research into the Old Testament, one of the peoples mentioned in it, in
Genesis 15:20 and 1 Kings 10:29, were the Hittites. In 1876 the British scholar
Archibald Henry Sayce (1845–1933) found some inscriptions carved on rocks
in Turkey that he argued could demonstrate the presence of Hittites in the
area. Ten years later, the discovery of clay tablets at a place called Boghazko ̈y
attracted the attention of the German scholar and cuneiform expert, Hugo
Winckler (1863–1913), who began his own expedition to the site in 1906.
Boghazko ̈y was identiWed as Hattusa, the capital of the Hittites, a powerful
force in the Middle East from 1750bceuntil 1200bce. During the excav-
ations thousands more tablets were recovered, most of them written in an
unknown language: Hittite. This was deciphered in 1915 by the Czech Pro-
fessor of Assyriology of the University of Vienna, Bedrich Hrozny (1879–
1952). The language proved to be Indo-European. Winckler’s excavations
revealed the remains of a mighty capital city with temples, palaces, fortiWca-
tions, and gateways. Tablets found in the temples conWrmed that the ritual
ceremonies described in the Pentateuch (theWve books composed by Moses,
i.e., the Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), until then
thought to be too complicated for the period in which they had been written,
were similar to those described in the Boghazko ̈y tablets (Zukeran 2000). The
Hittite past would not only be acclaimed by Christians and by archaeologists
investigating the archaeology of the Bible, it would also have a very diVerent
type of appropriation later in the century when Kemal Atatu ̈rk began his
search for a strong and uniWed Turkey (Magnarella & Tu ̈rkdogan 1976: 256).
MESOPOTAMIAN ANTIQUITIES AND
THE OLD TESTAMENTIn this section nineteenth-century archaeology of the area of modern Iraq and
Iran is discussed. European interest in the antiquities of the Pashalik of Bagh-
dad, a province of the Ottoman Empire that roughly coincides with modern
Iraq, had already started in the early modern era with theWnding of Persepolis
by Pietro della Valle (1586–1652) and other followers. This line of scholarship
led to the Danish Carsten Niebuhr (1733–1815) (Simpson 2004: 194), and was
partly connected with a search for remains linked to the biblical account. At the
start of the nineteenth century the area was relatively closed to European
inXuence and only a few Europeans lived there, of which some had an interest
in the antiquities of the area (ibid. 194–5). One of them was the English traveller
and scholar Claudius Rich (1787–1821), from 1808 to 1821 appointed the
East India Company’s resident in Baghdad (Lloyd 1947: chs. 3 and 5; Simpson
Biblical Archaeology 139