnished the last chapter of the Paikuli manuscript and will ask K. A. C. Creswell to send it to the publisher. 56 Herzfeld, “Friedrich Sarre,” 212. 57 Herzfeld to Sarre, 17 October 1926. 58 Of the 458 numbers inventoried as Herzfeld gifts, more than 362 belong to single sherds that he collected at diﬀerent locations. The other numbers belong to more complete works and comprise stuccoes, ceramic vessels or tiles, metal mirrors, coins, and other small objects.

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the label on the bag speciﬁes (ﬁg. 8).59 For this bag he collected pottery sherds, glass and metal cullet, a brick fragment, and fragments with stylized curls from the heads or beards of Persepolis sculptures. It is made up like a sample bag (ﬁg. 9). In a letter written in 1923, he mentions that his list of objects already totaled 1,700 items, and he estimated their value at £5500. The number soon increased, and his inventory eventually reached 2,956 items.60 Only ﬁfty-ﬁve small bags of this type are now housed in the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin.61 I do not know whether other museums or universities may have received similar material, nor whether he inventoried all objects that passed through his hands. The funds given to Herzfeld by the Gesellschaft zur Förderung von Ausgrabungen enabled him to travel widely in Iraq and Iran from February 1923 until the end of October 1925. He was thus able to make a trip to Afghanistan from India at the end of 1924.62 He stayed in Kabul for four weeks, but without being able to make any progress toward his goals as he was under a sort of curfew and could not do the work he planned. Finally, he had to leave the country in utter frustration. He saw clearly that it would be impossible to work in Afghanistan on a grander scale and that ﬁnds could not be taken out of the country. He told both Alfred Foucher and Joseph Hackin that he had postponed his plans.63 In India itself he visited the Parsee community in Bombay to talk about funds for excavations in Persepolis. Despite his experience in Afghanistan these were important years for him, because he was able to travel freely in Iran and survey most major sites, including Pasargadae, Persepolis, and Kuh-i Khwaja, and develop ideas for future excavations. His extensive travels had given Herzfeld a keen insight into what was going on at various archaeological sites. In June and again in 59 The bags each measure 16.0 × 17.5 cm. He mentioned small bags with sherds in a letter. Herzfeld to Sarre, 9 September 1923. 60 Two inventory books of Herzfeld’s collection are housed in Washington. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, notebooks 89 and 90. To a certain degree, it would be possible to build up a synopsis. 61 The bags with non-Islamic material were never inventoried, but instead stored in a case. 62 Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 262–65. The Times had already reported (24 July 1923), under the headline “German eyes on Afghanistan”: “An archaeologist, Professor H., is also on his way, though it is doubtful if he will be able to undertake any archaeological research when he gets there, since the French are believed to have obtained a sort of monopoly in this respect.” 63 Herzfeld to Sarre, 21 May 1925.

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September 1925, he sent long letters to Sarre along with drawings and photographs reporting on the results of private excavations at a mound called Nizamabad in the vicinity of Rayy-Varamin. The owner of the land was very unhappy with the worthless stucco he excavated, enabling Herzfeld to rescue most of the fragments before they were destroyed (ﬁg. 10). Because of Herzfeld’s presence in Tehran and the information he could transmit, Sarre was able to acquire most of the stuccoes from Nizamabad for the Islamic department in Berlin in 1928.64 Herzfeld sold the Pahlavi ostraca from the same site to the British Museum; they were subsequently published by Dieter Weber in 1992.65 Initially Herzfeld had wanted to excavate Nizamabad in 1927, but Sarre unfortunately did not have the ten thousand marks that Herzfeld thought he needed. As a result, important information that could only have been gained on the site was lost. Due to the ﬁnancial turbulence of the Weimar Republic in the mid-1920s, the death of Hugo Stinnes in 1924, and the following liquidation of parts of the Stinnes Company in 1925, Herzfeld apparently proﬁted mainly through the funds at his disposal to travel, survey, and excavate in a preliminary fashion. His results with respect to acquiring works of art had not been what the shareholders had expected. Moreover, things proved to be complicated with Herzfeld because he claimed rights on the company or at least ﬁnancial shares. These claims, however, were unsuccessful. The company was ﬁnally dissolved in August of 1929, and most of the antiquities that had been sent to Sarre in the museum were given by Herzfeld to the Islamic department in 1930–31. Inv.Nr. I. 4884–I. 4902. The inventory states that these ﬁnds were acquired in Persia by Prof. Herzfeld. Friedrich Sarre, “Figürlicher und ornamentaler Wandschmuck spätsasanidischer Zeit, Berliner Museen,” Berliner Museen. Berichte aus den preussischen Kunstsammlungen 49:1 (1928): 2, mentions that they were acquired through the art market in Tehran. Sarre probably paid Herzfeld privately the sum the owner had asked from Herzfeld. The French archaeologist Roland de Mecquenem wanted to pay ﬁve hundred toman to the owner (then, according to Herzfeld, about three thousand German marks). Herzfeld found this sum ridiculously small and therefore he must have paid more. He had nine cases specially built to transport these ﬁnds. The stucco sculptures that were saved seem to have belonged to a number of diﬀerent friezes. The site can be dated to the seventh to eighth century, and thus gives us an idea of a Sasanian-Umayyad transitional phase in Iran. In 1982 I published the stuccoes without being aware of the detailed letters on the site. Herzfeld to Sarre, 6 June, 17 July, and 13 September 1925. See Jens Kröger, Sasanidischer Stuckdekor, BaForsch 5 (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1982), 148–86. 65 Dieter Weber, Ostraca, Papyri und Pergamente: Textband, vols. 4 and 5, Pahlavi Inscriptions, Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum, no. 3 (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1992). 64

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In April 1925, the Anjuman Athar-i Milli (National Monuments Council of Iran) was founded.66 Its goals were to inventory and protect ancient monuments and to establish a museum and library. As the only foreigner on the committee of the Anjuman Athar-i Milli, Herzfeld was invited by the Iranian authorities to return to Tehran in April 1926. But he was not oﬀered any ﬁnancial compensation, and he was thus was skeptical about this association. In the following years he was continually involved in formulating drafts for this committee. Earlier, in 1924, he had worked on a proposal concerning Persepolis that was ﬁnally published in 1929.67 At least since 1925, Herzfeld had been working on the diﬀerent collections of Islamic manuscripts, a subject in which Shah Reza Pahlavi took particular interest. In 1926, the shah wanted to give eight thousand books and manuscripts as a gift toward a national library. Herzfeld had seen the shah’s library and wrote to Sarre about the miniatures. In the same letter, he wrote that the books from Ardabil would come to Tehran and that all Arabic manuscripts from Meshed were to come to Tehran so that he could copy them.68 This involvement with Islamic manuscripts seems to have been much more important than is apparent from Herzfeld’s bibliography.69 In 1929, the Iranian side was working on Herzfeld’s draft for an antiquities law. “The minister talked to me on diﬀerent occasions about his vague views,” he wrote to Sarre. “He is only thinking that the treasures, which he supposes to be in his property in Hamadan, should belong to him alone.”70 The law ﬁnally came into eﬀect in 1931.71 At a later date Herzfeld drew the logo for the Anjuman Athar-i Milli, which was used in 1934 for a Persian publication on

66 Contrary to Herzfeld, Isa Sadiq gives 1922 as the founding date. Isa Sadiq, “Anjoman-e Atar-e Melli,” in EncIr, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 2:83. 67 Herzfeld, “Rapport sur Persépolis,” 17–40. 68 Herzfeld to Sarre, 1 August 1926 and 17 October 1926. 69 Ernst Herzfeld, “Einige Bücherschätze in Persien,” Ephemerides Orientales 28 (1926): 1–8. 70 Herzfeld to Sarre, 6 February 1929. 71 It was published in the paper “Le Messager de Téhéran” on 12 December 1930, and a copy was sent to Sarre with a letter from the German embassy on 13 December 1930.

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the Persepolis reliefs (ﬁg. 11).72 The logo, which bears Herzfeld’s initials, shows the palmette tree from the Sasanian grotto at Taq-i Bustan embracing a reconstructed Persepolis palace, the Sasanian palace of Taq-i Kisra at Ctesiphon, and the Gunbad-i Qabus tower of 1006. Flanking the foot of the tree is an Old Persian inscription in cuneiform on the right and in Arabic script on the left. From 1926 to 1931, Herzfeld thus remained in Iran on a somewhat uncertain ﬁnancial footing, a situation that resulted in many diﬃculties. During these years he still received his salary from the University of Berlin, along with a supplement from the Auswärtiges Amt to defray the costs of living in Tehran. Yet he repeatedly complained to Sarre that life in Tehran was expensive, and he often wrote about ﬁnancial problems. As he also retained his apartment in Berlin, he constantly was in ﬁnancial diﬃculties. In 1929, therefore, he agreed to teach two courses for two semesters at the university in Tehran. At the time, this was the only way a foreigner could earn money from the Iranian side, and the Iranians must have signaled to him that he would not be able to continue his excavations without teaching.73 His dilemma was that he could not follow his scholarly research because no one would pay him for such a goal. He could only receive funds if he pursued excavations.74 In all these years in Iran he had contacts with French, English, and American diplomats and archaeologists. He had a closer relationship

72 The publication is listed in the bibliography compiled by George C. Miles, “The Writings of Ernst Herzfeld,” Ars Islamica 7 (1940): 91, no. 162. 73 Herzfeld to Sarre, 6 February 1929. 74 “In den ersten Januartagen habe ich, auf fortwährendes Drängen der Perser hin, einen Vertrag gemacht, dass ich hier Vorlesungen halten werde, und zwar zwei Semester zu zwei Collegs. Aber die Zeit ist nicht festgesetzt, sondern bleibt mir zu bestimmen frei, und wenn ich nicht lese, habe ich keine Verpﬂichtungen. Urlaub für Reisen brauche ich nicht. Trotzdem das abgemacht ist, sehe ich doch Verstimmungen und Schwierigkeiten voraus, und hoﬀe, dass es bald möglich sein wird, diesen Vertrag wieder aufzuheben. Ich habe ihn hauptsächlich gemacht, weil ich merkte, dass ich ohne das keine Reisen und Grabungen mehr machen konnte. Und ausserdem, weil ich davon etwas zu viel habe: gerade die Beschäftigung mit all diesen Sachen hat mir gezeigt, dass ich unbedingt eine Weile ruhig sein und nur verarbeiten muss. Die Schwierigkeit war aber immer, dafür Mittel zu ﬁnden. Man konnte Mittel für neue Unternehmungen, aber nicht dafür haben, dass man nichts unternahm. Und da tritt nun dieser Vertrag ein. Eine andere Form, eine Einladung, war unmöglich, weil alle Zahlungen an Ausländer nur mit Genehmigung des Parlamentes gemacht werden können, und dieses nur die eine Form kennt, die Regierung zu ermächtigen, den und den Vertrag zu schliessen. Und darauf warten, dass dieses Gesetz geändert würde, konnte man nicht.” Ibid.

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with the minister than did André Godard, and thus was informed of undertakings before Godard knew about them.75 The only person he deﬁnitively did not like was Arthur Upham Pope, whom he probably beﬁttingly compared to Elmer Gantry and who in his turn did not like Herzfeld.76 When Joseph Upton was with Herzfeld in 1929, Upton had to open letters from Pope because Herzfeld was so terriﬁed of him. In 1931, Pope told the Iranian minister of culture that Herzfeld had such important collections that a lacuna would remain in the International Exhibition of Persian Art if they did not go to London. Later, Herzfeld’s relationship with Pope deteriorated further.77 He was on very good terms with many of the Iranian politicians, including Siyyid Hasan Taqizadeh, the court minister Abdol Hossein Teymurtash, Mohammad Ali Foroughi and other notables, and in October and November 1928 he was invited to travel with Reza Shah Pahlavi on a trip to Khuzistan. He constantly sought to break the French monopoly on excavations. On 15 October 1927 the treaty lifting the French monopoly was signed, and the monopoly was to end with the arrival of the French adviser, André Godard. Herzfeld was himself on good terms with him. The years from 1923 to 1925 had given Herzfeld a good idea where to excavate after the French monopoly had been lifted. Beginning in 1923, Herzfeld was in close contact with Werner von der Schulenburg, the German ambassador in Iran, a friendship that endured until Schulenburg left Iran in 1931. This personal relationship was important in every respect. It gave Herzfeld the opportunity to send his glass negatives and much of the material he collected to Sarre in Berlin through the Auswärtiges Amt. Herzfeld, who had already stayed in the German embassy from 1923 to 1925, again lived there 75

Ibid. Jay Gluck and Noël Siver, eds., Surveyors of Persian Art: A Documentary Biography of Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman (Ashiya, Japan, and Costa Mesa, Calif.: SoPA, 1996; distributed by Mazda Publishers), 215–18. This is not the place to consider whether Pope may have plotted to have Herzfeld replaced at Persepolis by his protégé Erich F. Schmidt. See J. M. Rogers, review of Surveyors of Persian Art, JRAS 7 (1997): 455–58. 77 “Pope: er hat dem Kultusminister auseinandergesetzt, daß er Herzfeld so bedeutende Sammlungen hätte, dass eine Lücke in der Ausstellung bleiben würde, wenn sie nicht nach London kämen. Sie wissen vielleicht, daß man hier 15% des Wertes Ausfuhrzoll zahlen muss, und die Taxe natürlich ganz willkürlich ist. Seit der Zeit habe ich deﬁnitiv genug von Pope, und ich möchte auch Sie bitten, sich ihm gegenüber sehr zurückzuhalten.” Herzfeld to Sarre, 15 April 1931. Herzfeld accused Pope of being involved in the theft of antiquities. Herzfeld to Sarre, 6 June 1931. 76

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until in 1928 he ﬁnally settled in his own house adjacent to the embassy (ﬁg. 12). Over the years, Herzfeld in persona gradually had become a kind of semioﬃcial German archaeological institute. He was continually in touch with Gerhart Rodenwaldt, the president of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, about setting up such an institute, but the times were not in his favor.78 In 1927, Herzfeld drafted the goals for such an institute, a document discussed in Berlin among the Auswärtiges Amt, Sarre, and others in July 1927. The draft reads like a list of Herzfeld’s own future activities: the excavations in Pasargadae, Kuh-i Khwaja, and Persepolis, and future publications such as the Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran, are already mentioned.79 In 1928 he moved his library from Berlin to Tehran with the aid of the Auswärtiges Amt, so he could ﬁnally conduct research there. During these months he seems to have felt more at home than before, and he invited Sarre to come and visit him now that travel had become so much easier. Having turned ﬁfty in 1929—and not always in good health because of many problems involving his personal life and his health in diﬃcult climatic zones, his social loneliness due to continuous work and to the excavations he organized by himself, and his pressing publishing responsibilities—Herzfeld often longed for some tranquility.80 Thus, on hearing that Maria Sarre and her daughters were in Greece, he 78

See Nachlaß Rodenwaldt, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Berlin. “Denkschrift über die Errichtung einer Archäologischen Station in Teheran” (1927). Among future goals he mentions Tepe Giyan (without mentioning the name of the site or the fact that he had a large collection obtained from it), “Die Untersuchung einer Stadtruine aus der Zeit von 3000 v. Chr., von welchem Ort ich bereits eine grosse Sammlung wertvoller Keramiken, Bronzen, Goldschmuck und Siegelsteine besitze”; and, aside from Kuh-i Khwaja, he names the Hellenistic temple and the excavation of the oldest existing madrasa in Khurasan. Herzfeld did not name all sites in this draft. Perhaps he was already anxious that someone would take his ideas as later, when he thought that other archaeologists had only done research in places he had written about in his “Reisebericht” (1926). “Ich werde es in Zukunft so machen, dass ich die Orte der Funde nicht mehr angebe. Was not thäte ist also nicht dass Leute hingehen um auch zu sehen, was ich gefunden habe, sondern dass man mir Leute schickte, die unter meiner Leitung die Sammlungen von Materialien publicierten.” Herzfeld to Sarre, 25 February 1931. In an earlier letter he had been more explicit, noting that excavations at Hecatompylos, Nizamabad, and Nihavend would be worthwhile. Herzfeld to Sarre, 8 March 1927. But the paintings in Kuh-i Khwaja had priority. 80 “Ich fühle, wie man sich immer mehr mit vergangenen Dingen beschäftigt, und wie die Lust an zukünftigem wächst. Die Menge dessen was hinter einem liegt, überwiegt schon beträchtlich das was man noch erwarten kann. Daher kommt ein starkes Bedürfnis, die alten Arbeiten zu beenden.” Herzfeld to Sarre, 27 September 1929. 79

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remarked to Sarre, “Etwas Mittelmeer, das ist doch das Schönste.”81 Herzfeld was a workaholic who at times was dissatisﬁed with his situation.82 He had been extremely busy for all these years, without ever taking a vacation. In March 1927 he had completed the manuscript on the paintings of Samarra.83 He wanted to work on the topics that really interested him, such as the prehistoric ceramic material from Samarra, in which he was also interested because numerous new ceramic ﬁnds from Tepe Giyan, said to be from Nihavend, appeared on the market in Hamadan and Kirmanshah.84 But there were also other reasons, as he was anxious that someone would take this subject away from him.85 The manuscript was ﬁnished in 1929.86 He had also written numerous articles, especially for the journal Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran, the ﬁrst volume of which appeared in 1929. Because of problems with the Iranian side, he thought of returning to Berlin. He found every detail of the Berlin angle very disturbing, however, as he could not see where to store his library and large study collection in Berlin. It would not ﬁt into his apartment and he would have to have an assistant to work with him or help him with the material.87 His house in Tehran was adjacent to the German embassy, accessible to the embassy through a door in the rear garden. It was “of the usual type built by Grandees in the 19th century” and thus a large house in which he had a staﬀ of four servants.88 In this situation he was very glad to have had at his side in Tehran the

81

Herzfeld to Sarre, 1 June 1929. “Wenn man nicht intensiv arbeiten kann, ist der Orient fürchterlich.” Herzfeld to Sarre, 3 December 1931. 83 Herzfeld, Die Malereien von Samarra. 84 Herzfeld to Sarre, 17 October 1926. 85 “Die Architektur ist ja an sich für die Ausgrabungspublikation wichtiger. Aber das nimmt einem keiner weg, denn alles ist zerstört und existiert nur noch in unseren Aufnahmen. Die Kleinfunde aber sind verstreut und jedermann kann sie veröﬀentlichen.” Herzfeld to Sarre, 8 March 1927. 86 Herzfeld, Die vorgeschichtlichen Töpfereien von Samarra. 87 “Hier wird es täglich schwieriger, die Einbildung der Perser wächst . . . Ich beschäftige mich dauernd mit dem Gedanken meiner Rückkehr. Wenn nur Verschiedenes nicht so unmöglich wäre. Erstens rein technisch: wie soll ich mit dieser Bibliothek und den Sammlungen, d.h. mit 100 Kisten von 100 kg zurückkommen? Wie soll man die Transporte bezahlen. Dann wo soll man die Sachen überhaupt hinschicken: in meine Berliner Etage? Das geht nicht. Von Auspacken gar keine Rede. Woher soll man Raum bekommen, wo die Dinge geordnet und bearbeitet werden können? Wie soll man in Berlin leben: ich habe da doch nur die 10.000 Mark von der Universität.” Herzfeld to Sarre, 1 June 1929. 88 Joseph M. Upton, Travels in Persia, vol. I. Privately printed. September 1970, 14. 82

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young American student Joseph M. Upton, whom he found to be an extremely pleasant person to live and work with.89 Upton had worked with him at Kuh-i Khwaja in 1929. He held a Carnegie Fellowship to study with Herzfeld and had earlier been in Berlin, where he became friendly with the family of Friedrich Schmidt-Ott (1860–1956), president of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft. Later, it was Upton who was able to organize the Ernst Herzfeld Papers in Washington because of his knowledge of German, his ability to read Herzfeld’s handwriting, and his awareness of Herzfeld’s complex personality as well as numerous details of his life.90 While acquiring antiquities was an established goal of the enterprise from 1923 to 1925, it continued until 1931 on a voluntary basis. To judge by the correspondence, Herzfeld’s main clients seem to have been Sarre himself or the Berlin museums; aside from them, he collected mainly for himself and some friends. Whenever something interesting turned up or was spotted on one of his trips, he reported it to Sarre. His primary aim was to rescue the objects, since he alone—not the Iranian oﬃcials or the dealers—knew their historical importance, and usually only he could read the inscriptions. In the case of gold and silver objects, this meant recording historically important inscriptions before they were completely destroyed or lost to scholarly attention and, if possible, to record ﬁndspots and see for himself where objects were found. Sarre, however, did not have funds available as in the prewar years, and Herzfeld himself was usually short of money; as a result, he could not pay the sums asked for by the clandestine excavators in advance and had no sponsor. He sometimes asked Sarre desperately for money, as Sarre had promised to buy works of art should Herzfeld ﬁnd them. Herzfeld often needed the money for himself because he had to pay on the spot or, for example, to return from Kuh-i Khwaja to Tehran in 1929 with all the luggage and the ﬁnds of the excavations because the funds provided by the Notgemeinschaft der

89 Herzfeld to Sarre, 6 February 1929. It was because of Upton that he again looked at the Islamic material from Syria, Iraq, and Iran and was much fascinated by its beauty. 90 On Upton’s view of Herzfeld’s life in Tehran and the Kuh-i Khwaja excavations, see Upton, Travels in Persia, 13–37. Unfortunately he was not as explicit as he could have been. Upton called Herzfeld a perfect host and peerless friend. It is unfortunate that no one thought to interview Upton about Herzfeld at a time when he would still have remembered numerous details.

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Deutschen Wissenschaft did not cover all the expenses that eventually had to be paid. In short, he did not have an account from which to draw the sums he needed, but only his salary and the funds for projects. In a sense, however, he had become an archaeological institute himself, and thus the funds at his disposal were not suﬃcient. Thus the paintings from Kuh-i Khwaja were in his house and he did not know what would happen to them, let alone how to manage the diﬃcult job of transporting them from the site to Tehran. Herzfeld knew he could not trust Iranian bureaucracy with respect to caring for works of art. A number of objects had been destroyed during his years in Iran because he had arrived too late. This convinced him that works of art could best be saved if he bought them as soon as he received news of them.91 To his great despair, Sarre could not act quickly enough. Occasionally, however, the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft did respond in time to his desperate telegrams for funds to acquire objects. Thanks to Berlin connections and especially the inﬂuence of Carl H. Becker, the museum’s Near Eastern section was thus able to acquire the gold tablet of Aryaramna, which was said to have been found in Hamadan just before it disappeared entirely. It had already been broken into separate pieces, some of which had been melted down and were already missing.92 91

Herzfeld to Sarre, 15 March 1930. For details, see Ernst Herzfeld, “Die Goldtafel des Aryaramna,” Berliner Museen. Berichte aus den preussischen Kunstsammlungen 52 (1931): 53. The following can be seen as a statement by Herzfeld on the situations he encountered during his stay in Iran: “Als mir eine Kopie der neu im Handel aufgetauchten Tafel zur Lesung zugeschickt wurde, war es daher meine erste Sorge, auch ihren Fundort zu ermitteln. Dazu gehörte einige Vertrautheit mit den unerlaubten und den leider erlaubten Grabungen in Persien. Die Dareios-Tafeln waren Zufallsfunde und konnten gerade noch vor dem gewöhnlichen Schicksal solcher Funde, dem Schmelztiegel, gerettet werden. Auch die neue Tafel war schon zum Einschmelzen zerschnitten. Wie zu erwarten, hatte der Ankauf der Dareios-Tafeln den Anreiz gegeben, in Hamadan nach mehr solchen Schätzen zu suchen. Bei solchen Raubgrabungen werden nur Dinge, deren Verkaufswert schon bekannt ist, gesammelt, die wichtigsten anderen Urkunden zur Geschichte und zur Kunst des Landes einfach zerstört. Bei den gewaltigen Geldgewinnen, die die Finder und die hinter ihnen stehenden Händler machen, sind polizeiliche und zollamtliche Maßregeln dagegen natürlich wirkungslos. Zu der allein wirksamen Abwehrmaßregel, der Erteilung einer Erlaubnis zur Ausgrabung von Hamadan an eine wissenschaftliche Expedition, ist es leider noch nicht gekommen. Wissenschaftliche Beobachtungen sind unter solchen Umständen unmöglich, die doch erst den Funden ihr ganzes Leben und ihren ganzen Wert geben. Ob z.B. die Tafel als Bauurkunde an Ort und Stelle lag, ob sie als Trophäe eines Sieges nach Ecbatana verschleppt war, . . . wird immer unbekannt bleiben. Was ich festellen konnte war nur, daß die Tafel tatsächlich in Hamadan gefunden worden ist, und zwar ganz nahe dem Fundort der Dareios-Tafeln, in dem Stadteil, unter dem die Paläste der Meder und Achämeiden begraben sind.” 92

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It is especially tragic that this object did not survive the aftermath of World War II; because of its metallic value, it must have been destroyed. In 1926, Herzfeld wrote to Sarre about two identical silver and gold foundation tablets with trilingual inscriptions of Darius I (522–486 B.C.E.), found in an Achaemenid building in Hamadan. He had seen the exact ﬁndspot, a large tell.93 He asked Sarre to buy the gold tablet, which would have been possible if the authorities had wanted the silver tablet. Both tablets were ultimately obtained for the Tehran Museum by the Iranian government.94 To judge by the letters he wrote to Sarre, Herzfeld cannot be called an antiquities dealer. He had neither the money nor the necessary connections to an international network of art dealers. Indeed, his letters show him to be helpless in this respect.95 Furthermore, no instance of his having bought and sold an object in Iran can be cited. He was in a semioﬃcial position during these years. Perhaps one could call him a purveyor for himself, Sarre, and a few museums. From 1923 to 1926 he was given funds to acquire objects for collectors, including Sarre. Thereafter he collected a very limited number of works for Sarre, the major part for himself. He was interested in receiving money from Sarre to acquire works of art from excavations he could not prevent. In 1927 he had written to the Iranian minister in charge that he could not do anything to prevent thefts of antiquities as he did not have suﬃcient legal power to work against them.96 He was in the classic dilemma: On the one hand, he opposed clandestine excavations, the results of which interested him; on the other hand, he knew that it would be impossible to leave the art market without ﬁnds. He believed that clandestine excavations could only be stopped if oﬃcial excavations were to begin, and it was with these goals that he participated with the Anjuman Athar-i Milli committee.97

93 Herzfeld to Sarre, 7 July and 17 October 1926. On the contents and the ﬁndspot, see Ernst Herzfeld, “Eine neue Darius-Inschrift aus Hamadan,” DLZ 42 (1926): 2105–8. 94 Herzfeld, “Die Goldtafel des Aryaramna,” 53. 95 As Sarre was unable to purchase a rock crystal, Herzfeld asked, “I have no experience and connections, could one send the object to Charles Vignier or to another Parisian dealer? It is of no use to send it to Berlin. Or should one send it to [the dealer Maurice] Nahman in Cairo? I would leave it to you, but would like for something to happen with the object.” Herzfeld to Sarre, 1 June 1929. 96 Herzfeld to Sarre, 11 January 1927. 97 “Auf dem Markt ist nichts. Dies betriﬀt auch Nizamabad. Wie ich mich verhalten soll, macht mir Kopfzerbrechen. Einerseits bin ich natürlich gegen diesen Raubbau. Andererserseits kann man nicht den Handel brachlegen, und wirksame

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As a historian, however, he was extremely interested in the works of art that came to his attention. It seems possible that Iran’s cultural richness encouraged an obsession, so that he collected as much as he could for himself. Above all, he had a scholarly interest in works of art of all periods, and he had a ﬁne eye and followed a path that he had charted from the very beginning. Already on his ﬁrst journey to Iran in 1905, he came across a small fragment of a Sasanian silver-gilt hunting plate in the town of Dizful. As the owner was reluctant to sell the fragment, he could do nothing other than record the incident in his notebook.98 But he must have made a strong impression on the owner, because the piece turned up on the art market in Paris in 1909 and was oﬀered to Sarre, whom Herzfeld must have told about it. It was immediately acquired by the Islamic department as a gift from Wilhelm von Bode, who probably paid the requested amount of four thousand marks through a sponsor of the Berlin Museums.99 This was the ﬁrst work of art in the long relationship between Herzfeld and Sarre (ﬁg. 13). During their Mesopotamian journey of 1907–8, both Herzfeld and Sarre were constantly on the watch for interesting works of art that would be welcome additions to the Islamic department in Berlin. Thus most of the objects published in the Archäologische Reise im Euphratund Tigrisgebiet were departmental acquisitions.100 This pattern was also continued during the Samarra excavations and during the years in

Mittel für eine Aufsicht sind schwer zu ﬁnden. In dem Augenblick, wo wissenschaftliche Ausgrabungen erlaubt werden, muss alles andere aufhören.” Herzfeld to Sarre, 12 June 1926. 98 Ernst Herzfeld Papers, notebook 81, 108 (entry dated 10 October 1905). 99 Acquired from E. Gejou, Paris, it was inventoried as I. 1316. The half-ﬁgure was made of silver with remains of gilding on the robe and hair (h. 4.0 cm, w. 5.5 cm). Unfortunately stolen from the gallery between 6 and 9 December 1922, it was deaccessioned. This small but superb object has been published repeatedly. See Friedrich Sarre, “Ein Silberﬁgürchen des Sassanidenkönigs Narses im Kaiser-FriedrichMuseum zu Berlin,” JPKS 31 (1910): 73–78; Friedrich Sarre, Die Kunst des alten Persien (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1922), 49–50, ﬁg. 14; Kurt Erdmann, “Die sasanidischen Jagdschalen. Untersuchungen zur Entwicklung der iranischen Edelmetallkunst unter den Sasaniden,” JPKS 57 (1936): 209–10, ﬁg. 8; Prudence O. Harper, Silver Vessels of the Sasanian Period (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1981), 32, 57, pl. 12; and Ann C. Gunter and Paul Jett, Ancient Iranian Metalwork in the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1992), 158. 100 Sarre and Herzfeld, Archäologische Reise, 2:352–53; 3: pls. 9, 113–20; 4: pls. 140–47. The three capitals from Raqqa (4: pls. 140, 1–4) are currently on view in the gallery of the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin.

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Iran. Herzfeld kept Sarre constantly informed through his letters. Nearly all of them also deal with the question of works of art on the market. When an inscribed silver-gilt bowl dated to the Parthian period (third–ﬁrst century B.C.), said to have been found in Nihavend in western Iran, appeared on the market, Herzfeld wrote to Sarre and later sent telegrams asking for the necessary funds.101 The bowl was ﬁnally acquired in 1927 by the Islamic department and published by Sarre in 1931 (ﬁg. 14). This is the only major precious object that was acquired from Herzfeld by the Islamic department.102 It ﬁtted into Sarre’s concept of a department of Islamic art that also incorporated pre-Islamic works of art. In 1934, however, the vessel went on long-term loan to the Antiquarium (now the Antikensammlung) of the Berlin Museums, where it remains, comprising one of the masterpieces of art from Iran inﬂuenced by the West. Sarre’s retirement from the Islamic department in October 1931 meant for Herzfeld that his relationship with the department could not continue as it had before, because Ernst Kühnel became the new director. Since the inception of the Samarra excavations, Herzfeld and Kühnel had never gotten along. In December 1931, Herzfeld wrote to Sarre that he had just acquired a pen box dated 1210 and, as he had no library in Tehran, asked him whether this was the oldest dated example. Although we do not know what Sarre replied, the pen box did not enter the Islamic department in Berlin. It was instead acquired by the Freer Gallery of Art, which bought it in 1936 from the Kevorkian Foundation in New York.103 It remains to this day 101

Herzfeld to Sarre, 7 July 1926 and 17 October 1926. Acquired for ten thousand marks, it was inventoried on 6 May 1927 as I. 4924 (h. 8.5 cm, d. 14.7 cm). See Friedrich Sarre, “Einige Metallarbeiten parthischsasanidischen Stils in der Islamischen Kunstabteilung,” Berliner Museen. Berichte aus den preussischen Kunstsammlungen 52:5 (1931): 95, ﬁg. 1; and Arthur U. Pope and Phyllis Ackerman, eds., A Survey of Persian Art from Prehistoric Times to the Present (London: Oxford University Press, 1938–39), 1:460, pl. 137a. Other silver bowls mentioned in the letters in the years from 1926–28 were not purchased by Sarre, and I have not been able to identify them. Some objects were also lost during shipment. 103 “Vor kurzem habe ich hier ein silbertauschiertes Schreibzeug gekauft, dass aus Khorasan kam. Es ist in vollkommener Erhaltung, gross und sehr schön. Voll von Inschriften, die eine mit menschenköpﬁgen Lettern. Der Meister heißt Shadi, und das Datum ist 607/1210.” Herzfeld to Sarre, 3 December 1931. Esin Atil, W.T. Chase, and Paul Jett, Islamic Metalwork in the Freer Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.: Freer Gallery of Art, 1985), no. 14, does not mention Herzfeld. See also Rogers, review of Surveyors of Persian Art: “Dealing, like collecting, for all the highminded disdain of American art historians, is neither here nor there; those who decry it most forget that without it they would have little to study.” 102

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one of the masterpieces of pre-Mongol metalwork (ﬁg. 15). Herzfeld himself published it in 1936 as a highly important historical object because of the dated inscription, which also identiﬁes the person for whom it was made and the name of the master craftsman. He stated that it had been brought from Buchara to Iran, and from the article it is obvious that he had seen it for the ﬁrst time in 1928. But the article provides no indication that the object had been in his possession or that he had probably sold it to the Kevorkian Foundation.104

The Years in Iran: Part III, Persepolis With respect to archaeological ﬁeldwork in this period, the excavations at Pasargadae in 1928 and at Kuh-i Khwaja in 1929 were only possible because of the funds Herzfeld received from the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft. He was able to excavate at these sites thanks to the network of Friedrich Sarre at the Berlin State Museum, Eduard Meyer at the University of Berlin, Gerhart Rodenwaldt at the German Archaeological Institute, Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, president of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, and the Islamic scholar Carl Heinrich Becker, who was Prussian minister of culture from 1925 to 1930.105 But because of the economic depression and a change of policy in Germany at the time, these connections failed in the case of Persepolis.106 After preliminary investigations at Persepolis in the early 1920s, Herzfeld ﬁnally asked the Iranian authorities in May 1929 for permission to excavate the site. He desperately wished to carry out these excavations without the Americans, wanting only to operate with funds from the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft and from the Parsees in Bombay. He was certain this arrangement would 104

Ernst Herzfeld, “A Bronze Pen-Case,” Ars Islamica 3 (1936): 35–43. Carl H. Becker (1876–1933) was professor of Islamic studies and founder of the journal Der Islam. In the ﬁrst issue of the journal Herzfeld published his important essay on Mschatta, and thus he knew Becker well from the early days. As a letter of 30 December 1929 from Becker to Herzfeld shows, Becker wrote to Herzfeld in a collegial tone—something completely absent from the letters to Sarre. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, notebook 126. The correspondence makes clear that, apart from Eduard Meyer and Friedrich Sarre, Carl Heinrich Becker was of the greatest importance for Herzfeld. 106 For a view of the German Kulturpolitik in 1924–29, see Marchand, Down from Olympus, 276–88. 105

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work. As no funds from Germany were forthcoming because of the continuing ﬁnancial crisis, however, he eventually spoke with James Henry Breasted, director of the Oriental Institute in Chicago. It seems very probable that it was Eduard Meyer, who was on good terms with Breasted, who advised Herzfeld to do so. In May 1929 he had submitted his application to excavate in Persepolis to the Iranians. After four months had elapsed without any reply, he had a chance conversation with the court minister, who told Herzfeld that he would agree to grant it.107 In February 1931, Herzfeld received a permit for Persepolis from the Iranian government, and after diﬃculties with Breasted had been resolved he began to excavate. He was unhappy with the limited American funds, complaining to Sarre that he was short of money and that all of the excavation equipment, including the car, was his own property.108 He was glad that no small ﬁnds of importance were recovered, as they would only cause diﬃculties.109 In December 1931, he ﬁnally moved to Persepolis with his library and personal belongings from Tehran, where he had given up his house and stayed in Persepolis throughout 1932 (ﬁg. 16). In December 1931, he thought he knew exactly where to excavate and what he was looking for. Thus, he wrote that he wanted to ﬁnd a foundation tablet of Darius at the great wall around the royal tombs, as he knew where one should look because he had found such a document of Xerxes in situ in Persepolis under the corner of a wall.110 His last letter to Sarre at the museum was written from Tehran on 3 December 1931, and thus followed Sarre’s retirement on 1 October 1931. For the ﬁrst time since 1906, the letter began with “Lieber Herr Professor” instead of the usual “Hochverehrter Herr Professor.”

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Herzfeld to Sarre, 27 September 1929. “Jetzt werden wir [Herzfeld and Friedrich Krefter] hier also bis Juni arbeiten, auch bis dahin reiche ich nicht mit dem Gelde. . . . fast alles Material hier, Instrumente, Photographisches, Zeltausrüstung, das Auto, Küche, Geschirr, selbst Hacken und Spaten etc etc. ist alles mein Eigentum. Wenn unsere Universität und das Ausw. Amt mir nicht mein Gehalt und Zulage zahlten, könnte es überhaupt nicht gemacht werden. Und dann spielen die sich in Chicago damit auf.” Herzfeld to Sarre, 15 April 1931. Already in 1926 he had mentioned to Sarre that he would come to Iran with Krefter. Herzfeld to Sarre, 24 February 1926. 109 “Bewegliche Kleinfunde von grosser Bedeutung haben wir nicht gemacht und ich bedaure das nicht: es würde nur die größten Complicationen geben.” Herzfeld to Sarre, 6 June 1931, from Persepolis. 110 Herzfeld to Sarre, 3 December 1931, from Tehran. 108

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Through all the years and in countless letters, theirs had always been a formal correspondence with rather few personal elements. During the Samarra excavations, letters were often written twice a week; in the 1920s there were at least six long letters every year and even more during intense times such as the late twenties. From notes we know that Sarre usually replied immediately, but unfortunately these letters do not seem to have survived. From what has been preserved, it is clear that the correspondence between Herzfeld and Sarre documents an intense relationship. It surely covers the main points of Herzfeld’s life. His letters give a very clear picture of how Iran gradually developed into a fascinating province of world art heritage. Whether or to what extent Herzfeld kept things from Sarre and thus did not write to him about is of course diﬃcult to tell. To name one example, the Achaemenid silver phialae recently discussed in connection with Herzfeld are never mentioned in the letters that I read for this article.111 It is certainly possible that Herzfeld did not mention all objects to Sarre; another possibility is that these objects appeared at a date after 1931, when letters are missing. While the letters Herzfeld sent from Samarra were numbered and thus allow us to see which letters were later lost, the letters written in the 1920s were never numbered. It can be assumed that Herzfeld wrote letters to Sarre’s home in Neubabelsberg from 1932 onwards. None of these seems to have survived. As is probable, the letters sent to Sarre must have vanished with all of his personal belongings, diaries, library, and numerous works of art, when after the end of the war and his death on 1 June 1945 the Russians stripped a large number of houses (including the Sarres’ villa in Neubabelsberg) of their contents in preparation for the Potsdam Conference of the same year in nearby Cecilienhof. Maria Sarre had to leave Neubabelsberg with her daughter Marie-Luise—who had survived a concentration camp—within a few hours and took refuge in Switzerland with the help of one of her daughters and Baron Eduard von der Heydt, a collector of Far Eastern Art, to whom Sarre had connections.

111 Ann C. Gunter and Margaret Cool Root, “Replicating, Inscribing, Giving: Ernst Herzfeld and Artaxerxes’ Silver Phiale in the Freer Gallery of Art,” ArsOr 28 (1998): 6–16. See also Gunter and Hauser, this volume, 29.

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The Bad Ending During the 1930s, Herzfeld saw Sarre on several occasions, including when he was in Berlin in 1930 and again in 1931. After Hitler came to power in January 1933, Herzfeld was in Berlin for three weeks from 13 August until 9 September 1933. His ﬁnal visit lasted from 15 March to 3 April 1935. During all of these visits he saw not only Sarre, who turned seventy in 1935, but also numerous other friends and colleagues of long standing (ﬁg. 17). It seems especially noteworthy, however, that during his 1933 visit, he also met—in addition to Sarre and the Hahn family—his friend Werner Graf von der Schulenburg, the former ambassador to Iran; Wipert Graf Blücher, the acting ambassador; Ernst Kühnel, head of the Islamic department; Eugen Mittwoch of the Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen; Max Baron von Oppenheim; Gerhart Rodenwaldt; Theodor Wiegand; and his publisher, Dietrich Reimer. Undoubtedly, these visits concerned pressing questions about Herzfeld’s personal future as well as the future of Germany. On his ﬁnal visit to Berlin in 1935 from London, where he had found an apartment on 1 July 1935, Herzfeld seems to have settled all matters in connection with his Berlin apartment and his personal belongings. One sign of this is a fragment of a wall painting from Kuh-i Khwaja, which entered the Islamic department in 1935.112 At that date, or perhaps on an earlier occasion, he may have given many of his letters from Sarre to the museum, and he must also have deposited material on Samarra in the museum. Somewhat surprisingly, Herzfeld also went to Doorn, Holland, during these years to talk to the former kaiser, Wilhelm II. Wilhelm had long been interested in archaeology, wrote on the subject, and in his exile oversaw the archaeological Doorner Arbeitsgemeinschaft.113 He was acquainted with Sarre through his publications and had contributed to the Samarra excavations through funds of the Allerhöchste Privatschatulle, the kaiser’s privy purse. Sarre is quoted as having said to a young Nazi in 1933: “Except for his majesty my Kaiser, only the Jews have done something for the department.”114 112 The box has a penciled label reading “Fragmente Wandmalerei. Provenienz unbekannt, 1935 von Herzfeld an Abt. gegeben.” It was never inventoried. 113 Friedrich Sarre, “Kaiser Wilhelm II. und die Altertumswissenschaft,” Deutsche Zukunft (28 January 1934): 3–4. 114 Wolfgang F. Volbach, “Von Mainz über Europa nach Mainz/Ein Lebensweg,” in Wissenschaft und Turbulenz: Der Lebensweg von W. F. Volbach aus Mainz, ed. Walter Heist, Kleine Mainzer Bücherei Bd. 4 (Mainz: Verlag Dr. Hanns Krach, 1972), 24.

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But there is no evidence that they ever met while Wilhelm was emperor. As the kaiser was chieﬂy interested in pre-Islamic periods, he was therefore especially keen to hear about Herzfeld’s Iranian discoveries of the 1920s and 1930s. Already in the 1920s, Herzfeld seems to have been in Doorn for a ﬁrst visit.115 As entries in his notebooks make clear, he went to see the kaiser in Doorn on ﬁve occasions between 1930 and 1937.116 After this last visit in Berlin in 1935, Herzfeld and Sarre saw each other outside of Germany. In the fall of 1935 they met in Paris, in August 1936 in The Hague, and in September 1937 in Venice. The Venice meeting was apparently the last time they met, since Herzfeld ﬁnally sailed for New York on 23 September 1937 after his appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and did not return to Europe until after Sarre’s death in 1945. On 15 August 1936, the Reichs- und Preussische Minister für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung wrote to the curator of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität stating that, as Herzfeld lived continuously outside of Germany, his pension would no longer be paid to him, as it had been since his forced retirement on 1 January 1936. On 10 November 1936, Herzfeld then wrote to the curator of the University of Berlin requesting that his pension be used for the publication of the Ausgrabungen in Samarra, Iranische Denkmäler and the Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran. In earlier times, Herzfeld’s publications had been published with funds from the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft and the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft. Herzfeld wanted these books to be published in Germany. Sarre sent a letter from Florence expressing a similar intent.117 Beginning 1 January 1937 permission was granted by the Reichsund Preussische Minister für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung. The retirement sum was to be paid to a bank from which certain amounts were transferred to the publisher Dietrich Reimer. A small sum

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Herzfeld to Sarre, 19 June 1931. A ﬁrst meeting must have taken place in the 1920s, but it was not recorded. According to the records in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers, the exact dates for the 1930s are: 27 June 1930 (notebook 57); 16 September 1933 (notebook 60); 14 September 1935 (notebook 62); 10 January 1936, following a conference in Leiden (notebook 64); and 20 July 1937 (notebook 65). 117 Sarre to Prof. Slum of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, 14 December 1936. 116

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was also used to purchase books Herzfeld needed to work on the Samarra material.118 Irony has it that Herzfeld was oﬃcially granted permission to stay in Princeton, New Jersey, where he had been appointed professor in the School of Humanistic Studies of the Institute for Advanced Study. But this permission was only granted temporarily; as had already been the case with his residence in Iran and later in the United Kingdom, it had to be renewed repeatedly. A ﬁnal letter in the Berlin Museum gives the date of 30 September 1938 as the date from which Herzfeld was oﬃcially allowed to remain in the United States. But from his personnel ﬁle in the FriedrichWilhelms-Universität, we know that it had to be renewed constantly, probably until 1942.119 From November 1941, because of a new law, his pension ceased to be paid.120 In the years that followed, Herzfeld and Sarre probably heard from one another. The disaster of the Third Reich was also a personal disaster for Sarre. From a letter Maria Sarre wrote to Herzfeld after the war, we know that Sarre was deeply depressed during the war years. He was unable to write letters or work on certain subjects, as he felt that everything was doomed to perish.121 Since the letters in Berlin end with the year 1931, they do not explain how Herzfeld coped with emigration.122 In a certain sense, he had already emigrated from Germany when he left for Iran in 1923. Thereafter, he was only in Berlin for short visits. After he was forced to leave Persepolis in 1934, he saw his life as an odyssey that took him to London and later to the United States, where he never really 118 Universitätskurator, Berlin to the Reichs- und Preussischen Minister für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung, Berlin, to Herzfeld, 6 January 1938. 119 Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Berlin, Personalakte UK PA H 273; see also Renger’s contribution, this volume. 120 According to §10 of the II. Verordnung to the Reichsbürgergesetz, 25 November 1941, Herzfeld Personalakte, letter 182. 121 “Was soll ich schreiben, sagte er immer zu mir,—wie kann ich mich in Briefen über dies ganze entsetzliche Geschehen in Deutschland äußern—und es ignorieren und schreiben als wenn ich auf dem Mond lebte—das kann ich auch nicht. Er hatte Zeiten, da er alles Forschen und alle Wissenschaft sinnlos fand, da alles dem Untergang geweiht sei,—nur Samarra hat ihn trotz allem immer wieder beschäftigt und auch getröstet.” Maria Sarre to Herzfeld, 7 November 1945, Ernst Herzfeld Papers, notebook 131. 122 His parents came from Prussian Posen (today Polish Posznan). His grandparents were of Jewish faith but had assimilated already into German society, and therefore Herzfeld may not have developed a strong Jewish consciousness. He belonged to a generation deeply rooted in the German Kaiserreich that vanished in 1918.

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felt at home. As a result, he looked to places such as Istanbul, Damascus, or Cairo for permanent residence. But he saw that these places, too, had changed considerably by 1946 and were not what they had been in the old days.123 Before Herzfeld could ﬁnd a new home to his liking, he died in Basel on 21 January 1948.

Summary The relationship between Ernst Herzfeld and Friedrich Sarre was one that lasted more than thirty years. It hardly seems possible to speak of friendship between the two. It is better described as a similar way of thinking in pursuit of the same aims. Sarre was instrumental in Herzfeld’s involvement in the art and archaeology of the Near East, especially in the Iranian world. Thanks to the ﬁnancial resources of the Sarre network, a sort of symbiosis gradually developed, which lasted more or less until 1937. Despite these connections, however, there were always serious ﬁnancial problems and not all projects could be accomplished. Herzfeld would certainly have been successful without his acquaintance with Sarre, but his life would have developed much diﬀerently. As has been demonstrated, they were deeply involved in German political, industrial, and cultural life of the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century. Next to Sarre, Eduard Meyer and Carl Heinrich Becker played the most important roles in Herzfeld’s life. Because Sarre was active in Berlin he made Herzfeld’s excavations and publications possible. It also meant that Sarre, an art collector and head of a Berlin museum, met the art collector Herzfeld. Each of the two thus occupied precisely the place that best served their aims, because each held the position in which he was primarily interested and talented. It was a unique circumstance that Sarre and Herzfeld met and could combine their talents and visions.

123 Maria Sarre to Herzfeld, 7 November 1945, Ernst Herzfeld Papers, notebook 131. The quotation used as a motto for this paper was sent to Herzfeld in 1946 by W. von Blücher, the former German ambassador to Persia. Herzfeld used it in his letter to Maria Sarre as he realized that he, too, had become old. He saw the world as a place of disappointment, because times had changed so dramatically; this made him lonelier than ever.

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Fig. 1. Ernst Herzfeld as a young man. Herzfeld negative. Courtesy Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Museum für Islamische Kunst.

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Fig. 2. Friedrich Sarre, around 1895. Courtesy Staatliche Museen zu Berlin— Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Museum für Islamische Kunst.

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Fig. 3. Maria Sarre, around 1906. Photograph by E. Bieber, Hof. Photograph, Berlin & Hamburg. Courtesy Irmgard Sarre.

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Fig. 4. Ernst Herzfeld, Maria Sarre, and Moritz Sobernheim in April 1908 on a steamer in the Mediterranean. Photograph by Friedrich Sarre? Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 32, no. 64.

Fig. 5. Herzfeld’s study in Berlin, 5 Nürnberger Platz, around 1909. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 32, no. 47.

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Fig. 6. Herzfeld’s study in Samarra, around 1912. Herzfeld negative. Courtesy Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Museum für Islamische Kunst.

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Fig. 7. Reconstruction of decorated stucco wall panels from Samarra. Berlin, Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, room 14 (until 1931). Courtesy Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Museum für Islamische Kunst.

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Fig. 8. Herzfeld’s bag 1840, labeled “Persepolis Terrasse.” Courtesy Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Museum für Islamische Kunst.

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Fig. 9. Contents of Herzfeld’s bag 1840, “Persepolis Terrasse.” Courtesy Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Museum für Islamische Kunst.

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Fig. 10. Fragmentary stucco horse, Nizamabad 1925. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 8, no. 284.

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Fig. 11. The logo of the Anjuman Athar-i Milli, Tehran 1934. Courtesy Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Museum für Islamische Kunst.

Fig. 12. Herzfeld in the rear courtyard of his house in Tehran with his dog, Flohberger, 1929. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 10, no. 186.

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Fig. 13. Fragment of the ﬁgure of a Sasanian hunter. Iran, Sasanian period, probably 4th–5th century. Formerly Islamische Abteilung, Berlin; stolen in 1922. Originally part of a silver-gilt hunting plate; ﬁrst seen by Herzfeld in Dizful, 1905.

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Fig 14. Bowl. Iran, Parthian period, 2nd century B.C. Silver-gilt; height 8.5 cm, diameter 14.7 cm. Formerly Islamische Abteilung, Berlin. Said to have been found in Nihavand, western Iran. Courtesy Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Antikensammlung 31425.

Fig. 15. Pen box, made by Shazi for Majd al-Mulk al-Muzaﬀar. Iran or Afghanistan; dated 607 A.H. (1210/11 A.D.) Brass; engraved, chased, and inlaid with copper, silver, and black organic material; height 5.0 cm; length 31.4 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., purchase, F1936.7.

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Fig. 16. Herzfeld in Persepolis, probably 1932. Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, photo 22443.

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Fig. 17. Friedrich Sarre at age seventy, Berlin 1935. Courtesy Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Museum für Islamische Kunst.

PART II

HERZFELD AND KEY ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES

ERNST HERZFELD AND PASARGADAE David Stronach

The numerous contributions that Ernst Herzfeld made to Near Eastern studies during the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century remain unrivaled in range. But while his interests extended from prehistoric times to the Islamic era, his name will always be linked to Pasargadae, the monumental, dynastic seat of Cyrus the Great (559–530 B.C.). Pasargadae was the subject of his dissertation, published in 1908; a number of the main monuments from the site—including the tomb of Cyrus and the one surviving apotropaic doorway ﬁgure from Gate R—were included in Iranische Felsreliefs, a work that he and Friedrich Sarre published in 1910; and, above all, he conducted the ﬁrst Schürfungen, or “prospecting,” at Pasargadae in 1923 as well as the ﬁrst major excavations at the site in 1928.1 Furthermore, some of his long-held views about the nature of Cyrus’ capital were restated in his two best-known general treatments of the history, art, and architecture of ancient Iran: Archaeological History of Iran (1936) and his still more richly illustrated study, Iran in the Ancient East (1941). Herzfeld made his ﬁrst visit to Pasargadae in November 1905 in the hope, as he later wrote, that his brief examination of the ruins— especially when combined with a thorough review of the available literary sources—might help to answer certain outstanding questions. At that date, it is appropriate to remember, the identiﬁcation of the ancient remains in the vicinity of the monument then known as Gabr-i Madar-i Suleiman in the Dasht-i Morghab (The Tomb of the Mother of Solomon in the Plain of the Water-bird) could still be regarded as a topic for debate; and, as we shall see in a moment, Herzfeld was determined, somewhat anachronistically as it happens, to make the identiﬁcation of Pasargadae the main thrust of his thesis.

1 Herzfeld, “Pasargadae” 1908, 1–68; Sarre and Herzfeld, Iranische Felsreliefs; Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 241–45; Herzfeld, “Bericht über Pasargadae,” 4–16. In addition, Herzfeld, Altpersische Inschriften, 2–4, ﬁgs. 2 and 3, and pls. 1 and 2, treats inter alia the inscriptions known from Pasargadae following Herzfeld’s 1928 season.

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As early as 1812, when the prevailing view located the lost capital of Cyrus at Fasa, some 150 kilometers to the southeast, James J. Morier had almost got matters right when he reﬂected that “if the position of the place had corresponded with the site of Passargardae [sic] as well as the form of this structure [the building then known as Gabr-i Madar-i Suleiman] with the description [in classical sources] of the tomb of Cyrus near that city, I should have been tempted to assign to the present building so illustrious an origin.”2 In fact, the ﬁrst convincingly argued claim that the scattered ruins in the Dasht-i Morghab were those of Cyrus’ capital is owed to George N. Curzon who, writing eighty years later, still largely based his case on the same detailed architectural correspondences that had given rise to Morier’s prescient observation.3

Herzfeld’s Dissertation At the beginning of his doctoral thesis entitled “Pasargadae. Untersuchungen zur persischen Archäologie,” Herzfeld stressed that the object of his research was a very speciﬁc one: to address the problem of the identity of the ruins at Pasargadae “which was not solved until to-day.”4 A little later, he quoted the above-mentioned passage from Morier before referring to Curzon’s “sensitive . . . autopsy” in the latter’s Persia and the Persian Question—without any express hint that Curzon’s arguments, printed in 1892, had already eﬀectively settled the issue of the location of Cyrus’ capital. It is striking that the main substance of the thesis begins with a markedly comprehensive description of the hydrological context of Pasargadae. As beﬁts Herzfeld’s vast erudition, it is a wide-ranging discussion that uses medieval and other varied sources to complement the author’s keen eye for terrain.5 Then, and only then—with the realities of the physical setting of the site no longer a subject for speculation—does he allow himself to make full use of the numer2 James J. Morier, A Journey through Persia, Armenia and Asia Minor to Constantinople, in the Years 1808 and 1809 (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1812), 145. 3 George N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1892), 2:71–90. 4 Herzfeld “Pasargadae” 1908, 1. All translations from Herzfeld’s works are my own. 5 Ibid., 4–7.

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ous classical sources that relate to this and other matters. True to his stated goal of bringing topography, history, archaeology, and art history into the discussion, he begins by exploring such subjects as the topography of Persis in classical sources and the contrasting settings of Pasargadae and Persepolis.6 With reference to historical issues, he takes stock of Alexander the Great’s headlong dash, on his return from India, from Kerman to Pasargadae, and of the deﬁning battle between Cyrus and Astyages—a battle that he places, without equivocation, at Pasargadae.7 With Herzfeld’s “archaeological introduction” to the site, the number of items multiplies. Thus the Tall-i Takht (Throne Hill), the socalled altars at the northwest corner of the site, the Zendan, the tomb of Cyrus, the relief from Gate R, the visible remains of Palaces S and P, and the instances of the uses of a “foundation inscription” (the CMa text, as it is now usually designated) each receive separate consideration.8 In terms of the evolution of Herzfeld’s ideas over time, certain comments that appear in this pioneer study call for particular notice. In the case of the great stone platform locally known as Takht-i Madar-i Suleiman (the Throne of the Mother of Solomon), which juts out from the western side of the Tall-i Takht, it is clear that Herzfeld was at a loss as to where to place the structure in chronological terms. On the one hand, he thought that both its unﬁnished condition and its use of regular stone courses (as opposed to the use of polygonal masonry at Persepolis) could point to a late Achaemenian date. But on the other hand, various factors already suggested to him— some six decades prior to the publication of Carl Nylander’s seminal work, Ionians in Pasargadae—that connections with Lydian masonry and comparisons with Lydian masons’ marks would one day suﬃce to place the monument in a secure chronological setting.9 As Herzfeld realized at once, the supposed altars at the northwest corner of the site were not in fact altars; rather, the objects in question were no more than high stone plinths. Indeed, based on the 6

Ibid., 7–10, 13–15. Ibid., 20–26, 26–28. 8 Ibid., 29ﬀ. For the standard classiﬁcation of OP texts, see Roland G. Kent, Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon, 2d ed., rev., AOS 33 (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1953), 116ﬀ. 9 Herzfeld, “Pasargadae” 1908, 31; Carl Nylander, Ionians in Pasargadae. Studies in Old Persian Architecture, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Boreas 1 (Uppsala: Universitetet, 1970). 7

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presence of the twin rock-cut altars at Naqsh-i Rustam (which were only in 1941 correctly attributed to the Sasanian period), he proposed that each plinth originally supported an altar—and, hence, that the twin plinths bore witness to a special cult that called for the use of two ﬁres.10 It was Kurt Galling, writing in the 1920s, who ﬁrst grasped the signiﬁcance of the large stepped stone that still stands on the west side of the south plinth. In an analysis that has held up well, Galling used the analogy of the central scene in Darius’ funerary relief to suggest that, similarly, the author of these twin supports had most probably mounted one plinth in order to worship before an altar that stood on the second plinth.11 With reference to the date and function of the Zendan, Herzfeld at once recognized that the well-preserved Ka’bah-i Zardusht at Naqsh-i Rustam—in contrast to all the other monuments in and near Persepolis—retained many close correspondences not only with the much-denuded Zendan but also, more generally, with the distinctive use of contrasting light and dark stone that is such a special characteristic of the stone architecture at Pasargadae.12 This misled him into thinking that the Zendan and the Ka’bah were contemporary, freestanding tomb towers and that each could be said to antedate the rock-cut tomb of Darius. Unfortunately for this seemingly logical line of argument, the deeply carved channels in the doorway of the Ka’bah cannot be said to have had any connection with the transport of coﬃns either into or out of this supposed, temporary tomb.13 In chronological terms, moreover, no ruler prior to Darius would have been in a position to call for the construction of the Ka’bah, since this latter monument attests a square internal plan—such as Darius ﬁrst introduced within the

10 Herzfeld, “Pasargadae” 1908, 31. For the Sasanian date, see Kurt Erdmann, Das iranische Feuerheiligtum (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1941), 13ﬀ. 11 Kurt Galling, Der Altar in den Kulturen des alten Orients: Eine archäologische Studie (Berlin: Curtius, 1925), pl. 14, ﬁg. 5. See also David Stronach, Pasargadae: A Report on the Excavations Conducted by the British Institute of Persian Studies from 1961 to 1963 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 141. 12 Herzfeld, “Pasargadae” 1908, 32–33. 13 Marcel Dieulafoy, L’art antique de la Perse: Achéménides, Parthes, Sassanides, (Paris: Librairie centrale d’architecture, 1884), 1:15 with ﬁg. 19, ﬁrst scouted this notion; it was eventually refuted by Erich F. Schmidt, Persepolis, vol. 3, The Royal Tombs and Other Monuments, OIP 70 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 42, who demonstrated that the deep channels in the ﬂoor had merely served to facilitate the installation of the building’s heavy, double-leaved stone doors.

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context of Achaemenian monumental architecture—and, just as signiﬁcantly (as we now know), its own generous share of toothed chisel marks.14 In other words, we can now appreciate that Darius was concerned—for whatever still unknown reason—to retain each and every obvious external characteristic of the Zendan at the very same time that each of his other monumental constructions was seemingly designed to display new, innovative elements.15 The next section of Herzfeld’s thesis is devoted to the tomb of Cyrus. While space is naturally given to a description of the physical features of the monument, one has to wonder why his account fails to draw attention to the Ionian elements in the design.16 Indeed, since he somewhat lamely concludes that the tomb could have been modeled on local Iranian house forms, he may have been concerned with the possible chronological implications of wholesale Lydo-Ionian borrowings, which would have been more understandable at a date after the conquest of Sardis in (or soon after) 547 B.C.17 In his description and analysis of the doorway relief in Gate R, Herzfeld went out of his way to stress the clear parallel between the fringed dress of the winged genius and the robe of Teumann (TeptiHumban-Inshushinak), the Elamite monarch who suﬀered defeat and decapitation at the hands of the Assyrians at the battle of the Ulai River in 653 B.C. With characteristic insight, moreover, he realized that this striking correspondence could be attributed to Cyrus’ wish

14 Nylander, Ionians in Pasargadae, 32, and Stronach, Pasargadae, 99–100, on the chronological signiﬁcance of the introduction of the claw or toothed chisel in Iran in the second half of the sixth century B.C. 15 For a recent exploration of the subject, see David Stronach, “From Cyrus to Darius: Notes on Art and Architecture in Early Achaemenid Palaces,” in The Royal Palace Institution in the First Millennium B.C.: Regional Development and Cultural Interchange between East and West, Monographs of the Danish Institute at Athens, ed. Inge Nielsen, no. 4 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2001), 101–6. 16 Dieulafoy, L’art antique de la Perse, 42–43, already alluded (at least in somewhat critical terms) to certain of these. 17 On local Iranian house forms, see Herzfeld, “Pasargadae” 1908, 42. It is probably not too much to say that he was interested from the outset in projecting a uniﬁed view of Pasargadae as a creation of the ﬁrst ten years of Cyrus’ reign. Today, Herzfeld’s obsession in this regard, which called for an almost constant denial of any consequent inﬂuences from western Anatolia, is made all the more apparent by John Boardman’s recent, forceful estimation that the construction of the tomb was “executed in techniques” that were “essentially not eastern, but LydoIonian, and with features of Greek Ionic architecture.” John Boardman, Persia and the West: An Archaeological Investigation of the Genesis of Achaemenid Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 60.

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to underline his Anshanite/Elamite heritage.18 He also noted that the winged ﬁgure is not to be understood as a god, but as a protective “genius” in the already long-familiar tradition of Mesopotamian apotropaic doorway ﬁgures. Equally, Herzfeld never for a moment supposed that the ﬁrst-person inscription in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian, reading “I, Cyrus, the King, an Achaemenid,” which had stood above the winged genius until a date close to 1870, had been intended to serve as a label for the ﬁgure directly beneath it.19 On the contrary, he recognized that the inscription in question—the CMa text, in Roland Kent’s subsequent inventory of Old Persian inscriptions—had to be viewed as a foundation inscription in which the engraved legend necessarily carried the further implicit meaning “built this.”20 Just as importantly, this terse inscription (which otherwise still occurs on antae in Palaces S and P) served in his mind to provide a vital documentary link between Cyrus and the various monumental buildings that stood broadcast across the Dasht-i Morghab. In making this latter unequivocal connection, Herzfeld was obviously making the most of the limited inscriptional evidence then available to him. Thus, although the modest title “king” had suggested to Franz H. Weissbach that the inscriptions might have been the work of Cyrus the Younger (d. 401 B.C.), Herzfeld was quick to point out that there were no historical grounds to support such an interpretation.21 And although Herzfeld also felt it necessary to mention the possibility that Darius could have been the inventor of the OP cuneiform script, in keeping with the apparent sense of §70 of the Old Persian version of the Bisitun inscription, he was not willing to entertain this objection, either.22

Sarre and Herzfeld, Iranische Felsreliefs (1910) In using this joint publication to revisit various features of Pasargadae only two years after the publication of his thesis, Herzfeld did not have 18

Herzfeld, “Pasargadae” 1908, 64. Stronach, Pasargadae, 48, oﬀers a summary account of the notice paid to the monument prior to 1870. 20 Kent, Old Persian, 116. 21 Herzfeld, “Pasargadae” 1908, 65–66, citing Franz H. Weissbach, “Das Grab des Kyros und die Inschriften von Murghab,” ZDMG 48 (1894): 665. 22 Herzfeld, “Pasargadae” 1908, 65–66. 19

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many new perspectives to oﬀer. Nevertheless, he used the opportunity to reexamine a number of the deﬁning features of the winged genius. In particular, he pointed out that the attributes of kingship—a long beard, a scepter, and a lotus ﬂower—were all absent, and he drew on his own considerable skills as a draftsman to reveal certain hitherto undetected qualities in the sensitively rendered head. Herzfeld’s acute eye also detected the pre-Persepolitan style of the relief, and he drew special attention to the ﬁgure’s full proﬁle pose.23 With reference to the elaborate Egyptian crown that dominates the composition, Herzfeld chose to assume that this was no more than a well-known representational element in the Near East at the time that Cyrus chose to employ it.24 And since, in his estimation, Cyrus had introduced the motif before 550 B.C., Herzfeld saw no reason to stress any possible connection with the ruler’s eventual, very conceivable designs on Egypt or with (at the very least) the arresting submission in 539 B.C. of all the local rulers of the Levant. On the other hand, Herzfeld used the correspondences between the costume of Teumann and the costume of the winged genius not only to underline once again Cyrus’ Anshanite heritage, but even to raise the possibility—unlikely as it may be—that Cyrus himself wore a similar costume.

Prologue to the 1928 Season The events that led up to Herzfeld’s excavations at Pasargadae in 1928, and the actual nature of the work that was then undertaken, have not always received adequate attention. Herzfeld’s long acquaintance with the ruins, the many years that he had apparently spent contemplating their signiﬁcance, and, not least, his little-advertised preliminary campaign at Pasargadae in mid-November 1923, did much to allow him to provide a succinct but seemingly comprehensive view of a site where his formal excavations only occupied twentyeight days in April and May 1928. The notion of one day digging at Pasargadae is likely to have been with him from the moment in 1905 that he ﬁrst visited the site. In

23 Sarre and Herzfeld, Iranische Felsreliefs, 159–60; Herzfeld’s drawing is reproduced in ﬁg. 72. 24 Ibid., 162.

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a notable passage in the opening pages of his dissertation, for example, he bemoaned the fact that further information (beyond what he himself was able to glean from his surface inspection) was not likely to be forthcoming in the foreseeable future in view of the monopoly on excavation in Iran then held by the Délégation Scientiﬁque Française en Perse. His sense of frustration is palpable. One reﬂection of this frustration comes from a little-known event that took place quite soon after he started to visit Iran with some regularity early in the 1920s. In an article bearing the not very communicative title “Reisebericht,” Herzfeld mentioned, among many other things, the excavations that he undertook at Pasargadae in 1923. In this contribution, he records that he stayed at Pasargadae from 12 to 18 November 1923, during which time he found it possible to conduct unspeciﬁed Schürfungen. The report also indicates that he drew a plan of the entire site as well as plans of individual structures. Notebooks, drawings, and photographs recording his work are preserved in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers in Washington, D.C.25 Indeed, his detailed investigations during this week of intense eﬀort surely assisted him greatly in working with such tremendous speed and eﬀectiveness in 1928.26 It is true that Herzfeld’s opposition to the monopoly is usually framed in terms of his ambition to be the ﬁrst excavator of Persepolis. But since he found a way to work at Pasargadae as early as 1923, and since it was through the agency of his subsequent, more signiﬁcant season in 1928 that Pasargadae came to be the ﬁrst site to be excavated on the Iranian plateau after the abrogation of the French monopoly on excavations, it is abundantly clear that Pasargadae was 25 Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 241–45. Herzfeld seems to have worked at Pasargadae from 13–19 November 1923; see Ernst Herzfeld Papers, notebook N-83, 139–43, records work from 13–14 November 1923; notebook N-84, 1–11, records work from 15–18 November 1923 (includes a list of photographs taken). Copies of inscriptions, measured plans, and architectural details are recorded in sketchbook SK-IV, 1–33. Since the photographs of Pasargadae preserved in the papers in Washington are undated, it cannot always be determined which were taken in 1923 and which in 1928. 26 It may not be irrelevant to add that Herzfeld’s ﬁrst visit to Pasargadae in November 1905 failed to produce any published record. With czarist Russia in a state of great turmoil at the time, the ﬁrst part of Herzfeld’s homeward journey (aboard a train that ran from Baku to Batum on the Black Sea) proved exceedingly dangerous. In the end, he was obliged to abandon all his papers and photographs, as observed in Ettinghausen’s contribution to this volume. Herzfeld’s notes and sketches from his 1905 visit to the site are preserved in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers, notebook N-82, 22–31.

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never far from the top of the list of sites that he wished to excavate.27 By the close of 1926, Herzfeld found himself acting as an archaeological adviser to the Iranian government, and he seems to have decided that the time was already ripe to think in terms of funding future archaeological ﬁeldwork.28 Early in 1927, he wrote a memorandum to the most important policy makers in Germany. The memorandum stressed the importance of archaeological research in Iran and listed a number of projects for consideration. The projects for the immediate future (and for which he was indirectly applying for funding) were not all mentioned by name, but one can infer that he was planning excavations at Tepe Giyan, Kuh-e Khwaja, Kangavar, and the oldest surviving madrasa in Khurasan. In addition, the catholic quality of his interests and the boundless energy that he was ready to invest in new projects is underlined by his parallel stress on the need for a corpus of Parthian inscriptions and a comprehensive study of the rock reliefs of Elam. In the medium-term he pointed to Pasargadae and Persepolis as “grosses Ziel” and indicated that applications to fund investigations at these two sites could be expected. Indeed, the tenor of the memorandum makes it clear that he was already trying to interest sources in Germany in the prospect of future operations at Persepolis. And, with reference to subsequent events, the very fact that Herzfeld, as the clear choice to head any excavations at that challenging site, was subsequently obliged to enter into negotiations ﬁrst with the University of Pennsylvania and then with the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago can be directly related to the failure of his repeated applications for funding from German institutions.29 27 While Herzfeld failed to record the auspices under which he undertook the work at Pasargadae in 1923, it may be inferred that his extended activities in Fars in the winter of 1923–24 had the broad approval of the Iranian authorities. To begin with, his study of the ruins at Persepolis in that interval took place at the express request of the governor of Fars. Herzfeld, “Rapport sur Persépolis,” 17–19. Furthermore, Reza Khan had visited Persepolis in the autumn of 1922 (while he was the acting minister of war) and had complained of the lamentable condition of the ruins. M.-T. Mostafavi, “Amànatdariy-e khàk,” Barressihày-e Tàrikhi 11, no. 67 (1355/1976): 3. Above and beyond all else, Prince Firouz Mirza, the governor of Fars at the time, was one of Herzfeld’s most staunch supporters. 28 Mousavi, this volume, provides further information on this aspect of Herzfeld’s career. 29 Stefan R. Hauser, “Not Out of Babylon? The Development of Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Germany and Its Current Signiﬁcance,” in Proceedings of the XLV e RAI: Historiography in the Cuneiform World, ed. Tsvi Abusch et al. (Bethesda, Md.:

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In the meantime, in July 1927, Herzfeld received a salaried post as the Iranian government’s specialist in Oriental studies. Still more importantly for his future hopes, the agreement between Iran and France that abolished the French monopoly on archaeological excavations in Iran was signed on 18 October 1927. But whatever satisfaction Herzfeld may have derived from these successive events, his gratiﬁcation was likely tempered by the knowledge that, in return for the concessions that had been made, the French were to be allowed to select the future head of Iran’s Archaeological Service. It was this last development, which could only work to undercut Herzfeld’s existing authority, that presumably decided the precise timing of the 1928 season. There would have been little sense in trying to set an excavation in motion at upland, sometimes snowbound, Pasargadae in the waning months of 1927, but the late spring of 1928 would have beckoned as a moment of opportunity that could not be missed. In point of fact, Herzfeld’s promptitude in acting at this juncture, and in taking care that the whole season would last for only a very brief period of time, duly ensured that the work was completed well before André Godard, the newly appointed adviser, arrived in Tehran in August of the same year. That Herzfeld was able to organize and execute this second investigation at Pasargadae in such an incisive manner is nonetheless a matter for surprise. Because funds for the excavation were obtained from a German source, the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, there was apparently no need to apply to any Iranian source of funding; and, since his subsequent report makes no reference to the auspices under which the excavations took place, the reader is left to conclude that Herzfeld himself enjoyed the necessary authority to act as he did.30 At the same time, even with these considerations in mind, there is a huge contrast between the ease with which the work at Pasargadae was set in motion in the spring of 1928 and the protracted negotiations that attended the beginning of the excavations at Persepolis. In the latter case it was not until 1931 that Herzfeld, always the top candidate for the task, became the ﬁrst ﬁeld director of the Persepolis CDL Press, 2001), 211–37, quotes part of the memorandum and sets it in context. I am most grateful to Stefan Hauser for drawing my attention to this and other material cited in his article. See also Mousavi, this volume, on Herzfeld’s negotiations with American universities in connection with the Persepolis concession. 30 Herzfeld, “Bericht über Pasargadae,” 4–16.

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project on behalf of the Oriental Institute.31 In order to explain this discrepancy, it is perhaps partly necessary to remember that Herzfeld himself used the highly evocative ruins at Persepolis to highlight the need to preserve Iran’s ancient heritage well beyond the bounds of the customary operations of the Délégation, which lay in and near Susa. In a celebrated lecture to the Society for National Heritage, delivered in Tehran on 18 May 1927, he stressed, for example, the vital need to conserve the remains at Persepolis and the important role that such remains could play in helping to shape Iranian national consciousness.32 Pasargadae did not enter into the debate. Second, Pasargadae was not yet thought of as a site of national consequence. Its very identity had remained in doubt until not so many years earlier; its monuments were still largely identiﬁed (at least in terms of various colorful local names) with Solomon rather than with Cyrus; and—at a glance, at least—its scattered, largely buried remains could not compare with those of Persepolis.

The 1928 Season at Pasargadae In view of Herzfeld’s relative lack of success in raising money from German sources, the size of the expedition that set out for Pasargadae in April 1928 may well have been dictated by the limited nature of the funds available for the work. At all events, the team consisted— quite remarkably in view of all that was accomplished—of no more than three persons: Herzfeld; Friedrich Krefter, a twenty-ﬁve-year-old architect from Berlin; and a cook (ﬁg. 1). Herzfeld’s description of his excavations is clearly cursory by modern standards. The exact size of the areas that he examined is not always made clear, and it certainly seems unlikely that he ever aimed to uncover the entire surface of any largely buried, major monument. He also makes no mention of undertaking any work on the surface of the Tall-i Takht, even if he was most probably responsible for the two long parallel search trenches that are still visible on the summit of that sizeable hill.33 31 Erich F. Schmidt, Persepolis, vol. 1, Structures, Reliefs, Inscriptions, OIP 68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), ix. 32 Mousavi’s contribution to this volume examines the subject in detail. 33 Erich F. Schmidt, Flights over Ancient Cities of Iran (Chicago: University of Chicago

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With his ability to read the niceties of surface topography, however, Herzfeld quickly grasped the general character of the site. He not only saw that all the main buildings shared a common orientation, but (very possibly with the aid of various subsurface probes) he became aware that such structures were also complemented by a number of small pavilions and water channels.34 Thus, while Herzfeld’s historical convictions led him to insist to the last that Pasargadae was a place where nomads had only recently settled down, Herzfeld— as an experienced observer in the ﬁeld and as the ﬁnal authority behind the creation of Friedrich Krefter’s 1928 site plan—clearly recognized the consistent structural orientations that typiﬁed Cyrus’ unusual capital (ﬁg. 2).35 In the case of Gate R, enough work was done to prove that eight “mighty” stone columns had once supported the roof of the building’s spacious, rectangular hall; and I believe that Herzfeld should be taken at his word when he states that, while human-headed colossi ﬂanked the inner main doorway, winged bulls ﬂanked the outer doorway (ﬁg. 3).36 Four huge socles speak for the former presence of such colossi, and Herzfeld’s notebook preserved in Washington, D.C., contains a drawing of what may possibly be part of the crown of a human-headed lamassu.37 In addition, in the early 1960s, the excavations of the British Institute of Persian Studies recovered several fragments of carved feathers outside the outer doorway.38 Moreover, Herzfeld himself states that he found “many” small fragments of these gigantic ﬁgures in the course of his own work; and, if he had

Press, 1940), pl. 15, shows the trenches clearly. Herzfeld, himself a member of the excavation team at Assur from 1903 to 1905, would have been well aware of the famous system of parallel test trenches introduced at Assur in 1907. See also Stronach, Pasargadae, 6. 34 Herzfeld, “Bericht über Pasargadae,” 10. 35 Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 225. Apart from all else, Herzfeld introduced the designations by which the main structures in the palace area have come to be known. Thus, the monumental gatehouse, “der Palast mit dem Relief,” continues to be known as Gate R; the palace with the single surviving tall column, or “der Palast mit der Säule,” remains Palace S; and the building now dominated by a single surviving anta, or “dem Palast mit der Pfeiler,” continues to be referred to as Palace P. 36 Herzfeld, “Bericht über Pasargadae,” 11. 37 Ibid., 11. As Hilary Gopnik has kindly informed me, his label on the original cynanotype housed in Washington, D.C., reads “Pasargadae R: Fragment of crown of lamassu.” Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 2, vol. 2, no. 102. 38 Stronach, Pasargadae, pl. 47d.

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had less evidence to go on, he would presumably have taken the Gate of All Lands at Persepolis as his model and postulated the presence of wingless bulls at the outer entrance. What he missed was relatively slight: He makes no reference to the existence of a second side doorway and, inasmuch as he never referred to secondary construction at Gate R, he seems to have taken the small chamber outside the doorjamb bearing the relief of the winged genius to have been an original rather than a secondary feature.39 Highly important architectural evidence came to light in Palace S. Herzfeld instantly noted the ways in which this elegant columned hall—with its rectangular plan, tall principal hall, and four low porticoes—diﬀered from the later palaces at Persepolis. He also drew attention to the distinctive character of the column bases, the smooth column drums, and the innovative, double protome stone capitals. The fragmentary stone capitals were not only diﬀerent from those at Persepolis, but they were also “more powerful and more beautiful.”40 The reliefs in the four doorways were only preserved in their “lowest parts” and those in the opposed doorways in the two short walls showed minor deities “striding one behind the other.” But while the latter were seen to be threshold “blessing geniuses,” no mention was made of any debt to Assyrian prototypes.41 On the other hand, the striking representation of human and animal feet on the beautifully carved, best-preserved jamb of the southwest doorway undoubtedly captured Herzfeld’s close notice.42 Thus, over a period of thirty years, he took this severely truncated doorway relief, which may have depicted servants conducting a bull or cow to the scene of a feast, either to represent tribute-bearers bringing gifts of horses, priests leading a bovine animal to sacriﬁce, or “warriors leading horses.”43 39 The side room is clearly visible in ﬁgure 3, that is, on the plan that clearly includes features not shown in Herzfeld’s ﬁrst general plan (see ﬁg. 2). A more recent general plan of Pasargadae, which includes all the monuments identiﬁed as Achaemenian during the early 1960s, is reproduced here as ﬁgure 4. See Schmidt, Persepolis, 1:65–48, for details of the Gate of All Lands. 40 Herzfeld, “Bericht über Pasargadae,” 11. 41 For the Mesopotamian antecedents of such ﬁgures, see Trudy Kawami, “A Possible Source for the Sculptures of the Audience Hall, Pasargadae,” Iran 10 (1972): 146–48; Stronach, Pasargadae, 68–70; David Stronach, “Anshan and Parsa: Early Achaemenid History, Art and Architecture on the Iranian Plateau,” in Mesopotamia and Iran in the Persian Period: Conquest and Imperialism, 539–331 B.C., ed. John E. Curtis (London: British Museum, 1997), 44–45. 42 See Boardman, Persia and the West, 104, for a recent discussion of this sculpture. 43 For the interpretation of the scene as servants conducting a bull or cow, see

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The capitals, which failed to ﬁnd any illustration in the excavation report, received better treatment in Iran in the Ancient East: One photograph shows the impressive qualities of a horned and crested lion-headed creature, while a line drawing shows the only surviving stone column (composed of four drums) as it would have appeared capped by a double protome of this same type.44 A photograph of a fragmentary horse head was also published in Iran in the Ancient East, but another variant form—a second leonine monster or “perhaps a true lion”—seems not to have been published.45 Although Herzfeld’s latest published plan of Palace S suggests that he recovered the entire plan of the building during his excavations, this was not in fact the case (ﬁg. 5). In particular, this plan—which was based on a number of narrow crossing trenches—shows that he severely underestimated the number of columns in each of the porticoes.46 In the case of the two opposed short porticoes, he postulated the presence of two rows of six (instead of eight) columns; in the southwest portico, his drawing shows two rows of eight (instead of fourteen) columns; and in the northeast portico, we ﬁnd two rows of fourteen columns where there should have been a total of twentyfour in each row. Also at fault is a reconstruction by Herzfeld and Krefter that indicates that Palace S stood on a low platform approached by shallow, opposed staircases, with (yet again) the same inappropriate number of columns in each of the visible porticoes.47 Ann E. Farkas, Achaemenid Sculpture, Uitgaven van het Nederlands HistorischArchaeologisch Instituut te Istanbul 33 (Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut in het Nabije Oosten, 1974), 11; and Stronach, Pasargadae, 70. For Herzfeld’s various interpretations, see Sarre and Herzfeld, Iranische Felsreliefs, 184, ﬁg. 84; Herzfeld, “Bericht über Pasargadae,” 12; Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 257. 44 Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, pl. 39a; ﬁg. 344. 45 Ibid., pl. 39b. See Herzfeld, “Bericht über Pasargadae,” 12, where the variant is mentioned. A fragmentary example of the latter type (at least if it consisted of a “true lion”) may have come to light in 2001. According to Siyamak Eskandari, who was engaged in architectural studies at Pasargadae on behalf of the Cultural Heritage Organization in that year, a number of stone fragments, including in his estimation several possible fragments of the CMb inscription, were found “in a wooden barrel” in a storeroom in the adjacent village of Madar-i Suleiman. The lion capital (such as I was only able to examine in a photograph with no scale during a brief visit to Tehran in October 2002) is said to be smaller in size than the capitals published by Herzfeld; and, for this reason, it may indicate that lion-headed protomes capped the columns in at least one of the porticoes. I am most grateful to Shahrokh Razmjou of the Iran Bastan Museum for drawing my attention to the chance discovery of this material. 46 Stronach, Pasargadae, pl. 52d.

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By a stroke of great good fortune, Krefter was able to make a number of return visits to Iran in the early 1970s and, in response to evidence that had become available in the course of both Sami’s and Stronach’s excavations, he was kind enough to prepare a revised reconstruction of the original appearance of Palace S, drawn from the same angle. The two drawings, ﬁrst published together twentyﬁve years ago, are here reproduced as ﬁgure 7.48 Herzfeld’s chief discovery in Palace P consisted of the ﬁnely carved reliefs that ﬂanked the two opposed main doorways of the thirtycolumned central hall. Although found in a broken condition and only preserved, at best, to something approaching waist height, each example shows a king proceeding outward from the hall followed by an attendant (ﬁg. 8). Herzfeld observed that the ﬁgures wore the same pleated costume as that attested at Persepolis, but since the lines of the pleats were less “sweeping,” since they did not share exactly the same spacing, and since they stood, for example, within a distinctive raised frame, he found them to represent a stage of development prior to that attested by the reliefs at Persepolis. In all of this Herzfeld’s art historical instincts were correct. But when it came to ascribing an absolute date to these pre-Persepolis reliefs, Herzfeld the epigrapher prevailed. Thus the ﬁgures were not seen to be only marginally earlier than those at Persepolis—i.e., datable to within something like the ﬁrst decade of Darius’ reign, where they are customarily placed today—but substantially earlier.49 In deference to the inscriptions on the pleats of the king’s costume reading “Cyrus, the Great King, an Achaemenid,” Herzfeld felt convinced that the “riddle” of the date of the ruins at Pasargadae had at last been solved.50 In his considered view, Cyrus “the King” (as deﬁned in the CMa texts) took the decision to build at Pasargadae (as an expression of his desire to throw oﬀ the Median yoke) virtually as soon as he came to the Persian throne in 559 B.C.; he adopted the

Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, pl. 43 (below), reproduces a similarly ﬂawed frontal elevation. 48 See Stronach, Pasargadae, pl. 53, for the original publication. 49 Ibid., 100; see also Boardman, Persia and the West, 104. 50 Ibid., pl. 81b, reproduces Herzfeld’s original photograph of a single carved fragment that carries elements of both the Elamite and Babylonian texts. On the assumption that corresponding Old Persian versions would also once have been present, these CMc texts have long been classed as trilingual. Kent, Old Persian, 107, 116. 47

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more prestigious title “Great King” in the immediate aftermath of his defeat of his Median suzerain, Astyages, in 550 B.C.; and he only assumed the still more grandiose titles listed in his Babylonian cylinder after his conquest of Babylon in 539 B.C.51 Since all else had to be subordinate to this chronological scheme, each of the main monuments at Pasargadae had to be dated, eﬀectively, between 559 and 550 B.C. Inter alia, this meant that the Old Persian cuneiform script had to have been available to Cyrus from the outset of his rule, and, more than this, that the whole technical apparatus of sophisticated construction in ashlar masonry and the conventions governing the representation of voluminous multifolded costumes had to have been at Cyrus’ command during the ﬁrst ten years of his reign. Thanks to a succession of contributions by later scholars working in these various areas of inquiry it is now clear, however, that none of these chronological assumptions can be upheld. In the case of the Old Persian cuneiform script, Darius’ authorship is now unequivocally established; and Carl Nylander has demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that the beginnings of monumental stone construction at Pasargadae cannot predate Cyrus’ conquest of Sardis in or near 547 B.C.52 Further to Herzfeld’s third assumption, most scholars now accept that the style of the reliefs in Palace P has to be post-Bisitun, i.e., post-circa 520 B.C.53 Nylander in particular has drawn attention to the “striking formal similarities” between the Greek and Achaemenian treatments of voluminous drapery—treatments that suggest that the Achaemenian use of stacked folds with a zigzag edge is directly indebted to Greek conventions that date back, in Greece, to circa 550–540 B.C. (see ﬁg. 8).54

51 James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 2d ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 316, conveniently reproduces the text of Cyrus’ partly mutilated cylinder. 52 On Darius’ authorship, see, most recently, the magisterial study by Philip Huyse, “Some Further Thoughts on the Bisitun Monument and the Genesis of the Old Persian Script,” BAI n.s. 13 (1999 [2002]): 45–66. See Nylander, Ionians in Pasargadae, 90–91, for the chronology of monumental stone construction at the site. 53 Farkas, Achaemenid Sculpture, 14–26; Stronach, Pasargadae, 96–99, 104–6. 54 Nylander, Ionians in Pasargadae, 132. Needless to say, Nylander’s careful observations refute Herzfeld’s contention that the drapery style exhibited in Palace P had ﬁrst evolved in Iran, where, in the latter’s words, “it had already occurred—fully developed—at as early a date as . . . 559–550 B.C.” Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 260.

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As a sketch plan from Herzfeld’s excavation notebook of 1928 demonstrates, his own understanding of the overall plan of Palace P was based on no more than a minimal number of narrow search trenches (ﬁgs. 9 and 10). Nonetheless, it is apparent that this sketch was used as the basis, with certain modiﬁcations, for the plan that Herzfeld published in 1941 and that appears here, enlarged and redrawn (ﬁg. 11). The extent to which this latter drawing lacked precision (even if the number of columns in the porticoes was correctly represented) can be gauged from comparing the actual state of the remains as they were recorded in 1963 as well as from the details of a partial reconstruction based on the 1963 plan (compare ﬁgs. 12 and 13). But it is perhaps only fair to add that, even if Herzfeld never volunteered any comment about the tentative nature of his small-scale plans of Palaces S and P, he also never paraded these “miniature plans” as readily readable, deﬁnitive statements. Another category of evidence from Palace P that could have alerted Herzfeld to the contradictions inherent in his chronological construct comes from something as insubstantial as painted plaster. As his narrow search trenches in the main hall followed one or another alignment of stone columns, each no more than one drum high (see ﬁg. 10), he revealed many fragments of brilliantly painted plaster.55 And, since these were rounded in form, he rightly attributed them to the upper (i.e., wooden) elements of the thirty columns that had once supported the ceiling of the hall. But it never seems to have occurred to him to ask why Cyrus would have been content to complete his columns in this ad hoc fashion at a time when his unexampled reign still had close to twenty years to run.56 On the other hand, Herzfeld seems to have been genuinely puzzled by the fact that Palace P was characterized by horizontally ﬂuted stone tori. Such a feature “looks very Greek,” he noted, even if it was never found at Persepolis, where See Stronach, Pasargadae, ﬁgs. 44a–h, for examples. As I have indicated elsewhere, Palace P, the latest of the main buildings at Pasargadae, was still unﬁnished at the time of Cyrus’ death; and, in preparing that structure—and the site as a whole—for a new lease on life, Darius probably had no objection to the introduction of certain economies; see David Stronach, “Darius at Pasargadae: A Neglected Source for the History of Early Persia,” in Recherches récentes sur l’empire achéménide, Topoi orient-occident, Suppl. 1 (Lyon: De Boccard, 1997), 355. For details of the painted plaster shells that once encased wooden columns in the treasury at Persepolis, see Schmidt, Persepolis 1: ﬁg. 72j; and A. Shapur Shahbazi, Persepolis Illustrated, Institute of Achaemenid Research Publications 4 (Persepolis: Institute of Achaemenid Research, 1976), pl. 23. 55 56

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he thought that “Greek imports” might have been more readily encountered than at Pasargadae in the years before 550 B.C.57

Conclusion How, in an enduring perspective, should we view Herzfeld’s contributions to the study of Pasargadae? As I pointed out several years ago, any current inquiry has to take issue with virtually every assumption that Herzfeld ever made concerning the inscriptions from Pasargadae, each of which can be attributed to Darius I (522–486 B.C.)—and at least two of which (the CMa and CMc inscriptions) can now be seen to owe their more or less “modest” tenor to the vagaries of Darius’ successive policies vis-à-vis Cyrus.58 In addition, the fact that Herzfeld took possession of a number of key documents that he himself had excavated, such as the fragmentary horse-head capital and a good part of the CMb text, and that he may conceivably have been content to store still other prime objects in quite casual circumstances in the village of Madar-i Suleiman, very clearly complicates what can and should be said concerning his otherwise remarkable record of achievement.59

57 Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 239. I beg leave not to discuss in detail Herzfeld’s deeply mistaken lines of argument that led him to propose that the Terraced Mound at Pasargadae was once crowned by a small “cella” of the same appearance as the tomb of Cyrus. This unfortunate presumption led him, still more regrettably, to state that the tomb of Cyrus could be viewed as “a stone reproduction of a contemporary temple.” Herzfeld, “Bericht über Pasargadae,” 10; also Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 215, pl. 44. As I have indicated elsewhere, there are no valid grounds for these claims. Stronach, Pasargadae, 142–45. 58 David Stronach, “On the Interpretation of the Pasargadae Inscriptions,” in Ultra Terminum Vagari: Scritti in onore di Carl Nylander, ed. Börge Magnusson, Associazione internazionale di archeologia classica (Rome: Quasar, 1997), 329 n. 24. 59 At a time that is several steps removed from the way archaeology is conducted today, it may nevertheless be useful to attempt to see such peremptory actions in the context of an earlier time. As Robert Braidwood pointed out in a thoughtful essay on the history of archaeology in the Near East, very diﬀerent attitudes still prevailed as late as “the early 1930s.” Robert Braidwood, “Some Selected Archaeological Reﬂections,” in Between the Rivers and Over the Mountains: Archaeologica Anatolica et Mesopotamica Alba Palmieri Dedicata, ed. Marcella Frangipane et al. (Rome: Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche Archeologiche e Antropologiche dell’Antichità Università di Roma “La Sapienza,” 1993), 15–20. Moreover, whatever Herzfeld’s precise motives for retaining the above-mentioned objects may have been, it is a matter for gratiﬁcation that this did not preclude their subsequent publication (see, for example, Herzfeld, Altpersische Inschriften, pls. 1 and 2; Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient

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Among other things, it must be acknowledged that Herzfeld could also be oddly silent where seemingly pertinent testimony did not ﬁt his theories. On the foundation of Pasargadae, for example, Strabo (xv. 3. 8) is our most explicit authority: “Cyrus held Pasargadae in honor, because he there conquered Astyages the Mede in his last battle, transferred to himself the empire of Asia, founded a city, and constructed a palace as a memorial to his victory.” But this passage, which conﬂicted with Herzfeld’s determination to equate the entire construction of Pasargadae with Cyrus’ ﬁrst few years on the throne, was virtually ignored in his otherwise comprehensive treatment of relevant classical sources. Equally, as has already been remarked, Herzfeld never made any attempt to relate Cyrus’ adoption of LydoIonian masonry techniques or undeniable use of Assyrian iconography to any of the celebrated feats of conquest that were an integral part of Cyrus’ career after 550 B.C. Yet in terms of the overall value of Herzfeld’s excavations at Pasargadae—and his pivotal, pioneer role in stimulating those debates which to this day continue to reﬁne our knowledge of Achaemenid Iran—it has to be acknowledged that we stand squarely in his debt. His excavations as a whole were conducted with passion, ﬂair, uncommon knowledge, and, in the main, a profound respect for the testimony

East, pl. 39b); and that, as the following paragraph indicates, the location of the objects is once again known. Here it may be related—insofar as I have been able to piece together what happened over the years—that the objects were brought to the United States at or soon after the time that Herzfeld was appointed a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1936. At the time of his death in 1948, they passed to his sister, Mrs. Charlotte Bradford, who had also resided in Princeton during his tenure. They were subsequently acquired, together with other objects that later came to be known as “the Herzfeld collection,” by the noted New York restorer and collector, Joseph Ternbach (d. 1982). Ternbach subsequently published an article on the technical properties of an iron dagger from this group of objects (the so-called Herzfeld dagger) before donating his collection in the early 1970s to the Israel Museum, where he had long served as an adviser in conservation matters. Joseph Ternbach, “Technical Aspects of the Herzfeld Bent Dagger of Luristan,” in Dark Ages and Nomads c. 1000 B.C. Studies in Iranian and Anatolian Archaeology, ed. Machteld J. Mellink, Uitgaven van het Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut te Istanbul 18 (Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut, 1964), 46–51; on Ternbach’s gift to the Israel Museum, see Rivka Merhav et al., A Glimpse into the Past: The Joseph Ternbach Collection, ( Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1981). Thanks, moreover, to the good oﬃces of Dr. Talley Ornan, curator of western Asiatic antiquities at the Israel Museum, the fragments of the CMb inscription that are housed in the museum were recently re-photographed. At this writing, Professor Matthew Waters, University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, is preparing a new edition of the inscription.

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of the spade. Sometimes evidence was misunderstood and sometimes claims were made which should not have been made. At the last, however, we should be hugely grateful that the site was ﬁrst investigated by a deeply engaged scholar of prodigal talents, who also had the foresight to enlist the services of the talented Friedrich Krefter. Even if issues of minimal reporting—as well as other serious issues that have been explored in the foregoing pages—are kept in mind, the degree of commitment and erudition that Herzfeld brought to the all-important initial exploration of Cyrus the Great’s capital is something for which great gratitude is due.

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Fig. 1. Ernst Herzfeld in the ﬁeld at Pasargadae, 1928. Courtesy D. Reimer, Berlin.

Fig. 2. “Core area” of the plan of Pasargadae, drawn by Friedrich Krefter in 1928, published in Herzfeld, AMI 1 (1929–30). From left to right, labeled monuments include: tomb of Cyrus, walled village of Madar-i Suleiman, Gate R, Palace S, and Palace P. In current nomenclature, the Grabturm is the Zendan; the Burg is the Tall-i Takht (showing the outline of the great platform); and, in the top right corner, the rectangular feature beside the label “Tempel” is the Terraced Mound. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, drawing D-825.

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Fig. 3. Pasargadae, detail from the revised general plan by Ernst Herzfeld, published in Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East (1941). This updated version of the 1928 plan includes details of the columniation, which Herzfeld believed (correctly or incorrectly) to be present in Gate R, Palace S, and Palace P. The plan also demonstrates that Herzfeld was already well aware of the existence of a small pavilion (Pavilion B), located between Palace S and Palace P.

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Fig. 4. Pasargadae, plan of the principal known Achaemenid monuments at the close of the 1963 season, published in Stronach, Pasargadae (1978). Given the parallel preparation of many large-scale individual plans (see below, ﬁgs. 6, 12, and 13), little or no attempt was made to indicate doorways or details of the columniation that obtained in the porticoes of the two palaces. Key: 1 Tomb of Cyrus; 2 Gate R; 3 Palace S; 4 Palace P; 5 Royal Garden; 6 Pavilion A; 7 Pavilion B; 8 Canal Bridge; 9 Zendan; 10 Sacred Precinct; 11 Tall-I Takht; 12 mudbrick circuit wall.

Fig. 5. Pasargadae, plan of Palace S, published in Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East (1941) and redrawn for publication in Stronach, Pasargadae (1978).

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Fig. 6. Pasargadae, plan of Palace S, published in Stronach, Pasargadae (1978).

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Fig. 7. Pasargadae, two reconstructions of Palace S. Above, published in Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East (1941), Ernst Herzfeld Papers, drawing D-799; below, revised reconstruction by Friedrich Krefter, drawn in 1973 and published in Stronach, Pasargadae (1978).

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Fig. 8. Pasargadae, fragments of a relief from the northwest doorway of Palace P, excavated in 1928. The reassembled elements of the relief show one large and one small ﬁgure facing right. The pleated costume of the larger ﬁgure (depicted here) originally carried balancing bilingual inscriptions in Elamite and Akkadian reading “Cyrus, the Great King, an Achemenid.” Photo by Ernst Herzfeld. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 2, no. 143.

Fig. 9. Pasargadae, sketch plan of Palace P, redrawn from Herzfeld’s 1928 excavation notebook, documenting the extent of his search trenches; published in Stronach, Pasargadae (1978).

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Fig. 10. Pasargadae, Palace P. One of Herzfeld’s narrow trenches. This example runs parallel with, and more particularly along the top of, the greater part of the long southeast wall. Photograph by Ernst Herzfeld. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 2, no. 138.

Fig. 11. Pasargadae, Palace P, plan published in Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East (1941) and redrawn for publication in Stronach, Pasargadae (1978).

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Fig. 12. Pasargadae, Palace P, plan of extant remains in 1963, by F. Hinzen. Published in Stronach, Pasargadae (1978).

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Fig. 13. Pasargadae, Palace P, partial reconstruction of ground plan, published in Stronach, Pasargadae (1978).

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HERZFELD IN PERSEPOLIS Elspeth R. M. Dusinberre

Erich Schmidt, Ernst Herzfeld’s successor as director of the excavations at Persepolis sponsored by the Oriental Institute in the 1930s, began his three-volume publication of the site: The ﬁeld activities of the Persepolis Expedition were initiated by Professor Ernst Herzfeld in spring 1931, after the French archeological monopoly had been replaced by the new Antiquity Law, which opened Iran to archeological ﬁeld work by other nations. The expedition ended in fall 1939, after the outbreak of World War II. As far as we know, there is no camp diary recording the progress of work during the years of Herzfeld’s regime, which lasted until 1934. The writer obtained the following information from extracts of correspondence put at his disposal by the Oriental Institute.1

This lack of detailed record keeping characterized Herzfeld’s work at Persepolis and has troubled scholars ever since. Would a careful search through Herzfeld’s excavation records, if any existed, shed new light on the Achaemenid Persian capital? Would they reveal hitherto unsuspected complexities of stratigraphy, nuances of use, gaps, or gaﬀes in our understanding?2 When I began a three-month study of the Ernst Herzfeld Papers housed in the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives in the winter of 2000, I hoped to ﬁnd intact Herzfeld’s complete ﬁeld notes from his tenure as expedition director at Persepolis.3

1 Erich F. Schmidt, Persepolis: Structures, Reliefs, Inscriptions, OIP 68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1953), 1:3. See also his comments on p. ix. 2 Many thanks to Ann C. Gunter, Stefan R. Hauser, Charles Jones, Margaret Cool Root, and the anonymous reviewer of this volume for their comments on and help with this article. All errors are of course my own. 3 I am grateful to Colleen Hennessey, archivist, and Ann C. Gunter, curator of ancient Near Eastern art, for providing friendship, help, and professional advice during my stay in Washington, D.C. My study was made possible by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Oﬃce of Fellowships and Grants, Smithsonian Institution. The thoughts presented in this paper are based solely on observation of Herzfeld’s records in Washington, D.C.; I have not examined those housed in the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.

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I imagined sheaves of detailed notes and drawings, records that would lay bare the site of Persepolis and reveal other priceless bits of information that would revolutionize our understanding of the site and, indeed, of the Achaemenid Empire as a whole. Although the papers did not yield such rich material, they do include information about the way Herzfeld approached Persepolis—emotionally, intellectually, and physically. They do not substantially alter the impression given by Schmidt’s publication. But they do oﬀer new insights into Herzfeld, as an archaeologist and as a person. Herzfeld gave most of his professional records to the Freer Gallery of Art in 1946. The gift resulted primarily from his friendship with the curator of Near Eastern art, Richard Ettinghausen. Certain records are also housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, while many photographs and most of his correspondence from the early 1930s are at the Oriental Institute in Chicago.4 The Ernst Herzfeld Papers cover many years of exploration in the Middle East, including the excavations he conducted at Samarra and Persepolis. They comprise numerous volumes of photographs, plans, and reconstructions of buildings; paper squeezes of inscriptions together with notebooks preserving copies and translations of the originals; sketchbooks with pen and pencil drawings and watercolors of monuments; watercolors prepared for the publication of stone and ceramic vessels and other ﬁnds; journals in which Herzfeld recorded his travels and ﬁndings; his week-at-a-glance diaries; and some ﬁnancial records. Much of the material is unpublished, but archivist Colleen Hennessey has now made available on microﬁche selections of the collection, as well as a reprint of the index compiled in the 1970s by Joseph Upton. Herzfeld directed the exploration of Persepolis sponsored by the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute from 1931 to 1934; from 1934 to 1939, excavations were headed by Erich F. Schmidt. Persepolis had of course long been the subject of intense interest because of its imperial importance and grandeur, its still-visible sculptures and inscriptions, and the ﬁne objects that had been found there. The ﬁrst scientiﬁc exploration and recording of the site took place under Herzfeld’s direction (ﬁg. 1). At least as early as 1923, Herzfeld began

4 See Margaret Cool Root, “The Herzfeld Archive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” MMJ 11 (1976): 119–24. I am grateful to Oscar Muscarella for his hospitality during my information-gathering foray into the archives in February 2000.

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to formulate intentions to excavate the site extensively.5 He wanted to use German support for these excavations, but the ﬁnancial and political situation in Germany did not allow for the engagement of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft in these years. Until shortly before the excavations began in 1931, Herzfeld still was trying to gain cosponsorship of the Notgemeinschaft.6 He eventually settled on the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago as a worthy sponsor, however, despite the interest of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania.7 It mattered intensely to him to ﬁnd an appropriately rigorous scholarly sponsor for excavations at this site, which had captured his attention and imagination ﬁrst in 1905 and again in 1923.8 The records of Herzfeld’s early visits to Persepolis consist of two journals and several hundred photographs, a few sketchbooks, and numerous paper squeezes of the inscriptions. The journals are a combination of personal diary and archaeological notebook: They were handwritten at night by the light of candles or kerosene lamps and include detailed archaeological commentaries, sketches, plans of sites, and informal topographic maps. They also include commentaries on contemporary people and situations and descriptions of the landscape. Some of them also contain surprising other highlights, such as written-out paradigms of Greek nouns. Two pages of the journal Herzfeld kept during his 1905 visit to Persepolis preserve sketches comparing the ﬂowers held by Achaemenid Persian kings in imperial sculptures

5 As demonstrated by his early reports on the site as well as repeated mention of these intentions in memos to the German authorities and friends; most notable is a memo dating to (as it seems) late 1926/early 1927. See Stefan R. Hauser, “Not Out of Babylon? The Development of Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Germany and Its Current Signiﬁcance,” in Proceedings of the XLV RAI: Historiography in the Cuneiform World, ed. Tzvi Abusch et al. (Bethesda: CDL Press, 2001), 211–37, to which Stefan R. Hauser kindly drew my attention. 6 Ernst Herzfeld Papers, notebook N-104. Unless otherwise speciﬁed, all archival references refer to this source. 7 The story of Herzfeld’s choice of the Oriental Institute can be gathered from a variety of sources collected in Jay Gluck and Noël Siver, eds., Surveyors of Persian Art: A Documentary Biography of Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman (Ashiya, Japan, and Costa Mesa, Calif.: SoPA, 1996; distributed by Mazda Publishers), esp. 215–28. See also Mousavi, this volume. 8 The degree of his personal investment in choice of sponsor is clear from numerous pieces of correspondence. These include a letter to Carl Heinrich Becker, minister of culture, dated 30 March 1928; and a letter to the Notgemeinschaft. Notebook N-104.

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with those held by the later Sasanian kings (ﬁg. 2). Figure 3 reproduces two pages of the journal he kept at Persepolis during the month he spent there in 1923. Comparison of the sketch plan on the right page with the later measured site plan of the terrace and its buildings demonstrates the accuracy and detail even of Herzfeld’s hasty sketches. The journals convey a sense of Herzfeld’s multifaceted personality. He had a strikingly self-deprecating sense of humor. At one point he wrote, for instance: “One of the mules was grazing right next to my tent. I went outside to say something courteous to it; it turned its less intelligent half towards me and let loose. Nobody could have expressed his feelings more clearly. What are fame and worldly glory? One can take life lightly or very seriously. I no longer see a contradiction in this.”9 But most of the pages in these early journals are dedicated to recording the sites he saw and explored, including Persepolis. Herzfeld’s ﬁrst impression of Persepolis was recorded on 24 November 1905. He was struck by the landscape in which the site had been constructed as well as the details of its architecture. The situation of the city, or the palaces, is glorious. The wide, starshaped valley, completely ﬂat, and framed by bizarre ragged and highpiled mountains. To the north and northwest long valleys, at the ends of which appear the mountains of Khular and Ardekan. These high, blanketed with snow. The terrace itself, despite so few remains there, is wonderfully impressive. Almost more spectacular than some of the individual ruins at Palmyra.10

He went on to describe the buildings of the terrace at Persepolis, the nearby tombs, and the fortiﬁcation wall that enclosed the terrace and the hill behind it, and he mentions having taken a large number of photographs.11 He made a long list of things to do at Persepolis

9 Dicht bei meinem Zelt graste eins der Maultiere. Ich ging darauf zu, um ihm etwas Artiges zu sagen, es drehte mir seine weniger intelligente Hälfte zu und that etwas. Deutlicher könnte niemand seine Gefühle ausdrücken. Was ist Ruhm u. weltliche Grösse? Man kann das Leben komisch nehmen und sehr ernst. Auch darin sehe ich keinen Widerspruch mehr. Notebook N-84, 118. 10 (24 November 1905, Nachts. In der Balakhane des Posthauses von Sivand.) . . . Die Lage der Stadt, oder der Paläste is prachtvoll. Die weite sternförmige Ebene, ganz glatt, und eingerahmt von bizarr gezackten u. getürmten Sägebergen. Nach N u. NW lange Thäler, an deren Ende die Berge von Khular u. von Ardekan erscheinen. Diese, hoch, mit Schnee bedeckt. Die Terrasse selbst ist, trotzdem gar so wenig noch da ist, wunderbar eindrucksvoll. Fast grosszügiger als manche Einzelruinen von Palmyra z.B. Notebook N-82, 8. 11 At least some of which are to be found in photo ﬁle 5.

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(measure, draw, photograph, take squeezes, and copy inscriptions, etc.) and berated himself for not having taken more photographs. Herzfeld returned to the site for intensive study in 1923. From the end of November until the end of December 1923 he lived at Persepolis, working day and night with the remarkable energy that seems to have characterized most of his actions; in March 1924 he returned for one additional week of exploration. During this time he took extensive photographs of the site, drew a plan of all the discernible buildings on the terrace, noted many details of the relief sculptures that decorate the terrace buildings, and took paper squeezes of the major inscriptions.12 The tone of his journals in these years diﬀers from what it had been in 1905: gone is the youthful prewar enthusiasm. But the journals are full of philosophical thoughts, with occasional snippets of poetry as well. And they demonstrate how keenly alive Herzfeld was at all times to the landscape through which he moved and which had been peopled also in ancient times. His description of traveling from Pasargadae to Persepolis in November 1923 furnishes an example. The morning was splendid despite the frost: the area glittered like millions of stars, on everything lay a collar of long, light crystals. Even after the fabulous last sunset, the moonlit night at the grave of Cyrus was wonderful. The entire day marvelous: the narrow Pulvar valley, ﬁrst a wild crevasse with cliﬀs of dolomitic limestone, broadens slowly, with the foliage becoming ever thicker. Along the creek willows, reeds, oleander, Imrigen (or Inguba?) and almond trees. Even the cliﬀs slowly become grown over, like karst, and show that this area could indeed be forested and was perhaps much more thickly wooded in ancient times. The fall colors: the trees orange-yellow to carmine-red, the sky light turquoise, the mountains violet, blue, red, yellow. Splendid. I wish I could send something of the beauty of these days home. I keep thinking: Drink, eyes, what the lashes hold furled Of the golden beauty of this world.13 12 From 1923: notebook N-84, sketchbooks SK-IV, SK-V, SK-VI, most of photo ﬁle 30; from 1924: notebooks N-84, N-87, list of squeezes, list of photos. 13 Der Morgen war trotz Frostes prachtvoll: die Ebene glitzerte wie millionen Sterne, auf allen Sachen lag ein Reif von länglichen, leichten Kristallen. Schon nach dem fabelhaften letzten Sonnenuntergang war die Mondnacht am Kyrosgrab (4 grd. minus) wundervoll. Der ganze Tag herrlich: Das enge Pulvar-Tal, erst wilde Schlucht, mit dolomitenhaften Kalkfelsen, erweitert sich allmählich, die Bewachsung immer dichter. Am Wasser Weiden (pasibid), Schilf, nicht blühende Oleander, Imrigen (od. Inguba?) u. Badam-Bäume. Auch die Höhen wurden allmählich bewachsen, karst-ähnlich, und zeigen, dass dies Gebiet doch beforstet werden könnte und

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Much of Herzfeld’s attention during this stay at Persepolis was devoted to recording inscriptions. He had a special “squeeze crew” consisting of two young Iranians, Djewad and Djuml, who took squeezes of all the major inscriptions at Persepolis and several nearby sites during November and December 1923. Herzfeld had brought with him from London a supply of special Japanese paper (perhaps rice paper) that was thought to be the best for squeezes, but it was conﬁscated by the British customs authorities when he landed at Bombay on his way to Iran. And so, on 22 November 1923, he commented dryly: I did them all with cigarette paper, folded three times. The result is good. If only I’d had the Japanese paper that the Preventive Service of Bombay stole! Perhaps the result was thus even better, and even the Preventive Service is a part of that power that always desires the bad and creates the good. In any case, no governor of Bombay is going to get in my way. And so it will always be: if he steals the Japanese paper, I use cigarette paper. And if some other governor or government takes the customary aircraft and ships, one makes other, better ones. Let this be a warning to governors and governments.14

The monumental inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings were not the only inscriptions to which Herzfeld devoted his attention in 1923 and 1924, however. He carefully recorded more recent inscriptions as well: those of the Sasanian kings and the graﬃti left behind by subsequent visitors to the site. The latter included inscriptions in many diﬀerent languages, most of which Herzfeld could read. He was unimpressed: None of the graﬃti says anything. Just one person is homesick, and for him everything is tragedy. The Orientals are all profoundly impressed,

vielleicht in alter Zeit viel dichter bewaldet war. Die herbstlichen Farben: die Bäume orange-gelb bis karmin-rot, der Himmel helltürkis, die Berge violett, blau, rot, gelb. Prachtvoll. Ich wollte, ich könnte etwas von der Schönheit dieser Tage nach Haus schicken. Ich denke immer: Trinke, Auge, was die Wimper hält, Von der goldnen Schönheit dieser Welt. Notebook N-84, 11. 14 Ich habe alles mit 3-fach gefaltetem Cigarettenpapier gemacht. Das Resultat ist gut. Hätte ich das japanische Papier gehabt, das der Preventive Service von Bombay gestohlen hat! Vielleicht ist das Resultat so noch besser geworden, und selbst d. Preventive Service ist ein Teil von jener Kraft, die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schaﬀt. Auf jeden Fall, lasse ich mich von keinem Governor of Bombay behindern. Und so wird es immer sein: stiehlt er das japanische Papier, so nehme ich Cigarettenpapier. Und nimmt der andere Governor oder das Government die üblichen Flugzeuge und Schiﬀe, so macht man andere, bessere. Zur Warnung an Governors und Governments. Notebook N-84, 18.

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and that manifests itself in prayers and poems about the transitory nature and vanity of the world. The Europeans are all alike: I, with all titles, the great man, was here. Framed and underlined and—from such tremendous snobs as Curzon—written in italics, underlined and framed. How inferior [to the Orientals]!15

While at Persepolis in 1923, Herzfeld hosted important oﬃcial visitors from time to time. Figure 4 shows a group of visiting dignitaries, including the governor of the province and various members of the royal family.16 On this occasion, the local populace brought gifts in a procession that reminded Herzfeld of the tribute reliefs on the Apadana staircase. He wrote in his journal: “On the morning of the second day came the automobiles, preceded by mules, riders, and ten tents set up on the edge of the terrace in the front hall of the Palace of Darius. We watched it all over tea and breakfast. During breakfast everything came as it must have been: the people came with lambs, came with skins with must and so forth. Everything as it is written here on the doors. It was unforgettable.”17 Later he described the visit: “It was as if the reliefs had come to life and stepped out of their frame.”18

15

Die ganzen Sgraﬃti sagen nichts. Nur einer hat Heimweh, ihm ist alles nur Hecuba. Die Orientalen sind alle tief beeindruckt, u. das äussert sich in Gebeten und Gedichten über die Vergänglichkeit u. Eitelkeit der Welt. Die Europäer sind alle eins: Ich, pleno titulo, der grosse Mann, bin hier gewesen. Umrahmt und unterstrichen u. von so einem Riesen-Snob wie Curzon, schräg geschrieben, unterstrichen und eingerahmt. Wie unterlegen! Notebook N-84, 84–85. 16 Herzfeld listed some, but not all, of them by name: “Nusrat al-dauleh Firuz, Qawam al-mulk, sein Schwager Nasir al-mulk, der alte Mushir al-dauleh (WahlVorsteher) u. seiner Sohn Mustafa Khan, Aliqulikhan, Salar i Jang u. anderen, z.B. einer Akhund, Abgeordneter, aus Nafrak, der alte Onkel von Nasir al-mulk aus Radjiabad, usw.” Notebook N-84, 28. 17 Am 2 ten Tag Vormittags kamen die Autos, vorher Scharen von Maultieren, Reitern, 10 Zelte standen am Rand der Terrasse in der Vorhalle des Darius-Palastes. Wir besahen vieles, Thee, Frühstück. Beim Frühstück kam alles wie es sein musste: es kamen die Leute mit den Lämmern, den Schläuchen mit Most, u.s.f. Alles wie es hier auf den Thüren geschrieben steht. Es war unvergesslich. Notebook N-84, 28. 18 “Es war als wären die Reliefs lebendig geworden und als träten sie aus ihrem Rahmen.” Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg, “Nowruz in Persepolis,” in Through Travellers’ Eyes: European Travellers on the Iranian Monuments, ed. Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Jan Willem Drijvers, AchHist 7 (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1991), 175. She says that Gerold Walser, who quoted this passage in 1966, referred to an unpublished manuscript of a lecture for the Oriental Institute, which is now part of the Ernst Herzfeld Papers in Washington, D.C. I did not come across this manuscript in my study of the Ernst Herzfeld Papers, however.

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This visit of the notables was an important one for Herzfeld’s future connections to the site. When asked what could be done to preserve the monuments, Herzfeld was able to lead the conversation around to the possibility of excavation in conjunction with conservation and reconstruction of the buildings—with himself as the head of the project.19 These discussions were generally favorable and eventually led, in 1929, to his drafting a particularly passionate letter to the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft in Berlin explaining the problems related to passage of an antiquities law and proposing an expedition to protect Persepolis and excavate nearby Istakhr.20 Herzfeld thus spent an extraordinarily productive month at Persepolis in 1923, drawing, planning, measuring, photographing, deciphering, conducting guided tours, and working into the small hours of the morning, night after night. He produced quantities of sketches and measured plans of buildings as well as sculptures. He took squeezes of and deciphered almost all of the inscriptions, in addition to the graﬃti on the terrace. His photographic negatives ﬁlled many crates. What did he do with all this information? One thing he did not do was to publish it in any detailed form. In 1927 he wrote up a two-page synopsis in the Illustrated London News, titled “The Past in Persia II: The Achaemenian Period: Remarkable Discoveries at Persepolis (550–330 B.C.).” He published a more detailed description of the state of preservation and need for conservation of the site in 1928, reprinted in the Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran in 1929.21 Beyond this, he published none of the records he had kept during his work in 1923. He clearly planned to return to Persepolis for extensive exploration in the future and probably chose to keep his records to himself until he could verify them and elaborate on them by future study. But such reticence was also characteristic of his work on Achaemenid Persia. Herzfeld knew much more than he published, in general writing short popular articles or publishing in synthetic volumes such as his well-known collection of lectures, Iran in the Ancient East.22 Why was this? Part of it was probably due to time constraints and to his lively mind—he quickly became bored and leapt from his cur19

Notebook N-84, 30 and passim. Notebook N-104. But this was not his only memo; see Hauser, “Not Out of Babylon?” and Herzfeld, “Rapport sur Persépolis.” 21 Herzfeld, “Rapport sur Persépolis.” 22 Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 221–74, “The Achaemenian Period,” furnishes his most complete publication of Persepolis. 20

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rent site or subject to the next that fascinated him. But part of his reluctance to publish his records may have been related to more nefarious causes. Herzfeld worked at a time when ethical guidelines relating to the collection and sale of antiquities were diﬀerent from modern ideals.23 He was himself an active collector, from prehistoric seal stones through ancient precious metal vessels to textiles like carpets and ikat hangings. He later augmented his income through the sale of these objects.24 Other scholars have commented on Herzfeld’s removal of antiquities from Persepolis, in particular his gift to the crown prince of Sweden of a head from one of the staircase reliefs, and the surprising discovery in 1973 of a cache of crated Achaemenid vessels stored in the fortiﬁcation wall, neatly packaged and addressed to Herzfeld himself for shipment out of the country.25 Indeed, Jack M. Balcer has suggested that the Oriental Institute removed Herzfeld from his position as director of excavations in 1934 because of allegations concerning his illegal removal of antiquities from the country—even though, at the insistence of the Oriental Institute, Herzfeld signed an aﬃdavit asserting the contrary.26 Ali Mousavi has made other, more convincing arguments for Herzfeld’s removal from his position. And Herzfeld’s complicated relations with the personalities in power at the Oriental Institute, or such ﬁgures as the wealthy Arthur Upham Pope, may have factored in, as well.27 But it is certainly the case that Herzfeld did remove at least one piece of the Persepolis sculptures, despite qualms of conscience: He documents it clearly and explicitly in his 1923 journal. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has in its collections a sculpted foot from Persepolis, which Herzfeld sold to the museum in 1945 23 His contemporary, Arthur Upham Pope, for instance, was an art dealer on a large scale. 24 For Herzfeld’s activities in the art market in the 1920s, see Kröger, this volume. Most of Herzfeld’s own collection was sold in the 1930s and 1940s. 25 Ann C. Gunter and Margaret Cool Root, “Replicating, Inscribing, Giving: Ernst Herzfeld and Artaxerxes’ Silver Phiale in the Freer Gallery of Art,” ArsOr 28 (1998): 7–8; Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg, “Introduction: Through Travellers’ Eyes: The Persian Monuments as Seen by European Travellers,” 1–35; Heleen SancisiWeerdenburg, “Nowruz in Persepolis,” 173–201; and Christopher Tuplin, “Modern and Ancient Travellers in the Achaemenid Empire: Byron’s Road to Oxiana and Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 37–57, in Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Drijvers, Through Travellers’ Eyes. 26 Jack M. Balcer, “Erich Friedrich Schmidt, 13 September 1897–3 October 1964,” in Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Drijvers, Through Travellers’ Eyes, 147–72. 27 See Gluck and Siver, Surveyors of Persian Art.

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(ﬁg. 5).28 The foot is remarkable because it has incised onto it two human heads, which have been variously called “Achaemenid” and “Greek”; in any case they are particularly ﬁne, delicate images of humans.29 In Iran in the Ancient East, Herzfeld called the foot “a fragment of a shoe from a ﬁgure of Darius,” without explaining how he knew it was one.30 The puzzle is made clear through an entry in Herzfeld’s journal: On 4 December 1923, he wrote with passionate excitement, “Discovered something wonderful: two heads of men and the forequarters of a lion, drawn on a foot of Darius. Cannot be photographed. Tried to chisel the foot oﬀ. Barbaric, but the little heads are works of the ﬁrst rank, the ﬁnest that exists of Achaemenid art.”31 Perhaps it was because he could not photograph the foot that he chose to remove it for better documentation. In any case, the next day, he photographed his now-chiseled-oﬀ foot with its heads.32 Herzfeld returned to Persepolis in 1931 as ﬁeld director.33 The project was conducted under the auspices of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, with additional ﬁnancial assistance from other American individuals and institutions.34 It was conceived with three major foci: “ﬁrst, the clearance of the ruined palaces still rising above ground level on the vast terrace; second, the preservation of these remains; and third, the complete reconstruction of one of the palaces as a model of the Persian art of building in the Achaemenian period.”35 Herzfeld and his successor, Erich Schmidt, laid bare well over half the terrace under the guise of clearing the ruined palaces.

28 MMA 45.11.17, published by Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 251 and pl. 72. I am grateful to Oscar Muscarella for furnishing information on the date of acquisition. 29 For Achaemenid ethnicity and artistic origin, see ibid., 251. For Greek origin and ethnicity, see, for example, Gisela M. A. Richter, “Greeks in Persia,” AJA 50 (1946): 14–30. 30 Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 251. See Gunter and Root, “Replicating, Inscribing, Giving,” 7–8. 31 Entdeckte etwas Wundervolles: 2 Männerköpfe u. ein Löwenvorderleib, auf Fuss d. Darius gezeichnet. Nicht aufzunehmen. Versuchte den Fuss abzumeisseln. Barbarisch, aber die Köpfchen sind Werke ersten Ranges, das Feinste, was es von achaemenidischer Kunst gibt. Notebook N-84, 34. 32 Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, pl. 72. 33 A letter from James Henry Breasted, director of the Oriental Institute, appointing Herzfeld as director (28 January 1931) is preserved in notebook N-131, document A-9. 34 For these, see Schmidt, introduction to Persepolis. 35 James H. Breasted, The Oriental Institute (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933), 311.

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As ﬁeld director of the Oriental Institute’s excavations at Persepolis, Herzfeld concentrated primarily on exposing and recording the architectural remains, and also reconstructing the so-called Harem to serve as housing for the excavators and as storage and display room for their ﬁnds. His focus on architecture was partly the result of his own training as an architect and partly the result of his archaeological training at Assur in the so-called Koldewey school. It also followed from the site’s apparently straightforward stratigraphy, with comparatively few phases of construction and use (indeed, it was only in use for about two centuries). The very few sections Herzfeld included in his sketchbooks verify that terrace buildings were burned, especially the Hall of One Hundred Columns (ﬁg. 6).36 Otherwise, they simply show the kind of detritus and accumulation one would expect from the gradual disintegration of mudbrick walls over time. The sketchbooks, drawings, and photographs Herzfeld produced during his tenure as ﬁeld director at Persepolis are now almost all in Washington, D.C.37 They do not include major archaeological insights that went unpublished by Herzfeld himself or by Schmidt. Herzfeld sent lengthy reports to the Oriental Institute that summarized his work and progress.38 The large-scale architectural drawings, the major plans, and some of the elevations exhibiting the exquisite draftsmanship of Friedrich Krefter, Karl Bergner, and Herzfeld himself, have been published in Iran in the Ancient East, the three-volume

36 An example of a section is found in sketchbook SK-XVII, 12 (baulk drawing, done in 1932, at the steps of the “tripylon” or Council Hall). The drawing includes labels of various layers: “Kaschi,” “Ziegel,” “Dach,” “Lehm, brandgeröstet,” “Lehm.” Of the Hall of One Hundred Columns, Herzfeld wrote: “Verbrannt ist Apadana, 100-S. Saal, Hadish, oﬀenbar nicht Tacara u. SO-Palast. Damit ging die Welt des Alten Orients unter. Sie ist grandios untergegangen.” Notebook N-84, 57. For Herzfeld’s opinion of Alexander the Great: “So sicher der 100-Säulen-Saal durch Feuer zerstört ist u. zwar oﬀenbar durch absichtlich erzeugte Feuersbrunst—denn so viel Brennstoﬀ hat er mit seinen Steinsäulen u. Lehmwänden gar nicht—so sicher ist sonst nichts durch Feuer zerstört. Also das ist der Brand des Alexander. Da feierte er seine Gelage. Es ist der protzigste aber unschönste Bau. Charakteristisch für den Macedonier. Er ging zu Astoria, wie dessen Kenner geht in die kleineren besseren Locale. Der grosse Apadana ist unvergleichlich viel schöner.” Notebook N-84, 35. Later, in Iran in the Ancient East, 229, he equivocated about the extent of burning. Of course, the Treasury was also badly burned; see Schmidt, Persepolis, 1:173 and passim. 37 At least one notebook with ﬁnancial records is now in the Ancient Near East Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; other records may perhaps be elsewhere. 38 I have not examined these myself.

