given in the text, include the competition between Layard and Botta in
Mesopotamia, and Clermont-Ganneau and Charles Warren in Palestine.
However, the archaeology of the Bible diVered with respect to the other
areas of informal imperialism. These mainly related to the important role of
religion, both regarding the protagonists undertaking the job (many belonging
to Christian institutions, others very much aware of the religious debates
raging at the time), and regarding the aims of research which focused on the
search for sites and events mentioned in the Bible. Because of the religious
overtones of biblical archaeology, the professional base of archaeologists was
formed not only by the usual philologists and the amateurs coming from the
army or diplomacy as well as a few proper professional archaeologists such as
Petrie. Importantly, and this is exceptional in comparison to other parts of the
world, in addition to the groups just described archaeology was also under-
taken by theologists and members of religious institutions. Furthermore, the
religious associations of biblical archaeology also stopped local archaeologists
such as the Ottoman scholar Hamdi Bey, or the various Egyptian antiquarians,
from competing with the Europeans; the biblical past was not one of their
concerns, a situation that contrasts with what was explained in Chapter 5 in
respect to other types of antiquities. If Hamdi Bey became interested in
Lebanese archaeology, this was not owing to its biblical topography but as a
consequence of the discovery of the royal cemetery of Sidon, in which several
Hellenistic sarcophagi of supreme artistic quality (among which, that so
identiWed as the Sarcophagus of Alexander the Great) were discovered.
AWnal diVerence that separates biblical archaeology from other types of
archaeology is the special twist that racism took in the area, for if racism
aVected scholarship elsewhere, that against the Semites became particularly
acute from the last decades of the nineteenth century. This aVected negatively
particularWelds in biblical archaeology such as the study of the Phoenician
archaeology: what had been deWned as Phoenician, both in Lebanon and
around the Mediterranean shores from east to west, and even further into
the Atlantic, was either ignored, believed not worthy of consideration, or
interpreted as something else (usually Greek). As explained in this chapter,
racism also aVected the professional integration of the only archaeologist of
Mesopotamian origin, Hormuzd Rassam, in Britain, the country he had
moved to after meeting Layard.
Biblical archaeology, therefore, is a unique case in informal imperialism:
religion provided a strong alternative interest beyond the search for the classical
model. The religious interest inXuenced archaeology in many ways: in who was
doing archaeology and who paid for it, in what was excavated and in how
interpretations were well received in the Western world. The classical model,
however, would be paramount in the archaeology of the rest of the world. It had
Biblical Archaeology 165