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The ancient world
Archaeology is a fairly new discipline, little more than two hundred years old, even though its roots go back much further. Historians have divided its development into four separate phases: a period of speculation before 1800, a classificatory-descriptive period from 1800 to 1920, a classificatory-historical period from 1920 to 1960 and an explanatory period since 1960. Although the speculative phase is long, it is scarcely what we would now call ‘archaeology’ and is usually referred to as ‘antiquarianism’, an interest in old things, often more for their aesthetic properties than what they can tell us about the past. A good example of early speculation is found in the work of the Greek poet Hesiod (c 700 BCE), whose Works and Days (Εργα και Ημεραι) contains a well-known exposition of the five phases through which humanity has passed since creation. Beginning with an Age of Gold, humanity’s history is one of degeneration, through an Age of Silver, an Age of Bronze and an Heroic Age to reach our present Age of Iron. He is often mentioned in histories of archaeology as prefiguring a brilliant solution to the problem of dating the prehistoric past, but this was not his intention and he did not base his analysis on any physical evidence remaining from more ancient times. Instead, his purpose was a moral one
Slightly later, the Babylonian king Nabû-nā’id (known to Classical authors as Nabonidus, King 555-539 BCE) is known to have excavated the foundations of an old temple he was restoring to locate its dedication slab. It was a common practice for Assyrian and Babylonian kings to have their names and titles stamped onto the mud bricks used in the construction of an important public building work (a tradition, incidentally, revived by the Iraqi dictator Saddām Hussein ‘Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti (1937-2006) in rebuilding the walls of Babylon in the later twentieth century CE!); Nabû-nā’id wanted to credit the original builder of the temple while at the same time adding his name as its restorer. This is one of the earliest known uses of excavation as a method to find out something about the past when written texts and traditions do not contain the answer.
Later still, collecting antiquities was a popular pastime among Rome’s educated and wealthy élite. Their attitude to Classical Greece was somewhat ambivalent: they admired Greek culture, including poetry, philosophy, painting, sculpture and medicine, but they regarded the Greeks as an effete and degenerate people who had lost their former pre-eminence and were better off under Roman rule. Their estimation of Greek sculpture as superior to Roman products led to the wholesale plundering of statues from Greece to decorate their homes in Italy. It also led to the copying of Greek styles in Roman sculpture, not always very successfully. In one of his letters, Cicero tells his friend Atticus about a statue he has recently acquired.
As the Mediterranean became Mare Nostrum (‘Our Sea’) with the growth of the Roman Empire, so it became easier for people with enough wealth to travel around to see the wonders that previously had only been known through other people’s writings. The fascination with Greece led many wealthy Romans to Athens, Delphi, Corinth and elsewhere. Others travelled farther afield, most famously the Emperor Hadrian (76-135 CE, Emperor 117-135), whose progress through Egypt to see the wonders of Pharaonic civilisation has been imitated so many times since. As Christianity became the dominant religion of the Empire during the fourth century CE, growing numbers of pilgrims wanted to visit the holy places they read about in their Bibles. So the empress Helena (c 248-329 CE) undertook a visit to Jerusalem, where she organised searches for holy relics, unearthing what were proudly proclaimed to be pieces from the cross on which Jesus had been crucified. Later that century, a woman named Egeria (fl. 381-4) travelled from her home in Gaul to visit the sites of Palestine and Egypt and left an account of her travels that was widely read throughout Europe in the following centuries, as travel became increasingly difficult with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the economic problems that stripped the old élites of their wealth.