ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN STUDIES

SUPPLEMENT 31

PERCEPTIONS OF THE PAST

IN THE TURKISH REPUBLIC:
CLASSICAL AND BYZANTINE PERIODS
Edited by

Scott REDFORD and Nina ERGIN

PEETERS
LEUVEN PARIS WALPOLE, MA.
2010
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Scott REDFORD and Nina ERGIN

THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE

Archaeology and the Perception of Greek, Roman and Byzantine Eras in

Early Republican Turkey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Murat ERGIN

Constructing the Past in Ankara: From Augustus to Atatrk . . . . . . . . 35

Suna GVEN

INDIVIDUALS

From the Lofty Halls of Academia to the Dusty Hills of Anatolia: Howard
Crosby Butler and the First Sardis Expedition through Peace and War,
19091926 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Fikret K. YEGL

Guillaume de Jerphanion (18771948) as Jesuit and Scholar in Turkey . . . 101

Vincenzo RUGGIERI

Louis Robert (19041985): A Historian-Epigrapher Discovering Anatolia . 127

Pierre CHUVIN

The Archaeology of the Turkish Republic and the School of Ekrem Akurgal 137
A. COKUN ZGNEL

Arif Mfid Mansel: A Pioneer of Turkish Archaeology . . . . . . . . . . . 147

Haluk ABBASOGLU
vi CONTENTS

INSTITUTIONS

The Museum in Bergama as an Example of Turkish Politics of Culture and

of German-Turkish Collaboration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
Wolfgang RADT

The Russian Archaeological Institute of Constantinople (18941914): From

its Establishment until Today . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
Konstantinos PAPOULIDIS

THE STATE OF THE FIELD

The Future of Classical Archaeology in Turkey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

Kutalm GRKAY

Byzantine Art History in Modern Turkey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205

Engin AKYREK

Afterword: Heritage, Nationalism and Archaeology in the Republic of Turkey 225

David SHANKLAND
 INTRODUCTION

Scott REDFORD
Nina ERGIN
Department of Archaeology and History of Art
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Ko University
Rumeli Feneri Yolu
34450 Saryer/Istanbul
TURKEY
sredford@ku.edu.tr
nergin@ku.edu.tr

In December of 2006, the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (RCAC) of

Ko University, Istanbul, convened an inaugural symposium in its newly completed
auditorium. The symposium was entitled Perceptions of the Past in the Turkish
Republic (Greek, Roman and Byzantine Periods). The aim of the symposium, organ-
ized by RCAC founding director Scott Redford, was to use the occasion of the open-
ing of a new center for the promotion of archaeology in Turkey to examine its past.
In order to understand the present state of the field and ponder future directions, we
need to engage critically with the constitution of the field of archaeology in Turkey,
addressing such issues as the historical context of the production of knowledge and
the roles of individuals and institutions in shaping scholarship. In focusing on the
early decades of the Turkish Republic, archaeology should be situated in a nexus of
both intellectual currents and formative institution-building.
The generalizations made in the previous paragraph needed to be placed under the
scholarly magnifying glass. Intellectual trends can be understood better when lineages
are established: when the mix of Turkish and European scholars that formed archaeol-
ogy in the early years of the Turkish Republic resolves into examinations of professors
and students, schools, and generations, journals, departments, and excavation sites,
the general picture becomes clearer as well. This aim reflects the general aims of the
RCAC, one of which is to create in Istanbul a center of superior intellectual standing
that supports and disseminates research on historical art, architecture, and archaeology
in Turkey.1
Given the epistemological and historiographical aims of this conference, why was it
restricted to the Classical and Byzantine eras, when the best known association of the
early Turkish Republic with archaeology was the Sun-Language Theory and proposed
1
This quote is taken from the RCAC website: http://rcac.ku.edu.tr.
2 S. REDFORD N. ERGIN

