Beginning in the late fourteenth century, the cultural, social, and economic changes related to the end of feudalism in northern Italy led scholars to seek precedents in earlier times for political innovations. During the ensuing Renaissance, scholars looked to literature of the Classical era to provide a glorious past for the emerging Italian city-states and to justify the increasing secularization of Italian culture. Popes, cardinals, and Italian nobility collected and displayed ancient works by the late fifteenth century. They also sponsored expeditions to search out and recover materials of commercial and esthetic value. Excavations at the Roman sites of Herculaneum and Pompeii were examples of such treasure hunts (see Classical Archaeology).
Scholars of the Renaissance era became critically familiar with the texts of ancient Greece and Rome. They saw that the past was different and separate from the present, but also that past periods should be studied on a relative basis. Renaissance ideas inspired by the Classical world spread geographically throughout Europe and in the artistic and scholarly disciplines. These ideas inspired a surge in the arts and scholarly thought. A trend in the plastic arts - particularly sculpture, and also painting - demonstrated interest in humanism through artistic expression of nudity and human traits, such as dignity. Humanism as a philosophy developed as European societies began to choose between secular and religious views of the world. After the Renaissance, some antiquarians studied the local mounds and monuments of their own countries. Others traveled to Mediterranean and Near Eastern areas to investigate the origins of contemporary civilization. They returned to Europe with treasures for their wealthy patrons. Art history and Classical studies are two fields that grew from the pursuits of the Renaissance era, as members of the nobility became collectors of Greek and Roman objects and valued them as art.
Collectors looked on land and under water for treasures, as seen in Italy. One of the earliest episodes of underwater treasure hunting was in the midfifteenth century, when an avid collector named Cardinal Colonna commissioned the recovery of two sunken ships from the bottom of Lake Nemi. The ropes, however, were not strong enough to raise the ships, although some planks and a torso of a large Roman sculpture were recovered. The recovery of artifacts from ancient Italian sites in the early eighteenth century piqued interest in what else might lie beneath the surface. Engineer Rocco Gioacchino de Alcubierre, under orders from the king, opened haphazardly placed tunnels into the ancient town of Herculaneum, beneath the lava left by Mount Vesuvius. He found paintings, mosaics, and other preserved features. He continued at Torre Annuziata in the 1740s, gaining substantial support when it was discovered to be the ancient city of Pompeii. Excavations continued in a treasure-hunting capacity at both sites for decades.
The discipline of art history developed as a frame of analysis for ancient materials. Art history depended upon written records for the chronology and context of the changing styles of ancient works, but the field also brought the study of material culture into investigations of the past. Johann Winckelmann, a German scholar writing in the mid-eighteenth century, established art history as a distinct branch of classical studies. Winckelmann outlined periods of Greek and Roman sculptural styles and described the factors influencing the development of Classical art. Art history provided an analytical framework for using material culture to study the ancient past.
Classical studies became the mode of analysis stemming from the expeditions to ancient Aegean sites beginning in the mid-eighteenth century. Winckelmann had noted that most extant examples of Greek sculpture were actually Roman copies, which inspired the collection of authentic Greek works. British ambassador Thomas Bruce, also known as Lord Elgin, was granted permission by the sultan of Turkey to remove stones from Athens. His men removed many elements from the Parthenon and they were displayed in London in 1814. They became part of one of the first major controversies in the exhibition of archaeological materials. Some viewers protested the vandalism of the objects from their original sites, while others dismissed the sculptures as inferior to the Hellenistic-Roman style to which they were accustomed. Other excavations soon followed at the island of Peloponnesus, the Acropolis at Athens, and the island of Aegina.
Classical studies became the model for Egyptology and Assyriology. These fields drew on information recorded in the Bible about the ancient civilizations of Egypt and the Near East as seen by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Travelers from across Europe documented their travels up the Nile River and around Cairo, but contributed little else to the knowledge of Egypt. Discoveries by the French in the late nineteenth century made significant inroads into Egyptian archaeology. Scholars associated with Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt collected Egyptian antiquities, which generated interest about the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Soon after, French engineers discovered the Rosetta Stone, a slab of basalt inscribed with translations of ancient languages. Jean Francois Champollion and others interested in linguistics took to the task of deciphering the hieroglyphics associated with the finds. Interestingly, visitors to sites in Ethiopia and Sudan preferred to link the monuments with Egyptian culture, rather than appreciate them on their own merit or as historically associated with African peoples to the south. The exposure of Egyptian antiquities excited the public’s curiosity and spurred further expeditions from other European nations to learn more. As a result, many sites were pillaged to build collections outside of the Near East before dedicated study could begin.
The cultural regions of Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Asia Minor, or Persia did not at first glance seem to have grand monuments like those of Egypt. Travelers in the mid-sixteenth century, however, reported seeing great mounds of earth covering the traditional sites of cities such as Nineveh or Babylon. Napoleon’s invasions also brought attention to the region as they did to Egypt also. Researchers such as Edward Daniel Clarke and Jean Louis Burckhardt searched for evidence of Biblical sites in the Holy Land (see Biblical Archaeology). Clarke brought a healthy skepticism of traditional lore and tested sites to determine the physical locations of ancient cities. Others, like Edward Robinson, used investigations of the Near East to support a literal interpretation of the Bible. Linguists untangled the meaning of ancient sites with their deciphering of Mesopotamian cuneiform in the early nineteenth century. Their translations illuminated ancient political structures and genealogies. Slowly, a picture began to grow from the accumulated linguistic and material evidence.
Scholars of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries referred to a staged system of technological progress suggested by Greek and Roman historians and philosophers of Classical times. This approach was embraced for archaeology beyond the Mediterranean. Information was organized for professionals and the public using a tiered system. For instance, J. C. Thomsen’s arrangement of the national museum of Denmark in 1819 according to the Three-Age system with the idea that the ancient inhabitants of Europe passed through technological stages of development characterized by their use of stone, bronze, and iron. This system dovetailed with current social paradigms that associated class and race with human development as a staged process.
Methodologies for observing the natural world were also underway in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but would not directly impact archaeology for another century or two. Few scientists saw a conflict between their work and the Bible, and fewer still challenged religious doctrine or the historical reliability of the Bible rather than fight the rest of the scientific community for credibility. Scholars throughout Europe worked to fit ancient finds into the paradigm that the world was only about 6000 years old. On the other hand, geologists made headway in chronological thinking and methodology in their attempts to understand fossils. Large fossils were at first interpreted within mythological confines to be unicorns, giants, dragons, or even the remains of creatures killed during the Biblical flood. Robert Hooke, a geologist working in the mid-seventeenth century, saw that fossils differed from strata to strata and suggested that they could inform a chronology of the Earth that stretched before the book of Genesis. Nicholas Steno also noted that successive strata contained different flora and fauna, but demonstrated that these types of materials existed together in the same environment at the same time. Scientific methodology in the natural sciences would bring coherence to archaeology and inspire theoretical conceptions of the past, as well.
World History
