Scramble for the past. A story of archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753-1914

When at the turn of the 19th century Lord Elgin stripped the Parthenon of its sculptures and carried them to England, he saw himself as both preserving classical art for posterity and claiming classical heritage for the west. When, soon after, the French government purchased an armless statue of Aphrodite on the island of Melos and displayed it triumphantly in the Louvre, it, too, identified France as the natural heir of antiquity. The Austrians and Germans, for their part, unearthed and brought home vast quantities of sculpture and architecture from throughout the Near East.

Beginning in the mid-18th century, European scholars and amateurs poured into Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Mesopotamia to explore, dig, catalogue and cart home material remains of the ancient world. The collections they amassed became celebrated museums; the scholarly techniques they developed formed the foundation of modern scientific archaeology. At the time, however, the lands they traversed and the antiquities they found belonged neither to the empires of Europe, nor to local states; rather, the entire territory was the possession of the Ottoman Empire. What did the Ottomans think of the European passion for the past? What was their own view of the ancient world and its heritage?

Scramble for the Past explores the historiography of archaeology in the Ottoman domains between the founding of London's British Museum in 1753 and that of İstanbul's Evkaf Museum of Islamic art in 1914. It sees the rise of archaeology not as an alien western imposition upon the east, or indeed as a purely European invention, but as a process that emerged out of an interaction between Europe and the Ottoman world. Essays by fifteen leading international scholars explore the relationship of archaeology to politics, ideology and national identity, as well as the influences of ancient finds on popular culture.

Filled with anecdotes and incidents, and richly illustrated with period paintings, sculptures, postcards, photographs, documents and rarities from the Ottoman archives, Scramble for the Past offers a fascinating new look at the modern invention of the ancient world.