Egyptologists to work in the service. Moreover, these diYculties continued
after his death. Hamada Kosaku and Tsuboi Shogoro in Japan are two more
examples to be mentioned in this respect although in their case, their training
took place in Britain.
A note needs to be added at this point. When considering the state’s
willingness to fund archaeology, it is important to note that the level of
state sponsorship was not the same everywhere. Private funding played a
secondary role in France and Prussia. In post-revolutionary France the state
would be very wary of any institutions besides itself, such as charitable
foundations funding archaeology, especially if they had links with the Church.
Besides, sponsorship coming from the wealthy was not welcome at a time
when the state was trying to break up their large estates. The organization of
scientiWc research was something that was perceived as being a state’s duty
and nothing to do with private initiative. This situation contrasted with that
of Britain and the US, where for most of the nineteenth century philistin-
ism—deWned as the hostility towards culture and the arts, and, therefore, a
reluctance to sponsor non-proWtable areas—led to a comparatively much
lower level of state funding than in continental Europe. Some authors point
to the powerful image of the ‘unintellectual English’, which explains the
backwardness of British arts and sciences in comparison with its continental
competitors. In the 1860s John Robert Seeley (1834–95), in his acknowledge-
ment of this fact in theWeld of philosophy, had argued that ‘that barrenness in
ideas, that contempt for principles, that Philistinism which we hardly deny to
be an English characteristic now, was not always so’, referring to the seven-
teenth and early eighteenth centuries (Collini 2006: 70). I argue that the
diVerences between Britain and the US and the rest of the Western world
can best be understood as representing two diVerent models: on the one hand,
the Utilitarian model, and on the other, the State Interventionist model (or
Continental model). It would be only from the 1870s that Britain and the US
became more attracted to the latter model.
It is important to realize that the interest in the past was selective. TheWrst
concern was that of civilization, and the understanding of its manifestations
and the reasons for its eventual downfall. There was also an alternative concern
that guided much of the search for antiquities in certain areas: religion. This
issue is central to Chapter 6, in the discussion of the archaeology of the biblical
lands, but is present in most of the other chapters of Parts II and III of the
book. The study of Islamic, Byzantine, Hindu, and Buddhist archaeology all
became entangled with issues of religion, although archaeology was also
attracted towards the exotic. The search for antiquities in Palestine had as its
purpose to demonstrate or explain the biblical account, and, in contrast to the
archaeology of any other area of the world, most archaeologists practised one
16 Archaeology in the Nineteenth Century