A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology: Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Past (Oxford Studies in the History of Archaeology)

professionalism had now started to be the norm. They were all attached to the
University of Pennsylvania, the team being formed by Ward himself as well as
John P. Peters (1852–1921), a professor of Semitics, and the epigrapher
Hermann Volrath Hilprecht (1880–1900), the professor of Assyriology
(Cooper 1992: 139, 149; Lloyd 1947: 184–5). The University of Chicago
came to complement the eVorts of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1894
the Haskell Oriental Museum was opened at the University of Chicago. The
museum was not the only one to receive large donations from the young
magnate John D. Rockefeller, who in this way promoted an extreme version of
the British/American model of funding that has been highlighted in Chapter

5. Rockefeller also funded the University of Chicago Oriental Exploration
   Fund’s expedition to Bismaya (Iraq, ancient Adab, one of the Sumerian states
   of Shinar), located south of Nippur, which ran from 1903–5. The site had a
   chronology of at least two millennia dating back to the Uruk period (mid
   fourth millenniumbce), and a ziggurat was uncovered as well as several
   temples, a palace, an archive of tablets, houses, and a cemetery. Tablets,
   sculptures, and stone relief carvings constituted the main objects moved to
   Chicago (Meade 1974: 90–2; Moorey 1991: 45–53; Patterson 1995b: 64).
   As distinct from Italy, Greece, and Egypt, other foreign schools only started
   to make their appearance in the last years of the period under analysis. The
   American School of Oriental Research (ASOR) was founded in 1900 ‘to
   prosecute Biblical, linguistic, archaeological, historical, and other kindred
   studies and researches under more favourable conditions than can be secured
   at a distance from the Holy Land’ (in Moorey 1991: 35). It was created almost
   thirty years after the school in Athens (Patterson 1995b: 63). Britain would
   only open a British School of Archaeology in Iraq with private funding in
   1932, the year in which the Mesopotamian area came under British mandate.
   Turning to France, there was a ‘deWcit’ of institutions in the area, according to
   Gran-Aymerich (1998: 268). The archaeology of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine,
   Iraq, and Iran all depended on the French School in Cairo.

THE SEARCH FOR THE HOLY LAND: THE ARCHAEOLOGY

OF PALESTINE

Explorers, biblical topography, societies, and inscriptions (1800–90)

There are some eighteenth-century precedents to scholarly interest in Pales-
tine. One of them was that of Adrian Reland (1676–1718). He was a Dutch
Christian Hebraist and Orientalist, Professor of Oriental Languages at Utrecht

Biblical Archaeology 147