colonial links to India and the Orient. As in any other region of the British
informal empire, archaeology represented one more tool of imperial domin-
ation, and as such the political elites became interested in it. Yet, this interest
was also dominated by the religious overtones of the antiquity of the area. It is
symptomatic that the oYcial establishment of the Palestine Exploration Fund
was held in Westminster Abbey under the patronage of Queen Victoria and
the Archbishop of Canterbury (Silberman 2001: 493). Britain was not the only
imperial power in the region: to counterbalance its power, France guided
Lebanon’s politics, especially from the 1860s, and was able to make a limited
contribution to Egyptian archaeology even under British rule. Other coun-
tries, mainly Germany and the United States, would appear on the scene at the
end of the century. To start with, the imperialist ambitions of Germany in her
Drang Nach Osten—the surge towards the East—had an obvious eVect.
Kulturpolitik, the theoretical apolitical neutrality on the basis of German
foreign policy aimed at conversion to German interests without force,
resulted in the creation of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (German Oriental
Society) in 1898 as well as the Deutsches Evangelisches Institut fu ̈r Alter-
tumswissenshaft des Heiligen Landes (German Evangelical Institute for the
Antiquity of the Holy Land) in 1900. The American School of Archaeological
Research was also founded in the same year.
Archaeologists were not removed from the political situation. Nationalism
provided the framework for imagining ancient peoples, i.e. as old nations, but
it also had a strong inXuence on the way in which language and race issues
were considered. Going back to the 1840s, the British archaeologist Austen
Henry Layard (1817–94) explained in his popular book about his experiences
in Mesopotamia:
With these names [Assyria, Babylonia and Chaldaea] are linked great nations and
great cities dimly shadowed forth in history; mighty ruins in the midst of deserts,
defying, by their very desolation and lack of deWnite form, the description of the
traveller; the remnants of the mighty races still roving over the land; the fulWlling and
fulWlment of prophecies; the plains to which the Jew and the Gentile alike look as the
cradle of their race.
(Layard 1849 in Larsen 1996: 45).Imperialism also tainted archaeologists’ practice. Two examples will suYce to
illustrate this. TheWrst refers to imperial rivalry, represented by the competition
between Layard and Botta in Mesopotamia, an issue explained later on in the
chapter. Secondly, it is only within the framework of imperial competition that
the complications surrounding the publication of the inscription of the Moabite
Stone can be understood. This was an aVair that occurred in 1870. It had been
provoked by Clermont-Ganneau, a young French consul-archaeologist, who
Biblical Archaeology 135