Gods, Graves & Scholars: The Story of Archaeology

474 Pages·1986·7.7 MB·English

by  C.W. Ceram

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, August 1986
Copyright © 1951, 1967 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Copyright renewed 1979 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in
the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random
House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in German as Götter, Gräber und Gelehrte,
copyright 1949, © 1967 by Rowohlt Verlag GmbH., Hamburg-Stuttgart. This translation
originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1951 and in a revised edition in 1967.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ceram, C. W., 1915–1972.
Gods, graves, and scholars.
Translation of: Götter, Gräber und Gelehrte.
Reprint. Originally published: New York: Knopf, 1967.
Bibliography: p.
1. Archaeology—History. I. Title.
CC100.C4213 1986 930.1 86-11131
eISBN: 978-0-30781427-2
v3.1
There is no such thing as a patriotic art or a patriotic science. Both art and science belong, like
every higher good, to all the world and can be fostered only by the free flow of mutual
influence among all contemporaries, with constant regard for all we have and know of the
past
—Goethe
He who wants to see his time rightly, must look upon it from a distance. How great a
distance? Quite simply, just far enough away so that he cannot discern Cleopatra’s nose
—Ortega y Gasset
FOREWORD TO THE SECOND,
REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION
Since the original German edition of this book was published in 1949, it
has been translated into twenty-six languages and read by millions of
people, even though I have never permitted a reprint edition to be
issued. While Gods, Graves, and Scholars was originally written for the
widest general reading public, its strict adherence to scientific standards
has led long since to its being made required reading for some college
courses. University and college libraries often stock as many as ten
copies or more in order to be able to satisfy the demand for the book,
which my publisher and a number of critics have called a classic.
In the meantime, archæology has marched on. New discoveries have
been made, new interpretations advanced, and above all, remarkable
new techniques for archæological researches developed. To cover these
new developments, I have revised the original edition and concluded the
book with a summary of the important new findings and methods. The
extensive additions to the original American text have been translated
from the German by Sophie Wilkins, to whom I particularly wish to
express my appreciation also for her painstaking work in comparing
texts and making necessary rearrangements in the revised edition.
Gods, Graves and Scholars was followed by The Secret of the Hittites: The
Discovery of an Ancient Empire (1956), The March of Archæology (1958), a
pictorial history of archæology, and Hands on the Past (1966), a
documentation. Together these four volumes, with their combined total
of nearly a thousand bibliographical items and picture sources,
constitute the most comprehensive history of archæology ever published
for the general reader, containing numerous facts and stories long
forgotten even by the specialists, as well as the latest developments and
scientific thought in the field.
C.W.C.
July 1967
FOREWORD TO
THE FIRST AMERICAN EDITION
My book was written without scholarly pretensions. My aim was to
portray the dramatic qualities of archæology, its human side. I was not
afraid to digress now and then and to intrude my own personal
reflections on the course of events. Nor have I shied away from prying
into purely personal relationships. All this has produced a book that the
expert may condemn as “unscientific.”
But I wanted the book to be that way. Archæology, I found,
comprehended all manner of excitement and achievement. Adventure is
coupled with bookish toil. Romantic excursions go hand in hand with
scholarly self-discipline and moderation. Explorations among the ruins of
the remote past have carried curious men all over the face of the earth.
Yet this whole stirring history, I discovered, was hopelessly buried in
technical publications that, however great their informative value, were
never written to be read. I also learned that not more than three or four
attempts had ever been made to bring this dramatic story to light. Yet in
truth no science is more adventurous than archæology, if adventure is
thought of as a mixture of spirit and deed.
Though my method allows little scope for pure description, I am still
deeply obligated to learned writings on antiquity. It could not be
otherwise. Inded, my book is a hymn of praise to the archæologist’s
brilliant accomplishments, his penetration and indefatigability. Above
all, it is a memorial to those investigators who, out of genuine modesty,
have hidden their light under a bushel. With a sense of responsibility
toward these little-known people who make up the backbone of the
archæological profession, I have tried hard to avoid false groupings and
false emphases.
I realize that the specialist who reads my book will probably discover
certain defects. To some extent this is inevitable. When I began writing,
for example, the mere spelling of proper names loomed as an almost
insurmountable obstacle. More than once I had a choice among a dozen
different spellings of the same name. I finally decided to follow the
commonest usage and eschew any scientific principle that, in places,
