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A Complicated Legacy: The Original Collections of the Semitic Museum

2017; Penn State University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jeasmedarcherstu.5.1.0057

2166-3556

Joseph A. Greene,

Art History and Market Analysis

For museums, legacy collections of archaeological materials purchased from the antiquities market in the past are problematic in multiple respects. By any modern definition, they are loot: objects removed from their original contexts without regard to their find-spots (provenience), conveyed through a black market with no record of a chain of title (provenance), offered openly by sellers with no rightful claim of ownership to buyers with no scruples about receiving stolen goods. Thus such legacy collections were, are, and always will be tainted to a certain extent by their origins. As the name implies, however, legacy collections are just that, older collections accumulated in an era before the widespread application of international conventions on the trade and trafficking of cultural property. All major museums and most minor ones founded before the mid-twentieth century AD are implicated. The Semitic Museum at Harvard University, established in 1889, is no exception. However, the particular history of the Museum's collections and of the role played in that history by the Museum's founding curator, Harvard professor David Gordon Lyon, make for an especially complicated legacy.The original collections of the Semitic Museum were assembled by Lyon between 1889 and around 1929. He accomplished this almost exclusively by purchases from established dealers or by gifts or purchases from individuals. These purchases and gifts were not only archaeological artifacts, but also manuscripts in Semitic and other Near Eastern languages (as well as Greek papyri from Egypt), ethnographic materials (costumes, jewelry, weapons, tools and other implements), specimens of natural history, contemporary photographs of peoples and places in the Near East and plaster casts of ancient Near Eastern monuments and inscriptions. These latter were acquired from museums in London, Paris, Berlin, and Istanbul which owned the originals and which, in accordance with the practice of the day, routinely sold full-size replicas to other museums for display, early versions of 3D virtual reality.The inclusion of ethnography, photographs and museum replicas in the Semitic Museum's original exhibits was intended by Lyon to create a fully rounded presentation of the ancient Semitic world: full-sized replicas to stand in for well-known ancient monuments, photographs to give museum goers a sense of “Oriental” landscapes and peoples and contemporary Palestinian costumes and objects of everyday life that were thought (mistakenly) to fill gaps in the fragmentary material record of a vanished Biblical world.In conception, the exhibits at the new Semitic Museum were typical of their day: spaces full of cases with cases full of objects (Fig. 1). Everything was displayed; labeling was minimal and wall text non-existent. Visitors were expected simply to see and absorb it all. What could not be displayed for lack of space under vitrines was stored in specially built cabinetry beneath the showcases themselves. All the exhibits were fixed. Thus, after the Museum's formal opening in 1903 Lyon could publish a “Catalogue of Exhibits” (Semitic Museum 1903b; Fig. 2) with full confidence that it would never need revision since the exhibits would never change. The basement was not used for storage of collections reserves; it was merely a place for building machinery and public restrooms.At the core of the exhibits, of course, were actual ancient artifacts, many of them inscribed, particularly cuneiform tablets, which Lyon, an Assyriologist by training, purchased in large lots from dealers in the U.S. and Europe during the 1890s and first decade of the twentieth century. These were intended not only as exhibits for museum visitors, but also as instruments of instruction for Lyon's students and as subjects for scholarly research (e.g., Hussey 1912–15). Lyon's vision for the Semitic Museum was comprehensive. It was to be not merely a building for the display of artifacts, but rather an institution devoted to teaching, research, publication and public exhibition of Semitic history, languages and cultures.Although Lyon fully appreciated the importance of carefully recorded, scientifically excavated archaeological material, he was constrained by two factors. In the waning decades of the Ottoman Empire—the era in which Lyon was active—imperial policies forbade the export of antiquities (Empire Ottoman, 1324 [1907]: Chapitre VI, Article XXVII). At the same time, prevailing Western museum practice regarded as normal and acceptable the acquisition of museum objects, especially inscribed ones, by purchase from dealers or locals. Lyon bemoaned the former but took full advantage of the latter.To understand how Lyon reconciled himself to this dilemma, it is necessary to consider Lyon's own history and his role in the origins of the Semitic Museum. Lyon was a Baptist from Benton, Alabama, trained initially at Howard College, later Samford University, a Baptist institution