With a recent decision of June 2018, the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism required that archaeological excavations led by foreign institutions in Turkey should be composed of experts and scholars of Turkish nationality at a ratio of at least 51 percent. The new rule may appear to be the outcome of nationalist trends in Turkish as well as global politics, but it is also meant to counter long-standing dynamics of cultural colonization. An official ministerial statement reported on by the press explicitly mentioned as an example the fact that the Austrian archaeological mission that has been excavating for 150 years at Ephesus—a site listed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List since 2015—has not trained even a single Turkish archaeologist. The Austrians actually began work at Ephesus in 1890, but it is undeniable that, until recently, some excavations led by foreigners in Turkey evoked the same division of labor and social relations characteristic of 19th-century enterprises, with “three distinct entities: foreign archaeologists, Ottoman public servants, and local laborers” (p. 153). Mostly foreign experts (supposedly the bearers of modernity and civilization), Ottoman bureaucrats (often acting as obstacles to modernization, at least in the formers’ arrogant view), and a local workforce (laborers perceived as ignorant and primitive, but involved out of necessity): these are the main ingredients of the “landscape of labor” analyzed and discussed in the fifth chapter of Zeynep Çelik’s latest monograph, About Antiquities: Politics of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire. At one point in this chapter, the author mentions how, in 1914, Süleyman Nazif, the governor of Mosul, “pleaded with the ministry to stop all archaeological work by foreigners until the time when ‘experts are trained in our country’” (p. 155). The governor was complaining specifically about the role of foreign scholars in the illegal (though until 1874 virtually legal) pillaging of archaeological artifacts, a phenomenon that enriched Western museums at the expense of local heritage. During the ensuing period of over a century, many outstanding Turkish archaeologists have indeed been trained, both in Turkey and abroad, and the problem of pillaging has diminished—though it has not disappeared. Thus, the issues discussed by Çelik remain highly topical, as the recent decision by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism shows.

About Antiquities explores and discusses—from the point of view of cultural history, power relations, and the social production of meanings, rather than archaeology tout court—the manifold attitudes of Ottoman intellectuals, bureaucrats, educated laymen, and, perhaps most innovatively, humble workers and local dwellers toward an archaeological heritage that was as diverse and articulated as the social groups and communities inhabiting the empire. Çelik is a well-known, doyenne scholar of architectural/urban history and visual culture, a student of Spiro Kostof, and has produced groundbreaking studies on late Ottoman İstanbulFootnote ¹ and the architectural representation of the Ottoman self at the 19th-century world’s fairs.Footnote ² She has also worked on French colonial urbanism and orientalism,Footnote ³ and compared these with the Ottoman dynamics of center-periphery otherization.Footnote ⁴ Her initial productions were grounded on notions of dependency and modernization, as well as on the Saidian understanding of Orientalism—but with significant space, it must be pointed out, reserved for locals “speaking back” to the orientalist discourse. In her more recent work, however, Çelik has adopted a more nuanced and multifocal vision, one that problematizes the notion of Ottoman modernity and questions the common assumptions about dominant and subaltern groups that have been characteristic of much postcolonial scholarship. With the volume Scramble for the Past,Footnote ⁵ published in connection with an exhibition, she began to contribute to the increasing academic interest in the history of archaeology in the late Ottoman Empire, a subject that sheds light on both the empire’s appropriation and re-elaboration of modernity, and on its stance vis-à-vis Western cultural imperialism.

The interest in this subject is perhaps best exemplified by the recent mini-deluge of publications concerning Osman Hamdi, the Ottoman statesman, archaeologist, and painter who was virtually ignored outside of Turkey until the 1990s. A search of Google Scholar conducted on August 19, 2019 revealed no less than 1,030 occurrences of his name just in the scholarship produced between 2014 and that date. Osman Hamdi contributed greatly to the regulation, organization, and enhancement of the Ottoman relationship with the empire’s archaeological past by, on the one hand, drafting two pieces of legislation regarding antiquities in 1874 and 1884, and on the other hand by establishing in 1891 the first Ottoman museum in the modern sense (the Müze-i Hümayun, rendered throughout Çelik’s study as the “Imperial Museum”). This museum was enlarged in 1905 and then again in 1908 in order to be able to house and display the astonishing findings made by Osman Hamdi’s excavations in Lebanon and Anatolia. By adding two wings to the original museum building facing Topkapı Palace’s Tiled Pavilion (Çinili Köşk), which had been previously restored and was also used as exhibition space, the neoclassical museum appeared, according to a comment in a 1927 issue of the journal İçtihad reported by Çelik, “to take the [Tiled Pavilion] in its arms and protect it with respect and affection,” like a frame enhancing the beauty of a painting (p. 36).

