from a political point of view. As a matter of fact, some of them were
themselves empires, like the Ottoman Empire, China and, later on in the
century, Italy, and even possessed their own formal and informal colonies.
Despite this, Westerners operated in all these lands, some brought in as
advisers to help with state modernization, others whose occupation was
trade, and indeed others who had become interested in studying the cultural
aspects of the country. Among the latter there were archaeologists, who had
managed to convince state or private sponsorship to assist them in their
eVorts.
Chapter 5 deals with informal imperialism in the ancient Great Civiliza-
tions of Greece, Rome, and Egypt. In Italy and Greece the presence of
archaeologists from the Powers—France and Britain, but also from the
German principalities and the Scandinavian countries—followed a long trad-
ition. Yet, a new slant came to be added now: the understanding of the power
of the classics as the source of prestige, of what was right, good, and useful,
became appropriated by the nineteenth-century imperial powers to explain
the origin of their might. The archaeology of classical Greece, Italy, and Egypt
attracted scholars from the Powers whose initial individual undertakings were
increasingly supported by the creation of foreign schools. The attempt by the
Powers to control the archaeology of the Great Civilizations encountered
resistance, however. This was particularly strong in Greece and in Italy,
where antiquities became symbols of the national past and therefore a source
of their own prestige. In both areas legislation to ban the export of antiquities
was soon instituted, and museums and university chairs were created to allow
the curation, teaching, and study of the national antiquities. The result was
not a duet—native against foreign—but a chorus of many voices in many
languages, that often talked to each other. Resistance was weaker in the
Ottoman Empire, whose interest for the past of the Great Civilizations
in the early modern period had been much lower. The diYculties faced
in controlling the Powers’ desire for its Greek antiquities would only be
addressed when young scholars educated—at least in part—in the West
(mainly in Paris) attained positions of importance in the state machinery.
This was the case of Hamdi Bey in Constantinople (modern Istanbul), who
from the 1880s was the main promoter of legislation, the modernizer of the
Archaeological Museum, and theWrst advocate of scientiWc excavations and of
archaeological publications. The equivalentWgure in Egypt would be Rifaa
RaWi al-Tahtawi, but in this case the Powers’ greater control over Egyptian
politics and, therefore, archaeology did not allow this Egyptian native archae-
ologist to protect national archaeology as against the interest of the Euro-
peans. His attempts were curtailed by Europeans such as August Mariette,
who in his time as head of the Antiquities Service in Egypt did not allow local
An Alternative Account 15