in Alabama. From Howard, Lyon went to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Lexington, Kentucky. There he studied with Crawford Toy, another Baptist who then preceded Lyon at Harvard and who was instrumental in Lyon's appointment to the Hollis Chair of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School in 1882. First, however, Lyon went to Leipzig University to complete a doctorate in Semitic languages with Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch (Pfeiffer 1936; Axsom 2004).Lyon's German training introduced him to the idea of the “Oriental Seminar,” an institution of advanced higher learning devoted to the study of the ancient Near East, “the Orient.” Such an institution possessed a faculty and students, classrooms for teaching and offices for staff, a research library and a teaching collection of objects and texts displayed in a public gallery, in effect, a museum. Although it is nowhere explicit in any of the documents pertaining to the beginnings of the Semitic Museum in 1889 and the ultimate construction of the building in 1900–1902, I think it is very likely that what Lyon set out to create on Divinity Avenue in Cambridge was a Harvard “Oriental Seminar” (Lyon et al. 1898–1984; Semitic Museum 1903a; Lyon 1930).In this undertaking Lyon's principal academic sponsor was Harvard's president Charles Eliot (in office 1869–1909), who encouraged Lyon's initiative in expanding the university's resources for teaching and research. Lyon's chief financial backer was Jacob Schiff, a wealthy German-Jewish financier from New York City. At a time when Harvard was famously white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, Schiff saw Lyon, a Protestant academic sympathetic to things Semitic, as an inroad into this academic bastion of New England privilege. Schiff's stated aim was that the Semitic Museum highlight the contribution of the “Semitic peoples” to Western civilization (Semitic Museum 1903a; Harvard Alumni Bulletin 1926; Hallote 2009), this at a time when “Semitic” could also be a code word for “Jewish.” Lyon, by contrast, may have considered “Semitic” in more strictly linguistic terms. He was a scholar of Semitic languages and taught at Harvard in a “Semitic Department” (Lyon 1930). On the variable meanings of “Semitic,” Schiff and Lyon may have allowed to exist between them a degree of creative ambiguity. Lyon needed Schiff's financial support to create his “Oriental Seminar.” From Lyon Schiff sought an entrée to Harvard. Implicitly they may have agreed not to probe one another too closely on this point. This ambiguity did not prevent Lyon, in retirement, from opposing unambiguously (and successfully) the attempt by Harvard president Lawrence Lowell (Elliot's successor, 1909–1933) to impose a quota on Jewish enrollment at the university in the 1920s (Axsom 2004).Having secured funding from Schiff to erect his “Oriental Seminar” on Divinity Avenue, Lyon turned to Boston architect A. W. Longfellow to design the building. Longfellow conceived a structure with three floors and a basement. (The basement was strictly a machine space—and the location of the original lavatories—not, as we are inclined to think of museum basements nowadays, as repositories of all the treasures not on display.) The first floor was devoted entirely to teaching and research, with a 150-seat auditorium, a large classroom and a smaller seminar room, along with a dedicated library with built-in shelving. The upper two floors were given over wholly to exhibit galleries with custom-fitted built-in exhibit cases. There was a single office on the second floor for Lyon the curator (Fig. 3).With funding in hand from Schiff and designs from Longfellow, Lyon then faced the challenge of building the building. Here, too, Lyon was hands-on, or perhaps merely hand-wringing. An excerpt from his diary of November 16, 1900, mentions his visit to the campus construction site and his concern at the delays entailed by “want of iron and stone” (Lyon 1900; diary entry for November 16, 1900). These delays were not merely cause for localized anxiety. There were academic competitors looking over Lyon's shoulder. An upstart college in the American Midwest, the newly founded University of Chicago, had already opened its own ancient Near Eastern museum, the Haskell Oriental Museum, on its south-side campus under the leadership of another German-trained Baptist, the Egyptologist James Henry Breasted. Like Lyon, Breasted had the favor of his university president, William Rainey Harper. He also had access to the largess of the university's major donor, John Rockefeller (Breasted, J. H. 1933; Breasted, C. 1943; Abt 2011).By 1902, Lyon succeeded in completing the Semitic Museum building. From its outside the Museum has little changed since then, save for the landscaping (Figs. 4–5). Although Lyon had been acquiring artifacts for over a decade, there was still ample room for much more in the Museum's newly installed exhibit cases. Thus there was some urgency to fill up these cases in time for the Museum's formal dedication in early 1903. Therefore in 1902, Lyon made a lengthy collecting trip to the Near East funded by Schiff, stopping in Cairo, Beirut, Damascus and Jerusalem. On this trip he