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publication of Persepolis by Schmidt, and in the Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran.39 These drawings formed one of the primary foci of Herzfeld’s recording strategies at Persepolis. Whereas Schmidt’s publication of the terrace included extensive photographic documentation of the ruins (many of the photographs were taken during Herzfeld’s tenure as director, as shown by the glass negatives now in Washington), Herzfeld and his team concentrated on recording the inscriptions and on meticulous drawings of the architecture at Persepolis. Herzfeld’s sketchbooks from the 1930s include stone-by-stone elevations of most of the terrace wall and of several of the buildings he and his team explored, in addition to the outlines of a stone-by-stone plan of the terrace (with all clamps as carefully measured as the stones). These detailed elevations and plans were not published in Iran in the Ancient East but instead were summarized by means of “isometric plans,” which indicate the height of the standing remains by means of slanting shadows drawn in on the ground.40 A few examples demonstrate the manner of Herzfeld’s recording, including the careful sketches in the sketchbooks and the (often) large-scale composite drawings (often at a scale of 1:100) and photographs that were eventually published in Iran in the Ancient East.41 The Gate of Xerxes, or Gate of All Lands, was recorded by Herzfeld’s team in plan, section, and photography. Sketchbook 22 includes elevations of the guardian colossi as well as plans of the structure (ﬁgs. 7 and 8). The ﬁnal drawings include a plan and an isometric plan (indicating the height of the building), but omit the carefully detailed drawing of the man-bull, with its loving attention paid to such elements as the ornamental rosette on the chest (ﬁgs. 9 and 10). Similarly, the meticulous elevation of the Tripylon, or Council Hall, in Sketchbook 22 included details omitted in the ﬁnal plan (ﬁgs. 11 and 12). Herzfeld planned to publish the famous reliefs from the Apadana, and reserved this right for himself.42 Several of the drawings in

39

See bibliography. This is a characteristic feature of the Koldewey school, in which Herzfeld was trained at Assur. 41 Although the Ernst Herzfeld Papers include the negatives for these and other photos, those that were not published by Herzfeld himself or by Schmidt shed little extra light on the site. 42 As stipulated in a letter from Herzfeld dated 18 April 1946 (notebook N-131). Schmidt was also careful to make this explicit. See above, note 1. 40

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Washington, D.C., concern the identiﬁcation of the delegations on the Apadana, comparing renderings of facial features and clothing to the labeled peoples of the realm on the tomb of Darius at Naqsh-i Rustam (ﬁgs. 13–16). Indeed, Herzfeld explicitly reserved publication rights for two major aspects of his research. One, as already mentioned, was the detailed publication of the Apadana reliefs—a lacuna that has now largely been ﬁlled thanks to the work of Michael Roaf and many others.43 The other was the bulk of his notes, now in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers, which he gave to the Freer Gallery of Art with the explicit stipulation that, with the exception of the odd single photograph, they not be made available to the Oriental Institute or its representatives.44 Interestingly, the sketchbooks in Washington form part of Herzfeld’s papers, but they were apparently used by several people. Herzfeld’s own distinctive handwriting is found on most pages, but in some cases it seems to consist of annotations to drawings executed by others. This is almost certainly the case for the drawings of the Apadana reliefs, for instance. The identiﬁcation of the ethnicities of delegations is in Herzfeld’s handwriting, but the commentary “Pferd,” et cetera, is in a handwriting that looks to me like that of Friedrich Krefter (ﬁg. 17). Krefter was of course responsible for the reconstruction of the Apadana

43

See, for example, Michael Roaf, “Sculptures and Sculptors at Persepolis,” Iran 21 (1983); Erich F. Schmidt, Persepolis, vol. 3, The Royal Tombs and Other Monuments, OIP 70 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Margaret Cool Root, The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art: Essays on the Creation of an Iconography of Empire, ActIr 19 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979). 44 As documented in a letter from A. G. Wenley, director of the Freer Gallery of Art, to Herzfeld: “I have noted carefully the contents of your letter of April 18th, and also have at hand the memorandum given me by Dr. Richard Ettinghausen in regard to further wishes of yours concerning the Archive. . . . (3) Dr. Herzfeld does not wish to have photographs, or other material, used on a large scale by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. He has no objection, however, to the use of single photographs.” Letter dated 23 April 1946, notebook N-131. The letter of 18 April 1946, which is also housed in Washington, D.C., makes no mention of this stipulation which must, therefore, have been in the memo given to Wenley by Ettinghausen (and which is not part of the Ernst Herzfeld Papers). Herzfeld did request that the architectural drawings be kept for himself, however: “There are only a few things which I might still be able to publish myself, especially the large architectural drawings from Samarra and Persepolis, and these I would wish to have reserved for publication by myself. . . . For all the rest, I wish that, at the discretion of the Freer Gallery, the material would be made accessible to students, for study as well as publication. . . .” Herzfeld to Wenley, 18 April 1946, notebook N-131.

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published in Iran in the Ancient East.45 And it was Karl Bergner who completed a ﬁnal composite elevation of the staircase, a drawing now in Washington, D.C.46 Whose hand was responsible for the stone-by-stone drawing of the terrace, complete with clamps? Who took the measurements so carefully recorded? Again, these drawings seem to be the work of several men: The numbers on the drawing itself are very clean, neat, and small—hence perhaps not penciled in by Herzfeld himself—but page after page of calculations of measurements are certainly written in Herzfeld’s own hand. Thus the sketchbooks attest to the collaborative nature of the recording as it progressed under Herzfeld’s purview. Much of the work Herzfeld oversaw at Persepolis meticulously documented remains and building plans that were already known.47 But one of Herzfeld’s discoveries at Persepolis was entirely his own, and indeed has transformed our knowledge of the Achaemenid Persian Empire: the Persepolis Fortiﬁcation tablets.48 Charles Breasted, secretary of the Oriental Institute and son of its director, announced the discovery of the tablets in October 1933: “Not only have amazing works of ancient art been found,” he wrote, “but Dr. Ernst E. Herzfeld, Field Director of the Expedition, exploring for the Oriental Institute, has also uncovered a body of archives of the Persian kings, containing some 20,000 clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform characters.”49 The tablets—in fact closer to 30,000 in number—were discovered by accident, the chance by-product of a light rail route constructed to remove excavation debris across the eroded fortiﬁcation wall at its

45

See also the collection of drawings in Friedrich Krefter, Persepolis Rekonstruktionen, Teheraner Forschungen 3 (Berlin: Gebr Mann, 1971). 46 Drawing D-854. 47 It is not clear to what extent Schmidt carried out plans for excavation already formulated by Herzfeld, or, instead, struck out on his own, perhaps on paths deviating from those established by Herzfeld. 48 The bibliography on the Persepolis Fortiﬁcation tablets is vast and growing; see, for example, bibliography listed in Mark B. Garrison and Margaret Cool Root, Seals on the Persepolis Fortiﬁcation Tablets, vol. 1, Images of Heroic Encounter, OIP 117 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). The texts of the tablets are increasingly being made available online, thanks to the diligent eﬀorts of Matthew Stolper, Charles Jones, and Wouter Henkelman, inter alios. For regular updates on online materials on Persepolis and elsewhere in the Achaemenid Empire, see www.achemenet.com, overseen by Professor Pierre Briant of the Collège de France. 49 Charles Breasted, “Exploring the Secrets of Persepolis,” National Geographic 64 (1933): 381.

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northeastern quadrant.50 This trench exposed the two chambers within the fortiﬁcation that contained the tablets.51 Herzfeld made very few published references to the Fortiﬁcation tablets. To judge by his published comments, he seems to have thought that the rooms in which they were found were archival rooms (i.e., that the tablets comprised a speciﬁcally stored archive rather than simple construction ﬁll used to bolster the fortiﬁcation wall) and that some of them may have fallen from a second-story room.52 Apparently thinking they were the administrative documents of the garrison stationed at the fortiﬁcation wall, he implied that they were the records of local military guards.53 Yet in his publications he was surprisingly reticent about the tablets, especially given the importance accorded to other archives that had come to light at Near Eastern sites. But the personal records he left behind demonstrate that the Fortiﬁcation tablets did intrigue him. They also provide another glimpse into Herzfeld’s character and personality and the passion with which he approached Persepolis. The Ernst Herzfeld Papers reveal the care Herzfeld took with the Fortiﬁcation tablets, his desire to conserve them properly and to publish them appropriately. They furnish an idea of those aspects of the

50 Including crumbles of separate tablets as well as wholly preserved ones. They range in size from circa 2 cm (PF 1887) to circa 21.7 cm (PF 1946), but most are small enough to ﬁt within the palm of one’s hand. Most of them were inscribed in Neo-Elamite cuneiform, but about 700 were written in ink in Aramaic. For the texts of the Elamite tablets, see esp. Richard T. Hallock, Persepolis Fortiﬁcation Tablets, OIP 92 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Richard T. Hallock, “The Persepolis Fortiﬁcation Archive,” Orientalia 92 (1973): 320–23; Richard T. Hallock, “Selected Fortiﬁcation Texts,” CDAFI 8 (1978): 109–26; Richard T. Hallock, “The Evidence of the Persepolis Tablets,” in CHI, vol. 2, The Median and Achaemenid Periods, ed. M. Gershevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 588–609. In addition, the Babylonian, Greek, and Phrygian languages are represented by single inscriptions, published by Matthew W. Stolper, “The Neo-Babylonian Text from the Persepolis Fortiﬁcation,” JNES 43 (1984): 299–310; Jack M. Balcer, review of J. Hofstetter, Die Griechen in Persien, in BibOr 36 (1979): 276–80; J. Friedrich, “Ein phrygisches Siegel und ein phrygisches Tontäfelchen,” Kadmos 4 (1965): 154–56. 51 For a full account of the discovery and its implications, see the introduction to Garrison and Root, Images of Heroic Encounter. 52 See Ernst Herzfeld, “Recent Discoveries at Persepolis,” JRAS 1934: 231; Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 226; and the introduction to Garrison and Root, Images of Heroic Encounter. 53 Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 226 and 271, describes the “Susian” guards shown on the Apadana reliefs: “These are the Susian regiments (which have left their trace in the shape of the 30,000 Elamite tablets of their oﬃces).”

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tablets that most interested Herzfeld (or perhaps those aspects that for various reasons he thought would most interest others). And they show his extraordinary command of languages and logic, his ability to couch requests in terms that would be most persuasive to his audience. It is perhaps this insight into human character, when he wished to use it, which inspired the loyalty and passionate intellectual excitement of many of his colleagues. One begins to understand why, perhaps, the young Karl Bergner refused to continue working under the usurper Schmidt. And a letter from Bergner to Herzfeld, written from Persepolis in 1935, demonstrates the almost reverential regard he had for this inﬂuential and inspiring man.54 Table 1 Photographs of the Persepolis Fortiﬁcation Tablets The Oriental Institute holds copyright for all prints. Photos of PFTs Photo 24770 Photo 24771 Photo 26115 Photo 24772 Photo 24775 Photo 24803

being Neg. Neg. Neg. Neg. Neg. Neg.

excavated 14723 33–40 14724 33–41 15405 33–42 14725 33–34 14728 33–47 14742 33–65

Photos of PFTs Photo 25216 Photo 25215 Photo 29491 Photo 25109

Neg. Neg. Neg. Neg.

15113 15112 15769 14668

Photo 25104

Neg. 14663

Photo 25105 Photo 25106

Neg. 14664 Neg. 14665

33–119

Photo 25107

Neg. 14666

33–120

Photo 20935

Neg. 12979

32–85

Photo 20934

Neg. 12978

32–86a

54

Notebook N-113.

Slide 3422

34,626

Slide 3423

PFS 93* PFS 93* PFS 93* PFSs with hunt (lion/stagand heraldic griﬀons at tree) A large PFT, no sealing shown Same one A large PFT, no sealing shown PFTs of diﬀerent shapes, no sealings PFT, no sealing shown Same PFT

herzfeld in persepolis Photo 25136

Neg. 14785

33–167

Photo Photo Photo Photo Photo

Neg. Neg. Neg. Neg. Neg.

14784 14669 15770 15111 14786

33–166 33–123

Slide 3425

33–168

Slide 3424

Neg. 14667

33–121

25135 25110 29492 25214 25137

Photo 25108

153 PFTs with Aramaic in ink More Aramaic PFTs More Aramaic PFTs Same ones Greek tablet PFTs of diﬀerent shapes, one cuneiform, one Aramaic Various PFTs

The Ernst Herzfeld Papers preserve twenty-three photographs of the Persepolis Fortiﬁcation tablets, showing the excavation of the tablets and individual examples (table 1). The six photographs that document the tablets’ discovery give only the vaguest idea of their archaeological situation.55 Indeed, the limited documentation of their discovery may indicate that Herzfeld was preoccupied with other matters. No drawings of the fortiﬁcation wall are preserved in the sketchbooks in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers, and few completed drawings of it survive in his other records.56 The six photographs thus comprise the entirety of his documentation of the tablets’ discovery among his papers in Washington, D.C. And they seem to have been taken to show simply that tablets were found, and that they were of multiple shapes, rather than to record their precise ﬁndspots. That is, the excavation photographs seem to have been taken for precisely the sort of publications Herzfeld produced on Persepolis: short, popular articles in the Illustrated London News or letters to potential donors, interested colleagues, Iranian oﬃcials, and Breasted.57 The photographs of individual tablets tell a slightly diﬀerent story, however. Several photos were apparently taken to show the range

55 Photo numbers 24770, 24771, 24772, 24775, 24803, and 26115; negative numbers 14723, 14724, 14725, 14728, 14742, and 15405. See introduction and notes to Mark B. Garrison and Margaret Cool Root, Seals on the Persepolis Fortiﬁcation Tablets, vol. 2, Images of Human Activity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). 56 For a sketch by Herzfeld, see Garrison and Root, Images of Heroic Encounter, ﬁg. 5. I am not aware of additional drawings in the Oriental Institute. 57 This scantiness of publication was no doubt in part due to the ongoing nature of the excavations and Herzfeld’s emphasis on fund-raising in the early years of the project—and he could have had no idea he was to be removed from his directorship so soon!

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of shapes the tablets displayed.58 They may also have been intended as preliminary documentation of the writing on the tablets, perhaps to show to knowledgeable philologists, for they have been lit to show the cuneiform to best eﬀect. Other photographs document Fortiﬁcation tablets written in Aramaic, in ink, rather than inscribed in Elamite cuneiform.59 As Aramaic tablets comprise only around 700 of the roughly 30,000 tablets and fragments (that is, approximately 2.3 percent of the entire corpus), it is remarkable that Herzfeld should have noticed and photographed them. Either the Aramaic tablets were found in particularly prominent positions and therefore caught Herzfeld’s eye, or he spent signiﬁcant time looking through the collection of tablets to become familiar with its contents. One photograph in particular, which documents the solitary tablet in the Fortiﬁcation corpus inscribed in Greek, suggests that he pored over them.60 Surely, in order to ﬁnd this unique tablet in the enormous corpus, Herzfeld (or his associates) must have turned over the Fortiﬁcation tablets for hours on end. The photos Herzfeld took of the seal impressions on the tablets suggest considerable time spent looking at the tablets and attention to detail. They document only three of the hundreds of discrete seals that were used to ratify or bear witness to the transactions recounted in the associated tablet texts.61 One photo, taken as part of the series of images that illustrate the diﬀerent shapes of the tablets, documents two impressions of cylinder seals showing animals; one is a characteristic animal contest scene showing a lion and stag, the other, winged lions at a tree.62 This photo was probably taken as one of the shapedocumenting series, but was lit to emphasize the seal impressions rather

58 Photo numbers 20934, 20935, 25104, 25105, 25106, 25107, 25108, and 25137; negative numbers 12978, 12979, 14663, 14664, 14665, 14666, 14667, and 14786. 59 Photo numbers 25110, 25135, 25136, and 29492; negative numbers 14669, 14784, 14785, and 15770. 60 Photo number 25214; negative number 15111. 61 Approximately 1,162 analytically legible discrete seals have been recognized via the many thousands of complete or partial impressions on Persepolis Fortiﬁcation tablets 1–2087 alone. Garrison and Root, Images of Heroic Encounter, 6, postulate a large number of additional seals remaining to be identiﬁed on the thousands of Fortiﬁcation tablets not included in their research permit. 62 Photo number 25109; negative number 14668. For the numbers of these seals, see Mark B. Garrison and Margaret Cool Rott, Seals on the Persepolis Fortiﬁcation Tablets, vol. 3, Studies of Animals, Animal-Creatures, Plants, and Abstract Devices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

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than the writing on the tablet: Its negative number falls right at the end of the series showing shapes. As such, the photo scarcely serves as a detailed record of the particular seal impressions on this tablet, but chieﬂy demonstrates that the tablets were indeed ratiﬁed with seals. As we have seen, the other photographs, too, suggest basic documentation of the main features of the corpus. But later, after the kind of extensive work with the tablets that led him to discover the Greek tablet, Herzfeld made a particularly interesting discovery. Three photos document Persepolis Fortiﬁcation seal 93*.63 This fact conclusively demonstrates Herzfeld’s familiarity with the material and his interest in the seal impressions. PFS 93*, which shows a galloping horseman riding down enemies, is inscribed, in Elamite, “Kurash the Anshanite, son of Tishpish.” It is a seal that belonged to Cyrus, son of Teispes, the grandfather of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, and it was used on the Fortiﬁcation tablets as an heirloom piece.64 That Herzfeld should have documented this particular seal in three images—and one of only three seals speciﬁcally documented through photography—shows he had read enough of the seal’s inscription to understand its owner’s name and hence the seal’s historical importance. The photos of seal impressions thus reinforce the sense that Herzfeld returned repeatedly to the Persepolis Fortiﬁcation tablets, perhaps over the course of many weeks. But the purpose of his study seems to have been to familiarize himself with the contents, to gain an overview of the corpus, rather than to settle down to careful laborious research into detail. This was, of course, appropriate for the director of the expedition, who had many responsibilities and would expect 63 Photo numbers 25215, 25216, and 29491; negative numbers 15112, 15113, and 15769. 64 Much has been written about PFS 93*, much of it based on Richard Hallock’s sketch drawings; for contextualized discussions, bibliography, and excellent photos, see Mark B. Garrison, “Seals and the Elite at Persepolis: Some Observations on Early Achaemenid Persian Art,” ArsOr 21 (1991): 1–29; and Margaret Cool Root, “From the Heart: Powerful Persianisms in the Art of the Western Empire,” in Asia Minor and Egypt: Old Cultures in a New Empire, ed. Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Amélie Kuhrt, AchHist 6 (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1991), 1–29. For the ﬁnal composite drawing of the seal’s impression, with extensive bibliography, see the introduction to Mark B. Garrison and Margaret Cool Root, Persepolis Seal Studies, AchHist 9 (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1996, reissued 1998). See the introduction to Garrison and Root, Images of Heroic Encounter, for the usage of royal name seals. For deﬁnitive publication of PFS 93* see Garrison and Root, Images of Human Activity (forthcoming).

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to hand over an important work like this to the relevant experts. A draft of a letter preserved in one of Herzfeld’s undated notebooks in Washington, D.C., is illuminating.65 In it, Herzfeld was working on the wording of a letter to the Iranian authorities, requesting permission to remove the Fortiﬁcation tablets from Iran for conservation, preservation, and research at the Oriental Institute. The antiquities law, which had been passed before excavations began at Persepolis, stated clearly that all things found in hafari (excavations) were to remain in Iran. Herzfeld therefore drafted a letter making a strong claim to exempt the tablets from this law on semantic, circumstantial, and ethical grounds. The draft of the letter in Washington, D.C., is written partly in formal language, as if to an oﬃcial, and partly in informal language, apparently as notes to himself. He always writes the word hafari in Persian. His semantic argument is brief. The law never deﬁnes hafari, he claimed, and perhaps the discovery of the Fortiﬁcation tablets should not strictly count as excavation. Moreover, he continued, conservation of ﬁnds is an important part of ethical digging (he distinguishes here between excavation and digging). The circumstantial grounds are also dealt with summarily: He asserts that there should be a distinction between the remains found on the terrace (buildings, sculpture, etc.), which should stay in Iran, and those found next to the terrace, which might be exported for study. It is not entirely clear from the drafted letter how Herzfeld planned to claim that the Fortiﬁcation tablets were not found on the terrace, unless he would argue that the terrace was the area enclosed by the fortiﬁcation wall but not the wall itself. In any case, he moves quickly on to the ethical reasons that prompted his wish to transfer the tablets to Chicago for conservation and study. Here Herzfeld seems to feel on ﬁrm ground. He is passionate about proper treatment of the tablets and the necessity of sending them to the Oriental Institute where he is certain they will receive the requisite attention. Indeed, he makes use of extremely persuasive rhetoric, couched as it seems both in terms of personal conviction and also in those terms that are most likely to win over the Iranian authorities. “My personal responsibility,” he asserts in his draft, “to recognize this necessity, responsibility for undertaking publication: to see to authors and artists. To care for protection, decipherment and publication.”66

65 66

Notebook N-46. Meine persönliche Verantwortung diese Nothwendigkeiten zu erkennen

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157

If the decipherment and publication do not occur, the ﬁnd is nothing but dirt, without worth. The contents are with greatest likelihood of an administrative nature, juridical or legal, perhaps also business, and will, when deciphered, illuminate the daily life, the civilization, the Persian civility, the essential political history of the Persian people. The worth lies in the decipherment and publication; the individual tablet has no worth, only the entirety of the contents of all the tablets. The originals are simply documents for the conservators. As long as they lay in the earth, they were secure. Fate willed it that I discovered them. Because I discovered them, I must, in my responsibility to science, see to it that they can be deciphered and published. Otherwise, in the eyes of the future I am that person who brought about the destruction of this material through lack of care. I cannot be this person: I would have to publicly ﬁght against this accusation, so that no blame may be brought against me.67

The references to the Persian people, fate, and the importance of face and image, may have moved Herzfeld himself; they would certainly have been compelling for the Iranian authorities. And the desire for legitimate scientiﬁc study and publication would have mattered to all concerned. The Ernst Herzfeld Papers do not preserve a copy of the letter Herzfeld eventually sent, but it was clearly successful: The Fortiﬁcation tablets were sent to the Oriental Institute in Chicago for preservation and research.68 Apparently Herzfeld felt it impossible to study the tablets properly at Persepolis. He seems to have made no eﬀort to clean, preserve, or document them systematically in the ﬁeld. A desire to preserve them Verantwortung d. Publicatz als Unternehmen: für die Autoren u artisten schaﬀen. Behütung, f. i. Entziﬀerung u. Publication zu sorgend. [Herzfeld’s abbreviations] Notebook N-46. 67 Wenn die Entziﬀerung u. Publication nicht geschieht, ist d. Fund nichts als Erde, ohne Wert. Der Inhalt ist mit grosser Wahrscheinlichkeit administrativer Art, juristisch oder rechtskundlich, vielleicht auch wirtschaftlich, u. wird, wenn entziﬀert, das tägliche Leben, die Civilisation, der Persischen Civilität die eigentliche politische Geschichte beleuchten. Der Wert besteht in der Entziﬀerung u. Veröﬀentlichung, die einzelne Tafel hat keinen Wert, nur das Ganze d. Inhalts aller Tafeln. Die Originale sind nur die zu conservierende Person, Urkunden. Solange sie in der Erde lagen waren sie sicher. Die Zufall hat es gewollt, dass ich sie entdeckt habe. Da ich sie entdeckt habe, muss ich, in meiner Verantwortung der Wissenschaft gegenüber dafür sorgen, dass sie entziﬀert u. publiciert werden können. Sonst bin ich, der Zukunft gegenüber, derjenige, der den Untergang dieses Materiales durch die Verschaﬀung veranlasst hat. [?] Das kann ich nicht sein: diesen Vorwurf ablehnend müsste ich öﬀentlich ankämpfen, dass mich dann keine Schuld treﬀe. Notebook N-46. 68 Perhaps the letter is now in Tehran. I do not know whether Herzfeld corresponded with Breasted about this.

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properly for careful study elsewhere was clearly a strong motivating factor, and perhaps was the main reason he did as little as possible to disturb them on site. The Ernst Herzfeld Papers include a letter to Herzfeld from the chemical laboratories at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, which is in part a response to his request for information on how best to ensure the preservation of the tablets. The clay tablets you mentioned must of course be ﬁred. Perhaps you might try it ﬁrst with a sample piece in the following manner: ﬁll a petroleum canister of the sort that are always at hand there with dried sand, enough so that the clay tablet can be embedded in it. After this [the container] is heated slowly, so that the moisture present [in the tablet] entirely evaporates, and after this it is heated more intensely. After completion, let it cool slowly. Herr Prof. Andrae is supposed to have had success already using this method at his excavations. Whatever subsequent treatment is necessary can then of course take place at their [the tablets’] ﬁnal destination. . . .69

Herzfeld seems not to have followed these directions precisely, or perhaps he experimented with one or two tablets and found the method too destructive or time-consuming. The tablets were eventually impregnated with paraﬃn without having been cleaned ﬁrst, then packed in 2,353 numbered boxes (with additional fragments packed into large tins), and shipped to the Oriental Institute.70 But the letter demonstrates his concern to preserve the tablets, so they could be safely transported. In addition to soliciting expert advice on the conservation of the tablets, Herzfeld must also have discussed the Fortiﬁcation tablets with specialist colleagues. A chatty letter from the famous philologist, Wilhelm Eilers, asks: Please just tell me this: what’s up with the tablet aﬀair? I am more keenly interested in it than ever. For I imagine that on the tablets

69 Die von Ihnen erwähnten Tontafeln müssten natürlich gebrannt werden. Vielleicht versuchen Sie es einmal mit einem Probestück in der folgenden Weise: Ein dort ja immer vorhandener Petroleum-Kanister wird mit soviel trockenem Sande versehen, daß die Tontafel darin gebettet werden kann. Alsdann wird zunächst langsam erhitzt, damit die vorhandene Feuchtigkeit allmählich entweicht, und hierauf stärker. Nach Beendigung lässt man langsam abkühlen. Auf diese Weise soll Herr Prof. Andrae bei seinen Grabungen schon Erfolg gehabt haben. Am Bestimmungsort könnte dann später ja immer noch eine nötige Nachbehandlung stattﬁnden. Notebook N-126, letter dated 6 May 1933. 70 It is not clear if the groupings in the boxes bore any relation to the ﬁndspots of the tablets in the ﬁeld. See the introduction to Garrison and Root, Images of Heroic Encounter.

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must appear artistic expressions of the Achaemenid administration and its oﬃcials, as well as rich material on proper names. That is as it happens precisely what I presently seek. Where are the tablets actually going to be worked on, if the Persians do not let them out? Even in Tehran? A perhaps fantastic idea, but just right for my adventuresome sense.71

This is the only contemporary written mention of the seal impressions on the tablets known to me.72 But Herzfeld was certainly aware of the impressions, and indeed his photographs demonstrate that he spent a fair amount of time poring over them as well as over the writing on the tablets. The photo negative numbers may provide still further insight into the nature of Herzfeld’s involvement with the Fortiﬁcation tablets. The series of numbers given to the photographic prints does not correspond to that given to the negatives. Which series, if either, corresponds to the order in which the photos were taken? If the photograph numbers correspond to the order in which the photos were taken, then the tablets were photographed in situ, followed by a series documenting individual tablets. But if the negative numbers show the order in which the photographs were taken, then the series of photographs that document the variety of shapes represented in the Fortiﬁcation corpus, and some of those recording the Aramaic texts, were taken before the excavation photos that document their discovery (table 2). Indeed, they suggest that various tablets were removed from their archaeological context as they emerged to document the range of shapes represented in the ﬁnd. When Aramaic tablets began to surface, they too were taken away and photographed. But as more and more tablets turned up, a sense of the need to document the discovery emerged, and ﬁve of the six excavation photographs were taken. Then a few more Aramaic tablets were recorded. Only later were three photos taken

71 Sagen Sie bitte nun nur noch: was macht die Tabletten-Aﬀaire? Ich bin lebhafter denn je daran interessiert. Denn ich bilde mir ein, dass auf den Tafeln Kunstausdrücke der achämenidischen Verwaltung und ihrer Träger erscheinen müssen; ausserdem ein reiches Eigennamenmaterial. Das ist also gerade das, was ich gegenwaertig suche. Wo sollen denn eigentlich di Tafeln bearbeitet werden, falls die Perser sie nicht herauslassen? Gar in Teheran? Eine etwas phantastische Vorstellung, aber meinem abenteuernden Sinn gerade recht. Notebook N-126, 26 June 1934. 72 As we now know, the Fortiﬁcation tablets record disbursements of foodstuﬀs at and around Persepolis; the seals ratifying them belonged both to those issuing the rations and to those receiving them. See Garrison and Root, Images of Heroic Encounter; Images of Human Activity (forthcoming); Studies of Animals, Animal-Creatures, Plants, and Abstract Devices (forthcoming).

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in succession, recording the Greek tablet and PFS 93*; the ﬁnal photos included one more excavation record, one more of PFS 93*, and one more of the group of Aramaic tablets Herzfeld had previously set aside. Table 2 Order of Excavation Photos Based on the assumption that the negative numbers show chronology. Photo 20934 20935 Photo 20935

Neg. 12978

32–86a

Neg. 12979

32–85

Photo 25104

Neg. 14663

Photo 25105

Neg. 14664

Photo 25106

Neg. 14665

33–119

Photo 25107

Neg. 14666

33–120

Photo 25108 Photo 25109

Neg. 14667 Neg. 14668

33–121

at tree Photo 25110 Photo 24770 Photo 24771

Neg. 14669 33–123 Neg. 14723 33–40 Neg. 14724 33–41

Photo Photo Photo Photo Photo Photo

24772 24775 24803 25135 25136 25137

Neg. Neg. Neg. Neg. Neg. Neg.

14725 14728 14742 14784 14785 14786

33–34 33–47 33–65 33–166 33–167 33–168

Photo Photo Photo Photo Photo Photo

25214 25215 25216 26115 29491 29492

Neg. Neg. Neg. Neg. Neg. Neg.

15111 15112 15113 15405 15769 15770

34,626 33–42

Same PFT as photo Slide 3423

PFT, no sealing shown A large PFT, no sealing shown Same PFT as photo 25104 A large PFT, no sealing shown PFTs of diﬀerent shapes, no sealings Various PFTs PFSs with animal contest (lion/stag) and heraldic winged lions (griﬃns) PFTs with Aramaic

Exc. Exc. slide 3422 Exc. Exc. Exc. Slide 3425 Slide 3424

More inked PFTs PFTs with Aramaic PFTs of diﬀ shapes, one cuneiform one Aramaic Greek tablet PFS 93* PFS 93*

Exc. PFS 93* Same tablets as 14669

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For whatever reasons, the records Herzfeld left suggest a personal passion, excitement, interest, and overwhelming sense of the responsibility this discovery thrust upon him, combined with a public reticence. Herzfeld felt his responsibility for the tablets was to ensure their publication by others and to use them to good eﬀect for the continuation of work at Persepolis by mentioning them in glowing terms and illustrating a choice few exemplars. At the end of 1934, Herzfeld was removed from his position as expedition director.73 This began what seems to have been a diﬃcult time for him. He left Persepolis for the last time toward the end of November 1934 and went to London.74 There he spent a month, giving the Schweich Lectures at the British Academy, meeting with colleagues, and pursuing an active social life with various aristocratic friends and acquaintances as well as the odd business lunch with other archaeologists. But he was clearly unwell, and unwell in ways that may imply psychological distress. For some time, he had complained about his health in letters from the ﬁeld, convinced that the altitude was hard on his heart.75 While he was in London, he had a massage every other day. On 5 January 1935, he embarked from Southampton for Chicago. We have little evidence regarding what the three weeks that he spent in Chicago were like. He again gave a series of lectures at the University of Chicago, but the atmosphere must have been strained at best. He was removed from his position as director and, as noted above, was asked to sign an aﬃdavit that he had never transported antiquities from Iran.76 He had a massage every other day during his time in Chicago. But whereas in London his diary reveals a whirlwind of social engagements, in Chicago he seems to have met one or another colleague from the Oriental Institute for breakfast most mornings but otherwise to have been free of scheduled appointments.77 His social life improved when he went to New York in the following month, then seems to have reached a real

73 This may have been demanded by the Iranian government; see Balcer, “Erich Friedrich Schmidt,” 164. The details of his expulsion are incompletely known, and the circumstances may have been more complicated than Balcer suggests; see Mousavi, and Gunter and Hauser, this volume. 74 His diary, notebook N-61, preserves information on his activities in 1934; for 1935 see his diary, notebook N-62. 75 Notebooks N-113, N-126, and N-131. 76 The Ernst Herzfeld Papers contain no information concerning his state of mind at the time; his diaries preserve a basic outline of his activities. 77 It is not clear by whose choice.

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frenzy when he returned to Berlin for two weeks in March. He spent his evenings dining with the intelligentsia and with such aristocrats as Baron Max von Oppenheim, himself a well-known archaeologist. Herzfeld apparently left Berlin at the beginning of April 1935, traveling to London via Doorn and then embarking on an extensive trip to Poland and the Soviet Union.78 The years after Persepolis were diﬃcult and sad ones for Herzfeld. In the fall of 1935, he received a brief and peremptory note from the Nazi administration to the eﬀect that he was being relieved of his position as professor at the University in Berlin.79 He must have felt that his world had ended: no more working in Iran, no more oﬃcial praise for his brilliant, meticulous archaeology, increasingly short ﬁnances, and now rejection from the country for which he had fought in the First World War and which he had always held to be superior to all others. Although he moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1936, he never felt at home in the United States and left for the Middle East again as soon as the war permitted, in late 1946. There he led an increasingly embittered existence, as it became clear that the world had altered in ways he found untenable. His death in 1948 may have been due in part to the cynical hopelessness for a future that ﬁnds its way into all his late correspondence, as well as to his very real physical illness.80 Herzfeld’s records of his work at Persepolis, now in Washington, D.C., demonstrate what an extraordinary man he was, what a mixture of contradictory elements. Brilliant and ambitious, learned yet devious, overwhelmingly generous while remaining ﬁercely protective of his rights,81 talented and funny, dismissively snobbish and chauvinist, savvy and worldly-wise, extraordinarily gifted as a draftsman and a philologist, sensitive and full of energy, gentle at times and scathing

78

See Kröger, this volume. Notebook N-131, B-40. 80 His later correspondence, as represented by that preserved in Washington, D.C., attests to his growing feeling of despondence or even, at times, despair. This is perhaps most noticeable in his correspondence with Maria Sarre, widow of Friedrich Sarre. See notebook N-131, B-28, and Kröger, this volume. 81 See also his ﬁght with Robert Byron about taking photographs of Persepolis, detailed in Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (London: Macmillan, 1937), 164–67, his dispute with the Oriental Institute, discussed in Balcer, “Erich Friedrich Schmidt,” 164–69, and his interactions with Arthur Upham Pope mentioned in Gluck and Siver, Surveyors of Persian Art. 79

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at others—it is perhaps no wonder that he left such an inspired but complex legacy. Herzfeld was one of the last great synthesizers in Near Eastern archaeology, one of the few who could draw and measure plans and elevations of the architecture at Persepolis, produce breathtakingly lovely sketches of the sculpture, record and read inscriptions in a plethora of languages (including Akkadian, Old Persian, Elamite, Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Middle Persian, Arabic, Persian, French, German, and English), take hundreds of photographs for publication, seek globally for the best ways to preserve ﬁnds, obtain an excavation permit and keep it valid for many years, and indeed understand how Persepolis ﬁt in with its environment — geographical, cultural, and historical. It is a great pity for modern scholars that he was prevented, in the end, from publishing all that he knew of the site.

Fig. 1. Persepolis, view of the Apadana from south, 1923. Photograph by Ernst Herzfeld. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 5: 3, no. 5.

164 elspeth r. m. dusinberre

Fig. 2. Herzfeld’s illustrated journal recording his travel to Iran in 1905. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, notebook N-82, 14–15.

herzfeld in persepolis 165

Fig. 3. Herzfeld’s sketch plan of Persepolis terrace buildings, from the journal recording his visit in November-December 1923. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, notebook N-84, 46–47.

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Fig. 4. Persepolis, visiting dignitaries, 24 November 1923. Photograph by Ernst Herzfeld. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 30, no. 169.

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Fig. 5. Relief fragment with graﬃti of two humans and animal heads, Persepolis, late sixth century B.C. Limestone; 8.26 x 15.24 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1945, 45.11.17. Photograph by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Fig. 6. Persepolis, steps of the Tripylon (Council Hall), section of baulk. Drawing by Ernst Herzfeld, 1932. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, sketchbook SK-XVII, 12.

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Fig. 7. Persepolis, Gate of All Lands, measured elevation of sculpture; from excavation sketchbook. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, sketchbook SK-XXII, 28.

Fig. 8. Persepolis, Gate of All Lands, measured plan of structure; from excavation sketchbook. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, sketchbook SK-XXII, 31.

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Fig. 9. Persepolis, Gate of All Lands, plan of structure 1:100. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, drawing D-882.

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Fig. 10. Persepolis, Gate of All Lands, isometric plan. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, drawing D-848.

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Fig. 11. Persepolis, Tripylon (Council Hall), measured elevation, from excavation sketchbook. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, sketchbook SK-XXII, 20–21.

Fig. 12. Persepolis, Tripylon (Council Hall), isometric plan by Karl Bergner, 1935. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, drawing D-842.

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Fig. 13. Persepolis, Naqsh-i Rustam, measured drawings from excavation sketchbook. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, sketchbook SK-XXII, last unnumbered page.

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Fig. 14. Persepolis, Naqsh-i Rustam, Tomb of Darius, throne-bearers. Labeled drawings by Ernst Herzfeld. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, drawing D-903e.

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Fig. 15. Persepolis, Apadana, measured elevation drawings of ceremonial staircases carved with ﬁgures; from excavation sketchbook. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, sketchbook SK-XXII, 12–13.

Fig. 16. Persepolis, Apadana, east side, elevations of ceremonial staircases by Karl Bergner, 1934. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, drawing D-854.

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Fig. 17. Persepolis, Apadana, labeled drawings of tribute nations depicted on eastern staircase; from excavation sketchbook. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, sketchbook SK-XX, 58–59.

ERNST HERZFELD, KUH-E KHWAJA, AND THE STUDY OF PARTHIAN ART Trudy S. Kawami

The black basalt mount of Kuh-e Khwaja, rising out of the marshes of Lake Hamun, is a striking element in the landscape of the Helmand Basin, in the province of Sistan in eastern Iran (ﬁg. 1).1 The dark, eastern slope of the mount is marked by a large pale area: the weathered mud brick structure now called Ghagha-shahr, a complex of courts, rooms, and terraces.2 Ernst Herzfeld ﬁrst saw Kuh-e Khwaja in February 1925, although he was not the ﬁrst archaeologist active at the site.3 Aurel Stein (1862– 1943) had been there late in 1915, when he removed a stucco panel and a segment of a wall painting (ﬁgs. 2 and 3). Because Stein was working for the Archaeological Survey of India, the works were placed in the National Museum in New Delhi, where they are today.4 During

1 Trudy S. Kawami, Monumental Art of the Parthian Period in Iran, ActIr 26 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), 13; see also Klaus Fischer, “Field Surveys in Afghan Sistan, 1969– 1974,” in Prehistoric Sistan, ed. Maurizio Tosi, IsMEO Reports and Memoirs 19 (Rome: IsMEO, 1983), 1:31, 41; Walter A. Fairservis, Archaeological Studies in the Seistan Basin of Southwestern Afghanistan and Eastern Iran, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 48:1 (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1961), 14–21; Major B. Lovett, “Narrative of a Visit to the Kuh-i-Khwajah in Sistan,” JRAS 44 (1874): 148–49. For Stein’s description of Kuh-e Khwaja to Percy Staﬀord Allen (“Publius”), see Jeannette Mirsky, Sir Aurel Stein, Archaeological Explorer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 390–91; and Annette Walker, Aurel Stein: Pioneer of the Silk Road (London: John Murray, 1995), 56. Mahyar Nawabi, “Sistan,” in A Bibliography of Iran: Geography and Related Sciences (Tehran: Cultural Studies and Research Institute, 1360/1990), 8:286–89, provides a bibliography of the geography of the immediate area. 2 In 1872, these ruins were called Kuleh Kahgah; the name Kuh-e Khwaja designated the entire islandlike outcropping. Lovett, “Narrative of a Visit to the Kuh-i Khwajah,” 148. 3 Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 270–71. 4 Aurel Stein, Innermost Asia. Detailed Report of Explorations in Central Asia, Kan-su and Eastern Iran, Carried Out and Described under the Orders of H. M. Indian Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), vol. 3: pl. 54; Fred H. Andrews, Catalogue of Wall-paintings from Ancient Shrines in Central Asia and Sistan, Recovered by Sir Aurel Stein (Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1933), 57–59; Kawami, Monumental Art of the Parthian Period, 37, 38. I am indebted to the late Khrishna Riboud for help in locating these works.

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that initial visit, Herzfeld spent less than a month at Kuh-e Khwaja measuring and describing the ruins that he attributed to two periods, Sasanian (ca. 224–641) and early Islamic.5 On his second visit in 1929, Herzfeld captured the ruins of Ghagashahr in a series of Uvachrome slides now housed in Washington, D.C. (ﬁgs. 4 and 5).6 These early slides reveal that the complex is approached by a narrow path that zigzags through the ruins of the lower slope to reach an almost triangular terrace. From this point one passes through a tall, two-chambered Gate House (which Herzfeld called the South Gate) that gives out onto the large Central Court. Herzfeld’s 1929 plan shows how one moves from the open, “exterior” space of the triangular terrace to the enclosed space of the South Gate, and then to the open, “interior” space of the Central Court (ﬁg. 6). On the north side of this court, on a direct axis with the South Gate, lies another terrace with a central staircase; above that stands a oncedomed structure with an ambulatory, which Herzfeld called the Temple. This structure was the apparent goal of movement from the South Gate through the complex. The terrace that supported the Temple level revealed construction in two phases, with a heavy, simple arcade reinforcing an earlier wall that was pierced by arched windows and carried applied columns. Herzfeld photographed the facade in 1929 and elegantly reconstructed both phases (ﬁgs. 7 and 8). The beauty of his line and the quality of his draftsmanship are visually appealing, and his reconstruction appears persuasively realistic.7 The earlier phase of the north facade of the Central Court bore a life-size stucco ﬁgure in high relief on the east side of the doorway (ﬁgs. 9 and 10). Remnants of the cloak of a second ﬁgure were all that remained on the western side of the entry. The plastic mod5 I do not consider here the actual dates of the levels as suggested by later scholars. On this issue, see Giorgio Gullini, Architettura iranica dagli Achemenidi ai Sasanidi. Il “Palazzo” di Kuh-i Khwagia (Seistan) (Turin: Einaudi, 1964); Klaus Schippmann, Die iranischen Feuerheiligtümer, Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten Bd. 31 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971); Walter Meier-Arendt, Bronzen und Keramik aus Luristan und anderen Gebieten Irans im Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Das Museum, 1984), 113–14. 6 Uvachrome was an early commercial process for the production of three-color lantern slides using sheets of color-sensitive gel held between two glass sheets. The process was developed by Dr. Arthur Traube (1878–1948), a German chemist working for the industrialist Otto Perutz. Traube and his colleague Adolph Miethe are credited with the development of panchromatic emulsion. 7 Kröger, in this volume, describes Herzfeld’s early training in architecture.

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eling of the ﬁgure, the thin, clinging drapery with its rippling edges, the vigorously modeled curls, and the animated ﬂutter of the ribbons are characteristic of works in Sasanian style.8 Likewise, the ornamental straps crossing the chest are a royal Sasanian device.9 This ﬁgure, which clearly belongs to the earlier of the two phases, must date to the Sasanian period. Stucco sculptures on the western wall of the Temple facade depict a horseman meeting an attack by a rearing feline and, to the west of that scene, a procession of three horsemen moving away from the Temple (ﬁg. 11). The eastern facade of the Temple was completely eroded, but presumably it once bore sculptures as well. Beneath the Temple level and behind the applied columns of the ﬁrst phase was the Painted Gallery, rather like a Roman cryptoporticus, whose walls and window jambs bore ﬁgural compositions and whose ceiling was adorned with painted, decorative coﬀers (ﬁg. 12).10 The painting Stein removed to New Delhi came from this gallery. In the notebook recording his 1925 visit to the site, Herzfeld concluded that there were two building periods at Kuh-e Khwaja, and that all paintings probably dated to the ﬁrst of these.11 Three pages later, he stated unequivocally that “all the paintings are old. The second period didn’t paint any more!”12 Later, he reiterated, “[the] 2nd period could be late Sasanian or early Islamic; no paintings in 2nd period because of Islam?”13 He repeated this chronological assessment in a letter to Stein written in the same year, and in an account of his trip published less than a year later provided a closely similar date, between the third and seventh–eighth centuries.14 8

See, for example, Massoud Azarnoush, “Excavations at Hajiàbàd, 1977: First Preliminary Report,” IrAnt 18 (1983): 171–75, pls. 1, 3. 9 Prudence O. Harper, The Royal Hunter: Art of the Sasanian Empire (New York: Asia Society, 1978), 25–26. 10 Ian M. Barton, Roman Domestic Buildings (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), 184, deﬁnes a cryptoporticus as “a closed passage or gallery, sometimes with windows.” 11 Ernst Herzfeld Papers, notebook 85, 12a: “sicher 2 Bauperioden”; 15: “2 u. 3 zweifellos, 1 u. 4 wahrschl. erste Bauperiode. Keine Spur vom Malerei im zweiter Periode” (emphasis his), Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Unless otherwise speciﬁed, citations of archival sources refer to these papers. 12 Ibid., 18: “dass alle Bilder alt sind. Die 2te Bauepoche malte nicht mehr!” (emphasis his); this entry was dated 7 February 1925. 13 Ibid., 80. 14 Herzfeld to Stein, MSS Stein 82 (Correspondence 1891–1943), fol. 147r, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 271.

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In the middle of descriptions and measurements recorded in the 1925 notebook, Herzfeld commented on Stein’s decade-old observation that an early phase at the site may have housed a Buddhist community. “Before I can acknowledge the structure as a Buddhist monastery,” Herzfeld wrote, “I must study this more. Actually, it appears not so.”15 His papers in Washington, D.C., preserve no evidence of further inquiry along Buddhist lines. In 1925 Herzfeld wrote to Stein vigorously objecting to the suggestion that the complex at Kuh-e Khwaja could have been a Buddhist monastery, and in the following year he oﬀered parallels with Sasanian structures to identify the building on the High Terrace as a ﬁre temple.16 At this time, Herzfeld occupied the chair of historical geography at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Berlin, where he had begun teaching in 1919.17 Initially trained as an archaeologist in the excavations at Assur conducted by the Deutche OrientGesellschaft, he had traveled extensively in Iran since 1905 and published widely on its monuments. His words carried immense scholarly authority. In January 1929, Herzfeld was in Tehran, arranging with Iranian government oﬃcials for his second trip to Kuh-e Khwaja. In a draft of a letter to Ali Asqar Hekmat, minister of education, Herzfeld pressed hard to keep both found and excavated items from being sealed and stored in Sistan. He repeatedly stressed how important it was that all ﬁnds be studied scientiﬁcally. “I must have the right to transport all the transportable objects to Tehran, which I shall do at my own expense, and to study and treat them until the publication is prepared,” he wrote. “Then the objects shall be handed over to the Museum [presumably the Muzeh Iran-Bastan, now the Iran National Museum] or any other institution.”18 He threatened to withdraw from the project if he could not send the ﬁnds where he wished and drew attention to the 10,000 toman that would be lost if he did so. Herzfeld then traveled to Kuh-e Khwaja via Basra and Karachi, the standard route at the time.

15 Notebook 85, 15: “Bevor ich den Bau als buddhist. Kloster anerkennen kann, muss ich diesen mehr studieren. Es sieht eigentlich nicht so aus.” 16 Herzfeld to Stein, MSS Stein 82 (Correspondence 1891–1943), fol. 144r, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Herzfeld had long been aware of Stein’s discoveries of Buddhist monuments; see Herzfeld, “Khorasan,” 146 n. 1. 17 Several papers in this volume trace aspects of Herzfeld’s academic career; see especially the contribution by Johannes Renger. 18 Notebook 104, draft letter written in English.

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Herzfeld and a small crew worked at Kuh-e Khwaja through February and March 1929 (ﬁg. 13). The group included Hans Barthus, who had earlier worked for Herzfeld at Samarra detaching stucco wall decorations and paintings and who performed the same task for Albert von LeCoq in Central Asia.19 Barthus removed the paintings from the gallery at Kuh-e Khwaja and packed them (see the appendix to this article for a transcription of his packing list). During this time, the Now Ruz (Persian New Year) holidays occurred and many pilgrims visited Kuh-e Khwaja. Herzfeld noted the festivities in his diary and photographed the pilgrims and various small shrines on the mount.20 The festival deeply impressed him and in later publications he referred to the events he had observed.21 In March, Herzfeld sent the paintings he removed from Kuh-e Khwaja to Tehran, where they were stored for a time in the stables of the German embassy.22 The objects were then shipped to Berlin, where Stein saw them in September 1929.23 As far as I can determine, Herzfeld never again returned to Kuh-e Khwaja. Contrary to his January assertion to Hekmat, the paintings did not return to Iran and—except for one recently discovered fragment—are presumably lost.24

Herzfeld’s Interpretation of Kuh-e Khwaja In my study of Kuh-e Khwaja and its paintings published in 1987, I focused on the documentary material preserved in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers in Washington, D.C., and the Herzfeld Archive at the

19 Ernst Herzfeld, Erster vorläuﬁger Bericht über die Ausgrabungen von Samarra (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1912), vii, where his name appears as Theodor Bartus. Albert von LeCoq, Auf Hellas Spuren in Ostturkistan; Berichte und Abenteuer der II. und III. deutschen Turfanexpedition (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1926), 30–31, 39, 48, 61–62, 116–17; Albert von Le Coq, Von Land und Leuten in Ostturkistan; Berichte und Abenteuer der 4. deutschen Turfanexpedition (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1928), pls. 2 and 3. 20 Photo ﬁle 29, nos. 49–51. See also Lovett, “Narrative of a Visit to Kuh-iKhwajah,” 149–50. 21 Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 59–60; Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 291. 22 Wipert von Blücher, Zeitenwende in Iran: Erlebnisse und Beobachtungen (Biberach an der Riss: Koehler & Voigtländer, 1949), 248. I am grateful to Ali Mousavi for calling my attention to this citation. 23 Stein to Herzfeld, 6 November 1929, MSS Stein 82 (Correspondence 1891–1943), fol. 176r, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 24 See Kröger, this volume.

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Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.25 For the most part, I ignored Herzfeld’s published interpretation of the site as the location of Zoroaster’s preaching and as the palace of the Magi because I could not see the connection between his claims and the material remains. Moreover, I was puzzled by the change in his thinking about the site between spring 1925, when he wrote that “the 2nd building period at Kuh-e Khwaja can no longer be Sasanian, but early Islamic. IIIrd cent. AH, time of Ya"qùb b. al-Laith”; and autumn 1929, when he wrote to Aurel Stein stressing its Zoroastrian character.26 Herzfeld associated the ruins at Kuh-e Khwaja with the Magi, the Three Kings of the Christmas story. Wipert von Blücher, the German ambassador to Tehran at the time of Herzfeld’s 1929 expedition, believed that the ruins were, according to local tradition, associated with King Melchior, and he credited Herzfeld with ﬁnding these “relics” (paintings) associated with the Three Kings.27 But the ambassador may have misconstrued, or misremembered, Herzfeld’s comments. In a 1932 article intended for scholars, Herzfeld identiﬁed Kuh-e Khwaja with “the mountain of Gundofarr,” identifying Gundofarr with Kaspar, not Melchior.28 Departing markedly from his 1926 publication assigning the earliest phase to the third century, Herzfeld now declared that the architecture and decoration of this level dated to the ﬁrst century, when the site was ruled by a Gundofarr-Rustam (whose dates he gave as A.D. 20–65). Later, in 1935, Herzfeld explained his identiﬁcation of Gundofarr/Kaspar with Rustam, a legendary hero of Sistan. Rustam, of course, ﬁgures centrally in the Shahnama, Firdowsi’s epic poem of Iran composed around the year 1010.

25 Trudy S. Kawami, “Kuh-e Khwaja, Iran, and Its Wall Paintings: The Records of Ernst Herzfeld,” MMJ 22 (1987): 13–52. 26 Notebook 85, 12a and 15: “. . . dass also die 2te Bauepoche des Koh i Khwadja nicht mehr sasanidisch sein kann, sondern frühislamisch ist. III scl. H., Zeit des Ya’qùb b. al-Laith” (emphasis his). For the career of Ya"qùb b. al-Laith, founder of the ninth-century Saﬀàrid dynasty in eastern Iran, see C. E. Bosworth, “The Tahirids and Saﬀàrids,” in CHI, Vol. 4, The Period from the Arab Invasion to the Saljuqs, ed. Richard N. Frye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 109–16. For Herzfeld’s letter to Stein written in autumn 1929, see MSS Stein 82 (Correspondence 1891–1943), fol. 161, 163v, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 27 Von Blücher, Zeitenwende in Iran, 248. The now-traditional names of the Three Kings do not appear until the sixth century and were considerably diﬀerent in earlier Christian literature. See Raymond Edward Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke, Anchor Bible Reference Library (London: Chapman, 1993), 198–99. 28 Ernst Herzfeld, “Sakastan,” AMI 4 (1931–32): 115–16.

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Another local name for the site, or at least part of it, was Qaleh-ye Rustam, the Castle of Rustam.29 Place names incorporating Rustam are not limited to Sistan, however, but spread widely across Iran. Ninth-century rebels in the Caspian region adopted his name, and by the nineteenth century Sasanian rock reliefs in central Iran were associated with the hero.30 In other words, the fact that Rustam was linked with a locale does not guarantee a historical connection. The historical Gundofarr (also called Gondophares or Guduvhara) was an Indo-Parthian who ruled in the ﬁrst half of the ﬁrst century A.D. Best known from coinage, he is also documented by the inscription at Takht-i Bahì, near Peshawar, Pakistan, cut in the twenty-sixth year of his reign.31 He did not use the name Rustam on his coins or in the inscription. Herzfeld apparently made an identiﬁcation which later scholarship has not corroborated. In his Archaeological History of Iran, the printed version of the Schweich Lectures delivered at the British Academy in London in 1934 following his departure from Iran, Herzfeld reiterated what he saw as the historical connections between Kuh-e Khwaja and Gundofarr, the Magi, Zoroastrians, and early Christianity in the East.32 He presented what seemed to be local traditions regarding Kuh-e Khwaja, although he did not identify his sources. He wrote that Kuh-e Khwaja, the name of the site, meant Mount of the Saint or Holy Man, that locally khwaja meant “lord” (as in “saint”), and that the site was identiﬁed with a certain Sara b. Ishaq b. Ibrahim.33 Perhaps inspired

29

Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 62, 66; Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 302. See Bosworth, “The Tahirids and Saﬀàrids,” 109–16, for the adoption of his name in the ninth century. The Sasanian rock reliefs carved below the Achaemenid tombs on the western side of the Murgab Plain in Fars, for example, are still called Naqsh-e Rustam (Pictures of Rustam). 31 A. D. H. Bivar, “The History of Eastern Iran,” in CHI, Vol. 3, The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 197, 222 n. 14. 32 Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 58–66. This was Herzfeld’s ﬁrst book written in English, although he had published short articles in that language as early as 1927. See Ernst Herzfeld, “The Past in Persia, I. The Prehistorical Period to the Rise of Achaemenian Rule in Iran, 550 B.C.,” ILN, 19 November 1927, 905, 926. Mousavi and Dusinberre, this volume, discuss Herzfeld’s departure from Iran toward the end of 1934. 33 The identity of this individual is uncertain. An English visitor to the site in 1872 noted that it was named after “Pir Khwajah, a holy dervish.” Lovett, “Narrative of a Visit to Kuh-i-Khwadja,” 145, 149. Pir is an honoriﬁc, as is khwaja. The name could be translated as “Holy Lord/Saint” and does not refer to a speciﬁcally named person. 30

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by the Now Ruz ceremonies he witnessed in March 1929, Herzfeld connected this august personage with the prophet Zarathustra/ Zoroaster. He had earlier identiﬁed Kuh-e Khwaja with Mount Ushida of the Avesta. “The conclusion is compelling: on Kuh-e Khwaja Vishtaspa, the father of Darius, gave safe refuge to Zarathustra against the magus Gaumata,” he wrote in 1935.34 Herzfeld then underscored the sacredness of the site by citing the third-century Syriac Acts of Thomas the Apostle, interpreting its text to indicate that Thomas the Apostle—like Herzfeld himself—traveled to Sistan via Karachi.35 He referred to the Magi tales recounted in the Opus Imperfectum, a ﬁfth-century Latin commentary on the Gospel of St. Matthew; the sixth-century Syriac Book of the Cave of Treasures (Ma"arrath Gazzè); and the Codex Germanicus, an early-sixteenth-century prayer book.36 Herzfeld identiﬁed the Magus Kaspar via the Armenian name Gadaspar with the ruler Gundofarr and concluded “we could as well call it [the ruins of Ghagha-shahr] the Castle of the Three Magi.”37 This deeply romantic interpretation reveals an aspect of Herzfeld’s character that others have discerned in his early writings.38 Similarly, he evoked the relationship between the Edda and the Nibelungenlied to illustrate the development of Iranian epic literature.39 These expressions of cultural connectedness, however fanciful to us, are particularly poignant, for they occurred at a time when Herzfeld was exiled both from Germany and Iran. His discussion of Kuh-e Khwaja in Iran in the Ancient East (1941) was merely a shorter, less romantic restatement of the argument published in Archaeological History of Iran (1935). The later book is nonetheless important to our understanding of Kuh-e Khwaja, since it reproduced photographs of the subsequently lost segments of the 34

Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 170; Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 62. See Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India: The Beginnings to AD 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 26–30, for the context in which the book was written and what historical information may be deduced from it. 36 J. van Banning, Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum, Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 87B (Turnholti: Brepols, 1988); E. A. Wallis Budge, The Book of the Cave of Treasures (London: Religious Tract Society, 1927), 203–13. See Éva Knapp, Der Codex Germanicus, 2 vols. (Budapest: Helikon, 1993), for a facsimile of and commentary on the Codex Germanicus. 37 Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 66. 38 Margaret Cool Root, “The Herzfeld Archive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” MMJ 11 (1976): 124. 39 Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 291; Root, “Herzfeld Archive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” 123, also noted “his penchant for free associating.” 35

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Painted Gallery that had been removed to Berlin.40 A comparison of Herzfeld’s photographs and drawings with the published illustrations shows that Herzfeld retouched and colored the published photos (ﬁgs. 14–17).41 The results are not wildly diﬀerent, but stylistic aspects are nonetheless altered; moreover, details that allowed me to reconstruct the painting cycle, such as the curve of a window opening over which crenellated walls were painted, were cropped out. A second example, from a window jamb, contrasts the certainty of line and shape in his retouched photo with the ambiguity of the damaged original (see ﬁg. 15).42 Herzfeld made much of the classicizing aspects of the paintings, pointing to those features as another reason to date the ﬁrst building phase to the Parthian period.

Four Questions A review of Herzfeld’s work at Kuh-e Khwaja prompts four main questions. Why, in the face of the obviously Sasanian style of the paintings and stucco sculpture, did Herzfeld in his later publications insist on a Parthian date for the earlier level at Kuh-e Khwaja? Why did he connect the site so strongly with the Magi? Why did he ignore the Buddhist aspects of the site? Finally, to the extent that we can ascertain them, were there private factors that played a role in shaping Herzfeld’s scholarly opinions? Why Herzfeld wanted Kuh-e Khwaja to be Parthian and why he connected it with the Magi, may be answered in part by looking at the site itself. The three horsemen on the western facade of the Temple may have been a visual trigger for the association (see ﬁg. 11). In many Early Christian monuments the Magi were depicted as Persians, shown in the Parthian garb of trousers, sleeved tunic, and hood.43 The 40

Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 291–98, 301–2, and pls. 101–4. For an even more extreme example of retouching by J. H. Breasted, see Annabel Jane Wharton, Reﬁguring the Post Classical City: Dura Europos, Jerash, Jerusalem and Ravenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 35–38. 42 Kawami, “Kuh-e Khwaja, Iran, and Its Wall Paintings,” pls. 35, 43. Root, “Herzfeld Archive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” 121–22, ﬁgs. 3 and 4, oﬀers an earlier example of Herzfeld’s altering an image for reproduction. 43 The Magi depicted in the sixth-century mosaics on the north wall of the nave of the church of San Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy, wear characteristically Parthian garb: “Phrygian” caps, sleeved tunics, narrow patterned trousers, and soft boots. The ﬁgures are labeled “Balthasar,” “Melchior,” and Gaspar.” See Giuseppe 41

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Temple relief at Kuh-e Khwaja could evoke the Magi legend to a receptive mind. If the site were considered to be Parthian, the association would be all the stronger. In the early twentieth century it was common to regard northern European culture as the legitimate heir of ancient and lofty civilizations. A manifestation of Orientalism, this view appropriated the cultural achievements of Asian antiquity to the non-Oriental present. For Herzfeld in the 1930s, Kuh-e Khwaja may have provided a means of linking East and West, of uniting his European self with the East that had brought him such scholarly success and personal satisfaction. The stunning landscape and buildings of Iran can have a profound emotional impact on a receptive viewer. Herzfeld’s 1925 description of Qaleh-ye Dukhtar carpeted with tulips and almond trees like the Castle of the Holy Grail parallels Arthur Upham Pope’s aesthetic epiphany when, in the same year, he saw the Madresseh Moder-e Shah in Isfahan “splendid in the sunlight.”44 “Shiraz is the Weimar of Persia,” Herzfeld observed in the same article, further illustrating his linking of Iran and Germany.45 In his Archaeological History of Iran Herzfeld speciﬁcally linked Kuh-e Khwaja and Germany, referring to the “three Magi whose heads are buried in the dome at Cologne.”46 Herzfeld’s linking of ancient Iran with medieval Germany occurred at a time when the German society that formed Herzfeld was disappearing in the rise of the Nazi movement. The dream of the Magi uniting Iran and Germany may have been a consolation to Herzfeld as his life shifted in the mid-1930s from that of a famous professor and archaeologist to a refugee scholar depen-

Bovini and Mario Pierpaoli, Ravenna, Treasures of Light (Ravenna: Longo, 1991), pls. 37, 44; and Friedrich Wilhelm Deichmann, Ravenna: Hauptstadt des Spätantiken Abendlandes, Vol. 3, Frühchristliche Bauten und Mosaiken von Ravenna (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1958), pl. 103. 44 Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 252–53; I owe this reference to Robert Hillenbrand. Jay Gluck and Noël Siver, eds., Surveyors of Persian Art: A Documentary Biography of Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman (Ashiya, Japan, and Costa Mesa, Calif.: SoPA, 1996, distributed by Mazda Publishers), 20, cites Pope’s description. 45 Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 251. 46 Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 64, refers to the shrine of the Three Kings in the Cologne Cathedral (Kölner Dom). The relics of the Magi—whether the bodies or just the heads is not clear—were transported to Cologne in 1162 as part of the booty taken from Milan by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. See Brown, Birth of the Messiah, 197–201; The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, trans. Granger Ryan and Helmut Lothar Ripperger (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1941), 1, 84.

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dent for support on American philanthropy.47 Medieval German culture and legend clearly comprised an important source of metaphor for Herzfeld in his writings about ancient Iran. In a lecture delivered in 1937 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he described the crown of the Sasanian king Bahram II as “formed by a ﬁllet with ﬂoating ends, a pair of wings—like a Lohengrin—, and the indispensable globe.”48 Why did Herzfeld ignore the Buddhist aspects of Kuh-e Khwaja? He knew little about Buddhist art. It played no role in his vision of early Iranian history and consequently could be dismissed.49 There may also have been an element of competition with Stein, who was an acknowledged expert on the subject. As much as the two corresponded, they do not seem to have often met.50 In reading Herzfeld’s letters to Stein, one is struck by Herzfeld’s reserve. His tone was always proper, but rarely warm, and the enthusiasm for archaeology displayed in Herzfeld’s diaries and notebooks does not appear in his letters to Stein. Instead, the letters exhibit a didactic and guarded quality. Political tensions between the British and the Germans in eastern Iran may partly explain this reserve.51 Stein was a far more adept player in the great game, and he usually worked directly for the British government. He may have made Herzfeld, who was trying to chart an independent course for himself in both Germany and Iran, uncomfortable or uneasy. “No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life,” Edward Said has written, “from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member 47 From 1935 to 1937, Herzfeld received support from the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars to supplement his salary from the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. Ada Small (Mrs. William H.) Moore, who had supported the Oriental Institute’s excavations at Persepolis, underwrote the publication of Herzfeld’s Iran in the Ancient East (1941). On Mrs. Moore’s support of Herzfeld, Pope, and Phyllis Ackerman, see also Gluck and Siver, Surveyors of Persian Art, 24, 216, 238–42, 256; and Mousavi, this volume. 48 Ernst Herzfeld, “Sasanian Art” (lecture delivered 10 January 1937 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), 17. Box 10, MS 12, Herzfeld Archive, Department of the Ancient Near East, Metropolitan Museum of Art. 49 Similarly, Herzfeld failed to recognize Elamite, Assyrian, and Lydian contributions to ancient Iranian culture, as Stronach, this volume, also notes. 50 They were once photographed together at Persepolis, as Ali Mousavi has kindly informed me. 51 Mirsky, Aurel Stein, Archaeological Explorer, 389–90.

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of a society.”52 To appreciate certain aspects of Herzfeld’s work, we may also consider his family background and personal life. Herzfeld was born in Celle, north of Hanover, in Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) on 23 July 1879, the son of a medical doctor. His parents were middle-class Protestants, but in a statement required of him by the German government in 1935, Herzfeld admitted that his grandparents were “full Jews” (Volljuden).53 A decorated veteran who served in France in 1915, Herzfeld nonetheless later lost his university professorship as a result of Nazi legislation.54 Herzfeld’s sister, Charlotte Maria, born in Celle on 16 January 1887, married Carl Brodführer on 25 December 1915, and had one son. Herzfeld and his sister remained close throughout their lives. She visited him at Persepolis, and when in 1936 he moved to the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, she followed in 1937, anglicizing her name to Charlotte Bradford.55 Herzfeld’s Jewish ancestry was clearly a factor in his travels in the 1930s after he left Iran. But there may have been other forces at work. He may have been homosexual as was claimed by at least one person, now deceased, who knew him.56 Certainly having a sexual orientation that was unacceptable in Germany, as well as Europe in general, during the 1930s would discourage permanent residence in one place. But neither Herzfeld’s Jewishness nor his presumed homosexuality explains his archaeological work, nor his changing interpretations of Kuh-e Khwaja. Both factors, however, may have some bearing on his practice of concealing, or rather not revealing, information, whether it was personal or archaeological. It may also represent a subcurrent in Herzfeld’s pattern of keeping objects, as well as information, to himself. How did Herzfeld see himself? Certainly as a liberal conservative. Also as an aristocrat, to judge from the mournful and bitter tone of the obituary he wrote for Friedrich Sarre two years before Herzfeld himself died. In his obituary of Sarre, Herzfeld began his account at a period three hundred years before the scholar’s birth, and he

52

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), iii. Kröger, this volume, describes Herzfeld’s family background. 54 Renger, Hauser, and vom Bruch, this volume, discuss Herzfeld’s university career. 55 Photo ﬁle 5, vol. 3, 66a, preserves a photograph of Charlotte at Persepolis. 56 Edith Porada made this statement to me, and to others, in the 1980s. 53

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clearly placed himself along with his colleague and friend in the aristocratic continuum of northern European culture.57 Perhaps this mindset helps to explain why Herzfeld assured Hekmat in 1929 that the Kuh-e Khwaja ﬁnds would be placed in an Iranian museum, when it is now clear that he intended to ship them to Germany. As a member of the educated elite, Herzfeld may have felt that he knew better than any bureaucrat what should be done with antiquities. As for Herzfeld’s thoughts in earlier decades, Richard Ettinghausen provided a telling account in which he presented Herzfeld as quoting Plato: “ ‘The objects of this world, which our senses perceive, have no real being: they always become, they never are.’ And for historical studies we must train our eyes to see objects not as individuals, but as passing phases of their type, as a momentary stop in a continuous movement, or as the eﬀect of past causes and as causes of future eﬀect.”58 This platonic concern for the general rather than the speciﬁc, for the “ideal” rather than the “real,” may cast a useful light on Herzfeld’s retouching of the Kuh-e Khwaja paintings. Whether his motives were clearly acknowledged or unconscious, the altered paintings functioned better than the originals as “causes” of his Parthian dating. These aspects of his background and family help us understand his identiﬁcation with “old” and noble cultures and the painful exclusion he must have felt at being formally denied membership in the German intellectual elite to which he had contributed so much.

The Legacy Ernst Herzfeld’s legacy to the study of Parthian art is a complex one. He was perhaps the ﬁrst scholar to treat the period as important in its own right. He drew attention to signiﬁcant monuments through articles and books illustrated with copious new photographs, published over three decades. He stressed the continuity in Iranian culture from pre-Islamic through Islamic times and perceived intercultural connections across western Asia, an outstanding characteristic of the Parthian period. Herzfeld oﬀered a uniﬁed vision of Iranian history 57

Ernst Herzfeld, “Friedrich Sarre,” Ars Islamica 11–12 (1946): 210–12. Richard Ettinghausen, “In Memoriam: Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948),” Ars Islamica 15–16 (1951): 264. 58

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based on literature as well as archaeology. This vision encouraged— indeed, motivated—additional work by other scholars who, eighty years later, are still in his debt. But Herzfeld’s approach to individual archaeological monuments was, at times, highly subjective. His cursory reading of the Parthian inscriptions at Bisotun, and his desire to see in those fragmentary inscriptions references to known individuals, produced not only a false chronology of the associated reliefs but also inaccurate descriptions of the reliefs themselves.59 His dismissal of the obviously Sasanian style of the Kuh-e Khwaja reliefs and paintings further obscured our understanding of the development of art in both the Parthian and Sasanian periods. His collection of antiquities, his selling of his papers and Kuh-e Khwaja painting fragments to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his sales of antiquities to private individuals, reveal the mercenary side of a renowned scholar.60 Like that of any human being, his legacy is mixed. Because the high points of his work were so brilliant, the darker aspects are all the more painful.

59 Herzfeld, Erster vorläuﬁger Bericht über die Ausgrabungen von Samarra, 143; Herzfeld, Am Tor von Asien, 35–40, pl. 22; Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 63–64. For a reassessment, see Kawami, Monumental Art of the Parthian Period, 35–43, 154–59. 60 On Herzfeld’s collection of antiquities, see Arthur U. Pope and Phyllis Ackerman, eds., A Survey of Persian Art from Prehistoric Times to the Present (London: Oxford University Press, 1938–39), 1:171 n. 1; 208, ﬁg. 45c; 266, ﬁg. 50b, e–g; Oscar W. Muscarella, Bronze and Iron: Ancient Near Eastern Artifacts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988), 220–21, no. 330. Herzfeld’s collection was also mentioned in a letter from Walter Adams, general secretary, Academic Assistance Council, London, to Alfred E. Cohn, Rockefeller Institute, New York (an executive committee member of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars): “Nor can we assist him in his second problem of selling archaeological specimens which are his legal property and which are worth approximately £5,000.” Adams to Cohn, 17 October 1935, box 14, New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Papers of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars. At least some of the specimens mentioned in the letter were undoubtedly among the 270 objects the British Museum purchased from Herzfeld in autumn 1935, as I have learned from St John Simpson, Department of the Ancient Near East, British Museum. For Herzfeld’s sales to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, see Root, “Herzfeld Archive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” 119; Kawami, “Kuh-e Khwaja, Iran, and Its Wall Paintings,” 44. The museum acquired other objects once in Herzfeld’s possession after the scholar’s death, including two metal vessels published in Muscarella, Bronze and Iron, 220–21, 260, nos. 330, 348. Christine Lilyquist, “The Dilbat Hoard,” MMJ 29 (1994): 7–11, discusses Herzfeld’s role in the sale of the so-called Dilbat jewelry hoard. My thanks to Ann Gunter and Stefan Hauser for inviting me to participate in this symposium, which allowed me the opportunity to explore the complex issues surrounding Herzfeld, his work at Kuh-e Khwaja, and his legacy in the ﬁeld of Parthian art.

herzfeld, kuh-e khwaja, and the study of parthian art Appendix: 1929 Packing list for Kuh-e Khwaja paintings (Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Notebook N-29) [unpaginated p. 1] K.[iste] 1 Halbes Obertheil v. Torsu am Haupteingang wenn man über den Hof kommt Westseite

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K.[iste] 2 Unthertheil von dem Torsu in Kiste 1. Die Füsse fehlen ziemlich zerstöhrt. Die Schleifen u[nd] ein breiteres Stück[,] das an der Seite der Figur wahr liegen dabei und müssen an die Figur wieder ran gebracht werden. [Later addition: Noch 2 Stücke zugelegt 1 v[om] Fuss, ein kl[eines] Stück blau] K.3 Aus d[er] Wölbung in der Mitte. 1 Kopf auch [unpaginated p. 2] aus der Wölbung 2 Blumenornament[e] rechte Seite der Wölbung 1 Stück mit rothem Kopf aus der linken Wölbung fast alles gebrochen K.4 Mitte d [er] Wölbung sehr zerstöhrt 3 Bilder[.] Der auf dem Kopf steht[,] hat linke Seite gesessen

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K.5. 5 Rosetten aus d[er] Fensterwölbung. 3 von der hinteren[,] 2 aus d[er] vorderen Wölbung[.] Die oberen Bruchstücke aus dem Schutt gegraben. [unpaginated p. 3] K.6 3 Bortenstücke[,] 2 hiervon gehören aneinander Hinten unter der Wölbung 1 vorne unter der Wöl[bung]. und 1 grosser Kopf aus der rechten Wand in der Mitte des Gewölbes K.7 Obertheile von Lebensgrossen Figuren aus d[er] Fensterwand vorne zwischen d[en] beiden Fensterbogen. Ziemlich zerstöhrt Die Stücke liegen nicht alle bei einander. Diese Müssen nach der Aufname wieder richtig [unpaginated p. 4] gelegt werden, da die Leute mir die Platte schief hielten u[nd] mehrere Stücke rausﬁelen. Auch liegt noch eine 1/2 Rosette dabei, die noch zu den anderen in K.5 gehöhren[,] wo d[ie] 2 vorderen raus sind.

herzfeld, kuh-e khwaja, and the study of parthian art K.8 Rechte Seite aus der Fensterwölbung die oberen Theile soweit sie Noch erhalten [sind], und ein Untertheil[.] Das in grauweiss[.] Leider ist dieses ferfault [Verfault] so das[s] es nicht zusammen hält. Die Stücke müssen alle wieder zusammen [unpaginated p. 5] gepasst werden, weil es nicht immer in der gleichen Lage liegt. [Later addition:] Gro[sse] Kiste. Mit lebensgrossen Figuren aus der hinteren Fensterwand Kl[eine] K[iste] mit d[en] grünen Reitern

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Fig. 1. Kuh-e Khwaja, spring 1929. Photograph by Ernst Herzfeld. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 29, no. 3.

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Fig. 2. Kuh-e Khwaja. Portion of stucco panel removed in 1915 by Aurel Stein to the National Museum, New Delhi. Courtesy of the late Krishna Riboud.

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Fig. 3. Kuh-e Khwaja. Section of wall painting removed in 1915 by Aurel Stein to the National Museum, New Delhi. Courtesy of the late Krishna Riboud.

Fig. 4. View from Kuh-e Khwaja with Lake Hamoun in the distance, 1929. Photograph by Ernst Herzfeld. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Uvachrome color slide no. 5101.

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Fig. 5. Kuh-e Khwaja, view of the ruins of Ghagha-shahr, 1929. Photograph by Ernst Herzfeld. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Uvachrome color slide no. 5099.

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N

Fig. 6. Kuh-e Khwaja, plan of ruins drawn by Ernst Herzfeld, 1929. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, drawing D-692.

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Fig. 7. Kuh-e Khwaja, north facade of Central Court, 1929. Photograph by Ernst Herzfeld. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 17, no. 5.

Fig. 8. Kuh-e Khwaja, Herzfeld’s reconstruction of north facade of Central Court, earlier phase. Published in Iran in the Ancient East, pl. 98. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, drawing D-689.

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Fig. 9. Kuh-e Khwaja, stucco ﬁgure from north facade of Central Court. Colored pencil and ink drawing by Ernst Herzfeld, 1929. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, sketchbook SK-XV, 22.

Fig. 10. Kuh-e Khwaja, Herzfeld’s reconstruction of north facade of Central Court, later phase. Published in Iran in the Ancient East, pl. 98. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, drawing D-690.

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Fig. 11. Kuh-e Khwaja, western wall of “temple” with stucco sculpture of three horsemen. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 17, no. 11.

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Fig. 12. Kuh-e Khwaja, Painted Gallery, 1929. Photograph by Ernst Herzfeld. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 17, no. 4.

Fig. 13. Kuh-e Khwaja, Herzfeld’s excavation team, 1929; Hans Barthus, seated center. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 17, no. 2.

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Fig. 14. Kuh-e Khwaja, 1929. Herzfeld’s watercolor sketch of ﬁgures from the Painted Gallery. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, sketchbook SK-XV, 31.

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Fig. 15. Kuh-e Khwaja, 1929. Retouched photograph published in Iran in the Ancient East, pl. 104, bottom. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 17, no. 86.

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Fig. 16. Kuh-e Khwaja, 1929. Herzfeld’s colored pencil sketch of ﬁgures from the Painted Gallery. Ernst Herzfeld Papers SK-XV, 45.

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Fig. 17. Kuh-e Khwaja. Retouched detail published in Iran in the Ancient East, pl. 102, left. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 17, no. 80.

PRISMATIC PREHISTORY: ERNST HERZFELD ON EARLY IRAN Margaret Cool Root Ernst Herzfeld was a major ﬁgure in the young ﬁeld of prehistoric Iranian archaeology in the early decades of the twentieth century even as he was simultaneously making his mark as a deeply learned philologist, a serious contemplator of historical texts, and a giant in the archaeological exploration of later periods of Iranian civilization.1 What were his contributions to the study of prehistoric Iran? What were the axes of his interest? What were the hallmarks (and idiosyncrasies) of his approach to this ﬁeld? How has his legacy fared?

A Gentle Metaphor In attempting sympathetically to articulate the competing elements of Herzfeld’s role in this arena, I have searched for a visually compelling metaphor. The prism of my title is meant to suggest the ﬁeld of Iranian archaeology (and particularly its prehistoric aspect) in Herzfeld’s era. It was an “edgy” ﬁeld to be sure, charged with intense conﬂicts of personality and politics. If we imagine diﬀerent facets of an intricately angled oblique prism as the realms of diﬀerent factions or schools of thought, those facets that represented Herzfeld’s lines of inquiry and perspectives on the ﬁeld were his alone. They yielded, even on their own terms, competing spectrum ﬂashes. Sometimes they threw oﬀ rainbows of visionary insight, sometimes surprisingly naive intellectual engagement, sometimes solidly signiﬁcant documentary contribution, and sometimes stubbornly entrenched misunderstanding or misrepresentation. The spectral dispersions of Herzfeld’s engagements with prehistoric Iran also projected irreconcilable collisions between

1 I wish to thank Ann Gunter and Stefan Hauser ﬁrst for organizing the conference that spawned this volume and then for following through with richly informed, stimulating critiques of the work presented.

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his scientiﬁc visions and the eﬀects of his simultaneous role as a collector of antiquities. In sum, the dispersed spectra of Herzfeld’s prismatic facets of genius, serious intention, and yet frequently conﬂicted self-positioning are a far cry from the sharply focused, inexorably directed spectral dispersions of a classic prism captured photographically in a stable, clinically pristine environment. They seem more like isolated rainbow patches thrown oﬀ the swaying triangular prism-pendants of a Victorian lamp photographed in a dusty, sun-drenched room.

Herzfeld and His Seals: Collected, Studied, and Lost Herzfeld conducted archaeological soundings and explorations in the 1920s at the prehistoric Iranian site of “Persepolis” (now called Tal-i Bakun, near Persepolis in the southwestern highlands of Fars), and at the site of Tepe Giyan in the Luristan region of western Iran near the modern village of Nihavand.2 Both sites remain important in ongoing attempts to further our understanding of early seals as art and as social tools. They also continue to ﬁgure prominently in discussions of the early pottery traditions of Iran. Tepe Giyan in particular continues to feature in discussions of larger issues of interactions between Iran and Mesopotamia from the ﬁfth and fourth millennia B.C.

2 See Ernst Herzfeld, “Bericht über archäologische Beobachtungen im südlichen Kurdistan und in Luristan,” AMI 1 (1929–30): 65–75, for a report on his activities at Tepe Giyan; see Herzfeld, Iranische Denkmäler, for his work at Bakun. In a draft plan for archaeological work in Iran dated 1927, Herzfeld alludes to Tepe Giyan (without actually naming it) as an urban site deserving investigation and one from which he has already acquired a large collection of ceramics, bronzes, gold items, and seals; see Kröger’s contribution, this volume, with further references. It was the French, however, who returned to Tepe Giyan in 1931–32 for systematic ﬁeldwork. Georges Contenau and Roman Ghirshman, Fouilles du Tépé-Giyan près de Néhavend, 1931 et 1932 (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1935). Unfortunately, these excavations were, in the words of Elizabeth Henrickson, “conducted with little concern for stratigraphic, architectural, or cultural context, so that even its gross periodization remains problematic.” Elizabeth Henrickson, “Chalcolithic Seals and Sealings from Seh Gabi, Central Western Iran,” IrAnt 23 (1988): 1. Further exploration at Tal-i Bakun was undertaken in 1932 as part of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute expedition to Persepolis under the overarching supervision of Herzfeld himself and the direction of Alexander Langsdorﬀ; further excavations continued in 1937 after Herzfeld had been replaced by Erich F. Schmidt. Alexander Langsdorﬀ and Donald E. McCown, Tall-i Bakun A, Season of 1932, OIP 59 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942).

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Herzfeld freely acknowledged that his work at Tepe Giyan and Tal-i Bakun was not scientiﬁc excavation. He did, however, characterize his activity at Giyan rather passionately as a critical salvage eﬀort in the face of horrendous plundering that within the space of months had reduced to nothing the habitation area of the large mound that he had earlier identiﬁed and from which he gathered large artifactual samplings—including, as he notes, “hundreds of seals.”3 He published many of the seals he had collected/purchased at Tepe Giyan and Nihavand in an article in the recently created journal Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran, juxtaposing these artifacts with examples that had emerged from the French excavations at Susa in southwestern Iran (Khuzistan) as well as other ancient sites/cultures (ﬁg. 1).4 The article was a seminal contribution to the study of early stamp seals and until the late 1960s remained the only attempt at broad synthetic treatment of the material.5 It illustrated a large number of such artifacts and grouped them into basic categories of representational types (ﬁgs. 2 and 3). Since his own collection was so large and also loomed so large in this publication, Herzfeld’s seals themselves have remained entrenched as essential data on seal matrices in late prehistoric Iran and on indications of cultural interconnections with Mesopotamia. The Giyan seals Herzfeld presented in

3

Herzfeld, “Bericht über archäologische Beobachtungen,” 65–66. Herzfeld, “Stempelsiegel,” 49–103. 5 Briggs Buchanan, “The Prehistoric Stamp Seal. A Reconsideration of Some Old Excavations,” JAOS 87 (1967): 265, noted that “Ernst Herzfeld’s pioneer articles remain the only published attempt at a critical analysis of the subject [of prehistoric stamp seals].” Herzfeld’s work was preceded by David G. Hogarth, Hittite Seals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), but this earlier eﬀort was very limited both in repertoire and scope. Neither of the two articles in the Survey of Persian Art, whose titles suggest they will encompass prehistoric stamp seals, furthers discourse on this subject. A. Rutten, “Early Seals. A. Glyptic Types,” in A Survey of Persian Art from Prehistoric Times to the Present, ed. Arthur U. Pope and Phyllis Ackerman (London: Oxford University Press, 1938–39), 1:286–89, is extremely short and superﬁcial; Phyllis Ackerman, “Early Seals. B. Speciﬁc Problems,” in Pope and Ackerman, Survey of Persian Art, 1:290–98, only begins with the corpus of cylinder seals that we today would call “protoliterate,” not prehistoric. The stamp seal across a range of time periods in ancient Near Eastern studies has been the stepchild to the cylinder seal. Whereas the cylinder seal has beneﬁted from systematic cataloguing projects, synthetic analyses, and iconographical interpretation for well over a century, the stamp seal has gained systematic attention only since the later years of the twentieth century. See P. R. S. Moorey, preface to The Prehistoric Stamp Seals, vol. 2 of Catalogue of Ancient Near Eastern Seals in the Ashmolean Museum, by Briggs Buchanan and P. R. S. Moorey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), vii–x, on particular problems of stamp seal study. 4

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this article have continued to be cited, using Herzfeld’s original published drawings, even to the present day.6 This is the case despite the fact that most of the seals have not been accessible for physical examination by later specialists. Briggs Buchanan (1904–1976), the distinguished scholar of Near Eastern stamp seals, wrote in the 1960s that “most of the former Herzfeld Collection” of prehistoric stamp seals had been incorporated into the holdings of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania.7 But the museum seems to have no documentation of any Herzfeld connection. My ﬁrsthand survey of their prehistoric stamp seals in 1998, kindly facilitated by Richard Zettler, revealed no match either with a published Herzfeld collection seal or with one of the unpublished seals documented in sketches in Herzfeld’s notebooks in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers housed in the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives. It seems likely that Herzfeld did approach the University Museum with a proposal for purchase of all or part of his collection. The museum may have been disinclined to purchase the seals, holding out instead for a donation. We just do not know at this point. Whatever may have transpired, Herzfeld’s original intention must have involved the University Museum, as a particularly suitable location for his collection because of the connection with similar seals held there from excavations at Tepe Gawra in Mesopotamia. It is diﬃcult to believe that Buchanan (who stated the matter with such authority) would have been entirely mistaken about an initiative with the museum involving Herzfeld. In the 1940s, Buchanan became a key member of the committee on the Corpus of Ancient Near Eastern Seals in North American Collections, a long-term project to publish to an acceptable scientiﬁc standard of documentation all collections of Near Eastern seals in North America. The endeavor involved systematic identiﬁcation of these collections, followed up by eﬀorts to secure exclusive rights to publish the material.8 No one was better placed than

6 For example, see the following two major recent analyses, Mahmoud Rashad, Die Entwicklung der vor- und frühgeschichtlichen Stempelsiegel in Iran, AMI Ergänzungsband 13 (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1990); Alwo von Wickede, Prähistorische Stempelglyptik in Vorderasien (Munich: Proﬁl Verlag, 1990). 7 Buchanan, “Prehistoric Stamp Seal,” 265. 8 Even the (then) very small collections of stamp and cylinder seals in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology had been reserved since the 1940s for exclusive publication in the Corpus project by a written agreement that remained in eﬀect until the

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Buchanan to know what was happening or about to happen with major Near Eastern stamp seal collections in the 1940s and later.9 Thus, his misinformation on the ultimate disposition of the Herzfeld artifacts clearly indicates the degree of confusion surrounding Herzfeld’s ﬁnal property transactions in the United States but it also suggests Herzfeld’s original intention regarding the ultimate disposition of his seals.10 As far as I have been able to determine, Herzfeld made no comprehensive inventory of his collections that has been identiﬁed among any of his papers—either in the Herzfeld Archive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art or among the Ernst Herzfeld Papers housed in Washington, D.C.11 Attempts to reconstitute his collection of prehistoric stamp seals must piece together scattered information from his publications and personal notebooks. The collection itself simply disappeared, with no one apparently aware of where or how he had in fact disposed of it.

Herzfeld and His Seals: Found The story could well end here. But serendipity has intervened in this case. As a curator of collections at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan, I received an inquiry in 1991 from deaths of all core participants in the original planning of the enterprise rendered it moot. On the admirable and ambitious goals of the Corpus, see Albrecht Goetze, preface to The Collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library, vol. 1 of Corpus of Ancient Near Eastern Seals in North American Collections, by Edith Porada. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1948), ix–xiii. 9 Indeed, Buchanan’s two-part article on prehistoric stamp seals was oﬀered as an advance publication of some of the ongoing work of the Corpus speciﬁcally focusing on prehistoric stamp seals. Buchanan, “Prehistoric Stamp Seal,” 265. 10 A similar confusion occurred in relation to Herzfeld’s sale of “all” his papers and library holdings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and his more or less simultaneous gift to the Freer Gallery of a great deal of the archival material that the Metropolitan Museum thought it was acquiring. Margaret Cool Root, “The Herzfeld Archive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” MMJ 11 (1976): 119–24. 11 Selected Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (Leiden: IDC Publishers, 2000), microﬁche, and personal investigations of the Ernst Herzfeld Papers in Washington (with thanks to Colleen Hennessey for her repeated assistance); Root, “Herzfeld Archive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” and the full unpublished inventory of the Herzfeld archival holdings in the department of ancient Near Eastern art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Two inventory books in Washington show that Herzfeld kept such records, but they are not comprehensive. Notebooks N-89 and N-90, cited by Kröger, this volume.

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an elderly academic seeking to donate a collection of “ancient buttons” owned by his wife who had just died. Jane Ford Adams was a 1925 graduate of the University of Michigan. I was astonished to realize, upon further investigation, that Mrs. Adams’ collection of “ancient buttons” had been purchased in 1947 from the Gans Gallery in New York City, where they had been placed on consignment by one Ernst E. Herzfeld. The Gans Gallery specialized in artifacts relating to the history of the garment button; and the May 1947 volume of their publication, Just Buttons, prepared specially to accompany the Herzfeld lot, advertised the artifacts as “the earliest buttons ever known” (ﬁg. 4).12 The artifacts had been oﬀered for sale sewn on cardstock, on which they remained throughout the more than forty years they were in Mrs. Adams’ possession. In all, the collection numbered 158 stamp seals (with an additional ﬁve Egyptian scarabs and amulets once belonging to Herzfeld that were also included in the sale). The Kelsey Museum acquired and accessioned the donation in 1991. It immediately became clear that the Kelsey Museum was the new custodian of a large portion of the prehistoric stamp seals Herzfeld collected almost exclusively in Iran during the 1920s and early ’30s. Preliminary detective work revealed that 115 of the 158 seals in the Adams (ex-Herzfeld) collection are among those illustrated in Herzfeld’s pioneering analyses of prehistoric art in Iran—particularly his monographic article in Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran, Volume 5, and his more broadly stroked, synthetic discussion in Iran in the Ancient East.13 In the monographic treatment of 1933, Herzfeld published 159 prehistoric stamp seals that were part of his personal collection at the time. Of these published seals, 115 (a little over 72 percent) now form part of the Adams collection in the Kelsey Museum. The remaining forty-three seals in the Adams collection were never published by Herzfeld and thus represent a signiﬁcant expansion of the known repertoire of such artifacts. Of the remaining forty-four seals Herzfeld published in 1933 from his own collection that did not ﬁnd

12 G. Muesham, “The Earliest Buttons,” Just Buttons 5/8 (1947): 203–10. A collection of Sasanian seals owned by Edward Gans (of the Gans Gallery) eventually found an institutional home at the University of California, Berkeley. These, too, were characterized as buttons. Guitty Azarpay and Jeannette Zerneke, ECAI Publication of the Edward Gans Collection at the University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley: University of California, 2002). It is beyond my purview here to investigate Herzfeld’s connection with this Sasanian lot. 13 Herzfeld, “Stempelsiegel,” and Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East.

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their way to the Kelsey Museum, some were purchased from him in 1936 by the British Museum (ﬁg. 5).14 Ongoing work in London will elucidate the scope of the ex-Herzfeld seals held there. Eﬀorts in other collections will hopefully also aid in reassembling as much as possible of Herzfeld’s original holdings of prehistoric seals so that we can appreciate the extent of these holdings that ranged beyond those he actually published. For instance, sixteen prehistoric stamp seals in the Yale Babylonian collection described as “said to be from Tepe Giyan” surely came to Yale from Herzfeld. None of these appears either in any of Herzfeld’s published works or in any of his sketchbooks in Washington, D.C.15 In sum, Herzfeld owned a collection of prehistoric stamp seals that numbered 218 at a minimum and probably signiﬁcantly more, of which he published only 159 in his monographic study. This collection may have been a ﬂuid thing, with new seals coming into his possession even as others were sold or given away. That said, the 158 prehistoric stamp seals consigned to the Gans Gallery near the end of Herzfeld’s life had remained with him for almost two decades. Original Herzfeld Collection of Prehistoric Stamp Seals Published in 1933—now in the Kelsey Museum Published in 1933—now in the British Museum Published in 1933—current location not established Not published—now in the Kelsey Museum Not published—now in the Yale Bab. Coll. Not published—now in other collections

115 2+ 42 43 16 unknown

Total

218 +

It is possible to make some preliminary comments on the ﬁndspots of Herzfeld’s prehistoric stamp seals from Iran. Coordinating infor14 Two of these seals can be associated with the Herzfeld collection through recent publications: Dominique Collon, Near Eastern Seals (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1990), 12, no. 1A, and Dominique Collon, ed., 7000 Years of Seals (London: British Museum, 1997), 27, nos. 1/2 and 1/3. As this article goes to press it appears that the British Museum may hold as many as twenty-two of the ex-Herzfeld seals from Tepe Giyan. 15 Briggs Buchanan, Early Near Eastern Seals in the Yale Babylonian Collection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), nos. 17–29, 39–40, 71. Herzfeld is not mentioned here. Buchanan died after having completed the catalogue, but before writing the introduction. Had he been able to write the introduction, he might have added anecdotal information on the pedigree of these seals that cannot be found in their accession ﬁles. See instead William W. Hallo, introduction to Buchanan, Early Near Eastern Seals, ix–xv.

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mation from annotated illustrations in his publications, commentaries scattered anecdotally through his published texts, and annotated drawings in his notebooks now held in Washington, some speciﬁc details now emerge. More than half of the 158 Adams collection in the Kelsey Museum (eighty-nine seals) were gathered at Tepe Giyan or purchased there from local people in 1928, when Herzfeld investigated the site. An additional nineteen seals were acquired, he explained, from neighboring Nihavand’s local inhabitants and should also be considered to derive from Tepe Giyan. Of the remaining seals now in the Kelsey Museum, eight can be traced to other speciﬁc places of purchase, including Hamadan, Iran. This yields a total of 108 seals now in Michigan that can be assigned to the Tepe Giyan arena, with an additional eight seals provenanced much less informatively. The remaining forty-two Herzfeld seals sold by the Gans Gallery to Jane Ford Adams in 1947 neither appear in his publications nor have yet been otherwise traced back to a ﬁndspot or purchase locale.16 Provenance Breakdown of the Seals in the Adams (ex-Herzfeld) Collection From Tepe Giyan From Nihavand Miscellaneous purchase locales No provenance information

89 19 8 42

Total

158

Learning from the Lost and Found Box The seals Herzfeld acquired at Tepe Giyan are an extremely signiﬁcant group that can be associated with a particular site, however loosely we must construe the scientiﬁc value of that association.17 This cor-

16 Margaret Cool Root, “The Adams (ex-Herzfeld) Collection of Prehistoric Stamp Seals: Prospects and Quandaries,” Bulletin of the Museums of Art and Archaeology, the University of Michigan 1997–2000 12 (2000): 9–40, provides a preliminary article on the Kelsey’s ex-Herzfeld collection that lists by seal number the items in all these categories of provenance. 17 Some passing references to Herzfeld’s prehistoric seals from Giyan consider them as purchases from dealers with little to no value even for providing basic ﬁnd location (e.g., those mentioned in Root, “Adams (ex-Herzfeld) Collection,” n. 18). Other commentaries recognize the legitimacy of the site provenance even while acknowledging that the harvesting has robbed the material of much potential scientiﬁc value; see, for example, Buchanan, “Prehistoric Stamp Seal”; Dominique Collon,

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pus continues to be appreciated as the largest and most spectacular in its range, despite understandable and thoroughly justiﬁed anxieties about how, in the present-day climate of concern over antiquities dealing, to make use of the material.18 It includes numerous types with very close parallels at Tepe Gawra in northern Mesopotamia.19 The potential signiﬁcance of the seals from Giyan has increased as a result of a recent reexamination of the seal impressions excavated at Gawra.20 This work now allows the contextualization of extant seal matrices within the framework of analyses of seals as social/economic tools in late prehistory. The same is true of the sealings retrieved from the controlled American excavations at Tal-i Bakun that succeeded Herzfeld’s 1928 trial trenches there. These ﬁnds now have the potential to speak in new ways to the seal artifacts from this and related sites.21 Given the importance of Giyan and its material record to the larger discourse on a Greater Mesopotamian-Iranian regional system of cultural engagement, it would be especially perverse now to turn our backs on the Herzfeld corpus.22 In particular, recent discoveries of contemporaneous glyptic evidence from scientiﬁcally controlled excavations in Luristan now enhance the importance of Herzfeld’s very large collection of seal artifacts from Tepe Giyan and make it First Impressions. Cylinder Seals in the Ancient Near East (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Collon, Near Eastern Seals, 12; Root, “Adams (ex-Herzfeld) Collection”; Holly Pittman, “Mesopotamian Intraregional Relations Reﬂected through Glyptic Evidence in the Late Chalcolithic 1–5 Periods,” in Uruk, Mesopotamia & Its Neighbors: Cross-Cultural Interactions in the Era of State Formation, ed. Mitchell S. Rothman (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2001), 414. 18 Hildi Keel-Leu, Vorderasiatische Stempelsiegel: Die Sammlung des Biblischen Instituts der Universität Freiburg Schweiz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 10, speciﬁcally mentions the extraordinary importance of the Herzfeld seals even while describing them as deriving from the market: “Die spektakulärsten Siegel dieser Serie stammen aus dem Handel . . . Die von Herzfeld (1933) in der Gegend vom Tepe Giyan gesammelten Stücke geben zumindest einen Hinweis auf ihre Herkunft.” 19 On the Tepe Gawra excavations, see E. A. Speiser and A. J. Tobler, Excavations at Tepe Gawra, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Published for the American Schools of Oriental Research by University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935–50). 20 Mitchell S. Rothman, “Sealings as a Control Mechanism in Prehistory: Tepe Gawra,” in Chiefdoms and Early States in the Near East: The Organizational Dynamics of Complexity, ed. Gil Stein and Mitchell S. Rothman (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 103–20. 21 Abbas Alizadeh, “Socio-Economic Complexity in Southwestern Iran during the Fifth and Fourth Millennia B.C.: Evidence from Tal-i Bakun A,” Iran 26 (1988): 17–34. 22 D. H. Caldwell, “The Early Glyptic of Gawra, Giyan and Susa, and the Development of Long Distance Trade,” Orientalia 45 (1976): 227–50; Rothman, Uruk, Mesopotamia & Its Neighbors, esp. Pittman, “Mesopotamian Intraregional Relations.”

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all the more exciting that a good portion of it has now resurfaced in the public domain.23 The recovery of so much of the ex-Herzfeld collection from Tepe Giyan will enable us to ask fresh questions in this challenging new climate of inquiry. In what ways, in fact, will this new access to the Giyan material be helpful? The answer to this question depends upon a short critique of Herzfeld’s modes of publication. His works incorporating many of the Giyan seals were unsatisfactory in terms of basic documentation. Most of his illustrations were reproduced from his drawings, with very few also illustrated by photographs. Furthermore, his publications provided no scales or precise measurements of individual artifacts, nor information on condition. This lack of documentation will ultimately bear signiﬁcantly upon eﬀorts to examine seal artifacts against seals known from impressions deriving from speciﬁc usage contexts. Varying scales in seals displaying the same motif type may, for instance, have conveyed important distinctions in usage protocols. Such distinctions are documented with Neo-Assyrian royal-oﬃce stamp seals and with the Great Seal of England and its lesser counterseals.24 Since drawings of seal proﬁles were not always standard, information on seal shape and typology is haphazard. Data on perforation and its orientation in relation to seal imagery were not provided. Reliable identiﬁcation of stones was not, of course, de rigueur in Herzfeld’s day, and Herzfeld’s publications form no exception. Systematic, scientiﬁc identiﬁcation of stone needs to be done on the corpus. In short, important aspects of physical documentation, for which we had little or no information from Herzfeld’s publications, can now be addressed. Even at the level of representational information on the seal faces, we ﬁnd much wanting in the initial publication of these seals. Herzfeld was a gifted draftsman to whom we owe a great debt for his rapid visual presentation of so much material in a nascent ﬁeld. But he

23

Ernie Haerinck, The Chalcolithic Period, Parchinah and Hakalan: The Archaeological Mission in Iran. The Excavations in Luristan, Pusht-i Kuh (1965–1979) (Brussels: Royal Museums of Art and History, 1996); Henrickson, “Chalcolithic Seals and Sealings from Seh Gabi.” 24 Suzanne Herbordt, Neuassyrische Glyptik des 8.–7. Jh. V. Chr., State Archives of Assyria 1 (Helsinki: University of Helsinki Press, 1992), 129–34; H. Jenkinson, “The Great Seal of England: Deputed or Departmental Seals,” Archaeologia 85 (1935): 293–338; Guide to Seals in the Public Record Oﬃce, Public Record Oﬃce Handbooks, no. 1 (London: H. M. Stationery Oﬃce, 1968).

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frequently took liberties with the evidence.25 Consider, for instance, one seal reportedly from Tepe Giyan, now in the Adams collection: KM 1991.3.91. It renders an ibex-horned shaman ﬁgure ﬂanked by two snakes, a major motif in the late prehistoric art of Iran (ﬁg. 6). The composite illustration here displays multiple images of the same seal. The uppermost drawing is Herzfeld’s published version from AMI 5, Abb. 24 (here, ﬁg. 5) after the actual seal face. The lower drawing is a Kelsey Museum rendering after the impression of the seal, so that the image is in reverse of Herzfeld’s drawing. The museum drawing shows the seal face at life-size. Herzfeld’s rendering does not and there are no measurements or scale bars in his publication to indicate size. The details of the imagery of the two drawings should correlate in mirror image. But there are discrepancies here. The photograph of the actual seal face shown here makes it clear that Herzfeld’s drawing contains signiﬁcant inaccuracies, particularly at the shaman’s arms. Herzfeld has altered the image here, making the two upraised arms bend inward toward the head. In actuality, the two arms are held upright. Between the arms and the shaman’s head are two large, hemispherical forms. We know that Herzfeld had once observed this feature of the seal design, for a sketch preserved in his papers in Washington, D.C., clearly shows the same seal rendered with the hemispherical devices (ﬁg. 7).26 For the publication, it seems, he sought to rationalize these elements for which he had no interpretation. But by fusing the hemispheres to the shaman’s arms, he suppressed a potentially signiﬁcant semiotic nuance that deserves tabulation in any future study of the prehistoric repertoire.27 Without

25 For examples of this tendency revealed by material in the Herzfeld Archive, department of ancient Near Eastern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, see Root, “Herzfeld Archive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” 26 Ernst Herzfeld Papers, sketchbook SK-XXVII (neg. 64350), Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution. 27 Margaret Cool Root, “Animals in the Art of Ancient Iran,” in A History of the Animal World in the Ancient Near East, ed. Billie Jean Collins (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002), 184, discusses the possible meaning of the hemispheres relating to the healing properties of the bezoar stones of the ibex against snake bite. Another possibility is that hemispherical signs of this sort integrated into the imagery of prehistoric stamp seals served as some indicator of counting or (by metaphorical extension) a status designation of the seal owner. On deep circular signs impressed into early tablets as numerical notations, see Denise Schmandt-Besserat, How Writing Came About (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 84 and passim. For strategies in semiotic analysis in somewhat later glyptic production that could proﬁtably be adapted for application to the study of stamp seals produced in preliterate phases, see Holly Pittman,

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the recent resurfacing of the ex-Herzfeld material, our documentationof-record for this seal would be seriously ﬂawed; there would be no question of its ﬁnding a place in possible subtleties of semiotic discourse.

Buttons or Seals? Herzfeld’s Ambiguous Stance on Functional Analysis Herzfeld’s characterization of 158 items in his collection of prehistoric stamp seals to the Gans Gallery as the “earliest buttons ever known” may seem at ﬁrst blush like an extraordinarily cynical maneuver to exploit a particular “niche market” in antiquities. An examination of his scholarly discussions of the seals reveals, however, a serious (if perplexing) preoccupation with the notion of buttons. In his initial discussion of the Giyan seals, Herzfeld introduced the hypothesis of an evolution from stone buttons (Gewandknöpfe) to seals used as tools to mark property.28 Seals proper came into being, Herzfeld proposed, through the incidental behavior of individuals who began to use the decorated faces of their buttons to make marks in clay. In this way, sealing preceded seals. . . . Nicht nur sind die siegel älter als die schrift, sondern das siegeln ist älter als die siegel. . . . Denn im steinzeitlichen Persepolis [Bakun] bezeichnet man sein eigentum, lange vor aller schrift und vor dem siegel, durch abdruck des einen wirklichen gewandköpfes, den man trug.29

In his last work on the topic, Herzfeld reiterated the notion that sealing is older than the seal.30 Interestingly, it was only in an article jointly written with Sir Arthur Keith for the Survey of Persian Art that this notion was left aside in favor of a discussion that focused on the social functioning of “marks of ownership.”31 Here, there is no confusing excursion into the idea that the “marks of ownership” revealed at Tal-i Bakun through many impressions in clay were really the marks of garment buttons simply used as seals before seals qua seals had actually been invented. The Glazed Steatite Glyptic Style: The Structure and Function of an Image System in the Administration of Protoliterate Mesopotamia, BBVO 16 (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1994). 28 Herzfeld, “Bericht über archäologische Beobachtungen,” 69. 29 Herzfeld, “Stempelsiegel,” 52–53. 30 Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 15. 31 Ernst E. Herzfeld and Sir Arthur Keith, “Iran as a Prehistoric Centre,” in Pope and Ackerman, Survey of Persian Art, 49.

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Herzfeld’s theory of a perceived transition from garment buttons to seals intended from the beginning to serve as seals is confusing and diﬃcult to follow everywhere it appears. It is especially confusing since typologies of early stamp seals use the term “button seal” to denote a speciﬁc form that looks rather like a modern button even though it was not meant functionally to serve as a garment button in the sense that we know them today. The idea of this functional evolution and transition from a garment button to a seal modeled on a garment button but now created speciﬁcally to serve as a seal is simply not sustained by the material record available to us, nor by the record available to Herzfeld.32 There are puzzling inconsistencies in his discussions of this subject, with numerous artifacts characterized as “buttons” that could not possibly (from a purely functional viewpoint) have served that purpose.33 His veritable obsession with the button concept diluted the quality of contributions he might otherwise have made to discourse on early sphragistics, distracting him from working analytically with prehistoric seals as seals. Most subsequent commentators have relied on Herzfeld’s drawings of his seals as part of the available repertoire, but have avoided detailed reference to his theory on buttons used as seals.34

32 Excavations of burials at Tepe Hissar, Iran, revealed stamp seals apparently laid out in a row along the arm of the body. This suggested the possibility of items that had been sewn along the length of a garment sleeve, which had, of course, totally disintegrated. Erich F. Schmidt, Excavations at Tepe Hissar, Damghan (Philadelphia: University Museum, 1937), 54–56. There are, however, many problems with using this observation as evidence for the elaborate and confusing evolutionary model that Herzfeld proposed. 33 For example, see among many other possible examples, Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, pl. 1. Here he allows only one of the illustrated artifacts to be considered “true” seals (as opposed to buttons that may or may not in Herzfeld’s analysis have served as seals). Several of the group cannot possibly have been made as buttons based on their mode of perforation. 34 A notable exception is Pierre Amiet, La Glyptique mésopotamienne archaïque, 2d ed. (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientiﬁque, 1980), 17, who— while not mentioning Herzfeld by name—comments that “on a supposé avec vraisemblance que les cachets étaient originellement de simples accessoires vestimentaires ou de parure, utilisés plus tard comme sceaux.” Amiet’s passage puts the idea in a more reasoned and mild realm of the possible, avoiding Herzfeld’s rigid (and thereby certainly unsustainable) categorizations.

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margaret cool root Herzfeld as an Archaeologist and Collector of Prehistoric Material

Herzfeld’s legacy as a ﬁeld archaeologist of prehistoric sites is minimal, despite the fact that his prompt publication of ﬁnds from numerous important sites provided early corpora of evidence. In addition to early presentations of stamp seals, his presentations of painted prehistoric pottery were commendable documentary projects.35 Yet compared with the continuing citations of his work on later periods of Near Eastern archaeology, his work in prehistory is muted. As with Tepe Giyan, he avoided characterizing his publication of the Bakun painted pottery as an excavation report per se. Rather, he carefully qualiﬁed it as an eﬀort to present the visual evidence without extensive interpretation.36 Interestingly, the campaign at this site conducted by Alexander Langsdorﬀ (assisted by Donald E. McCown) in 1932 meticulously maintained sections at regular intervals so that later archaeologists could return to reevaluate their stratigraphy.37 Their careful retrieval of and recording of loci for the fragile and often elusive prehistoric sealings from the settlement has enabled a later generation of scholars to achieve new insights into early seal use and social organization.38 Herzfeld was instrumental in the appointment of Langsdorﬀ (from Germany) to the Oriental Institute staﬀ and he nominally oversaw the Bakun project during his tenure as ﬁeld director of the Persepolis expedition of the Oriental Institute. But it is diﬃcult to attribute the ﬁeld method of the 1932 eﬀort at Bakun speciﬁcally to Herzfeld’s directives or explicit encouragement. Indeed, it seems quite unlike what we know of Herzfeld’s own archaeological practice on the Persepolis Takht at the same time.39 Yet there were political pressures on archaeology at the capital of the Achaemenid Empire (the great prize of

35 Herzfeld, “Bericht über archäologische Beobachtungen,” (on Samarra); Herzfeld, Iranische Denkmäler (on Tal-i Bakun). 36 Later, in 1941, he did refer to his 1928 trenches at Bakun as “excavations” (Iran in the Ancient East, 9). This subsequent characterization should, however, be read in context. Iran in the Ancient East contains important information and insights, but it is also in some respects a retrospective synthetic gloss on a career of discovery that needs to be read in tandem with the original publications of the material discussed. 37 Langsdorﬀ and McCown, Tall-i Bakun A, esp. 5–21. 38 Alizadeh, “Socio-Economic Complexity in Southwestern Iran.” 39 See Mark B. Garrison and Margaret Cool Root, Seals on the Persepolis Fortiﬁcation Tablets, vol. 1, Images of Heroic Encounter, OIP 117 (Chicago: Oriental Institute Publications, 2001), 23–26, for the problematic nature of Herzfeld’s approach to the retrieval and recording of tablets at Achaemenid Persepolis.

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Iranian archaeology) that were not present at Bakun.40 Perhaps Herzfeld did indeed promote the method used at the nearby prehistoric settlement even though he could not operate in the same way at Persepolis. He may well have come to appreciate the importance of this approach speciﬁcally for prehistoric Tal-i Bakun. This initiative to revisit his earlier explorations there, led by an excavator in whom he had placed his trust, may have represented an evolution in his understanding of how best to further the study of the remote past in Iran. Alas, the relationship between Herzfeld and Langsdorﬀ deteriorated drastically for political reasons. Once back in Germany, Langsdorﬀ turned against his patron, ultimately renouncing him as a Jew.41 Thus a potentially important professional relationship around Iranian prehistory was tainted just when Herzfeld would most have beneﬁted from collegial dialogue. It was at this juncture in Herzfeld’s career (in the late 1930s) that he seemed intent upon returning to the study of Iranian prehistory in a comprehensive manner. Herzfeld himself spoke eloquently about archaeology in a manifestolike preface to his Archaeological History of Iran (1935) as “something wider than a mere history of ancient art.” By the rather dismissive phrase “a mere history of art” in the context of that writing, he would have meant something like “the mere creation of a typology of forms,” perhaps recollecting the pattern of the art historian Alois Riegl (on which see below). To his credit, Herzfeld was suggesting an intellectual practice that emphasized the conjoined visual and material record as a primary source on social history in all its complexities. He proposed that we must exploit as an archaeological document every object from which conclusions as to the political and cultural development of antiquity may be drawn whether it be architecture, sculpture, small works of art and industry, inscriptions and other written documents, myths and legends, coins, royal names, titles, and protocols. . . . Prehistory is entirely based on archaeology; in the transitional stages to history, archaeology is the main source; and for all ancient history it explains, more than inscriptions and literature, the growth of cultural life. It is the archaeological method, in dealing with all that disparate material, that makes its unity.42

40 See Dusinberre, this volume, on Herzfeld’s contractual agreement with the Iranian government concerning his mandate at Persepolis proper; see Kamyar Abdi, “Nationalism, Politics, and the Development of Archaeology in Iran,” AJA 105 (2001): 60–76 on the politics of archaeological enterprise at the Achaemenid capital. 41 Stefan Hauser, e-mail communication to the author, 27 May 2002. 42 Herzfeld, preface to Archaeological History of Iran.

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In Iran in the Ancient East (1941), he decried the loss of provenance of artifacts through clandestine harvesting and their passing into multiple hands, urging that the great public interest in archaeological exploration brings ﬁnancial support to excavations more readily than to studies and publications, and contributes to the fact that students with insuﬃcient archaeological training develop, for the romance of it, into “excavators.” Excavating is but one method of archaeological research. . . . It produces evidence for problems that change with and depend upon the momentary stage of our knowledge. Excavating is an art, but no autonomous branch of archaeology. Without intimate knowledge of the exact position of the problems, the excavator cannot solve them, nor even observe correctly in spite of all good will.43

It is diﬃcult from a present-day vantage point to reconcile these impassioned statements with Herzfeld’s obvious penchant for collecting antiquities and his willingness thereby to contribute to the erasure of their original context.44 In addition to the large seal collection discussed above, he also owned an extraordinary collection of harvested and purchased prehistoric painted pottery—a collection extensive enough to be spoken of in the same breath as the collections of the Louvre, the Tehran Archaeological Museum, the Hermitage, and the British Museum (see Kröger, this volume, ﬁg. 16).45 Herzfeld was, however, hardly the only archaeologist of his era who harvested antiquities from sites or even operated as an antiquities dealer in ways that compromised his scholarly integrity. By the 1920s and ’30s, the innovative ﬁeld methods of Flinders Petrie in Egypt oﬀered an established precedent in techniques of recovery demanded for prehistoric sites.46 But even the great Petrie, who set such an advanced stan-

43

Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 8–9. See Ann C. Gunter and Margaret Cool Root, “Replicating, Inscribing, Giving: Ernst Herzfeld and Artaxerxes’ Silver Phiale in the Freer Gallery of Art,” ArsOr 28 (1998): 1–38, for more on this aspect of Herzfeld’s professional life. 45 At various points, Georges Contenau, “The Early Ceramic Art,” in Pope and Ackerman, Survey of Persian Art, 171 n. 1, 178 n. 1, gives the impression that this large collection was derived from Herzfeld’s various ﬁeld operations, including the later Persepolis [Bakun] eﬀort of the Oriental Institute-sponsored excavations. See also Roland de Mecquenem, “Notes sur la céramique peinte archäique en Perse,” MDP 20 (1928): 16, witnessing evidence of Herzfeld’s large collection of pottery from Nihavand. 46 See, for example, Philip E. Cleator, Archaeology in the Making (London: Hale; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 121 ﬀ. 44

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dard for scientiﬁc excavation in Egypt, had been an active purchaser.47 In Iran, the political backdrop of archaeological practice remained particularly inviting to the ambiguities and even gross illegalities of ﬁeld archaeology-as-collecting after higher standards began to be initiated in other areas of the Near East. Many archaeologists acquired extensive personal collections of antiquities by on-site gathering as well as by purchase. Art dealers in Iran conducted unoﬃcial excavations that yielded enormous inventories for sale to European and American collectors and institutions.48 Arthur Upham Pope is widely acknowledged now as a collector and clandestine dealer trading artifacts for favors, whose eﬀorts as a scholar were insigniﬁcant compared to his illicit activities as a purveyor of antiquities. Jacques de Morgan maintained a personal collection of harvested and purchased antiquities even as he championed the ideals of a grand vision of a sweeping multidisciplinary mandate for the scientiﬁcally controlled study of prehistoric Iran.49 Especially in comparison to Pope, Herzfeld was highly motivated by a serious scholarly intent. Many of his clusters of acquired artifacts were clearly meant as study collections prized by Herzfeld for their evidentiary potential rather than their resale value.50 In the ﬁnal analysis, we would do Herzfeld a disservice to consider him as a ﬁeld archaeologist of prehistory whose methods can fairly be critiqued in direct comparison with those of Petrie. As a ﬁeld worker in prehistory, Herzfeld is most appropriately appreciated as an explorer, a mapper, a recorder, a collector of artifacts that he hoped would provide clues to an understanding of ancient social history, and an astute observer of terrain and culturally altered landscapes that might prove to be fertile ground in future investigations. 47 See, for example, Margaret S. Drower, “The Early Years,” in Excavating in Egypt: The Egyptian Exploration Society 1882–1982, ed. T. G. H. James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 9–36. 48 Stephen Vernoit, “Islamic Art and Architecture: An Overview of Scholarship and Collecting, c. 1850–c. 1950,” in Discovering Islamic Art: Scholars, Collectors and Collections, 1850–1950, ed. Stephen Vernoit (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 29–30. 49 Jay Gluck and Noël Siver, eds., Surveyors of Persian Art: A Documentary Biography of Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman (Ashiya, Japan, and Costa Mesa, Calif.: SoPA, 1996, distributed by Mazda Publishers), 151–70, 583–84; Jacques de Morgan and Andrée Jaunay, Mémoires de Jacques de Morgan (1857–1924): Souvenirs d’un archéologue (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 518, 521. On Pope’s cynical marketing of cultural heritage, see especially Oscar W. Muscarella, The Lie Became Great: The Forgery of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, Studies in the Art and Archaeology of Antiquity 1 (Groningen: Styx Publications, 2000), 7–8. 50 See Kröger’s contribution, this volume.

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Without condoning the practice of “harvest archaeology,” we may suggest that Herzfeld’s fairly modest pretensions as a ﬁeld excavator are his saving grace as we scrutinize this aspect of his relationship to Iranian prehistory. De Morgan, by contrast, really did portray himself as a muscular practitioner of scientiﬁc ﬁeld method. Furthermore, his experience working with prehistoric Egyptian sites before the move to Iran exposed him directly to the important precedents set there by Petrie and others. De Morgan’s background as an engineer/geologist, coupled with this particular ﬁeld exposure, should have made him better equipped than he turned out to be when he tackled the site of Susa. Yet his record of ﬁeld strategy and record keeping at Susa was nothing short of disastrous.51 He was also an avid harvester of artifacts. For all his acquisitions of antiquities, Herzfeld never acquired an apologist who would portray his activities to posterity in ennobling terms. Pope, by contrast, has been eﬀectively placed in a positive light. His biographers claim that he worked the clandestine art market out of a selﬂess will to sustain the American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology in Shiraz and the eventual Survey of Persian Art publication project.52 Some would look upon this explanation with a good deal of cynicism. De Morgan died, we are told by his biographer, in wretched poverty, having donated (rather than sold) his artifacts to museums. Apparently, according to his own memoirs, he made this noble gesture because the continued research value of the objects was more important to him than his own physical well-being.53 Whatever the actual backdrop of this self-representation, the apologetic is a matter of public record. Herzfeld did not write an autobiography, he did not publish his personal memoirs in an attempt to justify his career, and he has not had a biographer. The creation of this volume of papers on Herzfeld oﬀers a critical assessment rather than a eulogistic whitewashing. In the process, the man emerges in an interestingly sympathetic light, with shortcomings and determined investigative vision co-mingled. 51 Ali Mousavi, “Early Archaeological Adventures and Methodological Problems in Iranian Archaeology: Evidence from Susa,” IrAnt 31 (1996): 1–17, and his contribution to this volume; Nicole Chevalier, ed., Une mission en Perse: 1897–1912, Dossiers du Musée du Louvre 52 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1997); Boucharlat, this volume. 52 Gluck and Siver, Surveyors of Persian Art. 53 De Morgan and Jaunay, Souvenirs d’un archéologue.

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Herzfeld’s conduct also has a story behind it. His professional life left him poorly remunerated and frequently scrambling to achieve the ﬁnancing necessary to carry out his projects. He was also caught up in vicious interpersonal and international political rivalries of Iranian archaeology before World War II, frequently isolated from networks that might otherwise have assisted him. All this made his diverse and ambitious documentary pursuits especially diﬃcult to fund through any kind of broad-based, sustained institutional support.54 Eventually he was cut oﬀ from his university aﬃliation in Berlin as a result of Nazi anti-Semitic policies. Herzfeld’s deep investment in scholarly documentation, using his collections as a primary vehicle for reference, seems at odds with his willingness to sell a large segment of his prehistoric stamp seals to a button dealer. Through that decision, these important artifacts disappeared into the oblivion of private hands and would likely have remained so except for the remarkable thoughtfulness of Dr. John Adams in thinking to donate them to the University of Michigan. Particularly by consigning the seals to the Gans Gallery, Herzfeld allowed his seals to be marketed to a buyer cohort that was not likely to interact with the scholarly world of historians of prehistoric Near Eastern archaeology. All that said, Herzfeld had in fact allocated many of his artifacts to institutions like the British Museum. And, as we have seen, there is some indication that he originally intended to deposit the majority of his prehistoric stamp seals with the University of Pennsylvania. In the end, he held onto the bulk of his prehistoric stamp seals as long as he could, probably envisioning further work on them. He eventually consigned them to the Gans Gallery only in some desperation to liquidate his assets.

Herzfeld’s Stance within Broad Discourses on Prehistoric Culture Where did Herzfeld stand in relation to key issues current among scholars working in the ﬁeld of Iranian prehistory in his day? Discussion of this question must rely heavily on Iran in the Ancient East, Herzfeld’s last publication on Iranian archaeology to appear before his death. This book derives from his rewritten Lowell Lectures, delivered in

54

Kröger, this volume, elaborates poignantly on these diﬃculties.

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Boston in October and November 1936. As Herzfeld explained in the 1941 preface to the published version, he devoted the most energy of revision from lectures to book in the presentation of the prehistoric material.55 We can only be grateful that he chose to expend this eﬀort on the prehistoric material. In his earlier Archaeological History of Iran, based on the Schweich Lectures delivered in London a year before the Lowell series, Herzfeld did not address issues of prehistory in any substantive way. Instead, he expressed the hope to do so in the context of a larger three-volume work.56 Such a project never bore fruit. The collaborative article with Arthur Keith in the Survey of Persian Art might have been meant to ﬁll the gap, but it is instead a curious pastiche that raises numerous questions of authorial voice. Furthermore, the last six pages of this short Survey article veer oﬀ into later material that does not even pertain to prehistory as currently understood.57 Thus, Iran in the Ancient East must stand as Herzfeld’s major synthetic commentary on the primary issues of Iranian prehistory. The selected topics highlighted below suggest some of these issues and Herzfeld’s positions in relation to them.

Ethnicity One area of discourse in Iranian prehistory involved questions of ethnic categorizations and interrelationships. At Susa, de Morgan had been motivated (to paraphrase his words) by a burning desire to understand the ethnic origins of Iranian civilization, hoping ultimately to demonstrate how and under what conditions Indo-European culture had penetrated Europe from the East. With this goal in mind, he remained supremely frustrated at recovering nothing at Susa predating the late prehistoric Susa A/Susa I horizon, which is roughly contemporaneous with the Late Ubaid–Early Uruk periods in adjacent Mesopotamia.58 A pre–Susa A/Susa I sequence has now been recov55

Herzfeld, preface to Iran in the Ancient East. Herzfeld, preface to Archaeological History of Iran. 57 Herzfeld and Keith, “Iran as a Prehistoric Centre,” in Pope and Ackerman, Survey of Persian Art. 58 De Morgan and Jaunay, Souvenirs d’un archéologue, 430–31. See Edith Porada et al., “The Chronology of Mesopotamia, ca. 7000–1600 B.C.,” in Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, ed. Robert W. Ehrich, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1:92, 100, on the absolute dating of the Late Ubaid and Early Uruk periods to a very approximate 4500–3750 B.C. 56

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ered as a result of much later work at the site.59 But this eﬀort in the post-World War II archaeological environment was not driven by a goal to answer the question of where and how an Indo-European culture diﬀused itself. The idea that archaeology might recover the footprint of an Indo-European culture that inspired the glories of European civilization was, however, a critical one in the early twentieth century and was very much the product of its time. The concept, and the struggle to articulate it, was perhaps most famously presented by V. Gordon Childe in his 1926 work on prehistory, The Aryans.60 Childe’s Aryans was never reprinted (unlike his other books) and he seems to have been eager to distance himself from it in his own retrospective assessments of his contributions to the ﬁeld of prehistory. Its Eurocentric strains combined especially with the uncomfortable suggestion of alignment with later Nazi ideology on the notion of Aryanism and a German master race worked against its capacity to speak eﬀectively in subsequent years.61 Although Herzfeld had his own vision of Iran’s Indo-Europeanism in the cultural/historical mapping of Asia, as we shall see below, he simultaneously professed an explicit wish to avoid “ethnical” issues speciﬁcally in relation to prehistory. In his words, We can compare and distinguish the various “cultures” within the vast limits of time and space [of prehistory], but the question, who were [in ethnic terms] the people that created them, cannot yet be answered, and is better not asked. Descending into later periods, we may discuss ethnical problems with more or less prospect of result.62

59

Mary M. Voigt and Robert H. Dyson, Jr., “The Chronology of Iran, ca. 8000–2000 B.C.,” in Ehrich, Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, 1:131–32, summarizes evidence now available on the pre-Susa A/Susa I sequence. These developments were made possible by the enlightened direction of the mission at Susa beginning in 1967 by the prehistorian, Jean Perrot, who facilitated international eﬀorts to salvage stratigraphic information from the old trenches opened by De Morgan and De Mecquenem as well as to develop new loci for establishing the sequence. 60 V. Gordon Childe, The Aryans. A Study of Indo-European Origins (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.; New York: A. A. Knopf, 1926), esp. 94–137. 61 Barbara McNairn, The Method and Theory of V. Gordon Childe: Economic, Social, and Cultural Interpretations of Prehistory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1980), 12–13; Bruce Trigger, Gordon Childe: Revolutions in Archaeology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 37–55, 91–92; Bruce Trigger, “Childe’s Relevance to the 1990s,” in The Archaeology of V. Gordon Childe. Contemporary Perspectives, ed. David R. Harris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 9–34. 62 Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 6–7.

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Herzfeld’s stance on this topic sometimes wavered within the covers of Iran in the Ancient East, with a close reading across the entire text revealing pendulum swings on the degree to which he really believed in the categorical statement just quoted.63 In his coauthored article for the Survey, the “ethnical” question (Whence came the original Aryan-speaking peoples?) was posed as one of the two centrally important ones “for the interpretation of the evolution of culture, and speciﬁcally, the development of European civilization.”64 This is one passage in that collaborative article that seems speciﬁcally to reﬂect Keith’s professional involvement in tracing genetic links among early peoples.65 Herzfeld’s identity as a German Jew in the years leading up to World War II may have contributed to his attempt in Iran in the Ancient East to distance himself from long-standing trends in the ﬁeld to establish and articulate the “Aryan” ethnicity of the early peoples of Iran.66 The fact remains, however, that he frequently slipped into the ethnicity rhetoric so characteristic of the era; his stated stance did not achieve systematic integration within Iran in the Ancient East.67

63 For example, see Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 11, 49. Here he refers to “the genius of the race [of Iranians],” seeming to presuppose a notion of ethnic homogeneity and our ability to determine its identity. See also page 61, where he refers to “the Aryan immigrants.” 64 Herzfeld and Keith, “Iran as a Prehistoric Centre,” 42. 65 See George G. Cameron, History of Early Iran (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), 16–19, for a roughly contemporary summary of the trends in physical anthropology (including Keith’s place in the debate) relating to Near Eastern prehistory. Like Herzfeld, Cameron felt that the issue of determining the ethnic makeup of the early Iranians was at that point futile (page 19). Nevertheless, Cameron expressed faith in the possibility that physical anthropology might one day resolve the debate. Herzfeld, by contrast, did not comment on physical anthropology as a science that might oﬀer resolution. Instead, he seemed to feel that the matter could only be approached through linguistic analysis. 66 See Stefan R. Hauser, “German Studies in the Ancient Near East and Their Relation to Political and Economic Interests from the Kaiserreich to World War II,” in Germany and the Middle East, 1871–1945, ed. Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, Princeton Papers. Interdisciplinary Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 10/11 (2004), on the study of the Aryans in the practice of Near Eastern prehistory scholarship during the Third Reich. 67 The Herzfeld Archive, department of ancient Near Eastern art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, holds the original texts of Herzfeld’s 1936 Lowell Lectures, later published in revised form in Iran in the Ancient East (Ms-15a for the prehistoric through Achaemenid lectures). I have not yet had the opportunity to return to New York speciﬁcally to compare the original lectures on prehistory with the published versions.

