from the past in this search for the country’s advancement. Collections, seen
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a way of continuing and pre-
serving one’s image—that of scholars and of their sponsor—, were now seen
as enhancing the image of one’s nation (Findlen 1994: 293, 395). The new
museums were organized on the principles of classiWcation and taxonomy
and explained ideas about progress through their exhibits (ibid.344, 398). In
1708 one of the Tsar’s advisers, the German philosopher and mathematician
Leibniz, wrote explaining to the monarch that the objects in his museum
would ‘serve not only as objects of general curiosity, but also as means to the
perfection of the arts and sciences’ (in Norman 1997: 10).
Within the framework of rationalism, the eighteenth century went through
aWrst revolution in the historical method: standards were set and questions
that needed to be resolved were asked (Momigliano 1950). This is something
that antiquarians, historians, and philologists already did, but the results
obtained by the latter two were still considered more authoritative than
those of the former. The value of ancient texts had precedence over antiqui-
ties, and would clearly remain so for another century. The French scholar the
Count of Caylus (1692–1765) complained about this. In hisRecueil d’anti-
quite ́se ́gyptiennes, e ́trusques, grecques, romaines et gauloisespublished between
1752 and 1768, he insisted on the importance of using original documents:
I restricted myself to publishing in this compendium only those things which belong,
or belonged, to me. I had them drawn with the greatest exactitude, and I dare say that
the descriptions are no less faithful... antiquities are there for the extension of
knowledge. They explain the various usages, they shed light upon their obscure or
little-known makers, they bring the progress of the arts before our eyes and serve as
models to those who study them. But it must be said that the antiquaries hardly ever
saw them in this way; they regarded them only as a supplement to the proofs of
history, or as isolated texts open to the longest commentaries.
(Caylus in Schnapp 1993: 240).These complaints had little impact on general opinion. In a highly illumin-
ating study of what would later become the United States of America, Carl
Richard (1994) explains how the eighteenth-century education system was
one of the fundamental institutions for training future politicians in the
Classics. Secular education was encouraged to supply the need of absolutist
states for well-trained bureaucrats to control their large territories and popu-
lations. From an early age young children—especially boys—had to learn by
heart passages by Cicero, Virgil, Xenophon, and Homer, and master the rules
of Latin grammar. This knowledge would provide a key organizing principle
for much of their later learning. As a result of this solidly classical education,
the use of Graeco-Roman literature became a common feature among
42 Early Archaeology of Great Civilizations