Bible, Babel, and Boorishness

In the mid-1980s, I attended a retirement dinner in honor of Franz Rosenthal, Sterling Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures of Yale. Howard Lamar and I were the only two Americanists present, he because he was Dean of Yale College, and I because I had married into the field. At the end of the evening, Lamar eloquently saluted Rosenthal as a “scholar’s scholar” who reminded the rest of us why we had become academics. I recall wondering whether Lamar, like me, was inwardly contrasting Near Eastern Studies with American History and, if so, whether he agreed that our field suffered by comparison in terms of erudition, significance, nobility, and commitment to the life of the mind.

Guess what! Bruce Kuklick’s fascinating new book shows that the “Orientalists” are just as petty as we are and that a Rosenthal is a rarity in any field and at any time. Anyone interested in the history of academic intellectuals will want to read this book because of its penetrating discussion of disciplinary development within the university; the tension (often played out within individuals, as well as between them) between religion and secularism; and the extent to which scholars are captives of their civilizations. It is also marvelous entertainment.

Victorian intellectuals in fields ranging from geology to philosophy hoped knowledge would further faith, and science confirm religion, but the stakes in Oriental Studies must have seemed especially high. ¹ Until the nineteenth century, almost all that was known about Mesopotamia was contained in the Bible and the classics. When Orientalists began creating the discipline of ancient Near Eastern Studies, it became evident that some of the most cherished aspects of the Hebrew Bible, such as the Creation and Flood stories, possessed counterparts in earlier literature. Some believed the Hebrew Bible and the Near Eastern excavations could corroborate each other. As the German Assyriologist, Friedrich Delitzsch, explained in a turn-of-the-century lecture:

To what end this toil and trouble in distant, inhospitable, and danger-ridden lands? Why all this expense in ransacking to their utmost depths the rubbish heaps of forgotten centuries, where we know neither treasures of gold nor of silver exist? . . .

One answer echoes to all these questions—one answer, which, if not absolutely adequate, is yet largely the reason and consummation of it all: the Bible. . . [T]he results of the Babylonian and Assyrian excavations are destined to inaugurate a new epoch, not only in our intellectual life, but especially in the criticism and comprehension of the Old Testament, and . . . from now till all futurity the names of Babel and Bible will remain inseparably linked together. ²

It was largely Delitzsch’s students who brought the word about Babylon, Sumer, and Assyria to America. Foremost among them was Hermann Hilprecht, the first chaired Assyriologist at the University of Pennsylvania. By Kuklick’s account, he was an impossible cad who combined vanity and an ability to strut sitting down with an unattractive smarminess toward the powerful. But Hilprecht still deserves credit for taking American scholars beyond “armchair Assyriology” and enshrining epigraphy, the study of ancient inscriptions, in America. ³ He and Penn played a key role in organizing the Babylonian Exploration Fund, which sponsored America’s first excavation in Mesopotamia. Between 1888 and 1900, the BEF mounted four “campaigns” to the ancient Sumerian city and religious center of Nippur, near Babylon, whose story Kuklick relates.

And what a story! After traveling from London to Aleppo to Mesopotamia, the seven explorers in the first expedition, “the caravan of sixty-one horses and mules and a crew of local guides made its slow way, eight hours a day, at a little less than three miles per hour, along the Euphrates to Bagdad” (p. 37). In another hundred miles they arrived at the mounds and marshlands of what one member of the team, John Henry Haynes, referred to as “Robberdom and Murderland,” Nippur (p. 67). There they faced oppressive...