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The Utility of Ethnography The use of ethnographic analogies was a growing strategy of prehistoric archaeology in Herzfeld’s era. Herzfeld was heavily invested in a way of dealing with ethnographic analogy that we today would call the general comparative approach, which invites analogies from any time and place without any necessary condition of connection between the modern and ancient societies being compared.68 He associated himself, for instance, with the late-nineteenth-century work of Richard Andree, who argued for a universality in many “primitive” forms of human behavior and creative expression.69 Exploring the meaning of symbols on prehistoric painted pots, Herzfeld advocated looking to ethnographic analogies with, for example, “aboriginal Indian tribes of Brazil” on the one hand (for the meaning of certain geometric devices) and parallels from neolithic Gotland and contemporary Kurdistan on the other hand (for the meaning of the “comb-animal” motif seen so often on Susa A/Susa I and Bakun A pottery).70 Few early-twentieth-century scholars of Near Eastern prehistory embraced so enthusiastically and unquestioningly this general comparative approach. Herzfeld was less engaged than some of his contemporaries by its limitations for prehistory, less inclined to intellectualize the issues at stake. By contrast, passages in Henri Frankfort’s Studies in Early Pottery of the Near East, published in 1924, reveal a far more theoretically engaged mind attempting to weigh the value of general comparativism.71 Interestingly, Alois Riegl deployed a wide-ranging

68 The two major schools of thought on ethnographic analogy are reviewed most helpfully in Kamyar Abdi, “Strategies of Herding: Mobile Pastoralism in the Middle Chalcolithic Period of the West Central Zagros Mountains” (Ph.D. diss., The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2002), 23–25. For an earlier survey of the issues, see Bryony Orme, Anthropology for Archaeologists: An Introduction (London: Duckworth, 1981). 69 Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 158 n. 145. See Richard Andree, Ethnographische Parallelen und Vergleiche (Leipzig: Veit & Co., 1889), passim, oﬀering observations on customs and forms from around the world: “Mit Hilfe der Analogien dürfen wir nun auch derartige Vorstellungen bis in prähistorische Zeiten zurückverfolgen” (6–7). 70 Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 62 n. 27, 81 n. 32. 71 Henri Frankfort, Studies in Early Pottery of the Near East: Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt and their Earliest Interrelations, Royal Anthropological Institute Occasional Papers No. 6 (London: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1924). The general comparative approach has been subjected to especially vigorous critique in the late twentieth century: see Richard A. Gould and Patty Jo Watson, “A

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general comparativist strategy in his inﬂuential Stilfragen published in 1893.72 Herzfeld seems closer to Riegl with respect to concepts of the utility of ethnographic comparativism than he does to the archaeologically oriented prehistorians of his day, such as Frankfort. This methodological congruence with Riegl on this point exists despite the fact that Herzfeld certainly did not operate uncritically in relation to Riegl’s work in all aspects (as noted earlier and as will be brought up again shortly in this paper). Herzfeld does not explicitly refer to Riegl in his own publications, yet the archives now assure us that Herzfeld owned a copy of Stilfragen. It seems inconceivable that he was not fully aware of the work.73 Looking to more localized, historically linked uses of ethnographic analogy in the service of prehistoric inquiry, Herzfeld’s notebooks, daybooks, and diaries are full of his own observations on habitats and customs of settled and mobile peoples in speciﬁc regions of Iran. These are preserved in the Herzfeld Archive of the department of ancient Near Eastern art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as among the extensive holdings of the Ernst Herzfeld Papers of the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives. He drew occasionally upon such personal observations in his published work, but the unpublished papers deserve to be mined systematically for their ethnographic information.74

Dialogue with Meaning and Use of Analogy in Ethnoarchaeological Reasoning,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 1 (1982): 355–81. David Wengrow, “The Intellectual Adventure of Henri Frankfort: A Missing Chapter in the History of Archaeological Thought,” AJA 103 (1999): 597–613, discusses Frankfort particularly in relation to Gordon Childe. Although Wengrow does not refer to Herzfeld here, numerous topics he broaches with regard to Frankfort’s stances on issues of the day are relevant. 72 Alois Riegl, Stilfragen. Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik, Kunstwissenschaftliche Studientexte, Bd. 1 (Munich: Mäander, 1985 [1893]); Alois Riegl, Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament, trans. Evelyn Kain, with annotations, glossary, and introduction by David Castriota (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 73 An inventory of Herzfeld’s library prepared by the scholar himself in 1918 is preserved in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers, notebooks N-93 and N-94. I thank Ann Gunter for sharing this information with me. 74 For numerous discussions of the value of ethnography to archaeology, see contributions in Carol Kramer, ed., Ethnoarchaeology: Implications of Ethnography for Archaeology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).

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The Place of Iran in Prehistory Herzfeld had very deﬁnite ideas on Iran’s place in the ancient world particularly in late prehistory. There was great debate in his day over the competing claims of the primacy of the late prehistoric Susa A/Susa I culture and the Ubaid culture in neighboring southern Mesopotamia. Herzfeld was adamant in AMI 5 that the two civilizations existed along parallel tracks of development.75 He resisted the notion that the extraordinary painted pottery traditions displayed so dramatically at sites such as Susa and “Persepolis” (Tal-i Bakun) could be understood in any sense as secondary manifestations of a creative production that originated in southern Mesopotamia.76 As more and more sites have provided better data with which to assess such claims, the balance of opinion today, as characterized by Frank Hole, oﬀers a moderating view that the Susa I pottery tradition was a late, regional version of the Mesopotamian ‘Ubaid ceramic tradition that spread across the Near East during the ﬁfth millennium B.C. It is probable, although debated, that the Susa I pottery style persisted somewhat longer than the ‘Ubaid style did in southern Mesopotamia. In any case, the ceramics from this site represent a ﬂorescence unparalleled in the ‘Ubaid tradition and unequaled in any other prehistoric culture of the Near East.77

Ongoing discussion of the relation between the Susa A-B culture and the Ubaid-Uruk/Jemdet Nasr of Mesopotamia is raising nuanced issues of social history gleaned through analyses of style and iconography in the visual record.78 But the tone of the discourse is very diﬀerent. During the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, Old World archaeology

75

Herzfeld, “Stempelsiegel,” 55–56. See Voigt and Dyson, “Chronology of Iran, ca. 8000–2000 B.C.,” 122–78, for a recent overview of chronology. 77 Frank Hole, “The Cemetery of Susa: An Interpretation” and “Susa I Pottery,” in The Royal City of Susa: Ancient Near Eastern Treasures in the Louvre, ed. Prudence O. Harper, Joan Aruz, and Françoise Tallon (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), 26. 78 For example, see Pittman, Glazed Steatite Glyptic Style, 51–52; Susan Pollock, “Style and Information: An Analysis of Susiana Ceramics,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 2 (1991): 354–90; Susan Pollock, “Power and Politics in the Susa A Period,” in Upon this Foundation: The 'Ubaid Reconsidered, ed. Elizabeth F. Henrickson and Ingolf Thuesen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1991), 281–92; Daniel T. Potts, The Archaeology of Elam. Formation and Transformation of an Ancient Iranian State, Cambridge World Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 52–71. 76

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was an especially politically charged arena, with European states playing out their imperial visions and power struggles in part through the control of national site concessions within Near Eastern countries. Debates about regional primacies in antiquity thus had contemporary inﬂections. A particularly complicating factor was the role of Third Reich ideology in the debate over the relative cultural autonomy versus dependency between Susiana and Sumerian Mesopotamia. The German concession at the great Sumerian site of Uruk certainly created a nationalistic investment in the primacy of Sumer over Iran. Yet in acceptable German scholarship of the 1930s, it became crucial to ﬁnd a way to attribute the Sumerian cradle of civilization to the “Aryans” (but not to Iran) in order to establish the primacy of the master race.79 In all this, Herzfeld stands out as an unusual ﬁgure. His loyalties seemed to lie with Iran itself rather than with any Western state. A certain urgency sometimes radiates from his impassioned commentaries on the overarching issue of Iran’s place in the early history of world culture. This sense of urgency champions Iran as a concept. The concept, in turn, is quite disassociated from any role as a surrogate for contemporary competing claims of national superiority. Closely related to Herzfeld’s championing of a concept of Iran is his position with respect to another important topic debated by prehistorians and historians in the early decades of the twentieth century: the possibility (a) that Susa and Mesopotamia both owed the genesis of their prehistoric ﬂoruit to impulses emanating from the east, from a cultural intersection of Far Eastern cultures that took place in the Iranian highlands and (b) that these impulses subsequently spread westward, ﬁrst from the Iranian highlands and thence to Susa, Sumer, and ultimately to Europe. This thinking placed greater Iran in the pivotal position between an “East” and a “West.” Iran was the ﬁlter through which “European civilization” received the inspirational energy and conceptual fabric for its cultural achievements. In Iran in the Ancient East, he reiterated the position that Iran (meaning the Iranian highlands), rather than Sumer, was “a centre and the source of the culture revealed at Susa I.”80 In his commitment to an eastern origin of the cultural impulses leading to the ﬂourishing of Iranian civilization, Herzfeld allied him-

79 80

Hauser, “German Studies in the Ancient Near East.” Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 9.

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self particularly with the work of Sir Aurel Stein in southeastern Iran, John Marshall in west and northwest India (Sind), and J. G. Andersson in Honan, China. These colleagues were revealing a material record that suggested remarkable similarities, similarities too close to be coincidental, between distant regions.81 Thus Herzfeld developed a stance, expressed forcefully in Iran in the Ancient East, urging that the Iranian highlands (as revealed, for instance, at Persepolis [Bakun]) were the loci of creative exchanges with the Far East that stimulated the ﬂowering of local painted pottery styles. These styles, he proposed, were then transmitted from the highlands to Susa and westward to Sumer. For Herzfeld, Aurel Stein’s explorations “proved the gradual transition of style from Persepolis to Susa.”82 He asserted that The Iranian plateau, by its natural geographic position, is the point of junction through which all movements that ever crossed the great Asiatic continent must have passed and always did pass. And our whole problem has shifted from the narrower viewpoint of European interest to the wider one of Eurasian interrelations. . . . The unity of Asia, although rarely achieved in its political history, is a real factor in the history of its civilization.83

This insistence on the Iranian highlands as the pivotal locus in a diﬀusionist notion of cultural interconnections was at odds with the view of his French contemporary, Georges Contenau. Already in the late 1920s, Contenau had refuted the idea that the recently discovered decorated pottery from neolithic China revealed a direct relationship with Iran. He felt that the evidence was insuﬃcient to sustain such a theory.84 A great deal of Herzfeld’s exegesis in Iran in the Ancient East seems intended to respond to this skepticism. Thus, for instance, Herzfeld drew comparisons between several motifs found on Honan pottery and on the pottery from Bakun: the “”ﬁnger” motif attached to angular linear patterns, rows of zetas on the necks of pots, and the multiple cross inscribed in a circle (ﬁg. 8).

81 Ibid., 7, 9. In 1938, Stein had brieﬂy outlined discoveries in southeastern Iran that in his view connected the prehistoric pottery tradition there with the cultures of Persepolis (Bakun) and Susa. Childe had laid out similar comparisons already in The Aryans, 103–14, but without the stress speciﬁcally on Iran as the point of origin of cultural ideas that then “migrated” both east and west. 82 Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 52. 83 Ibid., 7. 84 Georges Contenau, Manuel d’archéologie orientale (Paris: A. Picard, 1927), 1:118–19.

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Herzfeld’s analyses of the prehistoric seals and painted pottery of Iran were intimately linked to the complex ranges of his thinking on the three features of discourse outlined above. The main axes of contemporary iconographical debate involved three overlapping issues: (a) the validity of seeing what we today would call semiotic systems embedded in imagery, (b) the meaning of speciﬁc discrete symbols, and (c) the narrative content potentially embedded in systems of grouped symbols. Herzfeld explored the idea that the rich repertoire of abstract motifs in the prehistoric art of Iran were the direct ancestors of the earliest proto-cuneiform signs (ﬁg. 9). He described the symbols shown here as a selection of abstract symbols, crosses, circles, oblongs, and lozenges with various ﬁllings, the pentagram, hexagram, etc.; and also the hourglass and the butterﬂy-combination of triangles, the wavy river lines, with plants at the edge, and the double-headed animals . . . These signs, still illegible to us, stand for everyday notions, not exclusively concrete ones. The character of the oldest Sumerian pictographs, likewise undeciphered, is similar. When these most ancient phases of eastern script have been deciphered, a ﬁnal interpretation of the more ancient symbols may be attempted.85

He went on to make direct links between an early stamp seal from Tepe Giyan, the Sumerian sign for “pen” or “stable,” and a Sumerian cylinder seal of the Uruk-Jemdet Nasr phase (ﬁg. 10).86 These brief suggestions are interesting. The late prehistoric stamps seals from Tepe Giyan and elsewhere indeed deserve to be explored anew with these ideas in mind. Herzfeld was more willing than many of his contemporaries (and even than more recent scholars) to consider meaning embedded in ostensibly simple geometric forms. He linked the cross motif, for instance, to the notion of the biblical “mark of Cain” (Gen. 4:15 RSV) used to brand the traveling blacksmith who was at once an outsider and a man of coveted skill.87 His grouping in Iran in the Ancient

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Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 65–66. Ibid., 69. 87 For example, see ibid., 157–58. Contrast Rutten, “Early Seals,” 289: “Seals engraved with geometric designs . . . are of little artistic interest.” This statement 86

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East of stamp seals bearing various versions of this image shows that he had contemplated the cross speciﬁcally as a device found repeatedly in this medium (ﬁg. 11). Yet he did not allow the observation to penetrate his insistence that these artifacts were garment buttons, not deliberately manufactured mark-producing tools (seals). Like this suggestion about the cross as a representation of the “mark of Cain,” his forays into the interpretation of the “comb” or “comb-animal” images on Susa A/Susa I pottery were idiosyncratic and never gained acceptance. Herzfeld was committed to the hypothesis that many of the abstract images on the painted pottery “evidently stand for real objects of daily life.”88 His interpretation of the “comb” motif as a representation of an actual comb emerges from that vantage point.89 There was a lively discourse on the imagery of the prehistoric pottery of Iran in the 1920s and ’30s.90 In more recent scholarship, Frank Hole has been particularly forthcoming in attempts to grapple with this wonderful material. His approach emerges from an anthropological analytical framework. Like most earlier interpreters, Hole has paid less attention to geometric motifs than to ﬁgural ones. Unlike Herzfeld, he has not invested meaning in motifs such as the cross, seeing them as ﬁller elements. But he raises important issues that will hopefully encourage further research.91 Among other features, Hole’s discussions allude to notions of landscapes of symbols on the

seems to equate lack of interest with lack of meaning. Amiet, perhaps the foremost iconographer of ancient Near Eastern art living today, similarly does not see meaning (or, perhaps more crucially, a strategy for investigating it) in the geometric motifs of late prehistoric seals. Amiet, La Glyptique mésopotamienne archaïque, 69–70. 88 Herzfeld and Keith, “Iran as a Prehistoric Centre,” 49. In this instance, the Herzfeld/Keith article certainly reﬂects Herzfeld’s voice. 89 Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 80 ﬀ. Contrast, among others, Contenau, “Early Ceramic Art,” 176 with n. 1, who notes the various representational interpretations of the image: two-headed eagle with outstretched wings, a rain cloud, or a multilegged ibex. Hole, “Cemetery of Susa,” 33, tentatively follows their interpretation as a stylized representation of sheep. 90 To cite a few examples: Frankfort, Studies in Early Pottery ; Edmond Pottier, “L’écriture primitive sur les vases peints de Suse et les origines du style géometric,” in Mélanges Gustave Glotz (Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1932), 2:739–50; and Amélia Hertz, “Le décor des vases de Suse et les écritures de l’Asie antérieure,” RA 29 (1929): 217–34. 91 For example, see Frank Hole, “Symbols of Religion and Social Organization at Susa,” in The Hilly Flanks and Beyond: Essays on the Prehistory of Southwestern Asia presented to Robert J. Braidwood, November 15, 1982, ed. T. Cuyler Young, Jr., Philip E. L. Smith, and Peder Mortensen, SAOC no. 36 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 315–31; Hole, “Cemetery at Susa.”

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pottery and to possibilities of narrative programmatic relationships embedded in the iconography.92 To some degree, these commentaries reach back to ideas Herzfeld was experimenting with rather tentatively in Iran in the Ancient East. Commenting on a pot from Bakun, Herzfeld remarked that If it were blue and white porcelain one could interpret the design as a Chinese landscape: a lake among mountains, a house at the bank and a boat on the water; but it is nothing but horns and abstract symbols.93

This is a curious statement in that it sets the reader up to anticipate a narrative reading of the pot and then steps back completely from this possibility. I believe Herzfeld may have intended to be ironic here. Many passages in Herzfeld’s work on prehistory suggest that he was, indeed, thoroughly invested in the notion that the abstractions of prehistoric painted wares composed meaning-laden decorative programs.94 His discussions of this issue speciﬁcally with reference to the prehistoric pottery from Mesopotamian Samarra gained more resonance in later scholarship than did his remarks on Iranian art.95 A survey of the history of gardens and garden imagery has acknowledged one of Herzfeld’s commentaries on Samarra ware. In this instance Herzfeld interpreted the bird-ﬁlled cross motif on Samarra painted pottery as a rendering of a landscape of the four rivers of life of Genesis and the Vedas.96 And Beatrice Goﬀ has referred several times to Herzfeld’s ideas on the symbols decorating Samarra ware in her discussion of symbols in prehistoric Mesopotamian art.97 Interestingly, however, she neither alludes to Iran in the Ancient East as a work that attempted to operate across the boundaries of Iran and Mesopotamia in the consideration of iconography, nor does she allude to Iranian traditions themselves as comparative phenomena. David Castriota has observed that Herzfeld “applied Riegl’s mode of analysis and terminology in the publication of the rich architectural decoration of the Abbasid palace at Samarra, opening up a whole new phase in the study of early Islamic ornament.”98 92

For example, see Hole, “Cemetery at Susa,” 33, on Louvre Sb 3174. Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 50, on ﬁg. 85. 94 For example, see Herzfeld and Keith, “Iran as a Prehistoric Centre,” 49. 95 Herzfeld, Die vorgeschichtlichen Töpfereien von Samarra. 96 Elizabeth B. Moynihan, Paradise as a Garden in Persia and Mughal India (New York: G. Braziller, 1979), 9. 97 Beatrice L. Goﬀ, Symbols of Prehistoric Mesopotamia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 3–5, 7. 98 Riegl, Problems of Style, xxi. 93

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Regarding prehistoric art, Herzfeld’s position in relation to Riegl cannot have been so emulative. If Herzfeld worked with Riegl’s Stilfragen as a theoretical model in the course of his thinking about prehistoric art, he must actively have rejected the applicability of Riegl’s formalism in this context. Riegl insisted upon the force of “Kunstwollen”—urging that ornament be studied as a purely decorative phenomenon. Herzfeld, as we have noted, looked for alternative explanations that invited the contemplation of meaning even in geometric devices. Herzfeld would have found a more natural aﬃnity for the later work of Ernst Gombrich, who was an admirer of Riegl even though he disagreed with many of his basic tenets.99 In contemplating how Herzfeld would have received Riegl in connection speciﬁcally with Iranian studies, he may have found Riegl’s utter disdain for Achaemenid Persian art oﬀensive: Dass den Griechen die Perser als Inbegriﬀ alles Orientalischen gegolten haben, ist nur aus dem Umstande zu erklären, dass die Perser die alleinigen Universalerben ihrer Kulturvorfahren auf asiatischem Boden gewesen sind,—freilich Erben die das empfangene Talent nicht gemehrt, sondern eher gemindert haben. An den Vorzügen und dauernden Errungenschaften der altorientalischen Künste haben unter allen Kulturvölkern des Alterthums die Perser den geringsten Antheil gehabt. Sie waren eben so glücklich, Zeitgenossen der griechischen Kunstblüthe zu sein, durch die sie verewigt und späteren Geschlechtern traditionell als Typen alles orientalischen Wesens überliefert worden sein.100

I wonder if Herzfeld was moved in part to contemplate meanings of prehistoric Iranian art precisely because this creative phenomenon represented an area that Riegl, at the dawn of the 1890s, could not have known. Herzfeld may have seen the prehistoric record in Iran, which began to emerge only following the publication of Stilfragen, as laying the basis for understanding Iran in a totally new and centrally creative light. In that sense, the very existence of the prehistoric art of Iran as fertile ground for inquiry was a refutation of Riegl’s aggressively Hellenocentric disdain. Herzfeld’s emphasis on the idea that the aesthetic agendas of prehistoric Iranian art were laced with meanings preﬁguring the symbolic ideologies of the world’s great religions may, in his mind, have oﬀered a dramatic alternative to Riegl-on-Persia. 99 Ernst Gombrich, The Sense of Order. A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), esp. 217–50. 100 Riegl, Stilfragen, 111; Riegl, Problems of Style, 104.

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An area of study in prehistoric art that has been little tapped so far involves possible relationships between signs and symbols (and their programmatic combinations) on the early painted pottery of Iran and the signs and symbols available for iconographical study on the synchronous stamp seals. Herzfeld, who was best placed in his era to address this issue, avoided it completely. Yet it is diﬃcult to turn the pages of Iran in the Ancient East, where he juxtaposed so much visual evidence in intriguing ways, without this visual record generating questions about such relationships across the two media. In Iran in the Ancient East, Herzfeld eulogizes a speciﬁc painted pot of Persepolis (Bakun) (ﬁg. 12): The masterpiece of all the vase paintings of Persepolis is shown on Pl. XII. On the doubly curved surface of the mastos-shaped vase a pair of wild sheep is drawn in an unhesitating style. The small bodies of the animals are near the pointed bottom, the colossal volutes of the two pairs of horns ﬁll the whole surface. . . . Problems of perspective do not enter the mind of the painter; he wants to bring out as much as possible the main characters of the subject represented. We must therefore refrain from applying to such primitive art an aesthetic terminology created for more recent stages of art. Primitive does not mean rude; it may be, and here is, extremely reﬁned—a quality which depends only upon the genius of the race.101

Herzfeld did not seize the opportunity in this passage to comment on the possible meaning of the encircled crosses that also ﬁgure prominently in the program of this vessel. His intention was, it seems, to champion the artistry of the “Persepolis” record, which was in other quarters seen as a somewhat provincial echo of the pots from the Susa cemetery. His intention was also, surely, to take a compelling stand for the artistic value of the visual record of prehistoric Iran. Somehow he was not poised yet to push deeper into systematic analyses of the ideas on iconography that he sprinkled lightly and tantalizingly in his publications. With these limitations stated, we can nevertheless appreciate that his beautiful watercolor rendition of this particular pot is a eulogy in its own right to accompany impassioned words. Perhaps we can forgive Herzfeld here as he slips into the rhetoric of ethnical valuation (on the “genius of the race”) that he elsewhere professed to ﬁnd irrelevant to the study of prehistory in his moments of more clinical assessment of the issues at stake. 101

Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 48.

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In Conclusion: Return to the Metaphor Herzfeld’s inﬂuence in the ﬁeld of Iranian prehistory was profound in that he collected artifacts and produced key documentary publications on them that have continued to serve scholarship. This, as we have seen, has been especially true in the area of glyptic studies. Although the scientiﬁc (as opposed to aesthetic) standards of his documentation were not always rigorous, this was typical of the age. The realization that his drawings were sometimes ﬂawed simply makes it all the more important that scholars working with this material now strive to establish the current whereabouts of his original collections. There is, alas, an irony embedded in the signiﬁcance of Herzfeld’s documentary work. Although his published drawings of the stamp seals in his large personal collection continue to be reproduced repeatedly in modern publications, they are increasingly cited with reference to the most recent syntheses in which they have been reproduced. The Herzfeld name has increasingly dropped out of the scholarly record. As an interpreter of the evidence of prehistoric visual culture, Herzfeld does not seem to have had a tremendous impact. This is unfortunate. His ideas on the meanings of prehistoric imagery were often idiosyncratic. Yet, when evaluated in opposition to the immensely inﬂuential doctrine of Riegl, Herzfeld’s forays in iconographical analysis of “decorative motifs” acquire an admirable boldness and intensity. Many factors have conspired to cloud Herzfeld’s legacy. Although the Herzfeld-facets of the prehistory prism touched each other and also touched those facets inscribed with the identities of other contemporaneous scholars, the intersections remained hard-edged. They remained too true, in eﬀect, to the physical properties of an actual prism. This is largely due to the interpersonal and political intrigues that tainted the practice of Iranian archaeology in the European/ American scholarly community in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century. Painfully we witness Herzfeld’s alienation and erasure within this milieu. In his article on early seals for the Survey of Persian Art, Rutten (astonishingly) did not even allude to Herzfeld’s work at Tepe Giyan or to his seminal 1933 publication in AMI 5.102 This is such a shocking aﬀront to academic propriety that it can only be explained as a crude and calculated eﬀort systematically to mute Herzfeld’s legacy. It must have reﬂected the deep hostility toward Herzfeld held 102

Rutten, “Early Seals.”

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by the lead editor of the Survey, Arthur Upham Pope. For his part, Herzfeld’s sole contribution to the Survey was the very general piece coauthored with Keith titled “Iran as a Prehistoric Centre,” which we have already discussed in terms of its oddities of voice.103 Given the extraordinary litany of Herzfeld’s accomplishments as a student of Iranian art through the ages, his absence from the pages of the Survey except for this collaborative article on prehistory is nothing short of bizarre. Pope acknowledged Herzfeld (along with others) in his preface to the Survey and Pope’s biographers claim that Herzfeld refused to accept an invitation to contribute a chapter on the Achaemenids Persians for the volume.104 Yet the erasure of Herzfeld’s work in the Rutten article, combined with all we can glean of Pope’s personality, suggest that enmity toward Herzfeld and a veritable crusade to marginalize him were at the core of the story. It is diﬃcult to assess the degree to which Herzfeld’s virtual invisibility in the massive Survey of Persian Art contributed to his lack of staying power as a well-recognized ﬁgure in the early history of the study of prehistory in Iran and the Near East. The Survey was certainly inﬂuential in characterizing the state of Iranian art studies for the duration of the twentieth century (through its second printing in 1967). Since Herzfeld’s most important contributions to prehistory lay in his documentation and preliminary interpretive discussions of large corpora of the visual record of seals and painted pottery, it was in the Survey that his eﬀorts should rightfully have been recognized. Although Herzfeld was not a visionary practitioner or theorist of ﬁeld archaeology, his work at numerous ancient Near Eastern sites (including the prehistoric Iranian sites discussed here) is a meaningful part of the history of the ﬁeld. His material discoveries and prompt publications deserve serious respect. Yet Herzfeld’s contributions to the archaeology of prehistory (and indeed more generally to the archaeology of later periods of ancient Near Eastern civilizations) has largely disappeared from the collective memory.105 For all his brilliance and pioneering inquiry on many fronts, Herzfeld emerges as a conﬂicted personality and a tragically isolated one in the realm of Iranian prehistory. 103

Herzfeld and Keith, “Iran as a Prehistoric Centre.” Pope, Survey of Persian Art, 1:xxi; Gluck and Siver, Surveyors of Persian Art, 298–99. 105 One index of this phenomenon is the fact that he received no entry in the inﬂuential Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, ed. Eric M. Meyers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 104

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Fig. 1. Herzfeld’s comparative approach revealed through assemblages of seals from Tepe Giyan (TG), Nihavand (Nih.), Susa (S), other sites in Greece and the Near East, and unprovenanced examples in the Louvre and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Ten of these Tepe Giyan/Nihavand seals are now in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. AMI 5, Abb. 17.

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Fig. 2. Herzfeld’s visual comparison of abstract and ﬁgural representations linked to his exploration of the notion of axial symmetry and representations of the scorpion. All but one of the Tepe Giyan/Nihavand seals (TG 2380, bottom row at far left) are now in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. AMI 5, Abb. 18.

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Fig. 3. Herzfeld’s visual comparison of representations of quadrupeds in various settings. AMI 5, Abb. 22.

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Fig. 4. Cover of Jane Ford Adams’ copy of Just Buttons (May 1947), the sales catalogue featuring Herzfeld’s collection of prehistoric stamp seals from Iran. Courtesy of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan.

Fig. 5. The seal on the top row, far right, from Tepe Giyan (TG 2331) is now in the British Museum (WA 128664). The other seals from Tepe Giyan are now in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan. AMI 5, Abb. 24.

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Fig. 6. Two drawings of KM 1991.3.91. Top: from AMI 5, Abb. 24, at scale of the original publication; bottom: rendering from the modern impression (a reverse image), at 1:1. Below: photograph of the actual seal face. Courtesy of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan.

Fig. 7. A page from one of Herzfeld’s sketchbooks; the seal in the top row (second from right) is the one featured also in ﬁgure 6 (now in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, KM 1991.3.91). Ernst Herzfeld Papers, sketchbook SK-XXVII, 19.

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Fig. 8. Comparisons between painted pottery of Honan (China) and Iran. Iran in the Ancient East, ﬁgs. 42a-b, 43.

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Fig. 9. Signs in the repertoire of prehistoric art. Iran in the Ancient East, ﬁg. 123.

Fig. 10. A comparison between a late prehistoric stamp seal image from Tepe Giyan showing penned animals, an Uruk period cylinder seal, and a cuneiform sign. Iran in the Ancient East, ﬁg. 130.

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Fig. 11. Selected prehistoric stamp seals (“buttons”) displaying variations on the cross image. Iran in the Ancient East, ﬁg. 129.

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Fig. 12. Herzfeld’s watercolor rendering of a painted conical pot from Tal-i Bakun (Persepolis), showing two wild sheep (and a pair of encircled crosses which Herzfeld does not mention). Ernst Herzfeld Papers, drawing D-634.

PART III

HERZFELD AND THE PERSIAN EMPIRES

MILESTONES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF ACHAEMENID HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE ERA OF ERNST HERZFELD Pierre Briant

It is clear simply from consulting the bibliography of Ernst Herzfeld that even though he did not conﬁne himself to this time and space of Achaemenid history and archaeology, he published many studies that concerned them. His investigations at Pasargadae, the opening of excavations at Persepolis, the founding of the Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran (the ﬁrst volume of which was published in 1929–30), the many articles on Achaemenid inscriptions that he published there and elsewhere, and his book on the royal inscriptions (1938)—all these are eloquent testimony to his interest in the Iran of the Great Kings. This is surely the reason that the organizers of this symposium initially asked me to give a presentation on the impact of Herzfeld’s work on Achaemenid history. Nevertheless, after consulting with Ann Gunter and Stefan Hauser, I decided to modify my approach somewhat.1 First, it is essential to recall that Herzfeld was at once a linguist, an epigraphist, an archaeologist, an art historian, a geographer, and more, as is revealed particularly well by his work at Pasargadae, where he marshaled every kind of information then available (almost a century ago) and where he opened radically new perspectives. It was the same at Persepolis between 1931 and 1934, after the remarkable bilingual report published in French and Persian in 1929–30.2 In short, as C. R. Morey correctly emphasized in 1952, “[Herzfeld was] a scholar whose like it would be diﬃcult to ﬁnd today and even more diﬃcult to expect to ﬁnd in the future, which seems to be trending more and more in the direction of specialized research.”3 1 I express my warmest thanks to Matthew Stolper (Oriental Institute, University of Chicago), who translated my text into English. Apart from some minor corrections and updates, the text published here is the same as the one delivered in Washington. 2 Herzfeld, “Rapport sur Persépolis,” 17–40. 3 C. R. Morey, “Ernst Herzfeld, 1879–1948,” in Archaeologica Orientalia in Memoriam Ernst Herzfeld, ed. George C. Miles (Locust Valley, N.Y.: J. J. Augustin, 1952), 1.

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Although I have always argued for an approach that crosses the boundaries of disciplines, I consider myself to be without the competence required to evaluate the scientiﬁc results of his inquiries in each of his ﬁelds of knowledge, ﬁfty years after his death. At the same time, even though his eﬀorts (along with the work of many others) indisputably played a role in the slow and contradictory movement that led to the birth and establishment of an Achaemenid history in the full sense of the term, I want to emphasize that, unless I am mistaken, the development of this history was never the prime concern nor the basic motivation of Herzfeld himself. To be sure, he published a voluminous study on the relationships between myth and history in ancient Iran.4 There, he commented that neither a philological analysis nor a literary analysis could suﬃce. It was also necessary, he wrote, to carry out the investigation with the help of historical method. He was undoubtedly also one of the ﬁrst to emphasize, in this same study, the need for an investigation of textual archaeology. Nevertheless, in the absence of a closer analysis, it is my impression that the most vital parts of his work are concerned primarily with archaeology, philology, and historical geography. It was around these focal interests that he constructed a book, the title of which was not settled when he died in 1948: Studies in the History and Geography of the Ancient East or, alternatively, The Persian Empire.5 To be meaningful, an analysis of Herzfeld’s work would have to be carried out in an exhaustive manner, a task that was not possible for the reasons I have mentioned. I have therefore chosen instead to place Herzfeld in the context of Achaemenid historiography in the period that corresponds to his lifetime, between 1879 and 1948.6 If we take stock of matters at Herzfeld’s demise at the age of sixtyeight, Persian and Iranian historiography seem to have been blossoming. In 1943, Clément Huart and Louis Delaporte published their book titled Iran antique; between 1947 and 1949, Roman Ghirshman prepared his Iran des origines à l’Islam (subsequently published in 1953); and it was also in 1947 that Herzfeld published his Zoroaster and His

4

Herzfeld, “Mythos und Geschichte,” 1–100; on the need for an investigation of textual archaeology, see page 2. 5 Morey, “Additions to the Bibliography of Ernst Herzfeld,” in Miles, Archaeologica Orientalia, 280. 6 On this topic, see also Pierre Briant, Leçon inaugurale (Paris: Collège de France, 2000), and Pierre Briant, Annuaire du Collège de France 100 (1999–2000): 781 ﬀ.

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World and made the ﬁnal addenda to the manuscript of the book that he had begun to prepare during the 1930s and ’40s. Finally, in 1948, the year of Herzfeld’s death, A. T. Olmstead’s History of the Persian Empire appeared posthumously—the same year in which George G. Cameron published the ﬁrst collection of the Elamite tablets from Persepolis, whose discovery had been announced in 1933 by Herzfeld himself in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, then by Erich F. Schmidt in 1939, and ﬁnally by Cameron and Richard T. Hallock in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies in 1942. Thus, the history of Iran appears to have been entering a phase with a trend toward greater generality, for the 1940s were an age of synthesis. To take only a few notable examples: In 1941, Mikhail Rostovtzeﬀ brought out his monumental Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World; in 1948, W. W. Tarn’s Alexander the Great was published; and in 1950, it was the turn of David Magie’s Roman Rule in Asia Minor.7 In an entirely diﬀerent domain—one with which Iranology has no direct relationship—how could one fail to mention that in 1948 Fernand Braudel was elected the ﬁrst president of the new fourth section of the École Pratique des Hautes-Études, and that, in 1949, he published his monumental and seminal The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II? In the introduction to the dissertation on Pasargadae that he published in the journal Klio in 1908, Herzfeld cited without exception all the travelers who had described, even studied, the ruins of Fars, from the Venetian Giosafa Barbaro in the sixteenth century to the report of M. W. Easton published in Philadelphia in 1892. As a logical element of his plan as an architect and archaeologist, Herzfeld had prepared a list of his predecessors at the sites. But the progress of study is not reducible to this aspect of things. For his part, Olmstead, in the introduction to his History of the Persian Empire (1948), was astonished that George Rawlinson’s Fifth Monarchy (1867) remained—even eighty years after its appearance—the only available synthesis of Achaemenid history, despite the fact that the history of the Near East had been profoundly modiﬁed in the meantime.

7

See Pierre Briant, “Rostovtzeﬀ et le passage du monde achéménide au monde hellénistique” (paper presented at “Colloque Mikhail Rostovtzeﬀ,” Paris, 17–19 May 2000); Pierre Briant, “Fifty Years of Research on Achaemenid Asia Minor: The Contribution of Greek and Epichoric Epigraphy” (paper presented at “Revisiting Asia Minor: Fifty Years after David Magie’s Roman Rule in Asia Minor,” Princeton University, 9–10 December 2000).

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Similarly, he wrote, Rawlinson had had access to almost all the sources that he himself had used to write his History of the Persian Empire. The assertion is, if I may say so, more generous than accurate in retrospect; Olmstead was actually able to use many sources that Rawlinson did not have. On the other hand, the assertion would be valid for someone like Herzfeld, who began his career as a scholar toward the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, it is rather the 1870s and 1880s that saw the inception of a ﬁrst ﬂourishing of the studies that preceded and preﬁgured the later ﬂourishing of the 1940s. I have tried to give an account—imperfect as it may be—of this ﬁrst ﬂourishing, with the aid of two tables with (selected) lists of publications: on the one hand, publications of documents, and on the other, works of synthesis on ancient Persia (tables 1 and 2). Around 1900, the discoveries and documentary publications of the preceding decades had radically changed the situation in the reading of the royal inscriptions (Rawlinson 1846; Loftus 1857); the exploration of Persepolis (Flandin and Coste 1843–54; Stolze and Nöldeke 1882); the excavation of Susa (Loftus 1857; Dieulafoy 1885, 1893); the publication of Babylonian tablets (Rawlinson 1880; Strassmaier 1890, 1897); of Aramaic documents from Egypt (Clermont-Ganneau 1878); of coins from the Persian period (Babelon 1898); even the translation of the Avesta and commentary on it (Darmesteter 1892) and the discovery of Greek inscriptions of Asia Minor (Cousin-Deschamps 1888), not to mention excavations at provincial sites, such as Sardis and elsewhere (for example, Xanthos in Lycia) (table 1).8 Furthermore, when Herzfeld undertook his own work between 1900 and 1948, the rhythm of publication did not abate: publications of the royal inscriptions (King and Thompson 1907; Weissbach 1911); of work at Susa (e.g., de Morgan 1905); of Aramaic documents from Egypt (Sayce and Cowley 1906; Cowley 1923); of Babylonian tablets (e.g., Clay 1912); of the Oxus treasure (Dalton 1905); and, of course, the publication of the Persepolis tablets, to which I will return in my conclusion. This is the stream to which Herzfeld added his own work during the forty years that elapsed between his thesis on Pasargadae in 1907 and Zoroaster and His World in 1947 and the manuscript that he left behind in proofs in Cairo.

8 See Enid Slatter, Xanthus: Travels of Discovery in Turkey (London: Rubicon Press, 1994).

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During the same period one can recognize a sustained rhythm of publication of works of historical synthesis on ancient Persia (table 2). On a purely scientiﬁc level, the multiplication and diversiﬁcation of documentary resources was certainly the cause, but it can scarcely be doubted that greater European interest in the Near East also promoted this movement. Table 1 speaks for itself and I will give only the briefest commentary on it. First, because of its obvious connections with the history of Greece, from Herodotus and Aeschylus on, the history of ancient Persia was included in universal and general histories, not to mention meditations on the philosophy of history from Jacques Bénigne Bossuet to G. W. F. Hegel. Second, the travels and ﬁrst excavations carried out in the Near East and in Persia stimulated an entire series of works on the history of Persia, especially in the 1870s and 1880s in Germany; without exception these works deal with the period of origins, the Achaemenids, the Parthians, and the Sasanians (to whom the lion’s share of attention is devoted). Third, later on, the studies become more precise, more specialized along with documentary publications, increasingly incorporating the results of excavations in Mesopotamia and Iran. It is therefore clear that after Herzfeld had been initiated into archaeology under Walter Andrae at Assur, between 1903 and 1905, when he turned to later periods, understanding of the history and civilization of the Achaemenid Empire had made prodigious advances during the preceding decades; sound documentary and historiographic foundations already existed, which could easily be integrated into the development of knowledge and research. What I want to focus on now are two speciﬁc historiographic aspects: ﬁrst, discussions of the place of Achaemenid history in the general history of the ancient Near East, and second, discussions of the sources for Persian and Achaemenid history. I will conclude with a brief return to the year 1948. The historical assessment of the Achaemenid phase of Near Eastern history was determined simultaneously by a judgment about the internal development of the empire and by its chronological position between the fall of the Assyro-Babylonian Empire and the conquests of Alexander. The internal development of the Achaemenid Empire was considered almost unanimously as a long decay after the defeats in the Persian Wars. That is the thesis George Rawlinson hammered out relentlessly in his various publications. In his handbook of ancient history that appeared in 1900, for example, speaking of the defeat of Darius

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III by Alexander, Rawlinson wrote: “The result of the contest might have been predicted from the time of the battle of Marathon.”9 An analogous judgment can be found in the work of Ferdinand Justi, who also relied on the famous story of Xerxes and his sister-in-law recounted by Herodotus, a story that he used to denounce harem intrigues. Justi judged that in this respect the Persian Empire shared the fate of all Oriental empires, and with this end in view he established a direct connection between the court of the Great Kings and the court of the shah in modern times, and he gave this deﬁnitive formulation: “Women played a much greater role in world history than is usually supposed, and the women’s quarters among the last of the Achaemenids [that is, after Xerxes] were not only the theater of personal intrigues and jealous quarrels, but they were also the actual point of departure for political actions, as well as for many abominable crimes.”10 Justi likewise dilated on moral and military enfeeblement and the incompetence of the kings, and he denounced Parysatis, whom he qualiﬁes as a “true Fury.”11 The same historiographic intrigue can be found in an article by Theodor Nöldeke published in 1886.12 He denounced Xerxes as “on a par with the absolute worst of Oriental despots in time of war, as vainglorious as he was eﬀeminate”; under these conditions, the defeats in Europe constituted the turning point of Persian history, and the succession struggles are just one of very many examples of this genre “in oriental history.”13 In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1885, James Darmesteter described an erosion, both internal and external; the former is caused by the hegemony of the Median magi (sic), the second by the defeats at the hands of the Greeks, which would “result in the dissolution of the Iranian state.”14 In Darmesteter’s eyes, the defeat was historically just: In fact, Achaemenid “despotism” is “a principle of death, for it degrades and annihilates the individual, and once it is shaken everything crumbles with it. . . . Marathon, Salamis and Plataea are victories, not for Greece, but for

9 George Rawlinson, Ancient History from the Earliest Times to the Fall of the Western Empire, rev. ed. (New York: Colonial Press, 1899), 94. 10 Ferdinand Justi, Geschichte des alten Persiens (Berlin: G. Grote, 1879), 126. 11 Ibid., 123, 136. 12 Theodor Nöldeke, “Persia,” Encyclopedia Britannica (1886), 42. 13 Ibid., 48–49. 14 James Darmesteter, Coup d’oeil sur l’histoire de la Perse, Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France (Paris: Collège de France, 1885), 19.

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humanity.” In the end, Sasanian Persia succumbed to the same evils, for “despotism is the tradition in Persia.”15 I do not think it would be useful to multiply citations that repeat one another. I will simply add two comments. The only diﬀerences among these authors have to do with the state of the empire at the arrival of Alexander and the personality of Darius III.16 For some (the great majority), Darius III was a remarkable prince, but he ruled an empire that was severely weakened and he had to battle an enemy who was his superior. For the others (such as Nöldeke), Darius III was an incompetent on the order of a Xerxes, but events proved what power of resistance remained in so immense an empire.17 My second comment has to do with the extraordinary persistence of this historiography. All the elements of “Persian decadence” had already been expounded in great detail by Charles Rollin in 1730.18 But in fact, Rollin himself borrowed this judgment from Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681). Both of them were still cited in the bibliography of Rawlinson’s inﬂuential handbook in 1900.19 Since exactly the same prejudices and formulas can be found in recent books— indeed, even in very recent ones—one is forced to admit that despite the progress accomplished in other areas, and despite some very early lucid openings, in Achaemenid historiography “Orientalism” has remained the keystone for more than three centuries!20 Is this not a disturbing observation?

15

Ibid., 20, 32. See Briant, Annuaire du Collège de France, 783–89; Pierre Briant, Darius dans l’ombre d’Alexandre (Paris: Fayard, 2003), esp. ch. 2. 17 Nöldeke, “Persia,” 81. 18 See Pierre Briant, Annuaire du Collège de France 101 (2000–1): 707–12; also Pierre Briant, “La tradition gréco-romaine sur Alexandre le Grand dans la France moderne et contemporaine: quelques réﬂexions sur la permanence et l’adaptabilité des modèles interprétatifs,” in The Impact of Classical Greece on European and National Identities, ed. M. Hagsma et al. (Amsterdam: Gieben, 2004), 161–80. 19 Rawlinson, Ancient History from the Earliest Times, 6–7. Nevertheless, Rawlinson did recognize that “the earlier portion of this work [Rollin’s] is now antiquated, and must be replaced by writers who have the advantage of recent discoveries.” 20 Among recent works, see Muhammad A. Dandamaev, Political History of the Persian Empire, trans. Willem J. Vogelsang (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989), together with Pierre Briant, “L’histoire politique de l’empire achéménide: problèmes et méthodes. (À propos d’un ouvrage de M. A. Dandamaev),” review of Political History of the Persian Empire, by Muhammad A. Dandamaev, RÉA 95 (1993): 399–423; also Pierre Briant, “L’histoire achéménide: sources, méthodes, raisonnements et modèles,” Topoi 4 (1994): 109–30. For early, lucid beginnings, see in particular the comments about the speciﬁcity of the Persian period in Egypt by Antoine J. Letronne, Mémoires de 16

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The other theme consists in an evaluation of the speciﬁc role played by the Achaemenid phase in the history of the oriental empires. I will take just two works, those by Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez, and by Gaston Maspéro, the ﬁrst appearing in 1890, the second in 1899, and both abundantly cited by later authors.21 In their chapter entitled “General Characteristics of Persian Art,” Perrot and Chipiez developed a thesis that was far from entirely original, but that they expressed in a form that appears new. For them, Persian art is born “from a determination to be imitative. . . . It is not, like the arts of Egypt and Chaldea, a spontaneous expression of ideas and beliefs of a great people.”22 Nonetheless, Perrot and Chipiez remain restrained. They did not push their thesis as far as did Jacques de Morgan, when he published the Achaemenid tomb at Susa in 1905. I cite only a single passage from this truly remarkable work: “The various elements [copied by the Persians] were, most often, associated with utter bad taste; rarely are they grouped in an agreeable fashion . . . The Persian aesthetic remains quite inferior to those of the peoples who were adopted as models.”23 Perrot and Chipiez, for their part, recognized a certain “originality” in Persian art, but nonetheless a limited originality, for it was never accompanied by any fertility or any diversity: “Behind sometimes brilliant appearances,” they wrote, “this immobility is nothing but decadence, more or less well concealed.”24 Furthermore, the authors repeated for their own purpose the very cautious judgment of Darmesteter: “Persepolis is the caprice of an all-powerful dilettante who has a taste for the grandiose”—a formula which is in my opinion nothing but an adaptation of a judgment made by Cornelius de Pauw, who in 1772 saw in Persepolis a testimony to “the barbarian magniﬁcence of Asiatic despots.”25 In

l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 17:1 (Paris, 1847), then by Charles Clermont-Ganneau, “Origine perse des monuments araméens d’Égypte,” RA 36 (1878): 93–107; and 37 (1879): 21–39; together with Briant, Leçon inaugurale, 10–12. 21 Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez, Perse—Phrygie—Lydie et Carie—Lycie, vol. 5, Histoire de l’art dans l’antiquité (Paris: Librarie Hachette, 1890). 22 Ibid., 883. 23 Jacques de Morgan, “Découverte d’une sépulture achéménide à Suse,” MDP 8 (Paris: E. Leroux, 1905), 56–58. 24 Perrot and Chipiez, Perse—Phrygie—Lydie et Carie—Lycie, 893–95. 25 Darmesteter, Coup d’œil sur l’histoire de la Perse, 18; Cornelius de Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, ou Mémoires intéressants pour servir à l’Histoire de l’Espèce humaine (Berlin: G. J. Decker, 1772), 1:383–84, quoted in Dirk Van der Cruysse, Chardin le Persan (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 211, 486.

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the view of Perrot and Chipiez, Persian art really had no autonomous position. It played, in essence, the role of a transmitter of the heritage of “the once-great peoples, now fallen,” that is, Egypt and Chaldea.26 They conclude thus: “The interest of this art is that it resumes in its works all the eﬀorts, all the plastic creations of the oldest civilized people, which Greece and Rome were bound to inherit; at the same time, it is the ﬁrst art which . . . underwent the inﬂuence of the Hellenic genius . . . By this twofold title, this study devoted to Persian art formed the natural epilogue to the history of the arts of the Orient which we have undertaken.”27 I must repeat a point: This general interpretation signiﬁcantly antedates Perrot and Chipiez. To be convinced of this, it suﬃces to read the pages written about Achaemenid Susa in 1857 by William K. Loftus, which he had himself unearthed some years earlier.28 “The palaces of Susa and Persepolis are much inferior to those whose remains are still preserved for us [in Egypt and in Assyria], and, far from being (as M. Flandin remarks . . .) ‘worthy to be classed with Greek art,’ they were rather the works of a powerful monarch, who wanted the skill and taste to direct the labour which his power commanded. . . . The purity and artistic feelings of the vanquished he could not transplant, nor even appreciate.” 29 From Loftus to Darmesteter and especially to de Morgan, the continuity is plain to see, and if Perrot and Chipiez added nuances that were not negligible, they did not bring into question the very bases of this assessment. Since then, despite the progress made during Herzfeld’s time, such prejudices continue to be transmitted. To return to the 1940s, one should recall that the famous articles by Henri Frankfort (“Achaemenian Sculpture”) and Gisela M. A. Richter (“Greeks in

26

Perrot and Chipiez, Perse—Phrygie—Lydie et Carie—Lycie, 880. Ibid., 897. 28 William K. Loftus, Travels and Researches in Chaldaea and Susiana, with an Account of Excavations at Warka, the “Erech” of Nimrod and Shúsh, “Shushan the Palace” of Esther (London: J. Nisbet and Co., 1857). 29 Ibid., 377. I suppose that here Loftus must implicitly refer to Eugène Flandin and Pascal Coste, Voyage en Perse de MM. Eugène Flandin, peintre, et Pascale Coste, architecte, Relation de voyage par M. Eugène Flandin (Paris: Gide et J. Baudry, 1843–54), esp. 2:148 ﬀ. Consider, for example: “Rien dans ces palais des princes achéménides, n’est sauvage ni barbare; tout, au contraire, on y décèle une ère de civilisation où les arts avaient déjà fait un grand pas. . . . Non! A Persépolis, tout est art, tout est élégance. . . . Les compositions des artistes perses se distinguent toujours par le goût, l’originalité et la richesse” (p. 211). 27

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Persia”) both appeared in 1946 in the American Journal of Archaeology. It would prove necessary to await the great work of Carl Nylander in 1970 for a radical critique to be made and an alternative interpretation to be proposed, then subsequently elaborated by Margaret Cool Root.30 Gaston Maspéro, for his part, expounded a thesis very close to that of Perrot and Chipiez, but he put his interpretation in the framework of political analysis. He, too, adopted the thesis of “Achaemenid decadence” and placed it in the Oriental longue durée in a section with the emblematic title “The End of the Old Oriental World.” He opined that the respite in the time of Artaxerxes III was only an illusion, for no renaissance was possible because of the exhaustion of the Orient: “The peoples of the Old Oriental World, at least all those who had taken part in its history, were either no longer in existence or else drawing out a failing old age. They had been worn out, one by the other, during their centuries of virility. . . . Only the indestructible Egypt had escaped the wreckage and seemed destined to outlive its rivals by a long time. . . . [In reality,] it lived and progressed by virtue of its sheer energy.”31 And he reconstructed the unfortunate historical fate of the Persians in this way: “The Iranians, initiated into the oriental civilizations at the time when they were declining into senescence, frequently aged from contact with them. Taking on the age along with the patrimony of their conquests, they lost all the bloom of youth in a few years, and the energy that remained to them was at most enough to maintain as a whole the empire that they had founded.”32 I quote ﬁnally the last phrase of the chapter: “The Old Oriental World was dying with its forces spent: before it died of its own accord, the fortunate audacity of Alexander called Greece to take up the succession.” One is reminded of the parallel ﬁnal phrase from chapter 16 of Perrot and Chipiez’s history of Persian art: “No longer does anything separate us from that Greece on which our eyes have been ever ﬁxed, as if on the goal and the promised land”!33 30 Carl Nylander, Ionians in Pasargadae. Studies in Old Persian Architecture, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Boreas 1 (Uppsala: Universitetet, 1970); Margaret Cool Root, The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art. Essays on the Creation of an Iconography of Empire, ActIr 19 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979). 31 Gaston Maspéro, Les Empires, vol. 3, Histoire ancienne des peuples de l’Orient classique (Paris: Hachette, 1899), 776–88, 789. 32 Ibid., 789–804. 33 Perrot and Chipiez, Perse—Phrygie—Lide et Carie—Lycie, 897.

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I come now to the second aspect that I mentioned, that is, discussions of the sources and priorities. I will touch brieﬂy on three matters, without taking the time to analyze them in detail. First of all, in a general way, it is certain that the authors of this period deplored the lack of documentation; thus Darmesteter in 1885: “The civilization of [the Achaemenid] period is known to us only from foreign testimonies and from much too rare national remnants.” Though vastly better informed, Eduard Meyer began his introductory exposition of the sources for Achaemenid history with this phrase: “In contrast with the older Oriental empires, the Persian empire left only very few monuments”; the main part of his introduction was then devoted to the Greek and Hebrew sources.34 In 1846, Henry Creswicke Rawlinson had underscored the entirely new matter that the Behistun inscription introduced. “The evidence of Herodotus, in regard to the early incidents of the reign of Darius, must be received with considerable caution,” he wrote.35 Properly understood, all work from then on makes use of the contribution of Behistun, yet Rawlinson’s cautious judgment on Herodotus is neither repeated nor even considered. On the contrary, Darmesteter, for example, judged that “the narratives of the Greeks, historians and poets, [are] conﬁrmed by the historical inscriptions carved on the rock by the Achaemenid kings” (pp. 17–18). This is a declaration that generations of historians have put in practice, systematically using Herodotus and Bisotun on the assumption that the two narratives were complementary—a method that is extremely dubious all the same.36 The title that Augustus W. Ahl gave to his book and the aim that he declared seem diﬀerent: “to make some contribution to our acquaintance with the Ancient Persians from an examination of sources truly Persian.”37 Indeed, the author carefully examined the Bisotun inscription; very quickly, however with the reigns of Xerxes and then of Artaxerxes I, he returns to a canonical narrative founded on a relentless reading of the classical sources and on the sure conviction of an irremediable

34

Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, 5 vols. (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1884–1902), 3. Major Henry C. Rawlinson, The Persian Cuneiform Inscription at Behistun Decyphered and Translated (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1846), 188–89. 36 See Pierre Briant, Histoire de l’empire perse. De Cyrus à Alexandre (Paris: Fayard, 1996): 119–27; Pierre Briant, “L’histoire de l’empire achéménide aujourd’hui: l’historien et ses documents. (Commentaire de l’auteur),” Annales HSS 54 (1999): 1134–35. 37 Augustus W. Ahl, Outline of Persian History Based on the Cuneiform Inscriptions, Studies in Philology and History (New York: Lemcke & Buechner, 1922). The author was professor of Greek language and literature, Thiel College, Oxford. 35

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decadence.38 In a certain measure, many works by Herzfeld on the Achaemenid inscriptions went in the right direction particularly because he also knew the Greek sources so well. But it would be necessary to await A. T. Olmstead for the balance between Greek sources and properly Achaemenid sources to be redressed. And even so, the movement was only begun in 1948 and is far from being complete even today, despite the large number of studies devoted to the theme “Greek Sources and Achaemenid History” in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.39 In the second place, I want to recall a debate that is entirely forgotten today. A ﬁrst oﬀensive against the hegemony of the Greek sources had in fact already been carried out in the course of the nineteenth century, but on completely diﬀerent grounds: Some scholars had tried to substitute for them “Oriental” sources—not the properly Achaemenid sources that were not yet known, but the medieval Persian and Arabo-Persian texts, especially Firdowsi’s Shahnama, of which Nöldeke had produced an analysis at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1850, W. S. W. Vaux systematically utilized sources of this type,40 then Joseph de Gobineau in 1869 (from a very diﬀerent point of view).41 But one of the ﬁrst to go in this direction was A. H. Malcolm, who in 1818 tried to construct a system of equivalence between the names of kings known from classical sources and the names found in what Arthur Christensen in 1936 called the Iranian royal legend—more precisely, the list of the Kayanids, frequently identiﬁed with the Achaemenids. In his Erânische Alterthumskunde, Friedrich Spiegel discussed Malcolm’s work at length.42 In addition

38 Ibid., p. 83: “[Xerxes] soon became a tool in the hands of the two everscheming political parties at the court”; speaking (very brieﬂy) of Darius III, the author (p. 107, n. 1) refers to Gaston Maspéro, The Passing of the Empires, 850 B.C.–330 B.C. (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1900). 39 See my cautious comments in Bulletin d’Histoire Achéménide II (Paris: Éditions Thotm, 2001), 23–32. 40 W. S. W. Vaux, Nineveh and Persepolis: An Historical Sketch of Ancient Assyria and Persia, with an Account of Recent Researches in Those Countries (London: A. Hall, Virtue & Co., 1850), 76. 41 Joseph de Gobineau, Histoire des Perses d’après les auteurs orientaux, grecs et latins, 2 vols. (Paris: H. Plon, 1869), and his methodological statement, “Façon de comprendre l’histoire iranienne et ses sources” (pp. 241–72). On Gobineau, see J. Calmard, EncIr X/1 (2001): 20–24; and an interesting book by Fotini Assimacopoulos, Gobineau et la Grèce, Studien zur Geschichte Südosteuropas 15 (Frankfurt: P. Lang, 1999). 42 Friedrich Spiegel, Erânische Alterthumskunde, 3 vols. (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1871–78).

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to converging criticisms, the publication of properly Achaemenid sources also eliminated the medieval texts from discussions of the sources of Achaemenid history. I mention in passing that Herzfeld also participated in this discussion, in his fashion, in his lengthy article titled “Mythos und Geschichte.” His conclusion is still valid: “Für die Perser ist das Epos bis heute ihre Geschichte. . . . Die Geburt der Geschichte ist der Tod des Mythos.”43 I come to my third and ﬁnal point. In a lecture that I delivered in March 2001 in Washington, D.C., I posed a question that I qualiﬁed as obsessive, to wit: In the swelling ﬂood of publications, how can one distinguish what is simply recent from what is really new?44 Analysis of the production of the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, even if incomplete, leads me to the same question. Let me recall brieﬂy a tale that is now well known. “Once upon a time”—actually, in 1933 and in 1936–38—archaeologists working on the terrace of Persepolis brought to light two groups of clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform. The ﬁrst group was discovered in the northeastern corner of the Fortiﬁcation, when Ernst Herzfeld directed the work on the terrace. These Fortiﬁcation tablets were carefully packed in 1935, then sent for study to the Oriental Institute in Chicago, where they are kept today on long-term loan.45 The Treasury tablets, found later, were divided between the museums in Tehran and Chicago. The new texts were studied mainly by Arno Poebel, George Cameron, and Richard Hallock. Cameron and Hallock each published a collection of texts, one in 1948, the other in 1969. In a fundamental sense, it undoubtedly was—and it still remains— a discovery of documents that completely overturned the traditional view of the Persian monarchy: An assessment of the tablets would have dissuaded anyone from analyzing the Persian monarchy through the deforming lenses of feudal, nomadic, or primitivist theses, since the tablets show that the administrative organization centered on Persepolis had genetic connections with the Syro-Mesopotamian kingdoms of earlier centuries. Now it is startling not only that (unless I am mistaken) Herzfeld never devoted a study speciﬁcally to the

43

Herzfeld, “Mythos und Geschichte,” 109. Pierre Briant, “New Trends in Achaemenid History,” Ancient History Bulletin (Calgary) 17/1–2 (2003): 33–47 (a revised version). 45 Except for about 150 tablets now in the Iran Bastan Museum, Tehran: George G. Cameron, “New Tablets from the Persepolis Treasury,” JNES 24 (1965): 167–92. 44

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tablets, but above all that despite the pioneering studies not only of the editors, but also of such great scholars as Emile Benveniste, Walther Hinz, and Ilya Gershevitch, for example, the importance of the discovery completely eluded historians who were trained primarily in the classical texts.46 And yet, as early as 1942, Cameron had published an article that established a connection between the “daughter” (actually, a princess) called Irtashduna in the text of a Fortiﬁcation tablet and the wife of Darius known from Herodotus under the name Artystone (although Cameron’s interpretation was partly erroneous). On the other hand, in a lucid review of Cameron’s book published in 1951, F. Altheim showed the connections between the Oeconomica of Pseudo-Aristotle and the workings of the royal economy in the Persia of Darius and Xerxes.47 Apart from the editors of the tablets, only one author had a very early recognition of the novelty introduced by this documentation— very early, that is, as of the 1940s. This was Olmstead, whose History of the Persian Empire was published posthumously in 1948—the same year in which Herzfeld died, with his own manuscript of this title in proofs. In the introduction to his book, Olmstead emphasized with regret how Achaemenid history had remained neglected, and he explained the reasons for such cumulative delay. For this reason, he hailed the opening of the Oriental Institute excavations of Persepolis as “a new epoch in the recovery of the Ancient Near East” or even as “the Renaissance of later Near Eastern history.” He did not neglect

46 The single direct reference is found in Ernst Herzfeld, “Recent Discoveries at Persepolis,” JRAS (1934): 226–32, the text of a lecture he delivered at the Royal Asiatic Society on 21 September 1933: “Among the small ﬁnds, not belonging to architecture and sculpture, is to be mentioned the discovery of two little archive chambers in the fortiﬁcation wall: not apparently the archives of the State, but either military or judicial records. There are about ten thousand intact examples, ten thousand more or less complete ones, and probably more than ten thousand fragments. The shapes vary greatly, from the largest ever known to the smallest. They are mostly in Elamite cuneiform, and will require years of labor and study to be deciphered. Among them are about ﬁve hundred small pieces with Aramaic writing in ink. As an exception there was found one piece—perhaps there are more—in Phrygian letters and language” (pp. 231–32). As I mentioned long ago in Rois, tributs et paysans (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1982), 505 n. 41, the great French historian Édouard Will “discovered” the existence of the Persepolis tablets only through David Lewis, Sparta and Persia (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977); see Édouard Will, review of Sparta and Persia, by David Lewis, Revue de Philologie 2 (1979): 315. 47 See also Briant, Histoire de l’empire perse, 466–71, 967–68; Briant, Bulletin d’Histoire Achéménide, 134–36 n. 281.

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to present the discovery of the tablets, to which he returned at greater length in a later chapter. To be sure, Olmstead himself worked at Chicago and, as he himself said, could beneﬁt from his collaboration and conversations with his colleagues—and his own students, including Cameron, Hallock, and others—who worked on “the cardcatalogue dictionary of Old Persian” and the counterpart dictionaries of Aramaic and Elamite and who prepared the editions of the tablets. But this proximity, from which Herzfeld could theoretically have beneﬁted, does not explain everything. If Olmstead immediately introduced discussions of these tablets, it was because he was a true historian, careful to examine all the documentary corpora, to determine their speciﬁcity but also to reveal the interdocumentary connections.48 He was equally concerned, as he insisted so vigorously, not to reduce the work of the historian to a description of the palace and the life of the court. On the contrary, he found in these new Persepolitan documents, as in the Babylonian and Aramaic documents, testimony to the daily life of ordinary people. The last sentence of Olmstead’s book makes the following declaration, full of legitimate pride in the work already accomplished by all the specialists, and especially full of optimism for the future that he did not have a chance to see but which he did much to prepare: “Now at last, through the united eﬀort of archeologist, philologist, and historian, Achaemenid Persia has risen from the dead.”49 There is no doubt that at this time he had understood that the Persepolis tablets were going to play a decisive role in this renewal. Operating in a milieu where the information coming from Persepolis converged, Olmstead was able to detect immediately among the recent information that which was truly new. It is not the least of his claims to glory!

48 Matthew Stolper, “A. T. Olmstead,” in American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 16:695–96, provides a short but very informative notice. 49 A. T. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 524.

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Dates 1838–1878 1843–1854 1846 1847

Documentary Publications (A selected list)

French translation of the Shah-nameh by Jules Mohl E. Flandin and P. Coste, Voyage en Perse (1840–1841) H. C. Rawlinson, Persian Cuneiform Inscription at Behistoun, London Letronne, Mémoire de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 17/1 (1847), on the Persian period in Egypt 1857 W. K. Loftus, Travels and Researches in Chaldæa and Susiana, London De Luynes, Mémoire sur le sarcophage d’Eshmunazar, Paris 1878–79 C. Clermont-Ganneau, “Origine perse des monuments araméens d’Égypte,” RA 36: 93–107; 37: 21–39 1880 H. C. Rawlinson, JRAS 12 (Cyrus Cylinder) 1882 F. Stolze and T. Nöldeke, Persepolis . . ., I–II, Berlin 1885 Discovery of the “lions and bowmen” at Susa (in M. Dieulafoy’s excavations) 1889 Cousin-Deschamps, BCH 13, “Letter of Darius to Gadatas” 1890, 1897 J. N. Strassmaier, Inschriften von Kambyses, . . . Cyrus, . . . Darius, Leipzig 1892 Hamdy Bey-Reinach, Une nécropole royale à Sidon, Paris 1892 J. Darmesteter, Le Zend-Avesta, I–III, Annales du Musée Guimet, Paris 1893 M. Dieulafoy, L’acropole de Suse, Paris 1893 E. Babelon, Les Perses achéménides . . . (coin catalogue), Paris 1898 H. Brugsch, Reise nach der grossen Oasen El Khargah, Leipzig 1898 Hilprecht-Clay, Business documents . . ., BE IX, Philadelphia 1905 De Morgan, MDP VIII (tomb of a Persian “princess” at Susa) 1906 Sayce-Cowley, Aramaic Papyri Discovered at Assuan, London 1905 Dalton, Oxus Treasure 1907 King-Thompson, The Sculptures and Inscriptions of Darius the Great at Behistoun, London 1908 E. Herzfeld, “Pasargadae. Untersuchungen zur persischen Archäologie,” Klio 81: 1–68 1911 F. H. Weissbach, Die Keilsinschriften der Achämeniden, Leipzig 1912 Clay, Business Documents of Murashû . . ., BE X, Philadelphia 1922 H. C. Butler, Sardis I: The Excavations, Leiden 1923 A. E. Cowley, Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century B.C., Oxford 1925 L. Legrain, The Culture of the Babylonians From Their Seals, Philadelphia 1929–1930 E. Herzfeld, “Bericht über die Ausgrabungen von Pasargadae 1928,” AMI 1: 4–19 1929–1930 E. Herzfeld, “Rapport sur l’état actuel des ruines de Persépolis et propositions pour leur conservation,” AMI 1: 17–40 1938 E. Herzfeld, Altpersische Inschriften, Berlin

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Table 1 (cont.)

Dates 1939 1942 1948

Documentary Publications (A selected list) E. F. Schmidt, The Treasury of Persepolis and Other Discoveries in the Homeland of the Persians, Chicago G. G. Cameron, “Darius’ daughter and the Persepolis Inscriptions,” JNES 1: 214–219 G. G. Cameron, Persepolis Treasury Texts, Chicago Table 2

Dates 1681

Historical Synthesis

Bossuet, Discours sur l’histoire universelle, Paris (Eng. trans. London 1730) 1730 C. Rollin, Histoire ancienne, I–XVI, Paris (Eng. trans. London 1862–67) 1815 A. H. Malcolm, The History of Persia, I–II, London 1833 H. G. Droysen, Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen, Berlin 1837 F. Hegel, Vorlesungen . . . (Leçons sur la philosophie de l’histoire, Paris, 1963 Première partie: Le monde oriental; Troisième section: La Perse, 133–168) 1839 A. J. M. de Saint-Félix, Précis de l’histoire des peuples anciens. III: Histoire des nations iramiques [sic], Paris: 275–448 1846 G. Grote, History of Greece, 12 vols., London 1850 W. S. A. Vaux, Nineveh and Persepolis, London 1867 G. Rawlinson, The Fifth Oriental Monarchy, London 1869 J. A. de Gobineau, Histoire des Perses, I–II, Paris 1875 G. Maspéro, Histoire ancienne des peuples de l’Orient, Paris (1st ed.) 1871 Fr. Spiegel, Erânische Althertumskunde, I–III, Leipzig 1879 F. Justi, Geschichte des alten Persiens, Berlin 1883 G. Weber, Histoire universelle, II: Histoire grecque, les peuples orientaux, Paris, French translation from the 9th German edition 1883 H. G. Droysen, Histoire de l’hellénisme, I, French trans., Paris 1884 F. Justi, Geschichte der orientalischen Völker, Berlin (Fünfter Abschnitt: Die Herrschaft der Perser; 373–426: Die Achämeniden) 1884–1885 M. Dieulafoy, L’art antique de la Perse, Paris 1885 J. Darmesteter, Coup d’œil sur l’histoire de la Perse (Leçon d’ouverture au Collège de France), Paris 1886 T. Nöldeke, “Persia,” Encyclopaedia Britannica 1887 T. Nöldeke, Aufsätze zur persischen Geschichte, Leipzig 1888 S. G. W. Benjamin, Persia, London-New York 1890 G. Perrot – C. Chipiez, Histoire de l’art dans l’antiquité, V, Paris (Book X: La Perse, 403–897) 1894–1904 T. Nöldeke, Das iranische Nationalepos, Strassburg (Eng. trans.

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Table 2 (cont.)

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Historical Synthesis

Bombay 1930) E. Meyer, Die Entstehung des Judentums. Eine historische Untersuchung, Leipzig 1899 G. Maspéro, Histoire ancienne des peuples de l’Orient Classique, IV, Paris (VI: La conquête iranienne, 569–695; VII: La ﬁn du vieux monde oriental, 697–814) 1900 G. Rawlinson, Ancient History, New York, The Colonial Press, rev. ed. (Book II, 77–94: History of Persia, 558–330) 1906–1910 V. Prasek, Geschichte der Meder und Perser bis zur makedonischen Eroberung, I–II, Gotha 1925 Cl. Huart, La civilisation iranienne, Paris 1929–1930 E. Herzfeld, ed., AMI, vol. 1 (Herzfeld, 1–185) 1936 A. Christensen, Les gestes des rois dans les traditions de l’Iran antique, Paris 1938 E. Benveniste, Les mages dans l’Iran ancien, Paris 1940 W. Eilers, Iranische Beamtennamen . . ., Leipzig 1941 E. Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, Oxford 1943 C. Huart and L. Delaporte, L’Iran antique. Élam et Perse et la civilisation iranienne, Paris 1946 G. Cardascia submits his thesis, Les archives des Murashû (= Paris 1951) 1947 E. Herzfeld, Zoroaster and His World, 2 vols., Princeton [1947] E. Herzfeld, [Studies in history and geography of the Ancient East] = 1968 1948 Death of E. Herzfeld and posthumous publication of A. T. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire, Chicago

1896

ERNST HERZFELD AND SASANIAN STUDIES Josef Wiesehöfer

Looking back on the general developments during the Sasanian period in Iran, we must emphasize that there is no continuous development in art arising from spontaneous creative power. It is no sovereign art that creates its own law. A period of 500 years of complete surrender to Hellenism is followed, under the Sasanian empire, by a period in which the foreign inﬂuences and elements are expelled: half a conscious reversive movement, half an unconscious relapse into previous stages; a reaction with weak activity.1

This quotation from Ernst Herzfeld’s Archaeological History of Iran, published in 1935, summarizes in short and concise sentences the historicocultural importance he was inclined to assign to the Sasanian period of Iranian history. In my article, and in light of this assessment by the man we remember in this volume, I will focus on three central questions: How can we describe Herzfeld’s role in Sasanian studies? Why and how did Herzfeld come to his speciﬁc assessment of Sasanian history and culture? And which new methodological reﬂections and which new insights regarding the content have, in the meantime, enabled us to go beyond Ernst Herzfeld’s observations and judgments? Before I discuss these questions, however, I wish to look back at the history of Sasanian studies up to the beginning of the twentieth century, when Herzfeld set new trends through his archaeological work in Iran.

The Sasanians in Early Modern Historical Interpretation Although most of the Sasanian monuments are situated in Fars, the Persis of the Greeks—that is, in the ultimate vicinity of the Achaemenid residences and tombs of Persepolis, Pasargadae, and Naqsh-i Rustam— their inspection, description, and interpretation took second place to 1 Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 107. I would like to thank Vesta and John Curtis, London, for improving my English and discussing the subject matter with me.

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that of the earlier symbols of Iranian greatness. It is true that some of the European diplomats and travelers prior to the mid-eighteenth century, who crossed Fars on their way to and from Safavid Isfahan or in conscious search of Persepolis, also encountered the archaeological and epigraphical remains of Sasanian times.2 This was the case, for example, with Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who visited the relief of Barm-i Dilak near Shiraz, and Engelbert Kaempfer, who also described the relief of Sarab-i Bahram, as well as with many others who came to see the Sasanian rock reliefs of Naqsh-i Rustam.3 Their eﬀorts to describe, draw, and interpret them, however, were much less enthusiastic than those to discover the function of Persepolis or to identify the builder or creator of the Achaemenid monuments. With

2 Although the history of European encounters with Iranian monuments of Sasanian times still is a desideratum, despite Alfons Gabriel, Die Erforschung Persiens. Die Entwicklung der abendländischen Kenntnis der Geographie Persiens (Vienna: A. Holzhausens, 1952) and G. Homayoun, “Iran in europäischen Bildzeugnissen vom Ausgang des Mittelalters bis ins achtzehnte Jahrhundert” (Ph.D. diss., Cologne University, 1967), some useful material may be found in books and articles on the history of the Achaemenid monuments in Iran. See, for example, Jan-Willem Drijvers and Heleen SancisiWeerdenburg, eds., Through Travellers’ Eyes: European Travellers on the Iranian Monuments, AchHist 7 (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1991); Antonio Invernizzi, ed., In viaggio per l’Oriente: Le mummie, Babilonia, Persepoli: Pietro Della Valle (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2001); Josef Wiesehöfer, “ ‘Sie waren das Juwel von allem, was er gesehen.’ Niebuhr und die Ruinenstätten des Alten Iran,” in Carsten Niebuhr (1733–1815) und seine Zeit, ed. Josef Wiesehöfer and Stephan Conermann, Oriens et occidens: Studien zu antiken Kulturkontakten und ihrem Nachleben Bd. 5 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2002), 267–85. Short but concise histories of the European discovery of the Orient are found in Georgina Herrmann, The Iranian Revival (Oxford: Elsevier-Phaidon, 1977), 9–24; John Curtis, Ancient Persia, 2d ed. (London: British Museum, 2000), 84–89; Philip Huyse, “Iranistik,” in Der Neue Pauly: Rezeptions-und Wissenschaftsgeschichte Bd. 14 (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1999), 633–41; and the articles “France” and “Germany,” in EncIr, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2001), 10:126–87; 506–74. 3 For Barm-i Dilak, see Jean Baptiste Tavernier, Les six voyages de Jean Baptiste Tavernier, ecuyer Baron d’Aubonne, en Turquie, en Perse, et aux Indes (Paris: G. Clouzier, 1679), 1:736–37; Engelbert Kaempfer, Amoenitatum exoticarum politico-physico-medicarum fasciculi v, quibus continentur variæ relationes, observationes & descriptiones rerum Persicarum & ulterioris Asiæ (Lemgo: H. W. Meyeri, 1712), 361–62; cf. L. Vanden Berghe, “Barme Delak,” in EncIr, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1989), 3:805–6. For Sarab-i Bahram, see Kaempfer, Amoenitatum exoticarum, 365; Georgina Herrmann, The Sasanian Rock Reliefs at Bishapur, Part 3, Iranische Denkmäler, Lfg. 11; Reihe 2, Iranische Felsreliefs (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1983), 28–31. On Kaempfer, see Josef Wiesehöfer, “ ‘A me igitur . . . Figurarum verum auctorem . . . nemo desideret.’ Engelbert Kaempfer und der Alte Iran,” in Engelbert Kaempfer: Werk und Wirkung. Vorträge der Symposien in Lemgo (19–22. 9. 1990) und in Tokyo (15–18. 12. 1990), ed. Detlef Haberland, Boethius 32 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1993), 105–32. For Naqsh-i Rustam, see the literature mentioned in this and the preceding note.

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regard to their Sasanian counterparts, most travelers did not bother at all to ask those questions; instead, they often recorded only the (obviously legendary) indigenous interpretation of the monuments as those of the Iranian hero Rustam, sometimes with a slightly contemptuous undertone. It must be said in their favor, however, that the early modern travelers were accustomed to viewing all Oriental places in the light of the biblical and Graeco-Roman traditions. Their reports, drawings, and interpretations therefore testify more to European mentalities of their times than to the condition of the monuments they visited. And since the Sasanians, the last of the great Iranian dynasties of pre-Islamic times, clearly played a less important role in the classical tradition than did the Achaemenids or the Parthians, the travelers’ ignorance of their history and legacy is all the more understandable. As in the ﬁeld of Achaemenid studies, the three-week visit in 1765 by Carsten Niebuhr, my compatriot and ﬁrst scientiﬁc traveler, marks something of a break. On the one hand, he assigned, more clearly than his predecessors, the “Rustamic” images, as he also called them, to a time later than Alexander’s burning of Persepolis. At the same time, however, in a modest and rather unprejudiced way, he took seriously the eﬀorts of the indigenous interpreters. On the other hand, it was Niebuhr’s precise observations, measurements, drawings, and copies, which—as in the ﬁeld of cuneiform studies—allowed scholars in Europe to make further progress. In this case they enabled Antoine Silvestre de Sacy, holder of the chair of Persian and Arabic at the Collège de France, to decipher epigraphical Middle Persian and Parthian and to assist in the founding of comparative Indo-Iranian studies.4 After the return of politically settled conditions in Iran following the ﬁnal triumph of the Qajar shahs, the country experienced a considerable increase in foreign visitors. Their eﬀorts to interpret the pre-Islamic remains also led to a marked improvement in the recording of those monuments. This process was particularly aided by photography, which supplemented the very precise drawings of the new

4 Carsten Niebuhr, Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegenden Ländern (Copenhagen: Nicolaus Möller, 1778), 2:119–65; for his description of Persepolis and Naqsh-i Rustam, his relationship with de Sacy, and the progress of Iranian studies, see Wiesehöfer, “Niebuhr und die Ruinenstätten des Alten Iran”; for the history of the decipherment of epigraphical Middle Persian and Parthian, see E. Drouin, “Histoire de l’épigraphie sassanide,” Le Muséon 17 (1898): 5–14, 108–21.

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century. At the same time, Sasanian remains outside the Persepolis region increasingly received attention. As far as we know today, James J. Morier was the ﬁrst European who visited not only the Sasanian relief at Rayy, but also the city of Bishapur, where he recorded the ruins of the residence of Shabuhr I, the fortress overlooking it, and the six monumental reliefs carved in the nearby gorge.5 He failed to discover the famous statue of the king carved out of a stalactite in a cave (Mudan), which was found in 1811 some weeks after Morier had left Bishapur by a Major Stone and published by Sir William Ouseley. This latter Oriental scholar was the ﬁrst who visited the sculptures at Darabgird and assigned them to Shabuhr.6 Soon afterward, in 1818–19, the “historical painter” Sir Robert Ker Porter, who had been sent to Iran by the president of the Russian Academy of Fine Arts to carefully draw the ancient monuments, recorded the Sasanian relief at Salmas in Azerbaijan and the late Sasanian grotto at Taq-i Bustan near Kirmanshah.7 This second monument, by the way, had already been visited by Guillaume Joseph Grelot and JeanBaptiste Tavernier in the seventeenth century.8 It was during the 1830s and 1840s that the “father of Assyriology,” as he is now called in Great Britain, Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, traveled widely in northwestern Iran and northeastern Iraq. There he visited the ruins of Paikuli as well as the famous Sasanian ﬁre temple of Adhur-Gushnasp on the Takht-i Sulaiman, destroyed by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius in 624.9 Traveling in Iran at the same

5 James J. Morier, A Second Journey through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor to Constantinople, between 1810 and 1816 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818), 190 (Rayy); James J. Morier, A Journey through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor to Constantinople in the Years 1808 and 1809 (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1812), 87–90 (Bishapur). On Morier, see Hugh McKenzie Johnston, Ottoman and Persian Odysseys: James Morier, Creator of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, and His Brothers (London: British Academic Press, 1998). 6 William Ouseley, Travels in Various Countries of the East, More Particularly Persia (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1821), 2:146–48. Kaempfer had already heard of them more than one hundred years earlier: “Urbium quoque Firusabaad & Daraab vicini montes Sculpturis Rustamicis, quas vocant, superbire dicuntur.” Kaempfer, Amoenitatum exoticarum, 365. 7 Robert Ker Porter, Travels in Georgia, Persia, Armenia, Ancient Babylonia, etc. during the Years 1817, 1818, 1819 and 1820 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821), 2:597, pl. 82 (Salmas); 171ﬀ., pls. 62–64 (Taq-i Bustan). 8 L. Vanden Berghe, Reliefs rupestres de l’Iran ancien (Brussels: Les Musées, 1983), 13. 9 For Paikuli, see Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, “Notes on a March from Zohàb, at the Foot of Zagros, along the Mountains to Khuzistan (Susiana), and from Thence through the Province of Luristan to Kirmanshah, in the Year 1836,” JRGS 9 (1839):

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time as Rawlinson, from 1839 to 1841, were the Frenchmen Charles Texier, Eugène Flandin, and Pascal Coste. Whereas Texier sketched the relief at Salmas near Lake Urmiyah, the painter Flandin and the architect Coste prepared plans and drawings of buildings and other rock reliefs.10 To them we owe our ﬁrst knowledge of the sculptures and palaces at Firuzabad as well as of the palace at Sarvistan.11 Other important travelers at the end of the nineteenth century included Friedrich Stolze and Friedrich Carl Andreas from Germany, who, after a long journey through Persia from 1874 to 1881, published two volumes of photographic records of Persepolis and Pasargadae as well as Bishapur.12 The quality of those early photographs, however, did not equal the precision and sharpness of Flandin’s drawings. When, as a result of the extremely successful excavations of Jane and Marcel-Auguste Dieulafoy at Susa, as well as through political and economic pressure, the French were granted a long-lasting archaeological monopoly in Iran in 1897, most archaeologists of other nations had to look for new sites in other parts of the Near East.13 Others, like Herzfeld, traveled through the country surveying more or less important places (see below). The turn of the century was also the end of a very fruitful period in European scholarship. As results of those

26–126; cf. Helmut Humbach, “Sir Henry Rawlinson’s Copies of the Paikuli Inscription,” in Mémorial Jean de Menasce, ed. Philippe Gignoux and Ahmad Tafazzoli (Louvain: Impr. orientaliste, 1974), 199–204. On Takht-i Sulaiman, see Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, “Notes on a Journey from Tabriz through Persian Kurdistan, to the Ruins of Takhti-Soleiman, and from Thence by Zenjan & Tarom, to Gilam, in Oct. and Nov. 1838,” JRGS 10 (1841): 51ﬀ.; cf. Rudolf Naumann, Die Ruinen von Tacht-e Suleiman und Zendan-e Suleiman und Umgebung, Führer zu archäologischen Plätzen in Iran, Bd. 2 (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1977). 10 Charles Texier, Description de l’Arménie, la Perse et la Mésopotamie (Paris: Didot, 1852), 2:33–34; see also Marie-Louise Chaumont, Recherches sur l’histoire d’Arménie, de l’avènement des Sassanides à la conversion du royaume (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1969), 173–75. Eugène Flandin and Pascal Coste, Voyage en Perse de MM. Eugène Flandin, Peintre, et Pascale Coste, architecte, 6 vols. (Paris: Gide et J. Baudry, 1843–54). 11 Ibid., 1:36ﬀ., 2:340ﬀ., 1:23ﬀ., 374ﬀ. 12 Friedrich C. Andreas and Friedrich Stolze, Persepolis, 2 vols. (Berlin: Ahser & Co., 1882). 13 Francine Tissot, “Délégation archéologiques françaises, i. Délégation Archéologique Française en Iran,” in EncIr, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 1996), 7:238–40; Kamyar Abdi, “Nationalism, Politics, and the Development of Archaeology in Iran,” AJA 105 (2001): 51–76; Stefan R. Hauser, “German Studies in the Ancient Near East and Their Relation to Political and Economic Interests from the Kaiserreich to World War II,” in Germany and the Middle East, 1871–1945, ed. Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, Princeton Papers, Interdisciplinary Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 10/11 (2004), 155–80. See also Boucharlat and Mousavi, this volume.

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eﬀorts, one has to remember, among others, Wilhelm Geiger’s and Ernst Kuhn’s Grundriß der iranischen Philologie, the Avesta edition of Karl Friedrich Geldner, still valid today, James Darmesteter’s linguistic Études iraniennes, and Jules Mohl’s important edition (and French translation) of Firdowsi’s Shahnamah, in which the Sasanians appear as pre-Islamic Iranian kings par excellence.14 There was a turn in historical research when in 1889 George Rawlinson added two chapters on the Parthians and Sasanians to his monumental The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World, originally published in four volumes in 1862–67.15 Traditional in its view of the Orient, this work, especially in its Sasanian section, had two major advantages over former accounts. On the one hand, it consulted, for the ﬁrst time, not only the Romano-Byzantine sources, but also the Armenian, Syriac, and Arab authors, as well as Sasanian coins and even the newly discovered archaeological remains. On the other, it was not merely a chronicle of political and military events but also devoted itself, in separate chapters, to Sasanian art as well as to the cults and religious movements of the empire, to kingship and life at court, to warfare and daily life. In considering the Oriental tradition, Rawlinson thereby forged links to the Islamic views of Sasanian history, hitherto noticed in Europe only by experts. The same applied to the history of Eastern Christianity, the Syriac part of which, however, after decades of the edition of texts, could only resort after the turn of the century to grammars, dictionaries, and detailed literary histories.16 One of the fundamental results of the race by several nations in the beginning of the twentieth century for the archaeological and manuscript treasures of the Turfan oases along the Silk Road was the decisive increase in our knowledge of the Middle Iranian languages. Whereas previously only the Parthian and Middle Persian of the 14 Wilhelm Geiger and Ernst Kuhn, Grundriss der iranischen Philologie (Strassburg: K. J. Trübner, 1895–1904); Karl F. Geldner, Avesta. The Sacred Books of the Parsis (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1886–96); James Darmesteter, Études iraniennes, 2 vols. (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1883); Jules Mohl, Le livre des rois, 7 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1838–78). 15 George Rawlinson, The Seven Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World; or, The History, Geography, and Antiquities of Chaldæa, Assyria, Babylon, Media, Persia, Parthia, and Sassanian or New Persian Empire (New York: Hurst, 1889). 16 For the history of scholarship, see Micheline Albert et al., Christianismes orientaux: Introduction à l’étude des langues et des littératures, Initiations au christianisme ancien (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1993).

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Sasanian inscriptions and the Middle Persian of the Zoroastrian texts had been known, many new scripts and languages now came to light: Manichean Parthian and Middle Persian, Buddhist, Manichean and Nestorian Sogdian, Khotanese, and Tumshuqese. It was not least these Middle Iranian texts, parts of which still remain unpublished to this day, which revolutionized our view of the religious aﬀairs of the Sasanian empire and its adjacent regions, and they still have a surprise in store.17 When the French monopoly on excavations in Iran ﬁnally came to an end in 1927, this not only made way for the ambitions of archaeologists from other countries, like Herzfeld, but men and women both in Iran and in Europe who were deeply interested in Sasanian history and culture could now also rely on a more solid basis of historical knowledge and methodology. It is not least Ernst Herzfeld’s work that testiﬁes to the fact that those people were even able to develop new ideas and in the course of their speciﬁc scholarly endeavors, introduce new trends into scholarship.

Ernst Herzfeld and the “Archaeology” of Sasanian Iran In a similar way [to Edward G. Browne’s great Literary History of Persia, which is history abstracted from literature] history can be written from archaeological monuments, in deﬁning archaeology as something wider than a mere history of ancient art and in taking as an archaeological document every object from which conclusions as to the political and cultural developments of antiquity may be drawn, whether it be architecture, sculpture, small works of art and industry, inscriptions and other written documents, or, otherwise, myths and legends, coins, royal names, titles, and protocols. 18

These general methodological remarks from the preface to Herzfeld’s Archaeological History of Iran also characterize his approach to Sasanian studies: on the one hand, a deﬁnition of the sources that strikes the reader as almost modern; on the other, a methodological and heuristic 17 For the Turfan texts, see Horst Klengel and Werner Sundermann, eds., Ägypten, Vorderasien, Turfan: Probleme der Edition und Bearbeitung altorientalischer Handschriften, Schriften zur Geschichte und Kultur des alten Orients 23 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1991); for the Manichean texts, consult the bibliography in Gunnar B. Mikkelsen, Bibliographia Manichaica: A Comprehensive Bibliography of Manichaeism through 1996, Corpus fontium manichaeorum, Subsidia I (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997). 18 Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, v.

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equipment of analysis and evaluation. With his education in the humanities; his training in Oriental languages, ancient history, archaeology, and structural engineering; and, in a Polybian manner, his familiarity with all problems of historical geography and topography, Herzfeld was predestined to be a scholar in the ﬁeld of Sasanian studies. If Ardashir and his successors did not arouse his special interest, this is due less to the subject itself than to the overwhelming amount of Herzfeld’s tasks and interests. Since I can only be asked to give a preliminary assessment of Herzfeld’s achievements regarding Sasanian history and culture—there is still a lot of work to be done in various archives—I would like to characterize them as follows: 1. his eﬀort to base historical and archaeological research on sources deﬁned as broadly as possible; 2. the discovery of the Sasanian reliefs at Guyum and Sar Mashhad;19 3. the ﬁrst scientiﬁc work on the Iranian rock reliefs, illustrated by photographs taken or obtained by Friedrich Sarre, to be followed up by numerous studies on individual sculptures;20 4. the attribution of the rock reliefs to speciﬁc Sasanian kings on the basis of a crown typology gained from Sasanian coins and a ﬁrst serious eﬀort to deﬁne Sasanian mints;21 5. a hint at the importance of seals and bullae for the reconstruction of Sasanian administration;22

19 For Guyum, see Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 250; cf. L. Vanden Berghe, “Het rotsrelief te Guyum in het licht van de hofkunst van de Sassanidische koning Bahram II,” Gentse Bijdragen tot de Kunstgeschiedenis en Oudheidkunde 18 (1959): 1–21. For Sar Mashhad, see Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 256; Ernst Herzfeld, “La sculpture rupestre de la Perse sassanide,” Revue des arts asiatiques 5 (1928): 137; Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 100; Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 325; cf. Leo Trümpelmann, Das sasanidische Felsrelief von Sar Ma“had, Iranische Denkmäler, Lfg. 5 Reihe 2, Iranische Felsreliefs, A (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1975). 20 For Sasanian rock reliefs, see Sarre and Herzfeld, Iranische Felsreliefs; Herzfeld, “La sculpture rupestre de la Perse sassanide.” For additional and special studies devoted to individual monuments, including Naqsh-i Rustam, Naqsh-i Rajab, Bishapur, Taq-i Bustan, Rayy, Salmas, and Firuzabad, see Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 55ﬀ., 81, 83–87, 101ﬀ.; Iran in the Ancient East, 97–100, 306, 311, 313–24, 328; Herzfeld, Am Tor von Asien, 57–111, 149 n. 59; Herzfeld, “Khusrau Parwez und der Taq i Vastàn,” AMI 9 (1938): 91–158. 21 Ernst Herzfeld, “Achaemenid Coinage and Sasanian Mint-Names,” in Transactions of the International Numismatic Congress 1936, ed. J. Allan, H. Mattingly, and E. S. G. Robinson (London: B. Quaritch, 1938), 413–26. 22 Herzfeld, Paikuli, 74–82; Herzfeld, “Achaemenid Coinage and Sasanian Mint-

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6. an exact description and characterization of numerous well-known Sasanian monuments, such as the ruins of the Sasanian palaces at Firuzabad, Qasr-i Shirin, and Ctesiphon;23 7. the reconstruction of the tower of Paikuli, its assignment to King Narseh, and a ﬁrst attempt to give a translation and philological commentary of both versions of the inscription;24 8. the excavation of the ruins at Kuh-i Khwaja in Sistan;25 and 9. ﬁnally, the attempt to present comprehensive and popular syntheses of Iranian history and culture, thereby questioning and, when necessary, bridging historical caesuras, such as that between preIslamic and Islamic Iran, as well as the limits of diﬀerent academic disciplines, such as that of ancient Near Eastern and Islamic archaeology

Herzfeld’s View of Sasanian History and Culture A summarizing assessment of Sasanian history and culture by Ernst Herzfeld can be found in his Archaeological History of Iran, in his Iran in the Ancient East, and in an essay on the “early history of the Sasanian Empire” (especially of its eastern parts) in his Paikuli monograph.26 Whereas the ﬁrst may be characterized as an attempt to connect the development of Sasanian art with the course of the Sasanian history of events (thus providing the historian with plenty of material for discussion), the second restricts itself to deﬁning Sasanian art as a “language” that changed its features in the course of time.

Names.” Material on Herzfeld’s commitment to Sasanian glyptic can be found in the Herzfeld records in Washington, D.C., and New York, as Stefan Hauser has kindly informed me. 23 Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 253; Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 88, 90ﬀ., 93–95; Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 314 f.; cf. Dietrich Huﬀ, “Firuzabad,” in EncIr, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 1999), 9:633–36; Herzfeld, “Luristan,” 49–63, 73–90; Herzfeld, Am Tor von Asien; cf. Oscar Reuther, Die Ausgrabungen der deutschen Ktesiphon-expedition im Winter 1928–29 (Wittenberg: Herrosé & Ziemsen, 1929); Jens Kröger, “Ctesiphon,” in EncIr, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 1993), 6:406. 24 Herzfeld, Paikuli 1914; Herzfeld, Paikuli 1924. See also Skjærvø’s contribution to this volume. 25 Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 270ﬀ.; Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 58ﬀ.; Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 291ﬀ.; and Kawami, this volume. 26 Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 76ﬀ.; Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 275ﬀ.; Herzfeld, Paikuli 1914: 35ﬀ.

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josef wiesehöfer . . . Sasanian art is a foreign language imposed upon a conquered population, Greek in grammar, declension and conjugation, but Iranian in vocabulary, phonetics and syntax. The Greek dialect adopted was one that was not spoken in western regions, but in the East, an isolated and therefore archaic dialect. The history of that mixed language is the gradual elimination of the foreign elements.27

Trying to get to the heart of Herzfeld’s view of Sasanian cultural history, one might recall the following quotation from his Archaeological History of Iran: “The Sasanian epoch is one of reaction of the oriental mind against Hellenism.”28 It is a Hellenism that, according to Herzfeld, had never really been understood in Iran and the inﬂuence of which is described as “aggressive” and “destructive.”29 And as the development of Sasanian art in the end is characterized as a process of degeneration in three phases, Sasanian history also appears as a gradual decline. The mighty kings of the third century, on the one hand insistently stressing their ideological and real superiority, but on the other inclined and able to grant religious freedom, were followed by the orthodox Zoroastrian Shabuhr II, whose intolerance paralyzed all intellectual life.30 In the end, there is, discernible in the “naïve” and “senile” art of Taq-i Bustan and in the rather lowbrow late Sasanian literature, “le roi qui s’amuse.”31 The Nachleben of Sasanian art is only due to the fact that the conquering Arabs had no superior civilization. Likewise, that of Sasanian history—for Herzfeld—is owed to the ﬁrm conviction of the Iranian people, who were never able to experience real historiography, that the Sasanian world of Iranian epics and legends is the historical one.32 Herzfeld’s interest in Sasanian epigraphy, numismatics, and archaeology not only inﬂuenced his view of Sasanian cultural history, but also his reconstruction of the history of events. In his book on the Paikuli monument and inscription, Herzfeld tried to draw up the genealogy of the house of Sasan (of the third century) and to describe the eﬀorts of the early Sasanians to control eastern Iran. He began his attempt by comparing the late Sasanian historical tradition concerning the rise of the Sasanians, handed down to us by Islamic historiographers (such as Tabari), with the Iranian legendary one (the 27 28 29 30 31 32

Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 339ﬀ. Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 79. Ibid., 99, 75. Ibid., 100. Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 338. Herzfeld, “Mythos und Geschichte,” 109.

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Karnamag), judging the value of each tradition in the light of corroborative numismatic and epigraphic evidence. In contrast to modern assessments, Herzfeld was thereby inclined to believe in the version of the Karnamag “that Ardashir (I) was the Arsacidan king’s son-inlaw and held a high oﬃce at the court.”33 For the history of the eastern parts of Iran during the early Sasanian epoch, he proposed the conquests of “Sijistan, Makuran, and Turan, and of the whole country to the north of the Hindukush” in the time of Ardashir, that “of the whole of Sakastan” by Vahram II during the war against his rebellious brother Hormizd, and the loss of “sovereignty over the Indian parts of Sakastan” during the war between Vahram III and Narseh in 293.34 He did so by ﬁrst abstracting those facts from both Western and Oriental literary tradition and from the inscriptions (especially Narseh’s from Paikuli) and then by trying to prove those deductions with the help of numismatic evidence (especially that of the KushanoSasanian coins).35 On the basis of those facts and inferences, Herzfeld was ﬁnally able to draw up a genealogical stemma of the ﬁrst eight generations of the Sasanian dynasty.36 It must have been one of many scholarly disappointments for him that not he, but his successor in Persepolitan aﬀairs, Erich F. Schmidt, had the lucky idea of removing the dust from the so-called Ka'ba-i Zardusht, thereby discovering the three versions of Shabuhr I’s political testament (Res Gestae Divi Saporis).37 Although some of the riddles of early Sasanian history are still to be solved (for example, the relationship between the Sasanian realm and Kushanshahr or the dating of the Kushano-Sasanian coins), the reading of this inscription has proved to be crucial for the reconstruction of early Sasanian history.38 It is a pity that Herzfeld in his last years obviously felt unable to reconsider his ideas about the early Sasanian history of events in the light of this new evidence.39 33

Herzfeld, Paikuli 1914: 40. Herzfeld, Paikuli 1914: 39ﬀ., 43. 35 Cf. Ernst Herzfeld, Kushano-Sasanian Coins, Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India 38 (Calcutta: Government of India Central Publication Branch, 1930). 36 Herzfeld, Paikuli 1914: 51. 37 For the history of the discovery of ”KZ, see Ernst A. J. Honigmann and André Maricq, Recherches sur les Res gestae divi Saporis (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1953), 3ﬀ. and the bibliographical references in M. Mancini, “Bilingui greco-iraniche in epoca sasanide. Il testo di ”àhpuhr alla Ka'ba-yi Zardu“t,” in Bilinguismo e biculturalismo nel mondo antico (Pisa: Giardini, 1988), 79 n. 16. 38 Philip Huyse, Die dreisprachige Inschrift ”abuhrs I. an der Ka'ba-i Zardu“t (”KZ), vols. 1 and 2, Pahlavi Inscriptions, no. 3 (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1999). 39 Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, does not quite come up to those expectations, since it is rather a treatise on cultural history than one on the history of events. 34

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Considerable progress in the ﬁeld of Sasanian studies has been made in three diﬀerent respects since Herzfeld’s death. First, progress has been made in the ﬁelds of source research and source veriﬁcation, for example, with the edition of the inscriptions of the third century, of Zoroastrian texts and late Sasanian law books, through a systematic compilation and annotation of the archaeological material and the reﬁnement of numismatic typology.40 With their help a number of Herzfeld’s judgments that he had to make on a rather unclear source basis could be veriﬁed or refuted. Herzfeld, for example, was inclined to identify the religious reformer Tansar (Tosar) of the Denkard with the famous historical mobad Kerdir, whose name he took as a title. Progress both in the decipherment of the inscriptions and in Middle Iranian linguistics and onomastics, as well as a new assessment of the historical value and the point of view of late Sasanian religious tradition helped to settle the case. Today, Kerdir’s cursus honorum and his religious convictions and visions help us both to analyze the relationship between the Zoroastrian clergy and the kings of the third century and to identify motives of Zoroastrian doctrine and eschatology. Tosar, on the other hand, has been rightly interpreted as a religious ﬁgure who played an important role in the late Sasanian reevaluation of the history of the Zoroastrian Holy Book(s).41 Second, it is true that scholarship has conﬁrmed Herzfeld’s broad concept of “archaeological” sources; at the same time, however, it has clearly stressed and underlined the diﬀerent value and the speciﬁc viewpoint of the various genres.42 Arthur Christensen’s epoch-making L’Iran sous les Sassanides (1944), a book that is characterized by the same kind of source veriﬁcation, also needs revision in that particular respect. Last, but not least, new studies of Sasanian art and culture 40 Cf. Carlo G. Cereti, “Primary Sources for the History of Inner and Outer Iran in the Sasanian Period,” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 9 (1997): 17–71; and Josef Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia, 2d ed. (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 283–87, 309 (for the relevant literature). For Rome and Sasanian Iran, see the sourcebooks by Engelbert Winter and Beate Dignas, Rom und das Perserreich: Zwei Weltmächte zwischen Konfrontation und Koexistenz, Studienbücher Geschichte und Kultur der Alten Welt (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001); and Geoﬀrey Greatrex and Samuel N. C. Lieu, The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars: A Narrative History (London: Routledge, 2002). 41 Cf. Michael Stausberg, Die Religion Zarathushtras: Geschichte, Gegenwart, Rituale, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 2002), with relevant literature. 42 Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia, 153–64.

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have been able to clarify further the amount and the characteristics of foreign inﬂuence, of Iranian originality, and Sasanian cultural mediation; they have thus particularly contributed to retrieving the respectability of late Sasanian culture.43 Thanks to his education and his varied interests, but also to the way Sasanian studies stood in his day, Ernst Herzfeld was one of the last scholarly “generalists.” A handbook of Sasanian history and culture written today, however, can only be contemplated as a joint and interdisciplinary enterprise.

43

Ibid., 216–21, 298–300.

ERNST HERZFELD AND IRANIAN STUDIES Prods Oktor Skjærvø

In Iranian studies there have been many good philologists and many good archaeologists, but only one archaeologist who was also an outstanding philologist. Ernst Herzfeld made several contributions to Iranian philology, among them his study of the Old Persian (Achaemenid) and of the Middle Persian and Parthian (Sasanian) inscriptions, in which he furthered these ﬁelds to a very considerable degree. These contributions are gathered in the two volumes Paikuli (1924) and Altpersische Inschriften (1938). His contribution to the history of Iranian religion, Zoroaster and His World (1947), though voluminous, was less signiﬁcant. Here I shall discuss in some detail his work on the Paikuli inscription and Sasanian epigraphy and make a few remarks on the other two works.

Paikuli (1914, 1924) Having had the opportunity to occupy himself with epigraphic material throughout his career, it was Herzfeld’s reconstruction of the monument and inscription at Paikuli that brought out his extraordinary talents. The monument at Paikuli is in modern Iraq, close to the border with Iran on a line drawn from Sulaimaniya in Iraq and Qasr-e Shirin in Iran.1 When travelers visited it in the nineteenth century, they recorded that it consisted of the ruins of a large square tower that had originally been covered on all sides by stone blocks, some of which contained inscriptions. At the time, the blocks lay scattered all over the ground around the monument. In his 1914 publication of the Paikuli monument, Herzfeld described the history of his preoccupation with the site. In 1844, Major Henry

1 See maps in Herzfeld, Paikuli, 1914, ﬁg. 1; and Helmut Humbach and Prods O. Skjærvø, The Sassanian Inscription of Paikuli (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1980–83), 1: ﬁg. 116.

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C. Rawlinson (to whom Herzfeld dedicated the publication) had visited the ruins at Paikuli and made drawings of thirty-two blocks. These drawings, which are now housed in the Royal Geographical Society, London, were published by E. Thomas in 1868; the inscription was studied by Iranists of the period, most notably, Martin Haug.2 Scholars recognized that the inscription was in two languages, then referred to as Arsacid and Sasanian Pahlavi, but today known as Parthian and Middle Persian. Intrigued by these reports, Herzfeld visited the site for the ﬁrst time in the summer of 1911, when he made a few squeezes and photographs, copies of which he sent to Professor Friedrich Carl Andreas in Göttingen (then regarded as the leading scholar on ancient Iranian languages).3 Herzfeld then applied for funding and received a grant to record the monument and the inscription, which he accomplished in the summer of 1913. During this period, he photographed and/or made paper squeezes of ninety-seven (MPers. 54, Parth. 43) blocks (ﬁgs. 1–2). With the addition of Rawlinson’s sketches, the number of known blocks totaled one hundred (MPers. 55, Parth. 45). Herzfeld reconstructed the ruined monument as a tall square box with a slightly wider base and the inscriptions placed some way up on opposing sides (ﬁg. 3). This placement is probably not correct, and in our reconstruction of the monument Humbach and I took into consideration W. B. Henning’s discovery that the inscription refers to the monument as a pillag, that is, a stairlike construction, as well as the empty spaces at the bottom of the blocks of the sixth rows (MPers. F, parth. f ) and placed these last two MPers. rows and the last Parth. row on the base.4 Herzfeld’s 1914 report had only presented his ideas about the form of the monument and recorded the inscribed blocks, in order to prepare a complete publication at a later date. This came in 1924, a lavish publication in double folio format consisting of one book and one case containing loose leaves with photographs and other illustrations. He decided to publish it in English in recognition of the support he had enjoyed from the Parsi community. It is Herzfeld’s 2 E. Thomas, “Sasanian Inscriptions,” JRAS (1868): 314–58; Martin Haug, Essay on the Pahlavi Language (Stuttgart: Guttenberg, K. Hofbuchdruckerei, 1870). 3 Helmut Humbach, “Friedrich Carl Andreas and the Paikuli Inscription,” Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft 41 (1982): 119–25. 4 W. B. Henning, “A Farewell to the Khaghan of Aq-Aqatäràn,” BSOAS 14 (1952): 518 n. 6.

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merit in this book to have determined correctly the position of almost all the blocks; read and translated the inscriptions, for the most part correctly; laid the foundations for the grammatical understanding of the languages; and determined the historical context of the monument and the inscription. Herzfeld’s accounts of the reconstruction of the monument (chapter 1) and the inscription (chapter 2) are utterly absorbing. He described in detail how he was able to assign to all the blocks their relative positions after deciphering all the partial inscriptions on each individual block, comparing the Middle Persian and Parthian texts, and measuring the blocks. He began by observing that eleven blocks from the second MPers. row (B) formed a continuous text, which overlapped with a similar sequence of Parthian blocks.5 Thus, lines 1–2 of the MPers. B row contained a long list of dignitaries going from B11, 1 to B12, 2 (Herzf. B8, 1 to BB9, 2), corresponding to Parth. a16, 5 to a14, 6 (Herz. A’10, 5 to A’8, 6). Moreover, lines 3–4 of MPers. B5–13 contained long sequences of texts corresponding to lines 1–2 of Parth. b5–12, et cetera, and in this manner the position of all the blocks was determined. In the chapter devoted to the inscriptions, Herzfeld then presented the Paikuli inscription as a synoptic text showing the relative position of the MPers. and Parth. versions. The principal drawback of this presentation is the lack of any indication of the actual length of the text and the lacunae, which makes itself felt in the parts of the inscription where the relationship between the two texts is not obvious. It is possible, however, to deduce these relationships from the reconstructed facsimile of the inscriptions in the plate volume. In our edition, Humbach and I tried to remedy this problem by presenting two synoptic transcriptions of the inscription, one according to the arrangement of the MPers. version and one according to that of the Parth. version. In this way, we tried to determine more precisely the exact position of all the text fragments. In spite of our eﬀorts, however, it is now known that Herzfeld was right and we wrong in at least one case. Block MPers. E1 has now surfaced on the antiquities market and it is a rather wide block, as suggested by Herzfeld, rather than a narrow one, as suggested by us.6 5 See Paikuli, 1924, 97, and the relevant tables in Humbach and Skjærvø, The Sassanian Inscription of Paikuli, 2. 6 Among the corrections brought by this block: Parth. 22d11,04 read LN pty

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While the publication was at the press, Herzfeld made another trip to Paikuli and recorded an additional thirty blocks (MPers. 20, Parth. 10), one of which was known from Rawlinson’s drawings; he thus brought the total number of known blocks to 129 (MPers. 74, Parth. 55) out of an estimated total of 235 blocks. This material was not included in the publication, and Herzfeld’s later thoughts on the inscription can only be found in his papers in Washington, D.C. It must have been deeply frustrating for him to know that his publication could have been so much better had he been able to include the new material. On the other hand, as he pointed out in a letter to H. F. Junker (19 April 1926), stating that twenty-seven of the thirty new blocks ﬁtted seamlessly into the lacunae of the reconstruction, the additional discoveries showed that his arrangement of the blocks was almost completely correct.7 More remarkably, he already realized that the order of the dignitaries in the conclusion of the inscription diﬀered in the two versions.8 The additional material remained unstudied until the late nineteen-ﬁfties, when it was ﬁrst used in various articles by Richard N. Frye, who published the new blocks of the end of the inscription with the list of dignitaries and rulers.9 Philippe Gignoux included the additional blocks in his glossary of Middle Persian and Parthian published in 1972 by the Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum.10 In 1971, Volker Popp traveled to the site and photographed the blocks for Helmut Humbach at the University of Mainz; together they published in 1973 photographs of several of the blocks not in Herzfeld’s

RB[A . . .] (instead of pty OB[Dkpy]) = MPers. LNE PWN LBA | plmnky “by Our magnanimity(?)”; Parth. 24d9,06 restore *nywpkpy (instead of [k]rpkpy) = MPers. nyw "pkyhy. 7 Cited by Werner Sundermann, review of The Sassanian Inscription of Paikuli, by Helmut Humbach and Prods O. Skjærvø, Kratylos 28 (1983): 88. 8 Herzfeld, Paikuli, 1924, 117, 119; see Humbach and Skjærvø, The Sassanian Inscription of Paikuli, 3.2; Sundermann, loc. cit. 9 Richard N. Frye, “Notes on the Early Sassanian State and Church,” in Studi orientalistici in onore di Giorgio Levi della Vida 1 (Rome: Istituto per l’Oriente, 1956), 314–35; Richard N. Frye, “Remarks on the Paikuli and Sar Ma“had Inscriptions,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 20 (1957): 702–8; Richard N. Frye, “Historic Material from Middle Persian Inscriptions,” in Akten des XXIV. internationalen Orientalistenkongresses München, ed. Herbert Franke (Wiesbaden: Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, 1959), 460–62. 10 Philippe Gignoux, Glossaire des inscriptions pehlevies et parthes, Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum, Supplementary Series, vol. 1 (London: Lund Humphries, 1972).

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Paikuli.11 Meanwhile, they obtained photographs of the documentation housed in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers in Washington, D.C., and Humbach decided to prepare a new edition of the whole inscription. In 1974, he published Rawlinson’s drawings.12 As a student, I had been reading Herzfeld’s Paikuli (a copy of which was found in Georg Morgenstierne’s superb collection of books on Iranian studies at the Indo-iransk institutt of the University of Oslo) and had begun reconstructing the text on the additional blocks from Gignoux’s glossary. When I visited Humbach in 1976, I therefore knew enough about the inscription for him to make available to me his own work, and in another year’s time he graciously suggested we co-author the new edition, which was published between 1980 and 1983.13 Herzfeld’s Paikuli was an enormous achievement and contained virtually everything then known about Arsacid (Parthian) and Sasanian epigraphy, as well as a study of the history of the early Sasanian Empire. He thus included new editions and translations of all the inscriptions and many coins and seals already known. These contributions were accompanied by an exhaustive glossary containing historical and philological notes. In his historical survey, he identiﬁed the event commemorated by the Paikuli inscription as the war between Narseh and Warahràn III, son and successor of Warahràn II, who had died in 293, citing the accounts of Arab and Armenian historians of this event.14 He correctly diagnosed the situation as that described by Ibn al-Athìr, who tells us that Warahràn III had been unwilling to take the throne, but had been forced by the nobility to accept it.15 Chapter 4, titled “Essay on Pahlavi,” deals with two important issues: the so-called ideograms (heterograms, arameograms) and the age of

11 Volker Popp and Helmut Humbach, “Die Paikuli-Inschrift im Jahr 1971,” BaMitt 6 (1973): 99–109, pls. 37–45. 12 Helmut Humbach, “Sir Henry Rawlinson’s Copies of the Paikuli Inscription,” in Mémorial Jean de Menasce, ed. Philippe Gignoux and A. Taﬀazoli (Louvain: Impr. Orientaliste, 1974), 199–204, pls. 6–11. 13 Humbach and Skjærvø, The Sassanian Inscription of Paikuli, pts. 1–3.2. 14 Herzfeld, Paikuli, 1924, 35. 15 Andreas, who had had early access to Herzfeld’s material, misinterpreted the reference to the Caesar toward the end of the inscription as referring to a victory over the emperor Galerius, and concluded the inscription had been composed before Galerius defeated Narseh (in 297); see Lentz in Humbach and Skjærvø, The Sassanian Inscription of Paikuli, 3.2: 143). In fact, the inscription refers to peace with the Romans.

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the Parthian and Persian written languages. Herzfeld forsook to write a complete grammar of the languages, stating that it was “not my intention to write a scientiﬁc and complete grammar of the Pahlavi language. This I hope will be done by one better ﬁtted for the purpose.”16 Ironically, none of those “better ﬁtted for the purpose” ever did write the “scientiﬁc and complete grammar of the Pahlavi language.” In fact, it still remains to be done. Herzfeld began his essay on Pahlavi with an analysis of the Aramaic element in Middle Persian and Parthian, which he referred to as Pársík and Pahlavík, respectively.17 Having explained that the systems in the two languages diﬀered, he then provided a detailed classiﬁcation of all the ideograms known to him (the numbering below is Herzfeld’s; I have added the translations and modern transcriptions): First he listed forms other than those with a weak third radical (page 53, nos. 1–20), for instance:

1. 2. 6. 9.

Aramaic root

Forms in the inscriptions

"zl “go” "˙d “take” ˙sn “hold” mll “speak”

"ZL-t "ÓD-t ÓÓSN-t YMLL-t

"ZL-W"ÓD-W ÓÓSN-WYMLL-W-

He pointed out that the ideograms in the middle column above (minus the ﬁnal -t) are all (Aramaic) third person singular (perfect), while those in the right column are all (Aramaic) third person plural (perfect or imperfect). Moreover, he analyzed the ﬁnal -t in the former group as a sign of the Iranian past participles and the ending -tn found with some ideograms as that of the inﬁnitive. The forms ending in -w he analyzed as Aramaic present stem forms, to which further Iranian endings could be added to denote the various persons and number (for example, YNTNW-nt “they give,” with -nt = third person plural). He also noted that some ideograms were (Aramaic) imperfect participles (for example, MKBLW- “receive,” from the root qbl ).

16

Herzfeld, Paikuli, 1924, 66. Old Iranian paryava- regularly became Middle Persian and Parthian pahlaw, and the ethnics Persian and Parthian are pàrs and pahlaw in the Paikuli inscription. See the long discussion in Ernst Herzfeld, “Medisch und Parthisch,” AMI 7 (1934): 9–64, where he also quotes the Manichean Middle Persian form pahlawànìg “Parthian.” 17

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Next, he listed the ideograms from Aramaic roots with weak third radicals (page 53, numbers 21–31), such as: 22.

˙z" “see”

ÓZY-t

ÓZY-W-

He identiﬁed the form ÓYTY- as a haph'el of "t " “come” with the meaning “bring,” but he also mistakenly included in this list several Parthian verbs, such as, k"myw- “wish” on the basis of their ending, which was formally similar to forms like ÓZYW-. His third group included ideograms with present stems in -h- (page 54, numbers 32–37), for example: 32. "t " “come” 34. hw" “be”

"TY-t YÓW-t

"TY-H YÓW-H-

He interpreted the forms like YÓW-H as third singular imperfect, but did not venture an interpretation of "TY-H. He concluded this ﬁrst group with three “obscure forms” (page 54, numbers 38–40): 35. yd' “know” 36. “m' “hear” 37. 'n" “answer”

YD'Y

YD'-H”M'YW'N'YW-18

He concluded the discussion of the Parthian forms by emphasizing that the Parthian system of verbal ideograms was based on “two diﬀerent Aramaic forms being used, one for the preterit, and another one for the present base of the Iranian verb, whilst the signiﬁcation of the Aramaic form has not the slightest inﬂuence on the signiﬁcation of the Iranian form.”19 In his discussion of the Middle Persian (Pársík) system, he pointed out that one and the same ideogram was used for both preterit and present forms. He classiﬁed the ideograms by similarity with actual Aramaic forms: third plural perfect and third plural imperfect forms in -wn, as well as second plural perfect forms in -tn and miscellaneous forms. He noticed that most of the forms in -tn were from verbs with weak third radical:

18 Herzfeld regarded the form 'N 'YWd as uncertain in every way (page 229); in fact, it should probably be read together with the preceding ˙n- as ˙nbndywd. The arameogram is found, however, in Sogdian. See W. B. Henning, “Mitteliranisch,” in Handbuch der Orientalistik (Leiden-Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1958), 1:34. 19 Herzfeld, Paikuli, 1924, 54.

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Aramaic root Aramaic form Forms in the inscriptions Third plural perfect (pages 54–55, nos. 1–16), for example: P6'al: 1. "zl “go” 2. "˙d “take” 9. “bq “leave”

"zlw “they went” "˙dw “they took” “bqw “they left”

'ZLWN 'ÓDWN ”BKWN

P6'íl 11. b'h “seek”

b'yhw “they sought”

B'YÓWN

Hoph'al [rather: haph'el]: 15. n˙t “place” hn˙tw “they placed”

ÓNÓTWN

Third plural imperfect (page 55, numbers 17–23), for example: P6'al: 17. "t " “come” y"twn “they come” Y"TWN Pa''el or Pu'al: 20. mll “speak” and so on.

ymllwn “they speak”

YMLLWN

Here he suggested that the diﬀerence between Parthian and Middle Persian in the use of the third plural endings -w and -wn (Parth. YMLLW versus MPers. YMLLWN ) might reﬂect Aramaic dialect diﬀerences (page 55). Among verbs with a weak third radical, he identiﬁed the following forms: Second plural perfect (pages 55–56, numbers 24–30), such as: 25. ˙z" “see” ˙zytwn “you have seen” ÓZYTN20 Third singular perfect: 31. “t" “eat” "“th “he ate”

'”TH

Third singular imperfect: 32. ßb" “wish” yßbh “he wishes”

YÍBH

Third plural perfect haph'el: 33. "t " “come” hytyw “they brought”

ÓYTYW “bring”

20 Following suggestions made by F. Altheim and R. Stiehl, I have analyzed this form as ˙zyt-n “I saw,” with the enclitic subject pronoun. See Prods Oktor Skjærvø, “Aramaic in Iran,” ARAM 6 (1995): 298.

ernst herzfeld and iranian studies Third singular perfect or participle: 34. hw" “be” hawà or hàwè

303

ÓWH

Verbs with 'ayn as third radical, he pointed out, were treated like verbs with weak third radical: 35. yd ' “know” yd 'twn “you knew” YD'YTN 36. “m' “hear” "“m'w “they heard” "”M'YW He concluded this survey with the observation that the ideograms without ending represented past participles or preterit forms, while those with (Iranian) endings represented present forms, and he remarked that “[i]n any case, the Pársík system appears more open to ambiguity than the Páhlavík [sic]. But it is also a carefully thought out system.”21 He concluded the section on the verbal ideograms with a discussion of the ideograms for the verb “to be,” in which he noted that the Parthian form ÓWYndy must be an optative form, which he read as H(é)ndé (the Manichean Parth. form is ahèndè ); with the important observation that the vacillation between "aleph and 'yn, ˙èth and hè, qàph and kàph, and taw and †èth, reﬂects diﬀerences found in the known Aramaic dialects (pages 56–57); and with thoughts about the use of Iranian endings, the so-called phonetic complements. Regarding these last, he made two important observations: 1. The orthography of ideographic forms diﬀered from that of phonetic forms: ideographic -m, -t, -tn versus phonetic -my, -ty, -tny; he also (wrongly) interpreted the ideograms in -n as present participles (most of these are ﬁrst sing. subjunctives). 2. Some ideograms were reserved for present stems only, while the past participles were written phonetically (page 57); thus we ﬁnd: Present 'SLWN- = band- “bind” 'BYDWN = kun- “do” YKTYBWN- = nibès- “write” YÓSNN- = dàr- “hold”

21

Ibid., 56.

Preterit and inﬁnitive bsty = bast “bound” klty = kerd “did” np“ty = nibi“t “wrote,” np“tny = nibi“tan “to write” d "“ty = dà“t “had, held,” d"“tny = dà“tan “to hold”

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This simple fact was later completely overlooked, and the ideographically written present stem forms were commonly interpreted as preterits. He added to the section on the form of the ideograms a synoptic list of the ideograms and their Iranian equivalents (page 58; ﬁg.), for instance:

1. 2. 3. 4.

Aramaic root

Parthian

Persian

Pahlavi

Phonetic

"zl “go” "˙d “take” "yty “there is” l" "yty “there is not”

"ZLt "ÓDt "YTY L""YTY

'ZLWN 'ÓDWN "YTY L'YTY

= = "YT' L'YT'

“utan griftan hast nést

He also touched on the question of dialect diﬀerences in words expressed by ideograms, as with “to speak, say”: MPers. YMLLWN- = guft, but Parth. YMLLW- = wàxt (page 59), but on the whole he was not yet able to assign correct values to the Parthian forms; the Manichean texts had yet to be studied in depth and he had not yet seen P. Tedesco’s fundamental study.22 Such questions were also discussed further in the glossary (MPers. kun- = Parth. kar- “do,” page 228, as well as in a lengthy article published in 1934.23 Coming to the ideograms of nouns, he classiﬁed them by their Aramaic forms: Parthian (pages 59–60): Singular indeterminate or construct (nos. 1–5): ÍBW “thing,” ”NT “year,” et cetera. Singular emphatic in -" (nos. 6–17): "LÓ" “god,” RY”" “head,” et cetera. Dual (no. 18): NGRYN “feet”. Plural indeterminate in -yn (nos. 19–23): "LÓYN “gods,” MLKYN “kings,” et cetera. Plural emphatic in -y " (no. 24): ÓˇY " “arrow” (only example). With added pronoun (nos. 25–32): BR-Y “son,” literally: “my son,” "TR-H “(his/its) place.”

22 P. Tedesco, “Dialektologie der westiranischen Turfantexte,” Monde oriental 15 (1921): 184–258. 23 Herzfeld, “Medisch und Parthisch,” 9–64.

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Middle Persian (pages 60–61): Singular indeterminate or construct (nos. 1–6): YWM “day,” ÍBW “thing,” ”NT “year,” et cetera. Singular emphatic in -" (nos. 7–15): "l”" [“throne,” MLK " “king,” et cetera. Plural emphatic in -y" (nos. 16–19): "LHY " and 'RÓY " “god,” ÓˇY " “arrow,” et cetera. With pronominal suﬃx (nos. 21–29): "B-Y “father,” literally: “my father,” BR-H “(his) son,” ”M-H “(his) name,” et cetera. With preposition (no. 30): B-YRÓ “month.” Adjectives (nos. 1–5). He pointed out that the various underlying Aramaic forms did not aﬀect the meaning of the Iranian words (page 61). Again he stressed that the two languages used diﬀerent systems of ideograms; for instance, the plural indeterminate in -yn is not used in Middle Persian. An important observation was that ideograms such as B-YRÓ “month” and ”M-H “name” can be explained as having been taken directly from actual Aramaic phrases: B-YRÓ from the dating formula byr˙ . . . “nt . . . “in the month of . . ., year of . . .”; emphatic forms from relative-genitive constructions; and ideograms with suﬃxed pronouns from relative-genitive constructions: br-h d.“mw"l “the son of Samuel,” gd-h d.mlk" “the fortune of the king.” He noted that nouns and adjectives could take the phonetic complement -n = -àn in the plural (MPers. MLK "n = “àhàn, LB"n = wazurgàn, Parth. RB "n), but he regarded Parthian forms such as "LÓYN, MLKYN MLK " as being all Aramaic.24 Discussing the pronominal forms, he observed that several were quite archaic, being those of the old Aramaic inscriptions (7–6th cents. B.C. and earlier), for instance ZNH versus standard Aram. dnh, and he compared unassimilated forms such as YNTN “gives,” later yitten, as well as forms with preserved q, as in Parth. QYN (Pahl. KYN ") “sheep” < qèn-à, Hebr. ß"n, Arabic ∂àn, and 'RK " for old Aram. "rq", Aram. ar'à, Hebrew ereß, with forms found in archaic Aramaic inscriptions.25 He ﬁnished his survey of the ideograms with those of other pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions. 24 25

Ibid., 61–62. Ibid., 63–64.

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Herzfeld then proposed a general theory of the Iranian ideograms. I wish to show that there were two diﬀerent systems or schools of ideographic writing, both of them deriving their Aramaic material from dialects spoken in Babylonia, and also that the methods of ideographic writing are those of the cuneiform inscriptions. The diﬀerences are caused by the fact that in Pahlavi ideograms were introduced into an alphabetic script, whereas in cuneiform writing they occur in a syllabic script. Sumerian was a monosyllabic language in which words, and syllables coincided. Therefore, when Akkadian scribes for the ﬁrst time invented an ideographic system, the idea was not strange at all, but rather quite natural. The less the syllables and words coincide, the more unnatural becomes this method of ideographic writing. Nay, the introduction of ideographic writing into an alphabetic script is an idea so unnatural, and so absurd that it could never have been invented, save where ideographic cuneiform writing was still alive, and where the scribes were accustomed to this method by a training handed down from times immemorial.26

And, he continued a few sentences later, we see that ﬁrst the oﬃcial books were kept in the language of the preceding Empire, but that, after a short while, the necessity made itself felt of having them kept in the living language of the new Empire.27

Adducing paragraph 70 of the Behistun inscription of Darius, which mentions texts on tablets as well as on parchment, he remarked: “There can be no doubt that the script employed on parchment was the Aramaic script. . . .”28 As for the age of the languages and the script, he suggested that the introduction of the Parthian writing system was contemporaneous with the beginning of the Arsacid era (247 B.C.), but, as for the Middle Persian writing, he saw in the Frataraka coin legends a detailed development of the script from “standard” Aramaic to the Middle Persian type, and he concluded that the Pársík system is centuries older than the Sasanian Empire. It was introduced into the Sasanian oﬃces, because it was in common use in Párs, but it was not invented by Sasanian scribes. . . . both systems must be older than even the beginning of the Arsacidan Empire.29

26 27 28 29

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

66. 66. 66. 72.

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And ﬁnally: If we take into account the very archaic character of a considerable number of ideograms, we clearly see that the ideographic system of writing in Aramaic script and in Iranian language must be an inheritance from Achaemenian times. The two systems belong to two diﬀerent schools of Aramaic scribes in the Achaemenian oﬃces. Perhaps, these scribes came from two diﬀerent regions, the North and the South of Babylonia, but the creation of the ideographic systems was in any case the work of learned men trained in cuneiform writing and intimately acquainted with old Babylonian methods.