links between the Turks and the Bronze Age civilizations of the Sumerians and Hit-
tites? There are three reasons for this. The first had to do with the mission of the
RCAC, which was, at that time, limited to the study of Anatolia in the Classical
through Ottoman periods. The second reason follows from the magnifying glass met-
aphor employed above: during a two-day conference, certain issues needed to be
addressed in detail, and the bringing together of scholars of allied periods would, it
was hoped, lead to a better understanding through in-depth analysis.
The third reason was even more practical. The idea of a symposium to examine the
role of art and architectural history and archaeology in the process of nation-building
of the Turkish Republic had occurred independently to Redford and to Glru
Necipoglu and Sibel Bozdogan, scholars of Ottoman and Turkish Republican archi-
tecture respectively. Due to their scholarly interests, Necipoglu and Bozdogan limited
the scope of the conference that they organized to scholarship on Islamic art and
architecture in the late Ottoman and Turkish Republican periods, with comparative
looks at Iran, India, and Egypt and the Levant. In May of 2006, they convened a
conference at Harvard University, entitled Historiography and Ideology: Architec-
tural Heritage of the Lands of Rum. The proceedings of this conference were pub-
lished in 2007.2 In certain ways, the conference proceedings found between the covers
of the present volume can be seen as complementary to those of the Lands of Rum
volume.
The critical reassessment of specific fields within archaeology and art history of the
last century or so, including the grand narratives and discourses they produced, has
become a common pursuit in the last two decades. Although Edward Said did not
examine material culture and focused exclusively on the Arab world, his Orientalism
and a growing literature on nation-building and the production of knowledge allow
scholars to revisit the ideological and historiographic implications of earlier contribu-
tions, and how these shape present studies.3
A collection of articles edited by Kohl and Fawcett was among the first to examine
systematically and comparatively the intersection of power, politics, nationalism and
archaeology. Pointing out that the relationship between archaeology and nationalism
is almost unavoidable or natural,4 and that it occurs even in countries without direct
links to an ancient history (such as the US), Kohl and Fawcett raise a number of
important issues: overt as well as covert abuses of archaeology in the service of the
state, so dangerous because the resulting narratives may fuel ethnic conflict; the role
of archaeology in the construction of national identities (and, vice versa, the role of a
quest for national identity in the construction of archaeological knowledge); why the

2
Bozdogan and Necipoglu 2007.
3
Said 1978.
4
Kohl and Fawcett 1995, p. 3.
 INTRODUCTION 3

relationship between nationalism and archaeology remained unacknowledged and

unstudied until the 1980s; and the potential contributions of archaeology to the con-
struction of future, meta-national identities. Although the Middle East and the East-
ern Mediterranean are extremely important regions because of their role in the birth
and formation of the discipline, the volume does not include essays on them, a lacuna
that Kohl and Fawcett themselves readily admitted and pointed out as being in urgent
need of further study. This gap was filled three years later, with another edited volume
that examines the interplay between archaeology and cultural and national politics in
Greece, Cyprus, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, the Gulf States
and Israel.5 Due to the striking way in which the old (archaeology) has been and con-
tinues to be used to justify the new (the state of Israel) in Israel, much scholarship on
archaeology and nationalism has focused and continues to focus on practices in this
country.6 Because the Ottoman Empire ruled in this region, archaeologists working in
Israel and the neighboring countries were among the first to address issues relating to
the archaeology of the Ottoman period explicitly, using approaches partially derived
from Said.7
Turkey constitutes a particularly interesting case-study in terms of the relationship
between archaeology and nationalism. Although the Ottoman Empire was never for-
mally colonized, in many ways the production of the modern nation-state of the
Turkish Republic approximates the challenges and paradoxes faced by colonized late
modernizers: not only did its producers lean heavily on concepts and notions of West-
ern modernity, but, in order to count as a modern nation-state, they also consciously
and willingly deployed the apparatuses, devices and processes that had shaped this
new world order. These apparatuses, devices and processes included, among many
others, scientific inquiry and the establishment of the roots and ancestry of the nation
in order to arrive at a carefully constructed, distinctly bounded, autonomous self.
In this context, Turkey exhibits some interesting parallels with modern Greece,
which, like Turkey, was never colonized, but which in Western eyes could not meas-
ure up to the achievements of its Classical past the modern inhabitants of the land
were considered as having fallen from grace and as degenerate versions of their
noble ancestors.8 In both countries the governments deemed it necessary to employ
foreign experts in order to introduce Western-style scientific methods to the country,
to conduct scientific studies, and to help construct a national historical narrative based
on the evidence resulting from these studies, a narrative that would secure not only a

