Archaeology and the Bible researcher 3/4

Excavation

English: Flinders Petrie and Hilda Petrie in 1903 Deutsch: Archäologe Flinders Petrie und seine Frau, die Zeichnerin Hilda Petrie 1903 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The demand for Egyptian antiquities led to organized tomb robbing by men such as Giovanni Battista Belzoni. A new era in systematic and controlled archaeological research began with the Frenchman Auguste Mariette, who also founded the Egyptian Museum at Cairo. The British archaeologist Flinders Petrie, who began work in Egypt in 1880, made great discoveries there and in Palestine during his long lifetime. Petrie developed a systematic method of excavation, the principles of which he summarized in Methods and Aims in Archaeology (1904). It was left to Howard’ Carter and Lord Carnarvon to make the most spectacular discovery in Egyptian archaeology, that of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922.

Sir Austen Henry Layard (1817-1894), oil on canvas (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Mesopotamian archaeology also began with hectic digging into mounds in the hopes of finding treasure and works of art, but gradually these gave way in the 1840s to planned digs such as those of the Frenchman Paul­Émile Botta at Nineveh and Khorsabad, and the Englishman Austen Henry Layard at Nimrud, Kuyunjik, Nabi Yünus, and other sites. Layard’s popular account of his excavations, Nineveh and Its Remains (1849), became the earliest and one of the most successful archaeological best sellers and is very relevant for the Bible researcher. Georg Friedrich Grotefendand George Smith must not be overlooked in Babylonian studies. In 1846 Henry Creswicke Rawlinson became the first man to decipher the Mesopotamian cuneiform writing. Robert Koldewey’s did the excavation of the mighty city of Babylon. Diggers like Layard and Koldewey, indeed the great Schliemann at Troy, were almost as destructive in their investigations as the first looters of Pompeii and the perennial robbers of Etruscan and Egyptian tombs, but these were early days, and the rough-handed pioneers were at least conscious of the significance and magnitude of the task upon which they were engaged. They have their place in the archaeological calendar.

Classical archaeology

From a German edition of Austen Layard’s A Popular Account of Discoveries at Nineveh. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Classical archaeology was established on a more scientific basis by the work of Heinrich Schliemann, who investigated the origins of Greek civilization at Troy and Mycenae in the 1870s. The main lesson of the astonishing discovery of Troy by this German genius was that a mound, or “tell” as it was called in the Middle East, was likely to be the accumulated ruins and occupation debris of an ancient inhabited site. In 1870, also, the American Palestine Exploration Society was founded, and it immediately set to work to complement the British survey of western Palestine by a similar survey of the eastern part of the land.

Interesting work was also done by M.A. Biliotti at Rhodes in this same period. Also notable was the German Archaeological Institute under Ernst Curtius at Olympia from 1875 to 1881; and the work of Alexander Conze at Samothrace in 1873 and 1875. Conze was the first person to include photographs in the publication of his report. Schliemann had intended to dig in Crete but did not do so, and it was left to Arthur Evans to begin work at Knossos in 1900 and to discover the Minoan civilization, ancestor of classical Greece.

In 1890 a thirty-seven-year-old Englishman, Flinders Petrie came to Palestine trained by ten years’ work in Egypt, where he had already learned to record systematically and in detail every find on a site. He had also glimpsed the possibility of using pottery for dating. In his excavations at Tell el-Hesi, Petrie reduced this invaluable idea to a time system. He was able to demonstrate that pottery could form a sequence and provide a key to the chronology of the stratified remains in any ruin mound. This fruitful discovery has been elaborated with the utmost sophistication and is now an indispensable skill for any archaeological investigation. The last decade of the 19th century is significant for its invention, establishment, and general recognition.

The same decade saw further excavation at Jerusalem by F. J. Bliss, the American who trained under Flinders Petrie in Egypt and became the first scholar of importance to recognize the value of Petrie’s pottery dating, along with his associate A. C. Dickie. William Mitchell Ramsay, professor of humanities at Aberdeen, was simultaneously busy with his epigraphical, geographical, and archaeological explorations in Asia Minor, and was writing the authoritative books which established so decisively the historical accuracy of Luke and the meaning 6f obscure chapters in the Apocalypse.

English: Flinders Petrie in Giza c. 1880 עברית: פלינדרס פיטרי בגיזה מצרים שנת 1880. בפתח מערת הקבורה אשר בה גר בכל תקופתו שם. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Toward the end of the 19th century, systematic excavation revealed a previously unknown people; the Sumerians, who had lived in Mesopotamia before the Babylonians and Assyrians. The most impressive Sumerian excavation was that of the Royal Tombs at Ur by Leonard Woolley in 1926.

Chance

The role of chance in the discovery of archaeological sites and portable finds is considerable. Farmers have often unearthed archaeological finds while ploughing their fields. The famous painted and engraved Upper Palaeolithic cave of Lascaux in southern France was discovered by chance in 1940: four French schoolboys were hunting for rabbits when their dog’ fell down a hole; they climbed down to retrieve him and found themselves in the middle of this remarkable pagan sanctuary. Similarly, the first cache of the Dead Sea Scrolls was discovered in 1947 by a Bedouin looking for a stray animal. These accidental finds often lead to important excavations. At Barnenes, in north Brittany; a contractor building a road got his stone from a neighbouring prehistoric cairn (burial mound) and, in so doing, discovered and partially destroyed a ‘number of prehistoric burial chambers. The French archaeologist P.R. Giot was able to halt these depredations and carry out scientific excavations that revealed Barnenes to be one of the most remarkable and interesting prehistoric burial mounds in Western Europe.

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