Herzfeld concluded that “the astonishing and absurd peculiarity of Pahlaví is that it adapts this ideographic system to an alphabetic script, whereas it is explicable if employed in a syllabic script.” It was by order of Darius the Great that for the ﬁrst time parchment was introduced as writing material into the Achaemenian oﬃces replacing the clay-tablets, Aramaic script as the oﬃcial script replacing the cuneiform, and Old-Persian as the oﬃcial language replacing Aramaic. That was the moment of the creation of Pahlaví.30

For whatever reason, the surprising fact remains that Herzfeld’s Paikuli and his contributions to Middle Persian and Parthian philology were barely acknowledged and largely ignored by Iranists for over half a century.31 Herzfeld himself pointed out that Andreas had had all of the material in Paikuli for ten years, but hardly made use of it.32 Herzfeld’s comment, however, that he must understand Andreas’s interpretation apud W. Lentz of the ﬁnal -ywt as the abstract suﬃx corresponding to Man. Parth. -ìft as “belehrung,”33 since it was published two years after Paikuli, was wrong. As Lentz explained, the article had been accepted for publication in March 1924 and went to press in July of 1925.34 Nevertheless, the example is revealing of Andreas’s lack of understanding of the inscription.35 30

Ibid., 73. See, most recently, B. Utas, “Verbal Forms and Ideograms in the Middle Persian Inscriptions,” ActaOr 36 (1974): 83–112; and C. Toll, “Die aramäischen Ideogramme im Mittelpersischen,” in XXIV. Deutscher Orientalistentag: vom 26. bis 30. September 1988 in Köln. Ausgewählte Vorträge, ed. Werner Diem and Abdoldjavad Falaturi, ZDMG Suppl. 8 (Stuttgart: Franz Steinger, 1990), 25–45. 32 Herzfeld, “Medisch und Parthisch,” 53–54. 33 Herzfeld wrote at the time when nouns were seldom capitalized in German orthography. 34 W. Lentz, “Die nordiranischen Elemente in der neupersischen Literatursprache bei Firdosi,” Zeitschrift für Indologie und Iranistik 4 (1926): 251–53, for Andreas’ comment. 35 Humbach remarked on Andreas’s lack of contributions in Humbach and Skjærvø, 31

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As far as I can determine, W. B. Henning’s 1933 study of the Manichean Middle Persian verb contained not a single reference to the inscriptions, and he cited no forms from Paikuli.36 In his study of the Parthian verb, A. Ghilain cited the conclusions regarding the spelling of verbal forms and ideograms, but otherwise hardly referred to it and, judging from the index, cited no forms from it.37 In an article published in 1952, W. B. Henning discussed several instances where Herzfeld had misread and misinterpreted the text, but nowhere did he acknowledge that the work might have any signiﬁcant position in Iranian studies or that Herzfeld’s work might deserve praise,38 and, while in his 1958 article on Middle Iranian in the Handbuch der Orientalistik he did acknowledge that Herzfeld’s “Essay on Paikuli” is indispensable (“für die Inschriften . . . nach wie vor unentbehrlich”), he largely ignored it in his own description of the verbal ideograms, which he himself maintained “must be peeled like an onion to ﬁnd the ur-ideograms.”39 This contrasts sharply with Herzfeld’s (in my opinion, correct) observation that the ideographic system was a “carefully thought out system” based on actual Aramaic forms. It was only during my own work on the Paikuli inscription that I realized that Herzfeld’s descriptions provided crucial clues for understanding of the ideographic writing system, notably the distribution of ideographic versus phonetic forms such as 'BYDWN ~ krty, “to do.” In all work on the inscriptions after World War II, forms such as 'BYDWN and 'BYDWNt had routinely been interpreted as kard, “did.” According to Herzfeld, however, these forms could only represent the present stem kun-, something that I was able to show is in fact the case.40 The Sassanian Inscription of Paikuli, 1: 14–15. This remark later led W. Lentz to threaten the authors with legal procedure if the remark was not withdrawn; this, in turn, led to the inclusion of his contribution in pt. 3.2, which, in hindsight, turned out to be a useful piece of Forschungsgeschichte. See also Sundermann, review of The Sassanian Inscription of Paikuli. 36 W. B. Henning, “Das Verbum des Mittelpersischen der Turfanfragmente,” Zeitschrift für Indologie und Iranistik 9 (1933): 158–253. 37 A. Ghilain, Essai sur la langue parthe, son système verbal d’après les textes manichéens du Turkestan oriental, Bibliothèque du Muséon 9 (Louvain: Bureaux du Muséon, 1939). 38 W. B. Henning, “A Farewell to the Khaghan of Aq-Aqatäràn,” BSOAS 14 (1952): 510–22. One of several merits of Henning’s article is to have identiﬁed the term plky = pillag “stairs” as a reference to the monument itself as a stairlike building (518 n. 6); this underlay the reconstruction in Humbach and Skjærvø, The Sassanian Inscription of Paikuli, 2: 10. 39 Henning, “Mitteliranisch,” 36. See also Skjærvø, “Aramaic in Iran,” ARAM 6 (1995): 307, 313–14. 40 Prods Oktor Skjærvø, Undersøkelser til verbalsystemet i gammelpersisk og vestlig middeliransk (master’s thesis, Oslo–Copenhagen, 1974); Humbach and Skjærvø, The

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It was, of course, unavoidable that many of Herzfeld’s analyses in 1924 would prove wrong. The languages were barely known at the time, especially Parthian. His method, however, was sound, and a large number of his conclusions stand unshaken.

Altpersische Inschriften (1938) Like Paikuli, Herzfeld’s Altpersische Inschriften (1938) is an impressive compendium of philology, history, and archaeology. It contains ﬁfty pages of editions of inscriptions in Old Persian, Akkadian, Elamite, and Aramaic collected over a few years (from 1932; some had already been published and discussed individually), followed by 316 pages of commentary on 142 key words (from all known inscriptions) and ﬁfteen pages of indexes. Among the inscriptions published here, all with drawings and excellent photographs, are the gold tablet of Ariaramnes, the inscriptions of Cyrus from Pasargadae, Darius’s second tomb inscription (DNb), Xerxes’ harem and daiva inscriptions, and inscriptions by Artaxerxes I and II. The commentaries range over the entire ﬁeld of Iranian studies as known to Herzfeld at the time. Notwithstanding the fact that much of the work is by now outdated, for someone who professed “I am no philologist, and languages are for me only tools for other purposes,” the breadth and depth of Herzfeld’s philological work leaves us in awe.41

Zoroaster and His World (1947) A certain tendency of Herzfeld’s observed also in the preceding works is to use a large variety of sources somewhat uncritically in order to paint large historical canvases.42 Nowhere, however, did Herzfeld construct a more colorful quilt than in his two-volume Zoroaster and His World. In this grandiose synthesis, he wrote a history of the

Sassanian Inscription of Paikuli, 2: 135–37; Skjærvø, “Verbal Ideograms and the Imperfect in Middle Persian and Parthian,” in Études irano-aryennes oﬀertes à Gilbert Lazard, StIr Cahier 7 (Paris: Association pour l’avancement des etudes iraniennces, 1989), 333–54. 41 Herzfeld, Altpersische Inschriften, v. 42 This was the main point of criticism made by Henning, “Farewell to the Khaghan of Aq-Aqatäràn,” 510–22.

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Achaemenids that included Zarathustra and those connected with him, most importantly Vi“tàspa, Zoroaster’s patron and Darius’s father. There is no need today to read this book for a useful discussion of Zarathustra’s time and place; it can be read, however, as a mine of information from countless sources about the early Achaemenids. Herzfeld’s theories came in for some deserved criticism, again, from Henning in his Zoroaster, though Henning himself then went on to paint his own, not much more realistic, canvas of Zoroaster and his patron Vi“tàspa “as the ruler of the Khwarezmian state of Marv and Herat in the ﬁrst half of the sixth century.”43

43 W. B. Henning, Zoroaster: Politician or Witch-doctor?, Ratanbai Katrak Lectures 1949 (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), 43.

Fig. 1. Paikuli, view of Narseh monument, north side. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 18, no. 5b.

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Fig. 2. Paikuli, view of Narseh monument, south side. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 18, no. 8b.

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Fig. 3. Paikuli, reconstruction of Narseh monument by Ernst Herzfeld, published in 1914. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, drawing D-747.

ERNST HERZFELD AND THE STUDY OF GRAFFITI AT PERSEPOLIS Shahrokh Razmjou

From its establishment in the reign of Darius I (522–486 B.C.), Persepolis has witnessed various periods of history in which kings, governors, commanders, famous individuals, and even ordinary people have left traces of their presence at the site. Following Alexander of Macedon’s invasion of the Achaemenid Empire in the 330s B.C., during which Persepolis was plundered and burned, local kings enviously observed its ruins but had neither the ﬁnancial nor the human resources to rebuild it. Some of the governors, as well as others, apparently viewed the ancient city’s remains with nostalgia. They saw it as a vanished place of splendor, and they gained a degree of satisfaction by constructing small memorials there. After the fall of Persepolis, the political and administrative center in Pars was transferred to the nearby city of Estakhr. For the inhabitants of Estakhr, Persepolis served as a memory and reminder of a past era of magniﬁcence and glory. This sentiment endured to the beginning of the Sasanian period (ca. 224–651). With the Sasanian dynasty’s rise to power came renewed strength and a sudden awareness of these now “ancient” monuments. After defeating the Parthians, Sasanian rulers devoted greater attention to the remains of the Achaemenid Empire, as archaeological evidence attests. Upon his victory over the last Parthian king, the Sasanian king Ardeshir I (r. A.D. 224–239/40) depicted this event alongside Achaemenid-period rock reliefs, near signiﬁcant Achaemenid remains. Indeed, this new king introduced himself as a ruler who deserved to place his triumphal scene in a place such as Naqsh-e Rostam, next to his glorious ancestors, using Achaemenid motifs but with new artistic elements that demonstrate a cultural substratum behind the political developments. Later, as with the composition of the story Karnamak-i Artakhshir-i Papakan, the Sasanian rulers endeavored to show direct ties to their Achaemenid Persian ancestors.1 This period of Iranian political revival 1

B. Farahvashi, Karnameh-ye Ardeshir-e Babakan (Tehran: Tehran University

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was an important one, and the visual arts produced during this era and shortly before it—including the graﬃti—are likewise signiﬁcant. First, the graﬃti were created at Persepolis, a capital of the Achaemenid Empire, and thus a highly symbolic place. Second, the graﬃti did not merely represent a continuation of earlier Iranian artistic traditions, but in some cases suggest the prototypes employed in large-scale Sasanian reliefs. These pictorial reliefs, which became the starting point of Sasanian art, were especially useful in creating strong, signiﬁcant narrative propaganda tools for the political developments at the beginning of Sasanian rule. This paper discusses Ernst Herzfeld’s pioneering studies of graﬃti at Persepolis and reviews the corpus of pre-Islamic graﬃti now known from recent investigations at the site. It also brieﬂy demonstrates the importance of graﬃti for both historical and art historical investigations. With the beginning of scientiﬁc excavations at Persepolis under Herzfeld’s leadership, carried out under the auspices of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, the buried remains and features of this important ancient site emerged after more than two millennia. Although Herzfeld conducted investigations at Persepolis and its surroundings over a lengthy period, he remained consistently attentive to details, as his study of the graﬃti at the site amply illustrates. While the graﬃti at Persepolis include examples from the Achaemenid period to the present, Herzfeld concentrated mainly on those of the Achaemenid and Sasanian periods. These examples not only raise questions from an artistic point of view, but also indicate some of the lesser-known aspects of ancient Iranian drawing and design. By the time Persepolis was destroyed, graﬃti and drawings covered the ruins; their presence in turn encouraged astonished visitors to leave a drawing or inscription as a memento of their own at this impressive place. Nomads, kings, princes, rulers, visitors, and travelers all tried to leave something of their own behind. We cannot conclude that all of these designs are graﬃti, however. The main category of Publications, 1354/1975), 5, for the beginning of the ﬁrst chapter of this Pahlavi book. See also Jean de Menasce, “Zoroastrian Pahlavi Writings,” in CHI, Vol. 3:2, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1187–88. For the Sasanian inscriptions from Persepolis, see Richard N. Frye, “The Middle Persian Inscriptions from the Time of Shapur II,” ActaOr 30 (1966): 83–93. I would like to acknowledge Patrick Sookiasian’s kind help with graﬃti studies. This paper reports work in progress; I am currently preparing a detailed publication of all graﬃti recovered to date from Persepolis.

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graﬃti at Persepolis is called naqsh-e soozani (Persian for “needle design,” after its thin design), and it is a very important group because of the historical and art historical aspects mentioned above. Nomads or temporary inhabitants carved images mostly showing animals.2 The second category is ancient inscriptions which includes drawings and texts carved or incised, and examples written in ink. Many of these incised designs were made with a sharply pointed, needle-like tool. Some can be felt on the surface of the stone, while others cannot. The Persian name for these graﬃti does not include the inscriptions or painted ones. The word graﬃto, however, has been used not only for writing, but primarily for images. Seemingly, it was not diﬃcult to incise designs on limestone with a sharply pointed tool. The diﬃculty we now encounter in seeing many of the graﬃti may, in fact, suggest that they were not intended to be easily visible. What was the purpose of the graﬃti? In some cases, someone with artistic ability may have sought to preserve images; the monuments thus served as a place for him to record an experience. Or, perhaps, he intended to express the sentiment, “I saw the king in all his glory.” Another explanation is that the graﬃti had a magical or propitious purpose. We can only speculate on what must have been multiple motivations for creating graﬃti. This paper introduces the corpus of ancient graﬃti now known from Persepolis, including a few examples that were addressed by Herzfeld. Graﬃti have been discovered and previously published by several scholars, notably Roland de Mecquenem, Alotte de la Fuye, Ernst Herzfeld, Taghi Aseﬁ, Ali Sami, and Peter Calmeyer. A few other graﬃti, images, and inscriptions found during my surveys at Persepolis from 1996 to 1999 have been added to the corpus. Roland de Mecquenem, then head of the French Archaeological Delegation in Persia, recognized the ﬁrst graﬃto at Persepolis in 1928, and Alotte de la Fuye published a drawing and interpretation.3 This graﬃto, which depicts a standing ruler, was found on the inner wall of a window in the southern portico of the so-called Harem.4 2 There are also examples of this kind of design at Pasargadae. See David Stronach, Pasargadae: A Report on the Excavations Conducted by the British Institute of Persian Studies from 1961 to 1963 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pl. 100:b. 3 Alotte de la Fuye, “Graﬃtis relevés en 1928 dans les ruines de Persepolis,” RA 25 (1928): 159–68. 4 I refer to the so-called Harem because there is no archaeological or historical evidence to support the building’s function as a harem. It is a misnomer for this

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Subsequently, although Herzfeld found an Achaemenid graﬃto at the Tachara Palace (Palace of Darius), he refers to only three graﬃti (including the graﬃto found by De Mecquenem) and discusses their artistic aspects.5 But in addition to the ones Herzfeld cited, there were still more graﬃti in situ. These include two Sasanian graﬃti depicting a royal ﬁgure on horseback, both located in the Harem, one below a window frame at the south-western corner of the palace, which Erich F. Schmidt published in 1953.6 At the same time, in the autumns of 1952 and 1953, Taghi Aseﬁ, designer and inspector of the Archeological Oﬃce, carefully drew a series of graﬃti found at Persepolis. One of his drawings was published by Ali Sami in March 1954.7 The rest were published in 1960, also by Sami, and in this group four new graﬃti were added to the previously known examples.8 On the basis of Aseﬁ’s work, Peter Calmeyer published several new drawings in 1976.9 In 1996, I explored the Harem area with the aid of lamps and other light sources, which revealed a few additional graﬃti, both images and inscriptions. With these new discoveries, we can present a more complete corpus of ancient graﬃti from the site. Moreover, the results of my recent surveys demonstrate the possibility of ﬁnding still further examples. For simple identiﬁcation, it is best to divide the graﬃti by location. Graﬃti occur mainly in clusters, at two locations: the Harem (where the majority have been found), and the Tachara Palace (Palace of Darius). As a result of the surveys, we recommend the following division, which includes only Sasanian and pre-Sasanian graﬃti and the few other examples referred to in this paper.

palace, is unconvincing, and obscures the building’s real function. Because this designation remains in common use, however, I have referred throughout to the building by this name. 5 Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 80–81. 6 Erich F. Schmidt, Persepolis, vol. 1, Structures, Reliefs, Inscriptions, OIP 68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1953), 258, pl. 199 A, B. 7 Ali Sami, Persepolis (Takht-e Jamshid), trans. R.N. Sharp, Publication of the Learned Society of Pars, no. 2 (Shiraz: Musavi Print. Oﬃce, 1333/1954). 8 Ali Sami, “Gozaresh-haye Bastanshenasi,” Archaeological Reports, vol. 4 (Shiraz: Publisher, 1338/Feb.1960), 270–76. 9 Peter Calmeyer, “Zur Genese altiranischer Motive, V. Synarchie,” AMI N.F. 9 (1976): 64–65, ﬁg. 3.

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Harem: Location 1: The second window at the western side of the northern doorway to the palace, including the sill Location 2: The ﬁrst window at the east side of the northern doorway to the palace, including the sill, interior right and left walls Location 3: The western window frame, at the right side of the internal doorway of the palace, including the sill and the lower part of the frame Tachara Palace (Palace of Darius): Location 1: The western doorway of the south portico, including the northern jamb Location 2: The interior of the window, southwest of the palace In addition, there were several Achaemenid-period graﬃti, which were the ﬁrst Achaemenid graﬃti that attracted Herzfeld’s attention and interest. During his work at the Tachara Palace (Palace of Darius), Herzfeld found a fragment belonging to a relief of Darius incised with four graﬃti that included two human heads, an unﬁnished lion, and a complete lion face (see Dusinberre, this volume, ﬁg. 5). Herzfeld concluded that these graﬃti dated to the Achaemenid period because they were under a layer of red paint. This is consistent with other examples of Achaemenid masonry, which typically have a layer of red color applied at the joints and on the joint surface of the stones, and it suggests that Herzfeld’s assessment was correct. He was apparently much attached to this fragment with its unique graﬃti, and he chiseled it from the site and took it with him. It is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.10 In 1935, Herzfeld wrote about the fragment as follows: The assertion that the ﬁgures in the windows represent the true Old Persian style is proved by a small fragment in my collection which once must have been part of the shoe of a sculpture at Persepolis. On this polished stone, before receiving its purple paint, the sculptors— perhaps in conversation during their work—have engraved with a sharp point, two human heads and that of a lion, small designs like miniatures which stand comparison with the best paintings on Greek vases, and which I regard as one of the ﬁnest specimens of Achaemenian art. Their special value is that they reveal to us what free artistic

10

For the history of this fragment, see Dusinberre and Mousavi, this volume.

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shahrokh razmjou thought, what reality stands behind the hieratic and conventional abstraction of the Achaemenian sculpture, and how that sculptural abstraction was created.11

A few years later, he wrote: Among the immense amount of Achaemenian sculpture there is but one piece entirely free from convention: the minute design, about a square inch in size, of two human heads engraved with a sharp point in the hard stone, a fragment of a shoe from a ﬁgure of Darius. Since the designs were engraved before the shoe was painted red, they are dated in the earliest period, prior to 500 B.C. The two heads are masterpieces of design, rivaling the very best of Greek vase-paintings, but of course they are no Greek work.12

Herzfeld’s opinion that the Achaemenid fragment and the window graﬃti represent pure Achaemenid style is still acceptable. Had the Achaemenid fragment not been found in its original location, or had it preserved no trace of red paint, it could easily have been mistaken for a Sasanian or pre-Sasanian graﬃto. Determining the artistic style of the heads and traces of tool use would be diﬃcult, except for the lion. The fragment also raises another point: The artisans working at the site were highly skilled draftsmen. In fact, the design of the lion could be a model for the lions drawn on the king’s robe depicted on the eastern jamb of the western doorway (northern side of the Tachara Palace), later painted in color by other artists following the pattern of line and form.13 Similar incised ﬁgures have also been observed on the royal dress at the southern interior doorway of the so-called Harem, but the lions on the Achaemenid fragment were more freely drawn than those depicted on royal ﬁgures. Indeed, the two human heads have no similarities among the graﬃti at any other palace. The image depicts a man without any type of headdress; he is bearded and has long, uncurled hair, indicating that he could not represent an oﬃcial or high-ranking individual. It seems reasonable to suggest that here the artist drew the face of his friend during leisure time, as Herzfeld proposed. The design incised on the king’s robe is also a kind of graﬃto, or

11

Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 73–74. Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 251. 13 For these incised ﬁgures, see Ann Britt Tilia, Studies and Restorations at Persepolis and Other Sites of Fàrs (Rome: IsMEO, 1972), 1:53. 12

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drawing, but of an oﬃcial type used in royal art.14 These drawings are entirely oﬃcial designs, and they can be counted as part of the royal artistic repertoire, which includes rows of lions, borders with geometrical designs, and lotus-rosettes.15 Ann Britt Tilia has observed and studied similar drawings at Persepolis, along with other drawings of a garment design of the royal throne at the northern doorway of the Hall of One Hundred Columns.16 After the fall of the Achaemenids, the abandoned ruins were visited by individuals of widely diﬀerent social position and rank, from shepherds and nomads to rulers and high oﬃcials. There are, however, no graﬃti that can be assigned to this intermediate period (up to the last two centuries of Parthian rule and the beginning of the Sasanian era). An approximate chronology for Sasanian graﬃti is nearly possible. Until this time, Herzfeld had referred to only three graﬃti—two standing ﬁgures and a rider—which he labeled “recently discovered.”17 He also referred to the oldest of these graﬃti as a representation of Manuchehr of Stakhr [Estakhr], one of the rulers of the Persid dynasty, on the basis of the coin typology developed by Sir George Hill. Herzfeld identiﬁed the ﬁgure from the style of his crown as Manuchehr, who lived two generations before Ardeshir, and which therefore gave A.D. 150–175 as an approximate date for the graﬃto.18 Apparently, during de Mecquenem’s visit to Persepolis he could ﬁnd only one graﬃto, which was visible on an unburied window sill. Following Herzfeld’s excavations and recovery of building remains, additional examples of graﬃti were found. Although Herzfeld refers to only three graﬃti, it is reasonable to suggest that he had seen many more, which are completely obvious, but which he apparently never published for reasons unknown. Some are adjacent to each other, making it extremely unlikely that they went unnoticed, especially by such an experienced eye as Herzfeld’s. We can now refer to each of the Harem locations separately with its related graﬃti. 14 Schmidt, Persepolis, pl. 198 A and B, for incised ﬁgural patterns on the royal robes depicted in reliefs at the Harem. 15 The rosette pattern can be compared with the individual rosettes that appear, for example, in the center interior of bronze vessels. 16 Tilia, Studies and Restorations at Persepolis, 54, ﬁg. 8. 17 Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 80. 18 Ibid., 80–81.

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On the window sill is a graﬃto of a king on horseback, the ﬁgure that Herzfeld identiﬁed as Manuchehr of Stakhr (ﬁgs. 1–2).19 His crown is in the shape of a Parthian crown; in the center of the crown’s ornaments is a crescent moon. This type of crown does not belong exclusively to the Persid ruler Manuchehr III, however. Coin portraits depict other rulers from the dynasty wearing similar crowns, which diﬀer only in minor details.20 Most of these ruler portraits include a crescent moon with a star above it. We can compare this crown with coin portraits of Darius II of the Persid dynasty, speciﬁcally the two attributes of the crescent moon and the ribbons knotted at the back of the crown.21 The graﬃto does not seem to be as early as the reign of this king, however. The crown on this graﬃto also features decorative elements that seem to be sewn on or otherwise attached, such as pearls, along with two ribbons in back that suggest an ornamented border. On other crowns, the edges of the crown cover the ears and back of the neck. In some respects, this crown closely resembles the ﬁrst crown of Ardeshir. In Vladimir Lukonin’s classiﬁcation, however, there are seven types of this kind of crown attested for Ardashir, from the beginning of his reign in Pars until his oﬃcial coronation (A.D. 220–227).22 Since none of these crowns has the same combination of elements as the one depicted on the graﬃto, no precise identiﬁcation of the ﬁgure can be proposed. This graﬃto is richly decorated, and the details it captures were carefully rendered. The king is dressed in Sasanian style, calmly sitting on horseback, and wearing a kneelength robe decorated with concentric circles at the shoulders and ties knotted on the chest. The wide trousers are covered with a pattern of squares or lozenges, each enclosing a ﬂoral ornament. On the front of one leg is a vertical row of sun or star symbols, similar to those on Parthian oﬃcial trousers; in other squares are circles sur-

19

Schmidt, Persepolis, 258, pl. 199B. Michael Alram, Nomina propria iranica in nummis: Materialgrundlagen zu den iranischen Personnennamen auf antiken Münzen, Iranisches Personennamenbuch, Bd. 4 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1986), pls. 19–21. See also David Sellwood, “Minor States In Southern Iran,” in CHI, Vol. 3:1, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pls. 10–11. 21 Ibid. 22 Vladimir Lukonin, Die Kunst des alten Iran (Leipzig: Seemann, 1986), 269. 20

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rounded by dots. In his left hand the king holds a decorated sword hilt. The horse’s body is decorated with ﬂoral ornaments, and the cloth saddle is ﬁnished with a row of tassels. The horse’s body is also covered with a pattern of dots, perhaps suggesting an article of dress. The tiny ribbons knotted onto all four feet of the horse strengthen this suggestion, although we cannot be sure about this. In front of the horse stand two men, one on each side of the animal, who appear to be holding the reins (ﬁg. 3). One wears trousers with a diagonal crosshatch pattern; the other, trousers with a pattern of lines. These ﬁgures seem to be completely separate from the image of the king on horseback, however, and they could be a later addition. They are taller than the horse, and they give the impression that the horse ﬂoats in the air. Most of the graﬃti of this period also convey the impression of a ﬂoating horse. In location 1 at the Harem are other graﬃti, in addition to those of the mounted king and his two attendants. On the left side of the stone is another graﬃto of a rider, who also wears a crown with a crescent moon (ﬁg. 4). He does not wear a robe, but in his right hand he holds a ring symbolizing royal authority, which later became a common motif in Sasanian art. The head and neck of the horse are covered by a kind of armor that appears to be made of woven material. On this stone are also images of four separate faces, two with ribbons. In front of the ﬁrst rider with two attendants are three faces; two are left unﬁnished, and the third is drawn as a half-ﬁgure depicting a king whose crown is unusual in its pattern of lozenges (ﬁg. 5). Just to the left of the faces is another head, drawn separately, which also features a crown with crescent moon and two ribbons in back. In all, there are four faces on this stone, along with the two riders and two attendants, who face left. Other, miscellaneous graﬃti on this stone include a single eye and two unﬁnished drawings resembling the oval objects that are shown suspended from the horses. They are common in oﬃcial Sasanian stone reliefs and seals, but it is diﬃcult to determine what they represent. One possible interpretation is that they were made in the shape of a round ﬁre altar; in fact, the king seems to have carried with him a ﬁre altar while on horseback. On the upper right-hand side of the stone I observed a row of connected swastikas, above which is an isolated, single swastika. The swastika is a very common design, appearing on Achaemenid seals found at Persepolis, on Parthian-period monuments such as decorated stucco, and on Sasanian monuments.

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During the same survey, a short inscription was found near the head of the ﬁrst rider with the two attendants; no certain translation has yet been made. The inscription and swastikas were scarcely visible without additional sources of light. If we count the ﬁrst rider and his two attendants as one graﬃto, then along with the other graﬃti and miscellaneous drawings there are fourteen graﬃti at the Harem site (location 1), including complete and incomplete images and inscriptions.

Harem, Location 2 The window is divided into four parts: lower stone of the window (exterior), interior left wall (eastern), interior right wall (western), and ﬂoor of the window. Approximately in the center of the window’s lower stone is a graﬃto of a seated lion, measuring about eight centimeters in height, completely covered with incised patterns (ﬁg. 6). It is possible that the lion follows artistic prototypes available at the time, but it has its own style and independent form, and does not appear to have been created under the inﬂuence of oﬃcial artistic rules. Inside the window at the right side (western) wall, as noted earlier, is an incised standing ﬁgure which Herzfeld identiﬁed as Papak, known as the king of Estakhr, and the father of Shapur and Ardeshir (ﬁg. 7).23 This identiﬁcation is based on the ﬁgure’s distinctive crown as depicted on coins of Shapur, elder brother of Ardeshir, on the reverse of whose coins appears an image of his father wearing this crown.24 On the ﬁgure incised on the stone this crown is shown in greater detail, and it appears to be surmounted by a cloth-covered globe (a feature of the crown that the coin images do not depict). The ﬁgure wears a long, belted robe, which has a collar with a decorated border. Over his long dress he wears a long robe with sleeves, tight at the wrists and knotted at the chest, with two round decorative patterns on the shoulders. Two long ribbons hang from the back of his magniﬁcent crown. He wears wide, lozenge-patterned trousers without further decoration but with a diﬀerently patterned border. In his

23 24

Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 80–81; Schmidt, Persepolis, pl. 199A. For this coin, see Alram, Nomina propria iranica in nummis, pl. 22: nos. 653–55.

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left hand Papak holds a sword hilt; in his right hand is an object resembling a small ladle. Perhaps he is shown in the act of putting incense into an incense altar decorated at the top with a crescent moon. The style of the standing ﬁgure and gesture indicated in the graﬃto may be compared with Parthian iconography, in particular with the scene of the sacriﬁce of Konon depicted in the Temple of Bel (Temple of the Palmyrene Gods) at Dura-Europos, and with a graﬃto from northern Mesopotamia dating to the Parthian period.25 The iconography continues an earlier tradition of ceremonial ﬁgures whose right hand is extended across the front of the body in a ritual gesture and whose left hand holds a sword instead of a vessel or plate. In Parthian style, faces are typically depicted frontally.26 In the Persepolis graﬃto ﬁgure, however, the head is shown in proﬁle and attention appears to be focused on the performance of the ceremony rather than on its observers. This set of conventions is standard in most of the Sasanian reliefs. In similar Sasanian representations of kings in ceremonies or other types of symbolic scenes, with few exceptions, the king is never shown with frontal face.27 Aside from the ﬁgure of Papak and two other graﬃti, nothing more has been published from this location. One of the published graﬃti is a half-ﬁgure of a goat running toward Papak, drawn at the edge of a window (ﬁg. 8). A copy was drawn by Taghi Aseﬁ and published by Ali Sami.28 The published version is an almost accurate copy, but in it the goat appears near the front foot of Papak and near the altar; in the original, the goat is ﬁfteen centimeters distant from the ﬁgure. The goat graﬃto shows traces of intentional damage made at some unknown time. In 1996 this area was surveyed carefully and, after removing dust and sediment on parts of the western wall, I found additional graﬃti, including ﬁve inscriptions in Hebrew (recently analyzed by Professor 25 The sacriﬁce of Konon depicted at Dura-Europos has been frequently reproduced; see, for example, Malcolm A. R. Colledge, Parthian Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pl. 48:c. For the Parthian-period graﬃto from Assyria, see Roman Ghirshman, Iran: Parthes et Sassanides (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 46–47, ﬁgs. 59 and 60. 26 Compare also the relief of Vologeses at Bisotun and the Elymais reliefs. See Trudy S. Kawami, Monumental Art of the Parthian Period in Iran, ActIr 26 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), 43–45, 69–87, with further references. 27 There are only few images of Ardashir and the guards of the ﬁre altar on the reverse of the coins, shown frontally, and they do not perform any rituals. 28 Sami, “Gozaresh-haye Bastanshenasi,” sixth drawing.

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James Russell; they were initially assumed to be Aramaic). Research now in progress indicates that Jewish travelers wrote these graﬃti, which bear names and dates, during the Sasanian period. Four of the ﬁve inscriptions are cut in the same style as the ﬁgural graﬃti; the ﬁfth is written in ink and could be seen under special conditions (ﬁg. 9). A small lion’s head was also engraved on the stone, perhaps by the artist who made the seated lion on the lower stone. On the right (western) wall are a total of eight graﬃti, including both ﬁgures and inscriptions.29 On the left (eastern) wall of the window a single ancient graﬃto drawn in ink depicts a sphinx, one of the mythological creatures of Persepolis, with a lion’s body, eagle’s wings, and human head (ﬁg. 10). Today the ancient prototype of this graﬃto appears in architectural sculpture at the top of the southern facade of the Tachara Palace (Palace of Darius), the western stairway of the Hadish courtyard, and the northern facade of the Tripylon Gate (Council Hall) stairway. We do not know whether other examples of the sphinx were visible in antiquity, but in any case the graﬃto copies an Achaemenid sphinx. Taghi Aseﬁ drew this graﬃto as he saw it, that is, incomplete.30 With additional light and photography, and by improving the quality of the image through computer processing, it was possible to bring out the seemingly invisible parts such as the face, beard and eyes, which had previously been thought to have vanished. At the bottom of the window is an incised gameboard, but the games at Persepolis are another story.

Harem, Location 3 At location 3 of the Harem, a site now located inside the museum at Persepolis, are a total of three graﬃti. Two riders are incised one above the other on the lower part of the window frame.31 The upper graﬃto depicts a king on horseback, holding in his hand a ring with two ribbons (ﬁg. 11). This graﬃto required extensive recording of a great deal of detail, which was accomplished but with considerably less care than with other graﬃti. For instance, the legs of the horse 29 Shahrokh Razmjou, “The Newly Found Inscriptions at Persepolis” (in Persian), Iranian Journal of Archaeology and History 13, no. 1 (1379/2000), 92–93. 30 Sami, “Gozaresh-haye Bastanshenasi,” sixth drawing. 31 Calmeyer, “Zur Genese altiranischer Motive,” 66, ﬁg. 4.

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have been drawn several times over each other, and the head of the horse does not ﬁt the body. In spite of these details, there are two features in this graﬃto that also appear on Sasanian reliefs and seals. One is the form and position of the rider’s foot, which points straight down. We are very familiar with this convention from Sasanian reliefs. The other is a round symbol above the crown, which was also used for coin devices and on reliefs. An exact identiﬁcation of this king is not certain. His crown resembles those of Parthian rulers and bears a symbol of a crescent moon. The second rider, drawn under the ﬁrst one, also wears a crown; the crown is decorated, and with a crescent moon on the crown added by a circle in the middle (ﬁg. 12). Perhaps a royal ﬁgure, this rider has been drawn in a style diﬀerent from that of the ﬁrst and seems to have been made by a diﬀerent artist. The rider holds his sword in his left hand, and an object like a standard in his right. The face was elegantly executed, but the body was drawn very quickly. In the survey I conducted in 1996, another graﬃto, eleven centimeters in height, was discovered at the upper part of the stone to the right side. In contrast to other graﬃti, it depicts a bearded man facing right, wearing an earring; his headgear consists of a tall hat. A sword hangs at his side. His lozenge-patterned trousers have two small extensions at the bottom of the legs, perhaps used to fasten shoes. His hands are held in front, ﬁngers pointing downward; it is not clear whether he holds anything in his hand. In location 1 of the Tachara Palace (Palace of Darius) is a graﬃto that Herzfeld counted as the third graﬃto. It shows a standing ﬁgure rendered with poor detail and decorations, with a robe and horse; it was drawn in the palace at the northern jamb of the western doorway of the south portico. There are two published drawings of this graﬃto, the ﬁrst by Herzfeld,32 the second by Taghi Aseﬁ.33 From the artistic point of view, in comparison with other graﬃti, it is of lesser quality. The standing ﬁgure faces left and wears a simple crown with two ribbons at the back. His right hand is at his side, probably pointing to something; in his left hand he holds his sword hilt. A decorative border extends from the collar and also encircles the robe, and his trousers bear a lozenge pattern. Later, an Islamic-period inscription 32 Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 307, ﬁg. 401, also reproduces the Islamic inscription carved across the upper part of the ﬁgure. 33 Sami, “Gozaresh-haye Bastanshenasi,” second drawing.

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was carved on the graﬃto. Herzfeld recognized the ﬁgure as Shapur, son of Papak and elder brother of Ardeshir, who ruled for about three months and then was killed by a falling stone during a visit to Persepolis; he was replaced by Ardeshir.34 At location 2 of the Tachara Palace (Palace of Darius) is a tiny graﬃto drawn inside a window frame in abstract form and perhaps later than the Sasanian era. The later graﬃti are numerous, and they need a separate study. The pre-Islamic graﬃti including Achaemenid and proto-Sasanian examples, as Herzfeld discussed, were driven by in part by artistic sources independent of oﬃcial artistic styles. For Sasanian iconography especially, these graﬃti should be given greater attention. Graﬃti oﬀer a very rich source of art and information, which clearly demonstrate the roots of the iconography and style used in the Sasanian and later periods. They can contribute additional evidence for crowns, headgear, costume, horse trappings, and the like. The variety of design and style also reveal that diﬀerent people were familiar with this iconography and drawing, and that they could skillfully draw them on stone with small, sharply pointed tools. Moreover, these graﬃti provide important evidence for the prototypes and artistic background that fed oﬃcial Sasanian art. The wealth of graﬃti at Persepolis, Khorasan province, and other places deserve further consideration.

34

Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 80.

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Fig. 1. A mounted royal ﬁgure, identiﬁed by Ernst Herzfeld as Manuchehr of Stakhr. Persepolis, Harem, Location 1. Author’s photograph.

Fig. 2. Detail of head. Author’s photograph.

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Fig. 3. Two attendants in front of mounted ﬁgure shown in ﬁgures 1 and 2. Persepolis, Harem, Location 1. Author’s photograph.

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Fig. 4. Graﬃto of mounted ﬁgure holding ring. Persepolis, Harem, Location 1. Author’s photograph.

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Fig. 5. Graﬃto of ﬁgure wearing crown. Persepolis, Harem, Location 1. Author’s photograph.

333

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Fig. 6. Graﬃto of seated lion. Persepolis, Harem, Location 2. Author’s photograph.

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Fig. 7. Graﬃto of standing ﬁgure, identiﬁed by Ernst Herzfeld as an image of Papak. Persepolis, Harem, Location 2. Author’s photograph.

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Fig. 8. Graﬃto showing forepart of goat. Persepolis, Harem, Location 2. Author’s photograph.

Fig. 9. One incised inscription. Persepolis, Harem, Location 2. Author’s photograph.

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Fig. 10. Graﬃto of sphinx; the image has been computer-enhanced. Persepolis, Harem, Location 2. Author’s photograph.

Fig. 11. Graﬃto of royal ﬁgure on horseback. Persepolis, Harem, Location 3. Author’s photograph.

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Fig. 12. Graﬃto of royal ﬁgure on horseback. Persepolis, Harem, Location 3. Author’s photograph.

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Fig. 13. Graﬃto of standing ﬁgure. Persepolis, Palace of Darius, Location 1. Author’s photograph.

PART IV

BYZANTINE AND ISLAMIC ART HISTORY

ERNST HERZFELD UND SAMUEL GUYER IN KILIKIEN: FORSCHUNGEN ZUR SPÄTANTIKFRÜHBYZANTINISCHEN ARCHITEKTUR Gabriele Mietke

Ernst Herzfeld wurde berühmt durch seine Forschungen zur vorderasiatischen und islamischen Architektur und Topographie. Zu Beginn seiner wissenschaftlichen Laufbahn gab es jedoch eine kurze Periode, in der er auch an Pionierarbeit auf dem Gebiet der spätantik-frühbyzantinischen Archäologie Kleinasiens beteiligt war. Im Frühjahr 1907 nämlich unternahm Herzfeld zusammen mit Samuel Guyer eine Reise in das südöstliche Kleinasien, die gezielt der Erforschung der spätantik-frühbyzantinischen Architektur dieser Region galt. Im folgenden sollen Vorgeschichte und Verlauf der Reise dargelegt, die dabei gesammelte Dokumentation, soweit sie erhalten ist, und die von Hindernissen gekennzeichnete Geschichte ihrer Publikation dargestellt und nach der Bedeutung dieser Arbeiten für die damalige und die heutige Forschung gefragt werden.1 Die frühbyzantinischen Denkmäler Kleinasiens sind heute unverzichtbarer Bestandteil jeder byzantinischen Architekturgeschichte. Um 1900 aber hatten sie noch kaum Eingang in die wissenschaftliche Literatur gefunden. Zwar hatte bereits früher im 19. Jahrhundert eine verstärkte wissenschaftliche Erschließung der Türkei mittels Forschungsreisen eingesetzt. Die meisten dieser Reisen dienten jedoch dazu, Informationen zu Geographie, Fauna, Flora und türkischer Kultur im Allgemeinen oder aber auf dem Gebiet der Altertumswissenschaften 1 Diese Arbeit stützt sich vor allem auf Materialien aus dem Nachlaß von Samuel Guyer, der größtenteils am Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie in Freiburg im Brsg. und bei Frau Gertrud Guyer-Wyrsch in Bern aufbewahrt wird. Ich danke Prof. Dr. Otto Feld und Prof. Dr. Rainer Warland, dem früheren und dem jetzigen Inhaber des Freiburger Lehrstuhles, und Frau Gertrud Guyer-Wyrsch, Tochter von Samuel Guyer, für die Genehmigung, die Kilikien betreﬀenden Archivalien aus dem Nachlaß wissenschaftlich auswerten zu dürfen. Samuel Guyer und Ernst Herzfeld betreﬀende Briefe und Akten werden auch im Zentralarchiv der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin aufbewahrt. Weiter danke ich der Archivarin Ms. Colleen Hennessey, die mir kenntnisreich und liebenswürdig geholfen hat, in den Ernst Herzfeld Papers in den Archives der Freer Gallery of Art, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington D.C. ergänzende Materialien zu ﬁnden.

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antike Inschriften zu sammeln. Zeugnisse antiker Architektur wurden oft nur kursorisch beschrieben, das Interesse konzentrierte sich dabei auf hellenistische und römische, selten nur auf byzantinische Bauwerke. Alleine denjenigen Konstantinopels war seit der Mitten des 19. Jahrhunderts größere Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt worden.2 Die Beobachtungen eigener Reisen in Kleinasien ﬂossen 1864 in das Buch Byzantine Architecture von Charles Félix Marie Texier und Richard Popplewell-Pullan ein.3 Das Interesse Auguste Choisys in seinem 1883 erschienenen Buch L’art de bâtir chez les Byzantins, in dem er auch kleinasiatische Denkmäler berücksichtigte, konzentrierte sich auf die technische Ausführung, besonders die byzantinische Wölbetechnik.4 Nur ganz vereinzelt wurden ausdrücklich frühbyzantinische Bauwerke Kleinasiens Gegenstand wissenschaftlicher Monographien. Arthur Headlam behandelte 1893 das frühbyzantinische Kloster Alahan Monastır und die Kuppelkirche von Da< Pazarı, beide im Rauhen Kilikien gelegen,5 Oskar Wulﬀ 1903 die Koimesiskirche von Nikaia (Iznik).6 Hinzu kam die Bekanntmachung einzelner Bauwerke in Aufsätzen, die oft nur spärlich illustriert waren.7

2

Hervorzuheben: Gaspare Fossati, Aya Soﬁa, Constantinople, As Recently Restored by Order of H. M. the Sultan Abdul Medjid (London: R. & C. Colnagni & Co., 1852); Wilhelm Salzenberg, Alt-Christliche Baudenkmale von Constantinopel vom V. bis XII. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Ernst & Korn, 1854); Alexandros Georgiou Paspates, Vyzantinai meletai topographikai kai historikai meta pleiston eikonon (Konstantinopel: A. Koromela, 1877); D. Pulgher, Les anciennes églises byzantines de Constantinople (Wien: Lehmann & Wentzel, 1878). 3 Charles Félix Marie Texier und Richard Popplewell-Pullan, Byzantine Architecture, Illustrated By Examples of Ediﬁces Erected in the East During the Earliest Ages of Christianity, With Historical and Archaeological Descriptions (London: Day, 1864). 4 Auguste Choisy, L’art de bâtir chez les Byzantins (Paris: Ducher et cie, 1883). 5 Arthur C. Headlam, Ecclesiastical Sites in Isauria (Cilicia Trachea), Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, Supplementary Papers no. 2 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1893). 6 Oskar Wulﬀ, “Die Architektur und die Mosaïken der Kirche zu Maria Himmelfahrt in Nikaia [russ.],” Vizantijski Vremmenik 7 (1900): 315–425; Oskar Wulﬀ, Die Koimesiskirche in Nicäa und ihre Mosaiken nebst den verwandten kirchlichen Baudenkmälern, Zur Kunstgeschichte des Auslandes, 13 (Straßburg: J. H. Heitz, 1903). 7 Gabriel Millet, “Les monastères et les églises de Trébizonde,” BCH 19 (1895): 419–59; Josef Strzygowski, “Les chapiteaux de Sainte Sophie à Trébizonde,” BCH 19 (1895): 517–22; J. W. Crowfoot, “Notes upon Late Anatolian Art,” BSA 4 (1897–98): 79–94 (u.a. zur Kirche in Yürme und Kapitellen des 5. Jhs.); Ernst Kalinka und Josef Strzygowski, “Die Cathedrale von Herakleia,” ÖJhBeibl 1 (1898): 3–28; G. Weber, “Basilika und Baptisterium in Gül-bagtsché (bei Vurla),” ByzZeit 10 (1901): 568–73. Diese Zusammenstellung kann sicher noch um den ein oder anderen Titel vermehrt werden, aber auch dann bleibt die Zahl der wissenschaftlich dokumentierten Denkmäler begrenzt.

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Im 19. Jahrhundert wurden zuerst begrenzte Grabungen in Kleinasien durchgeführt, denen im letzten Jahrhundertdrittel die ersten Großgrabungen folgten. Heinrich Schliemann machte 1870 mit Troia den Anfang, es folgte Carl Humann in Pergamon 1878.8 Die meisten Ausgrabungen lagen an oder nahe der Westküste Kleinasiens, keine hatte ausdrücklich die Erforschung spätantik-frühbyzantinischer Denkmäler zum Gegenstand. Diese wurden günstigstenfalls mitberücksichtigt—am ehesten, wenn es sich um Großbauten, zumeist Kirchen handelte—, im ungünstigen Fall nach ﬂüchtiger Dokumentation abgeräumt oder ohne Dokumentation als störende Schicht über den “wahren” archäologischen Resten abgetragen.9 Den entscheidenden Anstoß zu einer ernsthaften und intensiveren Erforschung der byzantinischen Architektur Kleinasiens gab im Jahr 1903 Josef Strzygowski durch das Buch mit dem provokanten Titel Kleinasien. Ein Neuland der Kunstgeschichte. Darin verwendete er bis dahin unveröﬀentlichtes Material, das J. W. Crowfoot und I. I. Smirnov auf Forschungsreisen gesammelt hatten.10 In seiner üblichen energischen und apodiktischen Art wies Strzygowski auf die herausragende Bedeutung Kleinasiens für die Entstehung der frühchristlichen und mittelalterlichen Kirchenarchitektur hin. Seiner Meinung nach waren das oströmische Reich und der Nahe und Mittlere Osten die Hauptquellen für die Herausbildung einer christlichen europäischen Kunst und Architektur. Bereits vorher hatte Strzygowski seine deutliche Gegenposition zu der vorherrschenden Auﬀassung geäußert, daß Rom und die römische, westliche Formenwelt den Ausgangspunkt für die frühchristlich-mittelalterliche Kunst und Architektur gebildet hätte. Seine Kritik richtete sich dabei vor allem gegen Franz Wickhoﬀ, seinen Vorgänger auf dem Ordinariat für Kunstgeschichte der Wiener Universität.11

8

Nach einer ersten Kampagne 1871. z. B. die byzantinische Wohnbebauung Pergamons: Klaus Rheidt, Die byzantinische Wohnstadt, Die Stadtgrabung, AvP 15, 2 Teil 2 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), 8 f. 10 Josef Strzygowski, Kleinasien: Ein Neuland der Kunstgeschichte (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1903). 11 Josef Strzygowski, “Die Entwicklung der Kunst in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten n. Chr.,” in Orient oder Rom. Beiträge zur Geschichte der spätantiken und frühchristlichen Kunst (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1901), 1–10. Zur “Orient-oder-Rom”-Debatte zuletzt Carola Jäggi, “Ex Oriente Lux: Josef Strzygowski und die ‘Orient oder Rom’-Debatte um 1900,” Okzident und Orient, Sanat Tarihi Defterleri-Kunsthistorische Hefte, Sonderheft 6 (2002): 91–111. 9

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Angeregt durch Strzygowski begannen Wissenschaftler, der byzantinischen Architektur Kleinasiens größere Aufmerksamkeit zu schenken. Die Zahl der Forschungsreisen, die sich auf die christlichen Bauten konzentrierten, nahm merklich zu. Im Jahr 1906 veröﬀentlichte Gertrude Bell Bemerkungen, Fotos und Grundrisse frühbyzantinischer Kirchen in Kilikien und Lykaonien, die sie auf einer Reise 1905 aufgenommen hatte.12 Bereits 1905 legte der Ingenieur Carl Holzmann rekonstruierende Aufnahmen der Kirchen von Binbirkilise vor.13 Gertrude Bell und William M. Ramsay besuchten 1907 bis 1909 erneut diese und benachbarte Ruinenstätten, über die sie gemeinsam eine Monographie veröﬀentlichten; in der Widmung und im Vorwort bezogen sie sich ausdrücklich auf das Kleinasienbuch von Strzygowski.14 Hans Rott und Karl Michel studierten 1906 und 1907 frühbyzantinische Denkmäler auf Touren durch das südliche und zentrale Kleinasien.15 F. W. Hasluck bereiste die byzantinischen Kirchen Bithyniens.16 Guillaume de Jerphanion begann, die Höhlenkirchen Kappadokiens zu untersuchen.17 Die gemeinsame archäologische Expedition von Samuel Guyer und Ernst Herzfeld muß im Zusammenhang mit diesem erwachenden Interesse an den frühbyzantinischen Denkmälern Kleinasiens gesehen werden. Der Schweizer Samuel Guyer (1879–1950) war nach einem 1902 abgeschlossenen Studium der Evangelischen Theologie im Jahr 1906 in Zürich in Kunstgeschichte promoviert worden (Abb. 1).18 Schon mit seiner Dissertation über “Die christlichen Denkmäler des ersten Jahrtausends in der Schweiz” hatte er sein Interesse für die frühen monumentalen Hinterlassenschaften des Christentums bewiesen;19 er

12 Gertrude L. Bell, “Notes on a Journey through Cilicia and Lycaonia,” RA (Sér. 4) 7 (1906): 1–29, 385–414; RA (Sér. 4) 8 (1906): 7–36, 225–52, 390–401; RA (Sér. 4) 9 (1907): 1–29. 13 Carl Holzmann, Binbirkilise. Archäologische Skizzen aus Anatolien (Hamburg: n.p., 1905). 14 William M. Ramsay und Gertrude L. Bell, The Thousand and One Churches (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909). 15 Hans Rott, Kleinasiatische Denkmäler aus Pisidien, Pamphylien, Kappadokien und Lykien, Studien über christliche Denkmäler, 5 u. 6. (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1908). 16 F. W. Hasluck, “Bithynica,” BSA 13 (1906–7): 285–308. 17 Guillaume de Jerphanion, “Deux chapelles souterraines de Cappadoce,” RA (Sér. 4) 12 (1908): 1–32; Guillaume de Jerphanion, “Les églises souterraines des Gueurémé et Soghanle (Cappadoce),” CRAI 1908: 7–21. 18 Johannes Kollwitz, “Heinrich Johann Samuel Guyer,” Neue Deutsche Biographie 7 (1966): 358 f. 19 Samuel Guyer, Die christlichen Denkmäler des ersten Jahrtausends in der Schweiz, Studien

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selbst bezeichnete sich als “christlichen Archäologen.”20 Folgerichtig lag ein Schwerpunkt seiner Forschungen auf den Anfängen der kirchlichen Architektur. Wissenschaftliche Reiseberichte älterer Forscher, vor allem von Rudolf Heberdey und Adolf Wilhelm über eine Reise durch Kilikien und von J. R. Sitlington Sterrett über die Wolfe Expedition, machten ihn auf die Bedeutung Kleinasiens, besonders Kilikiens für den frühen Kirchenbau aufmerksam.21 Kurz nach seiner Promotion am 3. März 190622 reiste Guyer von April bis Juli 1906 erstmals nach Kleinasien, und zwar nach Lykaonien und Kilikien, um gezielt nach frühen Kirchenbauten zu forschen. Schon was die Menge des Materials anbelangt, war er erfolgreich, denn in den Notizbüchern seiner Reise numerierte Guyer die von

über christliche Denkmäler N. F., Hft. 4 (Leipzig: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, T. Weicher, 1907). 20 Samuel Guyer, “Aus dem christlichen Kleinasien. Vorläuﬁger Bericht über eine Reise in Kilikien und Lykaonien,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung 127 (1906), Nr. 235, Erstes Morgenblatt, Samstag, 25 August 1906, S.1 unten. 21 Die von Guyer verwendete Literatur geht aus den Blättern der Türkeikarte von Richard Kiepert im Maßstab 1:400000 hervor, die aus dem Besitz von Guyer stammen und mit denen er oﬀensichtlich 1906 und 1907 in der Türkei reiste (GuyerWyrsch). Dort sind einzelnen Orten mit roter Tinte abgekürzte Literaturhinweise mit Seitenzahlen beigeschrieben, die folgendermaßen aufzulösen sind: “HW” = Rudolf Heberdey und Adolf Wilhelm, Reisen in Kilikien. Ausgeführt 1891 und 1892 im Auftrage der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Denkschriften der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, Phil.-hist. Kl. 44. (Wien: In Kommission bei C. Gerold’s sohn, 1896).—“Murr” = Charles Wilson (Hrsg.), Handbook for Travellers in Asia Minor, Transcaucasia, Persia, etc., with index and directory for 1907 (London: J. Murray, 1895). (Das Buch trägt auf dem Einband den Titel “Murray’s Handbook Asia Minor, Transcaucasia, Persia etc.”).—“R” = Carl Ritter, Die Erdkunde von Asien, vol. 9, Klein-Asien 2 (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1859).—“St” = John Robert Sitlington Sterrett, The Wolfe Expedition to Asia Minor. Papers of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 3 (Boston: Damrell and Upham, 1888).—Erst nach den beiden Reisen können Einträge in Bleistift mit dem Kürzel “RB” erfolgt sein, das für William M. Ramsay und Gertrude L. Bell, The Thousand and One Churches (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909) steht. Die Beischrift “Sachau 17.3.06” zu Pagrae im Amanus zwischen Iskenderun und Antakya verweist wahrscheinlich auf einen Brief von Eduard Sachau, Ordinarius für Orientalistik an der Universität Berlin, der mir jedoch nicht vorliegt. Von dem 1906 und 1907 in sechs Teilen in der Revue Archéologique erschienenen Bericht Gertrude L. Bells über ihre Reise durch Kilikien und Lykaonien im Jahr 1905 konnte bei Beginn von Guyers Reise 1906 höchstens der erste Teil publiziert gewesen sein, bei Beginn der Reise 1907 lagen—abhängig vom Auslieferungsmonat—vielleicht schon sämtliche Teile vor. Damit ist nicht gesagt, daß Guyer sie auch sofort in Händen hatte. Bell, “Journey through Cilicia and Lycaonia,” RA (Sér. 4) 7 (1906): 1–29, 385–414; RA (Sér. 4) 8 (1906): 7–36, 225–52, 390–401; RA (Sér. 4) 9 (1907): 1–29. 22 Gemäß dem Matrikelverzeichnis der Universität Zürich im Internet: http://wwwrektorat.unizh.ch/matrikel/data/167.html ( Januar 2002).

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ihm aufgenommenen Grundrißskizzen von Kirchen durch und kam dabei alleine für Kilikien bis zu der Zahl 91. Um die Kenntnis der frühchristlichen Architektur Kleinasiens zu vertiefen, schien ihm die genauere Untersuchung vor allem zweier Ruinenstätten in Kilikien geeignet, nämlich des antiken Wallfahrtsheiligtums Meriamlik und der Hafenstadt Korykos. Von Meriamlik, einem ausgedehnten Bezirk westlich von Silifke mit wenigstens drei großen Kirchen, Zisternen, einem Bad und weiteren Gebäuden, war bis dahin nicht eine einzige Abbildung veröﬀentlicht, Victor Langlois, Rudolf Heberdey und Adolf Wilhelm hatten die Ruinen nur ﬂüchtig beschrieben (Abb. 2).23 Um Korykos, in dem die Ruinen von wenigstens fünf großen aufwendigen und mehreren kleineren Basiliken erhalten waren, stand es nur wenig besser (Abb. 3).24 Guyer faßte deshalb den Plan wiederzukehren und an diesen beiden Orten Ausgrabungen zu unternehmen.25 Nach seiner Rückkehr gewann Guyer Ernst Herzfeld dafür, ihn bei diesen Ausgrabungen zu begleiten. Unklar ist, wie Guyer und Herzfeld sich kennengelernt haben. Samuel Guyer absolvierte sein Studium der Theologie bis 1902 in Basel, Berlin und Zürich, Herzfeld studierte nach dem Abgang vom Joachimsthalschen Gymnasium in Berlin 1897 an den Universitäten von München und Berlin Architektur und machte 1903 an der Technischen Hochschule in BerlinCharlottenburg seinen Abschluß.26 Möglicherweise haben sich die beiden bereits während Guyers Berliner Studienaufenthalt getroﬀen. Der älteste mir bekannte Brief Herzfelds an Guyer stammt erst vom 1.

23 Victor Langlois, “Les ruines de Séleucie dans la Cilicie-Trachée,” RA 15, no. 2 (1858–59): 748; Victor Langlois, Voyage dans la Cilicie et dans les montagnes du Taurus (Paris: B. Duprat, 1861), 184 f.; Heberdey und Wilhelm, Reisen in Kilikien, 105 f. Bereits Josef Strzygowski hatte 1903 allein auf Grund der Beschreibung von Heberdey und Wilhelm gefordert “Meriamlik muss ausgegraben werden”: Strzygowski, Kleinasien: Ein Neuland der Kunstgeschichte, 51. 24 Langlois, Voyage dans la Cilicie, Taf. zw. S.206 und 207 zeigt die beiden Burgen und die Felsnekropole von Korykos.—Die Aufnahmen und kurzen Beschreibungen von Gertrude L. Bell konnten Guyer bei Antritt der Reise 1906 noch nicht vorliegen: Bell, “Journey through Cilicia and Lycaonia,” RA (Sér. 4) 8 (1906): 7–28. 25 Das Vorhaben zu diesen Ausgrabungen wird in einem Brief Guyers an Wilhelm Bode vom 30. 11. 1906 deutlich. Berlin Zentralarchiv, Nachlaß W. v. Bode, Korrespondenz, Fasz. 1779. Auch Arnold von Salis nimmt in einem Brief an Guyer aus Milet vom 9. 11. 1906 auf dessen Reisepläne Bezug: “Ich beneide Dich um Deine bevorstehende Reise sehr!” Guyer-Wyrsch. 26 Kollwitz, “Guyer,” 359; Herzfeld, maschinenschriftlicher Lebenslauf, Ernst Herzfeld Papers.

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April 1909, also zwei Jahre nach der gemeinsamen Reise. Er beginnt mit “Lieber Guyer, wie Sie mir fehlen!” und enthält sehr persönliche Beobachtungen aus der Berliner Gesellschaft.27 Der Brief zeugt— wie die übrigen der über hundert erhaltenen Briefe—von dem vertrauten Freundschaftsverhältnis, das zwischen den beiden Männern trotz der Wahrung formeller Höﬂichkeitsformen—bis an ihr Lebensende redeten sie sich mit Sie an—bestand. Guyer und Herzfeld konnten zwei Quellen für die Finanzierung ihrer Unternehmung auftun. Das Königliche Preußische Kultusministerium bewilligte über den Generaldirektor der Königlichen Museen zu Berlin, Wilhelm Bode, einen Betrag von 1500 Mark.28 Als Gegengabe für die ﬁnanzielle Unterstützung sollte Bauornamentik aus Meriamlik und Korykos an die Berliner Museen abgegeben werden.29 Weitere

27

Brief an Guyer vom 1. 4. 1909, Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie. Am 30. 11. 1906 sandte Guyer auf Anraten von Theodor Wiegand, den er in Konstantinopel getroﬀen hatte, einen Bericht über seine 1906 ausgeführte Kleinasienreise an Bode und wies in dem begleitenden Brief auf die fehlenden Mittel für die geplante Ausgrabung in Meriamlik hin. Berlin Zentralarchiv, Nachlaß W. v. Bode, Korrespondenz Fasz. 1779. Am 2. 3. 1907 bat Guyer den preußischen Minister der geistlichen, Unterrichts- und Medizinal-Angelegenheiten Konrad von Studt oﬃziell um ﬁnanzielle Unterstützung, dieser forderte am 4. 3. 1907 Bode zu einer Stellungnahme auf. Berlin Zentralarchiv, Akte I FBS 5, zu F397/1907. Oﬀensichtlich ﬁel sie positiv aus, denn mit Schreiben vom 15. 3. 1907 bewilligte das Ministerium die 1500 Mark. Die Auszahlung sollte an Bode erfolgen, “welcher mit der Abführung des Geldes an Guyer beauftragt ist.” Berlin Zentralarchiv, Akte I FBS 5, F 474/1907. Am 27. 3. 1907 machte Bode Guyer davon Mitteilung. Abschrift in Berlin Zentralarchiv, Akte I FBS 5, zu F474/07. Guyer bedankte sich in einem in Korykos abgefaßten Brief vom 20. 4. 1907. Berlin Zentralarchiv, Nachlaß W. v. Bode, Korrespondenz Fasz. 1779. 29 Am 19. 3. 1907 fordert Bode Theodor Wiegand in Konstantinopel auf, von Osman Hamdi Bey eine Zusage zur Ausfuhr der erst noch zu ﬁndenden Bauornamentik zu erwirken. Berlin Zentralarchiv, Akte I FBS 5, F474/1907. Eine Liste in der Handschrift Herzfelds mit dem Vermerk “Frühjahr 1907” führt etwa ein Dutzend in Frage kommende Kapitelle und Konsolen auf. Berlin Zentralarchiv, Akte I FBS 5, zu F616/1909; eine Zweitausfertigung liegt lose in einem Notizbuch Guyers von 1907 ohne Titel in Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie. Zwei Kapitelle wurden für eine spätere Ausfuhr von Guyer und Herzfeld in das deutsche Konsulat in Mersin gebracht, oﬀenbar illegal, denn—so Guyer in einem Brief aus Urfa vom 19. 6. 1907 an die Generalverwaltung der Berliner Museen—“An die Mitnahme grösserer Stücke war jedoch nicht zu denken bei der scharfen Überwachung & Controlle, der wir ausgesetzt waren.” Berlin Zentralarchiv, Akte I FBS 5, F1123/07. Die Bemühungen um eine Ausfuhrgenehmigung bzw.—möglichkeit gestalteten sich jedoch schwierig. Die Frage wurde zuerst halbjährlich, dann jährlich erneut geprüft, 1920 wurden die Bemühungen auf Betreiben von Theodor Wiegand und unter mißbilligender Kenntnisnahme von Oskar Wulﬀ ergebnislos eingestellt. Berlin Zentralarchiv, Akte I FBS 5, F1149/1908, F1334/1908, F851/1909, F2[.]34/1909, F1154/1910, F2210/1912. Die Stücke müssen heute als verschollen gelten. 28

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Mittel kamen privat von Dr. Hugo Remmler, Inhaber einer pharmazeutischen Fabrik in Berlin.30 Die Reise nach Kleinasien begann im Spätwinter 1906/1907.31 Mitte März hielten sich Guyer und Herzfeld gemeinsam in Konstantinopel auf, um mit Hilfe von Theodor Wiegand, damals Direktor der Berliner Museen mit Sitz Konstantinopel, die notwendigen Genehmigungen von dem Generaldirektor der Kaiserlich Ottomanischen Museen in Konstantinopel, Osman Hamdi Bey zu erhalten. Am 21. März fuhren sie von Konstantinopel aus mit der Bagdadbahn Richtung Konya, dann weiter über Karaman bis Ere
30 Herzfeld und Guyer, Meriamlik und Korykos, xv. Eine Unklarheit betriﬀt 2000 Mark, die Guyer in der Abrechnung der zur Verfügung gestellten Gelder vom 20. Oktober 1907 als “von den k[öni]gl[ichen] Museen” stammend bezeichnete, die aber in der Reinschrift derselben Abrechnung durch die Generalverwaltung der Museen als “aus Privatmitteln gedeckt” ausgewiesen wurden. Berlin Zentralarchiv, Akte I FBS 5, F1744/07 und zu F1744/07. 31 Über ihren Verlauf sind wir durch eine Routenbeschreibung Herzfelds, wenige Datumsangaben in den Reisenotizen Guyers und vereinzelte Briefe unterrichtet. Herzfeld, “Reise durch das westliche Kilikien.” 32 Samuel Guyer, “Reisenotizen III,” Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie: “Korykos. Ankunft am 5.4.07.” 33 Die Arbeiten in Korykos dauerten etwa drei Wochen, die in Meriamlik etwa einen Monat. Das ungefähre Ausmaß der Erdarbeiten ist auf den plastischen

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Nach Abschluß der Grabungen trennten sich die beiden voneinander. Während Guyer über Mersin und Adana weiter in den Osten nach Aleppo, Urfa und Harran reiste, machte sich Herzfeld am 25. Mai von Silifke aus nach Norden auf und nahm Ruinen auf in “Pambuklu” (Imbriogon Kome), “Göl<ük,” “Meidan” ( mamlı) und “Uzun
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Kilikien reisten, um ausdrücklich an zwei bedeutenden frühbyzantinischen Stätten—nämlich Meriamlik und Korykos—Ausgrabungen zu unternehmen, wurden sie zu Vorreitern auf dem Gebiet der byzantinischen Archäologie ihrer Zeit. Eine glückliche Hand bewies Guyer bei der Auswahl der Orte, auf die sie ihre Arbeit konzentrierten. Meriamlik war in der Antike als Wallfahrtsstätte zur hl. Thekla überregional bekannt gewesen und durch Stiftungen des byzantinischen Kaisers Zeno ausgezeichnet worden. Die sehr große und ursprünglich reich ausgestattete Kirche über der Kulthöhle war eines der wichtigsten christlichen Kultzentren der Region. Eine weitere, ehemals überkuppelte Kirche gehört zu einer Gruppe von kilikischen Kirchen mit zentralisierendem Grundriß, die bis heute in Diskussionen über die Einführung der Kuppeln in den byzantinischen Kirchenbau wesentlich herangezogen werden. Unter den Kirchen von Korykos, die sich durch ihre Anzahl und zum Teil ebenfalls durch besondere Größe auszeichnen, weist die sogenannte Grabeskirche extra muros ebenfalls eine zentralisierende Struktur auf. Weitere der Kirchen zeigen typisch kilikische Lösungen der Ostteile. Die meisten sind mit einer qualitätvollen Bauornamentik in einheimischem Kalkstein ausgestattet, die für die Frage nach dem Verhältnis zwischen Abhängigkeit von hauptstädtischen Vorbildern und Eigenständigkeit provinzieller Formen wichtig ist.36 Guyer und Herzfeld brachten von ihrer Reise umfangreiches wissenschaftliches Material mit, das sie—zusammen mit dem von Guyer 1906 gesammelten—gemeinsam in einem Buch veröﬀentlichen wollten.37 Erschienen sind aber zunächst nur wenige kurze Aufsätze. Über

36 Friedrich Hild und Hansgerd Hellenkemper, Kilikien und Isaurien, Tabula Imperii Byzantini, Bd. 5, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-historische Klasse, Denkschriften, 215 (Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1990), 315–20, Korykos; 441–43, H. Thekla = Meriamlik. Stephen Hill, The Early Byantine Churches of Cilicia and Isauria, Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Monographs, vol. 1 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), 115–47, Korykos; 208–34, Meriamlik. 37 Erhalten sind davon: 2 Notizbücher Guyers von seiner Reise 1906, Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie. 2 Notizbücher Guyers von den Grabungen in Meriamlik und Korykos und von Besuchen weiterer Ruinen 1907, Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie. 8 Skizzenbücher Herzfelds von der Reise 1907, davon 7 Skizzenbücher in Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie, 1 Skizzenbuch in Herzfeld Archive, department of ancient Near Eastern art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2 Stapel von Fotos, Zeichnungen und Notizen, die Spuren einer Ordnung für den geplanten Druck des Buches über die frühchristlichen Kirchen Kilikiens aufweisen; die Unterlagen stammen teils von Guyer, teils von Herzfeld, teils von dritten, Lehrstuhl für Christliche

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seine Reise 1906 hatte Guyer unmittelbar nach seiner Rückkehr in der Neuen Zürcher Zeitung berichtet. Es sollte das einzige bleiben, was je über diese Reise publiziert wurde, sieht man von kurzen Erwähnungen in seiner gedruckten Dissertation ab.38 Über zwei Ruinenstätten, die Guyer und Herzfeld 1907 untersucht hatten, hielten sie am 3. März 1909 einen Vortrag vor der Archäologischen Gesellschaft zu Berlin, der später im Jahr im Archäologischen Anzeiger abgedruckt wurde. Herzfeld sprach über “Olba, die Stadt der Teukriden (Uzuncaburç),” Guyer über “Meriamlik, die Stätte der heiligen Thekla.”39 Schließlich veröﬀentlichte Herzfeld eine Routenaufnahme der Reise in Petermanns Mitteilungen 1909 und Guyer behandelte die Ala Kilise, eine frühbyzantinische Kirchenruine nördlich von Silifke in der Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Architektur 1909/1910.40 All diese Veröﬀentlichungen enthielten insgesamt nur einen Bruchteil des Materials, das Guyer und Herzfeld auf ihren Reisen zusammengetragen hatten. Der geplanten, umfassenden Veröﬀentlichung stellten sich jedoch immer neue Schwierigkeiten in den Weg. Die Bleistiftzeichnungen, die Herzfeld angefertigt hatte, mußten für den Druck sauber in Tusche umgezeichnet werden. Herzfeld hatte diese Aufgabe selbst übernommen, immer wieder aber drängten sich andere, ihm dringlicher erscheinende Arbeiten vor, und auch die Lehrverpﬂichtungen nach seiner Ernennung zum Privatdozenten für Historische Geographie an der Berliner Universität am 28. Juli 1909 beanspruchten seine Zeit. Fortwährend beklagte er sich gegenüber Guyer über den enormen Druck, unter dem er stand. “Die letzten Wochen hatte ich wahnsinnig zu thun, zu viel. [. . .] Ein Glück dass das Semester im Februar endet.”41 “Sodass ich eigentlich in den letzten Wochen nur mein Colleg u[nd] ganz mechanische Sachen

Archäologie. 297 Originalnegative von Herzfeld (Guyer-Wyrsch). die farbige Reinzeichnung der von Herzfeld aufgenommenen Reiseroute in 16 Blättern, Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie. Fotos und Notizen im wissenschaftlichen Nachlaß von Herzfeld, Ernst Herzfeld Papers. 38 Guyer, “Aus dem christlichen Kleinasien. Vorläuﬁger Bericht über eine Reise in Kilikien und Lykaonien,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung 127 (1906); Guyer, Die christlichen Denkmäler des ersten Jahrtausends, 7, 43 f. Anm. 3 u. 4; 73 mit Anm. 1. 39 Ernst Herzfeld, “Olba, die Stadt der Teukriden,” AA 1909: 434–41; Guyer, “Meriamlik.” 40 Herzfeld, “Reise durch das westliche Kilikien”; Samuel Guyer, “Ala Kilise, ein kleinasiatischer Bau des V. Jahrhunderts,” Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Architektur 3 (1909–10): 192–99. 41 Brief an Guyer vom 6. 2. 1910, Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie.

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schlecht u[nd] recht gearbeitet habe. Und die Zeit drängt: [. . .] Ich bin gehetzt, u[nd] weiss nicht aus u[nd] ein. Vollständig neurasthenisch bin ich augenblicklich.”42 “Mittlerweile starre ich auf den Berg Arbeit wie ein hypnotisiertes Huhn.”43 So war es nicht erstaunlich, daß sich die Ausarbeitung der kilikischen Zeichnungen über Jahre hinzog. Erst im April 1910 stellte Herzfeld ihre baldige Vollendung in Aussicht: “Nicht mehr lange, so ist auch unsere letzte Zeichnung gezeichnet.” 44 Doch auch in den folgenden Jahren wurde die Veröﬀentlichung über Kilikien nicht fertig. Herzfeld war durch die Vorbereitung und Durchführung der Ausgrabungen in Samarra beansprucht.45 Guyer nahm auf Auﬀorderung Herzfelds 1911 an der Kampagne in Samarra teil und bereiste im Anschluß die Gebiete nördlich von Aleppo, den Tur Abdin und den Oberlauf des Tigris. Intensiv interessierte er sich für die frühbyzantinischen Kirchen dieses Gebietes. Die Ergebnisse der Reise erschienen über einen langen Zeitraum verteilt, eine Monographie über “Denkmäler Mesopotamiens zwischen Antike und Islam” blieb unveröﬀentlicht.46 Abgesehen von einem kurzen Vikariat nach seinem theologischen Examen 1902, das er bald zu Gunsten seines Kunstgeschichtsstudiums aufgab, war Samuel Guyer zu keinem Zeitpunkt seines Lebens institutionell angebunden. Er bestritt seinen Lebensunterhalt mit Reiseskizzen und populärwissenschaftlichen Artikeln, die er für die Neue Zürcher Zeitung schrieb. Weitere Einkünfte waren die bescheidenen Erträge eines ererbten kleinen Stückes Land nahe Triest, genannt Pally-Haidenschaft, auf dem er sich in den Jahren nach der Kilikienreise häuﬁg aufhielt, wo es ihm aber an Arbeitsmitteln fehlte (Abb. 4). Darüber hinaus wurden seine Kräfte durch einen jahrelangen juristischen Streit mit dem italienischen Staat über die Wasserrechte für

42

Brief an Guyer vom 15. 5. 1910, Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie. Brief an Guyer vom 24. 5. 1910, Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie. s.a. die Briefe an Guyer vom 10. 6. 1909, 23. 11. 1909, 31. 12. 1909, Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie. 44 Brief an Guyer vom 14. 4. 1910, Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie. Bis zum 26. 4. 1910 waren weitere Zeichnungen fertig, aber oﬀenbar noch nicht sämtliche. Brief an Guyer vom 26. 4. 1910, Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie. 45 Pläne für eine Unternehmung in Samarra erwähnte Herzfelds gegenüber Guyer in den erhaltenen Briefen zum erstenmal am 10. 6. 1909, Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie. Sie waren von da an ständiges Thema. 46 Die Literatur zitiert in Kollwitz, “Guyer,” 359. Das Manuskript der “Denkmäler Mesopotamiens zwischen Antike und Islam” ist erhalten, Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie. 43

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das Grundstück abgezogen. Zwar gewann er schließlich den Prozess, mußte sich aber mit einem mageren Vergleich begnügen. Mit dem Ende des zweiten Weltkrieges wurde das Gebiet Teil Jugoslawiens, und Guyer wurde enteignet.47 Ende 1913 schien sich eine neue Möglichkeit zu eröﬀnen, das kilikische Material zu vervollständigen und zu publizieren. Oﬀenbar wurde Guyer von dem Epigraphiker Adolf Wilhelm aus Wien vorgeschlagen, im Frühjahr 1914 gemeinsam nach Kilikien zu reisen, um dort epigraphische und architektonische Forschungen zu betreiben. Herzfeld riet Guyer zu, forderte ihn jedoch zur Vorsicht auf: “Es hat natürlich gar keine Bedenken, mit Wilhelm zusammen zu arbeiten. [. . .] Aber ein anderes “Aber.” Das “gemeinsame-Sache-machen” muss genau praecisiert werden. [. . .] Will ferner Wilhelm für sein abschliessendes Werk, das vorzüglich epigraphisch sein wird, unsere Materialien haben, was sehr gut wäre, so muss festgelegt werden, immer alles schriftlich, dass in der Publication unserem archaeolog[ischen] Materiale genügender Raum zur Verfügung gestellt wird.”48 Im Januar diskutierte Herzfeld weiter die Bedingungen, unter denen Guyer nach Kilikien reisen sollte.49 Im Februar und April 1914 erkundigte er sich nach dem Stand der Verhandlungen mit Adolf Wilhelm.50 Ohne daß Herzfeld davon Kenntnis erlangt hätte, war zum Zeitpunkt des Briefes vom 25. April 1914 die Forschungsreise schon im vollen Gange. Adolf Wilhelm war zusammen mit Josef Keil und drei weiteren Begleitern bereits Ende März von Antalya aus aufgebrochen.51 Guyer war nicht dabei, es ist ungewiß, ob es zu keiner Einigung mit Adolf Wilhelm kam oder ob andere Schwierigkeiten seine Teilnahme verhinderten.52 Der Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges im August 1914 brachte eine veränderte Situation. Herzfeld wurde eingezogen und 1914 und 1915 in Frankreich, Galizien und Polen eingesetzt, 1916 kam er zur 47

Brief Guyer an Herzfeld vom 4. März 1946, Ernst Herzfeld Papers, personal correspondance, notebook N-131, und mündliche Mitteilung von Gertrud GuyerWyrsch. 48 Brief an Guyer vom 28. 12. 1913 (Guyer-Wyrsch). 49 Briefe an Guyer vom 10. und 23. 1. 1914 (Guyer-Wyrsch). 50 Briefe an Guyer vom 19. und 26. 2. 1914 und vom 25. 4. 1914 (Guyer-Wyrsch). 51 Josef Keil und Adolf Wilhelm, “Vorläuﬁger Bericht über eine Reise in Kilikien,” ÖJhBeibl 18 (1915): 5. Die Reise endete am 5. Juni mit der Einschiﬀung in Mersin, vgl. ebenda 58. 52 In Briefen Herzfelds an Guyer vom 24. und 26. 2. 1914 (Guyer-Wyrsch) wird auf eine schwere Erkrankung von dessen Mutter Bezug genommen.

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Deutschen Irak-Gruppe P.53 Bei längeren Berlinaufenthalten gelang es ihm, verschiedene eigene Arbeiten voranzutreiben.54 Auch Kilikien widmete er sich. “Ich habe in den letzten Wochen viel über Kilikien nachgedacht, u[nd] als ich vor einiger Zeit in dem Bericht über die Leibniz-Sitzung der Akademie las, dass das Gerhard-Stipendium zum 3ten Male nicht verteilt ist, also jetzt auf 7200 Mark angelaufen ist, habe ich mich an Wiegand gewandt, mit dem ich vor 2 Jahren etwa schon mal darüber gesprochen hatte, wie ich es während des Krieges anfangen könnte, mich darum zu bewerben. [. . .] Ich hoﬀe sehr, dass sich diese Angelegenheit [die Publikation des Kilikienbuches] mit dem Gerhard-Stipendium verwirklichen lässt.”55 Und tatsächlich ordnete Herzfeld das Material, ließ sich einen Kostenvoranschlag durch Ernst Vohsen vom Verlag Dietrich Reimer machen und beantragte das Eduard Gerhard-Stipendium der Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin. Auch eine nochmalige Reise nach Kilikien war geplant: “Eben habe ich die Ordnung des kilikischen Materiales fertig u[nd] werde um 1/2 11 Vohsen sehen, der mir einen Kostenanschlag machen soll. [. . .] Diesen Kostenanschlag u[nd] einen für die nochmalige Reise reiche ich dann der Akademie ein. Die Bestimmungen der Stiftung habe ich, sie passen genau zu unsrer Sache. Da aber Reichsangehörigkeit erforderlich ist, muss ich alles auf meinen Namen machen, was ja ganz egal ist.”56 “Das Gesuch wegen Cilicien ist abgegangen. Vohsen will es verlegen, für 9400 M. Zuschuss! Gesamtkosten über 12000 M. 2 Bände wie unsre archaeolog[ische] Reise: 120 Lichtdrucke, 150 Pläne, 200 Netzdrucke auf gestrichenem Papier, 32–36 Bogen Text, großes Format. Die Reise wird extra 3500 (höchstens) kosten, einschl[ießlich] der Materialien u[nd] photogr[aphischen] Arbeiten.”57 Noch gegen Ende des Krieges

53 Vgl. Feldpost an Guyer von September 1914 bis September 1915 und vom 1. 10. 1916 (Guyer-Wyrsch). 54 “[. . .] seit ich in Berlin bin [. . .], d.h. seit dem 9. Dez. [1915]. Seit der Zeit habe ich ungeheuer viel gearbeitet. Jetzt ist bald das Material von meinen Reisen nach u. von den Ausgrabungen fertig, es fehlt nur noch das der Expedition nach dem sasanidischen Paikuli-Denkmal. Auch eine ganze Menge nicht mit gehörige Sachen habe ich bearbeitet, im ganzen ein grosser Schritt vorwärts. Ich freue mich ungeheuer, denn in normalen Zeiten hätte ich immer soviel an den eigentlichen Grabungsresultaten zu arbeiten gehabt, dass ich nie dazu gekommen wäre.” Brief an Guyer vom 25. 1. 1916 (Guyer-Wyrsch). 55 Brief an Guyer vom 9. 8. 1915 (Guyer-Wyrsch). 56 Brief an Guyer vom 22. 9. 1915 (Guyer-Wyrsch). 57 Brief an Guyer vom 28. 9. 1915 (Guyer-Wyrsch).

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allerdings war die Angelegenheit nicht entschieden, und Herzfeld versuchte, neue Quellen der Finanzierung aufzutun: “ich muss Ihnen von meiner Unterhaltung mit Delbrück erzählen, bei der ich ihm vieles [sic] Zeichnungen u[nd ] Photos gezeigt habe. Also er ist aufrichtig von beiden, den hellenistischen u[nd] christlichen Sachen entzückt. Für das hellenistische wird sich das Institut interessieren u[nd] pekuniär beteiligen können, man kann also an eine Schürfung in Olba denken; für das christliche hat er einen Grafen XYZ, der eventuell auch Geld für eine Beendigung der Untersuchung giebt, besonders da die Sache damals so gut eingeleitet war. [. . .] Ich möchte das [die Finanzierung der Reise 1907] Delbrück genau angeben u[nd] einen Kostenanschlag machen, indem ich den Umfang der Arbeiten die ich für das Gesuch an das Gerhard-Stipendium s[einer] Z[eit] (1915) eingereicht habe, wo es einschließl[ich] Publication bei Reimer sich um c[irc]a 12500 Mark handelte, noch erweitere. Ich denke man wird etwa bis 25000 Mark gebrauchen können. Vielleicht liegen die Zeiten nicht mehr so fern, wo man an die Ausführung denken kann.”58 Doch schließlich resignierte Herzfeld vorläuﬁg, vor Ende des Krieges war nicht mit einer Finanzierung und also auch nicht mit der Veröﬀentlichung zu rechnen: “Vor einiger Zeit fragte mich Dragendorﬀ nach Cilicien, weil er als Mitgl[ied]d[er] Akademie mit der Gerhardstiftung zu thun hat, u[nd] wissen wollte, wie er über die Gelder disponieren könne. Ich sagte ihm, er möchte so rechnen, dass wir unmittelbar nach Friedensschluss Geld bekommen könnten, vorher ist es ja doch unmöglich.”59 Obwohl die wirtschaftliche Situation vor allem Deutschlands auch nach Ende des Krieges desolat war, bemühte sich Herzfeld weiter um Mittel für den Druck: “Gestern nachm[ittag] hatte ich eine Besprechung mit Dragendorﬀ—Sie wissen doch dass er Puchsteins Nachfolger am Institut ist—wegen unserer kilik[ischen] Arbeiten. Vorher hatte ich mit Zahn und Sarre gesprochen. Alle, auch ich, sind der Ansicht: nicht erst die Möglichkeit eines Hinreisens abwarten,

58 Brief an Guyer vom 18. 12. 1917 (Guyer-Wyrsch). Richard Delbrueck, bis 1915 Direktor des deutschen Archäologischen Instituts in Rom, war seit 1915 im Preußischen Kriegsministerium, später im Auswärtigen Amt in Berlin tätig. Mit dem “Institut” ist das Deutsche Archäologische Institut gemeint. 59 Brief an Guyer vom 27. 3. 1918 (Guyer-Wyrsch). Der Archäologe Hans Dragendorﬀ war 1911 Generalsekretär des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts Berlin geworden und 1916 an die Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften berufen worden.

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sondern gleich publicieren was man hat. Die Gegend wird Grenzgebiet zwischen Armenien, Türkei u[nd] Italien,60 wird sehr empﬁndlich sein, dazu die Infection mit 10000 etc etc Deserteuren, die dort als Räuber leben—das wird auch lange nicht gereinigt sein. Am 1. Mai ist die Sitzung der Akademie über das Gerhard-Stipendium, u[nd] Dragendorﬀ wird diesmal die Angelegenheit entscheiden lassen, nicht wieder um ein Jahr verschieben.”61 Und tatsächlich genehmigte die Berliner Akademie im Sommer 1919 5000 RM als Druckkostenzuschuß.62 Aber auch jetzt stand die Veröﬀentlichung unter einem unglücklichen Stern: Ehe es zum Druck des Buches kam, war durch die Inﬂation das Geld so stark im Wert gesunken, daß es für die Publikation nicht mehr reichte.63 Mit der Zeit setzten andere Wissenschaftler die Forschungen in Kilikien fort. 1914 waren die Österreicher Adolf Wilhelm und Josef Keil bereits kurz dort gereist. 1925 wurden sie von der American Society of Archaeological Research nach Kilikien geschickt, um einen 60 Die Abkommen von London vom 26. 4. 1915 und von Saint Jean de Maurienne vom 17. 4. 1917 sicherten Italien gegenüber den Allierten das Recht zu, Antalya und Umgebung, also die westlich an Kilikien grenzenden Gebiete zu besetzen, wenn es zu einer Aufteilung von Anatolien kommen würde. Internet: http://www.omroep.nl/ human/tv/muur/artikel3.htm – Absatz I (Februar 2002). 61 Brief an Guyer vom 30. 4. 1919 (Guyer-Wyrsch). Otto Puchstein stand von 1905 bis 1911, dem Jahr seines Todes, als Generalsekretär dem Deutschen Archäologischen Institut vor. Robert Zahn arbeitete an der Antikenabteilung der Berliner Museen, im Jahr 1919 als Zweiter Direktor. Friedrich Sarre war Direktor der Islamischen Abteilung der Berliner Museen. 62 Im Brief Herzfelds an Guyer vom 18. 5. 1919 ist die Entscheidung noch anhängig, in dem vom 14. 7. 1919 seit kurzem gefallen (beide Briefe Guyer-Wyrsch). 63 Der zunehmende Geldverfall Thema der Briefe Herzfelds an Guyer vom 6. 12. 1919, 25. 12. 1919, 29. 1. 1920, 4. 5. 1920 (Guyer-Wyrsch). “Also es (die Finanzierung) wird schon irgendwie gehen. Hätten wir, als wir das Geld im Mai oder Juni bekamen, sofort Francs gekauft, so hätten wir heute M. 20.000 und wären über alle Schwierigkeiten hinweg” (6. 12. 1919). “Heute zu Weihnachten bekam ich endlich von D. Reimer die wenig freudige Mitteilung, dass er das Werk über Cilicien mit einem Zuschuss von nur M. 5.000 nicht drucken könne. Die Kosten sind auf M. 27.000 veranschlagt und steigen immer weiter” (25. 12. 1919). “ [. . .] ein Sackanzug z.B. steigt gerade von 1250 auf 2000 M. [. . .] Auf unseren Fall übertragen bedeutet das, dass man eben nicht drucken kann, denn es ist einfach zu teuer. Man kann alles nur mit ausländischem Geld” (29. 1. 1920). “ [. . .] 2 Billets Berlin-Nauheim [Herzfeld hatte seine Mutter zur Kur nach Nauheim gebracht] mit Schlafwagen u[nd] Gepäck kosteten allein 920 Mark, früher vielleicht 120. [. . .] Ich sehe zunächst keine Möglichkeit, die Sachen [das Buch über Kilikien und Guyers Arbeit über die frühbyzantinische Architektur Mesopotamiens] zu veröﬀentlichen” (4. 5. 1920). Noch im vorletzten mir bekannten erhaltenen Brief Herzfelds an Guyer vom 20. 2. 1922 (Guyer-Wyrsch) ist von der Verzögerung der Kilikienpublikation die Sprache.

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Survey der archäologischen Hinterlassenschaft im Gebiet zwischen dem Gök Su und dem Lamas durchzuführen und die Resultate in einem Band der Monumenta Asiae Minoris zu veröﬀentlichen. Wahrscheinlich war die desolate ﬁnanzielle Situation in den Verliererstaaten des Ersten Weltkrieges der Grund dafür, daß diese österreichische wissenschaftliche Unternehmung mit amerikanischen Geldern durchgeführt wurde.64 Einheimische Mittel zu einer Fortsetzung der 1914 angefangenen Untersuchungen werden nicht zu beschaﬀen gewesen sein. In dem Band der Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua sollten auch unveröﬀentlichte Ergebnisse der Reisen von Rudolf Heberdey und Adolf Wilhelm 1891 und 1892 und von der erwähnten Reise 1914 eingearbeitet werden. Weil Herzfeld und Guyer die Denkmäler in Meriamlik, Korykos und Uzuncaburç bereits sorgfältig aufgenommen hatten, sollte ihnen Gelegenheit gegeben werden, ihre Untersuchungen im Rahmen dieses Buches zu veröﬀentlichen. Das Manuskript, das Guyer daraufhin über Meriamlik und Korykos ablieferte, erwies sich wegen der Fülle der zu behandelnden Bauten und der umfassenden zeichnerischen und fotograﬁschen Dokumentation als so umfangreich, daß es den Gesamtband gesprengt hätte. Aus diesem Grund beschloß die American Society of Archaeological Research, es als gesonderten Band der Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua zu veröﬀentlichen.65 Er erschien im Jahr 1930.66 So wurden 23 Jahre nach ihrer gemeinsamen Reise die Ergebnisse der Untersuchungen Guyers und Herzfelds in Meriamlik und Korykos endlich ausführlich bekannt gemacht. Für den Text zeichnete Guyer verantwortlich, die meisten der Abbildungen stammten von Herzfeld. Darüber hinaus steuerte letzterer Fotos und Zeichnungen anderer archäologischer Stätten in Kilikien zu dem Band von Keil und Wilhelm bei, der 1931 veröﬀentlicht wurde. In diesem wurde auch Uzuncaburç behandelt, der Text rührte jedoch nicht von Guyer oder Herzfeld, sondern von Josef Keil.67 Mehr wurde nicht publiziert. Das geplante umfassende Buch über Kilikien, das auch die Forschungsergebnisse der Reise Guyers 1906 64 Das kommt auch in dem Brief Herzfelds an Guyer vom 29.1.1920 zum Ausdruck, s. vorige Anm. 65 Josef Keil und Adolf Wilhelm, Denkmäler aus dem Rauhen Kilikien, MAMA 3 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931), xi–xii. 66 Herzfeld und Guyer, Meriamlik und Korykos. 67 Keil und Wilhelm, Denkmäler aus dem Rauhen Kilikien, zu Uzuncaburç 44–79, zur Autorschaft xiii.

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und weitere, im Jahr 1907 aufgenommene antike Orte beinhalten sollte, kam nie heraus.68 Herzfeld und Guyer haben auf ihren Reisen die Kenntnis von der frühbyzantinischen Architektur Kleinasiens wesentlich erweitert. Die geschilderten unglücklichen Umstände bewirkten allerdings, daß entgegen allen Bemühungen ihre Forschungsergebnisse erst nach Jahrzehnten und dann auch nur zu einem Teil veröﬀentlicht wurden. Trotz der langen Zeit, die seitdem vergangen ist, ist die Arbeit von Guyer und Herzfeld nicht überholt oder obsolet geworden. Ihr Wert liegt dabei vor allem in der Dokumentation des Bestandes, die den Hauptteil des Buches ausmacht, während Rekonstruktionen und architekturgeschichtliche Einordnungen heute auf Grund weiterer Beobachtungen und einer umfassenderen Kenntnis von der frühbyzantinischen Architektur in einzelnen Punkten anders beurteilt werden.69 Durch die Abbildungen und Beschreibungen sind die Bauten von Meriamlik und Korykos heute noch besser dokumentiert als die meisten übrigen frühbyzantinischen Monumente vor allem Kilikiens. An keinem der beiden Orte haben seitdem weitere Ausgrabungen stattgefunden. Erst seit wenigen Jahren unternimmt Metin Ahunbay eine Bauaufnahme des oberirdisch Erhaltenen in Meriamlik, das bereits zu Beginn des Jahrhunderts stark zerstört war und dessen Bestand seitdem weiter gelitten hat.70 Bis jetzt muß sich daher jede Äußerung über diese beiden Stätten auf die Forschungen Herzfelds und Guyers stützen. Ernst Herzfeld unternahm nach der Kilikienreise keine weiteren Forschungen zu frühbyzantinischer Architektur. Bereits in einem Brief, den er am 7. Mai 1907 aus Silifke an den Ägyptologen Adolf Erman in Berlin schrieb, gab er überschwenglich seiner Freude darüber Ausdruck, daß der Druck seines Buches über Samarra nun gesichert sei.71 Damit war bereits der Forschungsgegenstand angesprochen, dem in der Folgezeit sein persönlicher Einsatz gelten sollte. 68 Die erhaltene Dokumentation enthält Fotograﬁen und Zeichnungen von Denkmälern, die teils bisher nicht publiziert, teils heute ganz oder teilweise zerstört sind. Die wissenschaftliche Auswertung dieses Materials ist in Arbeit und soll an anderer Stelle erfolgen. 69 So bereits Edmund Weigand in einer Rezension des Buches. Edmund Weigand, Rezension zu Herzfeld und Guyer, Meriamlik und Korykos, DLZ 54 (1933): 2471–480. 70 Metin Ahunbay, “Binbirkilise ve Ayatekla 1996 Yüzey Ara tırmaları,” Ara tırma sonuçları toplantısı 15, no. 1 (1997), 59–69; Metin Ahunbay und Turgut aner, “Binbirkilise ve Ayatekla’da (Meryemlik) 1998 Ara tırmaları,” Arastirma sonuçları toplantısı 17, no. 1 (1999), 39–48. 71 Bremen, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Nachlaß Adolf Erman. Mit dem Buch über Samarra gemeint: Herzfeld, Samarra 1907.

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Guyer und Herzfeld wollten die Untersuchungen in Kilikien ursprünglich gemeinsam veröﬀentlichen. Herzfeld zog sich aber nach und nach aus diesem Unternehmen zurück. Am 10. Juni 1909 schrieb er an Guyer: “Unsere Arbeiten meine ich sind vorher sicher so weit fertig, dass ich Ihnen ausser sämtlichen druckfertigen Zeichnungen auch das Gerippe meines Textanteiles zurücklassen könnte. Über diese Frage, ich meine den Text, müssen wir noch mal eingehender reden. Ich bin jetzt der Ansicht, dass Sie selbst mehr davon übernehmen müssen, als ich ursprünglich dachte. Ich wäre für eine derartige Teilung, dass ich etwa einiges Geographisches und älteres Historische dazu beitrage u[nd] eine Beschreibung der griechischrömischen Ruinen, während Sie alles Byzantinisch-Christliche übernehmen, also im Wesentlichen Korykos u[nd] Meriamlik. Vielleicht kann ich über die mittelalterlichen Festungen auch etwas dazu thun. [. . .] An Meriamlik selbst werde ich textlich gar nichts zu thun haben. Vielleicht kann man eine kurze Beschreibung der Grabungen selbst vom technischen Standpunkte aus, u. ein paar Worte über die Aufnahmen, Zeichnungen u. Photos, in der Einleitung sagen. Überlegen Sie das bitte mal u[nd] schreiben Sie mir.”72 Nach und nach überließ er das gesamte kilikische Material Samuel Guyer zur Veröﬀentlichung, so daß es sich in dessen Nachlaß erhalten hat. Als das Buch über die Untersuchungen von Meriamlik und Korykos 1930 erschien, zeichnete auf dem Titelblatt für den Text alleine Samuel Guyer verantwortlich, nur für die Zeichnungen und Fotograﬁen (“Aufnahmen”) Ernst Herzfeld. Das entsprach sicher nicht den tatsächlichen Anteilen. Die Idee zu den Forschungen an frühbyzantinischen Monumenten in Kilikien und die Frage nach dem frühen christlichen Kirchenbau stammten ohne Zweifel von Guyer. Herzfeld hingegen brachte vor allem seine Professionalität als Ausgräber, Architekt und Zeichner in das kilikische Unternehmen mit ein. Das unterschiedliche Interesse der beiden Forscher wird aus ihren Notizund Skizzenbüchern deutlich. Während Guyer fast ausschließlich frühe Kirchenbauten dokumentierte, setzte Herzfeld Sakral- und Profanbauten antiker wie frühchristlicher Zeit gleichwertig nebeneinander. Er skizzierte selbst neuzeitliche Häuser, wenn sie sein architektonisches Interesse weckten.

72 Brief von Herzfeld an Guyer vom 10. 6. 1909, Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie.

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Angesichts der Tatsache, daß vor 1907 nichts auf eine Beschäftigung Herzfelds mit frühbyzantinischer Architektur hinweist, kommen Zweifel auf, ob er alleine aus wissenschaftlichen Beweggründen an der Forschungsreise teilnahm. Nur wenige Jahre danach drängte Herzfeld Guyer, der wiederum bis dahin kein spezielles Interesse an islamischer Architektur bewiesen hatte, mit werbenden Worten dazu, an der Kampagne in Samarra 1911 teilzunehmen, was schließlich auch geschah.73 Herzfeld scheint sehr daran gelegen gewesen zu sein, Guyer als Menschen zur Seite zu haben, dem er vertraute.74 Nur in der Korrespondenz mit Guyer hat sich Herzfeld auch auf Probleme der frühbyzantinischen Architektur eingelassen. Immer wieder diskutierte er in seinen Briefen Fragen zum Kirchenbau in Kilikien und später Nordmesopotamien und beriet Guyer in architekturhistorischen wie praktischen Fragen.75 Wahrscheinlich bald nach der Veröﬀentlichung des Bandes über Meriamlik und Korykos brach die Verbindung zwischen den beiden Forschern ab. Dazu trugen wahrscheinlich die räumliche Entfernung und die politische Entwicklung in Deutschland bei. Herzfeld hielt sich seit 1931 häuﬁg im Iran auf, wo er in Persepolis ausgrub, 1934 ging er nach London, 1935 verlor er auf Grund nationalsozialistischer Erlasse seine Anstellung an der Humboldt-Universität, 1936 emigrierte er endgültig in die U.S.A. Nach einer jahrelangen Pause in der Korrespondenz wandte sich Samuel Guyer am 4. März 1946 erstmals wieder mit einem Brief an Herzfeld. Der Brief beginnt mit den Worten: “Lieber Herzfeld, Seit Jahren, nein seit Jahrzehnten habe ich gar nichts mehr von Ihnen gehört und haben wir uns nie

73 Die erste Erwähnung seiner Pläne für Samarra an Guyer am 10. 6. 1909. Anfang April 1910 schlug Herzfeld erstmals vor, daß Guyer mit nach Samarra kommt. Der Brief vom 4. 4. 1910 nahm auf einen nicht erhaltenen Brief vom Vortag Bezug: “Überlegen Sie sich die Angelegenheit recht gründlich u[nd] schreiben Sie mir Ihre Ansicht. Eine Entscheidung ist ja noch nicht nötig, überhaupt kann das lange oﬀen bleiben, aber es wäre entzückend. Sarre fand die Idee ebenfalls vergnüglich.” Guyer war grundsätzlich zugeneigt, wie aus dem Brief Herzfelds vom 14. 4. 1910 hervorgeht: “Die Aussicht, dass Sie einige Zeit da mitwirken wollen, ist für mich eine begeisternde. Wenn Sie so lange einen Vertreter ﬁnden u[nd] sich so lange von Ihren Angehörigen trennen können, es wäre wirklich schön.” “Wie viel ich mir von Samarra verspreche, wissen Sie. Wie schön es ist, wenn wir da zusammen wären, wissen Sie auch.” In den folgenden Briefen werden Finanzierungsund Organisationsfragen erörtert (alle Briefe Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie). 74 Dafür sprechen die oft sehr persönlich gehaltenen Briefe Herzfelds an Guyer. 75 z. B. in den Briefen an Guyer vom 31. 12. 1909, 20. 2. 1910, 20. 3. 1910, 26. 4. 1910, 6. 6. 1910, Lehrstuhl für Christliche Archäologie.

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mehr geschrieben.” Herzfeld muß am 17. März freundlich geantwortet haben, wie aus dem folgenden Brief Guyers vom 14. April hervorgeht. Dieser endet mit dem Rückblick “Wenn Sie doch wüssten, wie oft ich immer wieder an Kilikien zurückdenke; immer sage ich mir, wie schön es wäre, doch noch einmal nach Alahan Monastir zu ziehen, um dort zu graben. Und dann sollte man auf der Hinoder der Rückreise über Korykos kommen, denn mein Heimweh nach diesen Stätten ist immer ein sehr grosses.”76 So knüpften die beiden in ihren letzten Lebensjahren wieder an ihre alte Freundschaft an. Keine der Aufnahmen, die von der Reise 1907 erhalten sind, zeigt die beiden Forscher gemeinsam. Ein Bild aber führt beide zusammen: Samuel Guyer in der gewölbten Zisterne von Meriamlik teetrinkend mit türkischen Arbeitern, gesehen mit dem Auge des Fotografen, Ernst Herzfeld (Abb. 5).

76 Die Korrespondenz zwischen Herzfeld und Guyer muß im Laufe der Zwanzigerjahre dünner geworden, danach ganz eingeschlafen sein. Aus Briefen Guyers an Friedrich Sarre wird ersichtlich, daß er kaum mehr Nachricht von Herzfeld hatte. Berlin, Museum für Islamische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin— Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Nachlaß Friedrich Sarre 3.10, Wissenschaftliche Tätigkeit, Sarre als Herausgeber “Forschungen zur Islamischen Kunst,” Briefe von Guyer an Sarre vom 11. 8. 1925 und 17. 10. 1926, die Kenntnis dieser Briefe verdanke ich der Freundlichkeit von Jens Kröger. Briefe von Guyer an Herzfeld vom 4. 3. und 14. 4. 1946, Ernst Herzfeld Papers, personal correspondance, notebook N-131.

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Abb. 1. Samuel Guyer. Frau Gertrud Guyer-Wyrsch, Bern.

Abb. 2. Meriamlik, Basilika und gewölbte Zisterne von Osten 1907. Negativ von Ernst Herzfeld, Bern GW.

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Abb. 3. Korykos, Landburg 1907. Negativ von Ernst Herzfeld. Frau Gertrud Guyer-Wyrsch, Bern.

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Abb. 4. Pally-Haidenschaft, nicht identiﬁzierte Frau, Herzfelds Schwester Charlotte Bradford (Brodführer) und Ernst Herzfeld. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 32, no. 73.

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Abb. 5. Meriamlik, gewölbte Zisterne, Samuel Guyer (rechts vorne) and türkische Arbeiter. Negativ von Ernst Herzfeld. Frau Gertrud Guyer-Wyrsch, Bern.

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MSHATTA, SAMARRA, AND AL-HIRA: ERNST HERZFELD’S THEORIES CONCERNING THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE HIRA-STYLE REVISITED Thomas Leisten

Ernst Herzfeld’s diary entries from the early 1900s describing visits to the site of Mshatta in the Balqa plain, thirty-ﬁve kilometers south of Amman, do not reveal the slightest hint of how closely this ruin would become intertwined with his life and career. Mshatta not only marked Herzfeld’s debut as a historian of the nascent discipline of Islamic art on an international stage but also the transition of this ﬁeld in Germany from the hands of collectors and connoisseurs, and specialists in ancient Semitic languages, Islamic history, or Byzantine art, to those who were actually trained in the architecture, arts, and languages of the Islamic world. The discourse concerning this palace accompanied Herzfeld throughout his career, and he revisited more than once details of both its architecture and decoration long after he had lost interest in the study of early Islamic art. For this reason, rather than discussing in this paper the single steps or the series of art historical arguments by which he unraveled the so-called Mshatta problem, I propose to follow the trace of Mshatta in Herzfeld’s oeuvre by singling out one speciﬁc idea: the development of the hira style, which he formed early in his career in connection with this and other key Islamic sites, and which he elaborated and applied almost until the very end of his life. In 1909, the year he wrote his groundbreaking article “Die Genesis der islamischen Kunst und das Mshatta-Problem” as the opening contribution for the ﬁrst volume of Carl H. Becker’s new periodical Der Islam, Herzfeld was a young scholar who had just turned thirty. In the previous year, he and Friedrich Sarre, director of the Islamic collection at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, Berlin, and Herzfeld’s mentor in the ﬁeld of Islamic art, had returned from an extensive archaeological journey through Syria and Iraq.1 Their main goal, to

1

Sarre and Herzfeld, Archäologische Reise.

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identify a major Islamic site for future excavation by a German team, had been accomplished; after examining and rejecting the Syrian sites of Raqqa and Rusafa, the two scholars chose Samarra, north of Baghdad. A reply to Sarre’s telegram to the Ottoman Imperial Museums, however, in which he had applied for an excavation permit—sent hastily from Baghdad in order to preempt a possible move in the same direction by the French or the British—was still pending.2 With no other venture immediately in sight, except for the publication of the material gathered during the Euphrates and Tigris expedition, Herzfeld looked for a new project with which he could put his new experience to work.3 Certainly, Herzfeld had previously traveled in Islamic countries. But the impressions to which he had been exposed during the fall and winter of 1907–1908, during a leisurely journey from Syria to Iraq that included methodical visits to dozens of sites and monuments, had schooled his eye in scanning minute details and sharpened his ability to make comparisons. With this experience came a new sense of the geography, distance, and space of this region, which proved highly inﬂuential, even inspirational, during the phase of his work that lasted from 1908 until his departure for Samarra in the fall of 1910. The Samarra project would soon mark the shift in focus of Herzfeld’s research on Islamic art away from the eastern Mediterranean toward the east, to Iraq and ultimately to pre-Islamic Iran. The year 1909, however, found him a scholar who digested the impressions from his travel and the ideas connected with them in a sweeping attempt to explain the formation of Islamic art. “Die Genesis der islamischen Kunst” advocates for the ﬁrst time the formation of Islamic art—exempliﬁed in the building of Mshatta—as a process of composition and planning, executed by a multiethnic workforce, based on concepts that had been traded back and forth between Syria and Mesopotamia over centuries, and ﬁnanced by a ruler who was not a local strongman or tribal chief, but the leader of a world empire.

2 Thomas Leisten, Excavation of Samarra: Architecture. Final Report of the First Campaign, 1910–1912, BaForsch 20 (Mainz: von Zabern, 2003), 24. 3 The volume that included Herzfeld’s report on Samarra was published in 1912. While working at Samarra in 1911, he also corrected the galley proofs of this volume. Working with this material on almost a daily basis may have inspired some of the ideas in which he linked Levantine traditions with Mesopotamian ones.

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In addition to Herzfeld’s conviction that he had a publishable thesis, there were other reasons why he would write his article at this time and speciﬁcally concern himself with Mshatta. In the early 1900s, the discussion about Mshatta or the “Mshatta problem,” which Herzfeld had already connected with the formation of Islamic art in the title of his article, had reached its peak for a number of reasons. By this time, Mshatta had been extensively documented and examined by a steadily growing number of scholars, to some degree even through archaeological methods.4 In other words, Mshatta was one of the very few monuments of the Levant that were more or less fully accessible to a scholarly discussion based on an impressive quantity of published, and rather opinionated, material. In 1903, major parts of its decorated facade had been removed from the original site and were displayed in the gallery of late antique art at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, Berlin, beginning in 1904. Its presence there as a monumental work of “Oriental” art—long before Babylon’s Ishtar Gate was reconstructed at the same museum—created a strong impetus to establish Mshatta’s place in history and speciﬁcally in the history of art. As a result, most European scholars whose ﬁeld of expertise seldom touched the topic—historians of Byzantine art, scholars of Semitic languages or Islamic history, and architects and engineers, along with the writers of the arts sections of major European newspapers—oﬀered dates for Mshatta that ranged between the second and ninth centuries A.D. and included rulers of six diﬀerent dynasties, from the Parthians to the Abbasids, as patrons of the palace.5 Becker’s ﬁnal remark in his review of Josef Strzygowski’s work on Mshatta, which was published simultaneously with the opening of the Berlin exhibition, not only reﬂects this quandary but also addresses what the real problem with Mshatta may have been in his time: “Today, no one who works on Oriental medieval art or culture can aﬀord not to take a position regarding Mshatta.”6

4 Rudolf E. Brünnow and Alfred von Domaszewski, Die Provincia Arabia aufgrund zweier in den Jahren 1897 und 1898 unternommenen Reisen (Strassburg: K. J. Trübner, 1904–09), 110–17; K. A. C. Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 1:134–35. 5 Brünnow and Domaszewski, Provincia Arabia, 110. See also Michael Meinecke and Volkmar Enderlein, “Graben—Forschen—Präsentieren. Probleme der Darstellung vergangener Kulturen am Beispiel der Mschatta-Fassade,” JBerlMus 35 (1992): 137–72. 6 Carl H. Becker, “Das Amida Werk,” Der Islam 2 (1910): 24. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

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Herzfeld, who in 1909 had become Privatdozent (instructor) for Historische Geographie und Kunstgeschichte des Orients at the University of Berlin, could not aﬀord to remain silent about Mshatta. Indeed, the Mshatta problem was the ideal jousting ground for a young art historian eager to prove himself. But while Herzfeld is credited with becoming the ﬁrst art historian to advocate an Islamic (i.e., Umayyad) date for Mshatta, others had already preceded him and paved the way. Immediately after the opening of the exhibition in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, Becker, for instance, had suggested an Umayyad date in response to Strzygowski’s argument favoring a Ghassanid (ﬁfth–sixth century) origin for the monument.7 The Ghassanids, a group of Christian Arab tribes, were the federates of Byzantium on the Arabian frontier from around 500 A.D. to the Muslim conquest. Becker was a professor of Islamic studies at Heidelberg whose work concentrated mainly on Islam in Egypt and particularly on the papyri from Aphrodito, but he had also reviewed several articles by Sarre that dealt with art historical material. Becker, it should be noted, had just emerged from another controversy, this one concerning the date of Qusair Amra, with the Austrians Alois Musil and Joseph von Karabacek. The latter two had suggested respectively a sixth-century (Ghassanid) and a ninth-century (Abbasid) date for this structure. At the time, the Qusair Amra debate was decided solely among philologists, to the exclusion of art historians. Becker was joined by Theodor Nöldeke and Enno Littmann, two other German Arabists and Semitists, in the correct interpretation of the Qusair Amra inscriptions, especially the one naming the Visigothic king Roderic, which established a terminus post quem for the building in the year 711 A.D.8 In the case of Mshatta, however, accompanying inscriptions had not yet been found, and Becker sought support for his hypothesis among art historians. In 1906, he was joined by the Byzantinist Oskar Wulﬀ, Herzfeld’s colleague at the University of Berlin, who in a series of lectures suggested the possibility of dating Mshatta in the early Islamic period.9 Herzfeld, who had also proposed an Islamic

7

Josef Strzygowski, “Mshatta,” JPKS 25 (1904): 205. See Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture, 1:390–449, for a detailed description of the monument and bibliography. 9 Herzfeld, “Die Genesis der islamischen Kunst,” 105 n. 2. 8

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date for Mshatta (but rather en passant, in his 1907 booklet on Samarra), shared Becker’s and Wulﬀ’s opinion about Mshatta and their reservations about Strzygowski.10 When Becker repeatedly encouraged Herzfeld to support their view on the building from an art historian’s perspective, the young scholar agreed to write the “Genesis” article. The result is legendary in the ﬁeld of Islamic art. Herzfeld’s response to Strzygowski’s discussion of the site was an art historical debate with gloves oﬀ, to be continued in several more articles and responses thereto. More than once, Herzfeld delivered his arguments in a tone not devoid of zealotry. And, youthfully precocious, he stressed the fact that he had personally examined all the comparanda on the basis of which he attacked and annihilated his opponent’s arguments, thus reducing Strzygowski to an armchair art historian. These are all characteristics of the human and scholarly side of Herzfeld, which may have left one or another of us with a feeling of gratitude that he bestowed on us his stupendous scholarly legacy, but is not our colleague today. His careful analysis regarding architectural details, however—building materials, vaulting systems, and the carved decoration of the southern facade of Mshatta—must be accepted, even from a modern perspective, as largely correct. But it was his conclusion that “Mshatta, Qusayr Amra, and also Kharana have to be of an Islamic, Umayyad, date, precisely because they are not similar in all their elements” that proved to be revolutionary in the ongoing discussion, as it grasped for the ﬁrst time the additive and experimental character of early Islamic art.11 For the most part, Herzfeld had agreed with those who traced Mshatta’s square enclosure back to the form of Roman castra of the Syrian limes.12 Features of Mshatta’s internal plan, however, such as the monoaxial layout that begins in the succession of corridors and courtyards and ends in the domed triconch, introduced a concept of palace quite unlike any Roman or existing Islamic structure. Citing the striking similarities between the residential compounds situated on both sides of a central domed chamber at the late Sasanian site

10 11 12

Herzfeld, Samarra 1907, 18. Herzfeld, “Die Genesis der islamischen Kunst,” 147. Ibid., 122.

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of Qasr-i Shirin, and the Islamic sites of Ukhaidir and Mshatta, made him suspect that this plan could have been modiﬁed somewhere outside of Syria—in other words, in the east, before it reappeared in the building of Mshatta.13 In an eﬀort to reconstruct these missing connections, Herzfeld introduced his second, inﬂuential (but problematic) idea regarding the site: He postulated that the origins of Mshatta went back to a lost type of royal palace built by the Lakhmid dynasty (ca. 300–600 A.D.) of pre-Islamic Hira in southern Mesopotamia.14 His proof of the importance and widespread recognition of the Hiran architectural heritage was the copious literary tradition praising legendary Lakhmid palaces such as Khawarnaq and Sadir, both believed to have been located in the vicinity of Hira.15 These arguments supported his conclusion that the Islamic palaces of Mshatta and Ukhaidir represent reﬂections of a palace type that developed as an amalgamation of southern Mesopotamian and Mediterranean elements after the Lakhmids had been introduced (through warfare against Roman and Byzantine Syria) to the form of the Roman cohort castra. Herzfeld found ﬁnal evidence even in the etymology and semantics of the word hìra. He declared that this type was not only characteristic of the Hira region, but also bore the very term hìra (from the Syriac word hertha, originally meaning “enclosure” or “encampment”), the meaning of which, he argued, must have been extended to signify even “palace.”16 Herzfeld’s idea about Mshatta as a building of the southern Mesopotamian “hira type” had immediate and wide-ranging consequences for the interpretation of the architecture he discovered in Samarra a couple of years after he wrote the “Genesis” article. After beginning his research at the site with excavations in the Great Mosque of the caliph al-Mutawakkil and in some residential buildings, by the late summer of 1911 he had shifted his activities to the

13

Ibid., 124. Ibid., 122–28. 15 Ibid., 127. 16 Ibid., 127 n. 1, 128. Herzfeld relied mainly on Henri Lammens, “La Bâdia et la Hîra sous les Omeyyades. Un mot à propos Msatta,” MélBeyrouth 4 (1910): 104–9. Heinz Gaube, Ein arabischer Palast in Südsyrien: Hirbet el-Baida, Beiruter Texte und Studien Bd. 16 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1974), has documented the only Ghassanid structure that comes close to the idea of a permanent settlement and that imitates Roman forts, but it lacks any other similarity to Mshatta. 14

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vast ruin called Manqùr, located in the extreme south of Samarra.17 The structure he investigated over the next two weeks soon emerged as a major palace complex consisting of an exterior mud-brick wall measuring 1,250 meters by 1,250 meters, which surrounded an oblong palace built in its western part. The main features inside the enclosure were broad avenues and streets that separated barracks. The palace’s structure itself was more complex; its eastern part was divided into three strips. But while the lateral ones were almost empty, the middle strip framed three monumental gates as part of courtyards that formed an axis leading slightly uphill toward a reception block in the eastern part of the palace. The audience block consisted of a cruciform domed hall with two major iwans in the east-west axis— an architectural concept that was common to a number of palaces at Samarra. Although they were never excavated, the tracts visible to the south and southeast of the reception block must have been occupied by residential quarters as well as storage and maintenance facilities, while parade and polo grounds, combined with stables, took over the northern tract. Herzfeld correctly identiﬁed the enclosure and residence as a palace with the original name of Barkuwara (or Balkuwara), well known from several medieval Arabic accounts. Probably built around the year 243/857, it was inaugurated in honor of the circumcision of al-Mutawakkil’s heir apparent, the later caliph al-Mu'tazz, and— probably more importantly—as the backdrop to a number of Mutawakkil’s splendidly infamous drinking bouts.18 While the excavation was still in progress, Herzfeld noted in his diary signiﬁcant similarities between Balkuwara’s ground plan and the description of a building he had earlier excerpted from the tenthcentury historian, geographer, and adib Mas'udi’s Mur j al-dhahab. Herzfeld held this book in high esteem for its degree of analytical interest in, and overwhelming knowledge of, the history, religion, and culture of the pre-Islamic period, articulating their importance in the shaping of an Islamic culture following the Muslim conquest of Syria, Iraq, and Iran from the Byzantines and Sasanians. In this book, Mas'udi tells the story of a fabulous building erected by alMutawakkil, who ruled in Samarra from 847 until his violent death

17 18

Leisten, Samarra, 85–90. Herzfeld, Geschichte der Stadt Samarra, 120.

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in the year 861 A.D. According to Mas'udi, the caliph built the structure in a pre-Islamic style, the so-called hira style, named after the ancient city of al-Hira in southern Iraq. The main characteristics of this building’s layout were that it imitated an army drawn up in battle formation; in Mas'udi’s own words, During his reign, al-Mutawakkil constructed a building according to a plan unknown until that time, which was known as “al-hira” with the two Sleeves and the Halls” [lit. al-hìri wal-kumayn wal-arwiqa]. The idea was suggested to him by one of his courtiers, who, in the course of an evening’s conversation, told him that the king of al-Hira, of the dynasty of the Numanids of the Banù Nasr, had a passion for war and, wishing always to have it constantly in mind, had had constructed at his capital of al-Hira a building which would evoke an army drawn up in battle lines. The hall [riwàq]19 of the palace—intended as the king’s reception room [majlis]—represented the center [sadr] of the army. The two side rooms symbolized its right and left ﬂanks. The two rooms that formed the wings were for the use of the most important members of the court. The right-hand wing was the royal wardrobe, while the left-hand one served as a repository for drinks. The court in front of the hall stretched along the center and the two wings, and three gates were leading towards it. This is the building [type] which is still today called ‘al-hira’ and also ‘The Two Sleeves,’ in memory of the town of al-Hira. The people emulated al-Mutawakkil in this— and it has remained famous down to our day.20

This passage, seemingly describing programmatic architecture in the form of an army unfolding in battle, had long been famous among Orientalists. It ﬁrst caught the attention of Joseph von HammerPurgstall, an inﬂuential early Austrian Orientalist and translator of Arab and Persian sources. As early as 1835, he published a paraphrase of the text in his book Über die Länderverwaltung unter dem Chalifate, where, curiously enough, it was the most extensive source for the reign of this particular Abbasid ruler.21 At the beginning of the twentieth century, when immeasurably more material on this period had become available, the poetically warlike hira-structure— cited, for instance, by Henri Lammens—had become transformed into a classic example of the exotic character of Abbasid architecture.22

19

For this term see ibid., 120–21. Barbier de Meynard and Pavet de Courteille, eds. and trans., Les Prairies d’or (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1861–1917), 7:189. 21 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Über die Länderverwaltung unter dem Chalifate (Berlin: Druckerei der K. Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1835), 26–28. 22 Lammens, “Bâdia,” 105. 20

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This medieval literary document, purporting to describe a building in the hira style in ninth-century Samarra, seemingly supported Herzfeld’s earlier ideas about Mshatta, Ukhaidir, and their pre-Islamic eastern connections. Having identiﬁed Balkuwara as a palace built in the tradition and form of a hìra, Herzfeld could now present an astonishing argument for the enormous impact of hira-style architecture in the form of three palaces built in diﬀerent periods and located in diﬀerent regions of the Islamic world. According to him, they were all linked by shared formal features: a surrounding wall, built-up quarters on both sides of the throne hall, and axial division into three strips.23 Herzfeld’s ﬁnal judgment, with which he put the problem to rest as “solved”—and, incidentally, a beautiful example of European Orientalist scholarship—once more underlines the connection between the Roman model and the hira in Samarra. In this example [Mas'udi’s story of the hira palace] one can recognize the way that Arabs perceive art historical contexts. The “picture of the battle” that conveys nothing other than the original meaning and purpose of the cohort camp, remains in one’s memory but altered in a genuinely Arab way. What is undoubtedly the result of a historical development is being depicted here as a spontaneous fad of the caliph, and a night’s conversation is the explanation for the introduction of a new building-type. That is characteristic: always spontaneous imitation, but no concept of historical development.24

Toward the end of his excavations in Samarra in 1913, Herzfeld was able to add another piece of evidence to uphold his theory about some kind of link between Mshatta and Samarra. During the excavation of the Bab al-'Amma, he discovered a stucco dado with triangular ﬁelds and rosettes in their centers that bore a striking resemblance to the stone frieze of Mshatta’s facade.25 How signiﬁcant he must have regarded the discoveries concerning hira-style palace architecture can be gauged from the lengthy and convoluted article on the subject that he published in 1921 and that included the new material from Samarra.26 Modifying his earlier writings only slightly,

23 While this description is true for Mshatta and Balkuwara, it is not necessarily correct in the case of Ukhaidir. 24 Leisten, Samarra, 225. 25 Herzfeld, Der Wandschmuck der Bauten von Samarra, 217–18. 26 Ernst Herzfeld, “Mshattâ, Hîra und Bâdiya, die Mittelländer des Islam und ihre Baukunst,” JPKS 42 (1921): 104–46.

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Herzfeld suggested that the emulation of Roman cohort encampments had begun earlier than he had suggested in his “Genesis” article, that is, in the ﬁfth and sixth centuries A.D., by the leaders of Arab tribal confederations who built impressive dwellings for themselves. In Syria, these leaders had been the Ghassanids, and in southern Mesopotamia, the kings of the Lakhmid dynasty of alHira, the dynasty that Herzfeld credited with having invented the hira style. Herzfeld’s ingenious combination of archaeological and literary material from which he pieced together his theory about the origins of the hira style, and the direct line he drew from the Roman castrum, the city of al-Hira, the tribal hìra, the legendary palaces of Khawarnaq and Sadir, and ﬁnally Mshatta, Ukhaidir, and Balkuwara, never met with scholarly opposition. The term “hira” consequently coined to designate this group of extant (or nonexistent) palaces found its way into the operative vocabulary of historians of Islamic art and remained in use until the end of the 1970s, when discussion of how to interpret the Umayyad desert palaces came to a preliminary conclusion.27 Even today, Mas'udi’s story about al-Mutawakkil and the introduction of a palace in the hira style can be found in textbooks on Islamic art history—in most cases with direct reference to Herzfeld’s interpretation of the ground plan of Balkuwara.28 Curiously enough, some questions were never asked. Why, for example, would the ground plan of a Roman military structure be used as a blueprint by the Lakhmid kings of al-Hira, a dynasty whose turf was rather the southern ﬂanks of the Sasanian Empire in southern Mesopotamia and the Gulf, and who had only to travel two days upstream to see the glorious palaces of their overlords in cities such as Ctesiphon, Kish, Bishapur, or Qasr-i Shirin? Why did none of the numerous excavations conducted during the twentieth century in Hira itself, the rest of Iraq, and the Levant, reveal any of the missing links—the palaces within an enclosure of the supposed Lakhmid or Ghassanid hira type as they must have existed, according to Herzfeld? Finally, and most importantly, does Mas'udi’s text really

27 Franz Altheim and Ruth Stiehl, Die Araber in der Alten Welt (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1964), 1:595. 28 Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture: Form, Function, and Meaning (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 405.

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describe a palace that would justify in the ﬁrst place the identiﬁcation of the hira with monumental structures such as Mshatta, Ukhaidir, and Balkuwara? Instead of focusing on the architectural origins of Mshatta, Ukhaidir, and Balkuwara, Mas'udi’s words should be revisited once again. To begin with, what strikes one immediately is that there is no mention of a palace. Mas'udi simply speaks of bunyàn, which can mean any built structure but does not necessarily imply a structure of palatial status. Furthermore, Mas'udi designates the “wings” (kummàn) of the structure as “baytàn,” two rooms. To invest these “two rooms” with a meaning that in the case of Mshatta would encompass four residential apartments, and in that of Balkuwara thirteen courtyard houses and approximately ten maintenance facilities on one side, polo grounds, and stables on the other, clearly overinterprets the text. If one examines another element in Mas'udi’s story, especially his remark that the hira style was introduced by al-Mutawakkil and henceforth remained popular until the author’s day, it becomes clear that an identiﬁcation of Balkuwara as a building erected in the tradition of hira-style architecture has a serious drawback. There is only one Balkuwara in all of Samarra and not a single recorded example after the time of al-Mutawakkil that could be taken as a hira, contrary to Mas'udi’s statement. But what about the possibility that al-Mutawakkil introduced the hira style—whatever it was—to Samarra? Not only Mas'udi, but also authors like al-Shabushti and al-Isfahànì, attest to the role of alMutawakkil and his court as arbiter arbitrarum, as trendsetters in the realm of fashion and style. While these literary sources credit the caliph and his entourage with having introduced new colors and textiles to the court of Samarra, soon to be imitated by those who could aﬀord them, good archaeological evidence of such reports exists in a diﬀerent medium: for instance, in the stucco decoration known as the “beveled style,” which became the standard decorative style of all buildings that we can safely date to the period of al-Mutawakkil. This is not to say that the beveled style was invented by artisans under this caliph’s tutelage; we know that earlier forms of this style existed well before the middle of the ninth century. But the preeminence that the beveled style enjoyed in the 850s and early 860s in the decorative program of larger residential houses and palaces suggests that by then it was recognized and identiﬁed as a courtly style.

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This phenomenon can also be observed in the sharp increase in a speciﬁc architectural element as part of the composition of both residential and palatial buildings at Samarra, datable once again to the years of al-Mutawakkil’s rule: an architectural element that should be identiﬁed as Mas'udi’s “hìra.” While dimensions and—very importantly—layout among palaces or residential houses could easily vary according to the wealth of the patron or the plot of land available, one recurrent architectural element in all these buildings is a formal reception hall in the form of a “T.” The horizontal beam of this T-shaped hall is formed by a transverse hall that opens to a courtyard by means of a portico consisting of three arches. Perpendicular to the transverse hall runs an iwan forming the characteristic T-shape or, to use Mas'udi’s vocabulary, “the hall and the two sleeves.” Two additional observations support the conclusion that the Tshaped hall served as the main room of a house, the majlis.29 It is the only type of roofed structure in a house that allows a large group of people to gather comfortably. At the same time it creates a hierarchical space, separating the iwan from the courtyard by means of the arcade and the transverse hall. In addition to these spatial features, stuccoed doorjambs and engaged colonnettes on the arcade’s front sides as well as decorative stucco panels on the walls of the iwan and its adjacent rooms underscore the importance of this part of the house. As in the case of the beveled-style stucco, the “hìra” was not invented in Samarra but had already been used earlier and, in fact, connects the hira building with the pre-Islamic period. Seemingly in opposition to Mas'udi’s statement—according to which the hira existed only in a single, legendary example before its “re-invention” by the caliph al-Mutawakkil himself—archaeological data tell us that structures of the “hìra” type were actually known before the third/ninth century. At Ukhaidir, for instance, is a palace located 170 miles south of Baghdad and built around the year 150 A.H., that is, only two and a half decades after the Abbasids seized power from the Umayyads. Here, hìras formed the reception halls of four apartments abutting the central domed chamber of the palace. A single, even earlier example dates from the Umayyad site of Qasr al-Shu'aiba,

29

Rivaled only by domed reception rooms as in House DGA 4 and 7 at Samarra.

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west of Basra. Among the many rooms, halls, and corridors of that palace, it is again only the audience hall (majlis) that was given the typical form of the hira style.30 The third and earliest preserved Islamic example of that type of structure was excavated in the summer of 2002 at Balis, Syria. Its location almost in the center of the courtyard of what is otherwise a regular Umayyad palace, and its rich interior wall paintings that imitate marble plaques and columns, establish its function as a reception hall. Literary sources inform us that Maslama b. Abd al-Malik, the famous general in the wars against the Byzantines, built it in the ﬁrst decade of the second century/early 800s.31 Finally, there is a good chance that hìras did in fact originate in the pre-Islamic period, although their pedigree diﬀers from the one given by Mas'udi. The only example of which I am aware does not originate in the city of al-Hira itself, but in Qasr-i Shirin, a late Sasanian palace complex situated on the ancient route that led from the Mesopotamian lowlands to the Iranian plateau.32 Here, the rooms in question are similarly arranged as in Ukhaidir, and they may have indirectly created the precedent for the ﬁrst Abbasid hiris. The ﬁnal evidence that we can correctly identify the “hìra” as the T-shaped halls of Samarra, however, does not derive from that city but from Fustat in Egypt. Certainly, T-shaped halls were “popular” here as well and have frequently been found during excavations of private houses.33 At the very latest they must have come with Ahmad b. Tùlùn, after he had been dispatched from Samarra to Egypt as governor. According to the Mamluk historian al-Maqrìzì, Ibn Tùlùn’s palace in al-Qata'i had a majlis in the form of a qamis, a “shirt”— which could have been modeled after a Samarran model.34 The crucial information, however, is provided by an unexpected source: namely, the documents of the Cairo Geniza. Many of these documents, found in the old synagogue of the Jewish community of

30

Dakhil Majhùl, “Majmù'a Tùlùl al-Sha'iba,” Sumer 28 (1972): 243–46. The excavation is conducted as a joint project by the department of art history and archaeology, Princeton University, and the Directorate of Antiquities of the Syrian Arab Republic. A preliminary report is forthcoming in Annales Archéologiques Syriennes. 32 Jürgen Schmidt, “Qasr-i ”irin, Feuertempel oder Palast,” BaM 9 (1978): 39–47. 33 Aly Bahgat and Albert Gabriel, Fouilles d’al Foustât, publiées sous les auspices du Comité de conservation des monuments de l’art arabe (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1921), 45–51. 34 Khitat I, 211. 31

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Cairo and dating from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries A.D., contain descriptions of properties as part of contracts or grants of ownership.35 Some of these properties are described in considerable detail, and in these instances the term majlis hayrì/hayri bi-kummayn appears frequently.36 As in Samarra, the hìras of Fustat were invariably the most ornate room in the house. The two columns as part of the triple-arched portico leading into the majlis are often mentioned in these documents and, when they were of marble, it was expressly stated. The walls of the hìra could be clad with white marble slabs, but sometimes the place opposite the entrance (sadr — another of Mas'udi’s terms that reappears) was decorated with multicolored marble.37

35

Princeton Geniza Project. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 4:65–66. 37 Ibid., 4:60. 36

ERNST HERZFELD, SAMARRA, AND ISLAMIC ARCHAEOLOGY Alastair Northedge Samarra was Ernst Herzfeld’s ﬁrst great excavation, in which he acted as ﬁeld director under the overall direction of Friedrich Sarre, honorary professor of the history of art in Berlin. At the beginning of the expedition, Herzfeld was thirty-two years old, a typical age even today for a young archaeologist to take charge of a large-scale excavation for the ﬁrst time. The work on the publication lasted the rest of his life, that is, another thirty-ﬁve years.