5
Meskell 1998.
6
Only one of the many articles and books by Neil Silberman was available to us (Silberman and
Small 1997). See also Abu el-Haj 2001.
7
For Ottoman archaeology see Baram and Carrol 2000. Most of the papers in this volume deal with
Israel/Palestine.
8
Hamilakis 2007, p. 21.
4 S. REDFORD N. ERGIN

national identity within, but also a place outside, in the wider community of West-
ern nation-states. Because of their tangible and visible nature, the material remains of
the past serve a particularly important function for imagining the nation; therefore,
archeology received a place of pride among the disciplines imported from Europe. In
Greece, both the first professor of archaeology and the designer of the first law con-
cerning archaeology were Bavarians.9 In the late Ottoman Empire, between 1915
and 1918, many German scholars (such as the ancient historian Lehmann-Haupt
and the archaeologist Unger) taught at the Darlfnun, the first Ottoman educa-
tional institution modeled after European universities.10 Still, even though both
countries eagerly appropriated Western methods and concepts (such as the neo-Hel-
lenism of the eighteenth and nineteenth century in the case of Greece), they man-
aged to recast these concepts in a novel way to imagine the nation in ways suited to
current local conditions.
Yet, the process of claiming the Classical past happened in Greece and Turkey in
quite different ways. After the establishment of the Turkish Republic on the remains
of the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire in 1923, the leadership soon abandoned Islam
as an official uniting force and substituted it with Turkish nationalism and Kemalism.
The turn away from religion and towards a secular narrative of nationhood at the
same time necessitated a turn away from the Ottoman past and toward alternative
ancestors. To facilitate the scholarly study of potential alternative ancestors of modern
Turks, the Committee for Research on Turkish History (Trk Tarihi Tetkik Heyeti,
later to become the Trk Tarihi Tetkik Cemiyeti, and finally the Trk Tarih Kurumu)
was established in 1930. This institution was instrumental in formulating and propa-
gating the Turkish History Thesis (Trk Tarih Tezi), which was published in the
book Trk Tarihin Ana Hatlar in 1930 and introduced to a wider audience of schol-
ars, intellectuals and educators at the First Turkish History Congress in 1932.11 The
Turkish History Thesis posits a Turco-centric view of world history, claiming that
Turks had their homeland in Central Asia where the origins of all of human civiliza-
tions are to be found; thus, Turks were the first people to develop both language and
civilization before they migrated westwards.12
Until it was officially (but not popularly) discarded in the late 1940s, the Turkish
History Thesis provided the citizens of the modern Turkish nation-state with an
ancestry that bypassed the Ottoman centuries. Beyond that, it had significant implica-
tions for the discipline of archaeology in Anatolia. Archaeological excavations could

9
Hamilakis 2007, p. 20.
10
See Ergin 2005, p. 386.
11
Clearly, the thesis could not have been formulated in such a short timeframe; some of its argu-
ments and general outline date back as far as before the turn of the century. See Erimtan 2008.
12
For a detailed discussion of the historical context in which Turkish nationhood was constructed
and the origins of the claim that Hittites are of Turkish ethnicity, see Erimtan 2008.
 INTRODUCTION 5