might have led to complete unintelligibility: If the great German
historian Eduard Meyer, faced with a similar problem in his History of
Antiquity, could say, speaking to the scholars themselves, “… here I saw
no other way than to proceed without any principle whatever,” the
author of a mere report may surely do likewise.
Beyond this, of course, simple factual mistakes have undoubtedly crept
into the text. Some delinquency, I believe, is quite unavoidable,
considering the tremendous amount of material drawn from four
specialized fields that I have tried to compress.
I am indebted, moreover, not only to archæology, but to the writers of
sound scientific popularizations, who have showed me what can be done
in this form and whom I have earnestly attempted to emulate. To the
best of my knowledge it was Paul de Kruif who first undertook to trace
the development of a highly specialized science so that one could read
about it with genuine excitement, with the sort of response too often
produced, in our times, only by detective thrillers. De Kruif found that
even the most highly involved scientific problems can be quite simply
and understandably presented if their working out is described as a
dramatic process. That means, in effect, leading the reader by the hand
along the same road that the scientists themselves have traversed from
the moment truth was first glimpsed until the goal was gained. De Kruif
found that an account of the detours, crossways, and blind alleys that
had confused the scientists—because of their mortal fallibility, because
human intelligence failed at times to measure up to the task, because
they were victimized by disturbing accidents and obstructive outside
influences—could achieve a dynamic and dramatic quality capable of
evoking an uncanny tension in the reader. The title of his book, The
Microbe Hunters, transforming as it did the dryly scientific term
bacteriologists into a dramatic human image, in itself contains the
program for a new literary category created by his revolutionary
approach. This new form is the narrative of facts currently called the
nonfiction or documentary novel.
Since Paul de Kruif’s pioneering effort there is hardly a science that
has not been skillfully popularized at least once. It is natural that most of
these popularizes should be dilettantes by scientific reckoning. They
cannot be dismissed on that account. In my opinion, a critical principle
to apply in measuring the value of this type of book is this: what relation
is there in the book between science and literature? Specifically, which
preponderates, the factual element or the literary? It seems to me that
the best works of the genre are those in which the literary effect is
derived from the factual “arrangement,” those in which fact is
consistently of prime concern. I have tried to approximate this ideal.
Finally I should like to express my thanks to all those who have helped
me with this considerable task. Dr. Eugen von Mercklin, Professor of
Classical Archæology at the University of Hamburg; Dr. Carl Rathjens,
Professor of Near East Geography at the University of Hamburg; and Dr.
Franz Termer, Professor of American Archæology and Director of the
Anthropological Museum at the University of Hamburg, were kind
enough to examine the manuscript, each from his point of view as
specialist. Dr. Kurt Erdmann, Professor of the History of Art at the
University of Hamburg; and Dr. Hartmut Schmökel, Professor of the Old
Testament and Biblical Culture at the University of Kiel, gave me some
important supplementary corrections. I should also like to record my
gratitude for something more than technical aid: namely, for the
complete understanding that they, as specialists, showed for my book.
C.W.C.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Foreword to the Second, Revised and Enlarged Edition
Foreword to: The First American Edition
I THE BOOK OF THE STATUES
Pompeii, Troy, Mycenæ, Crete
1/The Queen of Naples: From Her Garden to Pompeii
2/Winckelmann: The Birth of a Science
3/Interlude: Why Search for the Past?
4/Schliemann (I): A Merchant Digs for Trojan Gold
5/Schliemann (II): The Mask of Agamemnon
6/Schliemann (III): Conflict with the Scholars
7/Schliemann (IV): Mycenæ, Tiryns, and Crete
8/Evans: Crete and the Minotaur
II THE BOOK OF THE PYRAMIDS
The Empires of Egypt
9/Napoleon: In the Land of the Pharaohs
10/Champollion (I): The Mystery of the Rosetta Stone
11/Champollion (II): Treason and Hieroglyphics
12/Beizoni, Lepsius, and Mariette: Life in Ancient Egypt
13/Petrie: The Tomb of Amenemhet
14/Robbers in the Valley of the Kings
15/Mummies
16/Carter: The Tomb of Tutankhamen
17/Carter: The Curse of the Pharaohs
III THE BOOK OF THE TOWERS
The Kingdoms of Assyria, Babylonia, and Sumeria
18/Botta Finds Nineveh
19/Grotefend: A Schoolteacher Deciphers Cuneiform
20/Rawlinson: Nebuchadnezzar’s Dictionary in Clay
21/Layard: A Dilettante Outwits a Pasha
22/George Smith: The Story of the Flood
23/Koldewey: The Tower of Babel
24/Woolley: The Oldest Culture in the World
IV THE BOOK OF THE TEMPLES
The Empires of the Aztecs, the Mayas, and the Toltecs
25/Cortés (I): The Treasure of Moctezuma
26/Cortés (II): The Beheaded Culture
27/John Lloyd Stephens Buys a Jungle City
28/Intermezzo
29/The Mystery of the Abandoned Mayan Cities
30/Edward Herbert Thompson: Chiché-Itzá and the Sacred Well
31/Aztecs, Mayas, and Toltecs: Whence Did They Come?
V BOOKS THAT CANNOT YET BE WRITTEN
32/New Searches in Old Empires
Chronological Tables
Bibliography
About the Author