purchased hundreds of ancient artifacts (pottery, lamps, glassware, metalwork), native costumes and ethnographic items, and specimens of natural history. These complemented the existing collection of cuneiform tablets, replica casts and photographs, now all exhibited together in the second and third floor galleries of the new Semitic Museum (Fig. 6). To these were added the Selah Merrill Collection, an eclectic assemblage of Near Eastern antiquities, ethnography and natural history purchased from Merrill by subscription by the Harvard Divinity School and given to the Semitic Museum (Kark 2001).A few years after the opening, Lyon made another extended stay in Palestine, giving him further opportunities to enlarge the Museum's collections. On academic leave in 1906–1907, Lyon became Annual Director of the American School of Oriental Research in Palestine, (later the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research). In October 1906 Lyon took up residence at the school's rented quarters at 6 Ethiopia Street outside the Old City along with six of his Harvard students (ASOR Jerusalem School Register of Students [1900–1915]; Lyon 1907; King 1983: 38–41).In the course of that year, as a consequence of the flooding of the Jerusalem antiquities market with hundreds of whole Bronze Age vessels, Lyon learned of the existence of a large necropolis north of the city near the village of Samieh. Lyon set out there with his students to investigate, ultimately making three extended visits to the site in winter and early spring of 1907 and mounting what would be called today a “salvage excavation” to record the cemetery (Figs. 7–8). In his director's report to the Managing Committee of ASOR, Lyon recorded with evident dismay the discovery and looting of the cemeteries at Samieh and called attention to the need for further scientific investigation there (Lyon 1907: 46–48; see also Lapp 1966: 5–6). Save for certain details of diction and vocabulary that betray old-fashioned attitudes, Lyon's century-old report sounds strikingly modern: Of illegitimate plundering and destruction of ancient ruins, we came across evidence almost every day, both east and west of the Jordan. The rigidly prohibitive [Ottoman antiquities] law excludes trained observers, except such as have obtained a special permit. But nothing short of an extensive system of guards could check the ravages of the widespread mania for antiques which now animates the fellahin. The most elaborate illustration of this statement occurred […] at Samieh, six hours north of Jerusalem, and some two hours east of the road leading thence to Nablus. […] Suffice it here to say that Samieh is probably the most important necropolis yet found in Palestine. In addition to numerous later graves of well known types, more than a hundred shaft tombs had been plundered. These are circular wells of three to four and a half feet in diameter, and six to some fourteen feet in depth, communicating at the bottom with one or more burial chambers. […] Of these tombs have come large quantities of pottery and many bronze objects (articles of personal adornment and of warfare), which are estimated, by comparison with similar material from the lower strata at Tell el-Hesy, Ge[e]zer, Taanach, and Mutesellim [i.e., Megiddo], to be of Canaanite origin, and no later than 1500 B.C. Egyptian alabasters and scarabs have also been found. At our appearance on the scene the fellahin took alarm and discontinued the work of excavating the tombs. Though they filled in most of the shafts again, enough were left open for us to make a considerable study of the tomb chambers. […] The digging out of these tombs is an easy and inexpensive matter. It is greatly to be desired that some of them should be excavated under competent control, and not be left to have their contents dissipated by the ignorant fellahin. It can, of course, be no cause of wonder that these poor people, under the pressure of crop failure and crushing taxation, turn to robbing for gain. The inscribed column from Samieh, which has been removed to the little museum at the Turkish school for boys in Jerusalem [Collections gathered there formed the core of the Mandate-era Palestine Archaeological Museum, see Tubb and Cobbing 2005], was set up in the reign of Justinian. It seems to have belonged to some church or other religious establishment […]. Not only the cemeteries, of which there are at least two, deserve further examination; the whole site, which is extensive, and particularly the mountain rising above the fine fountain, call for exploration. […] (Lyon 1907: 46–48)Lyon's report contrasts his already established willingness to resort to the antiquities market with his acknowledgement of the circumstances in which that market existed. In extenuation, he cites the Palestinian peasants' poverty, exacerbated by Turkish maladministration. Moreover, in addition to conducting rescue excavations, in an effort to prevent the Samieh finds from being too widely dispersed Lyon purchased grave goods on the spot from locals. He also repurchased Samieh material from friends and colleagues who had already bought it from villagers in Samieh or from dealers in Jerusalem. The artifacts from Samieh collected by Lyon in 1907 are