The German Expedition to Samarra Samarra had been visited and described by a variety of nineteenthcentury travelers, many of whom were British.1 At the beginning of the twentieth century, the ﬁrst scholarly work was by the Frenchmen General Léon de Beylié and M. Henri Viollet.2 Viollet, an architect

1 James F. Jones, “Journal of a Steam Voyage to the North of Baghdad in April 1846,” JRGS 18 (1848): 1–19; James F. Jones, “A Steam-trip to the North of Baghdad,” Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, n.s., 43 (1857): 1–31; James F. Jones, “Narrative of a Journey Undertaken in April 1848 by Commander James Felix Jones I. N. for the Purpose of Determining the Tract of the Ancient Nahrawan Canal,” Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, n.s., 43 (1857): 33–134; James F. Jones, “Researches in the Vicinity of the Median Wall of Xenophon and along the Old Course of the River Tigris,” Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, n.s., 43 (1857): 216–301; John M. Kinneir, Journey through Asia Minor, Armenia, and Koordistan in the Years 1813 and 1814 (London: J. Murray, 1818); Claudius J. Rich, Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan, 2 vols. (London: J. Duncan, 1836); J. Ross, “Notes on Two Journeys from Baghdad to the Ruins of Al Hadhr in Mesopotamia in 1836 and 1837,” JRGS 9 (1839): 443 ﬀ.; J. Ross, “A Journey from Baghdad to the Ruins of Opis and the Median Wall in 1834,” JRGS 11 (1841): 121–36; Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, The Six Voyages of Jean Baptiste Tavernier . . . through Turkey into Persia (London: Printed for R. L. and M. P., 1678). 2 General Léon de Beylié, “L’architecture des Abbassides au IXe siècle. Voyage archéologique à Samara, dans le bassin du Tigre,” RA 4th ser., 10 (1907): 1–18; General Léon de Beylié, Prôme et Samara. Voyage archéologique en Birmanie et en Mésopotamie (Paris: E. Leroux, 1907).

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who later worked in Iran, excavated twenty-four sondages in the Caliphal Palace in 1909 and published four articles.3 According to Herzfeld’s correspondence, in the following year Viollet was involved in a scandal in Baghdad concerning the export of antiquities. Whatever the real importance of this aﬀair, Herzfeld was able to take over the ﬁnds of stucco decorations made by Viollet. Herzfeld’s ﬁrst visit to Samarra took place in 1903, the results of which he published in 1907 as Samarra. Aufnahmen und Untersuchungen zur islamischen Archäologie. His second visit, in the company of Friedrich Sarre, was published in the Archäologische Reise im Euphrat- und TigrisGebiet in 1911. Sarre negotiated the permit for the Samarra expedition, under the auspices of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, with Herzfeld named as ﬁeld director. This expedition worked in the ﬁeld for two long seasons, the ﬁrst from early 1911 until the end of that year and the second from December 1912 until July 1913, a total of about twenty months in the ﬁeld. Two preliminary reports were published shortly after the ﬁeldwork. The ﬁrst, a monograph entitled Erster vorläuﬁger Bericht über die Ausgrabungen von Samarra, was published after the ﬁrst season’s work.4 The second, an article that appeared in Der Islam in 1914, covered the work of the second season.5 The ﬁrst season’s work began with the mosque of al-Mutawakkil, built according to Ibn al-Jawzi between 849 and 851. In this campaign, the area around the mihrab was excavated, as well as two

M. Henri Viollet, “Description du Palais de Al-Moutasim ﬁls d’Haroun-AlRaschid à Samara et quelques monuments arabes peu connus de la Mésopotamie,” Mémoires présentés à l’Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles-Lettres 12 (1909): 567–94; M. Henri Viollet, “Le Palais de Al-Moutasim ﬁls d’Haroun-Al-Raschid à Samara et quelques monuments arabes peu connus de la Mésopotamie,” CRAI (1909) 370–75; M. Henri Viollet, “Fouilles à Samara en Mesopotamie. Un palais musulman du IXe siècle,” Mémoires présentés à l’Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles-Lettres 12 (1911): 685–717; M. Henri Viollet, “Fouilles à Samara. Ruines du palais d’Al Moutasim,” CRAI (1911): 275–86. Viollet’s photographic archive is housed at the Institut des Études Iraniennes, Université de Paris III. 4 Ernst Herzfeld, Erster vorläuﬁger Bericht über die Ausgrabungen von Samarra (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1912); see also Ernst Herzfeld, “Bericht über die Ausgrabungen in Samarra, Archäologische Gesellschaft zu Berlin (Aprilsitzung 1912); Ernst Herzfeld, “Die deutschen Ausgrabungen in Samarra,” Illustrierte Zeitung, no. 3608 (1912): 335–91; Ernst Herzfeld, “Expedition Samarra,” Der Islam 3 (1912): 314–16. 5 Ernst Herzfeld, “Mitteilung über die Arbeiten der zweiten Kampagne von Samarra,” Der Islam 5 (1914): 196–204. 3

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areas of the porticoes. In March 1911, work then began on what were called the houses of Samarra.6 Two groups of “houses” were excavated: those south of the modern city and those west of the congregational mosque, north of the modern city. South of the modern city—Houses I and II, a single excavation— were composed of one courtyard and parts of a second in the area of the cantonment now known to have been allocated to the Maghariba, a military unit of “Westerners,” in this case Arab Bedouin from Egypt.7 House III was situated in the same area. Houses IV and V represented isolated fragments from the same area. Houses VI and VII were again a single excavation in the same area (ﬁg. 1). Three complete courtyards were excavated, as were rooms belonging to about four others. These courtyards appear to form part of a block of small houses. The adjacent House VIII consisted of a courtyard with ﬁve rooms. Houses IX and X were composed of two courtyards and a line of rooms extending to the west. The eastern courtyard has a closed reception room and the western a T-iwan, that is, an iwan with two side rooms and a portico in front. In these sites, Herzfeld excavated parts of a military cantonment built at the time of Samarra’s founding in 836. The historical sources do not inform us of the way that the area developed later; the Maghariba were still located there in the 860s, however. North of the modern city, the houses excavated were situated in the area west of the Congregational Mosque of al-Mutawakkil, an area that was ﬁrst built up at the time of the founding of Samarra in 221/836, but was later extensively rebuilt. House XII was composed of a principal courtyard with two T-iwans, together with one secondary courtyard, and there were extensive decorations of beveledstyle stucco (ﬁg. 2). House XIII was composed of two courtyards, a T-iwan, and a square pillared hall. In room 12, a painting depicting a frieze of parrots was found. Houses XIV and XV were small excavations, but House XVI was a sondage, of which no plan was made, in the great mansion H28, probably the house of the leading

6 Herzfeld changed the numbering of the houses; the numbering adopted here follows his ﬁnal version. 7 References to modern-day thinking about the location of Herzfeld’s excavation sites are to my forthcoming volume titled Historical Topography of Samarra, Samarra Studies, vol. 1 (London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq).

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Turk Bugha al-Saghir.8 This excavation recovered the conventional stuccoes of the beveled style, but also extensive fragments of wall paintings. In this second area, also initially built up at the time of Samarra’s founding in 836, the originally military population seems to have been replaced by high-class military oﬃcers and civil oﬃcials keen to live close to the Caliphal Palace. The ﬁnds and architecture reﬂect this second period. In December 1911, three days were spent in clearing the interior of the Qubbat al-Sulaybiyya, an octagonal domed pavilion eighteen meters across, situated on the heights of the Jazira steppe on the west bank of the Tigris.9 Even before the excavation, Herzfeld had already published his view that the Qubbat al-Sulaybiyya was the mausoleum of the Caliph al-Muntasir, where two successors, alMu'tazz and al-Muhtadi were also buried. As it happened, excavation underneath the ﬂoor revealed traces of three burials, according to Herzfeld’s sketch.10 In fact the burials may well have been secondary, and the original purpose of the Qubba remains in question. What is certain is that Herzfeld failed to recover the complete plan, for recent work by the Directorate-General of Antiquities of Iraq has revealed an outer octagonal platform with four ramps.11 Also in the ﬁrst season, limited sondages were made in the Qasr al-'Ashiq, the medieval al-Ma'shuq, the palace of the last caliph of Samarra, al-Mu'tamid (256/870–279/892). The excavation took place in the main central iwan. Since then, the excavations of the directorategeneral of antiquities, which began in the 1960s, have revolutionized our knowledge of the plan. Few examples of architectural decoration have been found, however, and little has thus far been published. 8 The numbering here follows that of the Samarra Archaeology Survey, which I direct. The catalogue of archaeological sites at Samarra will shortly be published. Alastair Northedge and Derek Kennet, Archaeological Atlas of Samarra (forthcoming). 9 Sarre and Herzfeld, Archäologische Reise, 2:85–86; K. A. C. Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), 2:283–86; A. N. 'Abdu, “Qubbat alSulaybiyya,” Sumer 29 (1973): 111–18 (Arabic section); Sheila Blair, “The Octagonal Pavilion at Natanz: A Re-examination of Early Islamic Architecture in Iran,” Muqarnas 1 (1983): 69–94. 10 Ernst Herzfeld Papers, sketchbook SK–XXV, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as Ernst Herzfeld Papers). The surviving photograph shows two apparent burials barely revealed. Photo ﬁle 23, no. 370. 11 The current hypothesis, which I elaborate in a forthcoming publication, is that it may have been a building intended to teach the rites of the pilgrimage (hajj ) to the Turkish military. See Northedge, Historical Topography of Samarra.

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At the end of Herzfeld’s and Sarre’s ﬁrst season, work began on the palace at al-Manqur in the south. During the work, the ﬁnd of a wooden beam inscribed in the name of al-Mu'tazz, son of alMutawakkil, showed that this was the palace of Balkuwara, built for al-Mu'tazz by his father between 232/847 and 240/854. The plan of this building is particularly clear on the surface, with no rebuilding, and about three thousand square meters were excavated (in the two mosques, two gates, the main inner iwan, and ten other rooms). Extensive stucco decorations of the beveled style were found, together with some fragments of glass mosaic. As a result, the plan of the palace has been widely published. In the second season, work concentrated on the Caliphal Palace, that is, the palace of al-Mu'tasim, known to Herzfeld as the Jawsaq al-Khaqani (ﬁg. 3). Before Herzfeld the complex was designated as Bayt al-Khalifa (House of the Caliph), and today continues to be known in Iraq as Qasr al-Khalifa (Palace of the Caliph).12 Herzfeld had done his reading of the historical texts, and noted the frequent use of the term “al-Jawsaq” for the residence of the Caliph at Samarra. He presumed that this was the medieval name of the Caliph’s palace. In fact, as al-'Ani pointed out in 1983, two units are mentioned: alJawsaq and the Dar al-'Amma (House of the Public).13 Al-Jawsaq was only the subunit of the private residence, and the overall complex was known by diﬀerent terms varying around the theme of House of the Caliph. In the end, Herzfeld excavated eighteen thousand square meters of the complex, concentrating on the square building behind the triple iwan of the Bab al-'Amma, which is now known to have been the public palace called the Dar al-'Amma. On the whole this excavation was a disappointment to Herzfeld, as many of the walls had been robbed of bricks down to their foundations. In the southeast sector, however, which Herzfeld called the Harim, large quantities of fragments of ﬁgural wall paintings were recovered from a dome chamber (ﬁg. 4). Further sondages were made on the south side of the esplanade located east of the square building, in

12

For a recent re-evaluation of the palace, see Alastair Northedge, “An Interpretation of the Palace of the Caliph at Samarra (Dar al-Khilafa or Jawsaq al-Khaqani),” ArsOr 23 (1993): 143–71. I am currently preparing a detailed study of Herzfeld’s excavations in the Caliphal Palace. 13 A. A. N. Al-'Ani, “Istadrikat ta"rikhiyya li-mawaqi' athariyya III,” Sumer 39 (1983): 261–66 (Arabic section).

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the “Rotundabau” on the north side, and in the surface level of the sunken basin called the “Small Serdab.” This last revealed fragments of a painted stucco relief of winged camels, of which the only known parallel is to be found among the frescoes excavated at Varakhsha, northwest of Bukhara, in Uzbekistan.14 In the “Kashizimmer,” apparent stores were found of unused glazed tiles. While there remains some question of whether this stratigraphic interpretation was correct, further proof was uncovered of exceptionally rich decoration. A further excavation made during the second campaign was a brief clearance of the pavilion on the summit of the artiﬁcial mound of Tell al-'Aliq. This mound was constructed for the caliph to view the horse races, probably in the reign of al-Mutawakkil (847–861).15 Unfortunately no detailed plan was ever made, although the Ernst Herzfeld Papers in Washington, D.C., preserve a plan of the mound (ﬁg. 5). During World War I and subsequently, use of the mound as an observation post and triangulation point has irretrievably destroyed the remains of the pavilion.16 The third signiﬁcant aspect of the second campaign was the survey of the site of Samarra by Hauptmann Ludloﬀ, a military surveyor on the German General Staﬀ, which took place between the beginning of December 1912 and 5 February 1913. Although the methods used were not speciﬁed, Ludloﬀ probably triangulated from a plane table. The plan was drawn up in three sheets at a scale of 1:25,000, but never published, as the plates prepared for Herzfeld’s Geschichte der Stadt Samarra were destroyed in the bombing of Germany during World War II. Herzfeld’s own copy, however, survives among his papers in Washington, D.C. (ﬁg. 6).17 Considering that no aerial photographs were available at that time, the map is a remarkable achievement. Ludloﬀ was obliged to look for the detail and then sketch it, before carrying out the measurement. There are defects, of course; the plan is not very highly detailed, though the general lines of the buildings are there. The three musallas in al-Mutawakkiliyya are omitted: They could probably only have been detected from aer-

14 Guitty Azarpay, Sogdian Painting: The Pictorial Epic in Oriental Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 201. 15 For the main recent publication on horse racing at Samarra, see my article titled “The Racecourses at Samarra,” BSOAS 53 (1990): 31–56. 16 For a photograph, see photo Q24773, Imperial War Museum, London. 17 Ernst Herzfeld Papers, drawings D1006–1008.

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ial photographs.18 More importantly, everything outside the main area of the city was ignored: the entire west bank of the Tigris with the exception of al-Istablat, and all that remains north and east of the Nahr al-Rasasi.19 With the end of the second campaign in July 1913, no further campaign was apparently envisaged; none is mentioned in the correspondence. One can only conclude that there was no real plan to continue the excavation. The expedition experienced diﬃculties with the Qaimmaqam of Samarra.

Evaluation of the Work In the course of the two seasons, the large number of about nineteen diﬀerent sites was excavated.20 The Qubbat al-Sulaybiyya, although it has for long stood as a signiﬁcant landmark in the development of Islamic mausoleums, was excavated for only three days (3–5 December 1911). The single surviving photograph of the excavation under the ﬂoor of the dome chamber—which provided the evidence that the qubba was a mausoleum—was taken without a scale and shows two barely revealed inhumations peeping out of a mound of earth, although the question of how the caliphs were buried should have been an interesting one.21 Walter Andrae’s notebooks show that the burials at Assur were carefully cleaned and sketched.22 The excavation techniques employed were not exceptional. A varying number of workmen (up to two hundred) were employed, divided into teams under a foreman’s supervision. Herzfeld himself visited each site every three or four days, according to his notes. In the

18 A musalla was a site outside the city intended for the festival prayers of 'Id al-Fitr, and 'Id al-Adha. 19 The three-sheet map is also interesting for preserving what Herzfeld thought about the interpretation of the site in 1913. 20 The exact number is not certain. Seventeen houses were given numbers by the expedition, but multiple house numbers were allotted on more than one excavation site. 21 Samarra Archive, no. 370, Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin. 22 It may have been that in the course of the excavations at the Qubbat alSulaibiyya, the workmen refused to continue excavating when they realized that these were Muslim burials. Unfortunately, the state of the evidence leaves open the question of whether the burials were secondary and not original to the construction of the building.

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ﬁrst season, he took a whole month oﬀ to travel to Iran. There is no evidence that experienced foremen were employed, and certainly the workforce was drawn from the local population of Samarra. The photographs show some evidence of excavating along the walls, without clearing the interior of rooms. It was probably thought to be easy to identify walls of unﬁred pisé. In the second season, a twentyﬁve-meter grid was laid out over the Caliphal Palace excavation, but the work itself does not seem to have been controlled by the grid. Herzfeld was much interested in the architectural sequence, particularly in the Dar al-'Amma. Apart from the Qubbat al-Sulaybiyya, however, there is not much evidence of digging under ﬂoors. No doubt the idea of Samarra as a single-period site played an important role in excavation strategy. At any rate, the evidence of sequence recovered was not reﬂected in the citations of ﬁndspots of objects in the publications, which are limited to the name of the site where they were found. Where Herzfeld did come into the realm of the Mesopotamian archaeologists, in the cemetery of the prehistoric Samarran culture, his publication covers the ﬁnds but seems to lack much description of the site from which the material came.23 This lack of description speaks of not much recording of the site having taken place in the ﬁeld, on which the later publication could be based.

The Publications Although no further work was apparently anticipated after 1913, World War I and the British conquest of Iraq brought a deﬁnitive end to the project. Herzfeld himself, as a German oﬃcer, may have been present at the Turkish defense of Samarra in 1917.24 The ﬁnds were brought to Britain, and a selection was distributed to a number of international museums; I am aware of material in the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Louvre Museum, and other collections. The remainder was sent to Germany,

23 Herzfeld, Die vorgeschichtlichen Töpfereien von Samarra. Note, however, that he subsequently reassessed his own work at the site and the dating of the prehistoric pottery. Herzfeld, Iranische Denkmäler, 5; Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 29–30. 24 Thomas Leisten, conversation with author, 4 May 2001.

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to the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin, which also preserves the photographic archive and other papers from the excavations. During World War II, the objects were split up for safekeeping. As part of the division of ﬁnds after the excavations, a portion of the excavated material also went to Istanbul. A further division of the records occurred in 1936, when Herzfeld left Germany and ﬁnally settled in the United States. In 1946, he donated the material he had taken to the United States to the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. A considerable program of publication of the results of the expedition to Samarra was undertaken in a series of Ausgrabungen von Samarra, of which six volumes were eventually published. The ﬁrst, Der Wandschmuck der Bauten von Samarra und seine Ornamentik, was written by Herzfeld and published in 1923. This is a typological study of ornament recovered, categorized by motif and not by material. The second volume, Die Keramik von Samarra, published by Sarre in 1925, is also a typological study, with little attempt at a chronological division; the excavators were apparently aware, however, that some of the material was substantially later—as late, in fact, as the thirteenth century.25 The third volume, Die Malereien von Samarra, was published by Herzfeld in 1927 and dealt with the paintings. The fourth and ﬁfth volumes had originally been planned to deal with architecture, but the eventual fourth volume, on the glass ﬁnds and written by Carl Johan Lamm, was published in 1928. The ﬁfth volume, Die vorgeschichtlichen Töpfereien von Samarra, published in 1930, dealt with the ﬁnds from the cemetery of the Chalcolithic Samarran culture, located opposite the Congregational Mosque. The sixth and ﬁnal volume, which appeared after a hiatus of eighteen years, was the Geschichte der Stadt Samarra, whose publication virtually coincided with Herzfeld’s death in January 1948.26 The projected volumes on the architecture of Samarra were never completed. It is evident from material in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers

25 In recent years, Die Keramik von Samarra has been criticized for its failure to date properly the pottery from the excavations. Actually the general accuracy of the typology has been conﬁrmed in recent years by subsequent Iraqi work and the British survey work. The inclusion of material later than the ninth century occurred mainly because of the proximity of some of the excavations to the later medieval and modern city, where occupation seems to have survived longer than elsewhere. 26 See Ettinghausen, this volume, on its publication history.

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in Washington that a little preparatory work was done, but nothing substantial was written. Two albums in Washington labeled “Paläste und Moscheen I & II” contain a series of prints, which may be arranged in a tentative sequence for publication.27 The ﬁrst album covers the Caliphal Palace ( Jawsaq al-Khaqani); the second, the remaining architectural sites. If one considers this history of publication, it is evident that something went wrong with the series and at quite an early stage. The archaeologist today must ﬁrst publish a physical description of the site itself, with a full assessment of the areas excavated.28 This demonstrates that the excavator has reached a ﬁnal set of conclusions on the sequence and development of the site itself, and provides a ﬁrm context for the publication of the ﬁnds. However uninteresting these may be to read in some archaeological reports, the comprehensive description and ﬁnal analysis of site and excavations is fundamental and must come ﬁrst. In the case of Samarra, no publication of the excavations was ever made, nor does it seem that a coherent and unpublished description was written. The two published preliminary reports carry the kind of generalized description that it is possible to write at the end of a season’s ﬁeldwork, but little evidence on which to base an assessment of the work was completed. Because of this lack, it was decided in the early 1990s to publish the excavation results from the expedition. The ﬁrst of two planned volumes has just appeared.29

Herzfeld, Samarra, and Islamic Archaeology The ﬁrst excavations of what were known to be purely Islamic sites do not predate the beginning of the twentieth century. One can cite the excavations of General de Beylié at Qal'at Bani Hammad in Algeria, begun in 1908. Viollet’s work at Samarra was no doubt inﬂuenced by this contact. Nevertheless, Herzfeld had already vis-

27

Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo albums 22 and 23. See, for example, Leslie Grinsell, Philip Rahtz, and David Price-Williams, The Preparation of Archaeological Reports, 2d ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974); Philip Barker, Techniques of Archaeological Excavation (London: B. T. Batsford, 1982). 29 Thomas Leisten, Excavation of Samarra, vol. 1: Architecture. Final Report of the First Campaign 1910–1912, Baghdader Forschungen 20 (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2003). 28

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ited Samarra in 1903. In Spain, the ﬁrst (albeit unsuccessful) archaeological interest in Madinat al-Zahra dates back to 1854, but it was only in 1911 that Ricardo Velázquez Bosco began to excavate.30 One can say that scholarly interest in the monuments of Islam was developing during this decade, and that this was the moment when the archaeological techniques of excavation were ﬁrst applied to Islamic sites on a large scale. The Samarra expedition was doubtless intended to correspond, in the Islamic ﬁeld, to the distinguished German contribution to ancient Mesopotamian archaeology, notably the expedition to Babylon headed by Robert Koldewey, which continued for eighteen years, and the expedition to Assur, under the leadership of Walter Andrae, which began in 1903. Unfortunately, the Samarra expedition cannot truthfully be described as matching the work of Koldewey and Andrae. Although Sarre occupied a prominent position in Berlin, he was only able to raise barely adequate funds, and then only through the intervention of a private donor. Only a thousand marks were donated by a German company for the ﬁeld railway, and even that sum was late in arriving.31 It could be said that at that time, as more recently, public interest in the West for the history of Islam was only limited. Nevertheless, there were no problems with the publication after World War I. The ﬁrst volume, Der Wandschmuck, brought out a typology of Samarran decorations that continues to be used today. It was divided into three main styles: the ﬁrst, later called the beveled style (or Schrägschnittstil ); the second, characterized by crosshatched lobes; and the third, deﬁned by vine leaves with four holes. The sequence was based on the relative frequency of the styles. At a later date, K. A. C. Creswell reversed the sequence (which he labeled styles A, B, and C), arguing correctly that the vine-leaf style was chronologically earlier. In spite of Richard Ettinghausen’s argument for a long history for the beveled style, it seems to have had a relatively brief ﬂorescence: at Samarra in the reign of al-Mutawakkil and into the tenth century, and in Egypt under the Tulunids.32

30

EI 2, s.v. “Madinat al-Zahra.” My thanks to Jens Kröger for information on the funding diﬃculties of the Samarra expedition. 32 Richard Ettinghausen, “The ‘Beveled Style’ in the Post-Samarra Period,” in Archaeologica Orientalia in Memoriam Ernst Herzfeld, ed. George C. Miles (Locust Valley, N.Y.: J. J. Augustin, 1952), 72–83. 31

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Nevertheless, Herzfeld’s basic typology has survived, although there are many panels of stucco at Samarra that combine the vine-leaf and crosshatched lobe styles, and the beveled style seems to have been a particularly Samarran phenomenon, elsewhere only seen in Tulunid Egypt. In the second volume, Sarre, an art historian, studied the ceramics. As I indicated in an article published in 1996, the typology seems to be generally correct.33 Many of the objects are given their site of origin, but others come from elsewhere and must be considered objects introduced for comparison. There is no doubt that Sarre exaggerated the element of ﬁne ceramics, including the Far Eastern imports. This typology has had an enormous impact, for it was certainly the ﬁrst time a major publication of Abbasid pottery, apparently coming from a well-dated site, had occurred. This volume has been read with a good deal less subtlety than it was written. All the Iraqi ceramics in the report have been referred to as “Samarra wares,” despite the obvious point that the Caliphal capital would have imported products from all points of the compass.34 Only a beginning has been made in sorting out this problem. Robert B. Mason and E. J. Keall have succeeded in identifying the wares with a compact yellow earthenware body with the city of Basra, or at any rate southern Iraq.35 These wares have the well-known opaque white glaze with cobalt blue, gray, green, and brown, or polychrome or monochrome luster decorations. Sarre failed to distinguish a more important group, with gray-brown body, opaque white glaze and green, or green and yellow decoration, which may be the products of Samarra.36

33 Alastair Northedge, “Friedrich Sarre’s Die Keramik von Samarra in Perspective,” in Continuity and Change in Northern Mesopotamia from the Hellenistic to the Early Islamic Period, ed. Karin Bartl and Stefan R. Hauser, BBVO 17 (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1996), 229–58. 34 Derek Kennet and Alastair Northedge, “The Samarra Horizon,” in Cobalt and Lustre: The First Centuries of Islamic Pottery, ed. Ernst J. Grube, The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, vol. 9 (London: Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1994), 21–35. 35 Robert B. Mason and E. J. Keall, “The 'Abbàsid Glazed Wares of Sìràf and the Basra Connection: Petrographic Analysis,” Iran 29 (1991): 51–66. Monique Kervran has argued that pottery with a similar body is also a product of Susa. See Jessica Hallett, “Trade and Innovation: The Rise of a Pottery Industry in Abbasid Basra” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 1999), for a comprehensive reassessment. 36 Northedge, “Sarre’s Die Keramik von Samarra in Perspective”; R. K. Falkner,

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In the third volume, Herzfeld presented the wall paintings. All of these were found in fragments, with the exception of a painting of parrots in House XIII. Photographs were published of the fragments, together with watercolors reconstructing the images. The reconstructions have been widely published as representative of Abbasid wall painting, although no further investigation of the accuracy of the work has taken place.37 In fact, watercolor reconstructions produced so long ago are rarely very correct, if one takes the comparative example of the wall paintings of Qusayr 'Amra in Jordan. There, the watercolors by A. L. Mielich, executed for A. Musil in 1907, are not much like the paintings as they were actually cleaned.38 The main criticism of the Samarra reconstructions was ﬁrst made by Jean Sauvaget, who pointed out that the ﬁgures Herzfeld described as women must in fact be young, beardless men.39 Women are hardly ever mentioned in the contemporary textual sources on Samarra, though somewhat more in the tenth-century Kitab al-Aghani (Book of Songs) of al-Isfahani. Leaving aside the brief excavation of the Chalcolithic cemetery at al-Latwa published in the ﬁfth volume of the series, which is a separate issue, the most remarkable aspect of the publication remains this: Whatever its faults, it was indeed the ﬁrst major multivolume publication of an excavation of the Islamic period, created on the model of the publication series of ancient Near Eastern excavations.

Pottery from Samarra: The Surface Survey and Excavations at Qadisiyya 1983–39, Samarra Studies, vol. 3 (London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq, forthcoming). 37 See, for example, Richard Ettinghausen, Arab Painting (Geneva: Skira, 1962). 38 Alois Musil, Kusejr Amra, 2 vols. (Vienna: K. K. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1907). 39 Jean Sauvaget, “Remarques sur les monuments Omeyyades,” JA 231 (1939): 1–59.

Fig. 1. Samarra, beginning of excavation in House VI. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 19, 2.

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Fig. 2. Samarra, excavation photo of stucco panel (beveled style). Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 19, 60.

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Fig. 3. Samarra, reconstruction of facade of Caliphal Palace. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, drawing D-1101.

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Fig. 4. Samarra, excavation photo of the Harim in the Caliphal Palace, showing the conservation pattern of the remains. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 22, no. 78, ﬁg. 134.

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Fig. 5. Samarra, general plan at 1:100,000, published in Herzfeld, Geschichte der Stadt Samarra (1948).

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Fig. 6. Hauptmann Ludloﬀ ’s map of Samarra, Sheet 1. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, drawing D-1006.

THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY: ERNST HERZFELD AND THE ISLAMIC ARCHITECTURE OF IRAN Robert Hillenbrand

The Herzfeld symposium was boldly conceived, and its organizers deserve warm congratulations for challenging the participants—by focusing on this many-faceted man—to climb out of their familiar academic boxes and wander around the boxes of others. The symposium also provided a salutary reminder that history, which for their own ends scholars now chop up into pieces of a size convenient for modern academic study and success, is after all a continuum. Studying a man for whom that concept was a reality, not a pious platitude, forced all the participants—and, one may hope, will force the readers of these proceedings—to expand their intellectual horizons. For many who had enjoyed Herzfeld’s posthumous company for decades, the symposium was also a personal treat, for in a diﬀerent way to each of those present it shed a ﬂood of unexpected light upon this extraordinary man. That experience, too, can be savored at leisure in this volume. The present paper is structured around three key articles by Herzfeld, preceded and succeeded by some general comments. It may be helpful to begin with the generalities. Herzfeld combined to a rare degree two qualities that are normally incompatible: the ability to synthesize, to see the wider picture; and the ability to record an object in minute, yet enlightening, detail. And in his case these two gifts were mutually enriching. Thus his syntheses were plainly based on closely detailed ﬁeldwork, while the details of that ﬁeldwork were lifted out of the context of mere recording and infused with life and meaning. The fact of his range meant that it was equally natural for him to detect presages of later developments in preIslamic art and to illuminate his discussion of Islamic material by references to its non-Islamic precursors. For him, the border between pre-Islamic and Islamic was a membrane so permeable that it scarcely troubled him. But in today’s academic world that border has become almost an iron curtain, and while there is no need to suggest that a cold war is in progress, specialists in the one ﬁeld do tend to keep

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away from the other ﬁeld. The corollary is more personal and still more damaging: namely that they also tend to keep away from each other, and that each is unlikely to attend the gatherings of the other’s tribe. Of course, the quantity of published scholarship has grown exponentially since Herzfeld’s death in 1948. Of course, the loose academic structures from which he beneﬁted have gone with the wind. Of course, with problems of tenure, promotion, and a bureaucratic and accountable academic system, we have to play it safe. Think twice before you begin a big book. Pick a ﬁeld and stay in it. The loss of horizon that this entails is calamitous, and Herzfeld’s list of publications rams that home. They cluster around not one but three distinct geographical regions: Syria, Iraq, and Iran. The map tells us that each of these areas is contiguous to the next. On today’s academic map, not so: they are three separate entities, each further subdivided by chronology.1 Herzfeld’s vision encompassed all of these subsets, and that panoramic view enriched his insights immeasurably. No wonder it takes a score of us to assess him in the round. Shame on modern scholarship! That matter of range merits a little more discussion. Herzfeld was, by any standard, a prodigiously productive scholar. Yet even more remarkable than the quantity and quality of his output was his range. So far as the art and archaeology of Western Asia was concerned, he could justiﬁably have boasted (though he did not) nihil humanum mihi alienum puto—that he regarded nothing in that ﬁeld as outside his interests. The result was that he gradually acquired a well-nigh unique capacity to identify continuities and connections between monuments and artifacts that might be thousands of miles and even thousands of years apart. Happily for him, the spacious mental environment of the university system in which he operated gave him eﬀectively carte blanche to follow his learned inclinations, and he did not have to concern himself with ﬁlling regular publication quotas or competing for tenure. Thus he could and did take intellectual risks. His range, then, enabled him to expand the horizons of whatever ﬁeld he was working in, by broadening its chronological or geographical parameters.

1 This is perhaps more true of current scholarship in the ﬁeld of the ancient Near East than in Islamic art and archaeology.

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It is a thousand pities that the 1920s, when Herzfeld’s interest in Islamic Iran and speciﬁcally in its architecture and archaeology was at its height, was politically the wrong time for such work. At that stage, with the excavations of Samarra behind him and the ﬁnal reports of those excavations gradually achieving publication, Herzfeld was poised to embark on some grand new project. We know now, of course, that Persepolis was that project. But events could have turned out otherwise—if only more of Iran’s Islamic monuments had been accessible to foreigners. But the last days of Qajar rule and the early days of Reza Shah were a politically turbulent time, and there was little immediate prospect of such a ban being lifted. And by the early 1930s, when the situation had changed dramatically, Herzfeld was well ensconced with the Persepolis concession. The die was cast. So it was left to distinctly lesser lights—Arthur Upham Pope, Myron Bement Smith, André Godard, Eric Schroeder, Donald Wilber, and Robert Byron (all remarkable men in their way and all of them productive)—to carve up among them the newly unfolding territory of Iranian Islamic architecture. It was the nineteenth-century scramble for Africa replayed, in another time and place but with a similar colonial spirit and in the ostensibly more decorous environment of architectural ﬁeldwork and scholarly publication. Who can doubt that Herzfeld, had he been so minded, could have shown this sextet a clean pair of heels? He must assuredly have cast a wistful glance or two in their direction in the course of that decade. With his epigraphic bent, moreover, he would have put the study of Iranian Islamic inscriptions on the kind of ﬁrm footing which he had established (admittedly with help from his fellow scholars) for the medieval monuments of Syria. That work has still not been done. So much for generalities. Herzfeld’s contribution to the scholarship on the Islamic architecture of Iran is scattered throughout his oeuvre, but three articles stand out: “Khorasan” (1921), “The Gunbad-i 'Alaviyyan and the Architecture of the Ilkhanids in Iran” (1922), and “Arabische Inschriften in Iran und Syrien” (1936). This is pitifully little, and in no way does it reﬂect his deep knowledge of the subject. Moreover, most of his relevant publications date from a brief ﬁve-year period in the 1920s, though obviously they are founded on work done earlier and indeed over many years. With the partial exception of the article on the Gunbad-i 'Alaviyyan at Hamadan, moreover, they do not feature extensive, close technical analysis of

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speciﬁc buildings. Instead, they are full of brief generalizations, at once energetic, penetrating, tantalizing, and allusive, even gnomic. They open up wide horizons that Herzfeld does not explore there and then. For the most part he never did do so. At intervals in his later work he added further material, namely, in the occasional article in the periodical he founded (Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran), in his Archaeological History of Iran, and in the quartet of articles entitled “Damascus: Studies in Architecture,” which he contributed to Ars Islamica in the 1940s. But valuable as it was, this consisted entirely of thumbnail sketches of monuments visited decades earlier or of additions to and comments on the ﬁeldwork of others, especially in epigraphy. There is something curiously hurried about his visits to this material, as if his mind were really somewhere else. He never did get around to writing a book, or even a lengthy article, on the Islamic architecture of Iran. Alongside the never-completed yet crucial volume on the architecture of Samarra, this is perhaps the major gap in his published work, especially when all his preliminary labors toward such a study are taken into account. Who would not wish that he had devoted himself to these projects rather than to the Zoroaster controversy? Now to the three key articles. These are themselves distinctively diﬀerent. “Khorasan” is an attempt to assess the cultural signiﬁcance of a large Iranian province over several millennia; the article on the Hamadan tomb oscillates uneasily between the precise recording of the structure of this particular monument and a general survey of Ilkhanid architecture; and the article on inscriptions is self-explanatory.2 The most important of this trio of articles, and assuredly the least read, is that on Khorasan.3 The trigger for writing it, as for so much of his work on Islamic architecture at this time, was a series of illconsidered and half-baked assertions by Josef Strzygowski, Herzfeld’s bête noire, to the eﬀect that the source of Islamic art was to be

2

This is perhaps the place to mention a fourth article, which contains a good deal of Islamic material: Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 225–84, as its name indicates, subdivides its contents according to the chronology of the journey rather than the nature of the material itself. The need to keep the narrative moving, and to present a huge (and disparate) body of information, keeps the discussion of any one monument brief. Yet this piece is full of little gems. 3 Herzfeld, “Khorasan,” 107–74. The title is profoundly misleading, for most of the article is devoted to the pre-Islamic period and to areas west (or, to a lesser extent, east) of Khorasan.

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sought in Khorasan. More seriously, it responds to Ernst Diez’s Churasanische Baudenkmäler (1918); but the fact that Diez was a student of Josef Strzygowski’s was certainly a relevant factor.4 In turn, it must be conceded, Herzfeld’s views were challenged by V. V. Bartol’d on the basis of his much greater historical knowledge of Central Asia.5 But three issues arise here. First, Bartol’d’s expertise was much more limited than Herzfeld’s and did not allow him nearly the same latitude to use the visual arts as a key element in the argument. Essentially, then, they approach the problem from diametrically opposed angles and are not strictly comparable. Second, Bartol’d made no attempt to see Khorasan through the prism of the culture of southern and western Iran, let alone that of Mesopotamia and Anatolia, areas of which he had no ﬁrsthand knowledge; he assessed the area solely from the standpoint of Central Asia.6 Third, he did not extend his historical horizon nearly as far back in time as did Herzfeld. He was therefore less well placed to bring out immanent cultural themes or patterns. The work of these two scholars is therefore complementary. So, what is there to say about “Khorasan” with the beneﬁt of the hindsight oﬀered by eighty years of scholarship? Any brief study of this extraordinarily dense and closely argued article of some seventy pages is bound to do it an injustice. For modern scholars the temptation is to plunder it for ideas relevant to their own ﬁeld and leave the rest unread. That would be a bad move. The whole point of the article is to isolate long-term cultural patterns, and, not surprisingly, Herzfeld interprets these in typically idiosyncratic fashion. Even before he had begun the Persepolis excavations, his view of Iranian Islamic architecture was not just colored by but was essentially based on his researches on Achaemenid and, to a lesser extent, on Parthian and Sasanian monuments.7 In today’s much more specialized and

4

Herzfeld generally ignores Diez’s work. V. V. Bartol’d, “Vostochno-Iranskii vopros,” Izvestiya Materialnoi Kulturii 2 (1922): 361–84, conveniently summarized in Vladimir Minorsky, “Geographical Factors in Persian Art,” BSOS 9, no. 3 (1938): 621–52, reprinted in Vladimir Minorsky, Iranica. Twenty Articles, Publications of the University of Tehran, vol. 775 (Hertford: S. Austin, 1964), see especially 61–63 (pagination refers to this anthology). 6 Against this must be set Herzfeld’s ignorance of the monuments of Central Asia. 7 He had already, of course, completed his doctoral work on the early Achaemenid capital of Pasargadae. Herzfeld, “Pasargadae” 1907; Herzfeld, “Pasargadae” 1908. 5

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compartmentalized scholarship on Iran, that view seems well-nigh heretical. In this article Herzfeld argues that until the coming of Alexander the Great the key area for Iranian art was western Iran and Elam, in southwestern Iran. Thereafter, a gulf opened between eastern and western Iran that remained unbridged until Islamic times.8 These eastern territories, he argues, were heavily hellenized but also a cockpit of uninterrupted strife with the barbarians from Central Asia, which prevented the establishment of a rich culture there; hence the rarity of Parthian and Sasanian monuments in Khorasan. As he saw it, the cultural center of gravity under these dynasties had moved to Babylonia and Fars.9 Indeed, greater Khorasan was robbed of its Persian and Zoroastrian heritage by Buddhism.10 Later, he argues, Khorasan rose to importance as a focus for the ethnic, political, and religious opposition to Islam in the Iranian world; hence the fact that the 'Abbasid revolution had its beginnings there.11 It was in the ninth to eleventh centuries that Khorasan experienced a burst of creativity, as it had earlier done after Alexander, with the birth of a new Perso-Islamic culture.12 One major product of this was the architecture commonly termed (for convenience) “Saljuq,” because it was in the eleventh to twelfth centuries that the Saljuqs, together with their contemporaries and successors, brought brick architecture to a pitch of perfection. At other times, however, in the millennium before the Achaemenids, as well as in Achaemenid, Sasanian, and very early Islamic times—that is to say, for most of recorded history in the Iranian world—Khorasan has played, he maintains, a very minor role. Herzfeld justiﬁes these ringing generalizations by inserting detailed lists of both surviving and vanished monuments, and by brilliant, forceful summaries of what makes the art of each era distinctive. Yet here it has to be emphasized that at this stage of his career he had never even been to Khorasan. Let us test his theories by looking more closely at how Herzfeld deals with the transition from Sasanian to early Islamic architecture.

8

Herzfeld, “Khorasan,” 119; cf. 135 and 142. Ibid., 119, 147, and 152, where Herzfeld notes that the evidence of historical sources, surviving monuments, and references to vanished monuments all concur in suggesting that eastern Iran was culturally far behind western Iran in Parthian and Sasanian times. 10 Ibid., 146. 11 Ibid., 120. 12 Ibid., 121. 9

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His views are nothing if not bold. He begins with the premise that Sasanian vaulting does not owe its survival to its high intrinsic quality; indeed, he interprets it as merely an inﬂated version of vernacular domed and vaulted buildings in mud brick. He might have added, but did not, that the crucial reason it survives is that much of it is grossly overbuilt. He notes very properly that it simply does not evolve signiﬁcantly in the course of the Sasanian period (though he does not mention the Taq-i Kisra in this context) and lays the blame on poor materials: rubble and low-quality mortar.13 He proposes instead that most Sasanian buildings employed ﬂat roofs carried on wooden columns, following here an ancient indigenous tradition that can be traced back for at least a millennium before Sasanian times in the forms of rock-cut tombs in western Iran.14 Hence the easy transfer of that model for the earliest Iranian mosques. These have not survived, for wooden buildings rarely survive for more than ﬁve hundred years; but that model, he argues, lies behind the Great Mosque of Samarra.15 Had Khorasan developed innovative architectural forms in the Sasanian or the early Islamic period, they would have been reﬂected in the art of Samarra. But the local materials, principally stamped earth and mud brick, forbade this.16 So runs his argument. Here Herzfeld’s lack of ﬁeld experience betrays him. He never got to Central Asia. Had he done so, he would have realized that the massive, monumental goﬀered facades of the palaces and elite residences of early Islamic Merv tell a very diﬀerent story. Yet Herzfeld was not entirely wrong, either; for, impressive as these buildings are, they do not hold the key to what was to come. Herzfeld was entirely correct to underline the importance of the choice of baked brick as the preferred building material. For it was this that launched what is generally termed Saljuq architecture—a loose usage, since, although it reached its full ﬂowering under Saljuq rule, it predates the arrival of the Saljuqs in Iran by more than a century. It should therefore be attributed, in the present state of knowledge, to the Samanids.

13

Ibid., 158. Ibid., 156–58. 15 Ibid., 158. We have here a glimpse of what would probably have been a major theme of his never-to-be-published book on the architecture of Samarra. 16 Ibid., 160. 14

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Typically, Herzfeld sees the move to baked brick not as an isolated technical innovation of interest only to the historian of architecture. Instead, he creates a convincing historical context for the late ninth and tenth centuries in which the growth of Persian national sentiment under the Tahirids, Saﬀarids, and Samanids, the establishment of New Persian as its vehicle, the literary revival of which Firdawsi was the star, the golden age of science in the eastern Islamic world, as typiﬁed by al-Biruni, and ﬁnally the use of Shi'ism as an expression of political opposition reveal that the ferment in architecture was absolutely in tune with the spirit of the times and that it was a local Khorasani phenomenon.17 In an eloquent paragraph he traces the ramiﬁcations of this baked brick architecture to Afghanistan and northern India in the east and to Iraq and Anatolia in the west, notes its continuation under the Mongols, and credits Nur al-Din and Saladin with creating the barrier that prevented Persian culture from swamping the entire Near East.18 Thus he draws to unexpected eﬀect on his earlier ﬁeld experience in order to illuminate an entire epoch of medieval Islamic art. True, his view that the powerful simplicity of monuments erected around the year 1000—such as Gunbad-i Qabus and the tower of Radkan West—proves that this so-called “Saljuq” style was then in its infancy must be modiﬁed to take account of the maturing brick style of several tenth-century Central Asian mausolea, such as those of Bukhara and Tim, which he did not know.19 But this correction by no means destroys the thrust of his argument. Rather, it is astonishing that, with so few surviving monuments at his disposal, and without having seen any of them for himself, he should have seized on the essentials so unerringly. And he makes them speak volumes. But that, it has to be said, is as far as he takes the matter. His book on the stucco decoration of Samarra shows his capacity for detailed description and penetrating analysis.20 So does his work on the monuments of Aleppo.21 But with the sole exception of the

17

Ibid., 120–21, 173–74. Ibid., 121. 19 Ibid., 173. This view was based, in all likelihood, on the evidence of Diez’s Churasanische Baudenkmäler, which does not extend to the monuments of Central Asia. 20 Herzfeld, Der Wandschmuck der Bauten von Samarra. 21 Ernst Herzfeld, “Inscriptions et monuments d’Alep,” in Matériaux pour un Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum (Paris: E. Leroux; Cairo: L’Institut Française d’Archéologie Orientale, 1954–55). 18

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Hamadan tomb, he never employed these powers to their full extent on the Islamic monuments of Iran. Not a word about the vaulting of the Friday Mosque of Isfahan (ﬁg. 1), the great Saljuq dome chambers, the triumphal development of the squinch zone, the major building types like tomb towers and minarets, the language of ornament, and the evolution of epigraphy. These would have been themes worthy of his capacities, and he would have illuminated them decisively with his incomparable knowledge of Syria and Iraq. But Persepolis permanently deﬂected his energies toward the pre-Islamic monuments of Iran. In comparison with the article on Khorasan, his work on the Gunbad-i 'Alaviyyan is of much more restricted compass and frankly disappointing (ﬁg. 2).22 So convinced is he of its direct connection with the conversion to Shi'ism of the Ilkhan Uljaitu in 1309 that he dates it thereabouts without further ado and never seriously considers an earlier dating. The grossly mistaken assumption that Iran was uniformly Sunni from the Saljuq conquest until 1309 lies unexpressed behind the entire article. It was not Herzfeld’s fault that Iranian mosques were eﬀectively closed to foreigners at this time. Together with his then relative lack of direct ﬁeld experience of Islamic architecture in Iran, this meant that he simply did not know enough to tackle this complex monument satisfactorily. Some of his key comparanda are pre-Mongol and he still believed, for example, that fourteenth-century architecture was conﬁned to Azerbaijan. But Donald Wilber’s catalogue of the Ilkhanid monuments of Iran, which decisively disproves that view, still lay over thirty years in the future. Nevertheless, there are problems of method here as well. With minor and brief exceptions, the parallels he cites are not compared in detail with the Gunbad-i 'Alawiyyan. He makes no attempt to distinguish between local and distant parallels, with the result that the distinctively regional signiﬁcance of the mausoleum is obscured. He does not attempt to use the epigraphic forms, which should have alerted him to the possibility of a pre-Mongol date, as a dating control. He fails to register the key implications of the lack of glaze in the decoration, although most of the buildings that he himself cites as comparanda do use glaze. For all these reasons his dating is some 130 years too late and—rather

22

Herzfeld, “Gumbadh-i-"Alawiyyân,” 186–99.

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more to the point—decisively on the wrong side of the major divide in medieval Iranian architecture. For all that, the article is well worth studying. Rarely, for example, has the stucco technique been so well described. His analysis of the elevation and ornament in musical terms is arresting, as are his precocious comments on the notion of buildings like this and Radkan East being draped, as it were, in textiles.23 In his usual way, too, he casually presents unpublished inscriptions, such as those of Qum, Damghan, and Van, corrects or supplements earlier readings of inscriptions at Marand and Sarakhs, and comments illuminatingly on square Kuﬁc.24 From mid-February 1923 until the end of October 1925, a period of some two years and eight months, Herzfeld, then in his prime (he was forty-three when this time began), was able, thanks, as he says, to the support of two friends who wished to remain anonymous—the private Gesellschaft zur Förderung von Ausgrabungen und Forschungsreisen GmbH—to embark on an astonishingly ambitious ﬁeld trip centered on Iran but that also took in Egypt, Iraq, Ceylon, India, and Afghanistan. It must be admitted at the outset that the published results in the ﬁeld of Islamic architecture in Iran were disappointingly meager. It was pre-Islamic Iran that dominated his mental horizon throughout. Islamic material galore is certainly mentioned; but “mentioned” is about it. Some of the intellectual booty from this mammoth journey turns up in the Damascus articles, such as the caravanserais of Za'faruniya and Ahuan, but even there the material is presented in truncated and telegraphic form, as if Herzfeld had simply recomposed his ﬁeld notes.25 His “Reisebericht,” or “Travel report,” of 1926 is thus tantalizing precisely because of its brevity. As usual in his treatment of Islamic Iran,

23 Ibid., 190–92. See Lisa Golombek, “The Draped Universe of Islam,” in Content and Context of Visual Arts in the Islamic World: Papers from a Colloquium in Memory of Richard Ettinghausen, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2–4 April 1980, ed. Priscilla P. Soucek (University Park: Published for the College Art Association by the Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 25–49. 24 Herzfeld, “Gumbadh-i-"Alawiyyân,” 192–96. 25 Ernst Herzfeld, “Damascus: Studies in Architecture—I,” Ars Islamica 9 (1942): 1–53; Ernst Herzfeld, “Damascus: Studies in Architecture—II,” Ars Islamica 10 (1943): 13–70; Ernst Herzfeld, “Damascus: Studies in Architecture—III,” Ars Islamica 11–12 (1946): 1–71; and Ernst Herzfeld, “Damascus: Studies in Architecture—IV,” Ars Islamica 13–14 (1948): 118–38. For Za"faruniya, see Herzfeld, “Damascus II,” 22–23 and ﬁg. 2; for Ahuan, see ibid., 25–26, 28, and ﬁg. 43.

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inscriptions dominate:26 early medieval ones at Pasargadae, As'adabad, and the Sabzawar district; a fourteenth-century one at Qa"in; a medieval forged inscription at Qabr-i Kalandar; and a graﬃto of Shah 'Abbas in his own hand on the relief of Ardashir I at Naqsh-i Rustam.27 The monuments of Damghan are disposed of in three pages, the complex shrine of Bastam in a paragraph.28 Islamic shrines with Jewish associations at Pir-i Bakran, Hamadan, Dhu"l-Kiﬂ, and Isfahan are treated in a frustratingly elliptical fashion.29 We encounter a Muslim sanctuary by a Zoroastrian terrace at Takht-i Rustam and an Imamzada Ja'far at the site of a ﬁre temple in Firuzabad, with an Achaemenid porphyry column at its entrance.30 Fascinating as these scattered ﬁndings may be individually, they do not add up to a detailed study of any one aspect of Islamic architecture in Iran. Now for the third article. Ten years before his death, with World War II imminent, Herzfeld made a ﬁrst attempt to gather together his scattered Islamic material. The fact that the material is so scattered tells its own tale. It seems likely that he realized that time was too short and other commitments too pressing to permit a more leisurely exploration of this material. So he serves up one great chunk of protein after another, slow and hard to digest. The title of the article is revealing: “Arabische Inschriften in Iran und Syrien” (Arabic inscriptions in Iran and Syria).31 Epigraphy is the core theme, and here as in other ﬁelds he ﬁnds precisely those connections between disparate areas and periods that tend to elude later, more specialized scholars. Hence the appropriateness of the title “Iran and Syria.” Thus he ﬁnds Syrian epigraphic protocols on a tomb at Urmiya, and the unique occurrence of a Mamluk title in a Mongol mausoleum at Maragha inspires a fascinating excursus, culled from Mamluk chronicles and the epigraphic record in Syria and Iran, on an amir,

26 Cf., for example, Ernst Herzfeld, “Bericht über archäologische Beobachtungen im südlichen Kurdistan und in Luristan,” AMI 1 (1929–30): 65–75; Ernst Herzfeld, “Eine Bauinschrift von Nizâm al-Mulk,” Der Islam 12 (1922): 98–101; Ernst Herzfeld, epigraphical notice appended to M. B. Smith, “Imam Zade Karrar at Buzun. A Dated Seldjuk Ruin,” AMI 7 (1935): 65–81 (appendix, 73–81). 27 Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 230, 242–45. 28 For Bastam, see ibid., 277–28; for Damghan, see ibid., 279–82. 29 Ibid., 226, 231, 237, 238–39. 30 Ibid., 255–56. 31 Ernst Herzfeld, “Arabische Inschriften in Iran und Syrien,” AMI 8 (1936): 78–102.

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one Qarasunqur, perpetually on the run from a vengeful sultan.32 Herzfeld displays a vein of sardonic humor in manipulating Arabic epigraphic clichés to tell the story. Thus he notes dryly how “the animator of justice in the two worlds”—a title used by the Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Muhammad—closed a squalid deal with the Ilkhan Abu Sa'id to renege on the asylum that he had oﬀered Qarasunqur. In despair, the latter took his own life.33 Similarly, recounting the activities of the late-eleventh-century vizier Taj al-Mulk in Syria and Iran, Herzfeld comments on this handsome intriguer that Allah did not grant him a good end.34 The evidence of Taj al-Mulk’s patronage in Syria puts in a new light his much better-known contribution of the north dome to the Friday Mosque of Isfahan. More generally, Herzfeld places that mosque within the wider context of contemporary Saljuq Friday Mosques in Aleppo and Diyarbakir, and identiﬁes the various local styles that ﬂourished under Saljuq rule in the late eleventh century in Syria, the Jazira, and Iran as constituting the high point of medieval Islamic architecture. The epigraphic material presented here—and presented, it may be said, without fanfare—is wonderfully rich and varied. Apart from corrections to the readings of others, such as Yedda Godard, it contains observations on epigraphic good manners (such as the need to avoid dividing inscriptions); on the titles borne by viziers and Suﬁ shaikhs, for example at Natanz (he cites Rawandi to good eﬀect here); on Zoroastrian echoes in epigraphic formulae; on Buyid titulature and personalities; on the way Hanaﬁs and Shaﬁ'is fought for control of the Friday Mosque of Isfahan; on the Caspian origins of the tomb at Abarquh (an inspiration, this); and on a host of other topics. Particularly useful are his comments amplifying the work of others (for example, on Lajim, Abarquh, and Maragha); but this is an article that frustrates through its very brevity. The principal theme of the article, however, is a topic that lies at the very heart of medieval Islamic epigraphy: the transition from Kuﬁc to naskhi in monumental inscriptions. Herzfeld was the ﬁrst to tackle this subject on the basis of a substantial number of dated

32 33 34

Ibid., 92, 95–99. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 86.

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inscriptions, and it is typical of him that he should have drawn his material from Tlemcen in the far west to Delhi in the distant east. Like Max van Berchem, he associates the process with the so-called Sunni reaction, and like van Berchem, he places Syria, and speciﬁcally Syria in the period 1148 to 1156, at center stage.35 This almost certainly reﬂects his long ﬁeld experience in that country. Yet there are weaknesses here. The material that he himself has assembled demonstrates fairly convincingly that Buyid and Ghaznavid examples substantially predate the Syrian material. The evidence of Qur"anic manuscripts, a topic that he does not mention, points in the same direction and to an even earlier date, namely the late tenth century. The Qur"an of Ibn al-Bawwab, dated 1000 A.D., is merely the most famous of a whole series of such manuscripts.36 The special circumstances that applied to a twelfth-century Syria trying to rid itself of the crusaders simply do not apply here. It seems more plausible to connect the move from Kuﬁc to cursive in monumental inscriptions with an increased level of literacy for which the sudden popularity of Qur"ans in cursive script, the massive increase in the production of other types of manuscript, and inscriptions in the minor arts and on coins, all oﬀer corroborative evidence.37 Now back to generalities. Herzfeld was never much good at admitting that he was mistaken. As I have mentioned, in the narrow context of the Islamic architecture of the Iranian world, he was quite frequently wrong. The Friday Mosque of Isfahan and the Saljuq building at Khargird are two obvious examples.38 He misunderstood Safavid architecture to an embarrassing degree, maintaining that there were a few buildings (when in fact there are at least a couple of hundred) and asserting that many buildings had their inscriptions

35

Herzfeld, appendix, “Imam Zade Karrar at Buzun,” 74–81, especially 79–80. D. Storm Rice, The Unique Ibn al-Bawwab Manuscript (Dublin: E. Walker, 1955); David James, The Master Scribes: Qur"ans of the 10th to 14th Centuries A.D., The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, vol. 2 (New York: Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1992), 21–33. 37 L. T. Giuzalian, “The Bronze Qalamdan (Pen-case) 542/1148 from the Hermitage Collection (1936–1965),” ArsOr 7 (1968): 95–119; Ernst Herzfeld, review of “Ghazni,” by André Godard, “Le Décor épigraphique des monuments de Ghazna,” by Samuel Flury, DLZ , N. F. 3 (1926): col. 670, citing a Samanid coin of 385/995. 38 Herzfeld, “Arabische Inschriften,” 86. 36

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signed by painters (a total fantasy on his part).39 He took scarcely any account of the medieval architecture of Central Asia and vastly underestimated the extent and importance of the architecture of the Mongols. All this is exquisitely frustrating when one considers his contributions to the medieval architecture of Syria, and Iraq, with their wealth of illustrative material and detailed text—and high standard of accuracy. Nothing, but nothing, of the kind for Iran. And that is why he is an untrustworthy guide to its Islamic monuments. Why should this have been so? This was a man who, after all, graduated as an architect from the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg-Berlin. True, he quickly turned himself into an Orientalist, but he never lost his love of drawing and buildings.40 And yet he was capable, having produced a superlative ground plan of the highly complex Timurid madrasa at Khargird, of dismissing it in a sentence as a late descendant of the Sasanian palace at Firuzabad, or of using an equally ﬁne drawing of a muqarnas vault at Natanz as an extended footnote to a discussion centered on the architecture of Damascus.41 His published references to the many inscriptions on which he worked are even briefer (ﬁgs. 3–4).42 The real problem seems to be that he never addressed himself single-mindedly to the individual Islamic buildings of Iran. The mosques and major shrines, it must be reiterated, were out of bounds to him for most of the time he spent in Iran.43 Imagine trying to write a history of Gothic vaulting in France without access to the cathedrals! So he never saw more than a fraction of what there was to see, despite endless journeys, despite living in Iran for years: a

39

For Herzfeld’s views on Safavid architecture, see his review of F. Sarre, Ardabil, Grabmoschee des Schech Saﬁ. Denkmäler persischer Baukunst, Teil 2 in DLZ , N. F. 3 (1926): cols. 174–77. 40 Cf. the casual reference to his own ﬁeldwork on the houses of Latvia in the context of a detailed discussion of Median architecture: Herzfeld, “Khorasan,” 132. 41 Herzfeld, “Damascus I,” 37, 39–40 and ﬁg. 27. 42 For example, see Herzfeld, “Arabische Inschriften,” 79; Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 272. For comments on the quality of his ﬁeldwork on this site, see Bernard O’Kane, “Salguq Minarets: Some New Data,” Annales Islamologiques 20 (1984): 90–91, 96 (ﬁg. 4 reproduces Herzfeld’s drawing), and 101. 43 Toward the end of his stay in Iran, he nevertheless snatched enough time to produce an archive of photographs of the Friday Mosque of Isfahan, now housed in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives.

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sad irony indeed. One may speculate that the unsatisfactory nature of his total output on Iranian Islamic buildings may have something to do with the fact that—in contrast to his experiences in Iraq and especially in Syria—he worked on this architecture alone, without a group of informed peers to comment on his work. That said, the disiecta membra of his insights over the years repay close study. Thus he traces the tabula ansata, the schoolboy’s writing tablet of classical and then Islamic times, through a weird and wonderful range of transformations in medieval Iranian architecture, extending his purview into manuscripts and carpets as well.44 His lifelong obsession with Hellenism, a characteristic of German education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was entirely relevant to his work on the Umayyads and to much of what he did in the ﬁeld of pre-Islamic Iran. But it was nothing short of a baneful inﬂuence in his dealings with Iranian Islamic buildings, for it skewed his understanding of the tradition within which they were produced. Even there, though, he sometimes found gold, as when he teased out references to Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great, in the funerary inscription of the Gur-i Amir in Samarqand.45 And when he did very occasionally study a building in greater detail, the result is disappointing. He returned repeatedly in his writings to the enigmatic Saljuq ruins of Khargird, and as early as 1926 was championing it as an early madrasa, thereby toppling the entire ediﬁce of K. A. C. Creswell’s argument in favor of an Egyptian origin of the madrasa.46 Yet despite the seductive grace of his line, the architectural discussion is skimpy, and Herzfeld reserves his energies for the inscription, which elsewhere he calls the most beautiful in Iran.47 Or consider how he publishes Mil-i Radkan, a tomb tower of 1016–21. The title of his article explicitly emphasizes its Pahlavi inscription, and, sure enough, he worries at it like a dog at a

44 Ernst Herzfeld, “Die Tabula ansata in der islamischen Epigraphik und Ornamentik,” Der Islam 6 (1916): 189–99. The tabula ansata was still used in thirteenthcentury Iraq, as an illustration from a copy of al-Hariri’s Maqamat indicates: Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 131, ﬁg. 102. 45 Ernst Herzfeld, “Alongoa,” Der Islam 6 (1916): 321–27. 46 Ernst Herzfeld, review of “The Origin of the Cruciform Plan of Cairene Madrasas,” by K. A. C. Creswell, DLZ, N. F. 3 (1926): col. 423. 47 Herzfeld, “Arabische Inschriften,” 83.

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bone.48 So far as the meaning of the inscription is concerned, the article is a tour de force. But even in this epigraphic study a very great deal is left unsaid. He makes no comment on the implications of the fact that the Pahlavi inscription, though of roughly equal length to the Arabic one, is arranged in two tiers and occupies only about one-third of the space allotted to the Arabic inscription. There would have been no design problem in giving it a band of its own, of equal size. Thus the layout—as at Rasgat, incidentally—suggests that it was the Arabic inscription that counted and was (perhaps) intended to be read. Such a ﬁnding perhaps implies that the Pahlavi inscription had a more symbolic role. The whole question of visibility and legibility, however, is not discussed. The consonance of added ornaments in the two scripts—knotted motifs of various kinds, six-pointed stars, hearts, rings, and hooked leaves—is passed over without comment, though he notes the related eﬀort to formalize the Pahlavi ductus into something visually akin to Kuﬁc. Above all, the reasons for this survival of Pahlavi in the Caspian area at this time are left unexplored. But perhaps the oddest aspect of this article is the attempt to explain the details of the cornice layout entirely in terms of the vocabulary of classical architecture. The analogies seem forced to a degree and reveal more about Herzfeld’s early training and deeply instilled cultural preferences than they do about this building. It is time to conclude. What other twentieth-century ﬁgure in the vast ﬁeld represented in this volume could justify an entire symposium devoted to his or her work—three days under the microscope, if not on the rack? In the cloistered universe of academe, he was himself a kind of Caesar, a man who doth bestride the narrow world Like a Colossus; and we petty men Walk under his huge legs, and peep about To ﬁnd ourselves dishonourable graves.

But that colossus had problems of his own. For years he had been treated like royalty in Iran, with Qajar princes, provincial governors, foreign consuls, oil company, bank, and telegraph oﬃcials falling over themselves to lend him assistance on his travels. The Iranian 48 Ernst Herzfeld, “Postsasanidische Inschriften. I—Mil i Radkan,” AMI 4 (1932): 140–47.

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prime minister himself oﬀered to translate his report on Persepolis.49 For many years he encountered no academic rivals working in Iran, no one who could take him on as an equal. Unchallenged, isolated, idolized: a bad combination. Hence, perhaps, the increasingly dogmatic style of writing into which he fell. Moreover, he suﬀered from a serious information overload that seems to have reduced his attention span dramatically. He was constantly, uncomfortably, perhaps even guiltily, aware of all the things he wanted to say about other subjects. Hence the jerky style, the concentrated expressiveness rather than discursive exposition, the “take-it-or-leave-it” manner. And with a man who had so many sharp edges and, by the standards of the time, was eerily omnicompetent, people thought twice before disagreeing with him. We can all think of the old baboons in our various ﬁelds whom no one takes on until they are safely dead. Herzfeld may not have intended to be an intellectual terrorist of this kind, but he was assuredly perceived as one. His incisive, and occasionally truly violent, reviews often left blood on the carpet.50 But so what? Even now, generations later, and for all his faults, he is still an incomparable interpreter of medieval Iranian architecture, and every line that he wrote on that subject is worth reading. Let me end ﬁrst with a speculation and then a reﬂection. It would be surprising if Herzfeld did not greet the publication of A Survey of Persian Art in 1939 with a certain amount of weeping and gnashing of teeth. Here, after all, were literally hundreds of mouthwatering, top-quality, folio-sized plates of medieval buildings that Herzfeld had never ever seen, unfolding before him a medieval architecture of astounding richness and variety. No disrespect to the medieval architecture of Syria is intended by the comment that the output of medieval Iran puts it in the shade. Yet it was primarily Syrian and Iraqi, not Iranian, material that formed the bulk of the Islamic architectural archive that Herzfeld brought over to the United States. Now the reﬂection: the information explosion on medieval Iranian architecture began in 1936 with the initial publication of Athar-é Iran and peaked four years later with the “typographical magniﬁcence”

49

Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 247. For example, see Ernst Herzfeld, “Zu Strzygowski’s Aufsätzen in Band II, 79 ﬀ. u. OLZ 1911 Nr. 4,” Der Islam 2 (1911): 411–13. 50

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of the Survey.51 For Herzfeld, this was the most unfortunate of conjunctions. He had lost Persepolis, his Iranian home, his German professorship. By 1935 he had left Iran, as it turned out, forever. And now, suddenly, too late for him, with a world war threatening, the long-closed door swung open to reveal to him the unsuspected riches of Iranian medieval architecture. It was the comble de malheur. He had missed the boat, and he had missed it big time. May the earth rest lightly on him.

51 The phrase, encapsulating as it does a decade of bitter rivalry, is that of M. B. Smith; see his review of Donald N. Wilber, The Architecture of Islamic Iran. The IlKhanid Period, JAOS 76 (1956): 247.

Fig. 1. Isfahan, Friday Mosque, interior. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 11, vol. 2, no. 158.

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Fig. 2. Hamadan, Gunbad-i 'Alaviyyan, exterior from north. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 11, vol. 1, no. 31.

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Fig. 3. Radkan West, tomb tower, early thirteenth century. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 10, vol. 1, no. 121.

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Fig. 4. Radkan West, tomb tower, early thirteenth century, detail. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 10, vol. 1, no. 124.

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PART V

NEAR EASTERN STUDIES, CULTURAL POLITICS, AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL ETHICS

ERNST HERZFELD AND FRENCH APPROACHES TO IRANIAN ARCHAEOLOGY Rémy Boucharlat

In archaeological circles, the competition between Ernst Herzfeld and the Délégation Scientiﬁque Française en Perse, headed by Jacques de Morgan (1857–1924) and then by Roland de Mecquenem (1877–1947), is well known. On one level, it may be seen as an illustration of the political and diplomatic rivalry between the Germans and the French during the period that culminated in World War II. This dimension, however, lies outside the scope of this paper, which focuses on the scholarly goals and personal attitudes of these gentlemen.1 A series of diﬀerences between de Morgan (and later, de

1 My warmest thanks to Mrs. Elizabeth Willcox, who revised my English, and to Mrs. Nicole Chevalier, Musée du Louvre, and Mr. Mohammad-Nader Nasiri Moghaddam, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III, who read my paper and made valuable suggestions and corrections. There are many recent studies on the diplomatic activities by foreign countries in Iran in the early twentieth century, especially during World War I; see Oliver Bast, Les Allemands en Perse pendant la première guerre mondiale: d’après les sources diplomatiques françaises, Travaux et mémoires de l’Institut d’études iraniennes 2 (Paris: Peeters, 1997); Oliver Bast, “Germany, i: GermanPersian Diplomatic Relations,” in EncIr, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2001), 10:506–19; Oliver Bast, ed., La Perse et la Grande Guerre, Bibliothèque iranienne 52 (Tehran: Institut français de recherche en Iran, 2002). For the history of French archaeological research in Iran (speciﬁcally, the activities of the delegation) and its links with diplomatic history, see Jacques de Morgan, La Délégation en Perse du Ministère de l’Instruction publique 1897–1902 (Paris: E. Leroux, 1902); Jacques de Morgan, Histoire et travaux de la Délégation en Perse 1897–1905 (Paris: E. Leroux, 1905); Pierre Amiet, Suse: 6,000 ans d’histoire (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1988); Francine Tissot, “Délégation archéologiques françaises, i. Délégation Archéologique Française en Iran,” in EncIr, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 1996), 7:238–40; Nicole Chevalier, “La mission en Perse de Jacques de Morgan,” in Une mission en Perse: 1897–1912, ed. Nicole Chevalier, Dossiers du Musée du Louvre 52 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1997), 12–17; Nicole Chevalier, La recherche archéologique française au Moyen-Orient, 1842–1947 (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 2002); Jacques de Morgan and Andrée Jaunay, Mémoires de Jacques de Morgan (1857–1924): Souvenirs d’un archéologue (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997); Ève Gran-Aymerich, Jean Leclant, and André Laronde, Naissance de l’archéologie moderne 1798–1945 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1998), 292–96; 409–12; Ève Gran-Aymerich, “Archéologie et politique française en Iran: convergences et contradictions. Des missions Dieulafoy à la Délégation archéologique française en

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Mecquenem) and Herzfeld may well help to explain this rivalry: apart from the diﬀerence in nationality, diﬀerences in education and previous experience; in aims and methods of research; in the selected territories under investigation, in terms of geography and culture; and ﬁnally, in their personal attitude concerning the Iranians. Although German and French archaeologists have worked in amicable cooperation during the second half of the twentieth century, their chosen ﬁelds and methods of research display many similarities with those of their respective predecessors. Is this coincidence or consequence?

Education Herzfeld was ﬁrst trained as an architect but later became a good Iranologist, thanks to his education in the German school of Orientalistik and art history. During his travels in Mesopotamia and Persia, which began in 1905, he was able to read inscriptions in Arabic and in Old, Middle, and modern Persian. In his reports he wrote local names in Persian and had an idea of their etymology. In discussions of historical events, he could quote both classical and Oriental authors. Architect and Orientalist, he soon became a celebrated archaeologist. The French scholars, including the ﬁrst director and leading ﬁgure of the delegation, de Morgan, and later de Mecquenem, were trained as mining engineers; Marcel Dieulafoy (1844–1920) before them was a civil engineer. De Morgan, however, was certainly much more than an engineer, having inherited from his father a wide knowledge of geology, paleontology, geography, archaeology, and prehistory. As an educated man of the nineteenth century he was trained in classics and attended some courses in botany, linguistics, and foreign languages. His ﬁve volumes titled Mission en Perse, published between 1891 and 1904 and nearly all of which he wrote himself, illustrate perfectly his view that “un voyageur à mon sens, devait

Iran,” JA 287 (1999): 357–74; EI 2 s.v. “France, II–IV”; Mohammad-Nader Nasiri Moghaddam, “Les missions archéologiques françaises et la question des antiquités en Perse (1884–1914)” (Ph.D. diss., Sorbonne nouvelle [Université Paris III], 2002). For German archaeology in Iran, see Dietrich Huﬀ, “Germany, ii: Archaeological Explorations and Excavations,” in EncIr, 10:519–30; Wolfram Kleiss, “Deutsches Archäologisches Institut,” EncIr, 7:331–33.

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être un encyclopédiste s’il ne voulait rien perdre du fruit de ses explorations.”2 After he resigned as director of the delegation, and despite serious illness, he wrote many valuable books, particularly in the ﬁelds of numismatics and prehistory, and, like Madame Dieulafoy, he also wrote novels and scripts for stage plays and ﬁlms. Both Herzfeld and de Morgan were learned, brilliant, gifted men, who were interested in many ﬁelds, but those ﬁelds were not identical. Herzfeld’s interests lay chieﬂy in the humanities, de Morgan’s in the sciences. There was another, more important diﬀerence. Apart from his earlier participation in the Assur excavations, Herzfeld was not inclined to be the leader of a large team, which he had never been.3 On the other hand, de Morgan’s character and previous experiences in Malaysia (1884–85), as director of mines and archaeologist in Transcaucasia (1886–69) and Persia (1889–91), and as director of the Archaeological Service in Egypt (1892–97) shaped his agenda and methods in Iran when in 1897 he was appointed délégué général en Perse, or director of the French delegation for the entire country.

Activities and Methods When de Morgan accepted the directorship of the delegation, his ﬁrst concern was the careful building up of a team. Although he was the undisputed leader, he never felt able to work without his specialists, including other archaeologists like himself. His ambitious plan is clear when in his writings he compared his future delegation with the highly important Archaeological Service in Egypt or the famous French schools of archaeology at Cairo, Athens, and Rome; he foresaw the delegation as an institution extending its range from Mesopotamia to Afghanistan and from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf, and including scholars of both historical and natural sciences.4 Conversely, Herzfeld was a solitary scholar; during most of his travels and even in his excavations, beginning in 1928, he worked alone

2

De Morgan and Jaunay, Mémoires de Jacques de Morgan, 129. Friedrich Krefter, “Mit Ernst Herzfeld in Pasargadae und Persepolis 1928 und 1931–1934,” AMI 12 (1979): 13–25. 4 De Morgan and Jaunay, Mémoires de Jacques de Morgan, 429–35. The idea behind Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt is not far removed. 3

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or with only a few colleagues and companions, such as Friedrich Sarre, Karl Bergner, and Friedrich Krefter. Oddly enough, de Morgan’s team never included any true Orientalist who worked in Iranian languages and studies broadly deﬁned. The only specialist was Father Vincent Scheil (1858–1940), who was an Assyriologist, not a specialist in ancient Iranian languages. This situation continued in later periods of French activity at Susa, after de Morgan’s resignation in 1912. Jamshid Unvala, a Parsi from Bombay with a doctorate in philology, took part in the Susa excavations over a long period (1927–39) for the purpose of studying Parthian and Sasanian burial customs. Unvala produced little in that ﬁeld, however, and de Mecquenem’s reports explicitly state that Unvala came to Susa at his own expense. Occasionally, young people from the National School of Oriental Languages joined the mission, but they apparently acted as ﬁeld archaeologists, not as Orientalists, and they did not venture beyond Susiana. This composition of the delegation was determined by de Morgan’s scientiﬁc aims, which were concentrated in archaeology and reﬂected his primary interest in the earliest levels of ancient Susa. The ﬂints and other artifacts he collected during his ﬁrst visit in 1891 had convinced him that Susa was the right place for seeking the “origins of civilization.” He soon extended his plan to the third and second millennia B.C. because of the sensational discoveries made in the ﬁrst seasons, such as the well-known Elamite objects and the Mesopotamian booty that included the stele of Naram-Sin and the Code of Hammurabi. Because of these important results, de Morgan decided at an early stage to concentrate French activities at Susa and even to restrict them to that site. He attempted on many occasions to justify his decision.5 His strategy was to obtain more ﬁnancial backing, arguing that other ﬁeld activities demanded three times the allowed budget. But this never materialized, and in 1912 he resigned from his position. Leaving Assur in 1905, Herzfeld went into Iran through the central Zagros and thence to Shiraz via northern Khuzistan. His ﬁrst report, published in the Petermanns Mitteilungen in 1907, gives an account of his travels, including a study of the Persian Gates on his

5

De Morgan, La Délégation en Perse and Histoire et travaux de la Délégation en Perse.

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way to Persepolis.6 It should be noted that he did not stop in Susa, where the French team had already made great discoveries. His study, a doctoral thesis, published in Klio in the following year, showed his deep interest in Pasargadae.7 During this period, Pasargadae and Persepolis, the two Achaemenid capitals on the plateau, were hardly ever mentioned by the French. On other journeys, Herzfeld carefully studied the Sasanian inscription and monument of Paikuli in the western Zagros. From 1923 to 1925 he traveled widely in eastern and central Iran, where he recorded many monuments, including small rock-cut graves, inscriptions, roads, and other remains of both pre-Islamic and medieval periods.8 As a result of these wideranging activities, he became the foremost specialist, of any nationality, in the ﬁeld of Iranian archaeology. His two synthetic yet personal books, Archaeological History of Iran (1935) and Iran in the Ancient East (1941), were the brilliant results of his travels and excavations from 1928 onward of both prehistoric and historical sites in Fars (and, brieﬂy, in Sistan). He acquired an extensive knowledge of the country and of its history and archaeology. No one else at the time could have written such books. Of the French archaeologists working in Iran during the same period, only de Morgan published several general books, as noted above, but the subject matter was not so “Iranian” as was Herzfeld’s. Herzfeld’s aim was to study the territory of ancient Iran: the plateau as well as the central Zagros, the Median homeland. Farther east, he took an interest in the eastern Iranian world, as illustrated by his excavations at Kuh-i Khwaja, whose remains are interpreted as a temple of the Parthian and Sasanian periods. He attempted to work in Afghanistan, but once again he was confronted with the newly established French monopoly on archaeological research, as of 1921, in that country! These administrative restrictions on Herzfeld’s archaeological activities raise a question. Would Herzfeld have worked diﬀerently if he had been able to excavate before 1928, after which he did so extensively? He would most probably have begun digging earlier— as early as 1905—especially at Pasargadae, the ﬁrst site he studied

6 7 8

Herzfeld, “Luristan,” 49–63, 73–90. Herzfeld, “Pasargadae,” (1908): 1–68. Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 225–84.

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in depth.9 But his notebooks clearly show that even when he was busy excavating he paid great attention to the visible remains. “Excavating is but one method of archaeological research; it is what experiment is to natural science,” he wrote.10 The restrictions he experienced may have led him to pay more attention to major or secondary visible monuments and documents of any kind: rock art, small rock-cut monuments, objects on the antiquities market, and the like. He visited endangered sites such as Tepe Sialk, near Kashan. His notebooks preserved in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere are a remarkable source of information. The results of his investigations are partly reﬂected in the numerous papers published in the 1920s and later in Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran and Iranische Denkmäler, but his unpublished records certainly oﬀer rich material for further investigation. By contrast, from its inception the French delegation concentrated primarily on Susa, and then almost exclusively so for more than three decades, to the detriment of other investigations.11 The overwhelming emphasis on Susa brought about a misunderstanding between the archaeologists—that is, de Morgan—and the French politicians and diplomatic staﬀ in Tehran. The latter considered an archaeological monopoly on all of Iran as a means of inﬂuence, a way to counter the monopolies obtained by other Western countries in various economic and administrative sectors in Iran. These discrepancies between political and archaeological goals became evident by the turn of the century.12 Apart from Susa and its surroundings, French small-scale archaeological ﬁeldwork was no more than a response to the growing opposition of the Iranian authorities and elite, as well as to that of other Western scholars. Notable were a new but brief investigation in the Talish by de Morgan in 1901 and paleontological research in Azerbaijan by de Mecquenem in 1903. The travels de Morgan or

9

In fact, he did undertake “prospecting” (Schürfungen) at Pasargadae as early as 1923; see Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 241–43, and David Stronach’s contribution to this volume. 10 Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 9. 11 De Morgan had planned to organize four “missions” in Iran, dividing the country into four quarters: an enormous plan, which was to begin in 1900. De Morgan and Jaunay, Mémoires de Jacques de Morgan, 435–36. He never actually attempted to launch it. 12 Gran-Aymerich, “Archéologie et politique française en Iran,” 358–65.

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other members undertook after the end of the excavation season in Susa did not continue after the ﬁrst three years, and full reports on them have never been published. The greater part of the results steadily reported in the ﬁrst thirteen volumes of the Mémoires concern only Susa and, secondarily, its surroundings. In a booklet published in 1902, de Morgan stated in one paragraph that the rest of Iran was of great archaeological interest; but this was obviously an oﬃcial stance, not a plan of investigation!13 De Morgan did, however, maintain a keen interest in the archaeology of many other regions, as demonstrated by his previous publications, speciﬁcally volume four of the Mission Scientiﬁque en Perse.14 He investigated many historical sites, spending days or weeks in order to describe and sometimes to level them. They included Bisotun, Hamadan, the “Median” rock-cut graves, the major Sasanian sites and monuments, and the third- and second-millennium B.C. stelae and inscriptions, in addition to his excavations in the Russian Talish. Despite his interest in a wide range of periods and subjects, however, when he launched the excavations at Susa he devoted all his energy to them. After 1912, the year in which de Morgan resigned, and during the 1920s, little more was accomplished; what did take place was carried out elsewhere in Iran, without the explicit approval of Father Scheil, the new director, or de Mecquenem, the new ﬁeld director. These eﬀorts consisted of brief excavations at the Elamite site of Bushir, one unsuccessful season at Hamadan, and some attempts to work on sites in the Tehran area.15 As a result, the French delegation contributed little to the history of the Iranian heartland, a fact that probably had a negative eﬀect on the Iranian elite. Despite Susa’s role as an Achaemenid capital, they did not consider the site to be on a par with Persepolis. De Morgan had only touched Darius’ palace, which had been previously excavated by William Loftus and Marcel Dieulafoy. When he discovered the sole Achaemenid grave thus far known at the site, he began his report with a very negative assessment of the art of that

13

De Morgan, La Délégation en Perse, 125. Jacques de Morgan, Mission scientiﬁque en Perse (Paris, E. Leroux, 1896–1906), vol. 4:1, Recherches archéologiques; Jacques de Morgan, Recherches archéologiques (Paris: E. Leroux, 1896). 15 Nicole Chevalier, “Hamadan 1913: une mission oubliée,” IrAnt 24 (1989): 245–51. 14

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period.16 The post-Achaemenid periods, usually labeled “basses époques,” were scarcely even reported. According to de Morgan, they oﬀered very little of scientiﬁc or historical interest, as we are already well informed about them by the classical authors. Moreover, these late periods at Susa consisted of several meters of archaeological deposits, which made access to the “interesting” levels diﬃcult.17 Indeed, this attitude was shared by many Near Eastern archaeologists at that time and has persisted until recent decades.

The Situation of Khuzistan in the Early Twentieth Century Khuzistan province has long been inhabited mainly by Arab tribes that moved between that region and southern Mesopotamia, formerly part of the Ottoman Empire; indeed, during the period when Dieulafoy and de Morgan were active, Khuzistan was still called Arabistan. The central authority in Tehran barely controlled the Arab tribes and the rest of the population, especially the nomads and the sedentary Lurs. Shushtar and Dizful, the main cities of Khuzistan, were inhabited by both Arabs and Iranians. In their reports and memoirs, the archaeologists frequently describe their unsuccessful attempts to obtain eﬃcient aid from the local Iranian governors. Iranian authority over the local populations was weak, and Loftus, Dieulafoy, and de Morgan had to deal with constant banditry. From 1884 to 1886, when Dieulafoy directed the Susa excavations, the Iranian authorities were reluctant to allow foreigners to work there, knowing they could not really ensure their security.18 According to the French diplomats, this was the real reason for not renewing Dieulafoy’s permit in 1886; but there were other diplomatic reasons, including Jane Dieulafoy’s unkind articles published in various French magazines.19 Ten years later, de Morgan

16

Jacques de Morgan, “Découverte d’une sépulture achéménide à Suse,” MDP 8 (Paris: E. Leroux, 1905), 46. 17 De Morgan, La Délégation en Perse, 13–14. 18 Chevalier, La recherche archéologique française au Moyen-Orient, 122. 19 Ibid., 122–25. Nasiri Moghaddam, “Les missions archéologiques françaises,” chaps. 2–3.5, puts forward another explanation for the Iranian attitude. He demonstrates that the shah was angry with Dieulafoy because the archaeologist exported all the valuable antiquities, despite the bilateral agreement (1884) that they were to be shared between the shah and the French government. The French version of

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also had to deal with robbers during the ﬁrst seasons and often complained to the Iranian authorities.20 The precarious situation led him to build a castle instead of an excavation house along the Shaur River. This massive walled building, although justiﬁable, was a conspicuous fantaisie, or extravagance, that angered some Iranians.21 The disputes between the Ottoman Empire and Iran in the nineteenth century led to William Loftus’s arrival at Susa in connection with the Boundary Commission.22 The problems of internal and external security annoyed the Iranian authorities, and the French mission often complained through their diplomats about the attitude of the local Iranian representatives. Had they also worked in a less troubled region of Iran, Tehran would have regarded them in a diﬀerent light.

Elam versus the Iranian Heartland For de Morgan, Susa was a part of Mesopotamia; speciﬁcally Chaldaea, the “cradle of civilization,” which saw the birth of writing, metal technology, and art. Mesopotamia eventually inﬂuenced Egypt, of which de Morgan had wide experience through his ﬁeld research from 1892 to 1897, when he served as director of the Archaeological Service. In this sense, Susa was oriented toward the west and not toward the Iranian plateau. De Morgan’s program for the ﬁfteen years of his appointment was closely consistent with his goals, as shown by his concentration on Susa and by his strategy.23 What seems more surprising is that the delegation pursued this program after his resignation. Father Scheil, the new scientiﬁc director, was eager to recover more cuneiform

the agreement clearly establishes this point, and Dieulafoy did not deny it. The Dieulafoys later represented this violation as a gift from the shah. 20 Gustave Jéquier and Michel Jéquier, En Perse, 1897–1902: Archéologue, explorateur, bâtisseur (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1968); Chevalier, La recherche archéologique française au Moyen-Orient, 144–45. 21 De Morgan, La Délégation en Perse, 29; De Morgan and Jaunay, Mémoires de Jacques de Morgan, 450); Chevalier, La recherche archéologique française au Moyen-Orient, 145–46. 22 John Curtis, “William Kennett Loftus and His Excavations at Susa,” IrAnt 28 (1993): 1–55. 23 De Morgan resigned in 1912, but his last sojourn in Susa was actually much earlier (1908), and his last trip to Iran took place in 1911.

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texts, both Akkadian and Elamite. De Mecquenem, the ﬁeld director, did not have a strong enough personality to oppose him; he felt himself to be merely de Morgan’s successor. In his reports from 1920 to 1939, his scientiﬁc aims are not readily apparent. In the two decades following de Morgan’s resignation, the delegation clearly lacked a great archaeologist. From the viewpoint of early twentieth-century Iranians, Susa— capital of Elam and part of Mesopotamia in the lowlands of Khuzistan—did not appear to be a symbolic part of the Iranian world, but rather a peripheral one. Moreover, the French archaeologists of these decades never pursued the later historical periods of Iranian history proper. For educated Iranians, Susa was certainly not the ideal site for excavation. And the results do not seem to have elicited any positive response in Tehran.24 Khuzistan, located far from the capital, lay outside the traditional Iranian world. Many of the discoveries appeared to be more related to Mesopotamian than to Iranian cultures: the stela of Naram Sin in 1898, and the Code of Hammurabi and many other objects of Mesopotamian origin were found in the very ﬁrst seasons. De Morgan and de Mecquenem focused on the pre-Iranian periods and left aside the later ones, although these are well represented at Susa and even more so at several important Sasanian sites nearby. Iranians concluded that the French archaeologists were simply not interested in their country’s heartland.25 Conversely, as evidenced in the geography of his travels, Herzfeld paid particular attention to the history and archaeology of that heartland. When he obtained permission to excavate in 1928, he began

24

Alfred Foucher, another French archaeologist, was appointed director of the newly established Délégation archélogique française en Afghanistan. When he had to select the sites to be excavated there, he noted in 1922: “J’ai constaté à Téhéran que ce qui se faisait à Suze [sic] était aussi parfaitement ignoré que s’il s’était agi des fouilles pratiquées sur une autre planète.” These remarks are cited in Françoise Olivier-Utard, Politique et archéologie: histoire de la délégation archéologique française en Afghanistan (1922–1982) (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1997), 58. 25 Nasiri Moghaddam, “Les missions archéologiques françaises,” chap. 10.3, draws my attention to another reason: The Iranian elite thought that the French focused their research on Susania because they were allowed to export one hundred percent of the discoveries from that region, whereas in the rest of the country they were permitted only one-half. In my opinion, this explanation does not exclude the cultural one. Both considerations became increasingly important from the beginning of the Constitutional period (1906) onward.

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in the Persepolis area. One of his aims was clear. “My surmise that Iran was indeed a centre and the source of the culture revealed at Susa I has become more than justiﬁed,” he later wrote. “In 1928 I started excavations at a place discovered in 1923, only about two miles from the terrace of Persepolis, an insigniﬁcant oval mound covering about 750 to 1000 feet, of no greater elevation than twelve feet.”26 He had discovered the site of Tall-i Bakun, which he described at length in 1932, rightly showing it to be earlier than Susa I, although even in 1941 he did not take into account the previous Susiana periods, which were being discovered in the 1930s. Whether this was due to a question of character, to the reuse of older sources or to a lack of information, we do not know. Finally, there was another signiﬁcant diﬀerence between Herzfeld and the French directors: the personal attitude toward Iranians and Iranian institutions. Herzfeld was soon considered to be a highly competent or even the foremost specialist on ancient Iran and was on good terms with the Iranian elite in Tehran. He was respected by educated people, invited to lecture, and met many oﬃcials. One can easily imagine how attractive his views were for the Iranians of the new era, when he held in his books that “the long period from 300 B.C. to A.D. 200 begins with complete surrender to everything European. . . . Accepted without resistance, Hellenism, while preparing the Western world for a great future, had the most destructive eﬀect on Iran.”27 Often in Tehran, Herzfeld was able to conduct an eﬀective strategy, as the French diplomats openly acknowledged.28 Together with Arthur Upham Pope, Herzfeld held a leading position in the recently established learned society, “Institut des Œuvres nationales,” which awarded him grants for his research. Between 1925 and 1927, therefore, he could reasonably have hoped to be appointed adviser of the future national museum and even director of antiquities. But the French diplomats obtained the position of

26

Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 9–10. Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 75. 28 Chevalier, La recherche archéologique française au Moyen-Orient, 331–34. Herzfeld often appears to have acted alone, while the diplomatic support for the French archaeologists is obvious. He was strongly backed, however, by German diplomats in Tehran and scholars in Germany. Gran-Aymerich, “Archéologie et politique française en Iran,” 366, with references; Chevalier, La recherche archéologique française au Moyen-Orient, 174–75. Scholarly jealousy aside, it should be remembered that these events took place less than ten years before World War II. 27

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adviser for the French architect André Godard, in compensation for the end of the French monopoly on archaeological ﬁeldwork in Iran. Unlike Herzfeld, the French archaeologists were reluctant to stay in Tehran except for short periods, and they relied entirely upon their diplomats to arrange their aﬀairs. Tellingly, de Mecquenem was not active in Tehran during the crucial years of the 1920s, when the future of archaeological research in Iran was under discussion and the French monopoly had been challenged. Because of Herzfeld’s clear ambition to be chosen as the archaeological adviser, French diplomats were forced to resort to a subterfuge to lure de Mecquenem to Tehran in the hope that he would agree to be a candidate: They asked him to check on the commercial and illegal excavations being carried out in the Rayy area, which they considered a violation of the French monopoly. De Mecquenem was uncooperative. “Il [the French diplomat] eut du mal à comprendre que je n’étais pas chargé d’autre chose que des fouilles de Suse pour lesquelles je n’avais qu’un faible crédit et que c’était à lui de défendre notre Monopole avec l’appui des Aﬀaires Étrangères,” he wrote.29 The ﬁrst two directors of the delegation did not provide clear answers to the question of the monopoly, which was ﬁrst raised in 1906 at the time of the Constitutional Revolution. But as early as this period de Morgan was prepared to discuss the matter, although he was not inclined to accept any change in the 1900 agreement.30 The subject arose again in 1910 with the idea of a museum in Tehran and the project of a law governing antiquities.31 By then, de Morgan was no longer capable of facing these projects. Seventeen years later, the end of the French monopoly came as a logical consequence. After 1920, the political situation changed; the new Pahlavi dynasty and the elite were more nationalistic. Interestingly, the French diplomats saw things clearly and were ready to adapt to the new

29 Roland de Mecquenem, “Les fouilleurs de Suse (édité par P. Amiet),” IrAnt 15 (1980): 34. 30 Chevalier, La recherche archéologique française au Moyen-Orient, 173–83. 31 De Morgan was not favorable to the idea of a museum and was not inclined to excavate near Tehran, afraid that both projects would bring to light valuable objects—thus demonstrating to the Iranians the great interest of their antiquities! For him the “exploitation” of archaeological sites was intended to ﬁll French museums. Ibid., 186–87. Nasiri Moghaddam, “Les missions archéologiques françaises,” chap. 10, provides valuable information on this important period.

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situation.32 In Iran the archaeologists did not complain. De Mecquenem was content to continue his excavations at Susa, although he now had to share the discoveries with the newly created Archaeological Service. As a result, in addition to the archaeological research at Susa and Susiana conducted by the ex-Delegation—now reduced to the less ambitiously titled Mission de Susiane—excavations were launched elsewhere: Tepe Sialk, Tepe Giyan, and Bishapur. Between 1931 and 1934, American archaeologists worked at several sites of diﬀerent periods located in northern and northeastern Iran and in Fars: Tepe Hissar, Tureng Tepe, Nishapur, Persepolis, Tall-i Bakun, and Qasr-i Abu Nasr, and Surkh Dum in Luristan. The economic and political situation in Germany in the 1930s easily explains the absence of German institutions, while the British had long since decided to focus on Mesopotamia.33

After Herzfeld and de Morgan In comparing the history of German and French archaeological research in Iran, there are some general trends in later times that seem to continue those of the early twentieth century. In this respect, the two articles on this subject in the Encyclopaedia Iranica are illuminating.34 Whether this is due to lasting inﬂuence by the pioneering archaeologists, a deliberate choice by the later archaeologists and their academic institutions, or is the result of their respective backgrounds, is diﬃcult to say. Let us review a few examples. French archaeologists have been occupied with Susa for a long time. In the 1930s, Roman Ghirshman (1895–1979), although trained in Near Eastern archaeology and epigraphy, excavated protohistoric sites ﬁrst at Tepe Giyan, then at Tepe Sialk. In both instances he 32 The situation changed in the Middle East; after World War I, French political and cultural interests concentrated on the Levant, and Persia lost part of its importance. 33 Herzfeld soon looked for non-German funding for the Persepolis excavations. In this period, Erich F. Schmidt and many other German archaeologists ﬂed westward. 34 Huﬀ, “Archaeological Explorations and Excavations,” 519–30; Tissot, “Délégation Archéologique Française en Iran,” 238–40. There is no entry, however, under “France. French archaeological missions.” Tissot’s article is restricted to the “Délégation archéologique française,” and does not therefore take into account the other projects conducted outside this framework from 1912 through 1980.

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worked on behalf of the Musée du Louvre, not the Mission de Susiane. His excavations at Bishapur carried out in the same decade, which were also supported by the Louvre and not the Mission de Susiane, were the ﬁrst clear indication of French interest in an “Iranian” historical period. It comes as no surprise that when Ghirshman was appointed director of the delegation in 1946, he— like de Morgan before him—concentrated his eﬀorts on Susa. But there is an important diﬀerence: Ghirshman is best known for his research on the Elamite periods, but in fact he was genuinely interested in the later historical levels, looking for the arrival of the Iranians/Persians and exploring Partho-Sasanian and Islamic periods. Since the corresponding levels covered the earlier ones dating to the fourth to second millennia B.C., he worked to establish a complete stratigraphy of the site. He also excavated the ziggurat of Choga Zanbil, located close to Susa, an impressive monument directly connected with the history of ancient Elam and belonging to the pre-Iranian period.35 At this point, however, Iranians became aware of the importance of this heritage. Regrettably, Ghirshman’s very short ﬁeld season in 1950 at the Sasanian city of Ivan-i Karkhah near Susa had no future. Outside of Susiana, his excavations on Kharg Island in 1959 and 1960 had to do with rescue archaeology and were sponsored not by the mission but by the Iranian Oil Operating Companies. Finally, his last excavations in the postAchaemenid—once in his opinion pre-Achaemenid or Persian— “sacred terraces” of Bard-i Neshandeh and Masjid-i Solaiman, located in the mountainous part of Khuzistan, were carried out chieﬂy after he retired in 1967 as director of the delegation and thereafter conducted without French ﬁnancial support.36 Ghirshman is well known through his books and numerous articles on the history, archaeol-

35

The excavations at Choga Zanbil are generally credited to Ghirshman, but it should be remembered that de Mecquenem launched large-scale excavations there as early as 1936. 36 The publication series was renamed Mémoires de la Délégation archéologique en Iran in 1966 for the ﬁrst volume on Choga Zanbil. Thereafter the institution has usually been thus designated until the Iranian Revolution (1979), as was the new series entitled Cahiers de la Délégation archéologique française en Iran launched in 1972. The reason for this return to the former name is unknown to me. The excavations at Bard-i Neshandeh took place between 1964 and 1966 following the season at Susa, where Ghirshman was still director; subsequently, he worked in Masjid-i Solaiman between 1967 and 1971.

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ogy, and art of the pre-Islamic Iranian world, but as an excavator he was glued to Susa beginning in 1946, as were de Morgan and de Mecquenem in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century. In the last years of Ghirshman’s directorship and in the last decade before the Iranian revolution in 1979, the only important exception to the French “Susa-centrism” was the excavation at Tureng Tepe in northern Iran undertaken to investigate the Bronze Age. Jean Deshayes conducted excavations at the site from 1959 through 1977, heading an expedition independent from the delegation (although he maintained good relations with it). During those decades, three archaeological surveys carried out by the French are scarcely worth mentioning; interestingly, there was no archaeological reconnaissance. For German scholars, the situation has been quite diﬀerent. Apart from Herzfeld’s numerous activities, archaeological excavation began rather late, not before 1959 at Takht-i Solaiman and Zendan-i Solaiman; until 1975, these projects were carried out under the auspices of the Istanbul branch of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut.37 After the opening of the Tehran branch in 1961, ﬁeldwork began at Bisotun (1963–67), large-scale excavations began at the Urartian site of Bastam (1968–78), and a program of investigation was launched at Firuzabad (1975–78) in cooperation with the Iranian Archaeological Research Center and UNESCO.38 Both before and after World War II, German scholars intensively pursued philological and linguistic studies, to which Herzfeld had greatly contributed. More importantly, after World War II, apart from the important excavated sites, several German researchers— including Wolfram Kleiss, Dietrich Huﬀ, and Georg Gropp—traveled widely and carefully published their archaeological observations in numerous articles, especially in the journal Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran. Other German archaeologists, such as Hans J. Nissen, Reinhard Dittmann, and Stefan Kroll, carried out surveys in northwestern and southwestern Iran. Together, they continued the great tradition initiated by Herzfeld.

37 Before World War I, expeditions were also carried out in Iran by the Bavarian Oscar Ritter von Niedermayer, and by Ernst Diez, an Austrian closely related to the German historians of Islamic art. See esp. Ernst Diez and Max van Berchem, Churasanische Baudenkmäler (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1918). 38 Kleiss, “Deutsches Archäologisches Institut,” 331–33.

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The long-lived series Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse, the name of which has changed several times but which is usually known as MDP, was established in 1900 by Jacques de Morgan. With the new series Cahiers de la DAFI, begun in 1972, it is still alive. In the same way, Herzfeld’s publications Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran—now Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran und Turan—which he launched in 1929, Ergänzungsbände (1938), and Iranische Denkmäler (1932; to which the Teheraner Forschungen series was added in 1961) are still published on a regular basis. These invaluable publications bear witness to the long tradition in Iranian archaeology initiated by the pioneers from Germany and France.

ERNST HERZFELD, POLITICS, AND ANTIQUITIES LEGISLATION IN IRAN Ali Mousavi

To live over people’s lives is nothing unless we live over their perceptions, live over the growth, the change, the varying intensity of the same—since it was by these things they themselves lived. —Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends

The last two decades of the twentieth century have seen a growth of interest in tracing the early history of archaeological activity in Iran, a complement to earlier comprehensive studies.1 Two sets of literature, one written in Western languages, the other in Persian,

1 Pioneer studies on this topic are those of Muhammad-Taqi Mostafavi, “Talàsh dar ràh-e khedmat be àthàr-e melli va omid beh àyandeh,” Gozàrshehày-e Bàstànshenàsi 3 (1334/1955): 376–513; Muhammad-Taqi Mostafavi, “Amànatdariy-e khàk,” Barressihày-e Tàrikhi (Tehran: Historical Studies of Iran, Supreme Commander’s Staﬀ of the Imperial Army, 1355/1976), 11: 1–154; but Gholamreza Ma’ssumi, Bàstànshenàsiy-e Iran (Tehran: Historical Studies of Iran, Supreme Commander’s Staﬀ of the Imperial Army, 1356/1977) is the ﬁrst comprehensive history of Iranian archaeology. Sadegh Malek-Shahmirzadi’s articles are also important and helpful contributions, especially with respect to the history of the archaeological program at the University of Tehran. Sadegh Malek-Shahmirzadi, “Moruri bar tàrikhchey-e motaleàt-e bàstànshenàsi dar Iran,” Iranian Journal of Archaeology and History 2 (1366/1987): 57–73; Sadegh MalekShahmirzadi, “Barresiy-e tahavvolàt-e motàleàt-e bàstànshenàsi dar Iran,” in Majmu"eh Maqàlàt-e Anjomanvarey-e Barresiy-e Masàel-e Iranshenasi, ed. A. Mousavi-Garmarudi (Tehran: Institute for Political and International Studies, Ministry of Foreign Aﬀairs, 1369/1991), 373–447. In the West, the growth of interest in French archaeological activities in Iran has mainly been due to two exhibitions, one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the other in the Louvre Museum, Paris. See Pierre Amiet, “Bilan archéologique de la Délégation en Perse,” in Une mission en Perse: 1897–1912, ed. Nicole Chevalier, Dossiers du Musée du Louvre 52 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1997), 94–109; Nicole Chevalier, “The French Scientiﬁc Delegation in Persia,” in The Royal City of Susa: Ancient Near Eastern Treasures in the Louvre, ed. Prudence Oliver Harper, Joan Aruz, and Françoise Tallon (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), 16–19; Nicole Chevalier, “A Suse,” in Une mission en Perse, 76–93. This article is the fruit of four years of investigation on archives housed in several locations. I thank Naser Pazouki, director of the Tehran oﬃce of the National Heritage Organization of Iran, who gave me access to the invaluable documents of the Iran Bastan Museum (Bayegàniy-e Ràked), housed in the Tehran oﬃce. Mrs.

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have divided the history of Iranian archaeology into two principal periods: before and after the French exclusive right of excavation in Persia. There has frequently been a tendency to emphasize, and sometimes exaggerate, the importance of one or the other period. Yet these studies have almost totally ignored the signiﬁcance of a third major factor: the fundamental role played by Ernst Herzfeld, the famous German archaeologist, in shaping the future of archaeology in Iran. The present contribution seeks to cast light on such a transitional moment when, thanks to the eﬀorts of a German scholar, Iranian archaeology moved out of its French-dominated era and became an international concern. In studying this phase of Iranian archaeology, two principal issues will be addressed here along with an emphasis on the events of the 1920s: the situation of Iranian archaeology in the early years of the twentieth century and the period of Herzfeld’s active involvement in the archaeological concerns of the country. These interrelated issues were both deeply aﬀected by historical circumstances. Reconstructing the history of this period has been complicated by the diversity and fragmentary character of the sources dispersed over three continents. Maintaining objectivity in writing about an age of nationalistic sensibility and struggle presents another challenge. To succeed in such an attempt, Marc Bloch, the eminent French historian, advises caution in looking for and judg-

Gorel Mikaeloﬀ-Bloom of the Service d’Information, Swedish embassy in Paris, kindly provided me with information on the visit of the crown prince of Sweden to Iran. I am grateful to Mrs. Monika Friberg, the royal court secretary of the Bernadotte Library in Stockholm, for her assistance in locating the picture album of that visit in the royal collections, of which I have published a photograph in this article with the courtesy of the Royal Collections of Sweden. In September 1998, thanks to Dr. Chahryar Adle of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientiﬁque and Mrs. Marthe Bernus of the Islamic department of the Louvre Museum in Paris, I was able to consult a portion of André Godard’s papers held in the Louvre. This research was complemented by work in the Archives Nationales in Paris. I also thank my friend Mohammad-Nader Nasiri Moghaddam, who provided some oﬃcial correspondence and documents kept in the archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Aﬀairs and kindly advised me on some details concerning the French Archaeological Delegation in Persia. I am particularly indebted to Ann Gunter and Colleen Hennessey for their support and kind assistance during my research on the Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, in January 2001. I am grateful to Professor David Stronach, department of Near Eastern studies, University of California at Berkeley, who read an early draft of this paper and made constructive suggestions. Finally, I am indebted to another friend, Mehran Nikbakht, who helped to translate some of Herzfeld’s notes and letters. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

herzfeld, politics, and antiquities legislation in iran 447 ing past deeds if our goal is to understand and explain: “When all is said and done, a single word, ‘understanding,’ is the beacon light of our studies, . . . a word pregnant with diﬃculties, but also with hope . . . we are too far to prone to judge. . . . We are never suﬃciently understanding.”2

Iranian Archaeology in the Early Years of the Twentieth Century Archaeology in Iran, much the same as in other countries, made its debut through a quest for antiquities and a curiosity about the past. Recorded explorations and excavations in Iran go back to the ﬁrst decade of the nineteenth century. From the middle of that century onward, archaeological activities were intensiﬁed and Naser-Eddin Shah (r. 1848–1896), the Qajar king, was, in fact, a patron of explorations and of the documentation of ancient monuments.3 However, the French, who began to excavate extensively at the site of Susa, in southwestern Iran, realized the ﬁrst systematic and ambitious project in Iranian archaeology within the last late years of the nineteenth century.4 In 1895, with the intensive support of French diplomacy, the Qajar government granted a new permit that enabled France to resume and expand its excavations in Iran, particularly at Susa. Five years later, with the newly created Délégation en Perse, the French obtained a total concession covering all archaeological excavations in Iran for an indeﬁnite period.5 These treaties, better 2

Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (New York: Knopf, 1953),

143. 3 Chahryar Adle, “Khorheh, the Dawn of Iranian Scientiﬁc Archaeological Excavation,” Tavoos Quarterly 3–4 (2000): 4–31 (226–39, in Persian), gives an interesting account of the excavations carried out at Khorheh under the patronage of the Qajar king. 4 The site of Susa was ﬁrst explored by William Kennet Loftus, a Scotsman, from 1849 to 1850. Believing the mounds at Susa to be exhausted, the British abandoned the excavations. John Curtis, “William Kennett Loftus and His Excavations at Susa,” IrAnt 28 (1993): 15. Susa had to wait until 1884, when Marcel Dieulafoy and his wife, Jane, began to dig up the “mine d’or” and its treasures. 5 In 1894, René de Balloy, minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinary of France in Tehran, obtained approval of a treaty that granted France the exclusive right to excavate in Persia. Chevalier, “A Suse,” 78; Mohammad-Nader Nasiri Moghaddam, “Les missions archéologiques françaises et la question des antiquités en Perse (1884–1914)” (Ph.D. diss., Sorbonne nouvelle [Université Paris III], 2002), chaps. 3–5. The treaty was concluded on 12 May 1895, and renewed in 1900. The latter assured the perpetuity of right to conduct archaeological explorations in the

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known as the monopoly on archaeological excavations, gave total freedom to the delegation to carry out explorations throughout Persia; nevertheless, the site of Susa gradually became the exclusive center of French archaeological interest in the country. The excavations at Susa were funded by the French Ministry of Public Instruction with an exceptional budget approved speciﬁcally for the delegation. The work was also heavily supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Aﬀairs through its embassy in Tehran. Thus, the activity of the delegation in Persia was not only a matter of culture, science, and the acquisition of art objects, but also a matter of national pride coupled with an interest in political expansion and inﬂuence. During the early years of the French monopoly, the delegation carried out explorations outside the plain of Khuzistan, expanding its work to the north and south of the country. Nevertheless, there was an inevitable Susa-centrism in the delegation’s work, which increased with the departure of Jacques de Morgan, the founder of the delegation, and deepened after the First World War, when the delegation suﬀered a substantial cut in its budget.6 The ﬁrst third of the twentieth century was a time of important sociopolitical changes in Iran, which considerably aﬀected the future of archaeology in the country. The ﬁrst signiﬁcant event was the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, which engendered and promoted new ideas, notably an awareness of Iran’s cultural heritage and economic resources, and stimulated nationalist sentiments concerning the country’s historical heritage.7 In 1910, San"i-ol Molk, the minister of culture, took the initiative in creating the ﬁrst antiquities ser-

country, and the right to retain all ﬁnds from Susa. Chevalier, “A Suse,” 77. The original text and a Persian translation of the treaties have been reproduced in D. Karimlou, Tàràj-e Mirath-e Melli (Tehran: Institute for Political and International Studies, Ministry of Foreign Aﬀairs, 1379/1999), 1:232–34, nos. 25–260. For a general history of the delegation in Iran, see Chevalier, “A Suse”; for methodological aspects of the excavations and their archaeological results respectively, see Ali Mousavi, “Early Archaeological Adventures and Methodological Problems in Iranian Archaeology: Evidence from Susa,” IrAnt 31 (1996): 1–17; Amiet, “Bilan archéologique.” For a thorough study of the early history of French archaeological activities in Iran, see Nasiri-Moghaddam, “Les missions archéologiques françaises.” 6 De Morgan’s ﬁnancial misconduct, the subsequent scandal, and his resignation in 1912 were further serious blows to the situation of the delegation; see Roland de Mecquenem, “Les fouilleurs de Suse (édité par P. Amiet),” IrAnt 15 (1980): 20–22. 7 See Kamyar Abdi, “Nationalism, Politics, and the Development of Archaeology in Iran,” AJA 105 (2001): 51–76.

herzfeld, politics, and antiquities legislation in iran 449 vice, the direction of which was entrusted to Iraj Mirza Jalal-ol Molk, the famous poet and cultural personality.8 In 1916, Momtaz-ol Molk, the minister of public instruction, opened the ﬁrst antiquities museum in Tehran with 270 objects. Both of these institutions continued to function until the early 1930s. The most important factor shaping the future of archaeology in Iran was undoubtedly the declining situation of the Qajar government. It was directly succeeded in 1925 by a new ruling dynasty, the Pahlavi dynasty, which could not necessarily be expected to respect all the concessions given by the Qajars. One of these concessions was, of course, the French monopoly on archaeological excavations in Iran. By the beginning of the 1920s, therefore, the French Archaeological Delegation conﬁned to the excavations at Susa found itself in an embarrassing situation. The delegation was criticized both by the French government, which reproached it for its limited area of activity that left other parts of the country open to intervention by other European rivals, and by the Iranian parliament, now in a nationalist mood, which demanded an end to the “plundering of Iranian national treasures.”9 In 1923, when Reza Khan began taking over the control of the country, a group of Iranian elite and intellectuals founded the Society for National Heritage in Tehran (Anjoman-e thàr-e Melli), in order to “promote public interest in ancient knowledge and crafts, and to preserve antiquities and handicrafts.” One of the primary goals of the society was to “build a museum and library, and to employ knowledgeable specialists for their maintenance, and the proper recording of all the remains, the protection of which as national heritage

8

According to some published oﬃcial documents, the creation of an antiquities service apparently preceded the opening of the museum by Momtaz-ol-Molk. K. Afsar and Seyed A. Mousavi, Pàsdàri az Athàr-e Bàstàn dar Asr-e Pahlavi (Tehran: Ministry of Culture and Art, 1355/1976), 40–45; Mehdi Hodjat, “Cultural Heritage in Iran: Policies for an Islamic Country” (Ph.D. diss., University of York, 1995), 164–65. 9 Raymond Lecomte, plenipotentiary minister of France in Iran, had already blamed the mission of Susa for the gradual loss of the French inﬂuence in Persia, and proposed a reorganization of excavations in the country. Raymond Lecomte to Raymond Poincaré (then président du conseil in the Ministry of Foreign Aﬀairs), F/17/17247, 29 November 1912, Archives Nationales. In another document, the French ambassador in Iran complained about the heightening critiques by the Persian parliament and newspapers. Bonzon to A. Briand, 18 September 1925, F/17/17245, Archives Nationales.

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would be necessary.”10 The society organized conferences and invited scholars, most notably among them Herzfeld, to give lectures on the prehistory and history of Iran. One of Herzfeld’s ﬁrst tasks was to present a comprehensive list of eighty-eight monuments and sites, which were designated as historical monuments.11 Amongst his various lectures for the society, one should mention the National Heritage of Iran ( thàr-e Melliy-e Iran), which was given on 13 August 1925 in the Mass’udiyeh Palace, the central building of the Ministry of Public Instruction.12 In this presentation, delivered in French, Herzfeld outlined the importance of preserving historical monuments and its signiﬁcance for the identity of a nation, and he concluded: To prevent the vandalizing of historical remains, the government should establish appropriate regulations, and forbid the destruction of historical monuments in the provinces. Moreover, through the press, one should get the people interested in their national heritage and its preservation, and for this it is necessary to make plans and photographs of ancient monuments, and to keep the records in a suitable place. Equally, one should immediately attempt to take necessary measures for preserving the monuments that are in danger. Those who consider preserving national remains should also take into account the question of excavation and discovery of antiquities because important historical documents and ﬁne treasures of antiquities are buried beneath the Iranian soil. Arrangements for excavation should therefore complement

10 See Anjoman-e thàr-e Melli 1351/1973, Declaration, 3–4. The creation of the society was a result of Reza Shah’s social and economic reforms. The society’s founding members were all prominent elite and patriots, and some held key political positions in the nascent Pahlavi government: Abdol-Hosseyn Teymourtash (court minister), Mohammad-Ali Foroughi (minister of foreign aﬀairs), Prince Firouz Mirza (minister of ﬁnance), Moshirodwleh Pirniya (former prime minister at the time of the Constitutional Revolution). For a complete list of the members of the society, see Mostafavi, “Talash dar ràh-e khedmat be àthàr-e melli va omid beh àyandeh,” 392. Incidentally, it was Herzfeld who created the society’s logotype (see Kröger, this volume). Herzfeld remained one of the society’s favorite lecturers throughout the ﬁrst ten years of its existence. 11 Ernst Herzfeld, “Fehrest-e mokhtasari az àthàr va abniyey-e tarikhiy-e Iran,” in Majmu"eh Entehshàràt-e Qadim-e Anjoman-e Athàr-e Melli (Tehran: Anjoman-e Athàre Melli, 1351/1973), 284. André Godard and M. T. Mostafavi took over the task after 1930; the List of Historical Monuments has since been regularly updated. See the letter from Arthur Upham Pope to Gertrude Bell, 11 February 1926, quoted in Jay Gluck and Noël Siver, eds., Surveyors of Persian Art: A Documentary Biography of Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman (Ashiga, Japan, and Costa Mesa, Calif.: SoPA, 1996; distributed by Mazda Publishers), 112. 12 Recently renovated, the palace now serves as a center for the restoration of historical monuments.

herzfeld, politics, and antiquities legislation in iran 451 the preservation of national heritage, and the ensuing results should be exhibited in a national museum to encourage public interests so that Iranians can take advantage of them in their present technological improvement in order to revive and appreciate their civilization.13

Another important personality on the Persian scene at this time was the American scholar Arthur Upham Pope (1881–1969), another anti-monopoly Westerner present in Iran at the time.14 Pope ﬁrst came to Iran in 1925, and in the following year organized an exhibition of Iranian art in Philadelphia. In 1928, he founded the American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology in New York. He gradually gained a network of inﬂuential friends both in Iran and in the West.15 Although relations between Herzfeld and Pope were tense, both men opposed the French monopoly.16 There are regular records both in Persian newspapers and in French oﬃcial documents comparing the work of the society and that of Herzfeld with the work of the delegation in Persia, as the French ambassador in Tehran reported to his minister: L’Institut a manifesté jusqu’à présent son existence en priant le Professeur Hertzfeld [sic] de faire sous son patronage des conférences qui eurent un grand succès et en entreprenant la restauration de quelques monuments. A l’occasion de ces travaux le Journal “Ghanoun” invitait ces jours ci l’Institut à sauvegarder les richesses nationales de la Perse qui s’évadent à l’étranger, rappelant à ce propos tout le préjudice que causait à la Perse notre monopole, préjudice dû au double fait que le produit des fouilles est envoyé en France et que, par suite de la carence de nos missions, une grande partie du pays demeure inexplorée.

Herzfeld, “Fehrest-e mokhtasari az àthàr va abniyey-e tarikhiy-e Iran,” 43–44. Gluck and Siver, Surveyors of Persian Art, 215, refers to a conversation with Pope in which the latter claimed that in 1930 “France reportedly began negotiations for a secret treaty which would have exempted them from the law and granted them in eﬀect a state concession on archaeology, similar to what the British held for petroleum and the Russians for caviar.” There is, however, no evidence for such a “secret treaty” either in Persian or French oﬃcial documents. 15 In a harsh but revealing article, Oscar W. Muscarella attempts to demonstrate that Pope’s career was a double-faced one of antiquities dealer and eminent scholar: “The Pope and the Bitter Fanatic,” in The Iranian World: Essays on Iranian Art and Archaeology Presented to Ezat O. Negahban, ed. Abbas Alizadeh, Yusuf Majikzadeh, and Sadiq Malik Shahmirzadi (Tehran: Markaz-i Nashr-i Danishgahi, 1999), 5–12. Be that as it may, over a period of more than forty years, Pope sought energetically to introduce the arts of Iran throughout the world. 16 Considerable animosity between Herzfeld and Pope existed even before the Persepolis excavation permit was awarded to the Oriental Institute. Gluck and Siver, Surveyors of Persian Art, 216. 13 14

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ali mousavi Les griefs du “Ghanoun” sont ainsi que j’ai eu déjà l’occasion de vous l’exposer ceux de tous les Persans cultivés. Fort habilement l’archéologue Hertzfeld les entretient et il n’a pas besoin de se montrer très violent à notre égard pour imposer aux Persans la comparaison entre ce qu"il a fait pour découvrir les richesse du sol persan, limité pourtant dans se moyens par notre Monopole, et ce que pu faire ces dernières années notre mission. Les Persans n’aiment pas tenir compte de ce qui les gêne. A l’instigation de l’Institut des Oeuvres nationales et certainement sur les conseils d’Hertzfeld, le Gouvernement vient d’édicter un règlement concernant la recherche, l’attribution et la protection des antiquités, règlement dans lequel il n’est pas une fois question de notre monopole, et que par la matière même qu"il traite, a été rédigé comme si ce monopole n’existait plus . . .17

The End of the French Monopoly The last years of the French concession concerning archaeological excavations in Iran coincided with a period of intensifying FrancoGerman rivalry. An interest in archaeological matters, along with interests in commercial and political spheres, was active in Germany as early as the end of the nineteenth century. The Germans were interested in Marcel Dieulafoy’s excavations at Susa and then in the treaty of 1895.18 Later in a meeting with the French minister in Tehran, the German ambassador mentioned that also “in England, as in Germany, there was the same feeling about the shortcomings in the work of the French scientiﬁc mission.”19 By the time of the Constitutional Revolution, the increasing inﬂuence of Germany in Persia worried Jacques de Morgan, who wrote to the minister of public instruction and urged action: La diplomatie allemande travailla à Téhéran, et bientôt les critiques vinrent des Persans eux-même. Le Medjlis (Parlement) poussé par l’Allemagne voulut assimiler nos droits à ceux d’une concession de

17

Bonzom to A. Briand, minister of foreign aﬀairs in Paris, Tehran, 18 September 1925, F/17/17245, Archives Nationales. 18 25 March 1891, and 9 January 1896, Archives du Ministère français des Aﬀaires Etrangères. 19 Dispatch of the French minister in Persia to his ministry in Paris, 20 November 1907, Archives du Ministère français des Aﬀaires Etrangères.

herzfeld, politics, and antiquities legislation in iran 453 mine ordinaire tombant en désuétude par suite de la non exploitation dans un temps non précisé. J’ai comme de juste réagi contre cette tendance mais, en considération de l’état troublé dans lequel est actuellement la Perse, nous devons nous attendre à voir partiellement du moins, nier droits si nous n’agissons pas de suite pour les aﬃrmer en exploitant des sites dans toutes les parties de l’empire. Grâce aux troubles actuels nous ne rencontrerons aucune opposition et l’ordre, lorsqu’il sera rétabli, se trouvera en face d’un fait acquis, et non d’un droit sur le papier.20

The German interest was regularly maintained both during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.21 It is not surprising, therefore, that the French considered Herzfeld to be an instrument of German inﬂuence in Persia not least because of his habitual presence in the country beginning in 1923. With regard to this, Roland de Mecquenem, then director of the French mission, wrote in 1925: La vérité est que M. Parny, conseiller francais au Ministère de la Justice, et plusieurs de ses collègues, professeurs à l’Ecole de Droit, étaient contre le Monopole Français, d’autant que Herzfeld était venu en Perse et voulait se faire nommer conseiller pour les Antiquités de la Perse. Il s’agissait de lutter contre son inﬂuence et peut-être M. Bonzom [the French ambassador in Tehran] voulat-il me faire nommer à sa place. Il eut du mal à comprendre que je n’étais pas chargé d’autre chose que des fouilles de Suse pour lesquelles je n’avais qu’un faible crédit et que c’était à lui de défendre notre Monopole avec l’appui des Aﬀaires Etrangères. Une conférence eut lieu présidée par le Ministre des Finances qui en quelques mots très mesurés, rendit hommage aux travaux français mais dut reconnaître que tous les objets de Suse étant gardés par la France qui ne travillait pas ailleurs, la Perse

20

De Morgan to minister of public instruction, 16 September 1908, F/17/17245, Archives Nationales, quoted in Nasiri-Moghaddam, “Les missions archéologiques françaises,” 281. 21 For a general overview of the German involvement in Iran, see Wipert von Blücher, Zeitenwende in Iran: Erlebnisse und Beobachtungen (Biberach an der Riss: Koehler & Voigtländer, 1949), a fascinating account of his years in the country; and a recent overview by Oliver Bast, “Germany, i: German-Persian Diplomatic Relations,” in EncIr, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2001), 10:506–19. For Iranian policy vis-à-vis Germany in the 1930s, see Rouhollah K. Ramazani, The Foreign Policy of Iran: A Developing Nation in World Aﬀairs, 1500–1941 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1966), chap. 12. A detailed study of the German presence in Iran under the Third Reich is also of great value in this regard. Miron Rezun, The Soviet Union and Iran: Soviet Policy in Iran from the Beginnings of the Pahlavi Dynasty until the Soviet Invasion in 1941, Collection de relations internationales 8 (Alphen aan den Rijn and Geneva: Sijthoﬀ and Noordhoﬀ International; Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales), 330–56.

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ali mousavi était en droit de se plaindre et de demander une modiﬁcation du Monopole. . . .22

Thus, two factors challenged the continuation of the French monopoly at this time: all ﬁnds were sent to France and a large part of the country remained unexplored. In the fall of 1923, Reza Khan decided to inspect the south of the country. It was on this trip that he visited, for the ﬁrst time, the site of Susa. The sight of an enormous European castle with a French ﬂag at its top so enraged him that he said: “Did they intend to position an army there up on the hill?”23 He then asked to see the director of the mission, de Mecquenem, who was absent at that moment.24 A year later, Reza Khan received a telegram from one of his generals on mission in Khuzistan, who complained about the work of the delegation and the removal of the antiquities of Susa.25 The French ambassador in Tehran thought of the return of a Qajar to the throne and was not willing to cope with general dissatisfaction over the work of the French mission at Susa.26 In October 1925, the Majles formally deposed the last king of the Qajar dynasty, and a few weeks later, Reza Khan was proclaimed the new king of Persia. The die was cast. By the end of 1926, Herzfeld was acting as the archaeological adviser of the Iranian government. In July 1927, the government oﬃcially employed him to work as “a specialist in oriental studies” for three years with an annual income of 72,000 rials (then approximately £1500).27 He rented and furnished a large house in Tehran, where he installed his large library and all of his study material (ﬁg. 1). Some of his letters indicate that he hoped to establish a German

22

De Mecquenem, “Les fouilleurs de Suse,” 34. Mostafavi, “Talash dar ràh-e khedmat be àthàr-e melli va omid beh àyandeh,” 35. On his return to Tehran, De Mecquenem had to pay an emergency visit to the court. De Mecquenem, “Les fouilleurs de Suse,” 34. 24 Reza Shah’s last visit with his crown prince to the ruins at Susa was also noted in de Mecquenem’s journal: “N’ayant pas du haut de forme, je ne pus être présenté. Sa Majesté visita l’Apadana, se moqua de Moghadam [the inspector of the government] qui ne conservait plus que le sol des chambres du palais alors que les murs décorés étaient au musée du Louvre.” De Mecquenem, “Les fouilleurs de Suse,” 46. 25 Mostafavi, “Talash dar ràh-e khedmat be àthàr-e melli va omid beh àyandeh,” 245. 26 De Mecquenem, “Les fouilleurs de Suse,” 34. 27 Imperial Bank of Persia to Herzfeld, 26 February 1929, Bàyeganiy-e Ràked. 23

herzfeld, politics, and antiquities legislation in iran 455 archaeological institute there, an idea that was to be abandoned soon due to the world’s economic and political situation.28 As the archaeological adviser of the government, Herzfeld requested strict control of antiquities to be sent abroad, that is, the antiquities discovered by the French mission (since nobody else was able to dig in Iran at that time). He also announced that he intended to send inspectors to excavations.29 As director of the French mission at Susa, de Mecquenem complained about the possible presence of an Iranian inspector: “La présence d’un commissaire persan aux fouilles serait injurieuse pour nous qui avons travaillé 24 ans sans contrôle.”30 These were measures that the French obviously disliked. How did the French respond to the situation? Oﬃcial records imply that they were prepared to make some sort of compromise that would preserve/salvage part of their privilege. Besides, the political climate of Iran would no longer favor such an outright concession. The government of Iran was then under the control of AbdolHosseyn Teymourtash (1879–1933), court minister of Reza Shah and a very inﬂuential man.31 Teymourtash knew of French concern over the worsening situation, which he tried to exploit. In a series of meetings with the French ambassador, Teymourtash discussed the danger of an unconditional rejection of the monopoly by the Iranian parliament. In fact, he persuaded the French government to withdraw its concession as soon as possible if it wished to preserve certain privileges in the future archaeological structure of the country, especially since Herzfeld had inﬂuential friends in the Persian cabinet. About this Herzfeld himself wrote in 1929: “My presence here

28 Joseph Upton, Catalogue of the Herzfeld Archive, 1974, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 20. 29 Herzfeld, 19 December 1926, Bàyeganiy-e Ràked. 30 De Mecquenem, 3 June 1927, F/17/17245, Archives Nationales. 31 During the early years of Reza Shah’s reign, Teymourtash was the government’s policy maker. Teymourtash was sent as a child to czarist Russia for his education, and he also spoke ﬂuent French. After having held important political positions he was appointed minister of the Pahlavi court in 1925 and became virtually the king’s alter ego. As a patriot, Teymourtash tried to abolish foreign concessions. His popularity, inﬂuence, and competence in political aﬀairs of the country began to frighten Reza Shah. Consequently, Teymourtash fell into disfavor and was removed from his position in December 1932. He was then accused and convicted of corruption and ﬁnally was killed in prison upon the order of the shah in September 1933. There are several recent studies on diﬀerent aspects of his life and career, but for this article I consulted Cyrus Ghani, Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah: From Qajar Collapse to Pahlavi Rule (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 251.

