Near Eastern archaeology

Though comprised of many specialized disciplines and spanning a vast area from Iran on the east to Asia Minor, Cyprus, and Egypt on the west, Near Eastern archaeology retains an overall coherence in its continuing attempts to understand the origins, internal development, and external connections of a mosaic of complex cultures that first arose in the Neolithic Period. The discipline's origins can be traced to a confluence of medieval European pilgrimage traditions (that brought a continuing flow of travelers to the biblical sites of the region) and the commercial and scientific expansion of Renaissance Europe (that encouraged the search for knowledge through empirical evidence rather than legends or faith). Until the early nineteenth century, however, the study of Near Eastern antiquity was restricted to geographical exploration and the haphazard collection of relics. It was only with the beginnings of large-scale excavations in Egypt in the 1820s and in Mesopotamia in the 1830s that the systematic recovery of the region's ancient architecture and artifacts became an important tool for the reconstruction of ancient Near Eastern history.

Because of the abundance of written records from the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Syro-Palestine, and Egypt (both those derived from classical and biblical sources and those recovered from excavations), the role of the archaeologist in this region has often been subsidiary to that of the historian. Excavated cities, temples, and monuments have often been used as tangible illustrations of traditional historical understandings—rather than being seen as the raw material for independent analyses of ancient Near Eastern history. The excavation of inscriptions and written documents has always been of primary importance. The achievement of Jean Francois Champollion in his initial decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics on the basis of the bilingual Rosetta Stone, and of Henry Rawlinson and others in the decipherment of the cuneiform scripts of Mesopotamia provided modern scholars with abundant new written material on the civilizations of the second and first millennia b.c.

During the nineteenth century, modern European evolutionary and racial theories exerted a profound effect on archaeological interpretation in the Near East. The excavations of W.M.F. Petrie and George Andrew Reisner in Egypt, in particular, imparted an implicit developmentalist scheme to archaeological interpretations of ancient Near Eastern history. By stressing the sequence of superimposed strata within individual sites, these two scholars and their intellectual heirs began to move beyond mere illustration of traditional histories toward the illustration of the rise of social complexity in the regions—from prehistory to the Greco-Roman period. Elsewhere in the region, racial determinism provided the subtext of archaeological interpretation, especially in Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, where the supposed cultural superiority of the Indo-European Sumerians, Hurrians, and Hittites was seen as the motive force in the history of the Fertile Crescent and indeed of the entire Western world.

In the early twentieth century, much of the modern Near East fell under European colonial control, and conditions improved for the pursuit of Western-style archaeology. Large-scale excavations throughout the region established a detailed cultural history for the region by defining long sequences of sedentary occupation at sites such as Jericho, Megiddo, Carchemish, Bogozkoy, and Sumer, through stratigraphically established pottery sequences and architectural styles. It was only in the post-World War II era, however, that the influence of anthropology began to be felt in Near Eastern archaeology. Beginning with the pioneering surveys and excavations of Robert Adams near Baghdad, and with the proliferation of ethnoarchaeological studies, Near Eastern archaeologists began to see the rise of complex civilization there as a regional elaboration of universal social behaviors rather than as mere illustrations of unique biblical or ancient history.

The rise of independent nation-states throughout the region after World War II also had far-reaching effects on the conduct of Near Eastern archaeology. Though the European and American expeditions to the region continued, the control of archaeological sites was now placed in the hands of local universities and departments of antiquities. The interpretive orientation of these new national archaeologies was often connected with modern political symbolism: finding in the remains of certain ancient peoples and golden ages metaphorical legitimation for modern Nationalism. In recent years, this tendency has been tempered by the adoption by local archaeologists of an increasingly internationalist, anthropological perspective—which, in its own way, embodies a powerful modern ideology.

The chronological boundaries of Near Eastern archaeology are constantly expanding. The study of human evolution, long restricted mainly to Africa and Europe, has become a particularly important field of research owing to important human fossil finds in Iran and Israel. At the other end of the chronological scale, new interest has arisen in the archaeology of the medieval and post-medieval periods, illuminating through material culture far-reaching effects of the rise of the modern world system. Indeed, the study of the archaeological record in the Near East can no longer be neatly divided into the specialized realms of Egyptology, Mesopotamian, Anatolian, and biblical archaeology. Near Eastern archaeology is being ever more closely integrated to the archaeological record of other parts of the world.