Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (review)

Just as Turkey today struggles to define its national identity in relation to Europe and the Middle East, the late Ottoman Empire of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had a foot in both worlds. By 1914, the sprawling multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire had lost North Africa to European imperial powers and most of the Balkans to new nation-states and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. World War I stripped away the remaining Arab provinces, but the ensuing Turkish war for independence saved the Anatolian heartland from the full brunt of colonial rule.

Possessors and Possessed analyzes the part museums and archaeology played as the late Ottoman elite struggled to parry Western imperial aggression and construct a viable identity for its remaining peoples. The shapers of Ottoman museums were Westward-looking reformers working both for inclusion in the European club of nations and against European encroachment on the empire’s antiquities and lands.

Shaw uses categories of collection, taxonomies of organization and display, museum architecture, successive antiquities laws, the excavation and the export of antiquities, and the career of museum director Osman Hamdi Bey to demonstrate how the late Ottomans turned Western ideas about museums, archaeology, and history to their own purposes. The Ottoman Imperial Museum became an integral part of the empire’s struggle to assert a viable political identity. That effort ultimately failed and the Ottoman Empire went under, but its heartland - -along with its museums - - was reborn in 1923 in the Turkish Republic.

The prehistory of Ottoman museums centers on the tenth-century Byzantine church of Hagia Irene, which the Ottomans turned into their Imperial Armory upon conquering Constantinople in 1453. Incorporating the Armory into a courtyard of Topkapi Palace, they filled it with weapons, armor, Christian and Muslim holy relics, and other antiquities.

In 1846 the Imperial Armory was renamed the Magazine of Antique Weapons. This was in line with the Tanzimat, the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman campaign to fend off European encroachment by adopting and adapting various European institutions. The collection was now split into two categories, antique weapons and armor, and Helleno-Byzantine antiquities.

In 1869 another name change inaugurated the Imperial Museum and opened the collections to the public. For a dozen years, Europeans cataloged the antiquities and directed the museum. The building reverted to its status as an armory during the disastrous Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–78, and the weapons collection disappeared from public view for over thirty years.

Osman Hamdi Bey, a French-educated painter, directed the reopened antiquities museum from 1881 until his death in 1910. He arranged the exhibits in a remodeled fifteenth-century palace building, the Tiled Pavilion, and in a new building opened in 1891. The neoclassical architecture of the latter proclaimed its membership in the Western family of museums.

The Imperial Museum gave pride of place to Greek and Roman-Byzantine antiquities, but Shaw demonstrates well how the Ottomans disregarded the Western museum norm of constructing an evolutionary story of art-historical progress from the Greeks through the Renaissance to modern Western painting and sculpture. Western museums also considered their collections universal, advertising their countries’ nineteenth-century imperial reach with triumphant trophies from around the world.

Neither the West’s progressive evolutionary tale nor its claim to universalism suited the purposes of the Ottomans. Instead their Imperial Museum organized its displays to proclaim that the Ottomans had joined the powerful civilization of the West and had a museum full of choice Helleno-Byzantine antiquities from their own lands to prove it. The displays also advertised Ottoman control over far-flung provinces such as Yemen, Palestine, and Iraq and the determination to rein in aggressive European collecting in these domains. Hittite antiquities, which would later be prized as ancestral to the Turkish Republic, as yet received little notice. Not until 1889 did the Imperial Museum make a place for objects of Islamic and Ottoman art, which...