Chapter 1 of About Antiquities contextualizes the initiative of the Imperial Museum within the broader framework of 19th-century politics and the culture of museums from Paris to Berlin to New York City. New York’s Metropolitan Museum in particular is taken as a point of comparison by Çelik, but this choice remains unconvincing owing to the huge gap between the two institutions in terms of purpose, budget, contents, audiences, and urban setting. Cyril Mango once observed that art collections in new capital cities like St. Petersburg and Washington, DC (or, for that matter, in a young and growing metropolis like New York in the 1870s) performed much the same function that sacred relics had exerted long before in Constantinople, after it had been refounded by Constantine. The modern museum adds the aura of the past and cultural prestige to places lacking deep historical roots, much as the relics transferred to Constantinople from distant sites served to sanctify a city without a deep Christian tradition. But in the case of the Imperial Museum located on the grounds of Topkapı Palace in the late 19th century, the situation was exactly the opposite: here it was a capital city whose historic heritage was everywhere, but in a rather neglected state, and the museum was thus a demonstration that this city was also modern enough to take care of and display, according to international standards, the antiquities of its nation—not any artwork from foreign countries, whether acquired at auctions or donated by the wealthy. As Çelik recognizes, the Ottoman Imperial Museum, which was designed by the prominent Levantine architect Alexandre Vallauri (1850–1921), “does not make a visible contribution to the [city’s] urban image,” segregated as it is within the precincts of Topkapı Palace (p. 41). This is in sharp contrast not only with the Metropolitan Museum and other Western counterparts, but also, we might add, with other modern Ottoman educational projects, such as the Darülfünun (University) building designed by Gaspare Fossati (1809–1883), which dominated the Marmara Sea from the Sultanahmet district between the 1850s and 1933, when it burned to the ground.

In her treatment of the charismatic and pivotal figure of Osman Hamdi, Çelik seems equidistant from—I wouldn’t say “in between”—the opposite visions of Wendy Shaw, who assesses Hamdi as a sort of anti-colonial hero challenging in all possible ways Western cultural hegemony, and of Edhem Eldem, who considers his illustrious ancestor no more, and no less, than an oriental Orientalist entirely at ease with his assimilation of French and Western (mis-)perceptions about the Middle East and Islam. In Chapter 2 of her book, entitled “Scholarship and the Imperial Museum,” Çelik reminds how Osman Hamdi’s determination and “obstinacy” in halting the smuggling of antiquities from Ottoman territory led to him being harshly criticized by his angered French colleague Salomon Reinach, the brother of Théodore, who had collaborated on the excavation at Sidon. Osman Hamdi was also described as “the greatest anomaly of all” by the American archaeologist James Theodore Bent, who simply could not conceive of the existence of a non-Western archaeologist (p. 46). The “anomaly” of active subjects normally treated or expected to behave as passive objects is a theme that recurs, both explicitly and implicitly, throughout the book, whose most ambitious aim is to read against the grain historical, spatial, visual, and textual evidence so as to create an alternative narrative of Ottoman agency and local participation in the experience of the past, as unfolding through excavations and discoveries.

In terms of sources, Çelik’s book uses a fascinating array of materials: from the General Directorate of State Archives’ Ottoman Archives (Devlet Arşivleri Başkanlığı Osmanlı Arşivi) to the recently disclosed files of the Archaeological Museum of İstanbul (the Imperial Museum of Çelik’s narrative), as well as incorporating Ottoman periodicals ranging from Servet-i Fünun to Malumat to Şehbal, to name only a few. Photographs of excavation sites from archives both Turkish and foreign (especially, one might note, the University of Pennsylvania), along with published and unpublished reports and diaries, are of course another main ingredient as well. In Chapter 4, entitled “The Ottoman Reading Public and Antiquities,” journals are especially well represented, and the chapter features long paraphrases of Ottoman journal articles dealing with local and foreign sites and museums. In connection with this, Çelik argues that antiquities and the imperial museum had not only a foreign audience, but an Ottoman one as well, albeit this was an elitist audience. Here (pp. 119–128), Osman Hamdi’s younger brother Halil Edhem, who took over the direction of the Imperial Museum after the former’s death in 1910, and the architect Mukbil Kemal are emphasized as the most vocal and energetic defenders of the empire’s Islamic artifacts and buildings (whether Ottoman or pre-Ottoman), which was in line with the cultural politics of the Second Constitutional Era that began in 1908 and contrasted with the previous concentration on the Classical and pre-Classical periods.