produce evidence to be used in support of the thesis, as can be seen in the work of Arif
Mfid Mansel, one of the doyens of Turkish archaeology. Mansel argued that the
Ancient Greeks had usurped the legacies of earlier and superior civilizations settled in
the Aegean region.13 Such an attitude, however, did not diminish serious interest in
the Greek, Roman and Byzantine heritages on the part of Turkish archaeologists, not
least because archaeological evidence could also be used as ammunition in political
debates concerning territorial claims the mere act of excavating a site could bestow
on the excavators a claim to ownership in terms of territory as well as symbolically, as
belonging to the civilization that had produced the material remains in question.
Thus, the Republican government allotted some of its meager resources to excava-
tions, publications and scholarly activities and, by doing so, furthered the study of
Thraces and Anatolias prehistoric and Classical past a great deal.
The production of archaeological and art historical knowledge, as it will be dis-
cussed in greater detail in the essays by Murat Ergin and Suna Gven, and the result-
ing public memory have been the subject of several major publications. In order to
situate the present volume within the most recent discussion, a number of these pub-
lications shall be addressed here. Erimtan has analyzed in great detail the develop-
ments that led the Kemalist government of the 1920s to proclaim the Hittites as the
first Turkish presence in Anatolia in the second millennium BC.14 He provides a close
reading of the introductory essay in the propaganda tract Pontus Meselesi (1922),
authored by the intellectual Agaoglu Ahmed Bey, who based this claim on his own
ideologically motivated reading of European nineteenth-century scholarship on
Ancient Near Eastern History. This tract was written with the aim to disprove any
claims that non-Muslim inhabitants (and in particular the Pontus Greeks) could have
over Anatolian territory. At the same time, Agaoglus suggestion that there was unbro-
ken continuity in Turkish rule over Anatolia from the second millennium BC to the
Ottomans and the Kemalist government provided an outline for the Turkish History
Thesis.
The Seljuk and Ottoman periods, which Agaoglus interpretation as well as the
Turkish History Thesis reformulated as Turkish first and Islamic only second, and
the historiography of their art and architecture have been examined in a special issue
of the journal Muqarnas, based on the symposium mentioned above.15 The essays
included examine Orientalist and nationalist legacies in the writing of Anatolias archi-
tectural history of the Islamic period and how these legacies influenced Western and
local scholars alike, albeit in different ways. The authors expose not only anachronistic
uses of national and ethnic labels and the entangled relationship between Orientalist

13
Mansel 1938, p. 83; Mansel 1947, p. 6.
14
Erimtan 2008.
15
Bozdogan and Necipoglu 2007.
6 S. REDFORD N. ERGIN

and nationalist discourses in paradigmatic texts of the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries, but examine also the role of grand narratives in current practices of
archaeology, museology and preservation. The multicultural history of the Lands of
Rum (Anatolia and the Balkans) often marginalized in scholarship on Islamic art
because of its geographic location on the frontier of the Islamic World and the result-
ing cultural fluidity serves as a particularly fruitful case-study to point out the
historical complexities and sometimes even contradictions in the grand narratives of
Islamic and Turkish art.
How historical, art historical and archaeological knowledge thus shaped contributes
to Turkish collective memory has been taken up in The Politics of Public Memory in
Turkey, also published in 2007.16 Demonstrating that memory does not always mean
a nostalgic longing for a lost past but can indeed be a powerful tool to construct new
identities and come to terms with the past (including past trauma), the articles in this
book cover a wide array of topics. These include, among others, how different stake-
holders around atalhyk such as local residents and politicians, feminist goddess
groups, artists and archaeologists shape the public memory of this high-profile
archaeological site.17 Another contribution analyzes the ways in which contemporary
Turkish visitors of the Anatolian Civilizations Museum engage with, embrace or
undermine the story presented in its exhibition halls, a story of Anatolians sharing
a timeless essence from the Palaeolithic to the present.18
The development of museums and collections in the late Ottoman Empire in
their capacity as official organs of the state, they were the precursors to present-day
institutions such as the Anatolian Civilizations Museum is the subject of Wendy
Shaws Possessor and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History
in the Later Ottoman Empire. Considering the complex relationships between material
remains of both Classical and Islamic pasts, archaeological practice, laws and technol-
ogy, Shaw argues that the Ottomans chose to emulate European museums, but at the
same time subverted European museological practice in order to serve the empires
specific epistemological, political and social needs. Rather than presenting an encyclo-
pedic collection predicated on classification systems derived from natural history, the
Ottoman museum disregarded contemporary objects and emphasized specific histori-
cal moments as crucial underpinnings of a proto-nationalist narrative (at that point it
was not entirely clear what kind of identity that narrative was to serve). A crucial role
in the shaping of the collections and the archaeological practice constitutive of them