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was a very strong weapon in his [Teymourtash’s] hand to get rid of the French monopoly which he compared to the Russian monopoly on sailing, or the English monopoly on banking and petroleum, as he judged from a political point of view: ‘Many knots to strangle Persia, the knots of which we have to free ourselves.’ ” 32 Teymourtash frankly proposed the removal of the monopoly for the creation of an archaeological service, the direction of which would be given to a Frenchman. Gaston Maugras, the French ambassador in Tehran, wrote about the situation as follows: Voyant approcher le moment où malgré mes eﬀorts le contrat engageant le professeur Hertzfeld [sic] comme Directeur des Antiquités, du Musée et de la Bibliothèque allait être déposé au Parlement, j’ai cru devoir tenter une suprême démarche auprès du Ministre de la Cour M. Teymourtache . . . Je lui ai exposé qu’en conﬁant la Direction des Antiquités en Perse à un Allemand, le Gouvernement persan allait rendre impossible la révision de la Convention des Fouilles . . . Il m’a dit: “Hertzfeld a des protecteurs puissants qui le soutiennent d’abord parce qu’ils ont de l’amitié et de l’estime pour lui, ensuite parce qu’ils ne sont pas fâchés de battre en brèche indirectement les privilèges français. Le ﬁrman qui vous concède ces privilèges leur paraît sans valeur, parce qu’il a été arraché par la surprise à l’ignorance d’un Souverain qui, au surplus, n’avait pas le droit de traﬁquer ainsi de l’héritage des souvenirs nationaux. Néanmoins, je reconnais qu’il y aurait tout intérêt à ce que cette question archéologique put se régler à l’aimiable entre la Perse et la France. Vous allez à Paris. Voyez si le Gouvernement français serait disposé, en principe, à renoncer à son monopole moyennant la création d’un service archéologique dont la direction serait conﬁée, dans des conditions à déterminer ultérieurement à un de vos compatriotes. J’ai intéressé le Shah à cette aﬀaire. Envoyez-moi, le plus vite possible, votre réponse; je vous promets que tant que je ne l’aurai pas reçue, le contrat de Hertzfeld ne sera pas déposé au Parlement”. . . . Il m’a semblé qu’il nous fallait avant tout gagner du temps. J’ai accepté les propositions de M. Teymourtache. Sans doute il est déplaisant de devoir aborder la négociation en hâte, presque en demandeur et sous la menace d’une espèce de chantage, mais je crois que nous devons prendre parti de ces désavantages de notre position en nous disant qu’à retarder plus encore l’heure du marchandage, nous ne ferons que les aggraver. D’abord Hertzfeld est un habile homme et une fois installé dans la place, il ne s’en laissera

32 Herzfeld to Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, president of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, 1 November 1929, no. 104, 3 (Ernst Herzfeld Papers). I am particularly indebted to M. Nikbakht for translating diﬃcult passages of the draft for me.

herzfeld, politics, and antiquities legislation in iran 457 pas facilement évincer. Ensuite il me paraît inévitable que l’hostilité soulevée en Perse par notre monopole des fouilles croisse dans la proportion même où s’y développeront le nationalisme et l’instruction. . . .33

This was written in December 1926. The agreement abolishing the French monopoly on archaeological excavations (le droit exclusif ) was signed on 18 October 1927.34 A year later, André Godard arrived in Tehran as director of the newly created Iranian General Oﬃce of Archaeology, a position he held for some thirty years.

Herzfeld and Persepolis The considerable collection of documents belonging to Herzfeld that is housed in Washington, D.C., contains almost nothing about Susa, leaving the impression that this ancient Elamite site was a kind of forbidden territory for him. Instead, the fate of Iranian archaeology and Herzfeld were so strongly connected with Persepolis that it seems necessary to examine the circumstances by which Herzfeld obtained the concession to excavate at the site. The site of Persepolis or, to use the local designation, Takht-i Jamshid, represented (and still represents) for Iran the symbol par excellence of national heritage, a hallmark of past glory, which had to be treated properly. The distressed condition of the ruins was an important issue for the Iranian intelligentsia. Preceding Herzfeld’s presentation in the Society for National Heritage on 18 May 1927, Mohammad-Ali Foroughi, then minister of foreign aﬀairs and one of the society’s founding members, gave a short lecture at the end of which he talked about Persepolis: “I do not need to speak in detail of Takht-i Jamshid and its pitiful condition, you gentlemen have all heard about or seen it. . . . For its protection from robbery, it is necessary to put a metallic or wooden enclosure with a gate, and to employ guards to control entrance to the site, and to build a residence for them nearby, etc. . . . But all these require huge expenses, and I do not know when the time might come. It is warm here, and I must not hold you

33 Gaston Maugras to his minister in Paris, 24 December 1926, F/17/17247), Archives Nationales. 34 Protocol de Signature, 18 October 1927, concluded at 12:30 in the Palace of the Ministry of Foreign Aﬀairs, Tehran, Bàyeganiy-e Ràked.

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gentlemen any longer with my words. I had better end my talk, and give the turn to Professor Herzfeld.”35 Taking advantage of this introduction, Herzfeld skillfully emphasized the importance of preserving historical monuments and the role they played in shaping the identity of a nation.36 It seems that the whole quarrel between Herzfeld and the French monopoly was centered on the site of Persepolis and the possibility of its excavation, an idea he had entertained as early as the early 1920s. Moreover, it was with the prospect of digging at Persepolis in mind that Herzfeld had submitted the ﬁrst draft of an antiquities law to the Iranian government. Persepolis oﬀered a very promising ground for fund-raising and was, in fact, an outstanding rival to Susa. In the fall of 1922, Reza Khan, now acting as minister of war, visited Persepolis on his way to the port of Bushire and complained about the poor condition of the ruins.37 Though Herzfeld himself does not explain how he was solicited to work at Persepolis, it seems that, following Reza Shah’s visit, he was able to carry out the ﬁrst thorough exploration of the site, apparently at the request of the government and with the support of Prince Firouz Mirza.38 It can also be assumed that he was the only archaeologist at the time who was capable of taking on such a task. While working at Persepolis, Herzfeld received a number of visits from the prince, who was then governor of Fars. During one of those visits, Herzfeld spoke to the

35 M. A. Foroughi, “Moshàhedàt va taﬀakoràt darbarey-e athàr-e melli dar zemne safar-e. Esfahan va Fars,” in Herzfeld, Majmu"eh Entehshàràt-e Qadim-e Anjoman-e Athàr-e Melli, 66–67. 36 Ernst Herzfeld, “Athàr-e melliy-e Iran,” in Majmu"eh Entehshàràt-e Qadim-e Anjomane Athàr-e Melli, 33–44. 37 According to Mostafavi, “Amànatdàriy-e khàk,” 3, Reza Khan made the trip to welcome Ahmad Shah on his arrival from Europe. 38 Herzfeld, “Rapport sur Persépolis.” Prince Firouz Mirza or Nosrat-ed-Dowleh Firouz, was the eldest son of Prince Abdol-Hossein Farmanfarma. He studied in Tehran, then in Beirut and Paris. He was named minister of foreign aﬀairs under Ahmad Shah Qajar, then became involved in the ill-fated Anglo-Persian agreement of 1919. He was in turn the instigator of the dissolution of the Qajar dynasty, candidate for accession to the Qajar throne after Ahmad Shah’s trip to Europe, a supporter of Reza Khan for his accession to the throne, and later minister of ﬁnance under Reza Shah. Accused of corruption and treason, he was arrested in June 1929 and was sent to a prison in Semnân, where he was later executed as a dangerous rival in January 1938. Mahdi Bamdad, Sharh-e hàl-e rejàl-e Iran (Tehran, 1347/1968), 239–43; Ghani, Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah, 32.

herzfeld, politics, and antiquities legislation in iran 459 prince about the possibility of conducting excavations.39 Apparently interested, the prince revealed that negotiations to abolish the French monopoly were in progress in Paris; then came the question of funding: “He asked how much it would cost. I said: 15 to 20,000 pounds, and I told him that I might get the Parsis of India interested in that.”40 Later, through Firouz Mirza, Herzfeld presented on behalf of the Iranian government a proposal concerning possible excavations at Persepolis, without any claim on the ﬁnds. In order to satisfy any potential donor, Herzfeld proposed that permission should be granted to excavate at Istakhr, the ﬁnds from which would be divided between the donor and the government. But after a while Firouz Mirza was arrested following a “plot of high oﬃcials against him during the insurrections in Fars and Isfahan,” and Herzfeld lost one of his powerful protectors.41 Shortly after the French monopoly was abolished, in April 1928, Herzfeld made plans to excavate at Pasargadae under the auspices of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft.42 With his limited funds, Herzfeld set out for Fars with Friedrich Krefter, a talented young architect from Berlin, and a cook. The work lasted twenty-eight days, after which they went to Persepolis, where Krefter was in charge of verifying Herzfeld’s previous plan of the site. The expedition to Pasargadae was the only archaeological exploration that was carried out before the passage of the new law. In the absence of any concrete regulation, the excavations at Persepolis could not be carried out. Herzfeld’s ﬁrst task was to convince the Iranian government to accept and approve a law regulating excavation procedure in general, and then to apply such a law to the site of Persepolis. After submitting his proposal to the government in 1928, Herzfeld gave a detailed account of the matter: A response ﬁnally arrived on August 25 from Teymourtash, the Court Minister, who was “always open and frank to me.” He said: “justiﬁed or unjustiﬁed, there is a national sensibility that needs to be taken into

39 Colleen Hennessey, “The Ernst Herzfeld Papers at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives,” BAI n.s. 6 (1992): 135, ﬁg. 2, is a rare photograph of one of those visits. 40 Ernst Herzfeld Papers, notebook N-84, series 2, 30. 41 Herzfeld to Schmidt-Ott, 1 November 1929, Ernst Herzfeld Papers, 1. 42 Friedrich Krefter, “Mit Ernst Herzfeld in Pasargadae und Persepolis 1928 und 1931–1934,” AMI N. F. 12 (1979): 15–16.

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ali mousavi account, and thus it must look as if the government would do the job.” He proposed to form a committee with several high-ranking Persian oﬃcials and European scholars as well. He would nominate the Persian members, and I would nominate the European ones. This I did on the following day, and because I suspected that he would not know about the details of my proposal, I repeated them to him. I delivered my letter personally, but the Court Minister never received it. I waited, and ﬁnally I asked Count von der Schulenburg to follow up the matter.43 The answer was that the committee was set up, but they were waiting for my nominations. Thereupon, I immediately went to see the Court Minister with the third repetition of my proposal. After having read my letter, he was rather upset, and told me that this was “inacceptable et indiscutable.” I was astonished, and it turned out that he had thought that the whole fund would be given without any condition—simply for the sake of preserving Persepolis. Connecting the excavation with the division of ﬁnds, he thought, was “a devaluation of a very idealistic enterprise to a deal in which both parties would be betrayed.” In a previous discussion, he had mentioned Persian sensibility and also the fact that I ought to be aware of that; so, in this new discussion, I reminded him of what he had said, and I told him it was the same for us, and he should know the economic situation of the world well enough not to believe that such a great amount of money could be spent without expecting any kind of compensation, and also the donor had personal interests, and that the division of ﬁnds would not be a business at all; the donor wished to receive material for scientiﬁc purposes. I reminded him of the fact that there could be no interest in Persian art if foreign museums did not possess Persian art objects, that knowledge in that ﬁeld might not be developed, and so on. He seemed to be slightly appeased but maintained his point of view that such an exchange was impossible. Thereupon, I said: “In this case I cannot see any possibility to raise the necessary 600,000 Marks. The attitude of the government giving the impression that there are more favorable conditions for archaeological research, the conditions based on which I had decided to stay in Tehran rather than in Berlin, are not being fulﬁlled, that it is only to give lectures; so I prefer to leave.” This made him more cooperative, and he said I should not think about leaving. . . . With the abolition of the monopoly, the

43 Count Friedrich Werner Graf von der Schulenburg (1875–1944) was ambassador of Germany in Persia from 1923 to 1931. Schulenburg had a friendly relationship with Herzfeld. With the rise of the Nazis, he was appointed to the ambassadorship in Moscow and was inﬂuential in concluding the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939. He later perished in the unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944; see Hans-Heinrich Herwarth von Bittenfeld with S. Frederick Starr, Against Two Evils (New York: Rawson Wade, 1981), 90–93. My thanks to Dr. Hans Ulrich Seidt, former head of the cultural aﬀairs department of the German embassy in Washington, D.C., for drawing my attention to Herwarth’s interesting book.

herzfeld, politics, and antiquities legislation in iran 461 idea was to begin archaeological research . . . he would, however, have preferred that all the antiquities remain unexcavated than to see them carried away by foreigners. Perhaps the Persians would be able to do the job by themselves in 100 years from now. All of a sudden, I thought of the idea he had mentioned a few days earlier. With much more eﬀort, I continued this line of conversation so that he said: “You are here to guide us in these matters.” I said: “Very diﬃcult when the other person does not want to be guided.” So, he said: “If you cannot get along with the Minister of Culture, or if you have any reason not to negotiate with him, I may avoid his intervention.” At the end, he requested that I submit immediately a draft of a law concerning excavations, which he wanted to present in the parliament for approval through the unfavorable Minister of Culture. Then I could do my excavations to the extent I wanted under regular conditions at the same time, but not to include the excavation at Persepolis. The next day, the Minister of Foreign Aﬀairs [M.-A. Foroughi] told me that the whole cabinet was enthusiasmé. Two days later, I gave the Court Minister the draft of a law, and after a few days, I talked to him once again—and he agreed. The law included the equal division of ﬁnds. This was about six days before the departure of the Court Minister [to Europe], and that long absence meant a complete stop to everything. I inquired in the Ministry of Culture, and nobody knew about my draft. Either the Court Minister, busy as he is, forgot to transmit the draft before his departure although he said that the Minister of Culture had already asked for it or the latter withheld it.44

From this time on, Herzfeld encountered the opposition of Yahya Qaraqozlu, the new minister of culture (1929 –33), who was a landowner in the region of Hamadan. The passage of an antiquities law would limit illegal excavations, especially those in the Hamadan region from which the minister (according to Herzfeld) probably proﬁted. The minister of culture made his own draft of the law, in which everything would belong to the landowner or the ﬁnder without any obligation to declare the ﬁnds. According to Herzfeld, such a law would allow landowners and dealers to excavate as much as they wanted, and one-third of the law dealt with the diﬀerent ways by which shops and auctions would sell the ﬁnds to a future museum, without any mention of where the funds thus collected would go! Herzfeld bluntly opposed such a law: It was so absurd that I told the Court Minister that such a law would demonstrate to the rest of the world that Persia was an uncivilized

44

Herzfeld to Schmidt-Ott, 1 November 1929, Ernst Herzfeld Papers, 3.

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country! The Court Minister then ordered the Minister of Culture to form a committee together with Mr. Godard, the Frenchman who represented the abolition of the monopoly, and me. I received an invitation for tea where, during the reception, the Minister of Culture began to talk about the matter with the intention of telling the Court Minister that everything was in perfect order. During the reception, it so happened that I declared without any hesitation, that the scholarly world, aware of my presence here, would make me responsible, and I would have to avoid the impression of having agreed to such a law. I said: ‘If the law were to be passed, I would keep open the option to make it public, and to criticize it.’ This I wrote to the Minister the next day as an aide de mémoire along with a copy to the Court Minister. Consequently, that draft of the law was discarded, but for the moment, nothing has replaced it.”45

The court minister nonetheless managed to exert pressure both on the minister of culture and the latter’s protectors in the cabinet in order to press for the approval of Herzfeld’s version of the law. At the same time, Teymourtash tried to maintain a balance between Herzfeld and Godard by asking the latter to revise the draft that Herzfeld had prepared. As a politician, he played one against the other and, if necessary, both against his Iranian rivals. The approval of the antiquities law was, however, to be postponed for another year. After the end of the French monopoly, other nationals became interested in working in Iran. In consequence, Herzfeld found himself in competition with other colleagues, amongst whom Pope was unquestionably the most redoubtable. Because of Pope’s presence and his inimical actions, Herzfeld tried to hasten the passage of the antiquities law, but he also had to attempt to ensure that the law would authorize him to dig at Persepolis. The cost of excavating at Persepolis was very high, and no European country seemed to be able to raise the necessary funds for such a task. Herzfeld, however, repeatedly tried to interest German institutions, especially the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, in the prospect. In this regard, he wrote to Schmidt-Ott: “In the past few weeks especially, I had pushed the case of Persepolis more energetically because Mr. Pope had begun to meddle in it. I have not yet ﬁgured him out. One thing is for sure that he is not a person of real inﬂuence, and that he is trying with great eﬀort to establish himself as a kind of schol-

45

Ibid., 4.

herzfeld, politics, and antiquities legislation in iran 463 arly broker between all American missions and Persia.”46 Apparently, Pope was trying to propagate news about the excavation at Persepolis with the intention of getting other countries interested in it, and consequently to take the issue out of Herzfeld’s control. The beginning of American participation in Iranian archaeology fell in a period of rivalry between the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. At this point, Herzfeld thought it was time to get in touch with the Americans. One could speculate that Herzfeld had a premonition that the United States was headed for an economic crisis. At all events, adroit as he was, he began by asking the University Museum if they could provide him with an address for James Henry Breasted, director of the Oriental Institute. In this way, he was making an initial approach to the University Museum. Breasted and Herzfeld did not know each other from the time Breasted had studied in Berlin in the 1890s. But they met in 1928 in Bonn and Oxford, when Herzfeld mentioned his wish to excavate at Persepolis. The University Museum cabled Herzfeld, oﬀering him the opportunity to direct the Philadelphia expedition at Persepolis for a minimum of four years with an annual budget of $20,000. Horace Jayne, director of the University Museum, also authorized Pope to “take any further steps to clinch arrangements.” In turn, Pope sent a telegram to Herzfeld encouraging him to “discuss personally in full detail” the proposal of the University Museum. Later, it turned out that Pope, who had a strained relationship with Herzfeld, was trying to challenge him. For this reason, David Williamson, the American chargé d’aﬀairs in Tehran, sent a cable to Jayne: “Due to personal diﬀerences Pope’s meddling jeopardizes Herzfeld’s participation. Please advise former that you and I are handling aﬀairs direct.”47 Jayne immediately asked Pope to suspend his interference. Herzfeld’s original intention to contact Breasted continued to worry the University Museum. Herzfeld himself described the situation as follows: Shortly after, I was told that Breasted intended to oﬀer me the same thing, but I am not yet in touch with him. I contacted the Pennsylvania Museum, and told them that I could not work at Persepolis without the Notgemeinschaft, and that the cost would not be $20,000 but 46

Ibid., 5. Jayne to Pope, 8 October 1929, cited in Gluck and Siver, Surveyors of Persian Art, 216–17. 47

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ali mousavi $50,000 annually (I overestimated it), and that ﬁrst of all the permission had to be obtained, which required patience. Meanwhile, I received new telegrams from Mr. Pope saying that I should not make any arrangement before his arrival. . . . This happened when the Court Minister expressed his doubts [with reference to digging at Persepolis]. The latest development is that because of the critical situation of railroads, Count von Schulenburg accompanied the Shah [to the north] who was to watch the construction, and also the Turkmen race. The Court Minister also followed the Shah; so did Count von Schulenburg in an attempt to bring the matter to a decision or, at least, to ﬁnd out about it. . . . I asked the vice-director in the Ministry of Culture, with whom I have been friends for longtime, and he said that ‘if the government had wanted, they could have given permission for both things even without passing a law: Persepolis and Istakhr, and the real reason was that they wanted to do it on their own.’ This means that they keep believing in the total impossibility that they would be able to raise the necessary funds by themselves, and put me in charge of the job. I replied frankly that I did not believe that I would live long enough to see such a thing, and that it was very questionable that I would accept their oﬀer after they had turned down my proposal. . . . The Americans deﬁnitely want to get objects as much as possible, and thereupon will not be very enthusiastic about the details of my proposal concerning Persepolis. On the other hand, the American chargé d’aﬀaires wanted to see how strong the reluctant attitude of the [Persian] government was. He wanted to know if the Persian government would accept the demand of American institutes for largescale excavation permission. If they agree, he would ﬁrst ask for Hamadan-Ekbatan. If that is denied again, they would only ask for Istakhr, leaving open any cooperation with the Notgemeinschaft. Concerning Persepolis, I believe it might be easier to cooperate with the Americans, and that, for instance, participation by Parsis in Bombay would be more appealing to the government [Persian], and also less ‘egoistic.’ It is not out of the question that Count Schulenburg will come back with the permit for Persepolis, but Hamadan is so threatened that excavation is very urgent there. . . . As before, my only request is that the Notgemeinschaft should not neglect the possibility of a largescale excavation at Persepolis which could be undertaken at any moment.48

In the end, Herzfeld ﬁnally had to give up once and for all the idea of German participation under the auspices of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft. He was apparently looking for the most credible of the American institutions, and his choice ultimately fell upon the Oriental Institute. With reference to this, Rexford Stead wrote: 48

Herzfeld to Schmidt-Ott, 1 November 1929, Ernst Herzfeld Papers, 5.

herzfeld, politics, and antiquities legislation in iran 465 When the Iranian Government was about to revise its antiquities laws that aﬀected foreign archaeological expeditions, the then director [Horace Jayne] of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania got in touch with Pope—who enjoyed special privileges in Persia thanks to the Shah—and expressed a strong desire that his institution, in tandem with the Pennsylvania Museum of Art and the American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology, be awarded excavation rights at Persepolis on promulgation of the new law. For some reason not yet apparent to me Jayne had some misgivings about Ernst Herzfeld but told Pope that it would be a good move to name Herzfeld as ﬁeld director, but this would be a “titular” aﬀair. Jayne was prepared to move good men from Egypt and Mesopotamia to Persepolis “to begin work immediately.” But the whole eﬀort backﬁred when Herzfeld took some action of which I am yet unaware and the prize of Persepolis went to the Oriental Institute of Chicago.49

Moreover, the government was reluctant to authorize a foreign institution to dig at such an important and symbolic site. It is not clear how the initial work of preservation and restoration was subsequently transformed into a real archaeological excavation.50 In 1933, Reza Shah paid a formal visit to Persepolis. Herzfeld and Godard were present to welcome the king, and Herzfeld led a comprehensive tour of the monuments and his recent discoveries (ﬁg. 2). At the same time, Breasted, on behalf of the Oriental Institute, sent a telegram to welcome the arrival of Reza Shah at Persepolis. The king stayed for lunch and was so pleased that at the end of his visit, he said to Herzfeld: “You are doing a work of civilization here, and I thank you.”51

The End of Herzfeld’s Career in Iran Herzfeld began to work at Persepolis in March 1931. His excavations and the fascinating discoveries revealed during his tenure will 49 Rexford Stead to John A. Larson (museum archivist), 18 August 1982, Oriental Institute, quoted in Gluck and Siver, Surveyors of Persian Art, 215–16. 50 Herzfeld never published in full the results of his excavations, which he considered to be his own intellectual property. Besides, it is possible that by keeping the material mostly unpublished he had the intention to preserve his “monopoly” on Persepolis; see Dusinberre’s contribution, this volume. 51 See Charles Breasted, “Exploring the Secrets of Persepolis,” National Geographic 64 (1933): 384. The newspaper Ettela’at also gave a detailed account of the visit; see Afsar and Mousavi, Pàsdàri az Athàr-e Bàstàn dar Asr-e Pahlavi, 90–93.

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be the subject of another study. What is relevant here is the issue of his resignation and withdrawal as director of the excavations at Persepolis. It is obvious that with the onset of political changes in Iran, the country became more structured and institutionalized. If the evocation of nationalism had helped Herzfeld in his ﬁght against the French concession, nationalism was also bound to impose limitations on the scale of foreign activity in Iran, including Herzfeld’s own work. A survey of oﬃcial documents of the time suﬃces to show the extent to which the new regime felt it necessary to exercise close control in every context. Travel was no longer easy, and Herzfeld was required to inform the Persian authorities about his trips; sometimes he had to delay a trip because he lacked authorization. Diplomatic support dwindled, and the government was no longer expected to respect every complaint made by a foreign legation. Count von der Schulenburg, who had supported Herzfeld’s actions in the late 1920s, left Iran in 1931. With the escalating power of the Nazis in 1932, and the fact that Herzfeld was of Jewish descent, no further German support for him was likely to be forthcoming.52 At this stage, maintaining the work at Persepolis was the Americans’ principal concern. In consequence, support for Herzfeld from the Oriental Institute had begun to fade. Charles Breasted, the son of James H. Breasted, who served as the institute’s secretary, inquired about Herzfeld’s status at the University of Berlin. In particular, he asked whether the German government would be willing to allow Herzfeld to serve as the Oriental Institute’s ﬁeld director. He then wrote to Herzfeld: “Within the past year, for reasons wholly beyond our control, your oﬃcial relation to our Iranian Expedition has fundamentally changed. . . . ”53 Even in Iran, Herzfeld gradually lost his protectors. Prince Firouz Mirza had been imprisoned; Teymourtash was removed from his position in 1933; Foroughi fell from favor

52 Herzfeld was ﬁnally relieved of his professorship at the University of Berlin in 1935. Robert Byron, who encountered Herzfeld’s prohibition against taking photographs at Persepolis, wrote one of the harshest comments: “This attitude of German authoritarianism seemed unbecoming in a man about to be turned out of his country by the Nazis.” Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana (London: Macmillan, 1937), 186. 53 See Jack M. Balcer, “Erich Friedrich Schmidt, 13 September 1897–3 October 1964,” in Through Travellers’ Eyes: European Travellers on the Iranian Monuments, ed. JanWillem Prijvers and Heleen Sancisi Weerdenberg, AchHist 7 (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1991), 165.

herzfeld, politics, and antiquities legislation in iran 467 and had to resign. There was still Ali Asqar Hekmat, an educated minister of culture, but his capacity for action was reduced by the king’s frequent interference in the day-to-day activities of the government. Moreover, Herzfeld suﬀered from health problems and was advised not to remain at high altitudes.54 Fortune did not seem to smile on the German archaeologist as before. In November 1934, the crown prince of Sweden, later King Gustaf VI Adolf (r. 1950–1973), visited Iran with his second wife, Louise Mountbatten, and his son, Prince Bertil (ﬁg. 3).55 This was the ﬁrst time that an oﬃcial personage from the West had visited Persia. The crown prince, himself an archaeologist, was interested in seeing ancient monuments, especially those at Pasargadae and Persepolis.56 The crown prince stayed the night of 19 November at Persepolis. He even climbed the rock face at Naqsh-i Rustam to see the tomb chamber of Darius the Great. The visit was an unforgettable one both for the crown prince and for Herzfeld. At the end, Herzfeld thought that the moment was a favorable one to make a gift to Gustaf Adolf. As a result, he presented him with a gray limestone head of a Persian facing left, which belonged to the right wing of the eastern stairway of the Apadana. According to Mostafavi, who witnessed the episode, Herzfeld oﬀered two sculptured fragments to the crown prince. Mostafavi described the incident as follows: “Professor Herzfeld was an outstanding scholar but unfortunately he expressed some unfriendly feelings toward Iran, and treated the Iranians with some indignity. . . . In November 1934, when the Crown Prince of Sweden, Gustaf VI, came to Persepolis during an unoﬃcial visit, the late Professor Herzfeld, without any permission from the Iranian authorities, oﬀered him a small sculptured fragment of a Persian Immortal belonging to the eastern stairway of the Apadana, along with another fragment from the eastern stairway of the Central Palace

54

Herzfeld to Schmidt-Ott, 1 November 1929, Ernst Herzfeld Papers, 7. See J. Lagerberg, ed., Kronprinsparets Orientresa: En Minnesbok I Bilder, September 1934–Januari 1935 (Stockholm: n.p., 1935), 5. 56 The crown prince was interested in Iran’s past and historical monuments, but felt obliged to visit also newly built factories and industries. In order to show that Persia was a modern country, Reza Shah forbade the circulation of caravans with camels and mules along the routes that would be taken by the crown prince. On the outskirts of Isfahan, however, the crown prince suddenly saw a herd of camels; he was so excited that he stopped and took photographs. Von Blücher, Zeitenwende in Iran, 320, also records this episode. 55

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showing a servant. On top of his previous problems with the authorities, this oﬀer caused him to resign, and he was replaced by Dr. Schmidt of the Oriental Institute.”57 Herzfeld oﬀered the second fragment to Princess Louise. Both fragments are now in the Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities (Medelhavsmuseet) in Stockholm, and one of them has been published.58 Did Herzfeld intend to draw Gustaf Adolf ’s attention to the excavations at Persepolis in a desperate attempt to ﬁnd another sponsor for his work? The crown prince was known to support archaeological expeditions in diﬀerent parts of the world, and it is not improbable that Herzfeld, now in a delicate situation, sought ﬁnancial resources other than those of the Oriental Institute for his excavations. Nonetheless, there is another untold reality behind such gift giving. There are countless sculptured fragments at Persepolis, the exact location of which is often uncertain, and which cannot be ﬁtted precisely to any structure at the site. The fragments oﬀered to the crown prince of Sweden were among those numerous unfortunate fragments now gathered in unseen and dusty stores of the museum at Persepolis. Was Herzfeld’s idea to send a “cultural messenger” in the form of a masterpiece of Persian art to the royal court of a Western country, rather than to see it fall into oblivion? Did Herzfeld oﬀer the objects in the presence of Iranian authorities on the erroneous assumption that they might share his idea, thinking that such a gesture would please the government? Did he know that his career in Iran had reached its end? There is no evidence to give us unambiguous answers to these questions. With regard to the end of Herzfeld’s career, other factors should also be considered. First, there was certainly a kind of competition between Godard and Herzfeld, which began with the creation of the

57 Mostafavi, “Talash dar ràh-e khedmat be àthàr-e melli va omid beh àyandeh,” 35 n. 1. It is also true that Herzfeld took objects from his excavations out of the country and subsequently sold them in the West, as documents in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers demonstrate; see also Upton, Catalogue of the Herzfeld Archive, 21. He was further charged with the removal of other antiquities from Iran, yet in a “Conﬁdential Memorandum Regarding the Persian Government’s Charges against Professor Herzfeld Re Export of His Personal Baggage from Persia in 1933 and 1934,” signed on 31 January 1935, Herzfeld denied taking objects. Balcer, “Erich Friedrich Schmidt,” 164. 58 See Karin Ådahl, “A Fragment from Persepolis,” MedMusB 13 (1978): 56–59. My thanks to Mrs. Karin Ådahl and Mrs. Karen Slej, Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities, who informed me that the two fragments are in Stockholm.

herzfeld, politics, and antiquities legislation in iran 469 Iranian General Oﬃce of Archaeology. During his stay in Afghanistan, Godard was known to be particularly anti-German.59 He was employed by the Iranian government to exercise a ﬁrm control over excavations in the country, and this had probably resulted in certain limitations to Herzfeld’s freedom of action. There is no clear proof of a pronounced animosity between the two scholars, but Herzfeld, who had long acted independently, suddenly found himself under the control of a professional rival. Moreover, Godard was not in Iran when Herzfeld’s resignation took place. The second issue is the complicated relationship between Herzfeld and Pope. Pope was a friend of Mrs. William H. (Ada) Moore, who partly ﬁnanced Herzfeld’s excavations at Persepolis through the Oriental Institute (ﬁg. 4). Pope tried to remove Herzfeld from Persepolis and replace him with Erich Schmidt.60 It is not improbable that the authorities asked Pope’s opinion on Herzfeld’s gift/attempted gift of antiquities. In December 1935, James H. Breasted, another protector of Herzfeld and the Persian expedition of the Oriental Institute, passed away; this was another blow to Herzfeld’s situation. The expedition was maintained, however, and Erich Schmidt brilliantly carried out and expanded the Oriental Institute’s archaeological activities in Iran. Herzfeld left Iran forever in 1934. The legacy of his various studies and their impact on Iranian archaeology is immense. He was an architect and draughtsman, a skilled archaeologist, an excellent epigraphist, and a devotee. Herzfeld promoted a ﬂood of new ideas about the archaeology and ancient history of Iran, which have always been stimulating in their originality. His colleague Upton remarked that Herzfeld “never visited any remains of the past in Iran without writing at least a few pages to record his impressions.”61 Another speciﬁc aspect of his personality is the fact that he was never really attached to his native land. In the course of long years spent in traveling and exploring ancient monuments in various countries, it seems that he deliberately abandoned his own country in order to see and

59 Françoise Olivier-Utard, Politique et archéologie: histoire de la délégation archéologique française en Afghanistan (1922–1982) (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1997), 82. 60 Rexford Stead to Robert Payne, 27 August 1982, in Gluck and Siver, Surveyors of Persian Art, 216. Pope could certainly have tried to alter Mrs. Moore’s attitude toward Herzfeld. Consequently, the German archaeologist may no longer have enjoyed his benefactress’s support after falling into disrepute. 61 Upton, Catalogue of the Herzfeld Archive, 33.

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discover other ones. Instead, fate seemed to call him to Iran, a country that was particularly in need of such a man, much as he needed the challenges that Iran oﬀered. He was strong enough to resist various animosities on the aim to press his work forward with conviction. Herzfeld became involved in a conﬂict of ideas at a time of sociopolitical changes in Iran, of which he ﬁnally became a victim. For a wandering man like Herzfeld dropped in the meander of a world loaded with conﬂicts, there was only a life of constant struggle. It is in this context that we should try to understand him.62

Epilogue The legislation and the institutionalization of Iranian archaeology were born from the circumstances described above. It may be beneﬁcial to outline here the eﬀect of those events on the subsequent development of Iranian archaeology. Despite the fact that the years following the end of World War II were marked by ﬁnancial diﬃculties, the Iranian General Oﬃce of Archaeology, under the direction of Godard, managed to take over the task of preserving and conducting archaeological activities. Godard was an architect and had worked in Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan with distinction before going to Iran. At the time when Herzfeld was trying to get the direction of the antiquities service in Iran, the French ambassador in Kabul proposed Gabriel Jouveau-Dubreuil, an archaeologist who had worked in India, as the “man who was able to counter Herzfeld in case the latter would present himself.”63 However, the choice of the French minister of public instruction fell ﬁnally upon Godard. With the fall of France in 1940, Godard patriotically joined General de Gaulle and became the délégué général de la France libre in Iran; with the help of his wife, Yedda, he published La Revue de France Libre.64 Later, his political activities as a resistant caused for him some disgrace in

62

Elizabeth S. Ettinghausen, who personally knew Herzfeld, observed during the closing session of the Herzfeld symposium in Washington, D.C.: “Judge him in the context of time and not as he would have been today. We should see him ﬁrst in the light, and then in the shadow” (5 May 2001). 63 Olivier-Utard, Politique et archéologie, 88. 64 H. Blémont, “Godard (André),” in Dictionnaire de biographie française (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1985).

herzfeld, politics, and antiquities legislation in iran 471 both Iran and France.65 His contribution to the organization of archaeological institutions in Iran is remarkable, however. Godard was also inﬂuential in setting up a teaching program in the faculty of ﬁne arts of the University of Tehran. His reputation was later diminished by the rumors about his involvement in antiquities dealing. He ﬁnally retired and left Iran forever in 1960. He died ﬁve years later in Paris.66 Three major accomplishments marked Godard’s contribution to Iranian archaeology: the construction of an archaeological museum in Tehran named the Iran Bastan Museum, the task of systematically recording and preserving the country’s ancient monuments, and the publication of Athar-e Iran, a journal devoted to Iranian art and archaeology. His tasks were subsequently taken over by Mostafavi, another important ﬁgure in the history of Iranian archaeology. In the 1950s, archaeological activities in Iran began to increase signiﬁcantly, ﬁnally reaching their peak in the mid-1970s with at least forty-ﬁve expeditions working in diﬀerent parts of the country. Education in archaeology was signiﬁcantly advanced in the 1960s by Professor Ezatollah Negahban, who founded the Archaeological Institute of the University of Tehran in 1959 and initiated a comprehensive program of teaching and training in archaeology at the University of Tehran.67 In 1972, the General Oﬃce of Archaeology was reorganized; it was renamed the Center for Iranian Archaeology and its celebrated director, Dr. Firouz Bagherzadeh, took the initiative to end the division of excavated objects.68 As luck would have it, the ﬁrst foreign mission that welcomed Bagherzadeh’s initiative was the Délégation in Iran under the direction of Jean Perrot. Bagherzadeh’s tenure and his sponsorship of annual conferences during the 1970s marked what might be called the golden age of Iranian archaeology, with new trends and strategies in archaeological research, the detailed story of which deserves to be written. 65

After the war, it was Roman Ghirshman who represented the true French presence in Iran, while Godard remained an employee of the Iranian government. 66 Unfortunately, despite the existence of a considerable quantity of papers and photographs that document his career, there has been little eﬀort to organize such materials and make them accessible. 67 For a full history of the department of archaeology in the University of Tehran, see Malek-Shahmirzadi, “Barresiy-e tahavvolàt-e motàleàt-e bàstànshenàsi dar Iran,” 426–35. 68 According to the Antiquities Law, the ﬁnds were to be divided between foreign missions and the government. Règlement d’Application de la Loi du 12 Aban Mah 1309/3 novembre 1930 relative à la conservation des antiquités de la Perse, article 31, chapter 3, Tehran.

Fig. 1. Ernst Herzfeld in his living room, Tehran, around 1929. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, photo ﬁle 10, no. 187.

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Fig. 2. Herzfeld, his team and guests at Persepolis at the time of the visit of Reza Shah, taken in the northern portico of the Harem of Xerxes, 18 October 1933. Left to right: Alexander Langsdorﬀ and his wife; Joseph Upton; Charlotte Bradford (Herzfeld’s sister) and her son, Charles; Ernst Herzfeld; Friedrich Krefter; Hans Kühler (technician of the expedition); Mohammad-Taqi Mostafavi; André Godard. Courtesy of the Iran Bastan Museum, Tehran.

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Fig. 3. Herzfeld and the crown prince of Sweden at Persepolis, taken in the northern portico of the Central Palace, 19 November 1934. Left to right: Mostafa-Qoli Kamal Hedayat, representative of the Persian government; Ernst Herzfeld; Gustaf VI Adolf; Princess Louise (Louise Mountbatten); Prince Bertil. Courtesy of the Bernadotte Library, The Royal Collections, Royal Court of Sweden.

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Fig. 4. Mrs. Ada Moore at Persepolis, October 1933. Courtesy of the Iran Bastan Museum, Tehran.

ERNST HERZFELD IN AN ACADEMIC CONTEXT: THE HISTORICAL SCIENCES OF CULTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN DURING THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC (1919–1933) Rüdiger vom Bruch

In 1987, Allan Bloom, professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, described the decline of American universities to the level of mere professional schools and lamented the absence of a solid general education. In a chapter titled “The German Connection,” Bloom named the culprits: scientists from the “dark Germany” of Friedrich Nietzsche. He especially blamed the German immigrants who, in his opinion, had only radically continued in the 1960s what they had learned since the 1930s from their professors back home. As a result, Bloom wrote, an American lifestyle had developed that was nothing more than “a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family.”1 The book headed the U.S. best-seller list for over thirty-one weeks. There is no need to go into any great detail concerning the criticism of this book with the somewhat overblown polemics resulting from it, both in the United States and in Germany. But why did Bloom single out German professors and their universities in the early twentieth century to hold responsible for a decline in general education and a drift toward professional training in his own age? On the contrary, science and university history paints the peaceful phases of imperial Germany as a golden age of the German university, its inﬂuence extending far into international reaches.2 Moreover,

1 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 14–156. For the most recent analyses of Bloom, see Till Kinzel, Platonische Kulturkritik in Amerika. Studien zu Allan Blooms The Closing of the American Mind (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2002), summarized in English and American Studies in German: Summaries of Theses and Monographs, ed. Horst Weinstock, Supplement to Anglia (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2002), 136–40. Unless otherwise speciﬁed, all translations from German to English are my own. 2 See Gert Schubring, ed., “Einsamkeit und Freiheit” neu besichtigt. Universitätsreformen und Disziplinenbildung in Preussen als Modell für Wissenschaftspolitik im Europa des 19.

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even critics of the German university culture of that era tend to concede that, as a rule, German scientists then combined excellent indepth research with a broad general education,3 as is mirrored in the published letters of several eminent professors.4 For many of the natural sciences and some historical and cultural sciences, this almost classical period of world renown extended even into the 1930s, especially at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität5 at Berlin and most notably in the department of Oriental studies.6 This world renown is generally regarded as the result of the research imperative that had reshaped the entire German academic landscape, a change that had its origin in Prussia and Berlin.7 Education was now inextricably combined with research, and the former separation between the tradition of established knowledge at the universities and the generation of new knowledge at scientiﬁc

Jahrhunderts, Boethius 24 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1991); Rüdiger vom Bruch, “The Academic Disciplines and Social Thought,” in Imperial Germany. A Historiographical Companion, ed. Roger Chickering (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996), 343–76; Rüdiger vom Bruch, “Wissenschaftspolitik, Wissenschaftssystem und Nationalstaat im Deutschen Kaiserreich,” in Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft und Bildung in Preußen. Zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte Preußens vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Karl Heinrich Kaufhold and Bernd Sösemann (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1998), 73–89; Hartmut Boockmann, Wissen und Widerstand. Geschichte der deutschen Universität (Berlin: Siedler, 1999); Rainer Christoph Schwinges, ed., Humboldt International. Der Export des deutschen Universitätsmodells im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe, 2001). 3 See Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890 –1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969); Jonathan Harwood, Styles of Scientiﬁc Thought. The German Genetics Community, 1900–1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 4 See, for example, Kurt Aland, ed., Glanz und Niedergang der deutschen Universität. 50 Jahre deutscher Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Briefen an und von Hans Lietzmann (1892–1942) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1979); Stefan Rebenich, Theodor Mommsen und Adolf Harnack: Wissenschaft und Politik im Berlin des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts. Mit einem Anhang: Edition und Kommentierung des Briefwechsels (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997). 5 Rüdiger vom Bruch, “Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin. Vom Modell ‘Humboldt’ zur ‘Humboldt-Universität’ 1810 bis 1949,” in Stätten des Geistes. Große Universitäten Europas von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Alexander Demandt (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999), 257–78. 6 Johannes Renger, “Die Geschichte der Altorientalistik und der vorderasiatischen Archäologie in Berlin von 1875 bis 1945,” in Berlin und die Antike: Architektur, Kunstgewerbe, Malerei, Skulptur, Theater und Wissenschaft vom 16. Jahrhundert bis heute, ed. Willmuth Arenhövel and Christa Schreiber (Berlin: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut: Auslieferung Wasmuth, 1979), 151–92. 7 See Roy Steven Turner, “The Growth of Professorial Research in Prussia, 1818–1848: Causes and Context,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3 (1971): 137–82; Roy Steven Turner, “Humboldt in North America? Reﬂections on the Research University and its Historians,” in Schwinges, Humboldt International, 289–312.

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societies and academies was abandoned. Thus, the process of acquiring knowledge was concentrated at the universities and strictly regimented into separate departments, although the academies persisted despite the loss of some of their importance for research. Yet, at the same time, a new kind of research institution outside the university was established, during the second half of the nineteenth century, especially in the context of public research institutes or researchintensive industries. The modern German research university can be traced back to Wilhelm von Humboldt and his founding of a university in Berlin in 1810 on the ideal of a science that was, if not useless, then at least not immediately connected to any external use, serving mainly to complete the individual process of self-education. One of Humboldt’s aims was the unity of all sciences, and like the philosopher Immanuel Kant he called upon scientists to make critique a part of their calling. This ideal, more than anything else, would unite professors and students. The aim was “Wissenschaft als etwas noch nicht ganz Gefundenes und nie ganz Aufzuﬁndendes zu betrachten und unablässig sie als solche zu suchen.”8 The state was to keep its hands oﬀ science, for only then would science be useful to the state in the long run.9 This whole shibboleth of independent science turns out to be the exact opposite of “professional schools,” as Bloom characterized German universities. We cannot discuss at this point how fully Humboldt’s program was actually implemented at German universities throughout the nineteenth century, nor whether the typical research university that could be found all over Germany by 1870 was really founded on his ideals.10 Quite probably, structural reasons played no small part in establishing that type of institution, together with diﬀerentiated and variegated internal dynamics at each university that did not need Humboldt’s programmatic writings as 8 To regard science as something not quite yet discovered and never completely discoverable, and ceaselessly to search for it as such. 9 Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Über die innere und äußere Organisation der höheren wissenschaftlichen Anstalten in Berlin, 1809/10,” in Idee und Wirklichkeit einer Universität. Dokumente zur Geschichte der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1960), 194. 10 See Rüdiger vom Bruch, “A Slow Farewell to Humboldt? Stages in the History of German Universities, 1810–1945,” in German Universities Past and Future: Crisis or Renewal?, ed. Mitchell G. Ash (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1997), 3–32; Sylvia Paletschek, “Verbreitete sich ein ‘Humboldtsches Modell’ an den deutschen Universitäten im 19. Jahrhundert?,” in Schwinges, Humboldt International, 75–104.

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an inspiration. But Humboldt had not only started a successful experiment with his institution founded in Berlin in 1810, which would lead to the prominence of the university in Berlin throughout the German Reich more than sixty years later, he had also described an idealized type of university that had already developed, quite practically, in Göttingen or Jena around 1800. He had connected the driving force of idealistic philosophy with the educational program of neohumanism and, moreover, was able successfully to style his Berlin establishment as a national enterprise. In fact, many domestic and foreign contemporaries at the turn of the nineteenth century saw a connection between this program of the research university and the rise of university-based sciences in Germany, as do many historians today. Indeed, from about 1900 onward, Humboldt’s model has been held up as an ideal that should by no means be abandoned. Shortly before 1900, Humboldt’s decisive memorandum from 1810 had been discovered in the archives. Adolf Harnack, the Protestant theologian and educational reformer, immediately presented it to a wide public in order to promote his own views on the politics of science. Humboldt’s ideal—now revered as the foundation myth of the German university—was apparently in imminent danger of being overrun by modern mass society and the large scale of proceedings at highly specialized universities. In the ensuing discourse, stereotypical references to Humboldt invoked a seemingly endangered ideal, while Harnack himself skillfully managed to establish the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften (Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science), founded in 1911, as the natural conclusion of institutions devised by Humboldt himself—despite the fact that this society was a conglomerate of institutions almost exclusively dedicated to natural science and situated outside the universities themselves.11 But most contemporaries who now referred to Humboldt as their founding ideal perceived the imperative of strict scientiﬁc work to educate the individual, the unity of science, and especially the close interdependence of education and research, to be in danger. This concern became even more evident during the Weimar Republic. In 1930, the Berlin philosopher and educational scientist Eduard Spranger began his monumental work on German academics with a chapter

11

Vom Bruch, “A Slow Farewell to Humboldt?,” 12–14.

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titled “The Essence of the German University.”12 According to Spranger, the concept of the university entirely focused on science and education had lost none of its legitimacy, but the question arose whether it could still be viably put into practice under present circumstances. Spranger identiﬁed three Ausbruchsstellen der Krise, that is, speciﬁc points at which the crisis threatened to manifest itself immediately at German universities in the late 1920s: the democratization of education and a concomitant decline in its quality, an irreconcilable conﬂict between science and professional training, and an equally irreconcilable conﬂict between science and Weltanschauung.13 This brings us to a key term: crisis. A crisis of the sciences, a crisis of the universities in Germany was to become an issue for continual debate throughout the Weimar Republic. Prior to World War I, German science had been held in high esteem worldwide, even if skeptical criticism of problematic developments was occasionally uttered even then. But from 1920 onward, observers lamented the dire state in which German science found itself: cut oﬀ by boycotts from the international community of scholars, and suﬀering from an acute lack of funding for scientiﬁc journals and monographs, research equipment, and junior scientists, owing to the worldwide economic crisis and hyperinﬂation in Germany, which led to massive impoverishment and social deprivation of students and professors alike. It was because of this crisis that the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (Emergency Society for German Science) had been founded in 1920, aiming initially to ﬁll the most serious gaps in funding and later to ﬁnance major common research projects, such as the famed German expedition to Tibet.14 Without outside help, however, especially the generous grants from the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, a number of new research projects would not have been possible. But the educated classes in Germany were aﬄicted by more than a merely material crisis. Even before the turn of the nineteenth century,

12 Eduard Spranger, “Das Wesen der deutschen Universität,” in Das akademische Deutschland, ed. Michael Doeberl et al. (Berlin: C. A. Weller, 1930), Bd. 3, 1–38. 13 Ibid., 33. 14 See Notker Hammerstein, Die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in der Weimarer Republik und im Dritten Reich. Wissenschaftspolitik in Republik und Diktatur 1920–1945 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999); Winfried Schulze, Der Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft 1920–1995 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995).

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they had become increasingly dispossessed of their classical educational ideals. On top of that, with the dissolution of the German Empire in 1918, political dispossession followed, as many professors had supported the conservative state of the former Reich. And after 1918, the loss of material value suﬀered as a result of inﬂation and hyperinﬂation brought about their economic dispossession.15 And yet, the crisis of the period extended still further and deeper. Was it possible for the ideal of strictly rational and methodologically coherent science to prevail after the upheavals of the world war? Max Weber answered this often-heard question in his famous speech “Wissenschaft als Beruf ” (Science as a calling) with a passionate plea for utilitarian rationalism in science as it existed in a modern, rationalized, disciplined, and disenchanted world. “Unser aller Schicksal ist es, überholt zu werden” (It is the fate of each and every one of us to be overtaken), he said in this speech, delivered to Munich students in 1917; when it was published in 1919, it sparked intense debate. With acerbic precision, Weber stated that “Innerlich ebenso wie äußerlich ist die alte Universitätsverfassung ﬁktiv geworden.”16 The central theme of the younger generation would not be method and form, but spirit and life. The direct, frontal attack on Weber in 1920 by Erich von Kahler (a literary critic and poet associated with the circle around Stefan George) in his article “Der Beruf der Wissenschaft” (The calling of science), turned out to be symptomatic of that divide.17 Even established scientists turned against Weber, including the Orientalist Carl Heinrich Becker, whose theory of Christian-Islamic cultural synthesis in the Middle Ages was the subject of heated international debate and who went on to become a leading authority in educational politics in Prussia and Germany

15 See Dieter Langewiesche, “Die Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen in der Weimarer Republik. Krisenerfahrungen und Distanz zur Demokratie an den deutschen Universitäten,” Zeitschrift für Württembergische Landesgeschichte 51 (1992): 345–81. 16 Internally as well as externally, the old founding principles of the university have turned into a ﬁction. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze, vol. I/17 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1992), 75. See Rüdiger vom Bruch, “Max Webers Kritik am ‘System Althoﬀ’ in universitätsgeschichtlicher Perspektive,” Berliner Jahrbuch für Soziologie 5 (1995): 313–26; Christoph König and Eberhard Lämmert, eds., Konkurrenten in der Fakultät. Kultur, Wissen und Universität um 1900 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999). 17 Erich von Kahler, Der Beruf der Wissenschaft (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1920); cf. Gerhard Lauer, Die verspätete Revolution. Erich von Kahler. Wissenschaftsgeschichte zwischen konservativer Revolution und Exil (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), 218–21.

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during the Weimar Republic. In contrast to Weber, Becker emphasized life and experience, for that was what attracted young people to the sciences. Despite massive criticism of the superannuated habits and intellectual deﬁciencies found there, he believed in the future of the German university: “Der Kern unserer Universitäten ist gesund” (The core of our universities remains healthy), he wrote in 1919 in his article “Gedanken zur Hochschulreform” (Thoughts on reforming higher education).18 Weber, by contrast, had coolly remarked that it had become a ﬁction, internally as well as externally. The debate over science and life, methodology and truth, rational detachment and meaning-giving values, was especially acute in the humanities. In 1922, in his work Der Historismus und seine Probleme as well as in a spate of articles, the liberal theologian Ernst Troeltsch analyzed the problem of the relativity of values in the humanities, where historicist assumptions exercised a powerful inﬂuence.19 From 1918 onward, many disciplines experienced an “antihistorical revolution” that had begun even before 1914 and was exacerbated after the war.20 Literary studies rebelled against text-based philology and neogrammarianism, moving in the direction of Geistesgeschichte.21 A new genre of historical biography attempted to use psychological methods to delineate, within a single individual, the conﬂicts of an entire age.22 Young historians turned away from the state as a central category of thinking and discovered das Volk with an interdisciplinary totality.23 These few examples may suﬃce to point out how

18 Carl Heinrich Becker, “Gedanken zur Hochschulreform,” in Carl Heinrich Becker. Internationale Wissenschaft und nationale Bildung. Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Guido Müller (Cologne: Böhlau, 1997), 195. 19 Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme (1922), due to be published in two volumes as volume 16 of the critical edition of his collected works; and, recently, Gangolf Hübinger, ed., Ernst Troeltsch. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 15, Schriften zur Politik und Kulturphilosophie (1918–1923) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002). 20 Cf. Kurt Nowak, “Die ‘antihistoristische Revolution’: Symptome und Folgen der Krise historischer Wertorientierung nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg in Deutschland,” in Troeltsch-Studien, Bd. 4, Umstrittene Moderne. Die Zukunft der Neuzeit im Urteil der Epoche Ernst Troeltschs, ed. Horst Renz and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1987), 133–71. 21 Christoph König and Eberhard Lämmert, eds., Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 1910–1925 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993). 22 See Helmut Scheuer, Biographie. Studien zur Funktion und zum Wandel einer literarischen Gattung vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979). 23 Willi Oberkrome, Volksgeschichte. Methodische Innovation und völkische Ideologisierung in der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft 1918–1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht,

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deeply the cultural crisis in science was felt during the Weimar Republic. But what does all this have to do with the historical sciences of culture at the University of Berlin during the Weimar Republic? Three aspects are at issue here, all of which hearken back to late imperial Germany and are fundamental to understanding the situation in the 1920s. The ﬁrst is the special role of Berlin in the domestic as well as the international scientiﬁc system. The university was founded in 1810 in the spirit of idealism and neohumanism by Wilhelm von Humboldt, who imbued it with the motto of Einsamkeit und Freiheit (Solitude and freedom).24 Yet it was not pure chance that the primary building housing the university, the former Prinzenpalais, presented to the newly founded university by King Friedrich Wilhelm III, was located in close proximity both to the royal residence and the government ministries that later turned into central institutions of the Reich. Even during its actual founding, a strange dichotomy between the liberal demands for autonomous research and a mistrust of the monarch was very much in evidence, while Humboldt’s successors tended to emphasize to their ministry the immediate usefulness of the university to the state. The opposite pole of Humboldt’s ideal was ﬁnally attained during the war against France in 1870, when the physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond, supported by the historian Heinrich von Treitschke,25

1993); Peter Schöttler, ed., Geschichtsschreibung als Legitimationswissenschaft 1918–1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997). 24 See Helmut Schelsky, Einsamkeit und Freiheit. Idee und Gestalt der deutschen Universität und ihrer Reforme (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1963); also the papers in Schubring, “Einsamkeit und Freiheit” neu besichtigt. On the history of its founding, see Rüdiger vom Bruch, “Die Gründung der Berliner Universität,” in Schwinges, Humboldt International, 53–73, and Rüdiger vom Bruch, “Zur Gründung der Berliner Universität im Kontext der deutschen Universitätslandschaft um 1800,” in Die Universität Jena. Tradition und Innovation um 1800, eds. Gerhard Müller, Klaus Ries, and Paul Ziche, Pallas Athene 2 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2001), 63–77. 25 In 1870 Treitschke also declared: “Ist diese Zeit von Eisen, so bleibt es auch eine Notwendigkeit für die Gesittung der Welt, daß eine Nation bestehe, die neben dem Idealismus der Wissenschaft zugleich den Idealismus des Krieges behüte.” (If this age is made of iron, it will remain necessary for the civilized world that one nation may prevail where the ideals of science are protected alongside the ideals of war.) Quoted in Wolfgang Girnus, “Zwischen Reichsgründung und Jahrhundertwende 1870–1900,” in Wissenschaft in Berlin. Von den Anfängen bis zum Neubeginn nach 1945, ed. Hubert Laitko (Berlin: Dietz, 1987), 185. During World War I, Treitschke was quoted by the entente as a key witness to the militarism of German science.

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praised the University of Berlin as “das geistige Leibregiment des Hauses Hohenzollern” (the intellectual royal guard of the house of Hohenzollern).26 We must concede, however, that this often-quoted remark was uttered in the throes of nationalist enthusiasm. Later, Du Bois-Reymond, eminent natural scientist and inﬂuential ﬁgure in the scientiﬁc establishment in Germany that he was, never tired of emphasizing the internationalism of scientiﬁc research.27 This basic discord between nationalism and internationalism, especially among Berlin scholars, found its ultimate expression in imperial Germany in World War I, when eminent professors called in speeches and articles for Kulturkrieg.28 We can take it as a given that this tension between intellect and power, only hinted at in the preceding sentences, has shaped the University of Berlin like none other in Germany. In the Kaiserreich, especially after 1880, the University of Berlin became the center of German science, as support within the ministry as well as academic self-awareness and external recognition all serve to prove. The faculty doubled within two decades after 1880, with small numerical deviations from discipline to discipline, both in tenured as well as nontenured professorships. This increase held true for medicine and natural sciences as well as for the humanities. Friedrich Althoﬀ, the dominant cultural administrator in Prussia from 1882 to 1907, was a systematically planning science politician who aimed for Berlin to become a center for history and classical studies, but his policy on appointments remained sketchy at best. As Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf observed, Bonn still held the unchallenged lead as far as the classics and classical archaeology were concerned.29 Still, a chair at the University of Berlin was generally

26

Emil Du Bois-Reymond, “Der deutsche Krieg,” in Reden. Erste Folge. Literatur, Philosophie, Zeitgeschichte (Leipzig: Veit and Co., 1886), 92. 27 See Irmeline Veit-Brause, “The Making of Modern Scientiﬁc Personae: The Scientist as a Moral Person? Emil Du Bois-Reymond and His Friends,” History of the Human Sciences 15, no. 2 (2002): 19–49. 28 See Jürgen and Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg, Der “Aufruf an die Kulturwelt.” Das Manifest der 93 und die Anfänge der Kriegspropaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg. Mit einer Dokumentation (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1996); Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ed., Kultur und Krieg. Die Rolle der Intellektuellen, Künstler und Schriftsteller im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996). 29 See Bärbel Boschan, “In dubiis libertas? Die Entwicklung der Philosophischen Fakultät der Berliner Universität im Zeitraum 1870–1900 und Friedrich Althoﬀ,” in Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Wissenschaftspolitik im Industriezeitalter. Das ‘System Althoﬀ’ in historischer Perspektive, ed. Bernhard vom Brocke (Hildesheim: Lax, 1991), 267–85.

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regarded as the pinnacle of any possible academic career.30 At the same time, Berlin hosted an extraordinary number of young, dynamic, and innovative (and often Jewish) university lecturers. This predominance added to the attraction of Berlin’s excellent and highly diﬀerentiated academic landscape: The university oﬀered opportunities for fascinating new ﬁelds of research and highly specialized niches, but these lecturers could at most hope for an academic career by taking a detour through the provincial universities or by staying in Berlin in nontenured scholarly positions.31 Berlin thus became a fortress of predominantly conservative “excellencies” and Geheimraten (advisers on government policies), who enjoyed high social prestige. On the other hand, Berlin was also a place of intellectual ferment and ﬂexibility. New scholarly ﬁelds that transcended the boundaries of established disciplines more often than not tended to originate there. Moreover, Berlin was an extraordinarily large university with respect to the number of students. Even shortly before World War I, roughly ten percent of the 50,000 university students in Germany were concentrated there. Afterward, despite the academic crisis of the Weimar Republic, the earlier tendency toward excellence, specialization, and large enrollment continued. With more than 14,000 students enrolled in the winter semester of 1928–29, the University of Berlin was in many respects exceptional among German universities. This leads us to the second point: Berlin was also exceptional in its wide disciplinary spectrum. This was true not only for the university but also for the atypically diﬀerentiated urban research landscape. No other German university enjoyed a comparably dense network of institutes and seminars or could even aspire to its wealth of course oﬀerings, even in exotic disciplines. Moreover, the university that was by now greedily spreading over several disparate buildings situated in the center of Berlin was also part of a rich and variegated academic landscape. There were further institutions of higher education such as the Technical University, situated in the

30 See Marita Baumgarten, Professoren und Universitäten im 19. Jahrhundert. Zur Sozialgeschichte deutscher Geistes- und Naturwissenschaftler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1997). This study, based on prosopographic and statistical data, conclusively established a ranking of German universities on the basis of appointment procedures. 31 See Martin Schmeiser, Akademischer Hasard. Das Berufsschicksal des Professors und das Schicksal der deutschen Universität 1870–1920. Eine verstehend soziologische Untersuchung (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1994).

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suburb of Charlottenburg, which in 1900 had been given the right to grant academic degrees at the insistence of the emperor himself. There was also the Agricultural College, then a business school, and additional institutions of higher learning. The Königlich-Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, or Royal Prussian Academy of Science in Berlin, had already been founded in 1700. Moreover, the Kaiserreich saw the establishment of state research institutes that were massively concentrated in the capital, ﬁrst among them the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, or Imperial Institute of Physics and Technology, founded in 1887. Large electrical and pharmaceutical companies founded their own research laboratories in Berlin, emphasizing its role as an industrial city. In 1911, the founding of the Kaiser-Wilhem-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften had established an entirely new type of extra-university research institute. At ﬁrst almost exclusively dedicated to the natural sciences, even before World War I these institutes spread over a hastily developed area situated in the Dahlem suburb southwest of Berlin. Ideally, this kind of privately ﬁnanced and publicly controlled institution aimed at networked research by eminent scientists who were appointed directors of their own institutes and freed from the constraints of academic administration and teaching imposed on them by the university. Especially after 1918, many new Kaiser Wilhelm institutes were founded in Berlin.32 This trend toward independent research institutions became irreversible, despite complaints by many contemporaries that research, which Humboldt had brought to the universities in 1810, was now leaving them again.33 This leads to the third point separating Berlin from the rest of Germany. At the Deutsche Hochschullehrertag, or Convention of German University Teachers, in 1911, the debate over universitybound versus university-free research institutes escalated into a heated controversy that intermingled with a debate over the relative value of the sciences versus the humanities within the German system of

32 For the founding and early history of the Kaiser-Wilhem-Gesellschaft, see the articles by Bernhard vom Brocke in Forschung im Spannungsfeld von Politik und Gesellschaft. Geschichte und Struktur der Kaiser-Wilhelm-/Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, ed. Rudolf Vierhaus and Berhard vom Brocke (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1990). 33 See Rüdiger vom Bruch, “Wissenschaftspolitik, Kulturpolitik, Weltpolitik. Hochschule und Forschungsinstitute auf dem Deutschen Hochschullehrertag in Dresden,” in Transformation des Historismus. Wissenschaftsorganisation und Bildungspolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Horst Walter Blanke (Waltrop: Hartmut Spenner, 1994), 32–63.

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research. While Adolf Harnack, in his role as spiritus rector and ﬁrst president of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, focused almost exclusively on developing the most important natural sciences in order to remain competitive with imperialist rivals in France, England, and the United States, the alternative was seen in the research institutes for the humanities founded at the University of Leipzig by the historian Karl Lamprecht.34 The debate over the national and political importance of the humanities and sciences remained on the agenda throughout the ﬁrst third of the twentieth century. It continued during the Weimar Republic primarily in the context of the above-mentioned Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (later renamed Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), founded in 1920, which focused primarily on research at the universities.35 Competition between sciences and humanities did exist within the Notgemeinschaft, although the humanities could not claim to have been neglected per se. Friedrich SchmidtOtt, Althoﬀ ’s successor in the Prussian ministry of education, as president of the Notgemeinschaft continued to fund the humanities, a task that had never been neglected by Althoﬀ himself. Tensions and diﬃculties became most apparent, however, between the Notgemeinschaft and the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, the latter almost exclusively dominated by natural science. Althoﬀ’s policy toward the universities had favored the strengthening of local centers of competency, while he aimed to establish Berlin as a center of history and classical studies. As already mentioned, this aim was not in fact signiﬁcantly reﬂected in university politics at Berlin during his incumbency; still, viewed in long-term perspective, the primacy of the humanities as a whole cannot be denied for Berlin. The reasons can be found both in inclusion and exclusion. With the growth of cost-intensive scientiﬁc research laboratories throughout the capital, a certain division of labor emerged between those institutions and the university. At the beginning of

34 The most important of Harnack’s writings on this subject are found in Bernhard Fabian, ed., Adolf von Harnack. Wissenschaftspolitische Reden und Aufsätze (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 2001). For documentation of Lamprecht’s research institutes, see the appendix to Blanke, Transformation des Historismus. An extensive habilitation thesis (Leipzig, 2002) by Matthias Middell on the foundation and further development of Lamprecht’s research institutes as a contribution to universal history in the twentieth century is forthcoming. 35 See Hammerstein, Die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

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the century, the university had built its last expensive institute for the appointment of chemist Emil Fischer. This expenditure, however, marked the upper limit for the traditionally frugal Prussian cultural budget, and it prompted Althoﬀ to encourage privately ﬁnanced research institutes. Researchers in the humanities, however, even ﬁrstrate ones, could be won and kept at a comparatively low cost. On the other hand, Berlin oﬀered a unique infrastructure to researchers in the humanities, especially in the ﬁelds of history and classics. Institutionally organized international science politics had spread out from Berlin when the Institut für archäologische Korrespondenz (Corresponding Society for Archaeology) had been established in Rome by private initiative in 1829. It was taken over by the Prussian state and then (together with its branch in Athens) by the Reich in 1874 as the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, and has been termed the “ﬁrst large organization for international cooperation in the modern sense.”36 Research in classical archaeology was thus concentrated in the capital. In addition, the archaeology of the Near East gained in importance during the Wilhelmine era, encouraged by spectacular ﬁnds, wide public interest, the patronage of Kaiser Wilhelm II himself, and energetic private funding.37 Less spectacular, but just as research-intensive, the philological and historical aspects of classical antiquity were represented through a project of general text collecting and editing based on a division of labor, which as early as 1890 Theodor Mommsen had deﬁned as Großforschung, or large-scale research.38 All of these activities, as well as many additional historical research initiatives undertaken by university scholars, were ﬁrmly grounded in a culture of scientiﬁc societies that prevailed throughout Berlin. In August 1908, participants in the Third International Convention of Historians at Berlin received a voluminous guidebook that enumerated, besides much practical advice, the more than twenty scientiﬁc societies in Berlin that were active in the area of historical research, ranging from the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft

36 By Gerhart Rodenwaldt, then president of the institute, in his article “Archäologie als nationale und internationale Wissenschaft,” in Volkstum und Kulturpolitik. Eine Sammlung von Aufsätzen. Gewidmet Georg Schreiber zum fünfzigsten Geburtstage, ed. H. M. Konen and J. P. Steﬀes (Köln: Gilde-Verlag, 1932), 92. 37 See Olaf Matthes, James Simon: Mäzen im Wilhelminischen Zeitalter, Bürgerlichkeit, Wertewandel, Mäzententum Bd. 5 (Berlin: Bostelmann and Siebenhaar, 2000). 38 Rebenich, Theodor Mommsen und Adolf Harnack.

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(German Oriental Society) to the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museums-Verein (Kaiser Friedrich Museum Association).39 In general we can state that the university’s preeminence in science and research became concentrated in the humanities during the late German Empire, emphasizing historical and classical disciplines and supported by a wealth of urban infrastructure. This tendency continued throughout the Weimar Republic, when the permanent crisis of culture and science, especially in the humanities, became an ongoing subject of public discourse. This was the university from which Ernst Herzfeld received his doctorate in 1907, where he habilitated in archaeology and historical geography of the Near East in 1909, and where he was appointed to the chair for historical geography in 1920 after having occupied a nontenured professorship from 1917 onward. Here he founded his Seminar für Landes- und Altertumskunde des Orients (Seminar for Oriental Studies), and from here he was forced into retirement in September 1935 despite the fact that by then he had already emigrated to England and was on the point of permanently leaving for the United States to take an appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.40 Which type of scholarship did Herzfeld embody, and what was his connection to whatever “crisis” in whatever “humanities”? Where do we ﬁnd him within the educational system of the Weimar Republic? Herzfeld was not a specialist in the sense of the modern Fachmenschentum, to use a term coined by Max Weber. Highly educated, bursting with ideas and associations, he never allowed himself to be “disciplined,” although he accomplished great things within his discipline. For this, he received both praise and criticism. But this also indicates that he

39 Berlin. Für die Teilnehmer am Internationalen Kongreß für historische Wissenschaften. Berlin, 6.–12. August 1908 (Berlin 1908), 447–72. Two years later, eighty-nine societies for the promotion of science and culture were enumerated by Wilhelm Paszkowski, Berlin in Wissenschaft und Kunst. Ein akademisches Auskunftsbuch nebst Angaben über Akademische Berufe (Berlin: Weidmann, 1910). See also Rüdiger vom Bruch, “Die Stadt als Stätte der Begegnung. Gelehrte Geselligkeit im Berlin des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Fixpunkte. Wissenschaft in der Stadt und der Region. Festschrift für Hubert Laitko anläßlich seines 60. Geburtstages, ed. Horst Kant (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschafts- und Regionalgeschichte, 1996), 1–29. 40 On Herzfeld, see Friedrich Krefter, “Zum Gedenken an Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948),” AMI N.F. 12 (1979): 13–25; Colleen Hennessey, “The Ernst Herzfeld Papers at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives,” BAI n.s. 6 (1992): 131–41.

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stood in the tradition of universal education extending from Ernst Curtius to Wilcken, and that he was, at the same time, open to the new intellectual trends of the 1920s. But did he also represent that sense of crisis that reverberated throughout the humanities at the time, as described above? Certainly, Herzfeld’s situation must have been unique, since he was not, in fact, physically present in Berlin for many years. When we consider research in the humanities as a whole in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, we ﬁnd a rather paradoxical situation. On the one hand existed that permanent reﬂection on crisis; Siegfried Kracauer, highly attuned to the intellectual developments of his day, wrote in the 1920s that “the crisis of the sciences” had become the object of “the talk in the marketplaces today.”41 On the other hand, there was constant and concentrated progress in scientiﬁc research work that produced considerable results. Nothing much can be felt of a massive contemporary crisis in that respect. As to Herzfeld himself, we need to consider the fact that he was working mostly in the Near East itself and not in Berlin. He was occupied with excavations in Assur from 1903 to 1905, in Samarra (together with Friedrich Sarre) from 1911 to 1913, in Persia from 1923 to 1925, and as ﬁeld director of the American excavations at Persepolis from 1931 to 1934. But even in Germany itself, his combination of disciplines does not exactly appear to have been shaken by crisis. The classical period of archaeological and Oriental sciences (including Oriental philology and Islamic studies) covers more than half a century, from 1880 to 1930, and during this period there is little sense of any decline or paradigm shift.42 We have repeatedly mentioned the humanities, yet the title of this article refers to the historical sciences of culture. This leads to a highly problematic ﬁeld of terminological diﬀerences. A dichotomy between “humanity” and “nature,” when employed to denote radically diﬀerent research interests, appears dubious outside the strict

41 Siegfried Kracauer, Das Ornament der Masse. Essays (1920–1931) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 197. 42 On Islamic studies, see Yonghee Park, “Auf der Suche nach dem Orient. Die historische Erfassung des ‘islamischen Orients’ durch deutsche Islamwissenchaftler zwischen 1880–1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of Berlin, 2000), to be published shortly; it includes studies chieﬂy of Julius Wellhausen, Ignaz Goldziher, Martin Hartmann, Carl Heinrich Becker, and Georg Jacob.

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boundaries of science history. In the case of the humanities, we actually deal with the understanding, reconstruction, and typological classiﬁcation of cultural facts and their historical meaning, as Max Weber conclusively demonstrated shortly after 1900. He suggested instead the term “historical sciences of culture,” but it has never really taken root. In all contemporary sources, including course catalogues and surveys, humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) are contrasted with natural sciences. No tendency to favor the term Kulturwissenschaften (cultural sciences) can be discerned within the Federal Republic of Germany before the 1990s; at that point, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft set up a committee to put into eﬀect that change in terminology, although it has not yet managed to ﬁlter into common usage. One key memorandum of recent times is entitled “Zur Lage der Geisteswissenschaften” (On the situation of the humanities), and this is not the only example.43 The term is still used to juxtapose these disciplines to the natural sciences, even if the term of “cultural sciences” is promoted under just this pretext.44 Moreover, the historical, philological, and archaeological sciences that are at issue in this article can much better be described by the term “historical sciences of culture.” An example might show how problematic the deﬁnition of Geisteswissenschaften can be even in very recent historical research. In 1994, an important collection of essays was published under the title Geisteswissenschaften zwischen Kaiserreich und Republik (The humanities between imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic), more precisely deﬁned by the subtitle Zur Entwicklung von Nationalökonomie, Rechtswissenschaft und Sozialwissenschaft im 20. Jahrhundert (The development of national

43 See Wolfgang Prinz and Peter Weingart, eds., Die sog. Geisteswissenschaften: Innenansichten, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), Peter Weingart et al., Die sog. Geisteswissenschaften: Außenansichten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991); Wolfgang Frühwald et al., Geisteswissenschaften heute. Eine Denkschrift (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991). 44 See Jürgen Kocka, “Veränderungen in der Geschichtswissenschaft. Eine ‘Geisteswissenschaft’?,” in Weingart, Außenansichten, 134–37. If Kocka agrees with Weber in his plea for the present use of “historical sciences of culture,” an attempt to characterize retrospectively a ﬁeld extant already around the turn of the nineteenth century is supported by Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Auf dem Weg zu einer Historischen Kulturwissenschaft,” in König and Lämmert, Konkurrenten in der Fakultät, 105–23. See also Lorraine Daston and Otto Gerhard Oexle, eds., Naturwissenschaft, Geisteswissenschaft, Kulturwissenschaft: Einheit—Gegensatz—Komplementarität? (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1998).

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economics, law, and the social sciences in the 20th century).45 One would hardly subsume lawyers, economists, and social scientists under the label of Geisteswissenschaften. In view of such confusion, we will sensibly hold to the language of the historical sources. What do they subsume under the rubric of Geisteswissenschaften, if we start from the assumption that under this label are the sciences with which we are concerned? The answer seems incontrovertible: The humanities are the disciplines of the faculty of philosophy—as opposed to faculties of law, medicine, and theology—excluding the natural sciences, which (apart from medicine) were still part of the faculty of philosophy at Berlin in the 1920s. Four groups of documentary sources may assist us here. First, for Berlin itself are the semiannual course catalogues that list oﬀerings in each separate ﬁeld; second, the Amtliche Personenverzeichnisse (oﬃcial personnel directories) that are ordered by administrative years; third, the annual reports, which list faculty, courses, enrollments, and library holdings according to formal administrational units such as institutes and seminars.46 These three types of directories are by no means entirely consistent in their classiﬁcation and demonstrate shifts in nomenclature over the course of the 1920s.47 In addition, there are basic studies that furnish brief generic portraits of each individual institution.48 How are the disciplines classiﬁed within the faculty of philosophy? Let us take as an example the course catalogue for the summer semester of 1920. It begins in the faculty of philosophy with the

45 Knut Wolfgang Nörr, Bertram Schefold, and Friedrich Tenbruck, eds., Geisteswissenschaften zwischen Kaiserreich und Republik. Zur Entwicklung von Nationalökonomie, Rechtswissenschaft und Sozialwissenschaft im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1994). Even the time frame is irritating, as it should be correctly labeled “zwischen Kaiserreich und Diktatur.” This example should not be overstated, but it can be seen as symptomatic of a certain terminological helplessness. 46 With the exception of the triennial “Chronik der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin. April 1932/März 1935.” 47 Since, despite extensive research in the Berlin libraries I could not ﬁll all gaps in the course catalogues and personnel directories, I could not obtain an exhaustive overview for the period in question. A comparative use of sources from all three groups, however, serves to bridge this gap. 48 See, for example, Norman Balk, “Schriften des Akademischen Auskunftsamtes an der Universität Berlin,” in Die Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin (Berlin: Speyer und Peters, 1926). An overview of academic history in Berlin from 1810 onward is followed by short portraits of each separate institute or seminar from its founding to the present; typical entries consist of two pages per institution.

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philosophical sciences, followed by the mathematical sciences, state, ﬁnancial, and trade sciences; then history, geography, and archaeology; art history, music, philological sciences, and other diverse subjects; and ﬁnally, as a large block, the Seminar for Oriental Languages attached to the university, founded on Bismarck’s initiative as early as 1887 in the context of a foreign policy shift toward a new colonial policy for the Reich. This seminar turned out to be a melting pot and career ladder, both for individuals and for disciplinary history. The historical sciences of culture here combined fruitfully with numerous language courses and analyses of contemporary international politics. Yet it is hardly possible to determine how this seminar exerted its actual inﬂuence on the development of each individual discipline involved (as, for example, Oriental sciences), or how it changed its own substance under the inﬂuence of their development. Despite pragmatic interconnections, Humboldt’s ideal of “Einsamkeit und Freiheit” came into sharp conﬂict with the interest of a powerful industrial state, which sought to increase its political clout with the help of scientiﬁc progress. In 1893, Eduard Sachau, indefatigable promoter and future director of the seminar, deﬁned the reigning self-image of the ﬁeld of Oriental science: Von den meisten Universitätsstudien unterscheidet sich dasjenige der orientalischen Sprachen dadurch, daß es ein rein akademisches ist, insofern es nicht die Vorbereitung für eine praktische Thätigkeit in Staat oder Gemeinde zu erteilen hat. Wer ihm mit Erfolg obliegt, hat kaum eine andere Aussicht als diejenige selbst wieder Gelehrter und akademischer Lehrer zu werden.49

The same must have been true for the study of Near Eastern archaeology, even if spectacular excavation results were publicly counted as national achievements in the contest of cultural imperialism. In contrast, Sachau had programmatically described the task of the newly established Seminar for Oriental Languages: 49 The study of Oriental languages is distinguished from most other studies oﬀered by the universities by the fact that it is purely academic and does not train students for practical application in the service of the state or the community. Whoever undertakes this program of study has no possibility other than to become a scholar and academic teacher himself. Eduard Sachau, “Orientalische Philologie (mit Ausschluß der indischen),” in Die deutschen Universitäten. Für die Universitätsausstellung in Chicago 1893, unter Mitwirkung zahlreicher Universitätslehrer, Bd. I, ed. Wilhelm Lexis (Berlin: A. Asher, 1893), 512.

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Sprachlicher und realistischer Unterricht sollen, sich gegenseitig durchdringend, vorbereiten für alle praktischen Aufgaben des Lebens . . . Und wenn die Lehrthätigkeit, fest gegründet in wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis, in praktischem Können und reicher Erfahrung, dies Programm voll und ganz zur Ausführung bringt, dann ist dem Seminar eine segensreiche Wirksamkeit gesichert.50

While the language courses proper at ﬁrst took precedence over geographical, cultural, and historical subjects, the founding of the Hamburg Colonial Institute in 1908—simultaneously inspired by Berlin and perceived as its keenest competition—inﬂuenced Sachau’s direction of the Berlin seminar toward an equally strong emphasis on culture and history. As an academic pillar of nationalist power politics and, increasingly, foreign cultural politics, the seminar maintained its strong position as an associated institution of University of Berlin throughout the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic.51 With its claim to practical applicability it was an institutional pioneer; at the same time, Berlin was the last university of renown to establish a department of Oriental languages within the university itself.52 This took place only in 1929, considerably after Herzfeld had founded the Seminar für Landes- und Altertumskunde des Orients. Between 1920 and 1935, there were several signiﬁcant changes in the nomenclature used in the course catalogues and the oﬃcial

50

Education in languages and factual knowledge have to combine in order to prepare for all practical tasks in life. . . . And when educational endeavors, ﬁrmly grounded in scientiﬁc knowledge, practical skills, and a wealth of experience, develop this program to its utmost extent, this seminar will be guaranteed a beneﬁcial inﬂuence. Speech by Sachau published in “Bericht über die Eröﬀnung des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen an der Königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin und einige auf das Seminar bezügliche Schriftstücke, mitgetheilt von dem commissarischen Director Prof. Dr. Eduard Sachau,” Berlin 1899. 51 See Rüdiger vom Bruch, Weltpolitik als Kulturmission. Auswärtige Kulturpolitik und Bildungsbürgertum in Deutschland am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1982); Kurt Düwell, Deutschlands auswärtige Kulturpolitik 1918–1932 (Köln: Böhlau, 1976). 52 Nearly all German universities (with the single exception of Rostock) had already established seminars of Oriental studies, beginning at Jena in 1837; Berlin followed in 1929 as the twenty-second university to do so. I am indebted for this information and for well-documented research on the history of the Berlin seminar for Oriental languages to Dr. Ludmila Hanisch, who most kindly allowed me access to her unpublished manuscript, “Die Nachfolge der Exegeten—Deutschsprachige Erforschung des Vorderen Orients in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts.” For Oriental studies in nineteenth-century German, see Sabine Mangold, Eine “weltbürgerliche Wissenschaft”: Die deutsche Orientalistik im 19. Jahrhundert, Pallas Athene, vol. 11 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004).

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personnel directories relating to the organization of disciplines as well as to the terminology of the diﬀerent disciplines. These changes cannot be explored at this juncture. Until the winter semester 1932–33, these changes were relatively small and limited. It was only under the National Socialist regime, which exerted its destructive inﬂuence even on the heretofore quite productive classical sciences in Germany,53 that the institutional establishment of the German university, the ideal of the separate disciplines and their research objectives that still adhered to Humboldt’s model became signiﬁcantly shaken—even if the means and results diﬀered widely between separate scientiﬁc disciplines.54 A survey of the third documentary source, the annual institutional reports, reveals a slightly diﬀerent principle of organization. Take, for example, the chronicle of 1927–28, which already mentions Herzfeld’s seminar. As usual, the heading reads “Geisteswissenschaftliche Seminare und Institute der Philosophischen Fakultät.” It begins with the philosophical seminar, followed by the psychological institute; the pedagogical seminar; the seminar for state sciences and statistics; the seminar for history; the seminar for eastern European history and studies; Herzfeld’s seminar for Oriental studies; the seminar for international state craft and historical geography; the archaeological seminar; seminars for art history, the history of music, Indogermanic studies, and the institute for ancient studies; the seminar for prehistoric studies; seminars for German studies and the drama department; the seminars for Latin, English, and Slavic languages; and the seminars for Egyptian, Assyrian, and Chinese studies. Separately from all of these follows the Seminar for Oriental Languages, outside the university’s institutions. These institutional chronicles also attest to numerous changes in nomenclature between 1920 and 1930, the

53 See Markus Mode, “Altertumswissenschaften und Altertumswissenschaftler unter dem NS-Regime. Gedanken zum Niedergang deutscher Wissenschaften,” in Wissenschaft unter dem NS-Regime, ed. Burchard Brentjes (Berlin: Peter Lang, 1992), 156–69; Volker Losemann, “Aspekte der Standortbestimmung der Altertumswissenschaften in ‘Umbruchzeiten,’ ” in Wissenschaften und Wissenschaftspolitik. Bestandsaufnahmen zu Formationen, Brüchen und Kontinuitäten im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Rüdiger vom Bruch and Brigitte Kaderas (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2002), 310–23. 54 For the most recent overviews, see Ulrich Sieg, “Strukturwandel der Wissenschaft im Nationalsozialismus,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 24 (2001): 255–70; Michael Grüttner, “Die deutschen Universitäten unter dem Hakenkreuz,” in Zwischen Autonomie und Anpassung. Universitäten in den Diktaturen des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. John Connelly and Michael Grüttner (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2003), 67–100.

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elaboration of which is again not feasible at this point. As a whole, the course catalogues and personnel directories as well as the chronicles document a highly fascinating and diﬀerentiated mixture of congealing deﬁnitions and elastic expansion of terms; indeed, independent research on this subject might turn out to be very rewarding. A fourth type of source material is represented by the national university guides that are organized according to individual universities on the one hand, and around entire disciplines throughout the German Reich, on the other. These guides oﬀer a quick overview of disciplines established in the form of organized seminars and/or institutes at each individual university. While the more commonly consulted university calendars list separately the disciplines oﬀered at each academic location, especially the Berliner Akademische Auskunftsamt (Berlin Oﬃce of Academic Information) occasionally published these national university guides that listed, among other taxonomic principles, directories of all academic disciplines and the universities that oﬀered courses in them.55 The guide published in 1926 can be regarded as highly signiﬁcant in the present context.56 To locate Ernst Herzfeld’s ﬁelds of study, one must look up the headings “Oriental studies” and “history (including the Near East).” The discipline of Oriental studies oﬀered courses in Indian and Semitic philology at all universities and commanded specially established institutes at Berlin, Bonn, Breslau, Erlangen, Frankfurt, Freiburg, Göttingen, Halle, Heidelberg, Kiel, Königsberg, and Leipzig (with several seminars and institutes) as well as at Marburg, Munich, Münster, and Tübingen.57 Under the heading of history, however, only the Berlin Seminar for Oriental Studies and the Hamburg Seminar for Oriental History and Culture can be found.58

55 See the Deutsche Universitätskalender, founded by F. Ascherson. Herausgegeben mit amtlicher Unterstützung, e.g. sechsundneunzigste Ausgabe. Wintersemester 1922/23. Die Universitäten im Deutschen Reiche (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1922). 56 Karl Remme, ed., Die Hochschulen Deutschlands. Ein Führer durch Geschichte, Landschaft, Studium. Mit Unterstützung des Preußischen Ministeriums für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Volksbildung, des Reichsministeriums des Innern und der Hochschulen (Berlin: Verlag des Akademischen Auskunftsamtes, 1926). 57 Ibid., 76. This data is inconsistent with the much more extensive table Ludmilla Hanisch provides on the founding dates of seminars of Oriental studies at German universities. Either the contemporaneous lists are incomplete or—more likely—seminars of Oriental studies no longer existed in 1926 except at the universities listed here. 58 Ibid., 65.

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Herzfeld’s own path at the University of Berlin ranged from a wide oﬀering of basic courses in cultural sciences to prolonged absence due to ﬁeld research abroad. In the summer of 1918, he lectured in archaeology and art history on the origins of Islamic art. In the following winter, he taught introductory courses at the seminar for historical geography (Oriental section) on the geography of Oriental monuments and architecture. In the summer of 1920, after attaining full professorship (Ordinarius), he lectured on Iran and Oriental art and again taught introductory classes on Oriental archaeology. In the summer of 1921, he taught courses in Near Eastern antiquity and lectured once again on the origins of Islamic art. In the summer of 1926, now under the heading of archaeology and art history, he lectured on ancient Persian archaeology and Sasanian monuments. No sooner had he established his own institute, however, than he disappeared from the university’s pedagogical side. In the following years, the university directories simply state repeatedly that he is “on leave in Persia until the end of October 1933.” The reports of the University of Berlin concerning the Seminar for Oriental Studies read accordingly. Typically, they note from 1927 on that “the director of the seminar, Professor Herzfeld, is at present on a research trip to Persia.” In the summary triennial chronicle for April 1932 to March 1935, it is plainly stated that the director of the seminar, Professor Ernst Herzfeld, had been on leave for over twelve years for archaeological research in Persia and was retired in September 1935. The vice-director of the seminar, Albert Herrmann, remarked that “during the entire period, the seminar consisted only of introductory courses oﬀered by the undersigned.”59 The rest of the report on the seminar’s achievements is extremely meager, limited to the closing of occasional gaps in their collection of periodicals.60 Obviously, the seminar was consigned to a shadowy existence during Herzfeld’s absence. For the following year, 1935–36, ﬁve new members of the seminar and some increases in the library holdings are noted.61

59 Chronik der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin April 1932/März 1935. Im Auftrage des Rektors bearbeitet von Dr. Walter Wienert, Graphisches Institut Paul Funk: Berlin 1935, 296. 60 Ibid., 297. 61 Chronik der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin April 1935/März 1936, 139.

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On the other hand, Herzfeld oﬀers an atypical example in comparison with other prominent scholars expelled from Germany: instead of being actively removed, he simply disappeared from the picture. When we examine the list of dismissed or voluntarily retired university teachers whose teaching licenses were revoked or whose chairs were abolished, we do not ﬁnd Herzfeld among them.62 On the contrary, he is numbered among the tenured professors in the faculty of philosophy, and his impressive and wide-ranging memberships in national and international scientiﬁc associations and committees are as proudly listed as are his numerous awards, up to the Ritterkreuz of the Hohenzollern House Order he received in 1933.63 Literally untouchable, and highly respected at the same time, this important researcher of the Near East was originally ﬁrmly established within the spheres of cultural sciences at the University of Berlin. Because of his broad spectrum of interests and his research trips, however, he appears to have achieved the transition to the academic community of the Anglo-Saxon world without any break in continuity, simultaneously avoiding expulsion from the Berlin faculty that was now infected by National Socialism. His is a highly unusual case, crossing boundaries in many diﬀerent senses of the term, atypical of the fate of German universities in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century. In the context of the historical sciences of culture in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, was Ernst Herzfeld in fact an outsider? He represented the productive and expanding ﬁeld of his multifaceted discipline, and he does not appear to have been overly impressed by the contemporary crisis in the humanities. To what extent did this scholar understand himself as Geisteswissenschaftler, owing to his education and his research interests? Herzfeld embodied a transcendence of boundaries that was perhaps not altogether atypical for the younger generation of the Jewish, educated classes that ﬂocked to the University of Berlin around 1900 and was characterized by a considerable, cross-disciplinary curiosity due precisely to the strict deﬁnition of academic disciplines they encountered with their unfettered ﬂexibility.64 In his youth, Herzfeld gladly made use 62

Cf. Chronik 1932/35, 10, 37ﬀ., 41ﬀ. Ibid., 47. 64 See the numerous references in König and Lämmert, Konkurrenten in der Fakultät; Rüdiger vom Bruch, Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, and Gangolf Hübinger, eds., Kultur 63

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of the manifold oﬀerings of Berlin’s academic landscape as well as the wide spectrum of the university’s faculty of philosophy, as demonstrated in the curriculum vitae that formed part of his 1907 doctoral thesis:65 Ich Ernst Emil Herzfeld wurde am 23. Juli 1879 zu Celle, Prov. Hannover, als Sohn des Oberstabsarztes I. Kl. a.D. Sanitätsrats Dr. Herzfeld und seiner Frau Margarethe, geb. Rosenthal geboren und bin evangelischer Konfession. Meine Schulbildung empﬁng ich auf dem Domgymnasium zu Verden, Prov. Hannover, und dem Joachimstalschen Gymnasium zu Berlin, wo ich Ostern 1897 die Reifeprüfung bestand. Ich studierte Architektur an den Kgl. Technischen Hochschulen zu München und Charlottenburg und hörte gleichzeitig philosophische, kunstgeschichtliche und assyriologische Kollegien an der FriedrichWilhelms-Universität. Am 4. Juni 1903 bestand ich die erste Hauptprüfung für das Hochbaufach und wurde zum Königl. Regierungsbauführer ernannt. Vom 1. Sept. 1903 bis 1. Sept. 1905 war ich als Assistent bei den Ausgrabungen in Assur tätig. Bis zum Januar 1906 führte ich eine Forschungsreise durch Luristan, Arabistan und Fars aus. Seit Jan. 1906 hörte ich Kollegien und war seit Ostern 1906 an der FriedrichWilhelms-Universität als Hospitant eingeschrieben. Am 21. Februar 1907 habe ich meine Promotionsprüfung bestanden. Vom 15. März bis 15. Juni 1907 habe ich eine Ausgrabung in Kilikien ausgeführt. Meine Lehrer waren die Herren:66 (Richard) Delbrück (Archäologie), (Friedrich) Delitzsch (Assyriologie), (Hermann) Diels (Klass. Philologie), (Adolf ) Goldschmidt (Kunstgeschichte), (Hermann Friedrich) Grimm (Kunstgeschichte), (Reinhard) Kekulé von Stradonitz (Archäologie), (Karl Friedrich) Lehmann-Haupt (Alte Geschichte), (Felix) v. Luschan (Anthropologie), (Adolf ) Marcuse (Geographie), Eduard Meyer (Alte Geschichte), (Erich) Preuner (Archäologie), (Eduard) Sachau (Orientalistik), P.(aul) Schwarz (Arabistik), (Georg) Simmel (Philosophie und Soziologie), (Alfred) Vierkandt (Philosophie, Soziologie, Völkerkunde), (Adolf ) Wagner (Nationalökonomie), (Hugo) Winckler (Semitistik), (Hermann) Winnefeld (Archäologie), (Franz) Winter (Archäologie), (Oskar) Wulﬀ (osteurop. Kunstgeschichte). Allen diesen Herren sage ich hiermit meinen besten Dank.67

und Kulturwissenschaften um 1900. Krise der Moderne und Glaube an die Wissenschaft (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1989). 65 Herzfeld, “Pasargadae” 1907. 66 First names and ﬁelds of study were obtained from Gesamtverzeichnis des Lehrkörpers der Universität Berlin, ed. Johannes Asen, Bd. 1: 1810–1945 (Leipzig: Otto Harrasowitz, 1955), which I have not seen. 67 I, Ernst Emil Herzfeld, was born on July 23rd 1879 at Celle as the son of the retired army doctor Sanitätsrat Dr. Herzfeld and his wife Margarete, née Rosenthal. I belong to the Protestant faith. I was taught at the Domgymnasium at

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Herzfeld was ﬁrmly rooted in the academic spheres of Berlin at the turn of the nineteenth century, although his initial interest in architecture led him far aﬁeld from the strict conﬁnes of the humanities. But with growing physical distance may have developed a mental distance from Berlin crisis scenarios, even if his academic career during the Weimar Republic indicates participation or at least close observation. He only took note from afar, if at all, of the heated discussions within academic circles about scientiﬁc, psychological, and political orientation. He did not share the typical fate of other emigrant Berlin scholars, even if he chose after the National Socialists assumed power to take the typical route to the United States via England. He remained nominally present in Germany thanks to his academic honors and was retired in the ordinary way. In his position at the University of Berlin he can be counted among the “mandarins,” as Fritz Ringer has called them, although apart from practical work he did not have much in common with them. He did not participate in the critical discourse that took place throughout Germany before 1933. He was rooted in the international community of Oriental research, although with a breadth of research subjects and a scientiﬁc

Verden, Hanover province, and the Joachimsthalsche Gymnasium at Berlin, where I passed the general examination entitling me to study at a university in the spring of 1897. I studied architecture at the Royal Technical Colleges at Munich and Charlottenburg, at the same time reading philosophy, art history and Assyriology at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität. On July 4th 1903, I passed the ﬁrst main exam for structural engineering and was made a Royal state building director. From September 1st 1903 to September 1st 1905 I worked as an assistant at excavations in Assur. Until January 1906, I went on a research trip to Luristan, Arabistan and Fars. From January 1906 I read courses, being enrolled at the Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversität as postgraduate student. I passed my doctorate examinations on February 27th 1907. From March 15th to June 15th 1907 I led archaeological excavations in Cilicia. My teachers were the following: (Richard) Delbrück (archaeology), (Friedrich) Delitzsch (assyriology), (Hermann) Diels (classical philology), (Adolf ) Goldschmidt (art history), (Hermann Friedrich) Grimm (art history), (Reinhard) Kekulé von Stradonitz (archaeology), (Karl Friedrich) Lehmann-Haupt (ancient history), (Felix) v. Luschan (anthropology), (Adolf ) Marcuse (astronomy), Eduard Meyer (ancient history), (Erich) Preuner (archaeology), (Eduard) Sachau (oriental languages), P.(aul) Schwarz (Arabic), (Georg) Simmel (philosophy and sociology), (Alfred) Vierkandt (philosophy, sociology and ethnography), (Adolf ) Wagner (national economics), (Hugo) Winckler (Semitic languages), (Hermann) Winnefeld (archaeology), (Franz) Winter (archaeology), (Oskar) Wulﬀ (east European art history). To all these gentlemen, I hereby extend my heartfelt thanks. Phil. Diss. Herzfeld, 32.

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boldness that was in fact atypical for that community and that may have hearkened back to the unfettered intellectual curiosity of academic spheres in Berlin around 1900. It seems at the same time speculative and attractive to search for possible lines that connect Herzfeld’s work to the diagnostic critique in Germany during the early 1930s. This discourse is embodied prominently by Carl Heinrich Becker’s astute analysis of the cultural crisis of 1930; by the publication Deutscher Geist in Gefahr (German spirit in danger) by Ernst Robert Curtius, an eminent Latin philologist who argued in favor of a culturally conservative humanism; and in the basic deﬁnition of culture and existence set out in 1932 in the seminal work Die geistige Situation der Zeit (Man in the modern age) by the philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers.68 We cannot know how Herzfeld, increasingly familiar with AngloSaxon spheres of research, might have stood in relation to German culture and universities around the year 1932. The view from outside, however, and especially from the United States, occasionally arrived at a signiﬁcantly diﬀerent picture. In 1932, the American scholar Abraham Flexner published Die Universitäten in Amerika, England, Deutschland. In his closing remarks he stated with respect to England, where in his view the training of youth and the advancement of science were not yet adequately distinguished, that Dieser Unterschied braucht in Deutschland nicht besonders betont zu werden, und deshalb sind auch Deutschlands Abwege und Unzulänglichkeiten, so merkwürdig und unvernünftig sie sein mögen, nur begrenzt und bedeutungsloser, als die Abwege und Unzulänglichkeiten, denen wir in anderen Ländern begegnet sind.69

At the beginning of this article we cited Allan Bloom’s harsh criticism in 1987 of the putatively destructive inﬂuence exercised by immigrant German professors on American academic life in subsequent decades. We have shown that the crisis reﬂection that per68 Carl Heinrich Becker, Das Problem der Bildung in der Kulturkrise der Gegenwart (Leipzig: Quelle and Meyer, 1930); Ernst Robert Curtius, Deutscher Geist in Gefahr (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1932); Karl Jaspers, Die geistige Situation der Zeit, ed. G. J. Göschen, 5th ed. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1932). 69 Abraham Flexner, Die Universitäten in Amerika, England, Deutschland (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1932). In the case of Germany, there is no need to emphasize this distinction. Consequently, the detours and inadequacies of Germany, however odd and irrational they may be, are more limited and less important than those we have encountered in other countries (p. 257).

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meated academic and intellectual discourse during the Weimar Republic is not even remotely connected with the decline toward professional schools in late-twentieth-century America; on the contrary, it was rooted in the diﬃcult symbiosis of education and science that drove most of the innovations in cultural history around 1900. Bloom would have been well advised to recognize the oftenrepeated experience of his colleague, Edward Shils, that spanned many decades.70 On the contrary, both scientiﬁc systems had much to gain from the other’s ideal times and manifestations.

70 See, most recently, Edward Shils, “Die Beziehungen zwischen deutschen und amerikanischen Universitäten,” in Deutschlands Weg in die Moderne. Politik, Gesellschaft und Kultur im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Wolfgang Hardtwig and Harm-Hinrich Brandt (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1993), 185–200.

Fig. 1. Professor Eduard Meyer im blauen Dekansmantel, by Lovis Corinth, 1911. Oil on canvas; 2.00 × 1.505 m. Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle.

HISTORY, RACES, AND ORIENTALISM: EDUARD MEYER, THE ORGANIZATION OF ORIENTAL RESEARCH, AND ERNST HERZFELD’S INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE Stefan R. Hauser

aber nicht wahr: was menschen wollen, weiß man nicht einmal, wenn sie es selber sagen, und wer weiß was menschen wollten?1

In June 1909, the faculty of philosophy of the Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversität in Berlin faced a diﬃcult decision concerning the future of Near Eastern research. Ernst Herzfeld, at the urging of his professor, Eduard Meyer, had submitted part of his forthcoming study on Iranian rock reliefs as his habilitation thesis (Habilitationschrift).2 Herzfeld, not yet thirty years old, extremely talented and productive, and seemingly very self-conﬁdent, had applied for a venia legendi, or “privilege to teach”—bestowed upon scholars who were considered future professors by German universities—for historical geography, archaeology, and art history of the Orient.3 While Meyer supported Herzfeld’s application, the Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch

1

“But isn’t it true that you don’t know what people want even if they say it themselves, and who knows what people wanted?” Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 23. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 2 Sarre and Herzfeld, Iranische Felsreliefs. For a more detailed account of Herzfeld’s habilitation, see Renger’s contribution to this volume. I would like to thank warmly Johannes Renger, who made available to me the transcriptions of all the opinions (Gutachten) concerning Herzfeld’s dissertation and habilitation written by Meyer, Friedrich Delitzsch, and others. The papers are housed in the archive of FriedrichWilhelms-Universität Berlin (renamed Humboldt Universität in 1946). Documents relating to Herzfeld’s dissertation are found in the ﬁle on earned doctorates at the faculty of philosophy (Philosophische Fakultät 196, Promotionen vom April 1907–Juni 1914, Blatt 13–23). Documents concerning the habilitation are found in the ﬁle Philosophische Fakultät Habilitationen Littr. H, Nr. 1, Vol. 34 Nr. 1231, Blatt 1–15. 3 Delitzsch, who knew him personally, implied in his résumé on Herzfeld’s habilitation that Herzfeld was overconﬁdent. An alternative and more sympathetic explanation would be that Herzfeld found it diﬃcult to describe his position within an area of not-yet-established ﬁelds of research and opted for a complete list of those areas in which he was interested. For the text of Delitzsch’s résumé, see Renger’s contribution to this volume.

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voiced strong reservations, in part because Herzfeld had not speciﬁed the periods he intended to teach (thus implying that he felt competent to cover the most ancient to modern times). Most strenuously, however, Delitzsch objected to Herzfeld’s wish to be granted a venia legendi for archaeology. For Delitzsch, archaeology meant something entirely diﬀerent from the study of (all kinds of ) material remains, as it was and is commonly understood by traditional, processual, or post-processual archaeologists as well as those outside the ﬁeld.4 For him, archaeology meant studying all aspects of antiquity, including political organization, family law, trade, medicine, and religion. As he did not mention political events, we must assume that he considered them to fall within the realm and deﬁnition of history. Interestingly, Delitzsch followed the ancient deﬁnition of archaeology Plato introduced in his Hippias Major, a deﬁnition that translates into “knowledge of antiquity” or even “ancient history.”5 In Delitzsch’s view, the necessary precondition for this kind of archaeology was a clear understanding of the spirit of ancient people, which could only be gained through sustained philological study. Material remains were clearly secondary and only served as illustrations to his real aim. In accord with Delitzsch’s reservations, Herzfeld received a venia legendi for historical geography and art history of the Orient.6 Obviously the incident did not deeply aﬀect either Herzfeld or Delitzsch, as they remained on friendly terms.7 Moreover, in 1920, when Herzfeld became a professor at the Seminar für Historische Geographie, Delitzsch fully supported the appointment. Nevertheless, Herzfeld

4

See, from among many accounts, Glyn Daniel, A Short History of Archaeology (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), 13; Reinhard Bernbeck, Theorien in der Archäologie (Tübingen: A. Francke, 1997), 11; David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 152. 5 Alain Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past, trans. Ian Kinnes and Gilliam Varndell (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 60–65. In fact, Delitzsch’s deﬁnition closely mirrors contemporary deﬁnitions of cultural history (versus political history). Culture is here used in the sense deﬁned, for example, by Edward Tylor in 1871, as “knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” 6 Renger, this volume. 7 Herzfeld, “Hettitica,” 174, continued to speak of Delitzsch as “mein verehrter Lehrer.” In turn, Delitzsch presented Herzfeld with hundreds of photographs of Babylon and especially of Assur (“Hettitica,” 192). Since these must have included many photographs of unpublished ﬁnds, we can easily imagine that Walter Andrae— the director of the Assur excavations, who hated Herzfeld—will not have been amused.

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considered himself a true archaeologist and usually described himself as such. Thus, in 1923 he signed his important report on Persepolis, submitted to the Persian government and published in the ﬁrst volume of the journal he founded, Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran, as “Ernst Herzfeld, Professeur de l’archéologie orientale à l’université de Berlin.”8 The question remains how much, if at all, Herzfeld deviated from Delitzsch’s deﬁnition of archaeology, or whether he instead considered himself an archaeologist in exactly these terms with the important addition or diﬀerence that he (also) used material remains. This article is concerned with Herzfeld’s basic ideas about history and archaeology, the central terms and categories in his view of history, and his methodological approaches. It attempts to place Herzfeld and his writings within the intellectual environment in which he worked. Although Herzfeld was an avid, restless reader, as shown by the enormous amount of literature he cited, the principles of his thinking were inﬂuenced by a limited number of philosophers and scholars. As will be shown, the historian Eduard Meyer exercised a dominating inﬂuence on Herzfeld’s perspective on basic convictions as well as in detail, while Herzfeld’s colleagues working on the Near East played a very minor role. Meyer’s ideas about history, historical and archaeological methods, and certain historical developments, for better or worse, became guidelines of Herzfeld’s own thinking. In addition, as the central policy maker in research on the ancient Near East, Meyer became of pivotal importance to Herzfeld’s career. This article ﬁrst introduces Meyer and attempts to explain his role in German Near Eastern studies, then describes his relationship with Herzfeld. The main part of the article concerns the key concepts in Herzfeld’s philosophy and methodology and places them in context. Finally, the last part summarizes the preceding arguments and attempts to explain Herzfeld’s increased isolation in German research on the ancient Near East before World War II.

8 Herzfeld, “Rapport sur Persépolis,” 38. Because this was an oﬃcial report, his signature was included. With one other exception, Herzfeld never signed his articles for the journal, as he wrote all contributions himself (with a few late exceptions, as noted below).

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stefan r. hauser Eduard Meyer and his Role in German Near Eastern Archaeology

When Herzfeld came to Berlin in 1906, Meyer was already considered the leading ancient historian of his time.9 Born in 1855, Meyer was the precocious child of a teacher at the renowned Gymnasium Johanneum in Hamburg. He composed Latin verse at age six and was ﬂuent in Greek at twelve. On leaving the Johanneum, where he frequently lectured on problems of ancient history, he had also learned English, French, Hebrew, and Arabic. While at university he nearly skipped over the classics, instead studying at Bonn and Leipzig the history of religion, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Egyptology, and Sanskrit. His doctoral thesis on the Egyptian god Seth (1875) was followed by a year’s employment as private tutor in the house of the British consul general in Constantinople and by military service. His habilitation in Leipzig, where he learned Akkadian with Delitzsch, was achieved in spring 1879 with an investigation of the kingdom of Pontus. Meyer was appointed professor in Breslau in 1885, in Halle in 1889, and ﬁnally in Berlin in 1902. He retired in 1923 and remained in Berlin until his death on 31 August 1930, interrupted only by periods as visiting professor in Chicago (1904) and at Harvard (1909–10).10 In the United States he was greeted as “the most eminent living historian.” Meyer was a proliﬁc writer, but this assessment by the Evanston Index was based above all on Meyer’s famous Geschichte des Altertums, the last attempt by a single author to write a universal history. “It is impossible even now, a hundred years later, to read this ﬁrst volume of Ed. Meyer’s History of Antiquity

9 The literature on Meyer is extensive. For summaries of his life and work, see Karl Christ, Von Gibbon zu Rostovtzeﬀ: Leben und Werk führender Althistoriker der Neuzeit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972); Christhard Hoﬀmann, “Eduard Meyer,” in Classical Scholarship: A Biographical Encyclopedia, ed. Ward W. Briggs and William M. Calder III (New York: Garland, 1990), 264–75. Many aspects of Meyer’s life and impact are discussed in the excellent volume William M. Calder III and Alexander Demandt, eds., Eduard Meyer: Leben und Leistung eines Universalhistorikers, Mnemosyne Suppl. 112 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990). On Meyer’s education and studies, see Christhard Hoﬀmann, “Die Selbsterziehung des Historikers: Zur intellektuellen Entwicklung des jungen Eduard Meyer,” in Calder and Demandt, Eduard Meyer, 208–54. 10 Meyer became a very close friend of James Henry Breasted, founder of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago; see Mortimer Chambers, “The ‘Most Eminent Living Historian, the One Final Authority’: Meyer in America,” in Calder and Demandt, Eduard Meyer, 97–131.

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[published in 1884] without being dumbfounded by the intensity and accuracy of research. He gave ancient history its ﬁrst rigorous framework after the decipherment of hieroglyphic and cuneiform and . . . after the new wave of biblical criticism.”11 Four more volumes followed by 1902, presenting the fullest account of Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Greek history hitherto written and based on original sources in all the pertinent languages.12 Accordingly, once in Berlin, Meyer was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Science in 1903 as the representative for Oriental studies, and to the board of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft in 1905.13 When Herzfeld came to Berlin to pursue the archaeology and history of the ancient Near East, Meyer was therefore the obvious choice to serve as his Ph.D. adviser. Thus began a lifelong, intense relationship between these two scholars, in which Meyer in particular exercised a strong inﬂuence on Herzfeld’s intellectual development and career. But Meyer was inﬂuential in many other ways as well. Meyer’s appointment in Berlin to the most venerated chair of ancient history of the time, and his election to the Prussian Academy of Science, changed his academic role. For some years he continued to publish fundamental studies with astonishing speed. In 1906, he “was the ﬁrst to reconstruct the relations between Sumerians and

11 Arnaldo Momigliano, “Introduction to a Discussion of Eduard Meyer,” in A. D. Momigliano, Studies in Modern Scholarship, ed. Glen W. Bowersock and T. J. Cornell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 213. 12 During his years at Halle, Meyer also wrote two volumes on the history and historiography of ancient Greece, which Momigliano considered the best and most lasting nineteenth-century studies of these subjects. Momigliano, “Introduction,” 211. In addition, Meyer published the ﬁrst comprehensive Geschichte des alten Ägyptens (Berlin: G. Grote, 1887); and Die Entstehung des Judenthums, eine historische Untersuchung (Halle: Niemeyer, 1896), which placed the formation of postexilic Palestinian Judaism in the context of Achaemenid political and religious administration. See Fausto Parete, “Die Entstehung des Judenthums: Persien, die Achämeniden und das Judentum in der Interpretation von Eduard Meyer,” in Calder and Demandt, Eduard Meyer, 329–45. In this period Meyer also wrote important studies on slavery and ancient economy, criticizing in particular the national economist Carl Bücher’s reconstruction of developmental stages of economy. See Helmuth Schneider, “Die BücherMeyer Kontroverse,” in Calder and Demandt, Eduard Meyer, 417–45. Heinrich Marohl, Eduard Meyer: Bibliographie (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1941), lists 580 entries. 13 Christa Kirsten, ed., Die Altertumswissenschaften an der Berliner Akademie. Wahlvorschläge zur Aufnahme von Mitgliedern von F. A. Wolf bis zu G. Rodenwaldt 1799–1932, Studien zur Geschichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR Bd. 5 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1985), 126.

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Semites . . . on the basis of archaeological evidence.”14 In 1907 appeared the ﬁrst part of the completely revised ﬁrst volume of the second edition of his Geschichte des Altertums, a general assessment of history and its study in anthropological perspective. The second edition completely superseded the ﬁrst and is therefore the one that is usually cited.15 The second half of the ﬁrst volume, which appeared in 1909, presented a history of Egypt, the Near East, and Europe from the beginnings to the sixteenth century B.C. in nearly a thousand pages. Meyer nonetheless found time to publish several other more specialized and signiﬁcant studies, including one on the Jewish community at Elephantine based on the newly found Aramaic papyri from the site and the ﬁrst summary of the history of the Hittites.16 During World War I, Meyer became a fervent war supporter.17 He published pamphlets and toured the western front lecturing on

14 Momigliano, “Introduction,” 215. Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 35–36. 15 The numbering of the various editions of Meyer’s Geschichte des Altertums (often abbreviated GdA) is rather confusing. Reprinted or just slightly amended editions of the original work of 1884–1902 appeared at the same time as completely new volumes. In addition, the contents of the new volumes diﬀered completely from those of the ﬁrst edition and its (sometimes) amended reprints, all published in Stuttgart and Berlin by J. G. Cotta. Meyer did not ﬁnish rewriting his entire opus magnum. He published the new GdA Bd. 1,1: Einleitung: Anthropologie, in 1907. The standard edition is the amended third edition of 1910. GdA Bd. 1,2: Die ältesten geschichtlichen Völker und Kulturen bis zum sechzehnten Jahrhundert, appeared in 1909. The third edition of 1913 is standard. He still saw GdA Bd. 2,1: Die Zeit der ägyptischen Großmacht, 2. Auﬂ., in press in 1928, and completed the manuscript of volume 2.2. before his death; it was published in 1931. The other four volumes (3, 4.1–2, and 5) were edited by Hans Erich Stier, Meyer’s last assistant, then professor at Münster. Of these, only GdA Bd. 4,1: Das Perserreich und die Griechen. 1. Abteilung bis zum Vorabend des Peloponnesischen Krieges, is quoted here from its ﬁfth edition (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1954). Reprints of volumes 1 and 2 after World War II followed the last editions Meyer had published. 16 Eduard Meyer, Der Papyrusfund von Elephantine; Dokumente einer jüdischen Gemeinde aus der Perserzeit und das älteste erhaltene Buch der Weltliteratur (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1912). Eduard Meyer, Reich und Kultur der Chetiter (Berlin: K. Curtius, 1914) appeared one year before Bedrich Hrozn ’s decipherment of Hittite cuneiform texts and was therefore soon outdated in many respects. Meyer’s other studies included a book on the history of the Mormons, inspired by his stay in the United States. Eduard Meyer, Ursprung und Geschichte der Mormonen. Mit Exkursen über die Anfänge des Islâms und des Christentums (Halle: Niemeyer, 1912). For other studies, especially on Greek and Roman history, see Marohl, Eduard Meyer. 17 Christ, Von Gibbon zu Rostovtzeﬀ, 290; see also Bernd Sösemann, “‘Der kühnste Entschluß führt am sichersten zum Ziel’: Eduard Meyer und die Politik,” in Calder and Demandt, Eduard Meyer, 446–83; Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg, “Politik und

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diverse topics. In his “war psychosis,” to use Karl Christ’s phrase, he wrote books on England’s betrayal of European culture, the United States, the political history of those nations, and their war against Germany.18 Meyer was even one of the most outspoken supporters of unrestricted submarine war on freighters as a means of ﬁghting the British blockade.19 Together with Admiral Tirpitz, Alfred Hugenberg, and Wolfgang Kapp, he became a member of the Deutsche Vaterlandspartei in 1917.20 He was also a member of several conservative to reactionary nationalistic societies, such as the GermanFlemish Society, which supported the division of Belgium, and the German-Baltic Society, which called for German settlement of the Baltic region.21 Finally, enraged by the announcement of the conditions for peace, Meyer publicly announced that he had ripped into pieces the diplomas he had received for honorary doctorates from the universities of Oxford, St. Andrews, Liverpool, Chicago, and Harvard.22

Geschichte: Der Althistoriker Eduard Meyer im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Calder and Demandt, Eduard Meyer, on his wartime activities. 18 His book England; seine staatliche und politische Entwicklung und der Krieg gegen Deutschland (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1915) not only appeared in several German editions, but also in an English translation published in Boston in 1916: Christ, Von Gibbon zu Rostovtzeﬀ, 290 n. 10. Momigliano, “Introduction,” 220, calls Meyer’s wartime articles, pamphlets, and booklets “neither ignorant nor stupid, but still unworthy of a great historian.” Momigliano is most certainly right in assuming that Meyer’s involvement was prompted by a genuine feeling that the war called into question his beloved Prussia. Nevertheless, in his exculpatory view Momigliano seems unaware of Meyer’s manifold associations with nationalistic, right-wing groups. 19 Meyer, “Denkschrift über den U-Bootkrieg” (Berlin, 1916). 20 The Vaterlandspartei was founded in September 1917 in opposition to a peace resolution passed by a majority of the German parliament and in support of the military command and government. This nationalist party fought against peace negotiations and approved territorial annexations. 21 Gert Audring, Christhard Hoﬀmann, and Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg, Eduard Meyer – Victor Ehrenberg: Ein Briefwechsel 1914–1930 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1990), 18. Among the members of the German-Flemish Society were Gustav Stresemann, later minister of foreign aﬀairs of the Weimar Republic, and Konrad Adenauer, who became mayor of Cologne in the 1920s and chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany after World War II. 22 Chambers, “Meyer in America,” 127, reports that Meyer’s Chicago diploma was later found undamaged. According to information supplied by Professor Gert Audring, this diploma is preserved in the Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Nachlaß Meyer, Verzeichnis-Einheit 50, but it was indeed torn into pieces. Other, less important American documents survived intact. My thanks to Professor Audring for kindly bringing this information and correction to my attention.

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In this context it perhaps seems of minor importance that in January 1918 Meyer was—together with Sarre and Herzfeld, the Persian diplomats residing in Berlin, and a number of leading German industrialists—among the founding members of the German-Persian Society, which promoted economic and cultural exchange (and German inﬂuence in Persia). With the opening of the winter term in 1919, Meyer became rector of the University of Berlin, still ﬁghting lost battles against the opening of this institution to female students and the reform of school curricula ordered by the new Prussian minister for culture and his deputy, the Orientalist Carl H. Becker (1876–1933).23 Instead, Meyer opened the university to right-wing student groups that supported the coup d’état by Wolfgang Kapp in 1920.24 In the same year, Meyer retired as the university’s rector and from politics. He became professor emeritus in 1923. Meyer’s involvement with politics during World War I and the beginning of the Weimar Republic had considerably slowed his proliﬁc scholarly output. Already in 1921, however, the ﬁrst two of three volumes on the origins of Christianity appeared in print. His retirement, ﬁnally, helped Meyer devote more time to the second edition of his Geschichte des Altertums. A detailed discussion of the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Assyrian lists of kings appeared as an appendix to volume 1,2 in 1925. And in 1928, volume 2,1, on Egypt in the second millennium B.C., was published. Meyer was simultaneously working on all the other volumes, but he did not live to see the fourth book of his series published.25 He died on 31 August 1930, praised by his fellow historians as the only and last who managed to understand Oriental and Occidental history in his attempt to write universal history.26 23 Eduard Meyer, Die Aufgaben der höheren Schulen und die Gestaltung des Geschichtsunterrichts (Leipzig: J. B. Teubner, 1918). Cf. Carl H. Becker Gedanken zur Hochschulreform (Leipzig: Quelle and Meyer, 1919); Stefan R. Hauser, “Not Out of Babylon? The Development of Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Germany and Its Current Signiﬁcance,” in Proceedings of the XLV RAI: Historiography in the Cuneiform World, ed. Tzvi Abusch et al. (Bethesda, Md.: CDL Press, 2001), 211–37. 24 In a list for Kapp’s cabinet, Meyer is even named as a possible minister of culture. It is unknown whether he was aware of this fact, since his involvement with the insurgency was not reported. 25 Altogether ﬁve additional volumes covering Oriental and Greek history from the mid-second millennium down to 350 B.C. were published from Meyer’s estate between 1931 and 1939. 26 Cf. Ulrich Wilcken and Werner Jaeger, Eduard Meyer zum Gedächtnis: Zwei Reden

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Aside from his political involvement, there were several other reasons that slowed Meyer’s production of additional books on the ancient world. First, there were continually new editions of his previous publications, which he often revised. Second, Meyer had an enormous output of publications, but most of them were concerned with political matters.27 Third, we must recall the enormous amount of new information, particularly on Mesopotamian and Hittite history, which he had to consider in his history of the ancient world. Finally, of particular interest here, were Meyer’s manifold duties as academic power broker. He played an important role in the university, the Prussian Academy of Science, and the German Archaeological Institute, where he became a member of the board of the Römisch-Germanische Kommission, inaugurated in 1904, and a member of the decision-making inner circle of the institute, the Zentraldirektion, in 1908. Except for his professorship he remained at these posts until his death. In fact, these and several other positions made Meyer the key player in the development of German ancient Near Eastern studies between 1903 and 1930—a role that has not previously been understood or even recognized.

The Prussian Academy of Science As noted above, Meyer was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Science shortly after his appointment in Berlin in 1903. Together with Adolf Erman, the renowned Egyptologist, and other members of the academy, he was responsible for forming the Orientalische Kommission. After two years of lobbying, Meyer convinced Kaiser Wilhelm II (over the objections of the ministry of

von Ulrich Wilcken und Werner Jaeger (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1931). Victor Ehrenberg wrote to Meyer’s widow on 1 September 1930: “Unsere Wissenschaft hat ihren Vater verloren. . . . niemanden gibt es jetzt mehr, der, auch nur im entferntesten Abstand von ihm, sich Universalhistoriker des Altertums nennen dürfte!” Quoted in Audring, Hoﬀmann, and von Ungern-Sternberg, Meyer —Ehrenberg, Ein Briefwechsel, 132. In his critical obituary, Ehrenberg observed that Meyer was not a polyhistor of the old type, but transcended specialization through his ability to be a specialist in all ﬁelds: Victor Ehrenberg, “Eduard Meyer,” Historische Zeitschrift 143 (1931): 501–11. 27 Marohl, Eduard Meyer, lists ninety-one titles published between the outbreak of World War I and the end of 1920; sixty-nine entries concern international or educational politics. Many other entries consist of forewords or short contributions.

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ﬁnance) that it was necessary to have a permanent institute—in other words, the Oriental Commission—for the editing and publication of the thousands of important documents excavated or collected by Prussian scholars in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and Turfan. Meyer served as the commission’s chairperson from its inauguration in 1912 until his death. Academy members, it should be noted, never considered including archaeological research within the Orientalische Kommission, on the conviction that this activity should remain the domain of the Berlin Museums.28 Only long-term, limited expeditions to obtain new textual material were considered. The Orientalische Kommission and its projects became an important component of the academy’s humanities section.29

The Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft Already in 1887, spurned by Erman, Meyer heralded the idea of Prussian (not German) excavations in Mesopotamia and Babylonia.30 Nevertheless, while living in Halle he was neither a member of the Orient Comité of 1887, nor among the group discussing the founding of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, both of which were based in Berlin. After Meyer moved to the capital, he soon became a board member of the society in 1905. Following Eberhard Schrader’s death in 1908, Meyer also functioned as liaison on behalf of the Prussian Academy of Science in the Arbeitsausschuß (work committee and also the scientiﬁc advisory panel) of the society’s board.31 He immediately tried to change the society’s scientiﬁc course. Meyer became ﬁrmly opposed to the way the excavations at Assur and Babylon

28 On the problems of creating the Orientalische Kommission, see Hermann Grapow, Die Begründung der orientalischen Kommission von 1912, Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Vorträge und Schriften Heft 40 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1950). 29 Several projects were kept alive even when the Prussian Academy became the Academy of Science of the German Democratic Republic. The Assyriological projects were transferred only after the restructuring of the academy following German uniﬁcation in 1990; the editing of Turfan texts is still ongoing. 30 Olaf Matthes, James Simon: Mäzen im Wilhelminischen Zeitalter, Bürgerlichkeit, Wertewandel, Mäzenatentum Bd. 5 (Berlin: Bostelmann und Siebenhaar, 2000), 200–1. 31 Olaf Matthes, “Eduard Meyer und die deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft,” MDOG 128 (1996): 185–86.

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were conducted. His criticism was twofold: First, he pressed for ﬁnal publication of the results; and second, he criticized the handling of the excavations themselves. Since Walter Andrae (1875–1956) was trying his best to publish his excavations at Assur, Meyer’s criticism concentrated on Robert Koldewey (1855–1925) at Babylon, who was completely absorbed in unearthing new buildings and consequently slow to publish. As early as 1908, Meyer began to push for a stop to the Babylon excavations in order to begin post-excavation publication work.32 In so doing he was in agreement not only with the ministry of ﬁnance, but also with another board member, Friedrich Schmidt-Ott (1860–1956), a classmate of Kaiser Wilhelm II who was the deputy of the Ministry of Culture. The quarrel between Meyer and Koldewey escalated over the years despite all attempts at mediation by other board members. In 1913 and again in 1914, Meyer threatened to leave the board or to abstain from any discussion of Babylon matters as long as Koldewey remained in charge of excavation and publications.33 That Meyer was right in the end was demonstrated by the slow progress of the ﬁnal reports and the still very limited number of published ﬁnds.34 Even more interesting is Meyer’s harsh assessment of the excavations themselves. Already at the ﬁrst meeting of the Arbeitsausschuß he attended in August 1908, Meyer sharply criticized as unscientiﬁc the concentration on architecture in the large-scale excavations of Koldewey and his school.35 He noted a neglect of artifacts and

32

Matthes, “Meyer,” 188. Ibid., 199, 202. Meyer was not alone in his opinion of Koldewey; Matthes (p. 206), quotes negative views of Koldewey by Heinrich Schäfer and even by Koldewey’s friend Otto Puchstein, then president of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. 34 To Meyer’s intense irritation, Koldewey submitted plans in 1910 and 1912 for the continuation of ﬁeld work at Babylon until 1923 or 1927, respectively, and worked at Babylon until 1917. Ibid., 189–93. A best-selling summary of his work at Babylon is Robert Koldewey, Das wieder erstehende Babylon, 5th ed., rev. and enl., ed. Barthel Hrouda (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990). The book’s ﬁrst edition appeared in 1913, initiated and pressed for by Meyer. Except for volumes on the minor temples (1911) and the famous Ishtar Gate (1918), Koldewey never completed any other ﬁnal reports. Most of the architecture was published between 1930 and 1957 by his longstanding junior collaborator, Friedrich Wetzel (often under both names). For the Babylon publications, see the contributions by Barthel Hrouda, Claus Wilcke, and Ernie Haerinck in ibid., 386–88, 437–40. See also Johannes Renger, ed., Babylon: Focus mesopotamischer Geschichte, Wiege früher Gelehrsamkeit, Mythos in der Moderne, Colloquien der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 2 (Saarbrücken: SDV, 1999), for various contributions on new research about the site. 35 Cf. Matthes, “Eduard Meyer,” 193 n. 60. 33

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contexts and advocated the concept of working with closed deposits of ﬁnds long known in European prehistory and practiced by Flinders Petrie in his seriation studies of Egyptian pottery. In his critique of Koldewey’s (and, to a lesser degree, also of Andrae’s) methods, Meyer was largely in agreement with Herzfeld, who showed a clear interest in contexts and their exact stratigraphical position (as his documentation of burials at Assur between 1903 and 1905 demonstrates). Herzfeld criticized in print the architectural-historical approach of German (that is, the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft) excavations.36 His boldest statement came in the opening paragraphs of his unpublished handbook on the archaeology of the Near East (1933–34) 37 in which he described the society’s publications as “architecture in words and pictures” and “with a little exaggeration: the stratiﬁcation of the sites explored without their ﬁnds.”38 Whether Meyer was partly inﬂuenced (or felt corroborated) by Herzfeld’s experience at Assur and his opin-

36

Sarre and Herzfeld, Archäologische Reise, 1:111. The typescript of this handbook is now housed in the Herzfeld Archive, department of ancient Near Eastern art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. I would like to thank Prudence O. Harper and Joan Aruz who kindly permitted me to examine the papers in 1996 and 2001, and Oscar Muscarella who introduced me to the archive. The manuscript is entitled Die Kunst Vorderasiens (ausser Syrien und Kypern), for the Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft, Teil I: Die Kunst des Alten Orients. It consists of 192 pages and a complete list of 207 ﬁgures; although incomplete, it was obviously already edited. While the manuscript itself is not dated, Herzfeld mentions his work on it. Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 1. A series of articles in AMI titled “Aufsätze zur Altorientalischen Archäologie,” are studies connected with it. Why it remained unpublished is unknown. Herzfeld, “Der Tell Halaf und das Problem der hettitischen Kunst,” 121, used the past tense in referring to the manuscript he had intended for the Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft, and we may therefore conclude that in 1934 its publication was already in doubt. Herzfeld’s looming dismissal from his professorship therefore might have played a lesser role than his speciﬁc, isolated ideas about the topic and the associated polemics. 38 “Mit geringer Übertreibung: die Stratiﬁcation der untersuchten Stätten ohne ihre Funde.” Herzfeld, Handbuch, 2–3. In this introductory section Herzfeld described the state of research and criticized the unscientiﬁc approach of most excavation reports, which had mostly featured masterpieces; he then contrasted this approach with the German one. Although some of the ﬁnal reports from Babylon and Assur seem to support Herzfeld’s view, his criticism has to be judged as grossly unfair, as the ongoing construction of the Pergamon Museum prevented the unpacking and treatment of excavated artifacts. The editing of the volumes on the architecture of Babylon and Assur has to be seen as a great achievement of Walter Andrae and his collaborators. Nevertheless, the criticism is valid insofar as architecture clearly took precedence over objects and their ﬁndspots both during and after excavation. 37

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ion, or whether he was acting merely on his own scientiﬁc convictions, is hard to tell. Certainly, the continued battle over the correct method of excavation was grounded in diﬀerent interests in the archaeological record: architecture for Koldewey and historical facts for Meyer. Thus, in August 1908, Meyer proposed to augment the team of architects working in Assur and Babylon with people trained in archaeology and (physical) anthropology.39 This suggestion further fueled the hostility between Koldewey and Meyer. In 1911, at Meyer’s urging, the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft ﬁnally decided to send the historian Hugo Prinz to Assur and Babylon speciﬁcally to work on material recovered from closed deposits. After ten months at both sites Prinz, who was treated very badly by Koldewey, Andrae, and Julius Jordan (1877–1945) alike, returned to Germany in frustration.40 During his tenure on the society’s board Meyer also initiated certain research projects, such as the documentation of the rock reliefs at Bawian and Maltai in 1914, and he strongly supported the excavations at Uruk (ancient Warka).41 But both projects, undertaken by former members of the Assur excavation, ended in disappointment for Meyer. He disliked Walter Bachmann’s manuscript on the rock reliefs, and he became furious over Jordan’s work during the test excavations at Uruk. Meyer had hoped Jordan would provide evidence for the third and even fourth millennium B.C., the states of Sumer and Akkad and the development of writing. Instead, Jordan undertook important large-scale excavations of Seleucid and Arsacid temple complexes.42 Meyer never forgave Jordan, attacking him in society meetings and minutes, in the foreword to the third edition of his Geschichte des Altertums (1913), and even in his ceremonial address celebrating the society’s twenty-ﬁfth anniversary in 1923.43

39

Matthes, “Eduard Meyer,” 187. Ibid., 194. 41 Walter Bachmann, Felsreliefs in Assyrien, Bawian, Maltai und Gundük, WVDOG 52 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1927). Matthes, “Eduard Meyer,” 214, demonstrates that Meyer was extremely disappointed by Bachmann’s manuscript, which was completed in 1920. Meyer suggested that Herzfeld, who “by far knows these things [Arsacid reliefs] the best,” review the manuscript prior to publication. 42 Matthes, “Eduard Meyer,” 197–98. The Uruk excavations of 1912–13 were privately sponsored and planned as a preliminary examination of this enormous site, in order to plan future campaigns; Meyer’s annoyance is therefore understandable. 43 Eduard Meyer, “Fünfundzwanzig Jahre Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft,” MDOG 62 (1923): 11. 40

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In that address, Meyer correctly painted a dire picture of the current situation of German research in the Near East. Before World War I, the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft excavations were supported by the kaiser, public funds, private donors, and intense interest on the part of the general public. They were also greatly facilitated by the strong political and economic position that Germany held in the weakened Ottoman Empire. Following the war, the situation was entirely diﬀerent. The kaiser and other major supporters were either exiled or, like most of the public, limited in their funds because of inﬂation and economic depression.44 In addition, new states mostly controlled by France and Great Britain—Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan—emerged on the soil of the former German ally, the Ottoman Empire. Meyer’s view that German excavations in the Near East were unlikely to resume for years to come was widely shared.45 It was under these circumstances that Meyer became the savior of German ancient Near Eastern studies.

Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft Germany’s loss in World War I and the resulting economic crisis caused deep concern about the ﬁnancing of scientiﬁc research at German universities and research institutions. This issue was of the utmost importance, as in consequence of their support for the war German scholars were largely banned from international contacts.46

44

For a detailed description, see Hauser, “Not Out of Babylon?” See Stefan R. Hauser, “German Studies in the Ancient Near East and Their Relation to Political and Economic Interests from the Kaiserreich to World War II,” in Germany and the Middle East, 1871–1945, ed. Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, Princeton Papers, Interdisciplinary Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 10/11 (2004), 155–80, for a broader study of the subject. 46 The manifesto “An die Kulturwelt!” (1914) in particular disavowed German scholars. This tract, which presented the German army as the defender of European culture and promised the full support of the scholarly world, was signed by many leading scholars, including the Nobel laureates Paul Ehrlich, Fritz Haber, Max Planck, and Wilhelm Röntgen, as well as Adolf von Harnack, Theodor Wiegand and, naturally, Meyer. See Bernhard vom Brocke, “ ‘Wissenschaft und Militarismus’: Der Aufruf der 93 ‘An die Kulturwelt!’ und der Zusammenbruch der internationalen Gelehrtenrepublik im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Wilamowitz nach 50 Jahren, ed. William M. Calder III, Hellmut Flashar, and Theodor Lindken (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985), 649–719. 45

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Scientists as well as policy makers feared that they would be left behind. To provide ﬁnancial resources, the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft was founded in October 1920. Its president was Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, who was also a board member of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft.47 In 1921, the Notgemeinschaft established a system of expert committees for certain scientiﬁc ﬁelds. Meyer became chair of the Fachausschuß für alte und orientalische Philologie. The person responsible for art history and archaeology was Theodor Wiegand, former director of the prestigious excavations at Miletus, Priene, and Didyma, on the western coast of Turkey, and the well-connected son-in-law of Georg von Siemens, head of the Deutsche Bank. With the often joint eﬀorts of these three men, the Notgemeinschaft became an active promoter of German cultural policy, not least in continuing ﬁnancial support for traditional high-proﬁle projects.48 The Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, on whose board Meyer remained active, along with a large number of archaeologists, received grants for the publication of the society’s excavations and work on objects for the projected Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin.49 In his new role Meyer also channeled money to the publication of texts from Assur, Babylon, and Turfan, traditional projects of the Prussian Academy of Science’s Oriental Commission, which he still chaired.

47 As Ministerialdirektor in the Prussian Ministry of Education and Cultural Aﬀairs, Schmidt-Ott had been responsible for the development of Prussian universities between 1907 and 1917, before he himself became minister (to November 1918). 48 From early on the Notgemeinschaft was criticized for its reliance on the conservative, old guard mandarins of the prewar imperial period. According to the society’s statutes, Fachausschuß members should be elected every two years, but elections never took place. See Wolfhart Unte, “Eduard Meyer und die Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft,” in Calder and Demandt, Eduard Meyer, 527; Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 270. In 1929, the Notgemeinschaft was renamed Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and is still one of the largest and most important research foundations in the world. 49 The cornerstone for the museum was laid in 1910. After many disputes the museum ﬁnally opened in October 1930; see Nicola Crüsemann, Vom Zweistromland zum Kupfergraben: Vorgeschichte und Entstehungsjahre (1899–1918) der Vorderasiatischen Abteilung der Berliner Museen vor fach- und kulturpolitischen Hintergründen, JBerlMus N. F., Beihefte Bd. 42 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2001). The Near Eastern galleries were completed in 1936 and closed with the outbreak of World War II in 1939. The display was designed by Andrae, the former excavator of Assur, who had become director of the museum in 1928.

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Nevertheless, the only German excavations carried out in the Near East before 1928 were Herzfeld’s minor unoﬃcial (and, because of the French monopoly on excavations in Persia, illegal) Schürfungen (diggings) at Paikuli and Pasargadae in 1923.50 Not until 1926 did Germany’s international reputation allow it membership in the League of Nations. The changing political situation also seemed promising for relaunching excavations in Turkey and Iraq, together with Herzfeld’s work at Pasargadae.51 These new opportunities led SchmidtOtt, with Meyer’s encouragement, to invite Meyer, Wiegand, Gerhart Rodenwaldt (president of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut), Franz Dölger, and a number of ministry oﬃcials to discuss the future of German archaeology, particularly in the Near East. At this meeting, which took place on 10 February 1927, Meyer was the main referent and designed a plan to relaunch activities in Turkey and Iraq. As possible sites for excavation he mentioned Bo
50

Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 27, 241. See Hauser, “German Studies in the Ancient Near East,” for a more detailed account. 52 Unte, “Meyer und die Notgemeinschaft,” 522–23. 53 Although extremely successful in its results and scientiﬁcally important, only one campaign in 1928–29 was carried out due to ﬁnancial trouble. A second campaign in 1931–32, under the auspices of the Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin, was cosponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. On the excavations, see Jens Kröger, Sasanidischer Stuckdekor, BaForsch 5 (Mainz: von Zabern, 1982), 10–13. According to unpublished documents of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, money for a third campaign was granted in 1939, but the excavation fell victim to the outbreak of World War II. 54 Nevertheless, the founding of a Deutsches Archäologisches Institut branch at Istanbul, agreed on in principle by the Ministry of Foreign Aﬀairs and the institute on 19 February 1927, proved diﬃcult. Budgetary problems and reservations by Turkish politicians delayed the opening until 1929. Marchand, Down from Olympus, 51

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excavations were primarily ﬁnanced by the Notgemeinschaft and immediately led to an increased share of the budget for Oriental studies. The ﬁscal year 1928–29 saw the height of support for excavations.55 The amount plunged in 1929 in keeping with budgetary cuts for the Notgemeinschaft resulting from the general economic crisis.56 Nevertheless, “between 1928 and 1933, the Notgemeinschaft spent 51 percent of its travel and excavation fund on projects in the ﬁelds of Altertumswissenschaft and Orientalistik; these two ﬁelds thus consumed one-third of the agency’s budget for the humanities and onetenth of its funds overall.”57 Although the larger share went to classics, Mesopotamian studies were heavily subsidized. Meyer’s involvement did not end with the provision of ﬁnancial aid. In 1928, he personally managed the ﬁnancial operations of the Warka and Ctesiphon excavations. But for the ﬁeldwork itself Meyer— who had pledged to institute level-speciﬁc, careful, context-oriented excavation and a new generation of Near Eastern archaeologists— was forced to rely on members of the Koldewey school: Oskar Reuther at Ctesiphon and Julius Jordan, whom Meyer despised, at Uruk.58 This time, Jordan obeyed Meyer’s instructions and concentrated on the earlier levels. Thus, when Meyer died on 31 August 1930, he had managed—with unwavering support from Schmidt-Ott and Wiegand—to reorganize and heavily subsidize the study of Anatolian and Mesopotamian archaeology as well as the publication of pertinent texts from the older excavations. Moreover, his scholarly and personal standing as well as his expertise in historical, philological, and archaeological questions allowed him to mold ongoing research according to his personal convictions about the importance

283–84; Hauser, “German Studies in the Ancient Near East.” These diﬃculties also delayed the work at Bo
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of certain research questions. Looking at the kind of research he sponsored, however, we could agree with the assessment made by Heinrich Schäfer, director of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin: “Never forget that Meyer was for years the most ardent ﬁghter for Koldewey and Babylon, and that he is driven solely by a holy burning ﬁre for the matters of science. I know that this man never thinks about the person, as much as this is feasible.”59 For these aims he played the virtuoso with his posts in the general organization of Near Eastern research at the Notgemeinschaft, the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, and the Prussian Academy of Science.60

Ernst Herzfeld and Eduard Meyer It is unlikely that Herzfeld met Meyer before 1906. He had completed his studies at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin and his courses in Assyriology, philosophy, and art history at the FriedrichWilhelms-Universität before Meyer was appointed. In 1903, just turning twenty-four, Herzfeld became the third member of the small German team that began excavations at Assur under the auspices of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft. The director of the excavation was Walter Andrae, who was only four-and-a-half years older than Herzfeld. The third member of the team and second in command was Julius Jordan. Friends for many years, these latter two had already worked with Koldewey at Babylon for four and two years respectively and were the ﬁrst and most distinguished members of the so-called Koldewey school. Despite Meyer’s justiﬁed criticism,

59

Translated after the quote given in Matthes, “Eduard Meyer,” 206. The occasion for the quote is a letter written in 1913 to Bruno Güterbock, the longtime board member in charge of publications (Schriftführer). Gerhart Rodenwaldt, former president of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, stated: “Ganz uneigennützige und selbstlose Hilfe habe ich stets bei Wilamowitz und Ed. Meyer gefunden.” Klaus Junker, Das Archäologische Institut des Deutschen Reiches zwischen Forschung und Politik (Mainz: von Zabern, 1997), 97, for this quote. 60 This view takes issue with that of Ehrenberg, “Eduard Meyer,” 510, who stated that Meyer was no organizer of science. His argument is based on Meyer’s astoundingly small number of students, of whom only Erich F. Stier and Ulrich Kahrstedt became professors of ancient history. But Ehrenberg’s view is limited to the traditional ﬁeld of Greek and Roman ancient history, while Meyer displayed his enormous organizational talents in Near Eastern studies. Similarly, Herzfeld is never mentioned by any ancient historian in the rich literature on Meyer.

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the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft excavations at Babylon—and even more so those at Assur—revolutionized excavation methods in modern Iraq and are especially known for their comparatively meticulous documentation.61 There was certainly no better place for Herzfeld to learn how to excavate. Nevertheless, his personal relationships with Andrae and Jordan deteriorated considerably over time,62 and the ensuing unnecessary hostility can be traced in their published scholarly debates for decades to follow.63 Although it is impossible to answer, one can legitimately ask whether Herzfeld would ever have developed such a strong interest in Persia had he been friendly with the Koldewey school. On the other hand, even from the beginning Herzfeld’s interests seem to have diﬀered from those of the others. All members of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft expeditions were trained as architects. All of them shared wide interests not conﬁned to architectural problems, and all were excellent draftsmen, surveyors, and experienced traveler-researchers. Still, as much as Herzfeld was one of them in his travels, his questions and approach to his work were diﬀerent from early on. This is already indicated by his very ﬁrst article, published in 1907.64 Here the description of the ruins Herzfeld had visited in 1905 following his season at Assur was completely superseded by a discussion of ancient sources—Assyrian, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic, and Persian—on history and historical topography. In the curriculum vitae submitted for admission to his doctoral exams, Herzfeld mentioned that he had studied philosophy, art history, and Assyriology before 1903 at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität while studying architecture at the Technische Hochschule. In 1906, of course, the ﬁeld of Near Eastern archaeology was not yet established at any university in the world. But like no other place Berlin oﬀered an environment conducive to this ﬁeld of study. Among the

61 Walter Andrae, Lebenserinnerungen eines Ausgräbers (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1961), 78–79. On the Koldewey school, see Hansjörg Schmid, “Vorderasiatische Archäologie und Bauforschung,” in Fluchtpunkt Uruk, Archäologische Einheit aus methodischer Vielfalt, Schriften für Hans Jörg Nissen, ed. Hartmut Kühne et al. (Rahden: Marie Leidorf, 1999), 184–90. 62 See Gunter and Hauser, introduction to this volume. 63 See below and Herzfeld’s remarks on the publications quoted above, note 38. 64 Ernst Herzfeld, “Untersuchungen über die historische Topographie der Landschaft am Tigris, kleinen Zâb und ebel Hamrîn,” Memnon: Zeitschrift für die Kunst- und Kultur-Geschichte des alten Orients 1 (1907): 89–143, 217–38.

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faculty Herzfeld listed as his professors were the Assyriologists Friedrich Delitzsch and Hugo Winckler, the Orientalist Eduard Sachau, and the Iranist Paul Schwarz. In addition, the ancient historians Meyer and Carl Lehmann-Haupt both had a particular interest in the ancient Near East.65 It seems a logical step that on his return to Berlin in January 1906 Herzfeld wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Pasargadae with Meyer, the renowned ancient historian. Herzfeld’s dissertation marked the beginning of an intense, lifelong exchange between the two, and the inﬂuence Meyer exerted on him shows throughout Herzfeld’s work. But it set him even further apart from the Koldewey school. Although very knowledgeable and open-minded, none of those would state (as did Herzfeld) that the historical and ethnographic problems of the site of Hatra would be more interesting than its architectural archaeology.66 It was exactly along this line of argument that Herzfeld presented a research program for the historical geography of Mesopotamia in a lecture delivered on 19 July 1909, twelve days before his habilitation lecture. In the abbreviated published version, he outlined the three diﬀerent kinds of sources and the respective methods for their research. He began with literary sources, went on to explain physical geography, geology, and climate, and then concentrated on Kulturdenkmäler, or archaeological sources.67 Although Herzfeld here used “archaeology” in a limited sense, Delitzsch was certainly right to assume that Herzfeld in his 1909 application for a venia legendi really attempted a venia for cultural history in the widest sense of the term, which for Delitzsch was equivalent to archaeology. While Meyer agreed fully with Delitzsch on the absolute necessity of knowing all pertinent languages in order to comment on historical events or cultures, he was obviously assured of Herzfeld’s

65

Herzfeld’s curriculum vitae submitted for admission to take his doctoral degree, Akten der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin, Phil.Fak. 196, Bl. 16. In this document Herzfeld also mentions having studied with a number of other very prominent scholars: Georg Simmel, the important sociologist of art; the classical archaeologists Kekulé von Stradonitz and Hermann Winnefeld; the art historians Adolf Goldschmidt and Oskar Wulﬀ; and the geographer Adolf Marcuse, whose Handbuch der geographischen Ortsbestimmung für Geographen und Forschungsreisende (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg und Sohn, 1905), which had just been published, might have been of some interest to Herzfeld. 66 Ernst Herzfeld, “Hatra,” ZDMG 68 (1914): 655. 67 Herzfeld, “Die historische Geographie von Mesopotamien,” 345–49.

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language skills. Meyer became Herzfeld’s principal, most energetic, and most inﬂuential promoter. He was not only the spokesperson for the committees for Herzfeld’s doctoral and habilitation degrees in 1907 and 1909, but was also highly positive about the younger scholar’s abilities.68 While in 1911 Meyer had advocated that Herzfeld should undertake ﬁeldwork and publish, given the limited chances for a university position, he took the ﬁrst opportunity to secure Herzfeld a professorship in 1917.69 It therefore comes as a surprise that in May 1920 Meyer declared Herzfeld unsuitable for the position of full professor and head of an institute.70 Nevertheless, in July 1920, Herzfeld became the ﬁrst professor of Near Eastern archaeology in the world.71 Some of Meyer’s irritation with Herzfeld might have resulted from political diﬀerences between the two. While Meyer had been politically active in a chauvinistic manner, Herzfeld seems to have been free of this kind of sentiment. During World War I he was ﬁrst lieutenant of the baggage train during the invasion of France and received the Iron Cross.72 Afterward, he requested a transfer to the Near Eastern theater of war where he worked primarily as a surveyor in

68 Horst W. Blanke, ed., Transformationen des Historismus: Wissenschaftsorganisation und Bildungspolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg, Interpretationen und Dokumente (Waltrop: H. Spenner, 1994), 240, quotes Meyer on the subject of language study from the historian’s “Gutachten der Berliner Philosophischen Fakultät zu Breysigs Antrag auf Errichtung eines Seminars für vergleichende Geschichtsforschung,” 27 February 1909. 69 See Kröger, this volume, for Meyer’s warning in a letter to Sarre that Herzfeld tended to pile up an overload of work. 70 See Renger, this volume. 71 He became director of the Institut für Landes- und Altertumskunde des Orients (Renger, this volume). The very name has long confused Near Eastern archaeologists, as it does not signal that Herzfeld was expected to teach archaeology and cultural history in a broad sense. For this reason, Herzfeld is seldom mentioned in histories of the ﬁeld. 72 This was proudly reported by the MDOG 55, Dezember 1914, 3: “Das eiserne Kreuz haben erhalten die Herren Dr. Wetzel, Dr. Jordan, Dr. Reuther und Dr. Herzfeld, sowie unser Vorstandsmitglied Herr Professor Sarre.” Herzfeld himself was rather irritated, as he saw no achievement on his part that could possibly have qualiﬁed him. Herzfeld to Meyer, 24 October 1914. A number of letters from Herzfeld to Meyer, dating between 1908 and 1930 but mostly written during World War I, are preserved in the Archive of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Nachlaß Meyer. They were recently edited and published on the Internet by Gert Audring (http://www.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/bereiche/ag/Audring/ DFG_1.htm). The frequent correspondence well illustrates the intense exchange between the two scholars. This information arrived too late to insert further references to them in the article.

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northern Iraq.73 But already in 1915 he became increasingly critical of the war and despised its brutality and the suﬀering it inﬂicted. In his programmatic postwar article of 1919 he appears a devoted, internationalist scholar greeting the end of the war and planning for the joint international exploration of the Orient’s past.74 On questions of archaeological research and method, however, Meyer and Herzfeld remained on good terms. They agreed in their criticism of the Koldewey school, and Meyer based his planning for excavations at Ctesiphon largely on Herzfeld’s description of the ruins.75 And, in the above-mentioned meeting in February 1927, he included one of Herzfeld’s favorite projects, the description of the ancient road from Mesopotamia to Ekbatana.76 Through the Notgemeinschaft, moreover, he supported Herzfeld’s work at Pasargadae and Kuh-e Khwaja.77 Nevertheless, Meyer never followed Herzfeld’s pledge that “archaeological research of Persia will open wide horizons and give insights into questions that today require throughout a far higher interest than special studies in the classical countries and even in Egypt and Babylon.”78 On the contrary, although Herzfeld began at least as

73 Sarre and Herzfeld, Archäologische Reise, 2:205 n. 1, in which Herzfeld reports that he surveyed and drew a map in the scale of 1:20,000 of Mosul and its environment for the general staﬀ of the German army. 74 “Ich versetze mich in eine Welt, in der die Frage nach der Nationalität ebenso schamlos gelten wird, wie die nach der religiösen Konfession; in eine Welt, die von der primitiven Unethik des Nationalismus erlöst ist.” Herzfeld, “Vergangenheit und Zukunft,” 322. Already in his research program for ancient geography, he clearly expressed his dissent with the current concentration of major projects and the nationalist archaeological practice. Herzfeld “Über die historische Geographie von Mesopotamien,” 345–49. 75 Sarre and Herzfeld, Archäologische Reise, vol. 2. 76 Unte, “Meyer und die Notgemeinschaft,” 523. 77 Herzfeld was apparently on reserved but friendly terms with Schmidt-Ott, who in turn was a friend of Sarre. It was almost certainly the latter’s friendship with Leo Frobenius that brought Herzfeld to Doorn; see Kröger, this volume. I will treat on another occasion the former kaiser’s Doorner Arbeitsgemeinschaft. 78 Translated from Herzfeld’s memorandum on future archaeological work and the establishment of a German archaeological institute in Tehran, which was distributed to the most important decision makers in archaeology. Neither copy I consulted, in Washington, D.C., and Berlin, is dated. I had earlier assumed (Hauser, “Not Out of Babylon?” 211–12) that the memorandum was written late in 1926 in preparation for conferences that took place in February 1927, but I now know that the memorandum and Herzfeld’s dispatch to Persia were discussed at a meeting on 5 July 1927. It is therefore much more plausible that the memo was written in mid-1927.

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early as 1927 to inquire about German money for excavations at Persepolis, Meyer seems to have preferred to fund Uruk and Ctesiphon.

Meyer’s Inﬂuence on Key Categories in Herzfeld’s Work As we have seen, Meyer’s inﬂuence on Herzfeld’s career was considerable. His inﬂuence on Herzfeld’s scholarship was even greater. Evidence for this begins with Herzfeld’s repeated references to Meyer as the supreme authority. Herzfeld never tired of stressing the importance of Meyer’s work for the chronology of Babylonian and Assyrian history. Rarely, Herzfeld corrected Meyer in a gentle, diplomatic manner, which contrasts sharply with the often combative, disparaging way in which he criticized his fellow archaeologists. But it expresses a deep inner bond and a certain reverence Herzfeld felt for Meyer. More importantly, Herzfeld adopted Meyer’s deﬁnitions and theoretical standpoints on key, sometimes highly disputed, categories of historical and archaeological reasoning. Herzfeld never laid out his methods and theoretical approaches in a separate work. His thinking and theoretical parameters can only be extracted from scattered remarks throughout his articles. Of special importance are two articles outlining future research programs, one written on the occasion of his habilitation and another at the beginning of the Weimar Republic.79 Central ideological questions were also addressed in a report on people and cultures for the Notgemeinschaft in 1928. Furthermore, attacked by his colleagues for serious misjudgments on the dating of sculpture and pottery from the site of Tell Halaf, Herzfeld felt compelled to include in his defense some general methodological and theoretical statements.80 These statements are supplemented by remarks in many other writings. Surprisingly, although the articles in question cover a period of thirtythree years, Herzfeld’s convictions on central aspects of historical categories appear nearly unchanged. In comparison with Herzfeld, Meyer was a far more visible ﬁgure in both the scholarly and public worlds. He was one of the main 79 Herzfeld, “Die historische Geographie von Mesopotamie”; Herzfeld, “Vergangenheit und Zukunft.” 80 Herzfeld, “Völker- und Kulturzusammenhänge,” 33–67; Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte”; and Herzfeld, “Das Problem der hettitischen Kunst.”

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proponents of the conventional idea of history as a history of events (and the conditions governing them) and individuals (formed by and forming the conditions), and of a central role of the state in historical reasoning. He fervently fought against the late-nineteenthcentury ideas of history as social history or the history of developmental stages.81 Already in 1884, Meyer had opened his Geschichte des Altertums with some general assessments of anthropology and history. Prompted by theoretical debates and in an attempt to defend history against social sciences, however, he felt compelled to devote the ﬁrst volume of the second new edition in 1907 entirely to a discussion of the nature of history, its study, and its subjects.82 The volume, titled “Einleitung. Elemente der Anthropologie,” attempted to explain “the general forms of human life and human development (often also improperly called philosophy of history).”83 The book is divided into three parts describing the development of state and social organization, the intellectual development (myth, religion, philosophy, science), and the inner essence of history and historical science. This text is a unique explanation of the theoretical assumptions by a historian working largely empirically and has to be seen as an attempt to justify and substantiate Meyer’s claim to write universal history without theological foundations or transcendental perspectives.84 For Herzfeld, this book became a manual.

81 Meyer was a ﬁerce opponent of Karl Lamprecht and Kurt Breysig, both of whom attempted on diﬀerent occasions to found new institutes for cultural history and comparative historical research, respectively. Both met with strong resistance, not least from Meyer; see above, note 68. Meyer’s importance for the development of historical studies in Germany (and abroad) is therefore in no way limited to ancient history. Nevertheless, his inﬂuence on the course of historical studies declined even before his death, and afterward he was increasingly neglected. Cf. Wilfried Nippel, “Prolegomena zu Eduard Meyers Anthropologie,” in Calder and Demandt, Eduard Meyer, 311–28. See also Wilfried Nippel, “Die Kulturbedeutung der Antike, Marginalien zu Weber,” in Max Weber, der Historiker, ed. Jürgen Kocka (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Rupprecht, 1986), 112–18, who states that Max Weber depended on Meyer for his view of Greek history. 82 Nippel, “Die Kulturbedeutung der Antike.” The slightly amended edition of 1910 encompassed 252 pages. 83 Meyer, GdA 1,13, 3. 84 Cf. Nippel, “Die Kulturbedeutung der Antike,” 313, 316–17; Renate Schlesier, Kulte, Mythen und Gelehrte: Anthropologie der Antike seit 1800 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1994), 66–76.

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Deﬁnition of History Until the mid-nineteenth century, history was generally seen as following a course of evolutionary stages, or a supreme master plan. By contrast, subsequent German post-romantic historical thinking abandoned the idea of a universal plan and attempted instead to concentrate on Tatsachen (facts)—in other words, the positivist empirical concentration on existing sources. This approach found its philosophical anchor in the Neo-Kantians (Neukantianer), in particular its southwest German school that included Meyer’s contemporaries Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, who were based in Heidelberg. They contrasted history with natural sciences, stating that the aim of the latter is to ﬁnd “allgemeine Gesetzmäßigkeiten” (general laws, or “nomothetic sciences”), whereas history describes individualities, that is, reality, which is never general but always speciﬁc (“idiographic science”). While the reasoning behind this distinction between history and natural science is often considered primarily as a philosophical problem for Neo-Kantian philosophers, it is interesting (and has not previously been noted) that Meyer’s 1884 statement represents an early and prime example of this philosophy.85 He continued to clarify his point of view until his second edition of Geschichte des Altertums in 1907. For Meyer, it was central that history was the history of events. Every event transpires by chance, that is, through coincidence and thwarted causalities and through free will (of individuals or groups). In contrast to natural sciences, which aim at the abstract, typical history had to be interested in variety.86 But the quantity of possible individualities to describe creates another serious problem: how to choose among them? Meyer solved this problem, which was a central one for the Heidelberg Neo-Kantians, in that he (like they) introduced the standard of Wert (value). While every event and epoch of human evolution could be the subject of historical research, in reality these events are graded by the value attached to them by

Our modern, fragmented view of the manifold ﬁelds of research tends to blur inﬂuences between works in diﬀerent disciplines and the interrelations between philosophy, history, language studies, and archaeology. Meyer’s Geschichte des Altertums was widely read in the nineteenth century. It would be interesting to establish the place of his philosophy of history in the dialogue of contemporary Neo-Kantianism. 86 Meyer, GdA 1,13, 184–86, 190. 85

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modern historical interest, which is dominated by interest in the formation of the present. Thus value is awarded according to signiﬁcance and continued eﬃcacy.87 In this respect, Meyer’s view diﬀered from older approaches to history mainly in his explicit awareness and naming of subjectivity in research. His argument allowed him to argue in line with the current positivist historicism of scholars such as his Berlin colleague, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorﬀ, but at the same time the continued eﬃcacy enabled Meyer to reserve a special position for the ancient Greeks. Nevertheless, Meyer clearly saw the possible backlash of a valuebased selection of topics. Thus, on the one hand, he stressed the time-boundedness of historical research; on the other, he concluded that because of the limitless interdependency between events and causes, every history interested in reaching its goal had to be universalist in its scope and tendency.88 Consequently, he advocated particularist research in all kinds of individualities as pieces of the grand puzzle of history, which needed to choose from a universal perspective what value to assign to them. Thus he outlined a new scholarly argument for universal history, which had lost the unifying concepts of theology and evolution. For Herzfeld, this approach to history and archaeology became a groundline for his work. He never sought to ﬁnd laws in archaeology or history, although, following Meyer, he attempted to place the object of his study in a wide, even universal perspective. Like many German intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s, he was not only—like Meyer—aware of the time-boundedness of research, but even critical of the very existence of facts.89 He clearly stated that facts were constructs when he explained that scientiﬁc research aims to bring facts (or rather what people consider facts) into psychologically convincing contexts. For Herzfeld, facts could never be seen in their

87

Ibid., 191. “Alle Geschichte, die wirklich ihr Ziel erreichen will, muß ihrer Betrachtungsweise und Tendenz nach notwendig universalistisch sein.” Ibid., 196. 89 “Die deutende combination ist notwendig ewig wechselnd, denn sie enthält die componente der leider nicht stillstehenden gegenwart, und müßte sich auch bei gleichbleibendem stoﬀ ändern. Der stoﬀ selbst, als nur durch kritik zu erfassender, ist ebenso ewig veränderlich, auch ohne daß neuer hinzukäme.” Herzfeld, “Das Problem der hettitischen Kunst,” 123; compare Meyer, GdA 1,13, 188–89. 88

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totality; their explanation is never true or false, but only logically correct and psychologically convincing or not.90

History and Archaeology The facts that Herzfeld described as “polyhedrons of inﬁnite faces” could be gleaned either from written or material sources. As much as archaeological artifacts had contributed to bringing down the traditional worldview based on the biblical record, they gained in importance as additional or alternative sources to texts in the description of cultures.91 Increasingly, the elevation of objects (and in its wake, of archaeology and ethnology in general) made possible the exploration of cultures unaccounted for in biblical or classical texts, thus opening new avenues into the past.92 In the latter half of the nineteenth century this held true for European prehistory as much as— in consequence of European and U.S. colonization—the past cultures of the remotest parts of the globe.93 Even more than other ancient historians, Meyer made extensive use of archaeological material, or artifacts (i.e., Tatsachen), to bolster his arguments. And, even more than Meyer, Herzfeld relied on artifacts, especially works of art. “While history deals with the 90 See Herzfeld, “Das Problem der hettitischen Kunst,” 123–24, in which he seems to have been inﬂuenced by the philosopher Ernst Cassirer (himself a former student of Hermann Cohen, founder of the Marburg school of Neo-Kantians). Cassirer and Herzfeld almost certainly knew each other from the time they both were Privatdozenten in Berlin. 91 This also changed the archaeological practice in ﬁeld research. While in earlier times archaeology most often meant the hunting of treasures illustrating what was known from written sources, in their attempt to break the narrow scope of textual evidence archaeologists developed precise methods oriented toward hard science laboratories. See Adolf H. Borbein, “Klassische Archäologie in Berlin vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert,” in Berlin und die Antike: Architektur, Kunstgewerbe, Malerei, Skulptur, Theater und Wissenschaft vom 16. Jahrhundert bis heute, ed. Willmuth Arenhövel and Christa Schreiber (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1979), 138. For a short history of archaeological methods and theories, see Stefan R. Hauser, “Archäologische Methoden,” in Der Neue Pauly: Rezeptions- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte Bd. 13 (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1999), 201–16. Bruce G. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) is unsurpassed as a detailed account of archaeology’s history. 92 Suzanne L. Marchand, “The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The Case of Josef Strzygowski,” History and Theory 33 (1994): 112. 93 On the development of German archaeological research during the Kaiserreich, see Marchand, Down from Olympus; Hauser, “Not Out of Babylon?”

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historical, i.e., eﬃcacious deeds of man, archaeology deals with his [i.e., man’s] likewise eﬃcacious products in the realm of technical arts and sciences, especially the free creative fantasy, the arts.”94 For him, history and archaeology were “similar by nature, their methods naturally akin in character.” Accordingly, as with historical method, archaeological work is a tripartite process. For Herzfeld the following three steps or levels apply: I II III

History

Archaeology

critique of source and source tradition historical critique to understand the real events in their formation critique of the historical event itself evaluation of the prepared material writing of history

descriptive ascertainment of the observed establishment of a history of development presentation of the connections (i.e., the background) for the establishment of a history of development and its description from cause to eﬀect95

Herzfeld emphasized that archaeological method works with comparisons on several levels in the formation of the history of development as well as in their evaluation. Of central importance in comparisons is not the discovery of subjectively felt resemblances, but aﬃnity in character, which Herzfeld equated with style. Style, for him, was intellectual content and its form.96 Even at ﬁrst glance, Herzfeld’s model resembles Erwin Panofsky’s method of iconology, developed at about the same time. It is easy to compare Herzfeld’s “descriptive ascertaining of the observed” with Panofsky’s “pre-iconographical description” with its controlling principle of interpretation: the history of style. Herzfeld’s “establishment of a history of development” equals Panofsky’s “iconographical description” and its controlling principle of interpretation: the his-

94 “Während die geschichtswissenschaft sich mit den geschichtlichen, d.h. wirkungsvollen thaten des menschen befaßt, thut es die archaeologie mit seinen [d.h. des menschen] auch wirksamen erzeugnissen auf dem gebiet der technischen künste und wissenschaften, besonders der freien schöpferischen phantasie, der kunst.” Herzfeld, “Das Problem der hettitischen Kunst,” 124. 95 Herzfeld, “Das Problem der hettitischen Kunst,” 124. 96 Ibid., 124–25. The use of “style” by Herzfeld and other Near Eastern archaeologists and its relation to discussions in art history and classical archaeology is beyond the scope of this article; I will pursue the subject elsewhere.

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tory of types. And Herzfeld’s ﬁnal step of contextualizing the object and its meaning within processes can be compared with Panofsky’s “iconographical interpretation” of the intrinsic content. But it is highly unlikely that Herzfeld knew about Panofsky’s work. In addition neither the wording nor the exact descriptions of the three steps match.97 If Herzfeld (who does not quote anyone here) is alluding to the work of others, it might be to the sociologist Karl Mannheim and, of course, to Eduard Meyer, whose description of historical method Herzfeld used in his comparison of both methods.98

History versus Prehistory: Meyer and Kossinna on Kulturkreis As mentioned above, during the nineteenth century, material remains constantly rose in importance in ethnological and prehistorical research. Increasingly they served to deﬁne cultures no longer deﬁned as stages in human development, but as separate entities deﬁned by common material remains and supposed joint intellectual heritage. It was a short step to propose that distinctive archaeological cultures deﬁned by recurring, characteristic assemblages of artifacts were the remains of certain peoples or ethnic groups. While this idea was often but unsystematically applied to distinct archaeological cultures, Gustav Kossinna (1858–1931) made the decisive step toward a systematic approach to follow the distribution of ethnic groups via material traits. Kossinna had studied Germanic and Indo-Germanic Altertumskunde and became fascinated by the then hotly pursued topic of the original homeland of Indo-Germanic people.99 In two lectures at Kassel in 1895, Kossinna explained that in 97

Panofsky developed his model in several articles, incorporating major revisions, in the years 1930, 1932, 1939, and 1955. See Ekkehard Kaemmerling, ed., Bildende Kunst als Zeichensystem, vol. 1, Ikonographie und Ikonologie, 5th ed. (Köln: DuMont, 1991), 496–502. Compare Karl Mannheim, “Beiträge zur Theorie der Weltanschauungsinterpretation,” Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 1 (1921–22): 236–74. 98 Herzfeld, “Das Problem der hettitischen Kunst,” 119, where he explicitly quotes Meyer. 99 In current German as well as English usage, the term “Indo-Germanic” has been completely abandoned in favor of “Indo-European.” Despite its seemingly anachronistic or reactionary connotation, I have deliberately chosen to use it here because it was the term used throughout the historical debates described in these pages. To translate as Indo-European would garble the texts of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially as many participants in these discussions would not have had any interest in identifying (Indo-)Europeans.

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historical periods the distribution of distinct assemblages, which he called Kulturgebiet (culture area) would correspond with the settlement areas of people known from written sources. He deduced that if this were true in historical periods, it was also true in prehistory. His method, which he later called the “Siedlungsarchäologische Methode,” was more fully explained in 1911. It aimed to identify prehistoric people or races and consisted of a synchronic and a diachronic argument. Kossinna ﬁrst deﬁned archaeological cultures with the aid of particular artifacts. He then mapped the distribution of these artifacts and discerned discrete, contemporaneous distribution areas as diﬀerent cultures representing diﬀerent ethnic groups. The core concept reads: “At all times sharply deﬁned archaeological provinces of culture correspond with very speciﬁc peoples or races.”100 His distribution maps therefore represented settlement areas of diﬀerent ancient ethnic groups. And the aim was to identify these groups using the available information from written sources. In a second step he introduced the diachronic dimension. In contrast to the geographer Friedrich Ratzel and other diﬀusionists of the later nineteenth century, Kossinna was convinced that people and culture were largely autochthonous and rooted in the soil.101 Thus, as long as the material culture did not change considerably over time, he assumed that the same people still inhabited a certain area. Once an archaeological culture had been identiﬁed as an ethnic group it was therefore possible to follow changes in their settlement area and even possible migrations through the ages, thus transforming archaeological material into history. And this was what Kossinna really aimed for in his search for the original homeland of Indo-Germans and Germanic tribes: “Die Vorgeschichte hat ihr höchstes Ziel erreicht, wenn sie zur Geschichte wird.”102 In 1902, after years of intense lobbying and controversial debate, Kossinna became the ﬁrst professor of prehistory, or more precisely

100 Gustav Kossinna, Die Herkunft der Germanen: Zur Methode der Siedlungsarchäologie (Würzburg: Curt Kabitzsch, 1911), 3. “Scharf umgrenzte archäologische Kulturprovinzen decken sich zu allen Zeiten mit ganz bestimmten Völkern oder Volksstämmen.” [his emphasis] 101 See Klaus E. Müller, “Grundzüge des ethnologischen Historismus,” in Grundfragen der Ethnologie, ed. Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik and Justin Stagl (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1993), 197–232, esp. 202–3; Trigger, History of Archaeological Thought, 150–55. 102 Hans Gummel, Die Urgeschichtsforschung und ihre historische Entwicklung in den Kulturstaaten der Erde, vol. 1, Forschungsgeschichte in Deutschland (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1938), 320, with discussion of partly contradictory quotes from Kossinna in n. 5.

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for “Deutsche Archäologie,” in Germany.103 Two years later, at the meeting of the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte, his concept of culture areas, now called Kulturkreis— a term introduced by Leo Frobenius (1873–1938)—was adopted by ethnologists, especially Fritz Graebner (1877–1934).104 Nevertheless, Kossinna’s views were also attacked by fellow prehistorians and, not least, by Meyer, who was appointed in Berlin a year after Kossinna became professor, and who also became a member of (and lecturer at) the Prehistoric Society.105 Meyer was greatly concerned about the attempts by Kossinna and the ethnologists to transform prehistory into history. Their approach of describing the diﬀusion of material culture in prehistory as the historical migration of peoples conﬂicted with his concept of history as the history of individual events, which limited true historical reasoning to literally attested events. In Meyer’s conservative view, anthropology had to be concerned with the general course of human evolution, not with the individual.106 Meyer departed even more radically from Kossinna in his views on the development of cultures, peoples, and races. Kossinna argued that races and their cultures originated from a limited number of cultural cores. His method developed out of a search for the original homeland of the Indo-Germanic race, which he ﬁrmly placed around the Baltic Sea (in German, the Ostsee, or “Eastern Sea”). Meyer rejected Kossinna’s arguments and, focusing on linguistics, defended the idea of a Central Asian homeland for Indo-Germanic

103 To his complete disillusionment, he was appointed only as außerordentlicher Professor, and continued to receive his salary as librarian. On Kossinna’s professorship, see Hans-Jürgen Eggers, Einführung in die Vor- und Frühgeschichte (München: Piper, 1959), 214–19. 104 Leo Frobenius, “Der westafrikanische Kulturkreis,” PetMitt 43 (1897): 225–36, 262–67; 44 (1898): 193–204, 265–71; Fritz Graebner, Methode der Ethnologie (Heidelberg: Winter, 1911); see also Müller, “Grundzüge,” 204–5. Modern discussions of Kulturkreis generally forget that around 1900 ethnology and prehistory were closely interconnected both theoretically and institutionally. The Berlin society for anthropology, ethnology, and prehistory is just one example. In those years, too, the prehistory department of the Berlin Museum was part of the Ethnological Museum. 105 After many controversies with numerous other members, Kossinna ﬁnally left the ethnological society in 1909 and founded his own organization, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Vorgeschichte (renamed in 1912 the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Vorgeschichte). 106 Meyer, GdA 1,13, 184.

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language groups.107 Most importantly, however, was his diﬀerent idea about race, which Meyer dismissed as a modern concept.108 In a deliberate dispute with Kossinna, whom he never mentioned by name, Meyer explained in 1907 that the idea of permanence in human organizations, which he called “states,” is pure theory. Organization itself is eternal, while every concrete structure, that is, every materialization of the idea of organization, is constantly in a state of ﬂux.109 Among the large units of organization, Meyer listed race, linguistic stock, and ethnicity, usually regarded “as the oldest and most fundamental segmentations of mankind” and as evolving one from the other beginning with a few basic races.110 Meyer, followed by Herzfeld, strongly opposed this evolutionary concept. All races and ethnic groups constantly mix with each other and thus it is impossible to deﬁne them sharply.111 On the contrary, Meyer concluded that “in reality there are hardly any pure ethnic groups in the world, and the higher the culture, the more intense is usually the mixture. Pure-bloodedness, autochthony, shielding away of foreign inﬂuences is of so little advantage that as a rule a people is the more productive the more foreign inﬂuences it incorporated and melted into inner unity.”112

107

Meyer, GdA 2,12, 36–40. Meyer, GdA 1,13, 77. 109 Ibid., 73. 110 Ibid., 74; compare Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 24. 111 Ibid., 74, on race, and 77–78, on ethnic groups. Only gradually the idea of ethnic unity develops and ﬁnds its highest expression in the idea of nationality. This idea is usually supported by reference to joint origin and common blood, which for Meyer is a complete false argument. Ibid., 79. It is diﬃcult to understand how Meyer could clearly formulate an early version of the now widely accepted notion of the “invention of tradition,” when he himself became an ultranationalist only four years later. Compare Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 36: “Der staat ist älter als der mensch, schaﬀt erst die völker. Was er im laufe seines werdens zusammenfaßt, ist nicht eine vorher einige rasse. Auch geschichtliche rassen werden. Sie sind nicht. Dafür ist schädelform und knochenbau ganz gleichgültig. Zwischen rasse im geschichtlichen und im anthropologischen sinne ist ein tiefgehender, grundsätzlicher unterschied. Daher sind anthropologische feststellungen für geschichte meist nicht verwertbar.” 112 “In Wirklichkeit gibt es ungemischte Völker schwerlich irgendwo auf Erden, und je höher die Kultur, desto stärker ist meist die Mischung. Reinheit des Blutes, Autochthonie, Fernhaltung der fremden Einﬂüsse ist so wenig ein Vorzug, daß vielmehr in der Regel ein Volk um so leistungsfähiger ist, je mehr fremde Einwirkungen es aufgenommen und zu innerer Einheit verschmolzen hat—nur wo das nicht gelingt, ist die Mischung verderblich.” Meyer, GdA 1,13, 80. 108

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In addition, pointing to the United States where everyone speaks an Indo-Germanic language despite their individual origins, Meyer explained that language has nothing to do with physical races. This was neither to deny inherent intellectual and cultural heritage nor the inﬂuence language has on the structure of thought. On the contrary, much more than physical diﬀerences or the ever-changing races, language is important for history and culture.113 Race, language, and ethnicity produce physical and intellectual results that become part of the character of social groups and their members. The material and intellectual exchanges between diﬀerent groups have only limited inﬂuence on character and appearance, but they create a unity in their forms of life and ideas beyond the limits of race, language, or ethnicity. This abstract unity in forms of life and ideas Meyer called Kulturkreis.114 Meyer therefore engaged Kossinna, or rather reprimanded him, on all levels. While Kossinna regarded races as ﬁxed and the history of races as one of increased diversiﬁcation from a few common cores, Meyer explained race as a modern concept and the formation of larger entities of people as a late result of exchange and mix. While Kossinna searched for ethnic groups and races in stable material culture, Meyer described them as unstable units in constant ﬂux. While Kossinna saw Kulturkreis deﬁned by unity of material remains as expressions of ethnicity, Meyer used the term to designate the more abstract level of unity of ideas and forms of life. Thus, he denied the possibility of prehistory’s becoming history through the identiﬁcation of certain groups, as Kossinna proposed. 113 Ibid., 76. Meyer continued that languages in antiquity only served their means of communication while their relation was detected only in the nineteenth century. Likewise race for Meyer was a modern category. In what looks like an antiracist belief, he called theories that attach plenty of meaning to the opposition of races absurd—without mentioning speciﬁc examples. Nevertheless, in the immediately preceding sentence he described the diﬀerences in appearance, civilization, and mental structure between “Europäer und Neger” as so fundamental that this had to inﬂuence people in antiquity. After this relapse into common contemporary racism— a phenomenon fully ﬂedged only in Germanic and English tribes, as Meyer himself remarked—Meyer is on more than slippery ground with a remark on anti-Semitism added to the 1910 edition. “Die populäre Meinung, daß der Gegensatz gegen die Juden (‘Antisemitismus’) ein Rassengegensatz sei und mit der Rasse irgend etwas zu tun habe, ist vollständig irrig; er herrscht bei ihren nächsten Stammverwandten ganz ebenso wie bei den Europäern.” Victor Ehrenberg, personal memoirs, 32, quoted after Audring, Hoﬀmann, and Von Ungern Sternberg, Meyer—Ehrenberg, Ein Briefwechsel, 30, nevertheless states that Meyer “was a nationalist, but no antisemite.” 114 Meyer, GdA 1,13, 81.

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No wonder that in his most popular explanation of his method Kossinna forcefully attacked Meyer as someone with limited understanding of archaeology, linguistics, the role of races, and the fact that prehistory and history could not be divided (even less so than Orient and Occident).115 Kossinna’s small book, Die Herkunft der Germanen (1911), became a best-seller. Although shunned by many faculty colleagues at the University of Berlin, and avoided by members of the Prussian Academy of Science, Kossinna’s ideas became ever more popular.116 The special attraction was the turn from artifacts to people. His method added historical value to the new discipline of prehistory and also attracted students from abroad. His method of tracing circles of culture found its way into Anglo-American archaeology particularly via the work of Gordon Childe, although Childe later stripped it of its racist implications and ethnic attributions. In Childe’s work, changes in artifact technology and production, not ethnic groups, became the reasons for cultural change.117 Following Germany’s loss in World War I, Kossinna attempted to demonstrate through archaeological ﬁnds interpreted by his ethnic method that areas that the Treaty of Versailles required Germany to cede to Poland had been settled by Germans for millennia, and thus belonged to Germany. In an atmosphere of despair and national sentiment, his book Ursprung und Verbreitung der Germanen (1926) saw multiple editions. In this book he supplemented his “Siedlungsarchäologische Methode” with Indo-Germanic language studies and research on cranial material. His message—that even before the Neolithic period a uniﬁed Indo-Germanic race was settled around the Baltic Sea, and from which the German race of one language and culture emerged during the Neolithic period—appealed to the nationalist public. Neither these assumptions nor the equation of culture and race (or ethnicity) went unchallenged within German prehistory. Only a few scholars, even among those who used his method to identify cultural areas or just cultures, followed Kossinna’s racist

115

Kossinna, Die Herkunft der Germanen, 4–8. In 1912, Carl Schuchardt, director of the Museum for Prehistory in Berlin, was elected to the academy as its ﬁrst prehistorian; Kossinna was enraged. See Eggers, Einführung, 231. 117 Bruce G. Trigger, “Childe’s Relevance to the 1990s,” in The Archaeology of V. Gordon Childe. Contemporary Perspectives, ed. David R. Harris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 9–27. 116

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approach.118 But in the 1930s and 1940s, during the Third Reich, his method and especially its conclusions became part of oﬃcial doctrine.119 Among those who did not agree, Herzfeld was one of the most outspoken. “There is no real history without writing,” he declared in 1933, thus siding with Meyer.120 And a year later he expressed sympathy for the desire to transform archaeological material into history, but called the method of ascribing material culture to certain people mentioned in ancient texts an unprovable hypothesis. Herzfeld considered Kossinna’s method and conclusions to be problematic.121 He quoted Meyer’s statement that prehistoric research gains its value primarily in successfully attributing material culture to historically known cultures and past peoples. Herzfeld concluded that Meyer had made himself clear: Archaeologists should ﬁrst attempt to describe cultural groups and only eventually people.122

118 Cf. Karl-Heinz Jacob-Friesen, Grundfragen der Urgeschichtsforschung: Stand und Kritik der Forschung über Rassen, Völker und Kulturen in urgeschichtlicher Zeit (Hannover: Helwing, 1928); Ulrich Veit, “Ethnic Concepts in German Prehistory: a Case Study on the Relationship between Cultural Identity and Archaeological Objectivity,” in Archaeological Approaches to Cultural Identity, ed. Stephan J. Shennan (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 35–56; “However, in Menghin’s work we begin to see a replacement of the term ‘people’ by the more neutral and supposedly less dubious term ‘culture,’ a development which continued after World War II” (p. 41). See also Ulrich Veit, “Gustaf Kossinna and His Concept of a National Archaeology,” in Archaeology, Ideology and Society: The German Experience, ed. Heinrich Härke (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2000), 40–64. 119 The second edition of Gustav Kossinna, Ursprung und Verbreitung der Germanen in vor- und frühgeschichtlicher Zeit, appeared in 1934 (Leipzig: Curt Kabitzsch, 1934). “Es gehörte schon ein großer Mut dazu, wenn Ernst Wahle im Jahre 1941 in einer Heidelberger Akademie-Abhandlung »Zur ethnischen Deutung frühgeschichtlicher Kulturprovinzen« die Methode Kossinnas einer eingehenden Prüfung unterzog.” Eggers, Einführung, 237. 120 Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 1: “Wirkliche geschichte gibt es nicht ohne schrift.” cf. “Bis um oder bald nach 1000 a.Chr. der iranische zweig der Arier einwandert, bleibt Iran vorgeschichtlich. . . . Sonst kann die vorgeschichte nur dadurch in geschichte verwandelt werden, daß westliche urkunden von Iran reden” (p. 32). He also criticized as essentially wrong and always misleading the careless use of exact dates in prehistoric periods, “where there is no history” (p. 20). 121 Herzfeld, “Das Problem der hettitischen Kunst,” 140–41. This is not to be misunderstood as statement against the importance of archaeology. On the contrary, Herzfeld was convinced about the possiblilities of its cognitive faculty. Herzfeld, “Vergangenheit und Zukunft,” 314. 122 Herzfeld, “Das Problem der hettitischen Kunst,” 140.

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stefan r. hauser Herzfeld on Ethnic Interpretation

As described above, Kossinna had developed his method in a search for the Indo-Germanic homeland. Nevertheless, in the 1920s and 1930s both the underlying nineteenth-century concepts of diﬀusionism and migration, and the increased interest in ethnicity, dominated archaeological research worldwide. While the ﬁrst was the archaeological version of historical particularism, the latter gained importance with nationalist approaches within Europe. Herzfeld rejected as methodologically invalid the idea of identifying archaeological material with races or ethnic groups.123 In his often ironic to sarcastic style he complained: “Nearly everything written today about pre- and early historical epochs of ancient oriental archaeology is to the point of breaking124 burdened with and depreciated by precipitated fusion of archaeological observation with ethnic and historical conclusions. . . . People never come to peace. Even in the patriarchal air of the orient cultures have to burst, empires to tremble, countries to be attacked, and all just because of a new pot, a diﬀerent form of brick, a lappet of a gown draped over the shoulder, [or] a diﬀerently bent tip of a nose.”125 For Herzfeld, the modern fashion of assuming migrations because of change in material culture merely demonstrated inadequate thinking. In his view, migration was the exception to the rule of internal development as the reason for cultural change. To conclude that a migration had taken place, Herzfeld demanded rigorous standards. Only if two consecutive levels within a site show entirely diﬀerent material, if it can be ruled out that there is a time

123

Ibid., 141. The word brechen, which can also mean “vomiting,” was almost certainly quite deliberately chosen because of its ambiguity. 125 “Fast alles was heute über vor- und frühgeschichtliche epochen altorientalischer archaeologie geschrieben wird, ist bis zum brechen belastet und entwertet durch voreilige verquickung archaeologischer beobachtung mit ethnischen und geschichtlichen folgerungen. Gewöhnlich geschieht das schon in den ausgrabungspublicationen. Die völker kommen nie zur ruhe. Auch in der patriarchenluft des fernen ostens müssen culturen zersplittern, reiche zittern, länder überfallen werden, alles wegen eines neuen topfes, einer andren ziegelform, eines über die schulter geschlagenen gewandzipfels, einer anders gebogenen nasenspitze.” Here Herzfeld alluded to the opening lines of Goethe’s book, West-östlicher Divan: “Nord und West und Süd zersplittern,/Throne bersten, Reiche zittern,/Flüchte du, im reinen Osten/Patriarchenluft zu kosten.” Ibid., 150. 124

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gap between these levels, and if this change can be observed over a whole area, are we allowed to assume the arrival of a new culture.126 Part of the problem Herzfeld saw in the use of the term “culture” for diﬀerent phenomena: on the one hand, for assemblages based on material culture of certain levels within sites; and on the other hand, for the complex inner disposition and outer form of society. This confusion in terminology led to a false equation of the minor processes of material change with the highly complex change of organization, ideas, and beliefs accompanied by material change, especially as expressed in art.127 Herzfeld thus established a high threshold for determining cultural change. Nevertheless, migrations in the Near East were known from written sources mentioning a variety of ethnic groups, including Sumerians, Akkadians, Kassites, Assyrians, Hurrians, and others. As Herzfeld did not see a cultural change accompanying the advent of each of these groups, he regarded this as proof for his and Meyer’s theory that culture was more stable than ethnicity.128 Like Meyer, who had argued that material and intellectual exchange between diﬀerent groups created unity in their forms of life and ideas, Herzfeld considered each ethnic group only as one of several manifestations within the “long durée” of Kulturkreis.129 Even more, in the constant ﬂow of diﬀerent ethnicities, Herzfeld’s object of research complied with Meyer’s verdict on the possible usefulness of the history of peoples and cultures (in contrast to the history of certain individuals and events). While Meyer warned that the description of peoples and culture would ultimately tend to the description of stagnation, its right as historical study was secure as long as people and culture were seen as constantly changing, developing, and causing eﬀects.130 And this is what Herzfeld aimed to do. While for Kossinna (as for most archaeologists of his period) stability in material culture indicated ethnic continuity, for Herzfeld it simply indicated cultural continuity beyond the limits of ever-changing race, language, or ethnicity.

126 127 128 129 130

Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 36. Herzfeld, “Das Problem der hettitischen Kunst,” 150. Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 24, with reference to Meyer. Ibid.; compare Meyer, GdA 1,13, 73. Meyer, GdA 1,13, 196.

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stefan r. hauser Herzfeld and Indo-Germans

Herzfeld’s insistence on cultural continuity did not stop even at the most popular research topic of the 1920s and particularly of the 1930s: the Indo-Germans.131 While Meyer had been critical, Herzfeld repeatedly contested the idea of the importance of Indo-Germanic groups in the ancient Near East. On the one hand, he doubted the degree of cultural change ascribed to them. On the other hand, he argued vociferously against their close relation to Western IndoGermans, particularly ancient Germanic tribes. In particular, he insisted that language and race had little to do with one another. The Indo-Germanic language family, therefore, was no family of ethnic groups.132 He attempted to bolster his view by pointing to ﬁgural representations of Hittites, which showed no resemblance to members of the “Northern European people of Indo-German language.”133 In addition, he correctly ventured that the Indo-Germanic among the diﬀerent languages attested in texts from the site of Bo
131 Josef Wiesehöfer, “Zur Geschichte der Begriﬀe ‘Arier’ und ‘Arisch’ in der deutschen Sprachwissenschaft und Althistorie des 19. und der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in The Roots of the European Tradition, ed. Helen Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Jan W. Drijvers, AchHist 5 (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1990), 149–65; Hauser, “German Studies in the Ancient Near East.” 132 Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 27; Meyer, GdA 1,13, 76. 133 Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 28. 134 Ibid., 28–29. 135 Ibid., “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 36 n. 1.

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created an “Abteilung für den Vorderen Orient,” whose aim it was to establish the Aryan/Indo-Germanic inﬂuence on the progress of Oriental cultures.136 This was in accord with general trends in historical research in Germany. As noted earlier, while Near Eastern studies had enjoyed great support during the Kaiserreich, its importance diminished considerably during the 1920s.137 This was partly due to ﬁnancial and political problems, which at ﬁrst prevented and later limited ﬁeld research in the area. But it also coincided with an intense trend toward a new idealization of classical Greece as representing the “timeless values of humankind.” Before World War I, the scientiﬁc historicist approach and the new interest in foreign cultures had limited the inﬂuence of classical Greece on German intellectual life. In the 1920s, however, classical Greece was revived as the paradigmatic ideal for contemporary culture and character. This trend was accompanied by an increased acceptance of—or even a call for—value judgments. The return of the ideal Occident led also to the renewed denigration of the Orient. It found its clearest expression in an attack by the inﬂuential ancient historian Helmut Berve, who in 1935 branded ancient Near Eastern studies as useless because they were “dealing with alien, and therefore incomprehensible, races.” A “new demand for values,” which for Berve meant these studies had no validity, meant that the new basis for writing history had to be “völkisch” and “rassisch.”138 History had to be written from the perspective of the present and had to help illuminate German and Aryan history. In this highly ideologized approach, archaeology and ancient history became prime territory for political inﬂuence on scholarly work. In turn they gained considerable importance within Nazi ideology by supporting claims of superiority for Aryan Germans throughout history. Herzfeld set himself in opposition to these research paradigms. Instead he made jokes about, and polemized against, their importance and their protagonists.139 Since Herzfeld explicitly doubted the

136

Hauser, “German Studies in the Ancient Near East.” See ibid., for a lengthy discussion of the history of ancient Near Eastern research in Germany and its relation to economy, politics, and ideology. 138 Helmut Berve, “Zur Kulturgeschichte des Alten Orients,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 25 (1935): 229–30. 139 Ernst Herzfeld, “Spendarmat-Demeter,” AMI 3 (1931): 12, pokes fun at Hertel, who had been unaware of a study by Lammens, as Herzfeld suggested, because 137

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importance of Indo-Germanic groups, he came into opposition with the currents of research on the ancient Near East. Furthermore, he isolated himself from ongoing debates by questioning the validity of research aimed at the description of discrete ethnicities. Adhering to one of Meyer’s fundamental tenets, Herzfeld argued that races and ethnic groups, whether Indo-Germanic or not, were constantly becoming, never ﬁxed, and participated only in larger and long-lasting entities, or Kulturkreisen.

Herzfeld on Kulturkreis Herzfeld’s refusal to accept the equation of material culture with people and the explanation of migration for cultural change set him clearly apart from the archaeological (and Assyriological) mainstream of the 1920s to 1940s. And while he was the ﬁrst to introduce the term Kulturkreis to the study of the ancient Near East, his deﬁnition diﬀered markedly from those employed by European prehistorians and ethnologists. His idea of three distinct Kulturkreise discernible throughout Near Eastern history led him astray on important research questions and isolated him within ancient Near Eastern studies. He ﬁrst introduced this concept in an article for the Notgemeinschaft and subsequently elaborated it.140 Its most important formulation, however, is found in his unpublished manuscript titled “Die Kunst Vorderasiens (ausser Syrien und Kypern),” written before 1934 for the Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft. Herzfeld divided the Near East into three diﬀerent cultural circles: the Sumerian (the lowlands of Mesopotamia and Babylonia), the Elamite-Caspian (east and south of the Zagros Mountains), and the Hittite (situated mainly to the north and northwest of Mesopotamia, including Urartu and Anatolia). These three cultural circles—whose exact territorial limits changed over time—roughly coincided with speciﬁc types of geographic areas, namely, lowlands versus mountainous regions. In this respect, Herzfeld seemingly adhered in part to the anthropogeographic theory of his predecessor Carl Ritter, the famous Berlin professor of historical

“ihr Titel klingt, als läge er ‘arischer’ Forschung weltenfern.” See also Herzfeld, “Mythos und Geschichte,” 1–2. 140 Herzfeld, “Völker- und Kulturzusammenhänge,” 38–48.

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geography. Herzfeld, however, saw limitations in choice, a preselection by geographical conditions of diﬀerent cultural possibilities. In this he argued similarly to Clark Wissler in his concept of cultural areas in North America, avoiding the idea of determination of cultures by their natural environment as purported by later ecologically oriented anthropologists such as Julian Steward.141 Unfortunately, Herzfeld never gave a theoretical deﬁnition or explanation of his use of Kulturkreis. In connection with a defense of his application of Hettitischer Kulturkreis, he stressed that his cultural circle did not coincide with older or younger geographic, ethnic, political, linguistic, or religious entities. “I use this term Hittite exclusively as a modern name for an old cultural circle and its bearers, as long as I do not intend to identify them ethnically. This culture and art was carried by entirely diﬀerent people.”142 According to Herzfeld, the cultural circle existed from unknown early beginnings to the time of Alexander the Great.143 Here the cultural circle develops into a kind of living organism, coming to life, growing, living through many stages, and dying, an idea advocated by Leo Frobenius144 and also by Oswald Spengler (1880–1936).145 Their overlapping ideas about 141 See Clark Wissler, The Relation of Nature to Man in Aboriginal America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1926). It would be worthwhile to learn how deeply Childe was inﬂuenced not only by Kossinna, as is well known, but also by his other German contemporaries. For example, the idea that “cultures in their origin must have been hybrid,” which was their source of dynamism, is noted as original thinking by Childe by Michael Rowlands, “Childe and the Archaeology of Freedom,” in The Archaeology of V. Gordon Childe, 49. But it is obvious that Childe merely drew on an approach popular in Germany, to which Meyer and Herzfeld also adhered. 142 The term “hettitischer Kulturkreis” was a classic misnomer, insofar as Herzfeld always had diﬃculty in explaining that it bore no relation either to ethnic Hethiter (Hittites) or to the political entity of the Hittite Empire of the second millennium B.C. Herzfeld himself repeatedly and correctly criticized the confusion caused by the use of “Hittite” to designate the empire, the Neo-Hittite kingdoms, and the language. It would have helped him considerably not to have stubbornly insisted on using the term for his cultural circle. 143 Herzfeld, “Das Problem der hettititschen Kunst,” 137. The article was dedicated to Meyer on the occasion of his seventy-ﬁfth birthday. 144 Leo Frobenius, Paideuma—Umrisse einer Kultur- und Seelenlehre (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1921). Herzfeld probably knew Frobenius personally from his visits to former Kaiser Wilhelm in his exile at Doorn; see Kröger, this volume. Frobenius was friends with Wilhelm and the organizer of the Doorner Arbeitskreis, to which Sarre was a member. I suppose that Sarre brought Herzfeld along to these meetings of debatable scientiﬁc value. Herzfeld never quoted Frobenius and was certainly critical of his politics and later work. 145 The author of Der Untergang des Abendlandes, one of the most controversial books of the 1920s, Spengler had developed a close relationship with Meyer after the

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cultures as living organisms were compatible with Meyer’s doctrine of organizations as constantly developing, an idea grounded in the philosophy of the pre-Socratic thinker, Herakleitos. In fact, all of the above-mentioned men were close followers of Herakleitos, the most venerated Greek philosopher in Germany following his rediscovery by Nietzsche for his philosophical studies.146 Herzfeld often quoted Herakleitos and believed in his philosophy of constant change and the productivity of opposites. Herzfeld was therefore certainly open to the idea of cultures as living organisms. Nevertheless, his deﬁnition of Kulturkreis is more reserved than that of Spengler, who did not believe in signiﬁcant exchange between or among diﬀerent cultural circles. If Herzfeld was inﬂuenced on this issue by someone other than Meyer, we may suppose it was Frobenius. In contrast to Spengler, they believed in the diﬀusion, both contingent and arbitrary, of ideas between the diﬀerent cultural centers. Furthermore, they both agreed that cultural circles were independent from race or people. For Herzfeld, cultural circles consisted more than anything else of abstract ideas, speciﬁc continuous preferences situated in a speciﬁc area. But he never really managed to explain these essential principles. The Hittite cultural circle, for example, was distinguished by its predisposition to create reliefs from hard stone, which are placed into architectural contexts.147 According to Herzfeld, cultural circles expressed or manifested themselves in style, that is, in intellectual content and its form. Here he not only drew upon older archaeological concepts

latter had written a lengthy review of the book, Eduard Meyer, Spenglers Untergang des Abendlandes (Berlin: Curtius, 1925). See, on this topic, Alexander Demandt, “Eduard Meyer und Oswald Spengler: Läßt sich Geschichte vorhersagen?” in Calder and Demandt, Eduard Meyer, 159–81. At Meyer’s instigation, Spengler and Herzfeld were supposed to work on the joint project of the publication of the Museum of Oriental Art at Berlin in 1924. Anton M. Koktanek, Oswald Spengler in seiner Zeit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1968), 355–58. I am not aware that they ever met; considering the wide distribution of Spengler’s book, however, it is likely that Herzfeld had also read it. 146 On Nietzsche and Herakleitos, see Hubert Cancik, Nietzsches Antike: Vorlesung (Stuttgart/Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 1995), 75. Spengler had written his doctoral thesis on Herakleitos. Koktanek, Oswald Spengler, 69–84. Meyer devoted an entire chapter of his Geschichte des Altertums to Herakleitos (GdA 4,15, 856–65), and Herzfeld had chosen the later natural philosophers for his doctoral exam in philosophy. Most probably he was examined on Herakleitos, whom he often quoted in his articles in Greek (without telling which philosopher he cited, as he expected his readers to know). 147 Herzfeld, “Hettitica,” 140.

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of reasoning, but also—without explicit reference to it—applied the concept of Kunstwollen introduced by the art historian Alois Riegl (1858–1905), a concept that had revolutionized art history by stressing the importance of the collective idea in the creation of art (in contrast to that of the individual genius).148 Combining Meyer’s constantly developing institutions and Riegl’s collective Kunstwollen, for Herzfeld the art of a cultural circle, therefore, was “one and the same, in its diﬀerent time-, place-, and ethno-related varieties.”149 Herzfeld accordingly believed in the organic evolution of art, which could be dated through stylistical analysis. In addition, as cultural circles amassed knowledge over time, despite all variations in cultural expression and the possibility of stagnation, a certain general progress in basic cultural skills, such as writing, was inevitable. He could not believe, therefore, that the (undeciphered) “primitive” hieroglyphic script found on reliefs in northern Syria could be later than the more developed cuneiform writing.150 On the contrary, the intense exchange between Egypt, Babylonia, Elam, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor in pre- and early historical periods (with the inevitable diﬀusion of ideas) served him as an argument for the old age of hieroglyphic writing within his Hittite Kulturkreis. In turn, the existence of “primitive” hieroglyphs helped to establish the antiquity of this cultural circle itself. The description of the Hittite Kulturkreis as old and absorbing diﬀerent ethnic groups—among them some with Indo-Germanic traits—isolated Herzfeld. His scholarly standing was undermined when

148 Alois Riegl, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (Vienna: K.u.K. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1901). Furthermore, by arguing that Kunstwollen was not limited to objects of art, Riegl opened all kinds of artifacts to stylistical analysis. 149 “Diese Kunst und Kultur [eines Kulturkreises] ist von ganz verschiedenen Völkern getragen worden. Aber so wenig es eine gutaeische, kossaeische, chaldaeische Kultur und Kunst gibt, sondern nur eine sumerische Kunst der verschiedenen Epochen in jenem Gebiet . . . so gibt es keine khattische, mitannische, subaraeische, melitenische oder aramaeische Kunst, sondern nur eine hettitische Kunst der verschiedenen Epochen der verschiedenen Landschaften dieses weiten Kulturkreises.” Herzfeld, “Hettitica,” 137–38. “Denn die kunst ist eine manifestation der cultur und wird nicht völkisch bestimmt durch den zufall, der ihre einzelnen werke durch angehörige eines beliebigen, an dieser cultur teilnehmenden volkes ausführen ließ. Ein solcher sprachgebrauch gehört in die demagogie, nicht in die wissenschaft. Subaräische, mitannische, protoindogermanische, khattische, aramäische kunst kann es in diesem Kreise gar nicht geben. Die kunst ist dieselbe und eine, in ihren verschiedenen zeitlichen, örtlichen und ethnischen abwandlungen.” Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 25. 150 Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 23–24.

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he combined this idea with the (for him) most atypical prejudice: Orientalism.

Herzfeld and Orientalism Generally speaking, one of the major problems in research on the Near East was (and often still is) prejudice by Western scholars against the Orient.151 From the beginnings of research on the ancient Near East, which was supported by interest in the background of the Bible, the paradigm of Western superiority and the ideal of classical Greece had to be overcome.152 The famous statement by Theodor Nöldeke— the leading nineteenth-century scholar on Arabic and Semitic languages and history—that his studies as an Orientalist were exactly the correct way to strengthen his philhellenism, well demonstrates the problem.153 Similarly, Walter Andrae remarked that it took the classically educated Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft team members some time to become impartial and ﬁnd the right standards to judge ancient Oriental art.154 Andrae’s remark is also noteworthy in that in 1938 he had to defend his interest in the Assyrians against the allegations of uselessness, incomprehensibility, and lack of value, as decreed by Helmut Berve. As already noted, the issue of value-centered research became ever more pressing during the 1920s and 1930s. But Meyer had already observed that historical research was guided by current interests and the value that the present attaches to speciﬁc events or epochs. He therefore concluded that the history of the ancient Near East, because of its lesser inner value and its minor consequences in history, could

151 Stefan R. Hauser, “Orientalismus,” in Der Neue Pauly, 1233–43, oﬀers a general discussion of Orientalism and its inﬂuence in the study of the ancient Near East. 152 See Marchand, Down from Olympus, and especially Stefan R. Hauser, “‘Greek in Subject and Style, but a Little Distorted’: Zum Verhältnis von Orient und Okzident in der Altertumswissenschaft,” in Posthumanistische Klassische Archäologie. Historizität und Wissenschaftlichkeit von Interessen und Methoden, ed. Stefan Altekamp, Matthias Hofter, and Michael Krumme, Kolloquium Berlin 1999 (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2001), 83–104, on the enduring inﬂuence of these ideas in modern research. 153 Quoted by Carl H. Becker, Herzfeld’s friend and (in his position as Prussian minister of culture) supporter: Islamstudien I: Vom Werden und Wesen in der islamischen Welt (Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer, 1924), 517. 154 Walter Andrae, “Das wieder erstandene Assur,” MDOG 76 (1938): 3.

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never evoke the same interest as that of Greece or Rome.155 Yet Meyer, Germany’s foremost supporter of research on the ancient Near East, considered this research extremely important not only for its own sake, but also because it threw new light on the development of mankind as well as on the classical world. Berve’s verdict, by contrast, in the ﬁnal analysis precluded studies on the ancient Near East. As usual, Herzfeld followed Meyer’s approach, but this time with an important divergence, as he attached a high value to Oriental cultures. He admitted that European prehistory aroused more interest, because of its (supposed) closeness.156 But in his memorandum of 1927 he concluded that Persian archaeology has “great signiﬁcance, even compared to Babylon” because “Persia is the nodal point of the threads connecting the cultural evolution of Europe with that of south and east Asia.” And, comparing Egypt and Babylonia, he praised the former for its superior art but awarded the greater value to Babylonia, because of its enduring eﬀect on the present.157 It is astounding how little Herzfeld in his writings seems impressed by the revival of and renewed orientation on the Greek ideal, although he never questioned that Alexander’s conquest of the Achaemenid Empire marked a dramatic turning point of (cultural) history, the end of the ancient Near East and its cultural circles.158 On the contrary, he explicitly argued that hellenocentric views on art led to misjudgments about the art of the Hittite Kulturkreis.159 This attitude ﬁts well with Herzfeld’s exalted reputation within his host countries, especially Iran, where he enjoyed the friendship of many members of society and high-ranking oﬃcials, and was also the only foreign member of the Anjoman-e Athar-e Melli (Society for National Heritage).160 In Iran he promoted the end of the French monopoly

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Meyer, GdA 1,13, 193. Herzfeld, “Das Problem der hettitischen Kunst,” 140–41. 157 Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 22. 158 “There is no deeper caesura in the 5,000 years of history of the Ancient Near East than the conquest of Alexander the Great, and there is no archaeological object produced after that period that does not bear its stamp.” Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 275. 159 Herzfeld, “Hettitica,” 139. 160 See Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 283; Mousavi, this volume. See Kamyar Abdi, “Nationalism, Politics, and the Development of Archaeology in Iran,” AJA 105 (2001): 56, which also points to the intense exchange between Herzfeld and Hasan Pirnia, the most inﬂuential historian writing in Persian in the 1920s and early 1930s. 156

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on excavations and initiated and coauthored the new antiquities law. This anti-imperialist attitude was already heralded in his 1919 article on the future of research in the ancient Near East, in which he—as the ﬁrst Westerner, as far as I know—advocated the establishment of strong, self-governed departments of antiquity to control all ﬁeldwork in the newly emerging countries.161 In two basic assumptions on Near Eastern history, nevertheless, Herzfeld fell into the trap of Orientalism opened by Meyer: “Oriental stagnation” and “the uncreative Semites.” In German discourse, the idea of Oriental stagnation is rooted in the principal authors of German idealism: Hegel, Herder, and Schlegel. In their view, Western thinking was formed by historical consciousness, which aﬀords the ability to consider all things impartially based on self-awareness. They believed that this was impossible in the despotic East. Oriental thinking, therefore, was devoid of history and thus static or stagnant, without progress.162 In the essentialized discourse of Orientalism, the static, uncreative Orient became a common topos.163 Neither Meyer nor even Herzfeld managed entirely to avoid this fallacy. Indeed, on the contrary, Herzfeld twice openly expressed his deeply felt disgust at these Oriental qualities: “What makes the occupation with the Orient so unsatisfactory are these dead periods, these unbearable periods of stagnation, into which it relapses again and again.”164 The Orient’s stagnation was often ascribed to the Semites, its main ethnic group. In the nineteenth century, there was a general consensus in Western opinion that language was an important expression of—but also formative of—mind, culture, potential, and therefore character. As a result, linguistic groups necessarily shared certain other characteristics as well. Together with language, these traits served to deﬁne races, which were transtemporal, transindividual categories to which speciﬁc natures or characters were ascribed. Important to our discussion is the description of the Semitic character then current as stagnant and uncreative. Among those who shared this view were the foremost scholars of diﬀerent ﬁelds of research on whose On Herzfeld’s friendships with Prince Firouz Mirza and Mohammed Ali Foroughi, see Herzfeld, “Reisebericht,” 241, 247. 161 Herzfeld, “Vergangenheit und Zukunft,” 322. 162 Hauser, “Orientalismus.” 163 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 164 Herzfeld, “Das Problem der hettitischen Kunst,” 222. See also Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 48.

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publications Herzfeld drew: Nöldeke, for example, or the art historian Riegl, and, of course, Eduard Meyer.165 In a lengthy paragraph on the character of Semites and Indo-Germans, Meyer set out an entire arsenal of stereotypes. He praised the Semites for their matterof-fact thinking, keen observation, practical-mindedness, intuition, pride, rhetoric, and wit, but he denied them any imagination, freedom of thought, philosophical mind, and especially creativity, which, also prevented them from producing any graphic art.166 Meyer nevertheless stressed the Semitic inﬂuence on Babylonian culture. Although originally created by Sumerians in its fundamental elements—writing, religion, and art—Semites changed and contributed so much that Babylonian culture “became a mixed culture or, more to the point, the product of an historical process which encompassed diverse ethnic groups.”167 Meyer was one of the ﬁrst to formulate this longstanding creed of ancient Near Eastern studies. In this fundamental assessment Herzfeld followed suit, with minor but crucial deviations in emphasis. He considered Babylonian culture to be the product of the various talents of diﬀerent peoples, especially Sumerians and Semites, who lived alongside each other from early times.168 Despite their distinct ethnic groups and languages, however, they created a single culture and a single art: Sumerian culture. “One must not be irritated by anything in this cognition. In the long history of the Semitic peoples, there is not a single instance when they have created graphic art.”169 While Meyer

165 For Nöldeke, see Thomas Philipp, “Geschichtswissenschaft und die Geschichte des Nahen Ostens,” Saeculum 45 (1994): 168. Alois Riegl, Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Berlin: Georg Siemens, 1893), 86. 166 Meyer, GdA 1,23, 415–17. In comparison to his contemporaries Meyer was unusually positive in regard of Semites when he concluded that despite these shortcomings Semites were highly intelligent and of extreme importance in the history of mankind. 167 Ibid., 435–6. 168 Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 36–37. 169 “Es giebt also in Babylonien von anbeginn mindestens zwei volksteile, Sumerer und Semiten, daneben in geringerem umfange andere, es giebt zwei sprachen, sumerisch und akkadisch. Es ist oft erörtert worden, ob es auch eine sumerische und eine semitische cultur und kunst gab, und ob cultur und kunst sumerisch oder semitisch seien. Cultur und kunst sind, bei aller teilnahme der Semiten, sumerisch. . . . Durch nichts darf [m]an sich an dieser erkenntnis irre machen lassen. Es giebt in der langen geschichte der semitischen völker keine fälle, wo diese eine darstellende kunst geschaﬀen hätten.” Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 42–43. Nearly identical wording in Herzfeld, Handbuch, 18.

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had considered the “great art of the Akkadian period” as an exception that preceded the ensuing stagnation, Herzfeld insisted that even Akkadian art was the product of Sumerian culture, grounded in the sedentary lifestyle and organization in cities and state. In his view, this organization in its essence always remained foreign to the Semites, who never entirely lost their nomadic heritage. The inner core, the idea, of this culture, therefore, remained Sumerian even after the last Sumerians were gone. The Semites only added abstraction of older concepts.170 The art became deadened and developed no further.171 Again Herzfeld followed Meyer, for whom the low point and complete stagnation of political and intellectual life were reached in the second millennium B.C.172 Herzfeld emphasized the same for the arts and Sumerian culture in general. During the second millennium, he wrote, “Sumerian culture lives and has no eﬀect. This is the fundamental discovery for the assessment of the essence of this culture and art, and the eﬀect emanated from it, thus, its value for us: All eﬀect, which emanated from the Sumerian culture into the world, up to the present, has and can only have emanated in that very ancient time, the ﬁrst half of the IIIrd millennium.”173 This belief drove Herzfeld to make serious misjudgments with regard to a central archaeological question of his time: the date of a group of north Mesopotamian sculpture, now assigned to the early ﬁrst millennium B.C. The sculptures from Carchemish, Senjirli, and Tell Halaf fell within Herzfeld’s hettitischer Kulturkreis, and they formed prime examples for his theory that the essence of Hittite art consisted of large-scale sculptures carved from hard stone and set in rigorous architectural frameworks.174 When in 1931 Max von Oppenheim published the ﬁrst account of his already famous excavations at Tell Halaf, he included in the volume a short appendix on the date of

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Meyer, GdA 1,13, 417; Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 43–44. Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte.” 172 Meyer, GdA 1,23, 417. 173 “Seit der mitte des III. millenium liegt die führung Vorderasiens nicht mehr bei Sumer, sondern bei andren, westlicheren ländern, während des ganzen II. millenium in Ägypten und Kleinasien. Die sumerische cultur lebt und wirkt nicht mehr. Darin liegt eine grundsätzliche erkenntnis für die beurteilung des wesens dieser cultur und kunst und der von ihr ausgegangenen wirkung, damit ihres wertes für uns: alle wirkung, die von der sumerischen cultur über die welt ausgegangen ist, bis in unsere gegenwart, ist und kann nur in jener uralten zeit, der ersten hälfte des III. millenium von ihr ausgegangen sein.” Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 48. 174 Herzfeld, “Hettitica,” 140. 171

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the reliefs written by Herzfeld. For stylistic reasons, Herzfeld argued, the excavated reliefs dated to the ﬁrst half of the third millennium B.C. He considered their inscriptions, which date to the early ﬁrst millennium B.C., to be additions made during the reuse of the reliefs.175 This interpretation was widely attacked. His excellent defense against the many critical reviews showed for the last time his wit and lust in argument at its height. But it also disclosed once more the real reason for his early date for the sculptures, which none of the reviewers had detected. Because of the limited comparisons within the Hittite cultural circle, Herzfeld compared the reliefs with Babylonian art. But as Babylonian art in his view became unproductive and stagnant following the reign of Gudea (ca. 2100 B.C.), subsequent inﬂuence was thereby excluded.176 The Hittite sculptures had to date to the period when Sumerian culture was able to exercise an inﬂuence—in other words, the third millennium B.C.177 But while Herzfeld’s idea of Mesopotamian stagnation allowed him to date “old Hittite” art to an era contemporary with old Sumerian art, it likewise enabled him to assign an earlier date to his Hettitischer Kulturkreis, providing material evidence for its equality with the Sumerian cultural circle. This provided circumstantial evidence for his similarly isolated idea of the antiquity of Hittite hieroglyphs. Nevertheless, although no one objected to the underlying concept of Semitic stagnation, no one was willing to agree with Herzfeld on the date of the Tell Halaf reliefs. On the contrary, he became completely isolated in his opinion. Despite his forceful defense published in 1934, this had its eﬀect on Herzfeld, who repeatedly quoted Herakleitos for his idea of the fruitfulness of war (of ideas) and Nietzsche as witnesses for the importance of error. In particular, his own study of second-millennium glyptic material from Assyria and Babylonia made him reconsider his views. Unusually subdued, he noted only two years later that the alert reader would see that he had revised his ideas, especially concerning the art of the second millennium B.C.178 This extensive article—the ﬁrst on its subject— 175 Ernst Herzfeld, “Stilkritische Untersuchungen und Datierung der Steinbilder,” in Max von Oppenheim, Der Tell Halaf (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1931), 225–33. 176 At the time, the reign of Gudea was dated ca. 2400 B.C. See Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 2–20. 177 Herzfeld, “Das Problem der hettitischen Kunst,” 121, 149. 178 Ernst Herzfeld, “Die Kunst des zweiten Jahrtausends in Vorder-Asien, I,” AMI 8 (1936): 103 n. 1.

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was continued in the next and last volume of the Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran, which appeared in 1938. Herzfeld stated there that even before 1400 B.C. Assyrian art, although full of foreign elements, seems so mature and distinctively Assyrian that it must have existed since around 1700 B.C.179 This statement represented a total capitulation and a retraction of his earlier opinion. By this point, however, Herzfeld no longer expected a response: “Alle gemeinsamkeiten . . . möchte ich nicht wiederholen. Falls wider erwarten jemand sich die mühe geben sollte, diesen aufsatz zu lesen, müssen ihn die fortwährenden verweise, womöglich mit falschen zahlen, genug ermüdet haben.”180 Stripped of his professorship and of his excavation at Persepolis, isolated in his terminology and conclusions, he knew that in Germany, at least, no one was any longer willing to listen to him.

“Wo es sich um von Menschen gemachtes handelt, giebt es immer unzählige Gründe” 181 To summarize the preceding discussion: It is now clear how intensely Herzfeld depended on Eduard Meyer. Meyer was not only Herzfeld’s Ph.D. adviser and supporter of his habilitation, he also helped him obtain his professorship and supported his research ﬁnancially through the Notgemeinschaft. This was as important as Meyer’s enduring inﬂuence on Herzfeld’s notions of culture, peoples, Indo-Germans, and Mesopotamian history. Herzfeld embraced Meyer’s deﬁnitions of history and prehistory and made Meyer’s opinions his own, to the point where they led him to misunderstand the archaeological evidence and its cultural and historical implications. This intellectual failure, and his combative response to his critics, certainly caused him scholarly isolation. Soon afterward he was deprived ﬁrst of his directorship of the Persepolis excavations late in 1934, and shortly thereafter of his professorship in Berlin in 1935. While the ﬁrst loss might have had some connection with his German 179

Ernst Herzfeld, “Die Kunst des zweiten Jahrtausends in Vorder-Asien, II,” AMI 9 (1938): 30. 180 Ibid., 67. 181 Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 37. 182 Jack M. Balcer, “Erich Friedrich Schmidt, 13 September 1897–30 October 1964,” in Through Travellers’ Eyes: European Travellers on the Iranian Monuments, ed.

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nationality, his dismissal from the university resulted from his not being “German enough.”182 His personal and intellectual isolation began much earlier, however, and was caused by many diﬀerent factors. First, Herzfeld was a belligerent scholar. He was disliked for personal reasons by Andrae, Jordan, and others. He never had any students and only a few staﬀ members on his expeditions. Although he announced that he sought coworkers in the ﬁeld of Persian archaeology, he missed, for example, the opportunity to enlist Anton Moortgat as an associate.183 Instead, he alienated him by exaggerated, harsh criticism.184 Second, his main supporters in Germany were Meyer, Carl H. Becker (the Orientalist turned Prussian minister of culture), and Friedrich Sarre. The ﬁrst died in 1930, the same year Becker had to resign as minister. Becker died on 10 February 1933. While Herzfeld had earlier received funds for Pasargadae and Kuh-e Khwaja, after Meyer’s death the Notgemeinschaft—ﬁghting a losing battle against ﬁnancial limitations—no longer funded Herzfeld’s research, although together with the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut it continued to support his series Iranische Denkmäler. Third, Herzfeld was very close to leading members of the Persian government during the 1920s. But his longstanding friends and supporters Prince Firouz Mirza, the former ambassador to Germany and longtime court minister Teymourtash, and the minister Foroughi, were all removed from their positions in 1933–34. This left Herzfeld without backing in the government during an especially diﬃcult time for him.185 Fourth, his interest and long residence in Iran had made him a loner. Although he insisted on the importance and continued consequence of Persia, during periods of limited funds and very limited political and economic German interest in the country, he could not Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Jan W. Drijvers, AchHist 7 (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1991), 147–72; see also Dusinberre, Mousavi, and Gunter and Hauser, this volume. 183 Ernst Herzfeld, “Vorwort,” AMI 1 (1929): 1–3. 184 See Anton Moortgat, “Hellas und die Kunst der Achaemeniden,” MAOG 2, Heft 1 (1926): 1–39. Herzfeld, “Das Problem der hettitischen Kunst,” 129–32. 185 It seems not improbable that his close association with these former politicians made him vulnerable to removal from his post. This idea lends support to the thesis that Herzfeld was falsely accused of smuggling antiquities. See the discussion of this subject in the introduction to this volume.

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attract other scholars to his cause. Research in Iran gained importance only in connection with Aryan ideology during the Third Reich. The ﬁrst German archaeological institute at Isfahan, which resulted from political and ideological interest, was founded in 1938, when Herzfeld had already been forced to leave the country.186 On the other hand he had neglected his professorship in Germany and had not made any friends or built any alliances at the university that might have helped him. Fifth, Herzfeld was unable to function within the political and intellectual climate of the 1930s. Like Meyer, he explicitly argued against ethnic attributions in general and the search for Indo-Germanic traits in particular. Herzfeld’s overall concept of history and culture, which depended chieﬂy on Meyer’s work, was incompatible with racist perspectives.187 Increasingly, by opposing the two main research questions of his time, Herzfeld lost touch with contemporary research. Sixth, his use of Kulturkreis as a fundamental cultural entity was irritating. Herzfeld never clearly deﬁned his terminology. Drawn from Meyer’s and Ritter’s nineteenth-century concepts of culture, his vague deﬁnition conﬂicted with that of Kossinna and his school and of the Vienna Kulturkreislehre. His use of these terms was diﬃcult to understand, even for his German contemporaries, and all the more so outside Germany and for later generations. Nevertheless, Herzfeld had many friends and supporters in international circles, a clear result of his longstanding internationalist orientation. He spoke and wrote ﬂuently in French and English. He had no nationalist prejudice against aligning himself with the Oriental Institute after the failure of his attempts to gain German ﬁnancial support for the Persepolis excavations. His exalted international reputation is evident from his appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, together with the Nobel laureates Albert Einstein 186 Hauser, “German Studies in the Ancient Near East.” The articles by Berger and Duchesme-Guillemin in AMI 8 (1937) are certainly meant as addresses of solidarity. 187 Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 3, pokes fun at the Nazis: “In der inschrift TukultiNinurta I MVAG 1915 p. 17 n. 4 steht für diese 580 [ Jahre] abgerundet 600: wie wenn wir von ‘tausend jahren’ sprächen. So kann 580 schwerlich etwas anderes bedeuten als ‘etwas weniger als 600 jahre,’ mindestens aber den verzicht auf die errechnung der einer.” Already in the ﬁrst months of Nazi rule, this was a risky joke. Herzfeld’s description of Shabuhr II’s intolerant Zoroastrianism as paralyzing all intellectual life could also be interpreted as a reference to the political situation in Germany. Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran, 110.

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and John von Neumann, an honor not only for Herzfeld, but for the entire ﬁeld. It did not, however, help to reestablish Herzfeld’s reputation in Germany. He was genuinely disliked, either for personal or academic reasons, and most scholars will have been glad to be rid of him. Herzfeld’s isolation and condemnation in Germany did not end after World War II or his death in January 1948. The Herzfeld memorial volume that appeared in 1952 includes contributions from a wide array of German emigrants to the United States and—perhaps surprisingly, given his role in ending the French monopoly in Iran—an entire squadron of French archaeologists. Apart from Ernst Kühnel and the Arabist Adolf Grohmann, German scholars are suspiciously absent. Furthermore, today it is common opinion that Anton Moortgat in 1948 became the ﬁrst professor for Near Eastern archaeology, although Herzfeld had already been appointed in 1920. More recently, even his work in Iran has been completely misunderstood. While Herzfeld spent most of the period from 1923 to 1934 in Tehran or elsewhere in Iran, he has been reduced in a recent account to a coworker of the Isfahan station founded during the Nazi regime in 1938.188 Certainly his collecting of, and sometimes dealing in, archaeological material, and particularly the circumstances of his removal from Persepolis, must have made him suspect to colleagues.189 This added up to an emphasis on the controversial side of his scholarly output or the omission of his works.190 Moortgat’s fundamental study of the cylinder seals in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin,

188 Wolfram Kleiss, “Deutsches Archäologisches Institut,” EncIr 7 (2000): 331–33. Unfortunately this article completely garbles all historical facts (for example, in declaring Persepolis a German excavation before 1938). On the contrary, the relaunching of AMI in 1968 was explicitly intended to honor Herzfeld. See Heinz Luschey, “Einführung,” AMI N.F. 1 (1968): 7–9. In volume 12, a fairer description of Herzfeld’s relation to the institute appeared: Gerold Walser, “Zum Gedenken an Ernst Herzfeld,” AMI N.F. 12 (1979): 9–12. 189 See Kröger, Root, and Gunter and Hauser, this volume. 190 Cf. his theories on the development of stamp seals from buttons (Root, this volume) or the dating of Tell Halaf sculptures. In other cases, ideas for which he was criticized are once again accepted; see, for example, his theories on the architecture of Sasanian ﬁre temples. Dietrich Huﬀ, “Das Imamzadeh Sayyid Husain und E. Herzfelds Theorie über den sasanidischen Feuertempel,” StIr 11 (1982): 197–212. Moreover, Herzfeld repeatedly corrected his own previous publications. See, for example, “Meine Bemerkungen AMI I, p. 69 [that writing is older than seals] sind falsch.” Herzfeld, “Aufsätze zur altorientalischen Archäologie II. Stempelsiegel,” 51 n. 3. See also Herzfeld, “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte,” 29–30.

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in which he cites a few of Herzfeld’s illustrations but sidesteps his ideas, provides a good example.191 The circumstances under which these two works were produced likewise speak volumes. While Herzfeld published (in a volume ﬁnanced by his pension) three hundred of his own drawings assembled by himself over the years, Moortgat worked in cooperation with the scholarly community at Berlin and illustrated all the seals in glossy photographs. Herzfeld’s studies of Middle Assyrian seals, which represent his ﬁnal contribution to Assyrian and Babylonian archaeology, were largely superseded by two articles of Moortgat published during World War II. The only recognition of Herzfeld’s work on seals came from Edith Porada, in her article for the Herzfeld memorial volume. In this contribution she fundamentally altered the understanding of Kassite seals, although not without noting that she “had come to conclusions diﬀering from those of Ernst Herzfeld. However, had that great scholar seen the material at present available he would have been the ﬁrst to recognize its implications and to deduce from it the additions here oﬀered to his pioneer work in the ﬁeld.”192 Herzfeld’s label as pioneer today is connected with his work on early Islamic art and his prominent role in Iranian archaeology. It was tragic that Herzfeld was not allowed to enjoy the fruit of his work when he came under ﬁre from all sides. In this situation he could have certainly used the help of Meyer, that towering, inﬂuential ﬁgure in German Near Eastern studies from 1903 to his death in 1930, whose faithful pupil Herzfeld remained to the point where it led him astray. Although working hard, Herzfeld had to pay toll to dramatic developments in the many diﬀerent ﬁelds in which he had worked. Neither his concept of cultural circles nor his work on Mesopotamia was accepted, and his convictions were shaken by the new interest in races and Indo-Germans. His acknowledgment of the situation was as subtle and gentlemanly as possible. In the ﬁnal sentence of the last article he wrote for the Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran in 1938, he took up a topic close to his (and Meyer’s) heart, the transition from prehistory to history. 191

Anton Moortgat, Vorderasiatische Rollsiegel (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1940). Edith Porada, “On the Problem of Kassite Art,” in Archaeologica Orientalia in Memoriam Ernst Herzfeld, ed. George C. Miles (Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1952), 179–87. 192

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Etwa im 9. jahrhundert lebten Assyrer, wahrscheinlich als händler in Nordwest-Iran; diese gebiete hatten die babylonische schrift und rechtsgebräuche angenommen und städte und staatenbildungen entwickelt. Das ist die bedeutung der bronze tafel [the subject of this article]. Sie war bisher die erste ihrer art, aber da es solche dinge gab, werden in zukunft urkunden ans licht kommen, die den für uns vorgeschichtlichen zustand dieser länder in geschichte verwandeln werden. Ernst Herzfeld.193

Without any further remark, Herzfeld—who never signed any of his articles in the journal, as it was known that all of them were his—simply added his name after this last sentence. It was an epigraph to the journal and to Herzfeld’s cooperation with German archaeology.

193 Ernst Herzfeld, “Bronzener ‘Freibrief ’ eines Königs von Abdadana,” AMI 9 (1938): 177.

ERNST HERZFELD IN CONTEXT: GLEANINGS FROM HIS PERSONNEL FILE AND OTHER SOURCES Johannes Renger

Ernst Herzfeld’s position within the context of ancient Near Eastern studies in Germany is closely linked to the emergence of the ﬁeld at the end of the nineteenth century and its further development at the beginning of the twentieth century in Germany and in Berlin (speciﬁcally, the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, the Königlich-Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, and the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft). And it was especially the political situation following the disastrous year of 1933, with its severe repercussions for the discipline immediately afterward, that had an impact on Herzfeld, his personal fate, and his scholarly activities. The beginning of ancient Near Eastern studies in Germany is intimately connected with the name of Eberhard Schrader (1836–1908), who was the founder of the discipline in Germany.1 His seminal article concerning the decipherment of the cuneiform script, published in 1869, together with a further article in 1872, were instrumental in convincing the interested academic public that the cuneiform script could be considered to have been deciphered.2 Schrader’s great scholarly reputation led to his appointment in 1875 to the ﬁrst chair of Assyriology in Berlin. His appointment resulted from the joint eﬀorts of faculty members at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität and the Königlich-Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, and it marked the beginning of the discipline in Germany.

1 Johannes Renger, “Die Geschichte der Altorientalistik und der vorderasiatischen Archäologie in Berlin von 1875 bis 1945,” in Berlin und die Antike: Architektur, Kunstgewerbe, Malerei, Skulptur, Theater und Wissenschaft vom 16. Jahrhundert bis heute, ed. Willmuth Arenhövel and Christa Schreiber (Berlin: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut: Auslieferung Wasmuth, 1979), esp. 152–57; Johannes Renger, “Altorientalische Philologie und Geschichte,” in Der Neue Pauly-Encyclopädie der Antike: Rezeptions- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Bd. 13 (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1999), 101–13. 2 Eberhard Schrader, “Die Basis der Entziﬀerung der assyrisch-babylonischen Keilinschriften, geprüft von Eberhard Schrader,” ZDMG 23 (1869): 337–74; Eberhard Schrader, “Die assyrisch-babylonischen Keilinschriften,” ZDMG 26 (1872): 1–392.

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After this nascent stage soon followed a pioneering phase dominated by the extraordinary scholarly personality, Friedrich Delitzsch (1850–1922), whom Schrader had won over to the ﬁeld of Assyriology. After completing his habilitation in Leipzig in 1874, Delitzsch was appointed Professor Extraordinarius (equivalent to associate professor with tenure) at the same university in 1878; in 1885 he was named ordentlicher Honorarprofessor there. In 1893 he became Professor Extraordinarius, and in the same year full professor, in Breslau. In 1899 he succeeded Eberhard Schrader in Berlin, who for reasons of poor health had to resign from his position. Delitzsch’s appointment to the chair of Assyriology at the Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversität in Berlin and, simultaneously, as director of the Vorderasiatische Abteilung der Königlichen Museen in Berlin, marked the beginning of ancient Near Eastern studies in Germany in general and the formative stage of Assyriology in particular. Delitzsch was regarded as the paramount ﬁgure in the discipline at that time, not only in Germany but also elsewhere. Numerous students, especially from the United States, studied under him and earned their doctorates, ﬁrst in Leipzig and later in Berlin. His fame as the leading scholar in the ﬁeld was based on his grammatical and lexicographical erudition and the strict linguistic methodology by which he established Assyriology as an indisputable branch of Semitic philology. His extraordinary reputation made him a very inﬂuential person in the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft and in the KöniglichPreussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. His scholarly standing also led to a special relationship with Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was intrigued by the results of excavations in the Near East. The kaiser’s interest led in turn to his generous ﬁnancial support for the excavations in Babylon and Assur conducted by the Deutsche OrientGesellschaft. Delitzsch’s academic activities must be seen in the context of the general climate among the educated public and the political elite favorable to everything pertaining to matters of the ancient Near East.3 At the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Delitzsch found his equal in Eduard Meyer (1855–1930), professor of ancient history. Meyer

3

Olaf Matthes, James Simon: Mäzen im Wilhelminischen Zeitalter, Bürgerlichkeit, Wertewandel, Mäzenatentum Bd. 5 (Berlin: Bostelmann und Siebenhaar, 2000), 208, 226 f.

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represented a truly interdisciplinary approach to ancient history. In subsequent editions of the ﬁve volumes of his monumental Geschichte des Altertums, he always kept abreast of ongoing developments and scholarly achievements in Egyptology, ancient Near Eastern, and Old Testament studies.4 After chairs for Assyriology had been established in Berlin and Leipzig, professorships in Assyriology were soon established in several other German universities: Munich (Fritz Hommel); Würzburg (Maximilian Streck, later Theo Bauer); Heidelberg (Carl Bezold, later Albrecht Goetze); Marburg (Peter Jensen, later Benno Landsberger, Albrecht Goetze); Göttingen (Paul Haupt, later Adam Falkenstein, Wolfram von Soden); Breslau (Friedrich Delitzsch, later Arthur Ungnad); Königsberg (Felix Ernst Peiser). Appointments in Gießen ( Julius Lewy), Jena (Arthur Ungnad), and Münster (Friedrich Schmidtke, Albert Schott) followed later. One could speak of the spread and consolidation of academic positions. In France, Assyriology was practically restricted to the academic institutions in Paris, mirroring in a way the centralized system of the French state. In Italy, Assyriology was initially taught only in Rome. In England, the center of the discipline was London and the British Museum, which played a pioneering role in the development of the ﬁeld worldwide; later, positions were established in Oxford and Cambridge. In the United States, the preeminent centers of Assyriology at the beginning of the twentieth century were Johns Hopkins, Yale, Harvard, and Chicago.5 Consolidation, however, was not solely a matter of positions and appointments, but also meant consolidation of content, method, and vision. The rising star of this stage was Benno Landsberger (1890– 1968), who had studied with Heinrich Zimmern in Leipzig. In 1926, a few years after completing his habilitation in 1920, Landsberger was appointed Professor Extraordinarius in Leipzig.6 His enormous

4 Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 5 vols. (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1884–1902); the latest edition was published in 1954–58. 5 Svend A. Pallis, The Antiquity of Iraq: A Handbook of Assyriology (Copenhagen: E. Munksgaard, 1956); C. Wade Meade, The Road to Babylon: The Development of U.S. Assyriology (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974). 6 Johannes Renger, “Altorientalistik und jüdische Gelehrte in Deutschland–deutsche und österreichische Altorientalisten im Exil,” in Jüdische Intellektuelle und die Philologien in Deutschland, 1871–1933, ed. Wilfried Barner and Christoph König (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001), 247–61.

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international reputation—based more on oral communication than on his writings—convinced the founding members of Hebrew University’s ancient Near Eastern department to oﬀer him a professorship in Jerusalem, which he declined. Landsberger’s role became publicly visible through his inaugural lecture, “Die Eigenbegriﬄichkeit der babylonischen Welt,” delivered at the university of Leipzig in 1926.7 In addition to being grounded in an entirely new heuristic approach, the message of his lecture was to liberate Assyriology from the fetters of Old Testament studies, from a preoccupation by which concepts developed for and derived from the interpretation of the Old Testament were applied to analyze and understand the written sources from Mesopotamia. Landsberger was in a sense a cultural anthropologist. His method and aim were to reconstruct and revive a dead civilization by means of lexicon and grammar and thus to discover and describe the dominant features, structures, and processes of ancient Mesopotamian civilization. Landsberger’s grammatical and lexical studies, although based on Delitzsch’s fundamental achievements, represented a new, more complex and more sophisticated level in methodological and factual respects. A coincidence of far-reaching eﬀects was the cooperation between Landsberger and Paul Koschaker in Leipzig. Koschaker, the preeminent historian of Roman and Oriental law, came to the law school of the university in Leipzig in 1915. When, following the promulgation of the new civil law (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch), Roman law ceased after 31 December 1899 to be in force in Germany, Koschaker as a historian of Roman law discovered for himself a new ﬁeld of research: cuneiform law. He elevated the discipline of cuneiform law into the ﬁrst true subdiscipline in the realm of ancient Near Eastern studies. Accepted as such by jurists as well as by Assyriologists because of its high level of factual and methodological erudition, the discipline had shed every suspicion of an amateurish approach both in juridical as well as in Assyriological terms. The interests Landsberger and Koschaker shared, however, never led to a jointly authored

7

Benno Landsberger, “Die Eigenbegriﬄichkeit der babylonischen Welt,” Islamica 2 (1926); reprinted together with Wolfram von Soden, Leistung und Grenze sumerischer und babylonischer Wissenschaft (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1965); Benno Landsberger, The Conceptual Autonomy of the Babylonian World, trans. Thorkild Jacobsen, Benjamin Foster, and Heinrich von Siebenthal, Monographs on the ancient Near East, vol. 1, fasc. 4 (Malibu, Calif.: Undena Publications, 1976).

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article or monograph. Perhaps the reason was Landsberger’s dismissal from the university in 1935 by the Nazi authorities and his subsequent emigration to Turkey. But in the 1960s, a few years before his death in 1968, Landsberger expressed what the shared work and collaboration with Koschaker had meant to him.8 It took a long time, and a diﬀerent path, for Near Eastern archaeology to gain the status of an academic discipline and emerge as an equal to Assyriology. This was true for Germany but also for other countries engaged in substantial archaeological activities in the Near East from the mid-nineteenth century. German attempts to excavate in the Near East began in the 1880s with Robert Koldewey’s excavation in al Hibba, the site of ancient Lagash, and Felix von Luschan’s archaeological expedition to Sendçirli. The latter was sponsored by the Orient Comité, which, however, had only a limited lifespan.9 A new attempt was made late in the 1890s when, under the energetic leadership of James Simon, the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft was founded. Its foundation has to be seen in the context of the contemporary Kulturpolitik of the German Reich and especially that of the Prussian state.10 Its aim was to make the Königlich-Preussischen Museen in Berlin equal in importance to the ancient Near Eastern departments of the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London. Initiated by enthusiastic amateurs who served in the midnineteenth century as diplomatic representatives to Iraq from their respective governments, their successful excavations in Nineveh, Nimrud, and Khorsabad—the Assyrian capital cities of the ninth to seventh centuries B.C.—had brought spectacular artifacts back to France and England. Despite a number of attempts and the attention given to archaeological subjects by Delitzsch and Bruno Meissner or the archaeological activities of Hugo Winckler and Carl F. LehmannHaupt in Anatolia, ancient Near Eastern archaeology remained far from being a substantial part of the academic curriculum in Germany.11 Perhaps one reason was that the majority of German excavators were trained as architects, which was also true of Ernst Herzfeld. As such, their academic aﬃliation had to be with the architecture

8 9 10 11

In an unpublished manuscript, of which I own a copy. Renger, “Geschichte der Altorientalistik,” 159. Matthes, James Simon, 199–265, 213, and 226 f. Renger, “Geschichte der Altorientalistik,” 163 f., 173, and 186 f.

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department of a Technische Hochschule—the equivalent of an institute of technology, such as those in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Chicago—rather than with a university. The political dimension of the initiatives taken in Germany is best highlighted by a speech by Rudolf Virchow, a renowned pioneer in medical science and an inﬂuential member of the liberal faction of the Prussian house of representatives (Preussischer Landtag). In a speech delivered on 15 March 1898 before this body, he declared that the French had “. . . in Vorderasien außergewöhnliche Schätze gesammelt, die Engländer haben Assyrien explorirt. Wir haben recht wenig davon bekommen; wir haben uns lange damit begnügt, große Gypsabgüsse machen zu lassen, die in feierlicher Weise in Museen aufgestellt wurden. Es ist dies ein nicht zu unterschätzender Vorteil, aber es ist nicht zu leugnen, daß die Originale interessanter sind als die Gypsabgüsse.”12 In consequence, the Königlich-Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften sent an exploratory mission to Iraq under the direction of Eduard Sachau, professor of ancient Semitic languages in Berlin, and Robert Koldewey, the architect. The mission’s aim was to explore the possibilities and the feasibility of excavating the two major Mesopotamian capitals, Assur and Babylon.13 After their successful reconnaissance the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft acted quickly, and in 1899 Koldewey began excavations at Babylon.14 Koldewey and Walter Andrae, his assistant and soon his colleague in excavating Assur beginning in 1903, were not archaeologists in the sense that deﬁnes an archaeologist’s professional qualities today. They were trained architects. And it was this kind of professional training that put its stamp on German archaeological activities in the decades to come. It is against this background of ancient Near Eastern studies and early German archaeological activities in Mesopotamia that one has to view Herzfeld and his biography.15 Ernst Emil Herzfeld was born

12

Ibid., 159 with n. 36. Ibid., 159 f. 14 Gernot Wilhelm, “Babylon, Stadt des Marduk und Zentrum des Kosmos,” in Zwischen Tigris und Nil: 100 Jahre Ausgrabungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft in Vorderasien und Ägypten, ed. Gernot Wilhelm (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1998), 15–28. 15 See Herzfeld’s curriculum vitae in PA H. No. 16. The information in the following pages is based primarily on the ﬁles of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Berlin, regarding Herzfeld. The ﬁles are now housed in the Preussisches Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz. They consist of: (1) Philosophische 13

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on 23 July 1879 in Celle, a town in Lower Saxony near Hanover. His father was a medical doctor and Oberstabsarzt I. Klasse (lieutenant colonel in the Army Medical Corps) and Sanitätsrat in his civilian position. The various places to which Herzfeld’s father was assigned determined that he ﬁrst attended the Domgymnasium in Verden (Lower Saxony) and later the Joachimsthalsches Gymnasium in Charlottenburg (then a suburb of Berlin), both with emphasis on Greek and Latin. In 1897 he earned his high school diploma. Subsequently he began to study architecture at the Königlich Technische Hochschule in Munich and later at the Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg, or Charlottenburg Institute of Technology. During his time at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg, Herzfeld attended also courses in philosophy, art history, and Assyriology at the FriedrichWilhelms-Universität, Berlin. It is not clear from the records what motivated him to do so. On 4 June 1903 he took his ﬁnal exam in structural engineering at the Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg. Immediately afterwards he was appointed to the civil service position of Königlicher Regierungsbauführer. This qualiﬁcation led to his participation in the initial phase of Andrae’s excavation at Assur from 1 September 1903 to 1 September 1905. Immediately thereafter, until January 1906, Herzfeld traveled in western Iran, visiting the ruins of Pasargadae, and in Luristan, Khuzistan, Fars (where he visited Persepolis); and Iraq, where he studied the ruins of Samarra.16 His activities in Assur prompted him to continue his studies at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin and to matriculate there in 1906; his major subjects were ancient history and classical archaeology, and his minor subjects were Assyriology and philosophy. His professors were, among others, Reinhard Kekulé von Stradonitz, Richard Delbrück, Friedrich Delitzsch, Carl Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt, Eduard Meyer, Eduard Sachau, Georg Simmel, and Hugo Winckler.

Fakultät 196, Promotionen vom April 1907–Juni 1914, Blatt 13–23; (2) Personalakten UK PA H. No. 273, Blatt 1–182, 30. 4. 1926–19. 12. 1941 quoted henceforth as PA H. by Blatt-number (e.g., PA H. No. 1, etc.); (3) Dissertations-Gutachten E. Meyer (2 pages); (4) Philosophische Fakultät Habilitationen Littr. H., Nr. 1, Vol. 34 Nr. 1231, Blatt 1–15 Habilitation Herzfeld 31. 7. 1909; (5) Habilitations-Gutachten E. Meyer (3 pages) and F. Delitzsch (1 page); and (6) Diverse records from the Philosophische Fakultät are henceforth cited as “Akten Herzfeld” CV (= No. 16). 16 His c.v. reads “Arabia” (PA H. No. 16); in the version printed in his Ph.D. dissertation, it reads “Arabistan.” Herzfeld, “Pasargadae” 1907: 32.

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Herzfeld’s academic achievements are astounding. On 14 February 1907, he submitted his thesis entitled “Pasargadae. Aufnahmen und Untersuchungen zur altpersischen Architektur,” which was judged to be a specimen eruditionis et sagacitatis eximium (a work of extraordinary erudition and acumen).17 Meyer wrote in his report (2 February 1907): “So ungewöhnlich wie seine Laufbahn ist auch die wissenschaftliche Arbeit, die er vorlegt. Es ist nicht die Arbeit eines Anfängers, der die ersten tastenden Schritte zu selbständiger Forschung macht, sondern die eines in seinem Fach voll ausgereiften Gelehrten, der im Besitz umfassender Vorbildung, an große selbstgewählte Aufgaben herantritt und ihnen vollkommen selbständig und sicher gegenüber steht.” Herzfeld passed his oral examinations on 21 February 1907. The minutes of his orals read as follows: 1. Delitzsch: Assyr[iologie] i[m] Nebenfach: Anhand e[iner] Abschrift von den Annalen Sargons zeigte der Kandidat, daß er sich in die histor[ischen] assyr[ischen] Inschriften sehr gut eingelesen hat und die assyr[ische] Formenlehre sicher beherrscht, Sehr gut. 2. v. Kekulé: Archäologie als Hauptfach: Es wurde[n] grundsätzlich, aber nicht ausschließlich griech[ische] Bauten des 5. Jhd. besprochen, der Kandidat zeigt sich in allen Hauptfragen und Grundlagen sehr wohl unterrichtet. 3. -[Carl] Stumpf: Philosophie als Nebenfach: über die jüngeren Naturphilosophen; der Kandidat zeigte sich genügend unterrichtet. 4. -Meyer: Zur Geschichte als Hauptfach zeigte der Kandidat sehr gute Kenntnis der Hauptsachen und der Quellen der oriental[ischen] Geschichte von den Anfängen Babyloniens bis auf die Sassaniden und in den keilschriftlichen/aramäischen/arabischen Handschriften und Denkmälern. Er hat den Anforderungen sehr gut entsprochen.— magna cum laude.18 On 5 August 1907, Herzfeld received his Ph.D. diploma. Herzfeld was taught Assyrian and Babylonian as well as Arabic by Delitzsch and was well trained as an Iranist (Old Persian, Old Iranian, Pahlavi) and epigraphist. Meyer praised him for his lan-

17 Herzfeld’s thesis was published in the following year as “Pasargadae. Untersuchungen zur persischen Archäologie” (“Pasargadae” 1908). See Meyer note 1 in his Gutachten on Herzfeld’s dissertation and Philosophische Fakultät 196, Blatt 17. 18 Ibid., Blatt 18.

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guage competence: “So hat er eine viel discutierte Stelle der nur in susischer [i.e., altpersischer] Sprache erhaltenen Inschrift des Darius in Bisutun oﬀenbar richtig erklärt, ebenso den Sinn der Kyrosinschriften von Pasargadae.”19 Two years later, Meyer wrote in his Habilitations– Gutachten: “. . . ist er im Stande, das weitgestreute literarische Material, welches die griechischen und lateinischen Autoren, die assyrischen und persischen Inschriften, die arabische und persische Literatur und auch das Awesta bieten, selbständig auf Grund ausreichender sprachlicher Kenntnisse zu bewerthen und geschichtlich zu beurteilen.”20 Herzfeld’s Altpersische Inschriften, published after more than thirty years of study in 1938 by Dietrich Reimer Verlag, his publisher in Berlin, testiﬁes to these abilities. In his preface, Herzfeld remarked: “Ich bin kein philologe und sprachen sind für mich nur mittel für andere zwecke; die sprache selbst geht mich nur an, wenn ihre veränderung geschichtliche folgerungen ergeben.”21 These remarks sound like a late answer to those of Delitzsch in 1909 in his report on Herzfeld’s habilitation quoted below. Herzfeld’s habilitation took place only two years later, in 1909, while he was working in the department of Islamic art of the Königlich Preussische Museen.22 His thesis concerned Iranian rock reliefs from the Achaemenid period, but only two chapters were actually submitted to the faculty. Meyer gave the reason in his report: “Die Verantwortung dafür, daß die Vollendung des Werkes nicht abgewartet, sondern nur dieser erste Teil vorgelegt ist, trage ich [Meyer’s emphasis] persönlich. Der Grund liegt darin, daß ich im nächsten Winter nach Amerika gehen muß und daher als dann bei der Habilitation nicht würde mitwirken können. Deshalb habe ich dem Verfasser geraten, sich schon in diesem Sommer rechtzeitig zur Habilitation zu melden und nur diese beiden ersten Kapitel vorzulegen, die für die an eine Habilitationsschrift zu stellenden Anforderungen vollständig ausreichen.”23 Meyer expressed his satisfaction that previously neglected material had ﬁnally found the due attention of someone with adequate scholarly training, who was tackling the material with great competence. And, Meyer continued: “Und diese

19 20 21 22 23

Meyer, Dissertations-Gutachten, 2. Ibid., 3. Herzfeld, Altpersische Inschriften, v. Meyer, Habilitations-Gutachten, 1. Ibid., 2 n. 1.

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Eigenschaften, umfassende wissenschaftliche Schulung und große Energie der Arbeit sowohl am Schreibpult wie auf Reisen bei den Ausgrabungen, zeigt der V[erfasser] in allen seinen Arbeiten. Er sieht scharf und richtig, und ist befähigt, das Gesehene richtig zu beurtheilen und in den großen geschichtlichen und archäologischen Zusammenhang einzuordnen.”24 The other referees were Delitzsch and Wilhelm Sieglin; the latter simply put his approving signature on Meyer’s report. Delitzsch’s report on the habilitation thesis submitted to the Philosophische Fakultät consists of just one handwritten page. Delitzsch began with a statement agreeing with the positive evaluation expressed in Meyer’s report. Delitzsch had serious reservations, however, with regard to Herzfeld’s application for a venia legendi, or privilege to teach, encompassing the ﬁelds of historical geography, archaeology, and art history of the Orient, that is, for the oldest, the old, and the younger Orient (“d.h. also: des ältesten, alten und neuen Orients habilitieren zu dürfen und obendrein der Hoﬀnung Ausdruck giebt, dieses sein Forschungsgebiet allmählich noch erweitern zu können.”). His summary: “Seine unzweifelhaft hohe Begabung, Arbeitskraft und Begeisterung für den Orient haben im Verein mit gleich hohem Selbstvertrauen Herrn Herzfeld meines Erachtens die Grenzen nüchterner Erwägung überschreiten lassen.” Delitzsch continued with a lengthy and most emphatic statement opposing Herzfeld’s wish for a venia legendi for “Archäologie und Historische Geographie des Orients.”25 Der Habilitation für Archäologie der altorientalischen Völker, das heißt für Archäologie [Delitzsch’s emphasis] im gegenwärtigen Sinne und Umfang des Wortes, trete ich mit allem Nachdruck entgegen. Denn, wie ich schon in der Fakultätssitzung vom 17. d[es] M[onats] dargelegt habe, hat dieses Fach zur selbstverständlichen Voraussetzung, daß der akademische Lehrer in den Geist der betreﬀenden Völker eingedrungen ist, was aber nur durch fortgesetzte Beschäftigung mit den OriginalSchriftdenkmälern zu erreichen ist. Übersetzungen können hier gar nichts oder nur sehr wenig nützen, dagegen unabsehbaren Schaden anrichten. Wer über den Handel und Wandel, Familienrecht, Sklavenwesen, Staatsverfassung, Medizin, Sprachwissenschaft, Astronomie, Tempelkultur, usw. der Babylonier und Assyrer vortragen will, muß auf Grund eigener philologischer Studien das Gesetzbuch Hammurabis,

24

Ibid., 3. This was Herzfeld’s precise request in his application of 4 July 1909; see Philosophische Fakultät Habilitationen, Blatt 3. 25

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die riesige Kontraktliteratur, die Ritualtexte, Epen, Gebetsbücher usw. von Grund auf (innerhalb der Grenzen des Menschenmöglichen) kennen, und er muß gleichzeitig, da die babylonisch-semitische Kultur auf jener des sumerischen Volkes ruht, auch auf dem Gebiet der sumerischen Schrift, Sprache und Literatur und Religion selbständige Studien gemacht haben. . . . Nach alledem muß bis auf weiteres die Archäologie [Delitzsch’s emphasis] der altorientalischen Völker d.h. also die der Babylonier und Assyrer sowie der ihnen nahe verwandten Hebräer eine Domäne der altsemitischen Philologie, sprich der Assyriologie bleiben.

It remains unclear what these emphatic remarks and general reservations indicate with regard to Delitzsch’s personal relationship with Herzfeld. But it seems quite obvious that Delitzsch had formed for himself a rather critical view toward the way ancient Near Eastern archaeology presented itself at the time. For his inaugural lecture, Herzfeld proposed several themes: (1) “Die archäologische Entdeckung Vorderasiens,” (2) “Archäologische Beiträge zur Ethnographie Irans,” and (3) “Die Geschichte, Lage und die Ruinen von Thap Sakos.”26 Later he amended the three former themes with three new ones: (1) “Über die historische Geographie des nördlichen Mesopotamien,” (2) “Beiträge zur Ethnographie Irans mit bildlichen Darstellungen,” and (3) “Die Hellenisierung Kilikiens.”27 His public inaugural lecture took place on 31 July 1909; the title selected by the faculty was “Archäologische Beiträge zur Ethnographie Irans.”28 The lecture’s content derived from the second part of his habilitation thesis, “Reliefs der Königsgräber und die Völker und Satrapien des persischen Reiches.” The publication of his thesis took place in the following year as part of the volume, Iranische Felsreliefs, coauthored with Friedrich Sarre. Herzfeld was responsible for the sections dealing with the Achaemenid reliefs from Naqsh-i Rustam, Pasargadae, and Persepolis. The venia legendi given to Herzfeld was for “Historische Geographie und Kunstgeschichte des Orients.”29 Its deﬁnition obviously took into account the reservations Delitzsch had put forth in his report. The minutes of the faculty meeting, however, remain silent on this point.

26

Ibid., Blatt 8. Ibid., Blatt 9. 28 Ibid., Blatt 10. 29 For the recommendation by Meyer and Sieglin, see Archäologie und historische Geographie des Orients; for the recommendation by Delitzsch, see Historische Geographie und Kunstgeschichte des Orients; see the respective reports. 27

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Herzfeld’s tremendous energy and perseverance is best illustrated by his additional activities and publications in those years. In the spring of 1907, he participated in excavations at Korykos and Meriamlik in Cilicia under the direction of the Swiss archaeologist Samuel Guyer, a specialist in Byzantine archaeology.30 Herzfeld traveled with Friedrich Sarre in 1907 and 1908, the results of which were published as Archäologische Reise im Euphrat- und Tigris-Gebiet (1910– 20). His visit to Samarra in 1907 led to the excavations there from 1910 to 1913, and the publication of Erster vorläuﬁger Bericht über die Ausgrabungen in Samarra (1912). The Samarra expedition had been ﬁnanced by the Deutsche Bank and the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften.31 The results of Herzfeld’s work at Paikuli were published in 1914 as Aufnahme des sasanidischen Denkmals von Paikuli. But all this also took its toll. In 1911 Herzfeld had to leave Samarra temporarily during the ﬁrst campaign of excavations because of problems with his health.32 World War I interrupted Herzfeld’s extremely fruitful archaeological activities, extensive travels in the Near East, and resulting publications. His obligatory military training for the reserve oﬃcer corps had taken place from 1 October 1898 to 30 September 1899.33 Afterward he had the status of a reserve oﬃcer in the general staﬀ. During World War I he served ﬁrst in France, later in Poland and Lithuania, and again in France. On 2 December 1915, he was ordered to join the German military corps in Iraq (Heeresgrupe F Irak) because of his profound knowledge of the region and the hope on the part of the general staﬀ to use Herzfeld’s unpublished cartographic materials. On 25 March 1917 Herzfeld was promoted to the rank of Rittmeister (captain) and discharged as such in 1918. During his tour of duty in Iraq Herzfeld was able to travel to Iran around the beginning of 1917.34

30 The ﬁndings were published as Herzfeld and Guyer, Meriamlik und Korykos. Mietke’s contribution to this volume treats in detail Herzfeld and Guyer’s ﬁeldwork in Cilicia. 31 Friedrich Sarre, preface to Erster vorläuﬁger Bericht über die Ausgrabungen von Samarra, by Ernst Herzfeld (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1912), vi. Kröger’s contribution to this volume provides further information on the expedition and its sources of funding. 32 Ibid., vii. 33 PA H. No. 7. 34 Herzfeld, Am Tor von Asien, vii.

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The vision and eﬀorts of Meyer were instrumental in establishing ancient Near Eastern archaeology as an academic discipline at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. And it was Meyer, Herzfeld’s mentor and Doktorvater, who continued to be the primary, most energetic, and most inﬂuential promoter of Herzfeld’s academic progress and career. Herzfeld was well aware of Meyer’s sympathies toward him. He expressed his gratitude when he dedicated his Iranische Felsreliefs to Reinhard Kekulé von Stradonitz and Meyer (“in aufrichtiger Verehrung gewidmet”). At a faculty meeting in February 1915 it was decided to recommend Herzfeld to the minister of higher education for a lectureship devoted to the geography of the Near East.35 During a faculty meeting on 3 May 1917, the following ministerial decision was submitted to the members of the faculty: Der Herr Minister teilt mit, daß durch den Staatshaushalt für das Rechn[un]g[s]jahr 1917 für die hiesige Universität die Mittel für einen außerordentlichen Professor für orientalische Hilfswissenschaften bereitgestellt worden seien, und bittet eventuell die Fakultät sich darüber zu äußern, ob gegen die Übertragung dieses Extraordinariats auf den Privatdozenten Prof. Dr. E. Herzfeld Bedenken obwalten. Die Herren Penck, Tangl, Meyer, Noeck und Sachau sprechen aus sachlichen und persönlichen Gründen ihre freudige Genugtuung über diese Angelegenheit aus, über die der Dekan in diesem Sinne an den Herrn Minister berichten soll.36

Subsequently, the faculty moved the university administration and the academic senate as well as the ministry of higher education to appoint the person most suited and gifted for this position, that is Ernst Herzfeld, to the position of Professor Extraordinarius for “Orientalische Hilfswissenschaften” and as codirector of the Seminar für Historische Geographie. Herzfeld began teaching in the winter semester of 1920–21.37 According to the university records he taught the following courses: “Iran und die Kunst des Orients,” “Übungen über orientalische Altertumskunde,” “Morgenländische Altertumskunde,” and “Hethitische Altertumskunde,” the last resulting in an article.38

35

Philosophische Fakultät 1467 Anstellung von Professoren und Lektoren, Blatt 31–37. 36 Philosophische Fakultät Dekanat 1810–1945, Nr. 35, Sitzungsberichte Bd. 12, Nov. 1915–Okt. 1920, Protokoll der Fakultäts-Sitzung vom 3.5. 1917, 42R. 37 Renger, “Geschichte der Altorientalistik,” 186. 38 Herzfeld, “Das Problem der hettitischen Kunst,” 111–223.

