The Influence of the Middle Eastern Spectaculars

Abstract

During the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries, the archaeology of Britain had something of a second-best flavour about it. ‘It was not everyone,’ as Glyn Daniel has pointed out, ‘who could afford to travel widely in classical lands, and, for such, the study of British antiquities provided a cheap and interesting substitute near at hand.’1 Professor Daniel goes on to say: The literary movement known as the Romantic Revolt clothed in attractive garments the British substitute for classical archaeology. Scholars turned away from the classical light to barbaric gloom and romanticised the Ancient Britains and the Druids, and the local British antiquities attributed to them. The study of the picturesque in the landscape promoted an interest in those obvious picturesque and romantic features — the ancient barrows, forts, standing stones and hut circles — about which written history said so little. And what could be more romantic and exciting than the excavation of these strange antiquities?2