A Complicated Legacy: The Original Collections of the Semitic Museum

For museums, legacy collections of archaeological materials purchased from the antiquities market in the past are problematic in multiple respects. By any modern definition, they are loot: objects removed from their original contexts without regard to their find-spots (provenience), conveyed through a black market with no record of a chain of title (provenance), offered openly by sellers with no rightful claim of ownership to buyers with no scruples about receiving stolen goods. Thus such legacy collections were, are, and always will be tainted to a certain extent by their origins. As the name implies, however, legacy collections are just that, older collections accumulated in an era before the widespread application of international conventions on the trade and trafficking of cultural property. All major museums and most minor ones founded before the mid-twentieth century AD are implicated. The Semitic Museum at Harvard University, established in 1889, is no exception. However, the particular history of the Museum’s collections and of the role played in that history by the Museum’s founding curator, Harvard professor David Gordon Lyon, make for an especially complicated legacy.

Lyon’s Legacy and Lyon’s Dilemma

The original collections of the Semitic Museum were assembled by Lyon between 1889 and around 1929. He accomplished this almost exclusively by purchases from established dealers or by gifts or purchases from individuals. These purchases and gifts were not only archaeological artifacts, but also manuscripts in Semitic and other Near Eastern languages (as well as Greek papyri from Egypt), ethnographic materials (costumes, jewelry, weapons, tools and other implements), specimens of natural history, contemporary photographs of peoples and places in the Near East and plaster casts of ancient Near Eastern monuments and inscriptions. These latter were acquired from museums in London, Paris, Berlin, and Istanbul which owned the originals and which, in accordance with the practice of the day, routinely sold full-size replicas to other museums for display, early versions of 3D virtual reality.

The inclusion of ethnography, photographs and museum replicas in the Semitic Museum’s original exhibits was intended by Lyon to create a fully rounded presentation of the ancient Semitic world: full-sized replicas to stand in for well-known ancient monuments, photographs to give museum goers a sense of “Oriental” landscapes and peoples and contemporary Palestinian costumes and objects of everyday life that were thought (mistakenly) to fill gaps in the fragmentary material record of a vanished Biblical world.

In conception, the exhibits at the new Semitic Museum were typical of their day: spaces full of cases with cases full of objects (Fig. 1). Everything was displayed; labeling was minimal and wall text non-existent. Visitors were expected simply to see and absorb it all. What could not be displayed for lack of space under vitrines was stored in specially built cabinetry beneath the showcases themselves. All the exhibits were fixed. Thus, after the Museum’s formal opening in 1903 Lyon could publish a “Catalogue of Exhibits” (Semitic Museum 1903b; Fig. 2) with full confidence that it would never need revision since the exhibits would never change. The basement was not used for storage of collections reserves; it was merely a place for building machinery and public restrooms.

At the core of the exhibits, of course, were actual ancient artifacts, many of them inscribed, particularly cuneiform tablets, which Lyon, an Assyriologist by training, purchased in large lots from dealers in the U.S. and Europe during the 1890s and first decade of the twentieth century. These were intended not only as exhibits for museum visitors, but also as instruments of instruction for Lyon’s students and as subjects for scholarly research (e.g., Hussey 1912–15). Lyon’s vision for the Semitic Museum was comprehensive. It was to be not merely a building for the display of artifacts, but rather an institution devoted to teaching, research, publication and public exhibition of Semitic history, languages and cultures.

Although Lyon fully appreciated the importance of carefully recorded, scientifically excavated archaeological material, he was constrained by two factors. In the waning decades of the Ottoman Empire—the era in which Lyon was...