Osman Hamdi returns prominently in Chapter 5, which as previously alluded to is entitled “The Landscape of Labor,” and is probably the most successful part of the book. In this chapter, Osman Hamdi’s different attitudes toward local contexts emerge: his approach was paternalistic, Orientalist, and quasi-colonial at Mt. Nemrud, where the natives were treated as exotic and primitive, but more sympathetic in Sidon, where his knowledge of Lebanon as well as of local habits allowed him to understand and report about the emotional involvement of Muslim and Christian workers in the crucial stages of excavation and discovery. At least, Çelik argues, he recognized their dancing and shouting “frenetic hourrahs” for what they actually were: expressions of joy and excitement, rather than “war cries,” as some Western colleagues had imagined (pp. 166–167). This chapter also presents the alternative perceptions of another “oriental” archaeologist, Hormuzd Rassam, an Ottoman Chaldean Catholic from Mosul who collaborated closely with Austen Henry Layard and studied at Magdalen College, Oxford for 18 months in the late 1840s. Rassam criticized the condescending attitude of Western scholars toward local people, but in his own reports he also wrote ambivalently about Oriental women. His gaze was that of both an insider and an outsider to the culture that he described, possibly with a Western interlocutor in mind. In this chapter, Çelik also tries to provide alternative readings of a peculiar topos in the Western perception of local culture; namely, the persistence and continuity of past habits in the material environment of local residents. Some objects produced in the Neolithic period resembled some that were still in use in contemporary times, and this was traditionally seen by Western observers as a proof of backwardness and absence of progress, of detachment from historical change. But the same evidence, Çelik points out, could just as well be read as a sign of respect for and attachment to the past.

The previous scholarship on the topics addressed in About Antiquities focused especially on the idea of cultural and ideological ownership of heritage. The main works on this question are thoroughly discussed by Çelik.Footnote ⁶ Her book, like much of the literature, also examines questions of belonging, identity, and ownership, particularly in the introduction and the epilogue, which are devoted to the topicality of the study’s main problematic. The bulk of Çelik’s work, however, is elaborated upon from a more empirical and phenomenological viewpoint, and aims especially at recovering the lived experiences of the different actors and publics involved in the materials and dynamics of archaeological enterprise: the staging of power relations on excavation sites; the ways in which knowledge and control of a past heritage become entangled with, and indeed inseparable from, the elaboration of a local form of modernity; and much more. In the final chapter, entitled “Dual Settlements,” Çelik draws on her own experience and knowledge of colonial urbanism to analyze the spatial layout of excavation sites, which reproduced the dichotomy of colonial cities, where a space for the colonizer was separated from—and often visually dominated—the space of the colonized or the indigenous quarters. On excavation sites, of course, the two spaces are replaced by the residential quarters of the archaeologists and the improvised dwellings of the local workers. This may at first appear to be a somewhat schematic transfer of urban dynamics onto a limited working environment. Nevertheless, the overall evocation of the spaces and roles of local people, so long absent in the archaeological literature, finally begins to be really imaginable thanks to Çelik’s book, and more specifically to the ways it reads evidence against the grain. A 1935 poem by Bertolt Brecht, “Questions of a Worker who Reads,” addressed a different yet politically related absence: “In books you will read the names of kings. / Was it the kings who dragged the stones into place?/ And Babylon, so often destroyed, / Who rebuilt it so many times?”Footnote ⁷ This Brechtian interrogation may never find an answer, but it should be credited to Zeynep Çelik, the author of this engaging and critically informed discussion of antiquities from an Ottoman perspective, that she began answering another, connected question: Who uncovered Babylon from the dust of millennia? Was it only archaeologists?