Review: Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914, by Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik, and Edhem Eldem, eds.

Abstract

Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Celik, and Edhem Eldem, eds.. Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914 Istanbul: SALT, 2011, 519 pp., 178 illus. $58.99 (paper). ISBN 9789944731270 This admirable, innovative volume offers a unique panorama of archaeology and the traffic in antiquities generated in Ottoman lands during the essential formative period of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While it does not discuss Ottoman Egypt and Palestine (whose inclusion might have doubled the page count), Scramble for the Past engages strategically with archaeology and its institutions in modern-day Turkey, as well as Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Greece. The book’s editors and contributors analyze activities by English, French, German, and Austrian scholars and archaeologists at home and abroad. Further, and crucially, they break new ground by considering the motivations of the Ottoman peoples and government, rescuing them from the more common role of largely passive or picturesque backdrop for Western narratives of discovery. In their introductory essay, “Archaeology and Empire,” the editors state as their goal to challenge the view that “scientific archaeology” constitutes “a purely disinterested realm of scholarship” (25). Instead, this volume provides an impressive roster of the often buried and less than purely scientific or objective interests that motivated Western archaeological discovery in this portion of the world. Two particular themes recur throughout. First is the centrality of imperialism, the seemingly never-absent tie between scientific and political activities. Perhaps the most striking example occurs in Shawn Malley’s essay, “The Layard Enterprise.” Malley presents Austen Henry Layard, …