BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Does the Past Inform the Present?

The strange journeys of archaeological objects

The Mshatta Facade, on display in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin. Courtesy Richard Mortel from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Editor’s Note: This Bible History Daily article discusses an unprovenanced object. Learn more about the problems associated with objects that lack a secure archaeological context.

Archaeological objects are fascinating, but not always because of what they reveal about the past. Sometimes, it is the journeys these objects take after they are unearthed that provide new insights into how we interact with and think about the past and how we use it to tell our own stories. Presented here are two such journeys.

In the free eBook, A Digger’s Life: A Guide to the Archaeology Dig Experience, step into an archaeological excavation and find out what it takes to find, prepare for, and work on a dig.

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Spotting Nebuchadnezzar in Modern Jerusalem

Our first archaeological journey is a personal one. Several years back, as I sat in Christ Church Café in Jerusalem’s Old City, I came face to face with a brick inscription of Nebuchadnezzar II—the Babylonian king who famously destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BCE—that was part of the church’s private collection. At that moment, I became one of only a few people to have read the nearly 2,600-year-old inscription. Such brick inscriptions are far from rare. In the ancient Near East, they adorned monumental buildings that had been commissioned by powerful kings and rulers. In fact, hundreds if not thousands of nearly identical inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar II have been excavated, making this one, archaeologically speaking, worth no more than the discarded pottery sherds left behind at a dig site.

Photo and hand copy of the Nebuchadnezzar brick inscription: “Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon who provides for Esagil And Ezida, firstborn heir of Nabopolassar King of Babylon.”  Courtesy Nathan Steinmeyer.

Tracing the object’s modern journey, however, teaches us a lot about early 20th-century antiquarianism and the motivations that ultimately brought the inscription to Jerusalem. While the brick itself dates to the late seventh or early sixth century BCE, its modern history began in the 1930s, when it was purchased from an unknown antiquities dealer by a British minister, Leonard Pearson, during his travels around the Middle East. Upon returning to England, Pearson brought the brick and other such objects on a traveling exhibit meant to bring the Bible to life and prove that biblical figures such as Nebuchadnezzar really existed. It was one of many such exhibits at a time when interest in Middle East archaeology was driven in large part by its connection to the Bible. Upon Pearson’s death in 1978, the brick passed to his wife, and then to a church in England, which would later ship it to their sister church in Jerusalem, where I came across it, hidden away on a backroom shelf. Although we may never know where the brick originated in Babylon, we can still trace its modern journey to Jerusalem and the meaning it held for its various owners along the way.

A Wall Between Friends

Our second archaeological journey focuses on the Mshatta façade (pictured above), now housed in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum. The decorative façade originally belonged to an eighth-century Umayyad desert castle known as Qasr Mshatta, a site located about 20 miles south of Amman. While the decorative façade is a pristine example of Umayyad architecture, its modern journey reveals yet another way in which archaeological artifacts are often given new meaning—political capital.

So how and why did a 100-foot-long, 16-foot-tall wall travel from Jordan to Berlin? Excavated in the mid-18th century, the beautifully decorated façade was a gift by the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II to the German emperor Wilhelm II. Transferred from Ottoman Transjordan to Germany in 1903, the wall served as a truly impressive goodwill offering from one ruler to another, a sign of their shared economic and political interests. This wall served as yet another brick in a friendship that would include the two powers allying together in World War One.

Therefore, beyond their importance for understanding the ancient past, archaeological objects also carry the meanings that modern audiences bestow upon them. At times, these meanings gain even more importance than the objects themselves. This becomes obvious when we examine the reasons and motivations behind the strange journeys of these objects after they are unearthed. While the journey of the inscribed brick of Nebuchadnezzar II was powered by religious expression, the Mshatta façade’s journey was overtly political in nature. In studying these journeys, we gain tremendous insight into the motivations behind archaeology and how the past can be used to influence the present.

Related reading in Bible History Daily:

The Problem with Unprovenanced Objects

Slowly, Iraqi Antiquities Begin to Return

All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library:

First Person: What to Do with Unprovenanced Artifacts—Publish or Perish?

First Person: Unprovenanced Antiquities: Learning the Hard Way