Diplomacy, Art and Archaeology

  • John Henry Haynes and His Documents

    András Riedlmayer; Harvard University

    figure 1

    In 2008, a number of photographs by John Henry Haynes were offered for sale on an Internet auction site. At the time, Harvard's Fine Arts Library already had a collection of  photographs of Anatolia, Syria and Mesopotamia taken by Haynes, acquired in his lifetime by the Harvard Semitic Museum. This seemed like a good opportunity to add to it. We contacted the seller, an antiques dealer who had purchased the photos from Haynes’s descendants and persuaded him to sell us the lot, rather than letting the photographs be dispersed piecemeal. The lot that came to the Fine Arts Library as a result of this deal turned out to be more substantial than we had anticipated. It contained not only a rich trove of Haynes's photographs (more than five hundred prints), but also other material—including Haynes's correspondence with family and friends, his diaries and expedition notes, official documents, newspaper clippings and ephemera related to Haynes's life and the excavations at Nippur, the large American flag that Haynes flew over the first U.S. consulate in Baghad, the large wooden case in which he carried his camera, and various other items, including a collection of keffiyehs (traditional Arab cloth headdresses).

    View the entire essay with illustrations (PDF) >
  • American Relations with Ottomans

    Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet; University of Pennsylvania

    View the entire essay with illustrations (PDF) >
  • Germanophiles and Germanophobes: French Archaeology in the Mediterranean after the Franco-Prussian War

    Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer; University of Delaware

    figure 1

    Recent scholarship on the nineteenth century has addressed the theme of a politicized archaeology, torn between the conflicting tendencies of nationalistically-orchestrated politics of identity and an impulse to gain international pre-eminence. These tensions came to a head in the fraught years before and following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. In this essay, I explore the cultural aftershocks of the war as it affected opposing spheres of archaeological practice, the official (institutional) realm versus the individualized private domain. The war—I shall argue—bared the uneasy relationship between the two spheres, exploding the apparent cohesiveness of institutional responses and foregrounding the random subjectivity of individual reactions. Centering on a comparative case study of two French archaeologists, members of the French School at Athens, Edmond About and Salomon Reinach, whose work revolved around Greece and Turkey, I further suggest that the implications of this shift may be critical for our understanding of certain changes in the perception of the classical ideal, in particular its increasingly splintered nature in the last quarter of the century.  

    View the entire essay with illustrations (PDF) >
  • Between Istanbul and Cairo: Louis François Cassas and the Panoramic Perspective

    Doris Behrens-Abouseif; SOAS, University of London

    figure 1

    Louis François Cassas occupies a position of particular interest among the artists who traveled to the Ottoman Empire. He is one of the very few to be equally relevant to our knowledge of both Istanbul and Cairo in the late eighteenth century. Cassas, who has also been described as archaeologist, traveled through the Ottoman Empire depicting Turkey, the Levant, and Egypt. His work was unusual for its time in that it dealt with Ottoman Turkey and Egypt under the same cover, whereas Egypt was more commonly combined with either Syria or Africa or described separately.

    Cassas was born the son of a land surveyor in 1756 in Indre. He moved to Tours in 1770 to learn draftsmanship, and in 1775 he went to Paris to join the academy established by the Duke of Rohan Chabot in his palace. There he studied the art of surveying, in particular antique monuments, and was stimulated to travel to the Netherlands and Italy. He worked in Rome between 1779 and 1783 at the school of draftsmanship of the Palazzo Mancini, where he met the artist Baron Dominique Vivant Denont, who later joined Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt. After spending some years traveling in Dalmatia, Istria, and Sicily, Cassas met the recently appointed French ambassador to the Porte, Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier, who was also a collector and traveler and who invited Cassas to Istanbul. From 1783 to 1787 Cassas traveled through the Ottoman Empire, collecting material for a publication titled, Voyage pittoresque de la Syrie, de la Phénicie, de la Palestine, et de la Basse Egypte, which appeared in 1799. In the meantime, the French Revolution compelled Choiseul-Gouffier to seek refuge in Russia. Cassas thus lost not only his patron, but also the author who was to write the text for his Voyage pittoresque. He himself continued to be esteemed under the Revolution regime, notably by the disciples of the painter Jacques-Louis David. Between 1816 and 1827 Cassas served as the chief designer at the Manufacture des Gobelins and was honored in 1821 with the order of the Legion d’Honneur as well as other decorations. He died in 1827 in Versailles.

    View the entire essay with illustrations (PDF) >
  • Muhammad Ghaffari: The Persian Painter of Modern Life

    Layla S. Diba; New York City

    figure 1

    Orientalism, Edward Said’s landmark 1978 publication, revitalized—perhaps revolutionized—the study of the history and culture of the Middle East. Subsequent applications of his conclusions further enriched the field. After three decades of Saidian interpretation, a more nuanced approach to the subject has evolved, focusing on local institutions and agents of change who played a major role in the region’s response to the challenges of colonialism and modernity.  

    The second half of the nineteenth century in Iran was a period of autocratic rule dominated by the last Qajar ruler to exercise true power, Nasir al-Din Shah. During his long reign from 1848 until his assassination in 1896, Iran sought to maintain its independence from the colonial powers, and at the same time, to adopt certain innovations and technologies, such as printing and photography, considered as markers of progress essential to the emergence of a modern nation-state. In 1851 the Dar al-Funun (Abode of Sciences), Iran’s first institution of higher learning and military college, was established on the Shah’s orders. By the 1880s the telegraph had been introduced and the capital city of Tehran and the royal palace of the Gulistan had been renovated along European lines.

    View the entire essay with illustrations (PDF) >