About Antiquities: Politics of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire by Zeynep Çelik (review)

In the past three decades, the history of archaeology has emerged as a distinct discipline attracting scholars from a wide range of specialties. The people who dig up the past, it seems, can be just as interesting as the material emerging from the ground. At times, however, this story-behind-the-excavation scholarship can be remarkably uncritical of the political and economic dynamics inevitably underlying the archaeological expeditions of the long nineteenth century, especially those that took place in the Middle East and North Africa. Inspired by postcolonial theory and heritage studies, numerous publications have sought to address the link between political ideology and archaeology. One work that particularly stands out is the recent edited volume Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire (Bahrani, Çelik, and Eldem 2011), which identifies the sultan's well-protected domains as one of the primary fields of Western archaeological exploration, and the essays within explore the discourses of modernization and transnational encounter often at play in these endeavors.

Zeynep Çelik's newest monograph, About Antiquities: Politics of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, is the natural follow-up to Scramble for the Past (Çelik was one of its editors). While the edited volume has a more expansive chronological frame, however, Çelik's book narrows in on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when three interrelated developments characterized the Ottoman state's own entry into the archaeological arena: the government's establishment of the Imperial Museum in Istanbul, the initiation of several expeditions throughout the empire to fill the halls of said museum, and the passing of antiquities laws that regulated foreign excavations and made it increasingly difficult to transport material abroad. With these developments as her starting point, Çelik is particularly interested in placing the Ottomans in comparative perspective, making frequent juxtapositions with institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or the British Museum. Through a thorough presentation of a wide range of archival and published documentation, the author aims to demonstrate the partnerships, mutual admiration, and, yes, jealousy and tensions that arose between Ottoman antiquities officials and their foreign peers. The other main objective of this volume is to move beyond the elite actors of the Ottoman world and to offer lesser-heard voices in the scramble for antiquity, such as local school groups who visited the Imperial Museum or the laborers hired to work at dig sites. In order to recover these voices, Çelik takes up "unconventional methodologies" (11) and sources, primarily reading Western accounts "against the grain" (2).

The book could be divided roughly into two parts: while the first four chapters concentrate on the exhibitions and archaeological activities of the Imperial Museum in Istanbul, the last two chapters head out to the Ottoman provinces to provide an overview of the working conditions at various sites. Chapter 1 presents the emergence of the art and archaeological museum as a distinctive type of public institution in the nineteenth century. More specifically, Çelik closely compares the establishment and mission of the Imperial Museum with the Metropolitan Museum, not only because the administrators of both institutions interacted with and kept a close eye on one another, but also due to the fact that both museums stood on the periphery of the great art establishments of Europe, which until now have dominated the scholarship.

Chapter 2 examines the swirl of publications from both foreign and Ottoman scholars in response to the activities of the Imperial Museum and its director, Osman Hamdi Bey, especially the discovery of a number of impressive sarcophagi in Sidon (now in modern-day Lebanon). The number of journals, catalogs, and essays surveyed in this chapter convey the impression that despite the resentment that some foreign academics felt towards the museum there was also a great deal of collaboration and exchange of information between these scholars in the interest of advancing scientific knowledge.

Chapter...