{"id":35245,"date":"2018-03-10T01:00:12","date_gmt":"2018-03-10T06:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35245"},"modified":"2018-02-18T09:02:02","modified_gmt":"2018-02-18T14:02:02","slug":"qotd-the-beginnings-of-archaeology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/03\/10\/qotd-the-beginnings-of-archaeology\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The beginnings of archaeology"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is now forty-five summers since, at age eighteen, I stood myself in the ruins of Ninevah \u2014 across the Tigris from Mosul in post-modern Iraq, the seat of Christian Assyria. Gentle reader may be aware that the Assyrians, Yazidis, Armenians, Turkmen, Shabaki, and for that matter, a portion of the Arabs who once lived around that town have been slaughtered or exiled over the last two years by the Daesh. The self-styled \u201cIslamic Caliphate\u201d has also made a show of demolishing Mosul\u2019s remarkable Museum, and the more celebrated ancient monuments, starting with the purported tombs of Jonah and several other Old Testament prophets.<\/p>\n

How one wishes that the French and British, rivals for archaeological glory from the early Victorian age, had succeeded in floating more of the treasures they had uncovered, on great rafts down the Mesopotamian rivers to Basrah and the sea \u2014 and then by ship to safe new homes in the Louvre and British Museum. That was the heroic age of \u201cOrientalism,\u201d when under the burning sun, and the noses of Ottoman administrators, and in the face of Arab raids and depredations \u2014 goaded by an excited popular interest in the recovery of deep Biblical history \u2014 the lost kingdoms and empires of the Near and Middle East were being rediscovered. Not only the tireless spadework, but the ingenious decoding of ancient tablets found in subterranean libraries of clay, extended our detailed knowledge of the human past by thousands of years.<\/p>\n

This was a gentleman\u2019s contest, and I am struck by the way, without rules or treaties, the French and the British (later joined by Germans, and eventually Americans, Poles, Italians, and even Canadians) peacefully recognized each other\u2019s stakeholdings and claims, and honoured each other\u2019s adventurers and scholars. So much of what we now reflexively condemn as \u201cEuropean Imperialism\u201d was conducted at a level of civilization that is unimaginable today. We ritually sneer at digging practices that were primitive and inexact, forgetting that our own \u201cmodern methods\u201d were being devised by these men, as they went along, starting only from rumour and wild surmise.<\/p>\n

David Warren, “With Layard to Ninevah”, Essays in Idleness<\/em><\/a>, 2016-07-05.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is now forty-five summers since, at age eighteen, I stood myself in the ruins of Ninevah \u2014 across the Tigris from Mosul in post-modern Iraq, the seat of Christian Assyria. Gentle reader may be aware that the Assyrians, Yazidis, Armenians, Turkmen, Shabaki, and for that matter, a portion of the Arabs who once lived […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,370,41,16],"tags":[288,333,982],"class_list":["post-35245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-middle-east","category-quotations","category-science","tag-archaeology","tag-iraq","tag-isis"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9at","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35245"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35246,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35245\/revisions\/35246"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}