16
zyrek 2007; this is the substantially revised and translated version of Hatrladklaryla ve
Unuttuklaryla Trkiyenin Toplumsal Hafzas, published in 2001.
17
Remembering a nine-thousand-year-old site: Presenting atalhyk, by Ayfer Bartu Candan in
zyrek 2007, pp. 7094.
18
Stories in three dimensions: Narratives of nation and the Anatolian Civilizations Museum, by
Asl Gr in zyrek 2007, pp. 4069.
 INTRODUCTION 7

fell to Osman Hamdi Bey, who in 1881 was appointed director of the Ottoman
Imperial Museum at the inili Kk on the grounds of the Topkap Paplace and sub-
sequently became the founding director of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum and
the first Ottoman archaeologist.19 He was one of the first among those influential
individuals who shaped the production and dissemination of knowledge on art and
archaeology in the country.
The interactions between Turkish (or Ottoman, as the case may be) and foreign
scholars form the basis for several essays in this volume. For instance, Osman Hamdi
Beys relationship with the German scholar Alexander Conze and the German engi-
neer and excavator Carl Humann underlies much of the early history of excavation at
Pergamon, and he also figures in Fikret Yegls riveting account of changeling behav-
ior in American excavations at Sardis before, during, and after the Turkish War of
Independence.
The German education of both Arif Mfid Mansel and Ekrem Akurgal formed
their methodological approaches to the study of the Classical past, even as they as
holders of chairs in Classical Archaeology at the universities of Istanbul and Ankara,
respectively under the sway of Atatrks philosophy emphasized native Anatolian
developments. A. Cokun zgunels essay especially demonstrates how, even today,
the ideals and beliefs of that formative period continue. Akurgal was zgunels teacher,
and his close identification between his teacher and the founder of the Turkish Repub-
lic is evident. Haluk Abbasoglu, too, was a student of the subject of his essay, whose
career was directly affected by Atatrks interest in archaeology. Later in his career,
Mansel continued to emphasize Anatolian regionality, even when his scholarship dealt
with a traditional stylistic analysis of the Roman sculptures he uncovered in his pio-
neering excavations in Pamphylia.
The French scholar and architect Albert Gabriel figured in many of the essays of
the Lands of Rum symposium, and in 2006 he was the sole subject of an exhibition
and an accompanying catalogue containing a series of essays.20 Even though he was
primarily a scholar of Seljuk and Ottoman architecture, he is important for the study
of the Classical past of Turkey as well, due to his role in founding the French Institute
for the Study of Anatolia (IFEA).21 This is a prime example of Gabriels institution-
building in Turkey, a commitment that was not limited to promoting French aca-
demic study of the past of Anatolia, but also included years of lecturing at Istanbul
University.
By contrast, Gabriels successor as director of the IFEA, the brilliant French classi-
cist and epigrapher Louis Robert, the subject of the essay by Pierre Chuvin, devoted

19
For more detail on Osman Hamdi, see Rona 1993 and Cezar 1995.
20
Yap Kredi Kltr Merkezi 2006.
21
For more detail on IFEA see http://www.ifea-istanbul.net.
8 S. REDFORD N. ERGIN

his efforts primarily to his Bulletin pigraphique, published in the Revue des tudes
grecques, which he and his wife ran for decades almost single-handedly. He left an
indelible mark on the study of Greco-Roman Anatolia through his bulletin and
many other publications. In his essay, Chuvin demonstrates the love that Robert and
his spouse felt for the Anatolian countryside and its inhabitants. However, in con-
trast to the other figures discussed above, Roberts pursuits were more cerebral than
institutional.
Vincenzo Ruggieris essay on Guillaume de Jerphanion also highlights the career
of a highly influential scholar. Jerphanion, like Robert, integrated his love and knowl-
edge of Anatolian peoples and landscape into his work. Like Robert, too, he did not
engage with Turkey on an institutional level. Unlike Robert, he was largely self-
taught transformed in his career by his encounters with the landscape of Cappa-
docia in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire and the early years of the Turkish
Republic.
The interplay between foreign research institutes and Turkish academics provided,
and continues to provide, a means of interaction and exchange of ideas, making for
continuity between the archaeological excavations during the summer months. The
libraries, lectures, and symposia at the Turkish universities in Istanbul and Ankara,
and the five European and one North American research centers in these two cities
allow for the development and maintenance of webs of contact and exchange more
informal than those of the first decades of the Turkish Republic. The RCAC, as an
integral part of Ko University, continues this tradition of bringing together scholars
of different schools and generations to work in Turkey.

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 INTRODUCTION 9

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