now in the Semitic Museum, but the finds and Lyon's records of his rescue excavations remain unpublished.One result of Lyon's year in Jerusalem was the start of the long-sought Museum excavations at Samaria, which began in 1908 (Fig. 9). This fulfilled Lyon's intention, prompted by urgings from his benefactor Schiff, to conduct original field work in the Near East (Hallote 2009). Ironically, the prevailing rules of excavation imposed by the Ottoman authorities meant that no division of finds would be forthcoming for the Semitic Museum. This was a disappointment to Jacob Schiff, who had hoped to have something tangible to show for his support of the excavations. Nonetheless, Schiff underwrote the study and publication of the excavation results, a contribution prominently acknowledged in the front matter of the Samaria publication (Reisner, Fisher and Lyon 1924: v–vii). However, work on the publication was delayed by the outbreak of the First World War; and Schiff, who died in 1920, did not live to see the book in print. At his death he settled a final legacy on the Museum, the Jacob H. Schiff Bequest, which was set up in 1921 with its terms restricted to the “purchase of objects for the Semitic Museum” (Harvard University 1995: 541). These terms still stand and the legal proceedings by which they might be altered or enlarged are complicated and cumbersome. The Museum has not used the Schiff Bequest for the purchase of ancient artifacts since the 1960s.Though no division of finds from Samaria came to Cambridge, the discoveries of the expedition were nonetheless significant, among them early examples of Old Hebrew writing on ostraca found in the ruins of a ninth/eighth-century BC Israelite royal palace on the tell. The original ostraca were consigned to the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul, where they are still kept. Photographs of the ostraca made on large glass-plate negatives exposed when the ostraca were fresh from the ground are now in the Semitic Museum Archives. These negatives apparently preserve a better record of the inscriptions than can now be made out on the potsherds themselves, which have now been out of the ground for over a century. Despite the lack of a division of finds from the Museum's early campaigns at Samaria, the documentary and photographic archive that resulted from the expedition and is now in the Semitic Museum still contains a trove of information, not all of which was published in the final report.The same can be said of the documentary and photographic archive accumulated by Lyon in the course of his building up of the Museum's original collections. Lyon was a diligent documenter of his travels and collecting activities. He kept daybooks and diaries, saved copies of correspondence and purchase receipts, took photographs and made lantern slides. These, now in the Museum's Archives or in the Harvard University Archives, are another mostly untapped resource for the history of the Museum's collections and for the late nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century milieu—at Harvard and in Ottoman Palestine—in which Lyon worked and in which he made the Semitic Museum (cf. Tarazi 2015: 38–39). The photographic prints, which Lyon acquired from commercial outlets such as the Maison Bonfils of Beirut and which he hung in the Museum galleries to illustrate “Oriental” peoples and places, have now themselves become objects of curation as examples of the early uses of photography to record and interpret the “Orient” (e.g., Gavin 1982). The Museum's ethnographic collections, once regarded as a quaint relic of the misguided Western notion that “to gaze upon a Palestinian fellah was to see Father Abraham,” is now properly understood to represent the material remains of Palestinian cultural traditions radically altered through more than a century of change (e.g., Weir 2009).For a decade after his retirement in 1922 Lyon served as “Honorary Curator” of the Semitic Museum. In 1931 he was succeeded by his former pupil, Robert Pfeiffer. By then, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the installation of French and British Mandates between the eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, conditions for archaeological fieldwork in the Near East had changed enormously. Thus Pfeiffer presided over the expansion of the Museum's holdings through divisions of scientifically excavated finds from Museum-sponsored expeditions to Yorghan Tepe, ancient Nuzi, in Iraq, 1929–1931 (Starr 1937–1939); Serabit el-Khadim, in Egypt, 1930, 1935 (Butin 1932; Starr and Butin 1936); and Samaria in Mandate Palestine, 1931–1933 (Crowfoot et al. 1942–1957).From time to time between the 1930s and the 1960s, Pfeiffer and his successors returned to the antiquities market, using the Schiff Bequest to purchase individual objects for the collections, but the wholesale acquisitions of Lyon's day were over. None of the Museum's holdings, neither those acquired by Lyon nor the divisions brought in by Pfeiffer, have ever been subject to any repatriation claims. Since Lyon's day, the Museum's primary challenge has been caring for the collections it had. How the Museum met, or failed to meet, that challenge is the topic for another, separate article.