In their introduction to this volume of 18 essays, the editors distinguish between different stages in the historiography of an academic discipline (in this case, ancient Near Eastern studies). A first more “descriptive” stage collects basic data about individual researchers and the institutions in which they worked, while a second “analytic” stage makes use of this data to address broader questions of intellectual history, such as the way “political context affects and shapes research”. Given the uneven development of the historiography of ancient Near Eastern studies, it makes sense that the editors chose to include both kinds of studies.
Most historiographical research to date has been on the inter-war period and the effect on Assyriology of the rise of Nazism. Accordingly, the essays in the volume that deal with this period are more sophisticated and will likely be of wider interest. They include not only all six essays in Part 1 (“The edge of the abyss: the study of Antiquity under totalitarian threat”) but also (to my mind) Eva von Dassow's excellent article “Nation building in the Plain of Antioch from Hatti to Hatay” and the short survey of Assyriology in Turkey by Selim Ferruh Adalı and Hakan Erol. Taken together, these eight essays form a kind of book-within-a-book that tells a complex story interweaving racial and nationalist ideologies, colonial politics, institutional rivalries, and heartfelt concern for scholarship. Many chapters provide rich bibliographies that will surely assist future research, as well as generous excerpts from unpublished correspondence and other archival documents.
Some highlights: in Silvia Alaura's essay on the correspondence between Albrecht Goetze and Hans Gustav Güterbock from the 1930s and 40s, we find two pioneers of Hittitology worrying about how to rebuild their field from the rubble of the Second World War: Sebastian Fink's reassessment of language and race in the work of Benno Landsberger and Wolfram von Soden results in a far more complex picture of the latter than is commonly encountered (including in Jakob Flygare's contribution, which presents von Soden's scholarship as more conventionally motivated by racist ideology); Pietro Giammellaro gives an account of Italian fascist propaganda that equated the British Empire with the ancient Phoenicians (and hence, by the convoluted logic peculiar to such thinking, with the Jews); and Patrick Maxime Michel's contribution on Woolley's excavations in Syria in the 1930s raises the question of whether archaeological finds were thought best divided according to a principle of equity or equality.
Von Dassow offers an elegantly constructed and theoretically sophisticated essay about the many fallacies that arise in the common attempt to construe ancient peoples as collective historical actors. The piece deftly interlinks excavation history on the plains of Antioch, the interpretation of the finds, and the ideologically charged modern political history of this contested region located at the border between the emergent Turkish and Syrian states. Those who read the volume's sequence of chapters in order will find many themes recapitulated in von Dassow's essay. But whereas many of the earlier pieces seem to treat the influence of political ideology on scholarship as circumscribable to radical rightwing regimes, von Dassow insists that the problem is far more ubiquitous. “Were we to examine our scholarship or our politics”, she writes, “we would find the premises of racial thinking still shaping interpretations and policy”.
While von Dassow is surely right that racial and nationalist ideologies can function deep within scholarly work, her instinct to smell a rat may sometimes take matters too far. In this respect, Adalı and Erol's contribution comes as a welcome balance. They insist that it is “critical not to directly connect the history of Assyriology and Hittitology in Turkey with an anachronistic view of Turkey's queries of Turkish ethnicity in ancient history … These ideas have only indirect influence on certain aspects of cuneiform historiography in Turkey; they are not the driving force”. I am not in a position to officiate in this debate; I can thank the editors for giving these two Turkish scholars space to voice a position that runs counter to current mainstream academic fashion.
The editors are also to be applauded for seeking to expand historiographical study to such countries as Portugal, Belgium, China, and Iran. (A discussion of Soviet Assyriology would have been welcome.) These essays tend not to provide much more than a basic skeleton of who studied what with whom; at best, they provoke curiosity about how the recounted scholarly activities might have interacted with local culture and politics.
And yet, though the editors defend these descriptive essays as belonging to a preliminary stage in historiographical work, many of the pieces in the volume seem to hold the view that when functioning properly scholarship proceeds according to its own inner rules, uninfluenced by external political and cultural pressures. That is, they call into question the central conceit of historiographical work as the editors define it. Flygare, for instance, distinguishes between the introduction and conclusion of von Soden's 1936 article on Babylonian science, which have “no scholarly value” because “deformed by ideology”, and the central portion of that article, which “has scholarly value even today”. A positivist commitment to objective scholarship still runs disproportionately deep in ancient Near Eastern studies; we'd benefit from an historiographical study that elucidates why this is so.
As their letters reveal, Goetze and Güterbock were torn between their anti-fascist political views and their commitment to advancing Hittite scholarship. Since German archaeological institutions continued to function in Turkey after the Nazi takeover, many relevant discoveries were being made by scholars with close ties to the regime in Berlin. In their post-war correspondence, Goetze and Güterbock try to assess their colleagues’ complicity, often more generously than one might expect. Alongside Goetze's principled refusal to accept a professorship at Marburg after the war, I found these letters humbling because they show serious scholars struggling in a world in which one's commitments don't easily align.
