Week 9: Archaeology and Translatio Imperii: Empires past and present in Ottoman Iraq

Mini Lecture

Core Seminar Readings:

Primary Sources:

1-‘The arrival of the Assyrian sculptures at the British Museum,’ The Illustrated London News, 28 February 1852.

2-'Nimroud Sculptures just Received at the British Museum,'The Illustrated London News, 26 October 1850.

3-‘Review of Niniveh and its Remains’, The Times, 9 February 1849, p. 5.

4-Austen H. Layard, Nineveh and its Remains, 2 vol. (London: John Murray, 1849), selection.

Secondary Readings:

Shawn Malley, ‘Austen Henry Layard and the Periodical Press: Middle Eastern Archaeology and the Excavation of Cultural Identity in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain,' Victorian Review 22, no.2 (1996): 152-170.

Shawn Malley, ‘Layard enterprise: Victorian Archaeology and Informal Imperialism in Mesopotamia,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 40, no.4 (2008): 623–646.

Guillemette Crouzet, Chap. 5 ‘Passages to India: Mesopotamia and the Gulf in British Imperial Imaginaries,’ in Inventing the Middle East: Britain and the Persian Gulf in the Age of Global Imperialism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).

Further Readings:

Lesley Adkins, Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon (London: Harper Perennial, 2004).

Mogens Trolle Larsen, The Conquest of Assyria: Excavations in an Antique Land (New York and London: Routledge, 1994).

Vybarr Cregan-Reid, Discovering Gilgamesh: Geology, Narrative, and the Historical Sublime in Victorian Culture (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2013).

Frederick Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Steven Holloway, ‘Biblical Assyria and Other Anxieties in the British Empire’, Journal of Religion & Society 3 (2001): 1-19.

Shawn Malley, From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian England: The Case of Assyria, 1845-1854 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012)

Pearson, Richard, ‘A. H. Layard's 'Nineveh and its Remains': The Cultural material of Assyrian Archaeology,’ in The Victorians and the Ancient World: Archaeology and Classicism in Nineteenth-Century Culture, ed. Richard Pearson (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2006), pp. 41-60.

Jeffrey Richards, The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

Jack Green and Emily Teeter, eds., Picturing the Past: Imagining and Imaging the Ancient Near East (Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2012)

Billie Melman, Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and the Rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Ian Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes: Galleries of the British Museum, 1800–1939 (London: British Museum Press, 1992)

Frederick N. Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Frederick N. Bohrer, “Monumental Nationalism: Layard’s Assyrian Discoveries and the Formation of British National Identity,” in Cultural Identities and the Aesthetics of Britishness, ed. Dana Arnold (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).

David Gange and Michael Ledger-Lomas, eds., Cities of God: The Bible and Archaeology in Nineteenth-
Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).