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It is noticeable that in neither faculty meeting was Delitzsch mentioned among the faculty members supporting the respective moves and motions. One wonders whether this might indicate his reservations about the establishment of ancient Near Eastern archaeology as an academic discipline in general (and at the Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversität in particular) as well as some reservations speciﬁcally concerning Herzfeld himself. In 1919 Herzfeld became director of section A (Orient and classical antiquity) of the seminar for historical geography. On 6 July 1920 he was promoted to full professor and director of the Institut für Landes- und Altertumskunde des Orients.39 Thus was established the ﬁrst professorship for Near Eastern archaeology in Germany. The professorship, however, was personal; that is, for the time being the position was connected with Herzfeld himself. One might mention that—most likely on the initiative of Bruno Meissner, Delitzsch’s successor—after qualifying as university lecturer in 1924, Eckhard Unger was appointed as nichtbeamteter außerordentlicher Professor on 13 May 1930. Beginning with the winter semester of 1937–38, he served as beamteter außerordentlicher Professor (equivalent to associate professor with tenure).40 Herzfeld’s service at the university was, however, marred by his unruly personality. He obviously was not really born for academic teaching. According to the minutes of a faculty meeting on 20 May 1920, Meyer stated that Herzfeld was in no way suited for the position of full professor (“sich Herzfeld in keiner Weise für ein Ordinariat eigne”).41 Much later, Charles R. Morey observed that Herzfeld “was the perfect type of research scholar.”42 Whenever possible Herzfeld was drawn to travel and work in the Orient. From 1922 onward he was more or less permanently excused from his teaching duties on account of his travels and research in Iran. Despite the fact that courses were occasionally announced, they were always subsequently cancelled. A three-year furlough from university duties was granted for the reason that he would work for the archaeological interests

39

Philosophische Fakultät 1469, Blatt 69; Renger, “Geschichte der Altorientalistik,”

186. 40

Renger, “Geschichte der Altorientalistik,” 187. Philosophische Fakultät Dekanat 1810–1945, 295R. 42 C. R. Morey, “Ernst Herzfeld 1879–1948,” in Archaeologica Orientalia: In Memoriam Ernst Herzfeld, ed. George C. Miles (Locust Valley, N.Y.: J. J. Augustin, 1952), 3. 41

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of the German Reich, for which he was attached to the German embassy in Tehran. In 1931 Herzfeld began working in Persepolis under the sponsorship of the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago. Herzfeld’s association with the Oriental Institute as ﬁeld director of the Persepolis and Marv Dasht expedition lasted from 1931 until 1934, when it ended under tenuous circumstances. Herzfeld was dismissed by the Oriental Institute from his position as ﬁeld director. At the same time, obviously on the demand of the Iranian authorities, his diplomatic Kurierpass (in today’s terms a Dienstpass, which carries lesser privileges than a full diplomatic passport which entails diplomatic immunity) was rescinded. Eventually he had to leave Iran permanently. The reasons behind this were accusations by the Iranian authorities that Herzfeld had attempted to smuggle antiquities out of Iran. These accusations apparently revolved around two instances. First, he was charged with having placed a piece of a sculptured relief from the right wing of the Apadana staircase into the luggage of the Swedish crown prince (later King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden) who had been visiting the excavation site at Persepolis. Quite obviously, the visit has resulted in the fact that in 1936 the Swedish government bestowed upon Herzfeld the Swedish Order of Scholarly Merit.43 Second, Herzfeld reportedly tried to take other antiquities out of the country as part of his personal luggage when leaving Iran in 1933 and 1934, an allegation he strongly denied in a conﬁdential memorandum to the director of the Oriental Institute.44 The entire aﬀair is reﬂected in a number of letters exchanged between Herzfeld and the director of the Oriental Institute45 and in a defamatory and denunciatory report to the German authorities written by his onetime associate, Alexander Langsdorﬀ.46 Langsdorﬀ ’s report and

43 See also below, p. 576, with note 51, and Karin Ådahl, “A Fragment from Persepolis,” Medelhavsmuseet Bulletin 13 (1978): 56–59. 44 Jack M. Balcer, “Erich Friedrich Schmidt, 13 September 1897–3 October 1964,” in Through Travellers’ Eyes: European Travellers on the Iranian Monuments, ed. Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Jan Willem Drijvers, AchHist 7 (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1991), esp. 164. 45 Balcer, “Erich Friedrich Schmidt,” 164–67. 46 See Ahmad Mahrad, “Intrigen während der NS-Zeit gegen deutsche Orientalisten jüdischen Glaubens,” in Hannoversche Studien über den Mittleren Osten 28 (1999): 31–38. I have not yet been able to gain access to the Langsdorﬀ report itself. The article by Mahrad, in which the Langsdorﬀ report is extensively quoted, should be read with some caution. Mahrad is clearly unaware of the many aspects of Herzfeld’s

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Herzfeld’s disgraceful termination of his activities in Iran has not left any trace in his university personnel ﬁle and had obviously no eﬀect on Herzfeld’s relations with the university and the Reichs- und Preussische Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung. The entire aﬀair certainly has to be seen, however, in context with his acumen for acquiring, assembling, and collecting antiquities during his years in Iran. Herzfeld’s furlough was again extended until the beginning of the academic year 1933–34 and again until the beginning of the academic year 1936–37.47 The chronicle of the Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversität states for the period 1932–1935 that, because Herzfeld was on leave for more than twelve years, during this entire time the Seminar für Landes- und Altertumskunde des Orients was used only for some classes taught by the acting director, Albert Hermann.48 On account of the racial legislation of the Nazi regime—Rassegesetze, i.e., the Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums, enacted 4 April 1933—Herzfeld was dismissed from active duty at the university at the age of ﬁfty-ﬁve: “in den Ruhestand versetzt” (i.e., forced into early retirement), eﬀective 10 September 1935.49 Because of his service in combat in the army in World War I, Herzfeld was dismissed in 1935 and not earlier, in 1933, as was the fate of other Jewish professors who had not served in combat during the war.50 It has been questioned whether Herzfeld was Jewish. In a letter to the chancellor of the university dated 23 October 1935, Herzfeld declared under oath, as demanded by the university administration, that his grandparents on both sides were Jewish.51 Even though in his curriculum vitae Herzfeld himself gave his religious aﬃliation as Protestant, and despite the fact that most likely his parents and perhaps even his grandparents had converted from Judaism to Protestantism (as was not uncommon in Germany from the beginning of the nine-

activities and dealings in Iran, and he lacks an in-depth knowledge of Herzfeld’s complex personality. Langsdorﬀ, a professor of prehistory at the Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversität Berlin, was for a short while a member of Herzfeld’s staﬀ in Iran. He was also a very active member of the SS and the NSDAP. 47 PA H. Nos. 20 and 29. 48 Chronik der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, April 1932–März 1935, 296. 49 PA H. No. 32. 50 Renger, “Altorientalistik und jüdische Gelehrte in Deutschland,” 254. 51 PA H. No. 40.

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teenth century), Herzfeld was considered Jewish according to the racial laws of the Nazi regime. From the end of 1934 to 1936 Herzfeld lived in London, delivering his three Schweich lectures and working on his Persepolis manuscripts for the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago.52 In 1936 he took up residence in the United States. He ﬁrst held a number of teaching and research positions at the department for art and archaeology in Princeton and at the Institute for Advanced Study, also in Princeton, where he was among the ﬁrst faculty appointed to that prestigious institution’s School of Humanistic Studies. He also taught and lectured at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Oriental Institute in Chicago. His lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston in October 1936 were subsequently published as Iran in the Ancient East (1941). Herzfeld’s scholarly achievements were duly recognized when he was elected a corresponding member of the Arabian Academy in Damascus (1923); honorary member of the Central Asian Society, London, and of the Royal Asiatic Society, London; corresponding and honorary member of the Archaeological Survey of India, of the Instituut Kern, Leiden; member of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Berlin; member of the Fachkommission des Archäologischen Instituts, Istanbul (a section of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut), and of the Fachkommission der Islamischen Abteilung der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin; a member of Anjuman Athar-i Milli (The National Monuments Council of Iran), Tehran; and Träger des Ritterkreuzes des Königlichen Hausordens von den Hohenzollern.53 In 1936 he was recommended for the Swedish Order of Scholarly Merit.54 To accept it he needed, as was usual in such a case, the permission of the German authorities. But because his precarious status as a Jew created diﬃculties, Professors Hans-Heinrich Schäder (Iranian studies) and Richard Hartmann (Islamic studies) were asked for an opinion and subsequently recommended acceptance because of Herzfeld’s extraordinary scholarly merits.

52

PA H. No. 36. PA H. No. 2; Chronik der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, April 1932–März 1935, 47. 54 PA H. Nos. 85f. 53

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Despite his dismissal from active duty as professor, Herzfeld was still subject to the provisions of German civil service regulations. For this reason, his personnel ﬁle in the administration of the FriedrichWilhelms-Universität in Berlin continued. First of all the ﬁle contains an application of Herzfeld, dated 13 November 1934—shortly after his return from Persepolis—to permit him to stay in London in order to ﬁnish some of his manuscripts concerning the Persepolis excavations, which he undertook for the Oriental Institute in Chicago.55 After his furlough had expired in 1937, Herzfeld asked again for an extension. His request was not immediately answered because the Reichs- und Preussische Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung expressed reservations about whether “vom kulturpolitischen Standpunkt Deutschlands . . . die Tätigkeit eines deutschen Professors im Ausland überhaupt tragbar [sei].”56 His salary payments, to which he was entitled as a “Professor im Ruhestand,” had to be deposited in a special bank account. Since there were restrictions on the transfer of funds from Germany to foreign countries, his university salary was not available to him because he lived outside of Germany. The money deposited in the account could be used without special permission, however, for payments to German nationals residing in Germany.57 In April 1937, Verwaltungsrechtsrat Bähnisch was appointed to represent Herzfeld with regard to the publication of his manuscripts.58 In August 1937, Verwaltungsrechtsrat Dr. jur. H. Troeger took over from Bähnisch. In particular, he represented Herzfeld in matters concerning the payments from the university, the handling of his bank account, and all matters concerning the publication of his manuscripts.59 Much of Herzfeld’s correspondence contained in his personnel ﬁle at the university administration centered for the following years around the progress of the printing of his books. The publication of Ausgrabungen von Samarra, Iranische Denkmäler, and Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran had hitherto been supported by grants from the KaiserWilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften and the

55

PA H. No. 36. Herzfeld to the chancellor of the university, 28 January 1938. PA H. No. 113. 57 Reichs- und Preussisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung to Herzfeld, 4 April 1937. 58 PA H. No. 98. 59 PA H. No. 99. 56

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Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.60 Herzfeld now explored the possibility of paying in future for the costs of printing his manuscripts out of his salary and requested permission to have the funds deposited in his bank account used accordingly (Ausgrabungen von Samarra, volumes 6–9, Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran, Iranische Denkmäler, and Altpersische Inschriften). The chancellor of the university asked the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft for a statement regarding whether this would be in the interest of German scholarship (“ob Interesse der deutschen Wissenschaft vorhanden sei, daß die Bücher in Deutschland erscheinen”).61 In a letter dated 18 December 1936, the president of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft supported Herzfeld’s request. Referring to a letter written to him by Friedrich Sarre, he declared that the results of Herzfeld’s research would be widely recognized and greatly appreciated by the international scholarly community.62 It might be of some interest to compare the printing costs anticipated for Herzfeld’s manuscripts with the amounts actually paid out of his account. On 12 July 1938, Dr. Troeger estimated the printing costs for Altpersische Inschriften (2.200,00 Reichsmark), for Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran (2.000,00 Reichsmark), and for Iranische Denkmäler fascicle 5 (1.100,00 Reichsmark), for a total of 5.300,00 Reichsmark. For Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran, volume 9, the publisher Dietrich Reimer foresaw an amount of about 2.500,00 Reichsmark; the actual costs were 3.316,41 Reichsmark. On 14 October 1940, Dr. Troeger speciﬁed the anticipated printing costs for Ausgrabungen von Samarra, volumes 6–8, at a total of 12.500,00 Reichsmark. Three thousand Reichsmark had been paid to the publisher; for the remaining nine thousand ﬁve hundred Reichsmark, the account had no funds left. Thus, the Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran ceased with volume 9, fascicle 1 in 1938; Ausgrabungen von Samarra, volume 7, was eventually published in 1948 as Ausgrabungen von Samarra 6, Geschichte der Stadt Samarra. The other volumes planned by Herzfeld never appeared. There is no preface to the volume Samarra 6 referring, for instance, to the fate of the manuscript(s). In the ﬁrst volume of Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran, Neue Folge that appeared after the war, in which Heinrich von Luschey credited the Deutsche Archäologische Institut

60 61 62

PA H. Nos. 88 f. and 93. PA H. No. 8. PA H. No. 93.

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for having supported the journal from 1929 until 1938, there was no mention of Herzfeld’s own ﬁnancial contributions.63 Records from Herzfeld’s personnel ﬁle also contain some information on his expenditures, apparently all for printing costs. It is not possible, however, to match the ﬁgures thus available with those on record for the printing costs quoted above. During the year 1937, a total of 5.731,00 Reichsmark was deposited into Herzfeld’s bank account, expenditures for printing costs were 4.718,43 Reichsmark.64 According to another statement, between 17 June 1937 and 11 November 1938 Herzfeld received the sum of 10.489,04 Reichsmark and expended 9.793,99 Reichsmark.65 The last statement concerning Herzfeld’s bank account is a letter from Dr. Troeger dated 11 October 1941. At that time the account had a balance of 11.922,22 Reichsmark. But Dr. Troeger informed the chancellor of the university that the printing of Herzfeld’s manuscripts was discontinued after 10 September 1940 because of the possibility that manuscripts being sent from the United States could be lost on their way to Germany, obviously because of the submarine war in the North Atlantic.66 Herzfeld was known not only as a scholar but also for his abilities in economic aﬀairs (“für seine wissenschaftlichen und kaufmännischen Fähigkeiten,” as the dean of the Philosophische Fakultät of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität wrote in a letter dated 26 August 1936 to the chancellor of the university).67 Quite a few of the letters and statements in Herzfeld’s ﬁle concern his ﬁnancial situation. A number of those have, perhaps, some bearing on Herzfeld’s personality; others shed some light on the circumstances in which he lived and with which he had to cope. Thus on 4 April 1922, Herzfeld asked the university administration for aid for his sister who was living with him and whom he had to support; since her divorce was pending, her husband’s alimony payments had not yet been decided upon by the courts.68 Nothing on record indicates that this aid was granted. On 23 April 1926, he

63 64 65 66 67 68

AMI N. F. 1 (1968). PA H. No. 112. PA H. No. 145. PA H. No. 179. PA H. No. 82. PA H. No. 5.

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received a grant from the university in the amount of 1.500,00 Reichsmark for his travels in Persia.69 Eﬀective 27 March 1928, Herzfeld was attached to the German embassy in Tehran.70 The foreign oﬃce paid 1.800 toman (approximately 7.500,00 Reichsmark) per year for housing and servants.71 On 20 November 1930, Herzfeld asked to be treated for tax purposes like a member of the foreign oﬃce staﬀ. The denial of this request came very quickly, two days later, from the Internal Revenue Administration.72 In addition to his professorial salary from Berlin, his monthly allowance in Tehran, eﬀective 1 April 1928, was about 690,00 Reichsmark (150,00 toman; approximately US$150). Because of the world economic crisis, the allowance was reduced to 600,00 Reichsmark eﬀective 1 April 1930 and to 550,00 Reichsmark after 1 April 1931.73 Considered in the context of the usual salaries at that time in Germany, Herzfeld was very well paid. For Herzfeld’s monthly income from his salary, the personnel ﬁle contains some information for the time from June 1931 until December 1937. According to the records, his monthly salary in 1931 was 771,78 Reichsmark before taxes.74 It was reduced twice, in December 1931 and June 1932, as happened to all German civil servants on the basis of laws enacted by the Prussian State following the dramatic economic diﬃculties after the world economic crisis of 1929. Thus his salary amounted to 693,61 respectively 650,19 Reichsmark per month.75 According to a record dated 4 May 1936, his annual salary as professor “in Ruhestand” was 7.700,24 Reichmark (641,68 per month), that is, seventy-one percent of the full salary of 10.792,00 Reichsmark of a professor in active service.76 Soon afterward the amount of his salary was amended to seventy-ﬁve percent of a full salary, that is, 8.094,00 per year or 674,50 per month.77 The last information concerning Herzfeld’s salary is dated 14 December 1937.

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

PA PA PA PA PA PA PA PA PA

H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H.

No. 10. No. 26. No. 14. Nos. 15 and 16. No. 26. No. 25. Nos. 25 and 26. No. 59. No. 77.

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His monthly pay from now on is set at 636,86 Reichsmark.78 The ﬁle gives no indication for the discrepancy with the earlier amount. Not much information can be gleaned from Herzfeld’s personnel ﬁle regarding his income in the United States. For the year 1936 he declared a total income from the Oriental Institute and his teaching and lecturing activities in Princeton, New York, and Boston in the amount of US$5,618. During the ﬁrst six months of 1937 he expected to earn around US$3,000.79 By way of comparison, in 1945–46 a well-paid full professor in the humanities at the University of Chicago was paid an annual salary of about US$2,000. Finally, in 1936 Herzfeld asked for permission to reside permanently in the United States.80 Apparently no action was taken on this request, because subsequently his salary payments, together with permission to reside in the United States, were only granted from year to year: until 30 September 1938, 31 March 1939, 31 December 1939, 30 September 1940, and 30 September 1941.81 Eventually, in a letter dated 8 December 1941, Herzfeld received permission to reside permanently in the United States.82 Herzfeld’s personnel ﬁle ends with a letter from the chancellor of the university dated 15 December 1941, informing Dr. Troeger that Herzfeld’s salary payments ceased to be paid.83 The reason behind this was apparently the “Elfte Verordnung zum Reichsbürgergesetz vom 25 November 1941,” §1 of which stipulated that a Jew who has his usual residence in a foreign country cannot be a German citizen. §3 stipulated that all assets of any Jew who has lost his German citizenship on the basis of this law will be forfeited to the German Reich. Whether Germany’s declaration of war on the United States on 11 December 1941 (following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941) constituted an additional reason for Dr. Troeger’s letter remains an open question.

78 79 80 81 82 83

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H. H. H. H. H. H.

No. 104. No. 92. No. 92. Nos. 118, 143, 165, 169, and 177. No. 181. No. 182.

ERNST HERZFELD: REMINISCENCES AND REVELATIONS Elizabeth S. Ettinghausen I ﬁrst met Ernst Herzfeld in his spacious oﬃce at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in the fall of 1943, soon after my arrival in the United States. I had been appointed a junior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University’s research institute for Early Christian and Byzantine studies in Washington, D.C., and, on the advice of several Harvard professors, I stopped in Princeton en route to Washington to meet, among others, Professor Herzfeld. Even though he knew in advance of my visit, I was nevertheless amazed at how kindly and cordially this well-known elder scholar received me, a young Ph.D. completely unknown to him. I felt almost overwhelmed by the thoughtfulness with which he put me at ease and by the courteous way in which this eminent scholar spoke to me as if I were his equal. He was in no rush to end our conversation and was happy to show me some of the ﬁne Near Eastern prehistoric pottery that he had collected over the years. Reﬂecting on my visit of nearly sixty years ago, I can see that in spite of Herzfeld’s always having remained primarily a European in manner, mental approach, and outlook, he had adopted some American ways of equality and democratic thinking in relation to human encounter and interaction; or so it seemed to me, considering the extremely cordial way he received me. Perhaps he also appreciated a visit from a young person who made no demands on him except for an hour or so of his time and who naturally regarded him with immense admiration. Moreover, I myself was not only familiar with but also reared in the European tradition; yet, having come to the United States as a young person, I had been able to understand both worlds. In spite of Herzfeld’s many other visitors and innumerable connections on several continents, I somehow sensed, in my later encounters with him, that fundamentally he felt lonely, isolated, and often not understood, or misunderstood. My perception seems to be born out by remarks preserved in his frequent correspondence with Richard Ettinghausen, then associate curator of Near Eastern art at the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution,

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and editor of the journal Ars Islamica. This correspondence, preserved in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, is quite revealing not only for Herzfeld’s activities and interests, but also for what it tells of events in his life, his problems, actions, and reactions. Letters, statements, and other records housed in the Herzfeld Archive of the department of Islamic art and the department of ancient Near Eastern art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, provide another source of information. In addition, records at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, contain correspondence between Herzfeld and successive directors of the institute, letters from within and outside the institute, and memoranda and statements that concern Herzfeld in various ways. The problems Herzfeld and his supporters encountered prior to the ultimate success in establishing a prestigious appointment for him at the Institute for Advanced Study are documented in records preserved at the New York Public Library.1 Herzfeld’s appointment as a permanent member at the Institute for Advanced Study was preceded by lengthy correspondence between Stephen D. Duggan, executive director of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars, and Abraham Flexner, the institute’s director. Flexner also corresponded with Walter W. S. Cook, professor and chair, Committee on Graduate Studies, department of ﬁne arts, New York University. The committee was able to

1 I would like to thank the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and especially Colleen Hennessey, archivist, and Ann C. Gunter, associate curator of ancient Near Eastern art, who provided me with copies of the correspondence between Herzfeld and Ettinghausen from 1944–47. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, notebook 131, ﬁle D, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Unless otherwise speciﬁed, citations of archival sources refer to these papers. I would also like to thank the department of Islamic art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Daniel Walker, Patti Cadby Birch curator, Stefano Carboni, associate curator, Ms. Annick Des Roches, administrative assistant, and Ms. Trish Sclater-Booth, who assisted my research in many ways. I am also grateful to the same museum’s Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art, Dr. Joan Aruz, department head, and particularly Dr. Shoki Goodarzi, assistant curator. I am equally indebted to the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, Marcia Tucker, librarian, and especially Lisa Cotes, archivist, for allowing me to examine their ﬁles on Herzfeld, which comprise correspondence and memoranda by and about Herzfeld, his work, and his publications. Finally, I would like to thank the Rare Book and Manuscript Division, New York Public Library, New York, N.Y., for granting access to the ﬁle on Herzfeld contained in the Papers of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars. All translations from German to English are my own.

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provide ﬁnancial aid to refugee scholars only for a short period and only if the institution could guarantee a permanent, funded position. Letters in support of Herzfeld (“fan mail”) poured in to the committee. Meyer Schapiro, professor at Columbia University, called him the “foremost living scholar in ancient and mediaeval Persian art and besides, a distinguished worker in a whole series of related ﬁelds.” Maurice Dimand, curator of Near Eastern art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, wrote that he had “the greatest admiration for [Herzfeld’s] quality as a scholar and his skill as a pedagogue. . . . I can say from my own experience that he has always been extremely generous of his time and information.” Letters also arrived from Rudolf M. Riefstahl, Fine Arts Graduate Center, New York University; Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Doubleday, Doran and Company; Percy S. Straus, New York University Council; and Felix Warburg.2 Erwin Panofsky and Benjamin Merritt, both permanent members of the Institute for Advanced Study, were anxious for Herzfeld to join them.3 Walter Adams, general secretary of the Academic Assistance Council in London, expressed to the committee the view of Orientalists in Great Britain: “Sir George Hill, Sir Denison Ross and all other persons who are competent to express an opinion said that it would be a great loss to learning, if Dr. Herzfeld were not able in some way to put in permanent form so many years of work.”4 After several rejections, long deliberations, and voluminous correspondence, funding for Herzfeld’s position was arranged and agreed upon by Cook and Flexner. From Herzfeld’s temporary residence in London, he asked to begin his tenure in autumn 1936 in order to complete lecture courses already planned at New York University’s graduate program in ﬁne arts (later called the Institute of Fine Arts). Two years after my initial meeting with Herzfeld I married Richard Ettinghausen, an occasional visitor to Dumbarton Oaks and a good friend of Herzfeld’s. Much to my surprise, when informed of our wedding, Herzfeld wrote to him, “I remember [her] very well and the talk we had.” “My best wishes for your happiness,” he continued,

Duggan to Edward R. Murrow, 18 November 1935, Herzfeld ﬁle, Papers of Emergency Committee. 3 Flexner to Duggan, 17 November 1935, Herzfeld ﬁle, Papers of Emergency Committee. 4 Adams to Alfred E. Cohn, 17 October 1935, Herzfeld ﬁle, Papers of Emergency Committee. 2

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in a rather resigned mood. “You can look for a future and build up a life. At my age one looks back and must be glad, when the memories one has are such that it was worth while to have them.”5 The relationship between Herzfeld and Ettinghausen was one of absolute trust, openness, and devotion, and while formerly Herzfeld had also been the younger scholar’s adviser, in his later years he relied increasingly on Ettinghausen as his helper and facilitator, as well as adviser, in matters of strategy. As we shall see, this was especially the case with regard to Herzfeld’s problems with his publications. After my marriage I saw Herzfeld from time to time in Princeton, and, as a true gentleman of “the old school,” he was always extremely friendly and courteous. I also met his sister, Charlotte Bradford, who played an important role in his life as an understanding partner. She gave his life the stability of family, but without excessive obligations or limits on his freedom of action and direction. Their relationship was a close one of mutual respect and support, and she looked up to him with admiration.6 His closest association with a person of the opposite sex other than with his sister was (at least from my perspective) with Frau Sarre, wife of Friedrich Sarre. Herzfeld was devoted to her, as his letters demonstrate. My acquaintance with her was through conversations with my husband, her letters to him and to Herzfeld, and photographs, as I never met her, but she must have been a very beautiful and intelligent woman and a truly remarkable personality. Richard Ettinghausen thought very highly of her too, and both he and Herzfeld carried on a lively correspondence with her. While Herzfeld remained a lifelong bachelor, one could say that he was wedded to the one overwhelmingly great love in his life: the archaeology, art, architecture, culture, and history of the ancient and later Middle East, with whose languages he was also intimately familiar. He devoted his entire life to it and considered it his mission in life. But he was imbued with a broad vision and wide interests in the world beyond those of his studies and particular excavation sites. “The keenness of his insight extended from scholarly objectives to 5

Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 26 October 1944. I can attest to this from personal experience. Joseph M. Upton made similar observations in a letter to Ettinghausen, 11 November 1972, Herzfeld Archive, department of Islamic art, Metropolitan Museum of Art. 6

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persons,” wrote C. R. Morey, professor of art history at Princeton University. “This interest in human individuals also entered into his archaeology: nothing that he interpreted was without its humanistic signiﬁcance.”7 Herzfeld liked conversing with great minds of all nations and in all ﬁelds. Thus he enjoyed his high-level exchanges at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he was a permanent member in the School of Humanistic Studies (later the School of Historical Studies) from 1936 to 1944 and professor emeritus from 1944 until his death on 21 January 1948 at the age of sixty-eight. Herzfeld described a visit to the institute by Ghassami Ghani, with whom he discussed Iranian archaeology. Then I asked [Wolfgang] Pauli to come . . . the physicist with the new Nobel prize. He is interested in ‘Alchemie, Stein der Weisen’ and mysticism. After an hour I went with Ghani to Einstein for an hour and a half. I hardly remember three conversations so stimulating. In spite of the totally diﬀerent background, it was quite enough to start a sentence to be understood immediately, and the subjects were high science, high politics and religion. So it was always, when for instance, talking to Halil Bey [in Constantinople], or to old Nuri Pasha from Baghdad, or to Firuz Mirza in Teheran. When having a talk with [Henri] Seyrig, it is the same, a hint, an intonation is enough to agree and to be understood. There is nothing more tedious and irritating than being forced continuously to explain the values one connects with words and notions and to produce only the answer: ‘I never looked at it that way!’ Einstein feels exactly the same . . . Pauli remarked . . . I need some spiritual atmosphere.8

Elsewhere Herzfeld mentioned the same “immediate and full understanding” with Turks in Istanbul and Ankara, with his old friend Kurd Ali in Damascus, with Maugras in Ankara, and with Charles Kuentz, Roman Ghirshman, and Louis Massignon in Cairo.9 When after his retirement from the institute he left Princeton in May 1946 for Syria—Aleppo and chieﬂy Damascus—and then in the autumn moved via Beirut to Cairo, he was happy to converse with the likeminded intellectual elite of these respective countries.10 He wrote that 7 C. R. Morey, “Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948),” in Archaeologica Orientalia in Memoriam Ernst Herzfeld, ed. George C. Miles (Locust Valley, N.Y.: J. J. Augustin, 1952), 4. My thanks to Stefano Carboni for bringing these words to my attention. 8 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 2 January 1946. 9 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 1 November 1946, from Cairo. 10 Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 31 (sic) April 1946 and 24 October 1946; Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 10 August 1946 (some intermediate letters not in the archives), 28

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he was glad to meet so many “interesting people” in Cairo, although he was a bit overwhelmed because so “many searched [him] out.” His status there was diﬀerent.11 Richard Ettinghausen described Herzfeld as “a generous, helpful, charming and stimulating man. His boundless energy and untiring zest for scholarly work, his loyalty to ideas, his unselﬁsh actions, and his ﬁne humor inspired great admiration.”12 The fact that all his life Herzfeld remained primarily a European in his demeanor, approach, and understanding, and had a somewhat reserved manner, perhaps resulted in his misunderstanding or misinterpreting attitudes or speech; he was, perhaps, “on a diﬀerent wave length” and, expressed metaphorically, spoke “diﬀerent languages” from many in the United States.13 He often felt ill at ease and at times “unsure of himself,” which did not occur in the company of fellow intellectuals from the Near East and Europe.14 Yet there were many in the United States, both American- and foreign-born, who meant much to him. One was Mr. Hugo of the Meriden Gravure Company in Meriden, Connecticut, with whom Herzfeld negotiated concerning the plates for his various publications. “It is nice working with him, he has understanding,” Herzfeld wrote.15 Several times in his letters to Ettinghausen, Herzfeld expressed this longing to be understood. He wrote of being understood with a mere hint on various topics without needing to explain everything in great detail and, on another occasion, emphasized that “there was immediate and full understanding.”16 Perhaps it is also worth mentioning the high esteem accorded professors in Europe, especially in the early twentieth century, which Herzfeld seems to have missed in the United States. Yet another factor that contributed to Herzfeld’s particular personality should also be considered: He had spent long periods of time at excavations, most often

August 1946, 8 September 1946, and 1 November 1946. For subsequent correspondence that found Herzfeld in Cairo until his move to Switzerland—to Basel via Geneva and Zurich—in early May 1947, see Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 7 May 1947. 11 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 5 February 1947. 12 Richard Ettinghausen, “In Memoriam: Ernst Herzfeld (1878–1948),” Ars Islamica 15–16 (1951): 265. 13 Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 25 September 1946, refers to this diﬀerence; Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 1 November 1946, repeats this metaphor. 14 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 1 November 1946. 15 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 5 February 1947, from Cairo. 16 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 11 November 1946.

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as director with only a few collaborators (most or all of less status) and surrounded by local workmen accustomed to a hierarchical society and who looked up to the “all-knowing” professor. They must have admired him almost as a demigod, and his authority must have reigned supreme. Thus his role was that of a benevolent ruler whose commands were executed to the best of the workers’ abilities. This situation prevailed at many excavations in the early twentieth century and at some of them also later on, as I myself was able to observe. Herzfeld’s traditional European attitude is evident when, in a conversation in Cairo with Harold Glidden (whom he liked and trusted), he could not understand that some archaeologists and specialists left the ﬁeld because “there is no money in it.”17 Clearly, Herzfeld had never been able to understand and adjust to the diﬀerent value systems of the “New World.” Not surprisingly, in view of all the problems he faced, Herzfeld’s outlook and mood became increasingly pessimistic during the last years of his life. The great changes that resulted from World War II made him ever more nostalgic: “The old times are a thing of the past and almost nothing is left of it,” he commented.18 He was not optimistic about Europe’s future, a view, as he mentioned, shared by Einstein and others: “It is diﬃcult to understand really that all that world is gone. Even if ruins will remain, it is better never to see [Europe] again.”19 On some occasions toward the end of his life he voiced absolute pessimism, as when he spoke of the “utter futility of things and works and plans.”20 While in the United States he longed for the Near East, although he was also aware of the changes that had taken place there and mentioned speciﬁcally the sad impression he derived from all “the beautiful things having disappeared or are restored to not be recognizable,” or restoration with new paint that obliterated the old. “It is a closed chapter.”21 Herzfeld apparently found it diﬃcult to adjust to the entirely diﬀerent world of the United States, with its egalitarian and informal

17

Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 10 April 1947. Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 10 August 1946. 19 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 24 June 1945. Herzfeld never again set foot in Germany after his departure from Berlin in the mid-1930s. 20 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 24 April 1947, from Cairo. 21 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 28 August 1946. 18

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social ways. He was surprised by his encounter with a Mr. Powill— a Chicago realtor with the unusual penchant for collecting Near Eastern coins—who tried to acquire Herzfeld’s coin collection at Spink’s in London for a much lower price than oﬀered. Herzfeld was outraged when, at their ﬁrst meeting in Princeton, Powill suggested that they address one another by their ﬁrst names: “Ernst, call me Mike.”22 In the 1940s this was unusually familiar, even in the United States, and anathema for an older gentleman steeped in the prewar European tradition of formality and particularly in that of the pre-World War I tradition of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany.23 Those were Herzfeld’s formative years and, for him, the “good old days.” Thus, in spite of their friendship and frank exchanges of thoughts and opinion, Herzfeld and Ettinghausen always addressed each other by their last names and, although most of their correspondence was in English, when occasionally writing in German they used the formal “Sie.” During the last years of Herzfeld’s life, his adjustment to the contemporary world seemed to pose increasing diﬃculties for him, and he never entirely succeeded in it. It must have resulted from the innumerable problems and obstacles he had to face with his publications and other matters. Surely a contributing factor was his tendency to withdraw, especially when he did not feel a special aﬃnity to, or very comfortable with, a person. He was deﬁnitely not an extrovert, and at the Institute for Advanced Study he had the reputation of being a recluse.24

Journey on the Last Train through the Transcaucasus, December 1905 Herzfeld was a keen observer of people of all walks of life and entirely diﬀerent circumstances. He faced his problems with equanimity, focusing instead on his aims and steadfastly pursuing his goals. An example of his determination emerges from his descrip-

22

Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 26 October 1944. Herzfeld was an oﬃcer (commander and captain) in the German army during World War I, the son of a physician (Oberstabsarzt) in the German army, and recipient of the Order of the House of Hohenzollern. 24 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 1 November 1946, from Cairo, elaborates on having felt ill at ease. 23

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tion of a trip by train and boat that he took from 21 to 24 December 1905 during the troubling and uncertain period of strikes and lawlessness in the serious upheavals of the revolts in czarist Russia. The trip, wrought with anxiety, was from Baku to Batum by train and on to Constantinople by boat. Herzfeld’s report, titled “Der letzte Zug durch Transkaukasien” (The last train through the Transcaucasus), shows not only his talent in recounting an event in dramatic fashion, but also his courage and cold-bloodedness even in the face of extreme danger, his great endurance of physical hardships, and a capacity for rising above the vicissitudes of the moment as well as of judging events from a historical perspective.25 Since Herzfeld had come from Iran’s hinterland, not forewarned of any problems in Russia, he set out on a fearfully stormy Caspian Sea for Baku (now the capital of Azerbaijan). He was informed in Baku that because of the disturbances trains were no longer operating, but he nevertheless headed for the train station in freezing temperatures and a hailstorm, driven there at breakneck speed, “like the devil,” by a ruthless Tartar coachman for an exorbitant sum. At the station Herzfeld managed to push his way through thousands of unemployed workers milling around, and obtained a ticket for the last train— not to Moscow or Vienna, as he had hoped, but to Batum on the western rim of the Caucasus. “Not having seen a European town in several years, Baku appeared to me as a very cultured city,” he wrote. “Not much could be perceived of the ﬁerce ﬁres and destruction at the petroleum towers—it was like ﬁfty trees having been destroyed in a forest of thousands of trees.” He was obliged to send his large pieces of luggage containing his notes, plans, sketches, watercolors, and photographs from his recent travels in Persia to Batum in the train’s luggage compartment. While waiting for the train, he observed that the waiting rooms and even the corridors were ﬁlled to overﬂowing, especially with unemployed young people, all of them hungry and cold.

25 Herzfeld recounted his experiences on this perilous trip in a nine-page account, now in the Herzfeld Archive, department of ancient Near Eastern art, Metropolitan Museum of Art. I am grateful to Jens Kröger for having drawn my attention to Margaret Cool Root, “The Herzfeld Archive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” MMJ 11 (1976): 119–24, in which she mentions among the unpublished manuscripts the account of this trip, which is a typed elaboration of his short, handwritten journal entry preserved in notebook N-82, Ernst Herzfeld Papers.

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elizabeth s. ettinghausen I could well understand that in Baku one did not dare to go out at night at all and during the day only in a vehicle. . . . Never had I seen such motley crowds of people of all types . . . besides uniformed students, including girls, Tartars in sable fur caps . . . some Arab merchants with keﬁye and agal from Bukhara, Turks from the Kars region with their red fez, Persians in their frock coats and Persian headgear, some patriarchal Turkoman pilgrims with lamb fur caps, Germans, oﬃcers with their ladies, young girls, and women with young children.

They were all talking about the strike, Herzfeld reported. “As popular as the strike was, so was the government and the czar unpopular.” All kinds of rumors were circulating and “everybody listened and told their tales, gesticulating excitedly, and in all faces one could observe the same expressions of partly hopeful and partly fearful tension. Thus the restless but patient crowd waited from late afternoon till four o’clock in the morning for the last train.” Relieved at last, the disciplined crowd boarded the train quietly. Kozak soldiers with bayonet-topped riﬂes held watch, but they soon began singing the Marseillaise; consequently, “one felt like their prisoner rather than under their protection.” People began to speak of their experiences. When Herzfeld mentioned that he had come from Persia, they wondered whether “he had not experienced serious disturbances and threatening attitudes by the military and civilian populations,” but he retorted that it was euphemistic to speak of a Persian military force; the Persians were not threatening, and any disturbances were purely of a local nature. A Kozak captain mentioned that in Russia the military were all in the cities; lawlessness and plundering in the countryside was the order of the day. While stopped in a small town along the way, the guards were able to prevent the strikers from blocking the train’s path. Some Tartars, however, broke into the train and dragged out an Armenian passenger. His fate seemed clear when the train passed the ruins of a country estate, formerly the residence of another Armenian family. There was “nothing but walls blackened from ﬁres and empty holes where windows had been,” Herzfeld wrote. In the former vineyards, now only sheep and goats grazed. “Soon nothing would be left of it at all. Not one member of the family escaped from the ﬁre.” The increasingly slower train ﬁnally stopped for good in a larger settlement. Ultimately, the train did continue as far as Tiﬂis (now Tbilisi), which was blanketed in heavy snow. Herzfeld was faced with the prospect of being stranded there under the worst and most dangerous conditions. Luckily, another

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train headed for Batum was departing immediately, forcing Herzfeld to take only his hand luggage and abandon his large baggage. The way he reported this tragic loss characterizes his extraordinary endurance, self-discipline, and strength of character: “What I lost that way I could size up only gradually, namely, all records and photographs from my Persian trip.” His dry sense of humor came to the fore elsewhere in his account of the trip: “The Oriental virtue par excellence of patience enabled me to endure also the third night on the Transcaucasian train.” These examples well illustrate his ability to recount events in a dramatic fashion. One might say that it rivals his ﬁne sketches and watercolors in precision, sensitivity, and artistic rendering. For Herzfeld, however, his observations referred not to isolated events but to the ﬂow of human experience and history. In spite of his painful present adventures, he thought of related experiences in other times and contexts. Thus he continued his report: “In the morning I was already at the Black Sea. Relieved, I could have shouted ‘thalatta’ [Greek for the sea] like Xenophon’s ten thousand.”26 But the uncertainty continued, for Batum was on high alert for unsafe conditions. Despite all the dangers, Herzfeld managed to sense the city’s beauty even under its deep layer of snow: its orange, laurel, cypress, and palm trees, and “a melancholy impression, which ﬁts well the general atmosphere.” Herzfeld’s inner strength, ingenuity, and perseverance served him well: He found out about a small Russian boat headed for Constantinople, and reached it under hazardous circumstances. At last on the (albeit stormy) Black Sea, he thought again of the ancient Greeks, who had called it—appropriately, he felt—“the pontos euxeinos (friendly sea).” Now that his Russian nightmare was behind him, Herzfeld thought of what the famous explorer Sven Hedin had said to him in Tehran: “You will be longing for Persia and Turkey; the sense of insecurity in Russia is intolerable.”27 “Only once on board did I become aware of the terrible four days behind me, and the weariness of my frayed nerves became evident,” Herzfeld wrote.

26 Herzfeld refers to a well-known passage in Xenophon’s Anabasis, when in 401 B.C. the retreating and disheartened Greek mercenary army at last saw the sea on the way home from their campaign in Mesopotamia. 27 “Sie werden sich nach Persien und der Türkei zurücksehnen, das Gefühl der Unsicherheit in Russland ist unerträglich.”

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“I sat down in my cabin staring blankly ahead of me. It was Christmas Eve, a sad Christmas Eve.” Herzfeld ended his report with the words “I found out in Constantinople that I had not only traveled on the last train, but also on the last boat.”28 To add insult to injury, he had to abandon and thus lose all his papers and photographs of his just-completed trip to Persia, although the way he reports this fact again proves his amazing endurance. But even Herzfeld was shaken: “die Abspannung der Nerven machte sich dann geltend. Ich setzte mich in meine Kabine [on board the ship] und starrte vor mich hin,” he wrote.

Herzfeld and Richard Ettinghausen Perhaps the most trusted friendship Herzfeld enjoyed was that with Richard Ettinghausen, who rather early in his career was a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study for the year 1937–38. He was reappointed to the same position for the following year, but had to decline because of his appointment in the fall of 1938 as associate professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.29 While they had been acquainted earlier, it was during Ettinghausen’s residence at the institute that he and Herzfeld quite naturally developed close ties and a lasting friendship. They exchanged ideas and opinions on many subjects related to Islamic and preIslamic art, architecture, history, and literature, but also on many other subjects such as human relations and idiosyncrasies and on world aﬀairs (especially concerning the Near East). Thus, they also exchanged opinions about the future of Palestine and the Zionist movement, which they both felt was rather bleak.30 In their scholarly discussions Ettinghausen appreciated Herzfeld’s generous willingness to share his enormous knowledge and experience, acquired over many decades, in many ﬁelds relating to the ancient and later Near East and the Mediterranean world. Thus, for

28

“In Konstantinopel erfuhr ich später, das ich nicht allein mit dem letzten Zuge, sondern auch mit dem letzten Schiﬀ gefahren war.” 29 Letter of reappointment, 20 April 1938; Ettinghausen to Abraham Flexner, 22 April 1937 and 28 August 1938, Institute for Advanced Study. 30 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 20 March 1946; Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 25 March 1946.

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example, ﬁfty years ago, and without today’s much-expanded knowledge, few scholars other than Herzfeld would have been able to conﬁrm Ettinghausen’s opinion on the date and attribution of certain objects.31 Their friendship and support was reciprocal, and they had lively exchanges about many subjects. One topic of special interest to both of them was the Persian representation of the orthodox caliphs. These rather rare depictions were always similar, even if in diﬀerent media; one appeared on an amulet.32 A keen observer interested in human beings, Herzfeld was familiar with a vast array of people and was also knowledgeable about their backgrounds and families. He knew much, for example, about Jacques Matossian, a collector (later, primarily a dealer), and consequently felt that Matossian could be trusted to dispose of a few items without suspecting that Herzfeld wanted to get rid of objects that were not genuine.33 In other cases, however, he was alert to suspicions about certain objects or considered them outright fakes. This happened, for example, when G. H. Myers, the remarkable founder of the renowned Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., wanted a second opinion after Ettinghausen voiced suspicions about the authenticity of a recently acquired Iranian textile purported to be of Buyid manufacture. Although Herzfeld had clearly expressed himself in letters to Ettinghausen about the likelihood that such objects were not genuine, when he wrote to Myers he couched his opinion in rather vague terms because he did not know (and did not wish to oﬀend) him. Only after Ettinghausen urged the elder scholar to express his negative opinions more clearly, so that Myers would understand him, did Herzfeld openly state his views. Controversy ensued in many quarters after these textiles appeared on the market. In their correspondence on the subject, Herzfeld and Ettinghausen were able to further the detective work on the origin of these textiles and on those who initiated their production. Herzfeld knew that Mr. Injudjian in Paris dealt (among other items) with textiles from Iran and operated a workshop in Lyon that produced “old Iranian” 31

Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 10 August 1946, from Aleppo. For example, see Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 1 November 1946, 23 November 1946, and 6 February 1947, all from Cairo; Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 13 November 1946. 33 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 2 June 1947. Incidentally, Herzfeld mentioned in this letter, written from Basel, that on the following day he would move to a rest and rehabilitation center (Kurhaus) in Lucerne, Switzerland. 32

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textiles.34 Ettinghausen found the key to the puzzle in an illustrated article by Leigh Ashton in an old issue of Burlington Magazine that mentioned textile fragments recovered from excavations at the Bibi Shahr-i Banu mound near Rayy, south of Tehran.35 Myers’ fragment, dated 384 A.H./994 A.D., combined the representations of a piece then in Indjudjian’s possession and another in that of Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss. But Myers did not own the only ambiguous example. Other similar textiles in various private collections and museums, apparently also produced in Indjudjian’s workshop, came to light.36

Herzfeld’s Manuscripts: Arduous Paths to Publication By the mid-1940s, the mutual help and support that Herzfeld and Ettinghausen oﬀered each other had undergone a change. Ettinghausen’s role as helper and facilitator, as well as adviser, became all-important during the last years of Herzfeld’s life. Joseph Upton, a trained archaeologist who was also Herzfeld’s collaborator in 1929 at the excavations at Kuh-i Khwaja in Sistan, Iran, catalogued Herzfeld’s papers in the early 1970s. During Herzfeld’s “last years in Princeton and those after he left and until his death, you were his chief support and advisor,” Upton wrote to Ettinghausen.37 In another letter he mentioned that the publication of Herzfeld’s work on the architecture of Damascus, published in successive volumes of Ars Islamica, “would have been a major contribution [on your part] . . . but the persistent help in the sorry histories of Samarra,

34 Joseph Brummer, reputable collector and dealer, conﬁrmed Herzfeld’s suspicion concerning the Lyon workshop. Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 9 February 1946. 35 Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 18 February 1946. Ettinghausen here referred to Leigh Ashton, “Persian Exhibition: Textiles, Some Early Pieces,” Burlington Magazine, vol. 58, no. 334 ( January 1931): 22–27, ﬁgs. C, D (here called Seljuk). In this article, Ashton reports that he had visited the tomb tower at the conclusion of the excavation in 1927. 36 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 4 December 1945, and 9 February 1946; Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 28 December 1945, 19 January 1946, 6 February 1946, and 25 September 1946. Herzfeld mentioned that he had much earlier surveyed the tomb tower where the genuine textiles had been found. 37 Upton to Ettinghausen, 11 November 1972, Herzfeld Archive, department of Islamic art, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Aleppo and Persian Empire volumes must be added to it.”38 With tireless perseverance, and by contacting many people with various connections in the United States and abroad, Ettinghausen was able to arrange for Samarra, volume 6, to be released for publication by the post-World War II United States Military Command Post in Berlin. In Herzfeld’s own words, this volume “dealt with the town as a whole, its prehistory, its topography, its history (building phases, etc.) and the people living there. Many single buildings were published in it, especially isolated buildings, also e.g. the Band-i Adaim, the Harba bridge, etc. But not the architecture of the palaces, mosques and private houses etc., which would have become vol. VII and VIII.”39 Obtaining the release to publish Samarra, volume 6, was no mean feat, calling for strategies Ettinghausen initiated in multiple directions and through a great many channels. Dr. Frank Aydelotte, director of the Institute for Advanced Study, was also supportive in trying to expedite the publication process—though to no avail— through a top-ranking oﬃcer in the United States Military Command Post in Berlin.40 Herzfeld deeply appreciated all eﬀorts on his behalf, although—not surprisingly—the disappointment and frustration of failure weighed very heavily on him. He also tried on several fronts to further the cause, failing many times before ﬁnally achieving positive results. Many individuals, ranging from the scholarly world to those in U.S. government positions, were asked for help. From his curatorial post in the Freer Gallery of Art, which was part of the federal government, Ettinghausen began a letter-writing campaign.41 He asked others in the State Department (Drs. Harold Glidden and

38 Upton to Ettinghausen, 22 November 1972, Herzfeld Archive, department of Islamic art, Metropolitan Museum of Art. See also Ernst Herzfeld, “Damascus: Studies in Architecture—I,” Ars Islamica 9 (1942): 1–53; Ernst Herzfeld, “Damascus: Studies in Architecture—II,” Ars Islamica 10 (1943): 13–70; Ernst Herzfeld, “Damascus: Studies in Architecture—III,” Ars Islamica 11–12 (1946): 1–71; and Ernst Herzfeld, “Damascus: Studies in Architecture—IV,” Ars Islamica 13–14 (1948): 118–38. 39 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 24 June 1945. 40 Colonel Francis P. Miller, oﬃce of the director of intelligence, oﬃce of military government for Germany, to Frank Aydelotte, 11 March 1946 and 24 April 1946, Institute for Advanced Study. Major John Bitter, INF, acting chief of information services control section, publications sub-section, oﬃce of military government (Berlin), to Ettinghausen, 19 March 1946; Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 20 March 1946. 41 Ettinghausen to Lieutenant-Colonel Leonard, oﬃcer in charge, headquarters, Berlin District, information services control section, publication sub-section, AP 6515 Post, 13 February 1946.

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Donald N. Wilber) or in the United States armed services (Dr. George C. Miles) to exercise their inﬂuence, and he requested assistance from foreign scholars, such as Dr. David S. Rice, then in the British Military Command Post in Berlin.42 He also organized a petition to the United States Military Command Post in Berlin, asking Wilber and Miles to join him in proposing it during the session of the Near Eastern section of the conference celebrating Princeton University’s bicentennial, in the hopes that it would be adopted by the entire session.43 Herzfeld himself also attempted to further the Samarra publication project. When during a visit to Herzfeld Mr. Korostovtsev, a member of the U.S.S.R. Academy, heard about the diﬃculties, he arranged for the academy to take the matter up with the U.S. authorities in Berlin.44 Herzfeld also sought to involve a foreign government in this mission. The Iraq Antiquities Department had approached him to obtain survey maps and aerial photographs to be included in Samarra, volume 6, but which they needed for their report on excavations at Samarra carried out in 1936–39. Herzfeld asked them for a demarche at the United States Military Government in Berlin to release his publication for the beneﬁt of the Iraqi Government Agency.45 Thus, this foreign government was also anxious to have the publication rights given to the ﬁrm in Berlin, which had the printed manuscript and accompanying illustrations ready for publication.46 All of these eﬀorts clearly entailed an enormous amount of correspondence, telephone communications, and personal intervention, as well as much thought. A long period of frustration followed until, quite unexpectedly, Herzfeld received a huge package of corrected proofs sent by Rice via the French Institute in Cairo.47 Originally, Herzfeld had delivered the manuscript to the publishing house of Dietrich Reimer—as it happened, twenty days before 42 Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 13 February 1946, 25 September 1946, 13 November 1946, 11 December 1946, quoting a letter from D. S. Rice, and 19 March 1947. 43 Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 25 October 1946. 44 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 5 February 1947. 45 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 2 June 1947, from Basel. 46 Herzfeld received the complete galleys via his nephew in the British zone. He was busy correcting numerous mistakes and other changes needed because of the many years that had passed since the manuscript’s completion. Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 3 February 1946. 47 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 31 August 1947, from the Kurhaus in Lucerne, Switzerland.

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the outbreak of World War II. In spite of the war, the book had been printed by Reimer and proofread initially by Sarre but chieﬂy by Ernst Kühnel, Sarre’s successor as director of the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin.48 Herzfeld’s friendship with the former German ambassador, Count Friedrich Werner Graf von der Schulenburg, member of a prominent Prussian family and head of the German mission in Tehran, in many ways also helped the publication along.49 In an aﬃdavit Herzfeld was required to ﬁle with the United States Military Government, he explained what happened with the manuscript and its intended publisher, Dietrich Reimer. According to this statement, Reimer had not received a publishing license because one of its owners was originally a Nazi sympathizer and party member; the ﬁrm, which traditionally specialized in maps, had early on printed maps for the Nazi regime.50 Subsequently, it was learned that the ﬁrm had also in this period published a book devoted to Nazi party matters.51 The situation was an awkward one: The ﬁrm in the British-controlled sector of Berlin had suﬃcient paper and could print the plates, while the text, which lay with Reimer in the United States zone, lacked a publishing license.52 In the end, the dilemma was resolved by associating the ﬁrm of D. Reimer with the German ﬁrm of Eckhard und Messdorﬀ in Hamburg. When the book was ﬁnally published, the scholarly world was at last relieved of a heavy burden; alas, however, the long-frustrated author did not live to see the publication of Geschichte der Stadt Samarra (Samarra 6). Herzfeld had waited anxiously through years of uncertainty about the fate of the Samarra excavation records and the manuscript for volume 6 in Berlin, fearing—until they were found to be intact—that all had been lost during the war.53 The strain of this experience was

48 This happened in spite of Herzfeld’s rather cool relationship with Kühnel. Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 23 November 1946. 49 Count von der Schulenburg was later executed, along with all the other “accomplices,” because he participated in the assassination attempt on Hitler. See Herzfeld’s aﬃdavit, “Publication of the Excavations of Samarra,” attached to his letter to Ettinghausen of 12 December 1946. 50 Ibid. 51 Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 19 March 1947, mentions that he had learned this fact. 52 Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 25 September 1946, recounts Glidden’s report received at the Library of Congress from the United States Military Government in Berlin in response to his appeal. 53 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 24 June 1945.

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enormous and took its toll for many years toward the end of Herzfeld’s life. In many letters written from Princeton and later from the Near East, Herzfeld voiced concern about his account in the prestigious Commerzbank in Berlin, which contained his savings and the pension payments he received as a retired professor of the University of Berlin accumulated up to 1941. He wished to use the funds to ﬁnance his publications, at least in part, since previous sources were no longer available, and the ﬁnancial backers (such as Sarre) had either lost their money or had died.54 He discovered eventually that, in accordance with his previous arrangements, his Berlin account paid D. Reimer for the typesetting and plates of Samarra volume 6. As a result, his bank balance was signiﬁcantly reduced. He had also paid for the printing of his book on Zoroaster before these expenses were taken over by the Institute for Advanced Study. In the “Persepolis aﬀair,” Herzfeld had still another great disappointment that, initially, made him quite bitter; later, he succeeded in putting it behind him. From 1931 to 1934 Herzfeld was ﬁeld director of the excavations at Persepolis for the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. Although probably his most famous excavation, with spectacular results, he had never presented an extensive report on his work. When the Oriental Institute wanted to publish the material excavated by Herzfeld and his successor, Erich F. Schmidt, they did not seem to realize how sensitive an issue this was for Herzfeld. Indignant, he disassociated himself from the entire project. He felt that “the world has changed; there is no way back; those I ‘looked up’ to are gone, and I hate, but cannot help ‘looking down,’ a thing that poisons one’s mind.”55 This closed the Persepolis chapter for him with a dark cloud, surely contributing to the bitterness and pessimism that colored his thinking and approach to certain people and events during his last years. Whether his role at Persepolis was adequately recognized in the Oriental Institute’s

54 The foundation of Sarre’s aunt, Elise Wentzel-Heckmann, lost all its assets in the German ﬁnancial crash following World War I. Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 12 December 1946 and 30 March 1946. See also Kröger’s contribution, this volume. 55 He continued: “One lives in phases of disillusions. . . . One does something instead of nothing, therewith beginning a new phase of disillusion. I think of my connection with the Orient. Inst. Chic.” Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 7 April 1946; Herzfeld’s abbreviations.

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publication is perhaps debatable, although Herzfeld is mentioned and his contributions acknowledged.56 Many of Herzfeld’s manuscripts were diﬃcult to produce because they required, in addition to the innumerable plates, Arabic and other scripts and fonts. Moreover, he was a perfectionist, meticulous about the smallest details, as in the case of Herzfeld’s Lowell Lectures, for example, delivered at Harvard University early in his appointment in Princeton. When Oxford University Press ﬁnally published the lectures (with much delay, to the chagrin of the institute’s director, Frank Aydelotte), the editor wrote to Aydelotte about the problems of ﬁnding a good designer: “It is not a simple thing for a designer to plunge into the intricacies of a manuscript such as Dr. Herzfeld’s.”57 But Herzfeld also gave praise when he was satisﬁed with the results, as with his German publisher D. Reimer and the American ﬁrm Meriden Gravure Company, which printed the plates of several of his publications. This was, of course, in an era before computers were used for publications. Moreover, as Ettinghausen wrote to Herzfeld, “For the whole situation in the U.S.A. . . . the internal diﬃculties in the manufacturing of books are now greater than during the war. That applies to the availability of material, the problem of shipping, the question of skilled labor and general labor uncertainty. All these factors have slowed down production and instilled a certain sense of insecurity.”58 Although one manuscript was handed over to a press for publication ﬁrst, another had a shorter gestation period, albeit not one entirely devoid of diﬃculties and delays. In a list of proposed books Herzfeld presented to Aydelotte was an outline for his book Zoroaster and His World. In Herzfeld’s view, the particular reason for its importance was that it was the ﬁrst to analyze the Avesta not from a philological point of view, but for its historical and religious signiﬁcance. It established for the ﬁrst time that Zoroaster was indeed a historical ﬁgure and reformer of a thousand-year-old religion, which he changed from polytheism to monotheism. Among many other points, Herzfeld also emphasized the study’s importance for the formative

56

Record dated 20 September 1954, Institute for Advanced Study. Oxford University Press to Aydelotte, 30 April 1940, Institute for Advanced Study. 58 Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 25 September 1946. 57

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period of the Bible.59 The initial negotiations with the American Philosophical Society as sponsors of its publication were entirely negative, for no clear reason. Hoping to reverse their decision, Herzfeld’s lengthy summary of the manuscript was submitted to the society, but this only resulted in further delays.60 Fortunately the later negotiations in 1945 between Herzfeld and Datus Smith, director of Princeton University Press, were successfully concluded, and the press printed the Zoroaster manuscript.61 Herzfeld became impatient, however, when the book lagged far behind the original publication schedule. Finally, Ettinghausen obtained a ﬁrm commitment from the press to issue the book in February 1947.62 By far the most arduous path to publication (apart from that of Samarra, volume 6) was reserved for Inscriptions and Monuments of Aleppo, the ﬁrst of Herzfeld’s books planned for publication by Princeton University Press. This proved to be a much more diﬃcult work to produce. Although a contract was signed in 1944, preparations at the press dragged on for a long time. Finally it became clear that the press was unable to obtain the proper fonts needed to print the Arabic texts.63 Since Herzfeld was in despair over the lack of progress, Ettinghausen urged him (even before this situation arose) to look for a printer more experienced with complex, specialized publications.64 Smith was unwilling to accept Herzfeld’s suggestion that the printing be contracted to a Cairo establishment, and the two ﬁnally agreed to dissolve the contract; on Ettinghausen’s advice, Herzfeld withdrew his manuscript from Princeton University Press.65 After lengthy nego-

59

Herzfeld to Aydelotte, 21 February 1941, Institute for Advanced Study. 1 March 1941; Summary and Memorandum dated 18 December 1941, Institute for Advanced Study. 61 Smith to Aydelotte, 9 January 1946, states that most of the Zoroaster book had by then been typeset; a contract, however, was only signed on 16 January 1946. Smith to Institute for Advanced Study, 3 April 1944, Institute for Advanced Study, concerns methods of printing both the Aleppo and the Zoroaster books. 62 Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 25 February 1946, reports assurance from Princeton University Press. 63 Smith to Aydelotte, 3 April 1944, adds that he considered it a special honor to be associated with the institute and to publish a book by Herzfeld; the contract was signed 8 June 1944. The problem with fonts is revealed in a memorandum of a meeting between Smith and Aydelotte dated 2 October 1945. All of these records are in the Institute for Advanced Study. 64 Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 21 November 1945. 65 Datus Smith “almost oﬀered that . . . I was to withdraw the manuscript . . . and I accepted.” Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 4 December 1945. 60

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tiations, it was agreed to publish the Aleppo volume instead through the French Institute in Cairo, with which Herzfeld had always enjoyed friendly relations, and with whose director, Charles Kuentz, he was on close terms.66 This arrangement was facilitated by Princeton University Press’s willingness to furnish the necessary paper, which in that postwar period was particularly scarce; probably relieved at being released from the burden of publication, Smith was only too willing to obtain the paper (for which the Institute for Advanced Study paid).67 The institute’s ﬁnancial support, of course, was a great boost, and Herzfeld much appreciated Aydelotte’s eﬀorts on his behalf. At ﬁrst the printing at the French Institute in Cairo proceeded steadily, and production did not seem to be halted by Herzfeld’s corrections and additions of newly published references to the proofs. Because of internal politics and shifts in responsibilities, however, the work slowed and ﬁnally ground to a halt.68 Sadly, Herzfeld’s health had suddenly deteriorated so greatly that he could not adequately pursue the project; nor could Ettinghausen accomplish much at long distance. In Herzfeld’s view, this change on the institute’s part was due to Professor Louis Massignon, who was in charge of all French cultural activities in the region and had other priorities. The printing of the book fell behind, then stopped completely. From the French point of view, Herzfeld surmised, his book competed with Jean Sauvaget’s recent publication on Aleppo. Herzfeld even oﬀered to allow Sauvaget to contribute a chapter commenting on Herzfeld’s projected book and to include his name on the title page; but this gesture seemed not to appeal to either French scholar and did not lead to a solution.69 Herzfeld’s deteriorating health, which did not respond to treatments in Cairo, led him in 1947 to join his sister, Charlotte Bradford, in Basel, Switzerland, where she had moved from London after leaving Princeton.70 Shortly after arriving in Basel,

66

Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 1 November 1946. Aydelotte to Herzfeld, 23 January 1945; Aydelotte memorandum to Marsden Morse; Institute for Advanced Study. Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 18 February 1947, 22 February 1946, and 9 March 1946. 68 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 12 October 1947, from a hospital in Basel. This was Herzfeld’s ﬁnal letter to his colleague and friend. 69 Ibid. 70 Herzfeld left Cairo for Geneva on 17 May 1947 and was in Basel at least by 2 June 1947, as demonstrated by his letters to Ettinghausen dated 24 April 1947 and 2 June 1947. 67

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he entered a rehabilitation center (Kurhaus); soon, however, he moved to a hospital, where he remained until his death on 21 January 1948.71 The drama of the Aleppo publication, however, continued. When Ettinghausen queried his friend Glidden (then attached to the U.S embassy in Cairo) about the status of the book, hoping to announce it in Ars Islamica as a forthcoming publication, Glidden reported that the proofreading of the galleys was far from ﬁnished.72 There were other serious problems as well. One of the ﬁne plates prepared by the Meriden Gravure Company was completely destroyed, and many others were damaged, during their shipment to Cairo. Moreover, the press in Cairo had produced a diﬀerent page size from that of the Meriden Company. In the end, however, all diﬃculties were overcome. With his understanding of scholarly sensibilities, Glidden recommended Sauvaget to carry out the lengthy task of proofreading; Glidden reasoned that the Frenchman was the most qualiﬁed scholar for the task and that choosing him would also serve diplomacy and tact, thinking of later reviews of the publication.73 Les Inscriptions et Monuments d’Alep, consisting of two volumes of text and one of plates, ﬁnally did appear in 1956—many years after its initial submission to Princeton University Press—but, sadly, its author had died eight years earlier.74 Another manuscript, which Herzfeld had completed in 1944, was tentatively titled The Persian Empire, or (for a while) “the Persepolis book,” or (again) The Geography of the Ancient Near East; actually, however, its subject was ancient Iranian geography.75 Its publication

71 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 11 July and 31 August 1947, from the Kurhaus in Lucerne; 12 October 1947, from the hospital in Basel. 72 Ettinghausen to Glidden, 27 April 1948, Institute for Advanced Study. This publication, titled Aleppo. Matériaux pour un Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum, Deuxième Partie, Syrie, was announced as “in printing stage in Cairo.” Ettinghausen, “In Memoriam: Ernst Herzfeld,” 266–67. 73 Glidden to Robert Oppenheimer, director, Institute for Advanced Study, 11 September 1948; Glidden letter of 18 June 1948, quoted by R. Ettinghausen, Institute for Advanced Study. 74 Jean Sainte Fare Garnot, director, Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, Cairo, to Ettinghausen, 10 January 1955, informs him that the book’s publication, with some additions by M. Combe, is set for 1955. Garnot’s secretary to Oppenheimer, 13 June 1956, announces that the publication has now appeared and that ﬁfty copies were shipped to the institute in gratitude for having furnished the paper for the text volumes and all the plates; Institute for Advanced Study. 75 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 26 October 1944. The book was “actually a polit-

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would require printing in several languages and scripts, such as Pahlavi, Persian, and Arabic, which in the pre-computer era was, of course, an even more diﬃcult and daunting task. Princeton University Press initially accepted the work, but soon it turned out not to be the right “match.” Herzfeld concurred with Ettinghausen’s suggestion to have the manuscript brought out either by a European publisher experienced in the ﬁeld or in the Near East.76 By this time, Herzfeld had moved to Cairo and did not have the manuscript with him. Ettinghausen arranged for Glidden, an Arabic scholar and former student of Herzfeld’s, to deliver the manuscript when he arrived in Cairo as publications oﬃcer at the U.S. embassy. Aydelotte supported the decision to have the book also published by the French Institute in Cairo. In 1946, an agreement had been reached along the lines of the book on Aleppo, and the manuscript was typeset.77 The delays in the Aleppo book’s publication, however, along with Herzfeld’s deteriorating health, caused such insurmountable problems that those publication plans were abandoned. Once Herzfeld had left Cairo to seek treatment for his medical problems and to escape a cholera outbreak in Egypt, he could do little to further his projects there. Moreover, Jean Sainte Fare Garnot, the new director of the French Institute, who pursued diﬀerent paths from those of his predecessor, favored withdrawing the book despite the institute’s publishing contract and even though the book had already been typeset and its appearance announced in the institute’s catalogue of publications in its Mémoires.78 Professor Gerold Walser of the University of Bern was willing to take on the task of updating and editing the book, but Garnot objected that the proofreading would involve too many scholars in diﬀerent ﬁelds. Ettinghausen, by contrast, felt that it contained so much useful and important information that it merited publication, even though it had been completed

ical geography of the ancient Near East,” according to a memorandum from Aydelotte to Professor Marsden Morse, a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study, 16 January 1946, Institute for Advanced Study. 76 Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 25 September 1946; Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 1 November 1946. 77 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 12 October 1947, from Basel. 78 Ettinghausen to Oppenheimer, 14 January 1955; Miles to Oppenheimer, 13 January 1955; Ettinghausen to Oppenheimer, 18 September 1964, Institute for Advanced Study.

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over nine years earlier. Editing the manuscript, of course, would be essential.79 George Miles, who following World War II was appointed curator and later director of the American Numismatic Society, also tried his best to further the manuscript’s publication. Although a specialist in Islamic numismatics and history, Miles had a wide knowledge of the Near East and had been, in his own words, “an associate of Professor Herzfeld at the Institute in 1938–39 and a friend of his from earlier years.”80 “Almost anything of Herzfeld’s mature work is worth publishing,” he wrote to Robert Oppenheimer, the institute’s director, “provided it receives competent editing, proof reading and perhaps indexing and other mechanical polishing.”81 An admirer of Herzfeld’s, Miles became the editor of the impressive memorial volume in Herzfeld’s honor and also published a bibliography of his writings.82 Oppenheimer solicited opinions from American scholars regarding who might best undertake this task, chieﬂy from George G. Cameron, chairman of the department of Near Eastern studies, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Miles corresponded with Cameron about the possibility of editing the manuscript, to be undertaken by Cameron himself or by Herbert H. Paper, a younger faculty member in the same department (and a student of Cameron’s). “The editor must be familiar with Old Persian, Avestan, Pahlevi, Assyriology and related ﬁelds,” Miles wrote Cameron. What is needed is a pre- and post-type composition proof reading . . . systemization of transcriptions and references . . . and several other corrections or improvements. . . . This work of Herzfeld’s, the last on which he was engaged, is, I feel certain, an important one and it must not be lost; doubtless there will be much that is controversial

79 Garnot to Oppenheimer, 14 December 1954; Herbert H. Paper to Ettinghausen, 10 January 1955; Ettinghausen to Oppenheimer, 14 January 1955, Institute for Advanced Study. 80 Miles to secretary, 23 January 1948, Institute for Advanced Study. 81 Miles to Oppenheimer, 13 January 1955, Institute for Advanced Study. 82 George C. Miles, ed., Archaeologica Orientalia in Memoriam Ernst Herzfeld (Locust Valley, N.Y.: J. J. Augustin, 1952), 279–80, which supplements his earlier compilation in Ars Islamica 7 (1940): 82–92. Originally, Baron von der Heydt, a German living in Ascona (where Frau Sarre also resided) was eager to ﬁnance the volume, but the U.S. government seized his assets when his Nazi past was revealed. The publisher J. J. Augustin was then brought in, and funding was provided from other sources (chieﬂy the Institute for Advanced Study and the publisher). Ettinghausen to Oppenheimer, 27 June 1950, Institute for Advanced Study.

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and in some respects it may be outdated by developments and research since Herzfeld’s death, but . . . none of his mature work should be buried.83

An entirely diﬀerent type of person with a diﬀerent perspective, Cameron had seen the manuscript at the French Institute in Cairo. He pointed out to Miles the ﬂaws in the manuscript—which was by then about eleven years old—including epigraphic shortcomings and historic weaknesses, and declared that the editing would constitute an enormous task.84 Paper was designated as the ultimate arbiter on the subject of the manuscript. A young scholar having yet to establish himself, Paper felt that he could not himself aﬀord to devote the time needed to bring the book up-to-date; he suggested instead that “a commentated analytic table of contents” be published in the Journal of the American Oriental Society. Following a telephone conversation between Oppenheimer and Paper, this plan was expanded to Paper’s writing a summary of Herzfeld’s book.85 Resigned to this decision, Miles decided that the manuscript would at least be accessible to further scholarly inspection as part of the Ernest Herzfeld Papers housed at the Freer Gallery of Art.86 There is a happy ending to this drama, although it took a long time in the making. Walser, whose earlier oﬀer to edit and update Herzfeld’s manuscript had been rejected around 1954, did pursue this task. The manuscript was ﬁnally published in 1968.87 Unfortunately, the endless problems with the publication of his works on Samarra, Aleppo, and other subjects not only aﬀected Herzfeld’s mental outlook, but may well have accelerated the declining state of his health. In earlier years an avid horseback rider and hiker, who enjoyed long journeys in Switzerland and the western United States, he began to experience dizziness and problems with his legs.88 83

Miles to Cameron, 28 January 1955, Institute for Advanced Study. Cameron to Miles, 15 February 1955, Institute for Advanced Study. Other problems included the question of where the complete manuscript was located. 85 Paper to Oppenheimer, 1 June 1955; Paper to Institute for Advanced Study, 20 April 1956, Institute for Advanced Study. He sent reprints of his summary with this letter. 86 Miles to Oppenheimer, 25 May 1955; Institute for Advanced Study. 87 Ernst Herzfeld, The Persian Empire. Studies in Geography and Ethnography of the Ancient Near East, edited from the posthumous papers by Gerold Walser (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1968). I am grateful to David Stronach for information on this publication. 88 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 7 August 1945, Institute for Advanced Study. Herzfeld frequently rode horseback during World War I while he was stationed in the Near East. 84

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A diagnosis of atheriosclerosis followed, but in spite of various treatments his condition did not improve and ﬁnally began to deteriorate dramatically. In his ﬁnal, long letter to Richard Ettinghausen, dated 12 October 1947, Herzfeld complained that it took him twenty days to write it. Clearly, his body and mind were in decline: a sad state of aﬀairs for a brilliant, formerly physically vigorous, individual. Herzfeld wrote in a rather elegiac mood about all his unﬁnished work, wishing that he had collaborators to take over and complete it (as had been the case with Sir Aurel Stein).89 It was most unfortunate that Herzfeld never produced the ﬁnal two planned volumes of the Samarra reports, which would have dealt with the city’s major buildings. I remember that Ettinghausen talked to Herzfeld and exchanged letters about it, but the correspondence seems not to have survived. Herzfeld intended to write the volumes and had done much preparatory work for them, but his untimely death at the age of sixty-eight prevented him from accomplishing the task.90 All exchanges with Herzfeld on future Samarra volumes or on other subjects— such as Ettinghausen’s suggestion that he produce another report on travels in the Tigris and Euphrates region—called for tact and understanding. This was the case, too, with the series of articles on the architecture of Damascus published in Ars Islamica under Ettinghausen’s editorship.91 A great deal of persuading was needed before Herzfeld would agree that he was the ideal person to write the obituary of Sarre, his colleague and friend, for the same journal.92 The obituary greatly pleased Sarre’s widow, Maria, as well as others.93 “I like

89 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 10 April 1947. Herzfeld had hoped that Upton would work on and publish the excavation material from Kuh-i Khwaja, Sistan, eastern Iran, but Upton did not feel he could undertake the task. Upton to Ettinghausen, 11 November 1972, Herzfeld Archive, department of Islamic art, Metropolitan Museum of Art. 90 Thomas Leisten, associate professor, department of art and archaeology, Princeton University, drawing on Herzfeld’s notes and other documents, has completed a volume on the subject, which was published by the German Archaeological Institute in 2003. 91 The lengthy correspondence between Herzfeld and Ettinghausen concerning Herzfeld’s publications in Ars Islamica between 1944 and 1947 is housed in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers. 92 Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 19 July 1945; Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 19 November 1945 and 2 January 1946. 93 Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 19 March 1947.

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it very much,” Ettinghausen wrote to Herzfeld, “as it does not only give an insight into Sarre’s personality, but also of a whole period.”94

Finding Repositories for Herzfeld’s Papers and Antiquities In spite of all the diﬃculties he faced, Herzfeld accomplished a great deal.95 Yet much more can be gleaned from his numerous notebooks, sketches, and other records. He felt that he should entrust all his materials to an institution for safekeeping and to be made accessible for scholarly investigation. Initially he was in a quandary about ﬁnding the right repository, thinking for a while of a museum or academy in the Near East. Ettinghausen, then head curator at the Freer Gallery of Art, successfully persuaded Herzfeld to donate his notebooks, written records, correspondence, sketches, drawings, and photographs to the Freer Gallery of Art. Upton was asked to catalogue the holdings; he not only organized them systematically, but also created an invaluable, detailed list of their contents. “I am glad, even at this late date,” he wrote to Ettinghausen, “to be able to repay my debt to him by putting his gift here in useful shape.”96 The Ernst Herzfeld Papers have been further reﬁned since Upton completed his cataloguing of the material. They are housed, in wellorganized fashion, in the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, under the capable supervision of the museums’ archivist.97 These papers comprise the bulk of Herzfeld’s scientiﬁc materials; a limited collection went to the Islamic department, and a much larger collection of records, reports, and sketches, went to the department of ancient Near Eastern art, both at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.98 Both Herzfeld and Richard Ettinghausen were

94 Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 9 January 1946. For the obituary, see Ernst Herzfeld, “Friedrich Sarre,” Ars Islamica 11–12 (1946): 210–12. 95 Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 30 April 1947, in which he also attempts to cheer up the older scholar by mentioning his many accomplishments while in Princeton. 96 Upton to Ettinghausen, 11 November 1972, department of Islamic art, Metropolitan Museum of Art. 97 Colleen Hennessey, “The Ernst Herzfeld Papers in the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives,” BAI N. S. 6 (1992): 131–41. 98 Upton to Ettinghausen, 11 November 1972; Ettinghausen to Upton, 29 November 1972, both Herzfeld Archive, department of Islamic art, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ettinghausen’s lengthy correspondence with Herzfeld on the subject of the papers includes: Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 30 March, 7 April, and 12 April, 1946;

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pleased with Herzfeld’s gift to the Freer, as was Joseph Brummer, the well-known collector and dealer, who had remarked that “it would be most appropriate to be deposited in the future capital of the world.”99 Maria Sarre was also pleased by Herzfeld’s decision to place his materials at the Freer.100 She must have felt that this ensured a safe haven for all of this information, in contrast to what had happened to most of her late husband’s records. The day following her husband’s funeral on 31 May 1945, the Soviets occupied the Sarres’ house in Neubabelsberg, Berlin, along with other houses in the area, destroying the contents in preparation for the forthcoming Potsdam Conference.101 It was not only an enormous personal loss, but also meant the destruction of much valuable information concerning excavation records and archaeological research. Herzfeld was well versed not only in many ﬁelds of archaeology, architecture, and art, but also in languages and philological matters ranging from ancient languages to Arabic and Persian inscriptions and calligraphy. In addition, he was interested in many other subjects. As director of the Persepolis excavations he made an eﬀort to produce healthy and varied supplies of vegetables by obtaining and planting seeds in the expedition garden near the site. It was characteristic of him that he was aware of the ancient world as a whole, its events and its literature, for he saw everything in context. He was eager, for example, to obtain seeds of the soma plant (or its modern relatives), which is mentioned in the Avesta.102 Herzfeld had a large collection of objects, particularly pottery and metalwork, acquired in the Near East. In the early twentieth century, antiquities (especially small objects such as ceramic pots) could be bought for very small sums. Part of his collection derived from excavations Herzfeld had conducted in the ﬁrst decades of the century, when it was still the custom to divide excavated ﬁnds between

Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 4 April, 9 April, 12 April, and 31 [sic] April 1946. Ettinghausen visited Herzfeld in Princeton to discuss and ﬁnalize the negotiations for the gift. 99 Quoted in Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 12 April 1946. 100 Ettinghausen to Herzfeld, 25 September 1946. 101 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 19 November 1945, recounts Frau Sarre’s report to him. 102 Herzfeld corresponded about seeds and botanical studies with W. F. F. von Wilmonsky, a New York attorney. Wilmonsky to Herzfeld, 14 February 1932, department of ancient Near Eastern art, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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the excavators and the country of origin. In some cases Herzfeld’s excavations were privately funded, especially through the Gesellschaft zur Förderung von Ausgrabungen und Forschungsreisen GmbH, the foundation of Sarre’s aunt. Under these circumstances, the excavator’s share was to be partly or entirely his private possession, as Herzfeld wrote in a statement about Samarra: A small part of the ﬁnds had been divided, in 1913, between the Constantinople Museum and the expedition; about 300 large boxes were left in the Government’s building at Samarra, but were lost for the greater part at the end of the ﬁrst World War. About 80 boxes were brought to London and the Colonial Oﬃce invited me, early in 1921, to come over for discussing what to do with these objects. A proposal of Col. Lawrence was accepted, and “type-sets” of the objects were given to almost all museums that had departments of Muhammedan art. The objects received by the Expedition itself were kept in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin, but not as property of the museum.103

These ﬁnds were registered in the Museum für Islamische Kunst, however, as museum property.104 In another letter Herzfeld wrote that half of the ﬁnds from Samarra belonged to Frau Sarre and half to him.105 Thus he had accumulated a number of important artifacts from various sources, which he disposed of in several diﬀerent ways later in his life. He was anxious to sell his collections primarily to cover publication costs not underwritten by the Institute for Advanced Study. In addition to sales of artifacts to museums and commercial galleries, he also donated objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.106 Objects in his collections were purchased by and donated to the museum’s department of Islamic art and the department of ancient Near Eastern art. Many ﬁne sketches and watercolors depicting ﬁnds from Herzfeld’s excavations in Samarra, chieﬂy stucco and wall paintings, were acquired by the department of Islamic

103 Herzfeld, “Publication of the Excavations of Samarra,” 12 December 1946, attached to his letter to Ettinghausen. 104 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 26 November 1946. 105 Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 8 September 1946, and 2 June 1947. The Samarra objects never came into Herzfeld’s possession and remain in the Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin. See also Kröger, this volume. 106 Herzfeld also intended to give objects to Art Museum, Princeton University (now called Princeton University Art Museum) if it acquired certain objects in which they were interested; apparently the museum did not pursue this. Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 24 June 1945; Princeton University Art Museum, telephone conversation with the author, June 2002.

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art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum also purchased Herzfeld’s library of approximately four thousand volumes. The Field Museum in Chicago acquired his large and distinguished collection of early Iranian pottery and metalwork and also arranged for the Oriental Institute to obtain a portion of the collection. Herzfeld also disposed of other possessions through at least two auctions at Parke-Bernet (later Sotheby’s) and through sales to the (later defunct) Gimbels department store, where he sold his Qajar paintings and a few miniatures.107 These are probably the same paintings acquired by Charles K. Wilkinson, on the curatorial staﬀ of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1932–69 and the Brooklyn Museum of Art from 1969–74. While Wilkinson bequeathed one of these paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1986, the others came to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1997 as a bequest of his widow, Irma B. Wilkinson.108 Remarkably, during the 1920s or earlier, Herzfeld recognized the value of this art, at a time when it was still disdained by both western and Iranian collectors and scholars. He was clearly charmed by them. In a photograph of Herzfeld in his study in Tehran, four of these paintings hang on the rear wall of his study (see Mousavi, this volume, ﬁg. 1).109 A number of ﬁne sketches and watercolors depicting various ﬁnds, primarily stuccos and fragments of wall paintings that Herzfeld excavated at Samarra, were acquired by the department of Islamic art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and displayed in a special exhibition in 2002–03.110 The material gathered in this small exhibition demonstrates Herzfeld’s great sensitivity and remarkable artistic ability. It also opened up a vista on the rich program and decorative variety both in subject matter and media employed in the main halls of the caliph’s palace and other dwellings. Despite the small size of the

107

Herzfeld to Ettinghausen, 18 April 1945, and 24 June 1945. MMA 1987.355.I. See Layla S. Diba, “Pictorial Cycle of Eight Poetic Subjects,” in Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch, 1785–1925, ed. Layla S. Diba with Maryam Ekhtiar (London: I. B. Tauris with Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1998), 162, ﬁg. 30. For Irma B. Wilkinson’s bequests, see ibid., 159–62, ﬁgs. 29a–g. 109 Ibid., ﬁgs. 29 b (MA 1997.108.4), 29c (BMA 1997.108.6), 29a (BMA.108.3), 29f (BMA 1997.108.1). Although some of the paintings in the two museums have curved upper borders that do not appear in the photograph, I believe that my identiﬁcation can stand; some alterations may have taken place, in Tehran or later. 110 The exhibition “Herzfeld in Samarra,” organized by associate curator Stefano Carboni, was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from 5 June 2002–2 March 2003. 108

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fragments preserved, or rendered in Herzfeld’s watercolors, the rich accoutrement of the throne hall and harem can be imagined. Representations of garments decorated with multicolored patterns stem from the ﬁgures of men and women, now only fragmentary, depicted on the walls. The ﬁgures must have mirrored actual events that took place there, and seemingly expanded the numbers of people in attendance so as to enhance the scenes’ impressiveness. The eﬀect was surely dazzling, creating an opulent atmosphere and a sense of magic. The fragments of ﬁne ﬂoor and wall tiles contribute to the impression of unreality. The ﬁne decoration of at least the mihrab area of the Great Mosque at Samarra is documented by small marble opus sectile and mille ﬁore glass mosaic tile fragments now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.111 Other objects that had been in Herzfeld’s possession are now dispersed. Among them are several colorfully painted wooden panels from the Qajar period, probably mid-nineteenth century, which were built into chests. They are now the property of the Institute for Advanced Study.112 A few other pieces are in private collections. They include a Qajar-period triptych-like mirror with ﬂoral and bird decoration, a sixteenth-century brass bowl with inlays, a ﬁne seventeenth-century Persian pen-and-ink drawing, and wood panels with ivory inlays, incorporated into a wooden chest. Charles Rufus Morey, a distinguished specialist in Early Christian art in the department of art and archaeology, Princeton University, hoped that Herzfeld, despite his appointment as a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study, would be permitted to “train up a group of men of the younger generation to perfect themselves in his methods and absorb his extraordinary knowledge of the ﬁeld so that this combination will be continued in American scholarship in the future.”113 Herzfeld did teach courses and a seminar for graduate students, which included Glidden and Richard Starr. Another student was Bishr Farès, a talented specialist in Islamic art, who unfortunately died young. Donald N. Wilber, trained as an architect, 111 Larger fragments are housed in the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art, Istanbul. 112 They may have been acquired in 1944. “Cabinets in your large room and in the museum behind, which you suggested, you would be willing to sell to the Institute . . . this was approved by the committee and the transfer was arranged.” Aydelotte to Herzfeld, 21 November 1944, Institute for Advanced Study. 113 Morey to Flexner, 11 November 1936, Institute for Advanced Study.

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was another in the group; he participated in excavations in the Near East and later divided his time between the Central Intelligence Agency and his studies of Iranian architecture. During his ﬁrst two years at the Institute for Advanced Study, Herzfeld also lectured at the Fine Arts Graduate Center (later the Institute of Fine Arts), New York University. Herbert Winlock, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, recommended Herzfeld’s lectures to two curators in the department of Egyptian art. It was “the ﬁrst time in their experience that anyone has with authority discussed the ancient art of the Near East,” Winlock reported to Walter W. S. Cook, chair of the Fine Arts Graduate Center.114 Herzfeld’s intimate acquaintance with and knowledge of the Near East seemed to Aydelotte a great asset that could be directed to the war eﬀort during World War II. Herzfeld would have been happy to serve, and Aydelotte oﬀered his services to the military in Washington, D.C., explaining that the German scholar’s application for American citizenship beyond the ﬁrst papers was delayed by the attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into the war.115 Herzfeld was deeply opposed to the Nazi regime, but his services were not sought. Perhaps the U.S. military intelligence was apprehensive about employing a German who had not yet obtained American citizenship. Morey’s comments on Herzfeld’s scholarly accomplishments by the mid-1930s deserve quoting here: Ernst Herzfeld is recognized as the foremost scholar in the ﬁeld of Islamic Archaeology of the present day, and also is one of the best of the explorers in the ﬁeld of Persian Archaeology. His position is undisputed because of his extraordinary command both of the languages involved in the ﬁeld and of the archaeological methods which he learned from Sarre, his teacher. He has made a survey of the Islamic monuments in Mesopotamia, Persia, Syria and Palestine. . . . At present he has in hand the ﬁrst two or three volumes in which he expects to embody the results of a lifetime spent in the exploration of Islamic lands. There has probably never been so happy a combination of philologist and archaeologist as in the case of this scholar. His researches based on the sound knowledge of the inscriptional and literary evidence bearing upon his archaeological ﬁnds have put Islamic archaeology on an entirely new basis.116

114 115 116

Cook to Flexner, 16 January 1937, Institute for Advanced Study. Memorandum, November 1942, Institute for Advanced Study. Morey to Flexner, 11 November 1936.

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After Herzfeld’s death on 21 January 1948, Ettinghausen and Hetty Goldman, archaeologist and member of the Institute for Advanced Study, planned a memorial conference. Eventually, however, it was decided instead to bring out the memorial volume described earlier. As Ettinghausen wrote in his obituary of his colleague and friend, “there would never be another archaeologist like him: an original and penetrating scholar whose research had covered the whole ﬁeld of Near Eastern archaeology. . . . A list of his main ﬁelds of interest reads like the disciplines of a school of Oriental studies with an extensive faculty.”117

117

Ettinghausen, “In Memoriam: Ernst Herzfeld,” 261–62.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by or Coauthored by Ernst Herzfeld Cited in Abbreviated Form Altpersische Inschriften Altpersische Inschriften. AMI Erg. 1. Berlin: D. Reimer, 1938. Archaeological History of Iran Archaeological History of Iran. Schweich Lectures of the British Academy, 1934. London: Oxford University Press, 1935. “Bericht über Pasargadae” “Bericht über die Ausgrabungen von Pasargadae.” AMI 1 (1929–30): 4–16. “Die Genesis der islamischen Kunst” “Die Genesis der islamischen Kunst und das Mschatta-Problem.” Der Islam 1 (1910): 27–63, 105–44. Geschichte der Stadt Samarra Geschichte der Stadt Samarra. Forschungen zur islamischen Kunst, no. 2. Die Ausgrabungen von Samarra, Bd. 6. Hamburg: Eckardt and Messtorﬀ, 1948. “Geschichte und Vorgeschichte” “Aufsätze zur altorientalischen Archäologie I. Geschichte und Vorgeschichte.” AMI 5 (1933): 1–48. “Gumbadh-i-'Alawiyyân” “Die Gumbadh-i-'Alawiyyân und die Baukunst der Ilkhane in Iran.” In A Volume of Oriental Studies Presented to Edward G. Browne on his 60th Birthday, ed. Thomas Walker Arnold and Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, 186–99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922. “Hettitica” “Hettitica.” AMI 2 (1930): 132–64; 65–203. “Die historische Geographie von Mesopotamien” “Über die historische Geographie von Mesopotamien. Ein Programm.” PetMitt 55 (1909): 345–49. Iran in the Ancient East Iran in the Ancient East. Archaeological Studies Presented in the Lowell Lectures at Boston. London: Oxford University Press, 1941. Iranische Denkmäler Iranische Denkmäler, I. Steinzeitlicher Hügel bei Persepolis. Berlin: D. Reimer, 1932. “Khorasan” “Khorasan. Denkmalsgeographische Studien zur Kulturgeschichte des Islam in Iran.” Der Islam 11 (1921): 107–74.

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“Luristan” 1907 “Eine Reise durch Luristan, Arabistan und Fars.” PetMitt 53: 49–63, 73–90. Die Malereien von Samarra Die Malereien von Samarra. Forschungen zur islamischen Kunst, no. 2. Die Ausgrabungen von Samarra, Bd. 3. Berlin: D. Reimer, 1927. “Mythos und Geschichte” “Mythos und Geschichte.” AMI 6 (1934): 1–109. “Olba” “Olba, die Stadt der Teukriden.” AA (1909): 434–41. Paikuli 1914 Die Aufnahme des sasanidischen Denkmals von Paikuli. Abh. d. Königl. Preuss. Akademie der Wissenschaften, Jg 1914, Phil-Histo Kl, No. 1. Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften in Kommission bei Georg Reimer, 1914. Paikuli 1924 Paikuli: Monument and Inscription of the Early History of the Sasanian Empire. Forschungen zur islamischen Kunst, no. 3. Berlin: D. Reimer, 1924. “Pasargadae” 1907 “Pasargadae. Aufnahmen und Untersuchungen zur persischen Archäologie.” Berlin, Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde, 1907. “Pasargadae” 1908 “Pasargadae. Untersuchungen zur persischen Archäologie.” Klio 8 (1908): 1–68. “Das Problem der hettitischen Kunst” “Aufsätze zur altorientalischen Archäologie III. Der Tell Halaf und das Problem der hettitischen Kunst.” AMI 6 (1934): 111–223. “Rapport sur Persépolis” “Rapport sur l’état actual des ruines de Persépolis et propositions pour leur conservation.” AMI 1 (1929–30): 17–40. “Reise durch das westliche Kilikien” “Eine Reise durch das westliche Kilikien im Frühjahr 1907.” PetMitt 55 (1909): 25–34. “Reisebericht” “Reisebericht.” ZDMG 80 (N. F. 5) (1926): 225–84. Samarra 1907 Samarra. Aufnahmen und Untersuchungen zur islamischen Archaeologie. Berlin: Behrend und Co., 1907. “Stempelsiegel” “Aufsätze zur altorientalischen Archäologie II. Stempelsiegel.” AMI 5 (1933): 49–103. Am Tor von Asien Am Tor von Asien: Felsdenkmale aus Irans Heldenzeit. Berlin: D. Reimer, 1920. “Vergangenheit und Zukunft” “Vergangenheit und Zukunft der Erforschung Vorderasiens.” Der Neue Orient 4 (1919): 313–23.

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Die vorgeschichtlichen Töpfereien von Samarra. Forschungen zur islamischen Kunst, no. 2. Die Ausgrabungen von Samarra, Bd. 5. Berlin: D. Reimer, 1930. “Völker- und Kulturzusammenhänge” “Völker- und Kulturzusammenhänge im Alten Orient.” Deutsche Forschung, Aus der Arbeit der Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft 5 (1928): 33–67. Der Wandschmuck der Bauten von Samarra Der Wandschmuck der Bauten von Samarra und seine Ornamentik. Forschungen zur islamischen Kunst, no. 2. Die Ausgrabungen von Samarra, Bd. 1. Berlin: D. Reimer, 1923. Zoroaster and His World Zoroaster and His World. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947. The Persian Empire Herzfeld, Ernst and Gerold Walser. The Persian Empire. Studies in Geography and Ethnography of the Ancient Near East. Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1968. Herzfeld and Guyer, Meriamlik und Korykos Herzfeld, Ernst and Samuel Guyer. Meriamlik und Korykos. Zwei christliche Ruinenstätten des Rauhen Kilikien. MAMA 2. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1930. Sarre and Herzfeld, Archäologische Reise Sarre, Friedrich, Ernst Herzfeld, and Max van Berchem. Archäologische Reise im Euphratund Tigris-Gebiet. 4 vols. Forschungen zur islamischen Kunst, no. 1. Berlin: D. Reimer, 1911–1920. Sarre and Herzfeld, Iranische Felsreliefs Sarre, Friedrich, and Ernst Herzfeld. Iranische Felsreliefs. Aufnahmen und Untersuchungen von Denkmälern aus alt- und mittelpersischer Zeit. Berlin: E. Wasmuth, 1910. Journal and Series Abbreviations AbhBerl AchHist ActaOr ActIr AvP AJA AOS AA AMI ArsOr BaForsch BAI Berliner Museen BCH BibOr BSA BSOAS ByzZeit CDAFI CHI

Abhandlungen der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin Achaemenid History Acta Orientalia Acta Iranica Altertümer von Pergamon American Journal of Archaeology American Oriental Series Archäologischer Anzeiger Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran Ars Orientalis Baghdader Forschungen Bulletin of the Asia Institute, n.s. Berliner Museen. Berichte aus den preussischen Kunstsammlungen Bulletin de correspondance hellénique Bibliotheca Orientalis Annual of the British School at Athens Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies Byzantinische Zeitschrift Cahiers de la Délégation Française en Iran Cambridge History of Iran

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Comptes rendus des séances l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres Deutsche Literaturzeitung Encyclopedia Iranica Encyclopedia of Islam Iranica Antiqua Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen Jahrbuch der preussischen Kunstsammlungen Jahreshefte des österreichischen archäologischen Institutes in Wien, Beiblatt Journal asiatique Journal of the American Oriental Society Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Journal of the Royal Geographical Society Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal Monumenta Asiae minoris antiqua Mémoires de la Délégation Française en Iran Mémoires de la Délégation Française en Perse Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft zu Berlin Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph, Beyrouth Oriental Institute Communications Oriental Institute Publications Orientalische Literaturzeitung Petermanns Mitteilungen Revue archéologique Revue des études anciennes Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization Studia Iranica Wissenschaftliche Veröﬀentlichungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft Zeitschrift der Deutsch-morgenländischen Gesellschaft Frequently Cited Archival Sources

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Rémy Boucharlat, Ph.D. (1978) in Near Eastern archaeology at the University of Paris I (Sorbonne), is director of research at the C.N.R.S., Maison de l’Orient Méditerranéen and University of Lyons. He has excavated and published extensively in the archaeology of Iran, the Persian Gulf, and central Asia, with particular emphasis on the Sasanian and early Islamic periods. Pierre Briant, Ph.D. (1972) in ancient history at the University of Besançon, is professor at the Collège de France, where a chair in Achaemenid history was created for him. His numerous seminal studies in Achaemenid and Hellenistic history include Histoire de l’empire perse: De Cyrus à Alexandre (1996), recently published in English as From Cyrus to Alexander (2002). Elspeth R. M. Dusinberre, Ph.D. (1997) in classical art and archaeology, University of Michigan, is assistant professor in the Classics Department, University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research focuses on the art and archaeology of the Achaemenid Empire, to which her most recent contribution is Satrapal Sardis and the Achaemenid Persian Empire (2003). Elizabeth S. Ettinghausen, Ph.D. (1943) in Byzantine art history, University of Vienna, is a member of the Princeton Research Forum. A specialist in the ceramics of Byzantine Asia Minor, she has recently contributed to A Lost Art Rediscovered: The Architectural Ceramics of Byzantium, edited by Sharon E. J. Gerstel and Julie A. Lauﬀenburger (2001). Ann C. Gunter, Ph.D. (1980) in classical and Near Eastern art history and archaeology, Columbia University, is curator of ancient Near Eastern art at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Her publications include Ancient Iranian Metalwork in the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art, coauthored with Paul Jett (1992), and A Collector’s Journey: Charles Lang Freer and Egypt (2002).

626

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Stefan R. Hauser, Ph.D. (1994) in Near Eastern history and archaeology, Free University, Berlin, is senior researcher at the University of Halle and is completing his habilitation thesis on burials and social structure in Neo-Assyrian Ashur. He has written and edited numerous contributions to Near Eastern and Byzantine archaeology, history, and historiography, with particular emphasis on the Parthian and Sasanian periods. Robert Hillenbrand studied Islamic art at the University of Oxford and holds a chair in Islamic art at the University of Edinburgh. His numerous publications on Islamic art and architecture include the prize-winning Islamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning (1994). Trudy S. Kawami, Ph.D. (1983) in art history and archaeology, Columbia University, is director of research at the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation, New York. Her studies on the art of pre-Islamic Iran include Monumental Art of the Parthian Period in Iran (1987). Jens Kröger, Ph.D. (1982) in Islamic studies and ancient Near Eastern archaeology, Free University, Berlin, is curator of Islamic art at the Museum of Islamic Art, Berlin. His publications on Sasanian and early Islamic art—the most recent of which is Nishapur: Glass of the Early Islamic Period (1995)—encompass comprehensive studies of Sasanian and Islamic stucco and glass. Thomas F. Leisten, Ph.D. (1993) in Near Eastern studies and Islamic art history, Eberhard-Karls University, Tübingen, is associate professor in the department of art and archaeology at Princeton University. He has published broadly in the ﬁeld of Islamic archaeology and architecture and has recently completed Excavation of Samarra: Architecture. Final Report of the First Campaign 1910–1912, Baghdader Forschungen 20 (2003). Gabriele Mietke, Ph.D. (1986) in the archaeology of the Late Antique and Byzantine periods, University of Freiburg, is curator at the Collection of Sculptures and Museum of Byzantine Art in Berlin. Her research concentrates on architecture and architectural sculpture in the Byzantine East and on the history of Byzantine studies in Asia Minor.

list of contributors

627

Ali Mousavi, M.A. (1997) in archaeology, languages, history, and civilization of the ancient world, University of Lyons, is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of California at Berkeley. He is completing a dissertation on the Early Iron Age in north central Iran. He has also participated in archaeological ﬁeldwork in France, Iran, and Turkey, and has published articles on his ﬁnds and on the history of Iranian archaeology. Alistair Northedge, Ph.D. (1984) in Islamic archaeology, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, lectures in Islamic archaeology at the University of Paris I (Sorbonne). His extensive ﬁeldwork experience in the Near East and Central Asia includes a comprehensive survey of Samarra, which he is currently preparing for publication. He is also writing a volume on the architecture of Samarra. Shahrokh Razmjou, M.A. (2001) in ancient Near Eastern languages and archaeology, Azad University, Tehran, is curator of the epigraphical collections at the National Museum in Iran. His ﬁeldwork in Iran includes projects at Pasargadae and Persepolis. Johannes Renger, Ph.D. (1965) in Assyriology and Near Eastern archaeology, University of Heidelberg, is professor emeritus of ancient Near Eastern philology and history at the Free University, Berlin. He has written and edited many contributions to ancient Near Eastern economic history and the history of ancient Near Eastern studies, including the recent volume Babylon: Focus mesopotamischer Geschichte, Wiege früher Gelehrsamkeit, Mythos in der Moderne (1999). Margaret Cool Root, Ph.D. (1976) in classical and Near Eastern archaeology, Bryn Mawr College, is professor of art history at the University of Michigan. A specialist in the art of the Achaemenid Empire, she has recently coauthored, with Mark B. Garrison, Seals on the Persepolis Fortiﬁcation Tablets, Volume I: Images of Heroic Encounter, OIP 117 (2001). Prods Oktor Skjaervø, Ph.D. (1981) in Iranian linguistics, University of Oslo, is Aga Khan Professor of Iranian Studies at Harvard University. His numerous publications on ancient Iranian languages and linguistics include The Sassanian Inscription of Paikuli, coauthored with Helmut Humbach (1978–83).

628

list of contributors

David Stronach, professor of Near Eastern archaeology at the University of California at Berkeley, studied Near Eastern archaeology at the University of Cambridge. He has directed excavations at many sites in the Near East and Russia, and is the author of Pasargadae: A Report on the Excavations Conducted by the British Institute of Persian Studies from 1961 to 1963 (1978). Rüdiger vom Bruch, Ph.D. (1978) in history, University of Munich, is professor of the history of science at Humboldt University, Berlin. Editor of the journal Jahrbuch für Universitätsgeschichte, he has contributed signiﬁcantly to the history of German higher education and scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Josef Wiesehöfer, Ph.D. (1977) in history, Indo-European linguistics, and Near Eastern archaeology, University of Münster, is chair in ancient history at the University of Kiel. His many contributions to ancient Near Eastern history and historiography include Das antike Persien (1993; English translation, 1996).

INDEX

Abbasid capital, see Samarra Adams, Jane Ford, 220, 222 Adams, Walter, 32, 194 n. 60, 585 Adams collection, 220–22, 225 Afghanistan, French archaeological mission in, 433, 469; Herzfeld’s interest in, 61, 62 Ahl, Augustus W., 273–74 al-Hira, excavations at, 25 Aleppo, Herzfeld’s publication of monuments in, 412, 602–4 Altheim, Franz, 276 Althoﬀ, Friedrich, 485, 488 American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology, 232, 451, 465. See also Pope, Arthur Upham Anau, 9 Andersson, J. G., 241 Andrae, Walter, and Assur, 9, 11, 391, 395, 515, 517, 522, 523, 566, 567; and Fara, 9, 17; relationship with Herzfeld, 59, 523, 555 antiquities market, see Herzfeld, Ernst; Pope, Arthur Upham Andreas, Friedrich Carl, 285, 296, 307 Andree, Richard, 237 Anjuman Athar-i Milli (Anjoman thàr-e Melli), early history, 66–67, 449–50; Herzfeld’s participation in, 26, 73, 439, 457, 549, 577; logo designed by Herzfeld, 66–67 Aseﬁ, Taghi, 317, 318, 326, 327 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, excavations at Kish, 17 Assur, 24; and Herzfeld, 5, 9, 10, 11, 46, 59, 184, 431–32, 516, 523, 567. See also Andrae, Walter Assyriology, 5–6, 34, 46, 562–65 Auswärtiges Amt (German Ministry of Foreign Aﬀairs), 62, 67, 69 Aydelotte, Frank, 597, 601, 603, 605, 614 Babylon. See Koldewey, Robert Bachmann, Walter, 517 Bagherzadeh, Firouz, 471 Barthus, Hans, 185

Bartol’d, V. V., 409 Bauer, Theo, 563 Becker, Carl Heinrich, 72; dating of Mshatta, 373–75; and educational politics, 482–83, 502, 512; and Herzfeld, 76, 82, 555; and Der Islam, 371 Bell, Gertrude, 17, 20; ﬁeldwork in Cilicia, 348, 350 n. 24 Benveniste, Emile, 276 Berchem, Max van, 59, 417 Bergner, Karl, 432; at Persepolis, 147, 150, 152 Berve, Helmut, 543, 548 Beylié, General Léon de, 385, 394 Bezold, Carl, 563 Bieberstein, Adolf Freiherr Marschall von, 53 Bishapur, French excavations at, 16, 26, 442; Sasanian palace in, 380 Bismaya (Adab), 8, 9 Bloom, Allen, 477, 479, 502–3 Blücher, Wipert von, 79, 186 Bode, Wilhelm von, 53, 74, 351 Bo
630

index

Calmeyer, Peter, 317, 318 Cameron, George G., and Herzfeld’s manuscript on the Persian empire, 606–7; and Persepolis Fortiﬁcation tablets, 265, 275, 276, 277 Carchemish, 12, 552 Cassirer, Ernst, 531 Childe, V. Gordon, 235, 241 n. 81, 538, 545 n. 141 Chipiez, Charles, 270–72 Choisys, Auguste, 346 Christensen, Arthur, 274, 292 Choga Zanbil, 442 Churchill, Winston, 55 Cilicia, Herzfeld’s ﬁeldwork in. See Guyer, Samuel; Korykos; Meriamlık Cohn, Alfred E., 32, 33, 34, 194 n. 60 Cook, Walter W. S., and Herzfeld’s academic appointment, 33, 584–85, 614 Coste, Pascal, 266, 285 Creswell, K. A. C., 395, 419 Crowfoot, J. W., 347 Ctesiphon, excavations at, 20, 21, 24, 520, 521, 526, 527; Sasanian palace at, 67, 289, 380 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 491, 502 Curzon, George N., 104 Darius, foundation tablets of, 73, 77 Darmesteter, James, 266, 268, 270, 273, 286 Delaporte, Louis, 265 Delbrück, Richard, 359 n. 58, 500, 567 Delitzsch, Friedrich, 508; and archaeology, 506–7, 565; and Assyriology, 6, 562–63; Babel-Bible controversy, 5–6; and Herzfeld, 500, 505–7, 568, 570–71 Délégation Scientiﬁque Française en Perse, 16, 110, 429–32, 440–41, 447–49 Deshayes, Jean, 443 Deutsch-Persische Gesellschaft (German-Persian Society), 62, 512 Deutsche Bank, 12, 519; support of Samarra excavations, 53, 572 Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society), founding of, 6; sponsorship of excavations, 6–7, 11–12, 514–18. See also Andrae, Walter; Jordan, Julius; Koldewey, Robert

Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, station in Isfahan, 27, 35, 556 Diels, Hermann, 500 Dieulafoy, Jane and Marcel, 7, 430–31, 435–36, 452 Diez, Ernst, 409, 443 n. 37 Dimand, Maurice S., 34, 39, 585 Dittmann, Reinhard, 443 Doorn, 79, 80, 162, 526 n. 77 Doorner Arbeitsgemeinschaft, 79, 526 n. 77. See also Wilhelm II DuBois-Reymond, Emil, 484, 485 Duggan, Stephen D., 33, 584 Dura-Europos, 24, 189 n. 41, 325 Easton, M. W., 265 Eilers, Wilhelm, 27, 35, 158 Einstein, Albert, 36, 556, 587, 589 Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars, and Herzfeld’s academic appointment, 32–34, 36, 39, 191 n. 47, 194 n. 60, 584–85 Erman, Adolf, 362, 513, 514 Ettinghausen, Richard, on Herzfeld, 3, 193, 588, 615; friendship with Herzfeld, 37, 585–8 6, 590, 594–96; role in advancing Herzfeld’s publications, 596–609; and Herzfeld’s gift of scholarly papers to Freer Gallery of Art, 609–10; on Samarra beveled style, 395 Falkenstein, Adam, 563 Fehrmann, Karl, 61 Field Museum, excavations at Kish, 17; Herzfeld’s sale of antiquities to, 16 n. 34, 38, 612 Firouz Mirza, Prince, Herzfeld’s friendship with, 16, 450 n. 10, 458, 459, 466, 555, 587 Firuzabad, 285, 289, 415, 418, 443 Flandin, Eugène, 266, 271, 285 Flexner, Abraham, and Herzfeld’s appointment to Institute for Advanced Study, 32, 34, 584, 585; on universities, 502 Foroughi, Mohammad-Ali, 26 n. 67, 68, 450 n. 10, 457–58, 461, 550 n. 160, 555 Forschungen zur islamischen Kunst, founding of series, 56 Foucher, Alfred, 64, 438 n. 24 Frankfort, Henri, 18, 237, 271

index Freer Gallery of Art, Herzfeld’s gift of scholarly papers to, 138, 149, 393, 609–10; purchase of pen box published by Herzfeld, 75–76. See also Ernst Herzfeld Papers; Ettinghausen, Richard; Upton, Joseph M. French monopoly on excavations in Iran (Persia), 15, 16, 21–22, 68, 110, 287, 433, 440, 446–59, 457, 549–50 Frobenius, Leo, 526 n. 77, 535, 545, 546 Frye, Richard N., 298 Fuye, Alotte de la, 317 Galling, Kurt, 106 Gans Gallery, Herzfeld’s consignment of seals to, 220, 221, 222, 226 Geiger, Wilhelm, 286 Geldner, Karl Friedrich, 286 Gershevitch, Ilya, 276 Gesellschaft zur Förderung von Ausgrabungen und Forschungsreisen GmbH, 60–65, 414, 611 Ghani, Ghassami, 587 Ghirshman, Roman, excavations in Iran, 16, 441–43; and Herzfeld, 31 n. 87, 587 Gignoux, Philippe, 298, 299 Glidden, Harold, 589, 597, 604, 605, 613 Gobineau, Joseph de, 274 Godard, André, archaeological adviser in Iran, 112, 440, 457, 462, 468–69, 470; at Persepolis, 465; relationship with Herzfeld, 68, 468–69 Godard, Yedda, 416, 470 Goetze, Albrecht, 563 Goldman, Hetty, 615 Goldschmidt, Adolf, 500, 524 n. 65 Gombrich, Ernst, 245 Graebner, Fritz, 535 Grelot, Guillaume Joseph, 284 Grimm, Hermann Friedrich, 500 Grobba, Fritz, 18 n. 41, 62 Grohmann, Adolf, 557 Gropp, Georg, 443 Gunbad-i 'Alawiyyan, Herzfeld’s study of, 407–8, 413–14 Gumbad-i Qabus, 67, 412 Gustav VI Adolf. See Sweden, crown prince of Gutmann, Herbert M., 62 Guyer, Samuel, and Herzfeld, 345, 348–64, 572; at Samarra, 54, 356

631

Güterbock, Bruno, 47, 522 n. 59 Gwinner, Arthur von, 53 Hackin, Joseph, 64 Hahn, Georg, 50, 55, 79 Hallock, Richard T., 265, 275, 277 Hamadan, as source of antiquities, 72, 73 Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph von, 378 Harnack, Adolf, 56, 480, 488 Hartmann, Richard, 577 Hasluck, F. W., 348 Hatra, 12, 24, 524 Haug, Martin, 296 Haupt, Paul, 563 Headlam, Arthur, 346 Heberdey, Rudolf, 349, 350, 361 Heckmann, Georg, 53. See also Wentzel-Heckmann, Elise Hedin, Sven, 593 Hegel, G. W. F., 267, 550 Hekmat, Ali Asqar, 184, 185, 193, 467 Henning, W. B., 296, 308, 310 Herakleitos, 546, 553 Herrmann, Albert, 498 Herzfeld, Ernst, birthplace and family background, 31, 45–46, 50, 81 n. 122, 192–93, 236, 466, 566–67, 576–77, 586, 589–90; childhood and early education, 45–46, 50, 350, 566–67; training as architect, 46, 147, 350, 418, 430, 567; university training, 46, 567–68; University of Berlin appointment, 20, 31–32, 51, 162, 490, 498–501, 506, 524–25, 554, 557, 570–71, 573–74; military service, 14, 31, 57, 392, 525–26, 572; and antiquities collecting, 29–30, 31, 37–38, 62–65, 73–76, 145–46, 161, 194, 216–22, 230–33, 557, 575–76, 583, 610–12, 613; as archaeological adviser to Iran, 15, 16, 66, 111, 439–40, 454–55, 550; membership in learned societies, 499, 577; emigration to United States, 32–37, 38, 81–82, 499, 501; Schweich Lectures (British Academy, London, delivered in 1934), 28, 161, 187, 234, 577; Lowell Lectures (Lowell Institute, Boston, delivered in 1936), 234, 577, 601; death, 82, 604, 608. See also Aleppo; Assur; Ettinghausen, Richard; Kuh-i Khwaja; Mshatta;

632

index

Paikuli; Pasargadae; Persepolis; Samarra; Sarre, Friedrich; Tal-i Bakun; Tell Halaf Heydt, Baron Eduard von der, 78, 606 n. 82 Hill, Sir George, 321, 585 Hinz, Walther, 276 Hole, Frank, 243–44 Holzmann, Carl, 348 Hommel, Fritz, 563 Hrozn , Bedrich, 24, 510 n. 16 Huart, Clément, 264 Huﬀ, Dietrich, 443 Hugenberg, Alfred, 511 Humann, Carl, 49, 347 Humann, Hans, 61 Humann, Maria. See Sarre, Maria Humann Humbach, Helmut, 297, 298, 299 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 479–80, 484, 494, 496 Institut für Archäologische Korrespondenz, 489 Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Herzfeld’s appointment to, 32–34, 35–36, 80, 81, 162, 577, 583–87, 590, 613–15 Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, Herzfeld’s appointment to, 33, 34, 577, 584, 585, 614 Iran (Persia), antiquities legislation and Herzfeld, 66, 550; Constitutional Revolution of 1906, 440, 448, 452 Jaspers, Karl, 502 Jayne, Horace, 463–65 Jensen, Peter, 563 Jerphanion, Guillaume de, 348 Jordan, Julius, and Assur, 522; and Herzfeld, 21, 59, 523, 555; and Uruk (Warka), 12, 20–21 Junker, H. F., 298 Justi, Ferdinand, 268 Kaempfer, Engelbert, 282 Kahrstedt, Ulrich, 522 n. 60 Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, Berlin, and Samarra ﬁnds, 55–56, 393 Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, founding of, 480, 487; funding of Samarra excavations, 56, 386, 572 Kangavar, 111

Kapp, Wolfgang, 511, 512 Keall, E. J., 396 Keil, Joseph, 357, 360, 361 Kevorkian Foundation, 75, 76 Khargird, 417, 419 Khirbet al-Mafjar, 25 Khorasan, 111, 407, 408–13 Kleiss, Wolfram, 443 Koldewey, Robert, excavations at Babylon, 7, 9, 395, 515, 517, 523, 566; and Herzfeld, 59; and Koldewey school of archaeology, 147, 148 n. 40, 515, 520–23, 525, 526 Korykos, Guyer and Herzfeld’s expedition to, 345, 350–65, 572 Koschaker, Paul, 564–65 Kossina, Gustav, 533–41 Kracauer, Siegfried, 491 Krefter, Friedrich, 432; and Pasargadae, 113, 114, 116, 117, 122, 459; and Persepolis, 28, 147, 149, 459 Kroll, Stefan, 443 Kuentz, Charles, 587, 603 Kufah, 25 Kuh-i Khwaja (Kuh-e Khwaja), Herzfeld’s expedition to, 181–214; ﬁnds in Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 194; ﬁnds in Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin, 79. See also Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft Kuhn, Ernst, 286 Kühnel, Ernst, 29–30, 557, 599; relationship with Herzfeld, 54, 75 Lakhmid dynasty, 376, 380 Lamm, Carl Johan, 393 Lammens, Henri, 378 Lamprecht, Karl, 488, 528 n. 81 Landsberger, Benno, 563–65 Langlois, Victor, 350 Langsdorﬀ, Alexander, and Tal-i Bakun excavations, 30–31, 228–29; denunciation of Herzfeld, 30–32, 229, 575–76 LeCoq, Albert von, 185 Lehmann-Haupt, Carl H., 500, 524, 565, 567 Lentz, W., 307 Lewy, Julius, 563 Loeb, James, 34 n. 96, 62, 63 Loftus, William, excavations at

index Susa, 266, 271, 435, 436, 437, 447 n. 4 Louvre Museum (Musée du Louvre), excavations in Iran, 442; and Samarra ﬁnds, 392 Luschan, Felix von, 500, 565 Luschey, Heinrich von, 579–80 McCown, Donald E., 30, 228 Malcolm, A. H., 274 Mannheim, Karl, 533 Marquart, Josef, 62 Marcuse, Adolf, 500, 524 n. 65 Marshall, John, 241 Mason, Robert B., 396 Maspéro, Gaston, 272 Massignon, Louis, 587, 603 Maugras, Gaston, 456, 587 Mecquenem, Roland de, 65 n. 64, and French monopoly, 440, 543–55; and Susa, 429–30, 432–35, 438, 441, 443, 455 Megiddo, 9, 18 Meissner, Bruno, 565, 574 Meriamlık, Guyer and Herzfeld’s expedition to, 345, 350–65, 572 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Herzfeld Archive, 38, 185–86, 238, 584, 611–13; and Kuh-i Khwaja ﬁnds, 194; and Nishapur excavations, 25; and Samarra ﬁnds, 611–12, 613; sculpted foot from Persepolis, 145–46, 319–20 Meyer, Eduard, as Herzfeld’s academic adviser and mentor, 18, 50–51, 82, 507, 525, 568–73; and Near Eastern studies, 507, 513–2, 558, 573; WWI and post-WWI politics, 510–12; on Achaemenid history, 273 Michel, Karl, 348 Mielich, A. L., 397 Mil-i Radkan, Herzfeld’s study of inscriptions, 419–20 Miles, George C., 598, 606, 607 Mittwoch, Eugen, 59, 62 Mohl, Jules, 286 Mommsen, Theodor, 489 Moore, Ada Small (Mrs. William H.), 191 n. 47, 469 Moortgat, Anton, 555, 557–58 Morey, C. R. (Charles Rufus), 263, 574, 587, 613 Morgan, Jacques de, 270 429–30,

633

432–38, 443, 448, 452; contrasted with Herzfeld, 231, 232, 429–36 Morier, James J., 104, 284 Moritz, Bernhard, 59 Mshatta façade, controversy over dating, 11, 371–76 Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin, and Samarra ﬁnds, 393, 611 Musil, Alois, 374, 397 Narseh, and Paikuli inscription, 289, 291, 299 Nasr-Eddin Shah, 447 Nazi regime, and Herzfeld, 32–35, 162, 192, 233, 466, 576–77, 582; racial legislation of, 27, 31–32, 192, 576; and research on “Aryan” past, 27, 35, 235–36, 541–44, 556 Negahban, Ezatollah, 471 Neo-Kantians, 529, 531 n. 90 Neumann, John von, 557 Niebuhr, Carsten, 283 Niedermeyer, Oskar Ritter von, 15 n. 30, 443 n. 37 Nihavand (Nihavend), alleged source of Parthian silver-gilt bowl, 75; source of prehistoric ﬁnds from Tepe Giyan, 70, 222 Nippur, 8 Nishapur, 25 Nissen, Hans J., 443 Nizamabad, 65 Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, 481, 488, 519; funding of Near Eastern ﬁeldwork, 20–21, 520–21; sponsorship of Herzfeld’s excavations, 22, 71–72, 76, 112, 459, 462, 520, 526, 554; support of Herzfeld’s publications, 80, 555; and Persepolis, 76, 139, 144, 462, 464. See also Schmidt-Ott, Friedrich Nöldeke, Theodor, 266, 268, 269, 274, 374, 548, 551 Nuremberg laws, 27 Nuzi, 24 Nylander, Carl, 105, 118, 272 Olmstead, A. T., 263, 266, 274, 276–77 Oppenheim, Max von, 79, 162; and Tell Halaf excavations, 10, 12, 21 n. 50, 552 Oppenheimer, Robert, 606, 607 Oppert, Jules, 5

634

index

Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, founding of, 8, 17–18; rivalry with University Museum over Persepolis concession, 77, 11, 139, 463–65; sponsorship of Persepolis excavations, 139, 146. See also Breasted, Charles; Breasted, James Henry; Persepolis; Schmidt, Erich F. Ouseley, William, 283 Paikuli, Herzfeld’s excavations at, 20, 63, 289, 296–98, 433; Herzfeld’s publication of, 63, 291, 295–309, 572. See also Narseh; Rawlinson, Henry C. Panofsky, Erwin, and concept of iconology, 532–33; at Institute for Advanced Study, 585 Paper, Herbert H., 606, 607 Pasargadae, Herzfeld’s doctoral thesis on, 10, 104–8; Herzfeld’s excavations at, 21–22, 76, 103, 109–22, 433–34; British Institute of Persian Studies excavations at, 114, 116–17. See also Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft Pauli, Wolfgang, 587 Pauw, Cornelius de, 270 Peiser, Felix Ernst, 563 Perrot, Georges, 270–72 Persepolis, Herzfeld as ﬁeld director (1931–34), 28, 112–13, 146–61, 263, 316, 441, 491, 575, 600; Fortiﬁcation tablets, 28, 150–61, 275–77. See also Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft; Oriental Institute; Tal-i Bakun; Sweden, crown prince of; University Museum Persian List (“Black List”) of 1919, 15 n. 30, 60–61 Petrie, Flinders, 230, 231, 232, 516 Plato, 193, 506 Poebel, Arno, 275 Pope, Arthur Upham, 190, 407, 439; and American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology, 232, 451, 465; and Architectural Survey of Islamic Monuments in Iran, 25; and International Exhibition of Persian Art, 68; and Survey of Persian Art, 25, 232; as antiquities dealer, 231, 232; and Ada Small (Mrs. William H.) Moore, 469; and Persepolis

concession, 463–65; relationship with Herzfeld, 68, 145, 451 Popplewell-Pullan, Richard, 346 Porada, Edith, 558 prehistory, Herzfeld’s theories concerning, 233–48, 527, 533–39, 554 Preuner, Erich, 500 Princeton University Press, and Herzfeld’s publications, 602–3, 604 Prussian Academy of Science (Königlich-Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften), 48, 487; support of excavations, 8–9, 566; and Eduard Meyer, 509, 513–14 Qaraqozlu, Yahya, 461 Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi, 25 Qasr-i Abu Nasr, 26 Qasr-i Shirin, 376, 380, 383 Qusayr Amra (Qusair Amra), 374, 375, 397 Ramsay, William M., 348 Raqqa, 10, 372 Ratzel, Friedrich, 534 Rawlinson, George, 265–69, 286 Rawlinson, Henry C., and decipherment of cuneiform, 5, 273, 284; and Paikuli, 284, 295–96, 299 Rayy, 10, 19, 25, 596 Reitlinger, Gerald, 25 Reuther, Oskar, 20, 521 Reza Khan (later Reza Shah), 66; and Persian nationalism, 15, 25–26, 449; at Persepolis, 458, 465; at Susa, 454 Rickert, Heinrich, 529 Richter, Gisela M. A., 271–72 Riefstahl, Rudolf M., 33, 34, 585 Riegl, Alois, 229, 237–38, 244–45, 247, 547, 551 Ringer, Fritz, 501 Ritter, Carl, 544, 556 Rodenwaldt, Gerhart, 69, 76, 79, 520, 522 n. 59 Rollin, Charles, 269 Root, Margaret Cool, 272 Ross, Sir Denison, 585 Rott, Hans, 348 Rusafa, 56, 372 Sachau, Eduard, 494–95, 500, 524, 566, 567, 573 Samarra, Herzfeld and Sarre’s

index excavations at, 10–11, 52–55, 376–79, 386–92, 572; prehistoric ﬁnds from, 23, 70, 244; publication of excavations, 52, 56, 57, 80, 392–94, 396–97, 572, 578–80, 597–600, 607. See also British Museum; Deutsche Bank; Herzfeld, Ernst; Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften; Louvre Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Sarre, Friedrich; Victoria and Albert Museum Sami, Ali, 317, 318, 325 Sarre, Friedrich, family background, 49; marriage to Maria Humann, 49; collaboration with Herzfeld on Iranische Felsreliefs, 10, 48, 505, 569, 571, 573; and Gesellschaft zur Förderung von Ausgrabungen und Forschungsreisen GmbH, 60–65; correspondence with Herzfeld, 77–78; inﬂuence on Herzfeld’s career, 82, 555. See also Samarra Sarre, Maria Humann, 49–50, 61, 69, 78; friendship with Herzfeld, 50, 81, 586, 608, 610 Sarvistan, 285 Sasanian reliefs, Herzfeld’s publications of, 57–58, 288–89, 290, 292–93, 324–25, 327–28 Sauvaget, Jean, 397, 603, 604 Schapiro, Meyer, 34, 585 Schäder, Hans-Heinrich, 577 Schäfer, Heinrich, 522 Scheil, Father Vincent, and Susa excavations, 432, 435, 437–38 Schliemann, Heinrich, 347 Schmidt, Erich F., and Fara, 17, 19; and Persepolis, 19, 137, 146, 147, 148, 152, 291, 318, 468, 469; and Rayy, 19, 25; and Tepe Hissar, 18 Schmidt-Ott, Friedrich, and Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, 71, 76, 488; and Prussian ministry of education, 488, 529 n. 47; and Wilhelm II, 515; and Herzfeld, 459–64, 526 n. 77 Schmidtke, Friedrich, 563 Schott, Albert, 563 Schrader, Eberhard, 514, 561, 562 Schroeder, Eric, 407 Schulenburg, Werner von der, 21, 68, 460, 464, 466, 599 Schwartz, Paul, 46, 500, 524

635

Shils, Edward, 503 Siemens, Georg von, 519 Sieglin, Wilhelm, 570 Simmel, Georg, 500, 524 n. 65, 567 Simon, James, 565 Smirnov, I. I., 347 Smith, Datus, 602, 603 Smith, Katherine (Mrs. Myron Bement), 36–37 Smith, Myron Bement, 36, 407 Sobernheim, Moritz, 49, 50 Soden, Wolfram von, 563 Spengler, Oswald, 545, 546 Spiegel, Friedrich, 274 Spranger, Eduard, 480–81 Starr, Richard F. S., 36, 613 Stein, Sir Aurel, 241, 608; and Kuh-i Khwaja, 181, 183–86, 191 Steward, Julian, 545 Stier, Erich F., 522 n. 60 Stinnes, Edmund, 61, 62 Stinnes, Hugo, 61, 62, 65 Stolze, Friedrich, 266, 285 Stradonitz, Reinhard Kekulé von, 50, 500, 524 n. 65, 567, 568, 573 Streck, Maximilian, 563 Strzygowski, Josef, clash with Herzfeld over Mshatta, 59, 373–75; and Byzantine architecture, 347–48, 353; and Islamic architecture of Khorasan, 408–9 Stumpf, Carl, 568 style, concept of, in Herzfeld’s work, 532 Survey of Persian Art, 25, 232, 421, 422; article on early seals coauthored by Herzfeld, 226–28, 234, 236, 247–48. See also Pope, Arthur Upham Susa A/Susa I pottery, 234–35, 237, 239–46 Susa, excavations at, 8–9, 12, 266, 435–43 Sweden, crown prince of (later King Gustav VI Adolf ), and Herzfeld’s gift of Persepolis antiquities, 29, 31, 145, 467–69, 575 Tal-i Bakun, excavations at, 19, 30, 216, 217, 228, 439; prehistoric pottery from, 228, 237, 239–41, 244, 246 Taqizadeh, Siyyid Hasan, 68 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste, 282, 284 Tell Arpachiyya, 17 Tell Halaf, excavations at, 10, 12, 552;

636

index

Herzfeld’s dating of reliefs from, 527, 552–53 Tepe Gawra, 15; prehistoric seals from, 218, 223 Tepe Giyan, 111; prehistoric seals from, 216–17, 221–226, 228, 242–43, 247–48. See also Nihavand (Nihavend) Tepe Sialk, 441; visited by Herzfeld, 434 Texier, Charles, 285, 346 Teymourtash Abdol-Hosseyn (Teymurtash, Abdol Hossein), 450 n. 10 and French monopoly on excavations, 455–57; Herzfeld’s friendship with, 16, 68, 466, 555 Tilia, Ann Britt, 321 Tirpitz, Admiral, 511 Troeltsch, Ernst, 483 Tureng Tepe, 18, 443 Ukhaidir, 376, 379–83 Unger, Eckhard, 574 Ungnad, Arthur, 563 University Museum (University of Pennsylvania), importance in Near Eastern ﬁeldwork, 17–19, 111; rivalry with Oriental Institute over Persepolis concession, 18, 111, 139, 463–65 Unvala, Jamshid, 432 Upton, Joseph M., assistant to Herzfeld, 71; cataloguing of Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Freer Gallery of Art, 71, 138, 609; on Herzfeld, 469; and Kuh-i Khwaja, 71; and Nishapur, 25 Ur, excavations at, 16, 17 Uruk (Warka), excavations at, 12, 20, 21, 517, 520, 521. See also Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft; Jordan, Julius Vaux, W. S. W., 274 Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and Samarra ﬁnds, 392

Vierkandt, Alfred, 500 Viollet, M. Henri, 385–86, 394 Virchow, Rudolf, 566 Wagner, Adolf, 500 Walser, Gerold, editing of Herzfeld’s The Persian Empire, 605, 607 Warburg, Felix, 34, 585 Wasit, 25 Weber, Max, 482, 490, 492 Weissbach, F. H., 108, 266 Wentzel-Heckmann, Elise, 49, 56, 600 n. 54, 611. See also Georg Heckmann Wickhoﬀ, Franz, 347 Wiegand, Theodor, 79, 352, 519, 520, 521 Wilamowitz-Moellendorﬀ, Ulrich von, 485, 530 Wilber, Donald N., 407, 413, 598, 613 Wilkinson, Charles K., 612; and Nishapur, 25 Wilkinson, Irma B., 612 Wilhelm II, 13, 489; and Babel-Bible controversy, 6; and Doorner Arbeitsgemeinschaft, 79, 526 n. 77; and Herzfeld, 79–80; and Schmidt-Ott, 515 Wilhelm, Adolf, 349, 350, 357, 360, 361 Williamson, David, 463 Winckler, Hugo, 500, 524, 565, 567 Windelband, Wilhelm, 529 Winlock, Herbert, 614 Winnefeld, Hermann, 500 Winter, Franz, 500 Wissler, Clark, 545 Woolley, C. Leonard, 17 Wulﬀ, Oskar, 346; as Herzfeld’s professor, 500, 524 n. 65; and dating of Mshatta, 374–75 Wulsin, Frederick R., 18 Yale Babylonian collection, 221

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