CONCLUSIONThe nineteenth-century European powers inherited the practices established
in the early modern period, such as the value given to the ancient Great
Civilizations as the origin of the civilized world (Chapters 2 to 4). In the
context of aWrm belief in progress, historians set about to show how civilized
their own nation was, by describing the inevitable steps that had propelled it
to the summit of the civilized world in comparison with its neighbours. As
seen in Chapter 3, early nineteenth-century imperial intervention, as a logical
continuation of the Enlightenment and early modern imperialism, had
resulted in the appropriation of archaeological icons from Italy, Greece (partly
through the Roman copies of Greek works of art) and Egypt which were then
exhibited in the greatest national museums of the imperial powers—the
Louvre and the British Museum. An emerging group of quasi-professional
pioneers had started the process of modelling the past of Italy, Greece, and
Egypt into both Golden and Dark Ages. The end of the Napoleonic era would
not halt their activities. On the contrary, archaeology, as a form of hegemonic
knowledge, proved useful not only for producing and maintaining ideas
commonly held in the imperial powers, but also in deWning the colonized
areas and legitimizing their assumed inferiority. This was the context in which
the events narrated in this chapter took place. Simplifying the situation to the
extreme, one could propose that there were two types of archaeology: that
undertaken by the archaeologists of the imperial powers and that carried out
by local archaeologists.
Regarding imperial archaeologists, imperialism fostered the remodelling of
discourses about the past of areas beyond their boundaries. People beyond the
core of imperial Europe were perceived as static, needing guidance from the
dynamic entrepreneurial European classes to stimulate their development or
to regain—in the case of the countries where ancient civilizations had oc-
curred—their lost impetus. An exception was made originally with the mod-
ern inhabitants of those areas in which the classical civilizations had emerged.
AtWrst they were imagined to be carriers of the torch of progress, a perception
particularly strong in Greece, but also present in Italy. Direct contact with the
realities of these countries soon resulted in a transformation of Western
perceptions, equating them to a great extent with societies elsewhere. Locals
were generally viewed either as having degenerated from their earlier ances-
tors, or as the descendants of the barbaric peoples who had provoked the end
of the area’s glorious period. The role of the Western archaeologists coming
from the most prosperous nations—mainly Britain and France to start with,
Europe and the Ottoman Empire 127