nineteenth-century Italy and Greece there were two opposing accounts, that
of the hegemonic imperial powers and the alternative local view. When
examined more closely each of them encompasses a diversity of voices.
Resistance against European informal colonialism and its lust for classical
antiquities was more diYcult beyond Europe, and this chapter has discussed
the cases of Turkey and Egypt. In the 1830s many of the provinces still under
the political control of the Ottoman Empire contained ruins of a glorious past
which had already been or were eventually to become incorporated as an
integral part of the origin myth of the Western nations. The Greek remains
found in Turkey, the impressive monuments located in Egypt, and, from the
mid nineteenth century, those in Mesopotamia (Chapter 6), became a target
of the Western lust for appropriation. The seizure of ancient works of art was
enormous. During the second half of the nineteenth century the largest
contingent of antiquities, and the most celebrated, were especially those
coming from theWrst two areas. They were received by the large imperial
museums in Europe—the Louvre, the British Museum, the Munich Glyp-
tothek, the Prussian Altes Museum, and the Russian Hermitage. The Ottoman
Empire, however, did not remain impassive to the appropriation of its past by
Westerners. The nineteenth century saw the formation, still timid, of a local
scholarship with competing narratives about their national past. At the
beginning of the century the obvious political decadence of the Ottoman
Empire had encouraged politicians and scholars to approach Western think-
ing. Nevertheless, the formal and structural diVerences between Ottoman and
Western knowledge were too large for a swift transition. The diversity of
countries within the empire and their wide autonomy also explains how the
transition occurred at a diVerent pace in the various parts of the Ottoman
Empire. In Turkey a form of civic nationalism was imposed from above at the
start of the nineteenth century and with it theWrst museumwas organized. Yet, it
would only be later in the century that this ideology spread in earnest among
intellectuals. From the 1870s more protective legislation regarding antiquities
was passed: the museum in Constantinople was modernized and others were
opened, scientiWc journals began to be published, and excavations started. Less
Westernized than Turkey, Egypt also saw the early organization of museums,
only to be dispersed as Egyptian rulers used them as a source for prestige gifts.
Egypt being under European control, and European archaeologists in charge of
archaeology, the chaos of plunder by treasure hunters was only partially halted
from the 1860s. Under their direction, however, local archaeologists stood
little chance ofWnding employment in thisWeld, although a few did. A more
extreme example would be archaeology in Mesopotamia. As will be seen in
Chapter 6, this remained almost completely in the hands of imperial archaeolo-
gistsandwouldonlybedevelopedbylocalarchaeologistsinthetwentiethcentury.
130 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism