Michael Press Profile picture
Oct 2, 2020 11 tweets 4 min read Read on X
"After seeing the pyramid, all other architecture seems but pastry."
Herman Melville at Giza (Journal Of A Visit To Europe And The Levant 1856-1857) Image
"The tearing away of the casing, though it removed enough stone to build a walled-town, has not subtracted from its apparent magnitude. It has had the contrary effect." Image
In January 1857 Melville makes it to Palestine.
"A delightful ride across Plain of Sharon [really plain of Philistia] to Jaffa. Quantities of red poppies." Image
Melville at Jaffa: "From the top of it, I see the Mediterranean, the Plain, the mountains of Ephraim. A lovely landscape."

But

"I am emphatically alone, & begin to feel like Jonah." Image
In which Melville meets a mezuzah -- apparently for the first time -- in his Jaffa hotel. Image
Melville makes an interesting reference to "strata" of cities under present-day Jerusalem!
(By 1857 it had become common to talk about past Jerusalem as buried below, but this is the 1st time I've seen this word appear.) Image
Melville's mention of remains 40 feet below the surface might refer to those uncovered during the construction of Christ Church near Jaffa Gate in the 1840s -- an even often mentioned in subsequent accounts.
Melville goes on at length about how rocky the landscape is in the Judean hills . . . Image
Like so many other American & European visitors at the time, Melville looks at Palestine and sees desolation.

"In the emptiness of the lifeless antiquity of Jerusalem the emigrant Jews are like flies that have taken up their abode in a skull." Ugh. Image
Besides being a strange way to describe a city of 10-15 thousand people, the description is a cliché.

Compare Edouard Lockroy on the village of Qala'at al-Husn inside Krak des Chevaliers, the famous Crusader castle in Syria, in the early 1860s:
Melville's failed attempts to understand Palestine (and Jews) continue.
He adds: "Besides, the number of Jews in Palestine is comparatively small. And how are the hosts of them scattered in other lands to be brought here? Only by a miracle." Image

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More from @MichaelDPress

Aug 11, 2021
The headline for this was originally "Why did the Museum of the Bible have to return 17,000 ancient artifacts?", but then the Post discovered that 1000s were actually returned by Cornell & changed it
(The url and the Twitter card reflect the original)
washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…
Current headline:
It feels like the scandals of the last few years were a great opening for a better discussion of provenance & its importance, but I suspect many -- certainly the Washington Post -- would rather use it to mock evangelicals.
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Read 4 tweets
Jul 8, 2021
The strangeness of this article is perfectly symbolized by what looks like a fashion photoshoot featuring a BM curators with props.
telegraph.co.uk/art/architectu…
h/t @PortantIssues
It's good that the article does not continue Simpson's insistence that looting in the Middle East mostly stopped after 2003-04.
I'm guessing the £30 million here is just a typo (as this has been repeatedly reported to be around £3 million)?
Read 8 tweets
Jul 5, 2021
How does Shaked/Ford/Bhayro's 2013 publication of the Schøyen Collection Aramaic incantation bowls deal with provenance? This is an interesting case, worth looking at a bit.

From the EBSCOhost ebook, it would seem the word "provenance" doesn't occur in the book . . .
But in fact this appears to be a case of poorly-done OCR, as the word does occur.
We find it on (at least) one page of the text, though here it refers to ancient provenience, not to modern findspot or collection history.
Read 15 tweets
Jun 28, 2021
Amazing that this is the full provenance statement for a Palmyrene funerary relief in a reputable academic journal in 2014 -- around the height of the Syrian Civil War. Image
To be fair, that's not quite it: in the footnote, the author thanks the gallery for permission to publish and for providing photos. Image
Also to be fair, it's better than this article from the same journal in the following year, where all we learn of the collection history of seven Palmyrene reliefs is that they're in "a private collection in Lebanon" Image
Read 5 tweets
Apr 10, 2021
This is a really interesting review by Moses Finley of several books on archaeology, published in 1966.
Thanks @EirikWelo
nybooks.com/articles/1966/…
Among those under review is Leo Deuel's Testaments of Time (1965), which started my interest in the review.
Much of the review is concerned with how archaeology is presented to the public.
Finley recognizes that, for all their flaws, 19th-century archaeologist-explorers had this down.
Read 10 tweets
Apr 9, 2021
Has anyone heard of the book Testaments of Time by Leo Deuel? It's a popular account of manuscript hunting, first published in 1965. @EvaMroczek @LivLied
It's a broad survey of the material, what you might expect for 1965: starts with Renaissance humanists, and moves on to chapters on Tischendorf, the Cairo Geniza, Oxyrhynchus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, but also a range of other things . . .
It also includes what you imagine might have been standard attitudes in the 1960s, cheering on manuscript hunters like Tischendorf who "outwit" the "negligent but perversely possessive" and "half-literate" monks
Read 15 tweets

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