Cairo conference December 2013

Main hall to Cairo University

 

The First International Conference of Islamic Archaeology in the East, 8-11 December 2013, Faculty of Archaeology, Cairo University, Cairo 

 

The current situation in Egypt made this event a little less 'international' than intended, which was a great shame for the organisers, Professor Ahmed Rageb Ali, Conference Coordinator, Professor Mohamed Hamza Ismail al-Haddad, President of the Conference, and Dr Rehab Ibrahim Ahmed el-Siedy, Lecturer in Islamic Archaeology - all from the Faculty of Archaeology. These security concerns were totally unfounded and the few of us who did attend enjoyed three days of papers and discussion followed by two days of sightseeing. I must confess that I passed on a visit to the pyramids (having lived in Cairo the past know only too well how cold it can be out there in December) in favour of a visit to the Museum of Islamic Art to meet the Director, Mr Mostafa Khaled and the Curator of Textiles, Mr Mohamed Abdelsalam, in search of the Herzfeld Samarra typeset that should have been received sometime after the 1922 division meeting at the British Museum - more on that below.

Dr Abdelrahman Salem and Professor Bernard O'Kane chairing a session

The conference languages were Arabic and English, which called for extreme concentration on the part of the few non-Arab attendees! Although the title specified Islamic archaeology to the east of Cairo, some topics covered the Maghreb, Andalusia and the Eastern Mediterranean (click here for the full programme). There were some interesting papers on Uzbek sites, and several on Syrian ones, including a distressing assessment of the recent damage in Aleppo by Dr Walid Ahkrass of the Syrian Antiquities Department. Undoubtedly the highlight for me was Dr Stéphane Pradines' assessment of Abbasid fortifications in Egypt and his tracing the continued practice of construction in red burnt brick walls with rounded towers at intervals through Raqqa, northern Arabia, Sinai, the Delta sites, the island of Rawdah, Cairo and finally Qala'at al-Kabsh, the Tulunid barracks immediately south of Ahmad ibn Tulun's mosque in Cairo. The latter two sites will be his next project to survey and plan, if at all possible. Ms Yui Kanda, currently an MPhil student at Wolfson College, Oxford, presented a thought-provoking study of the 15th-century Cairene potters' workshops, based on comparing the quality of signed bowl fragments and tiles, demonstrating that there were many versions of a signature such as Ghaybi's.

An example of one of Ghaybi's fragmentary bowl bases in the collection of the Cairo University Museum

Dr Manu Sobti, School of Architecture & Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, gave an interesting account of Eric Schmidt's achievement in aerial archaeology in 1930s Iran, outlining the importance of his work and how useful it is today for studying the hinterland of the Iranian sites.

I presented our Samarra Finds Project at the V&A, spreading the word that it will shortly be accessible to researchers and anyone interested, via the Museum's website. 

Bab al-Nasr from outside the walls

The conference days were highly concentrated, and to fit in a site-visit to Dr Pradines' current excavations inside the Fatimid and Ayyubid walls of Cairo near the north-eastern gate of the Bab al-Nasr entailed an early meeting and a race back to the university. Happily Dr Rehab el-Siedy, who has been working at the site too, was equally keen that we should go, and kindly facilitated this. It was a chance for me to meet their ceramologist, Dr Julie Monchamp, who wrote her extremely useful PhD dissertation on the pottery excavated from the north-eastern areas of the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk levels associated with the city walls. For obvious reasons photography was not permitted, so all I can include is a view of Bab al-Nasr - but if you follow Dr Pradines on Academia.edu you can access all his reports, which come out regularly.

From left: Ahmed Ali (Museum Curator), Mohammed Darwish (Museum Director), Maha Mohammed (Curator), Yui Kanda, yours truly, and Tarek Gallal (Head of PR for the Faculty of Archaeology)

Another visit made during the conference was to the University Museum. This covers both Pharaonic, Graeco-Roman and Islamic periods, and I was amazed to find four excellent examples of South Arabian votive stelae with Sabaean inscriptions. Not, I should add, found in Egypt, but donated by the Yemeni government to a former head of faculty and Chairman of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Professor Abd al-Halim Nureddin, a colleague from the early 1980s when we were both working in Sana'a. The Islamic section is largely made up of Fustat finds from Dr Suad Maher's excavations and loans from the Museum of Islamic Art. The highlight for me was an almost complete cobalt blue flask, very similar to the fragmentary examples from Samarra we posted on this blog in August. This was apparently found in Fustat, so like the burnt brick fortifications, similar Abbasid containers, in addition to the well-known lustrewares, travelled or influenced local glass production too.

Cobalt blue glass phial similar to the 170 found by Herzfeld in the Dar al-Khilafah, Samarra

As mentioned above, I visited the Museum of Islamic Art in search of the typeset supposed to have been sent to Cairo after Herzfeld's division was made in 1922. Sadly there is no trace of such a gift and I would welcome any suggestions for where to find records or documentation about why it never reached its destination. I will start with the India Office and Colonial Office records, as both were involved in the finds being shipped from Basra to London. The museum does, however, hold 25 carved stucco panels, ten of which are on display with the remainder in storage. These were sent directly from Baghdad by the Iraqi government and must be from the Iraqi excavations between 1936 and 1939. It is now impossible to photograph anything on display without the express permission of the Minister of Antiquities, so unfortunately I am not able to include any images of these panels here.

View of the Muhammad Ali mosque and the green dome of Sultan Nasir Muhammad's mosque on the citadel

The following day we visited the Citadel and were taken to areas that I had never been able to visit before, including Qasr Ablaq, the area excavated in the 1990s where some late 13th century mosaics were found (these were described by Iman Abdulfattah and Mamdouh Mohamed Sakr at the 2009 ‘Arts of the Mamluks’ conference at SOAS, since published in the volume The Arts of the Mamluks in Egypt and Syria - Evolution and Impact, ed. Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Bonn University, 2012). We also explored the south-eastern fortifications, as well as the mosque of Sultan Nasir Muhammad and Muhammad Ali's Ottoman landmark, before descending to Sultan Hasan's masterpiece on the square below.

The group inside the south-east fortifications on the citadel

The Madrasa of Sultan Hasan (left) and the Rifai mosque (right), at the base of the citadel

In the evening I gave an extended version of my BISI conference paper on Gertrude Bell's influence on Islamic archaeology to the Netherlands Flemish Institute, as part of their regular Thursday evening lecture series. This provided a great opportunity to discuss the topic with a former teacher from the American University in Cairo, Professor Bernard O'Kane, and other friends involved in the Islamic archaeological world.

I was extremely glad that I was able to attend this first in a new conference series (by the way, next year's will encompass the eastern Mediterranean world). It was a great opportunity to make contact with Egyptian colleagues and to hear about their current research. 

The Samarra finds project is now signing off for the Christmas break, but we wish you all the best for the festive season, and look forward to continuing our project in the New Year!

Rosalind Wade Haddon

Matching objects with archives

Please do not interpret the Blog's silence as lack of activity in the Samarra Project - nothing could be further from the truth! We have entered a 'research' period, trying to identify where individual pieces of the V&A's 285 artefacts were found on the site, what they can tell us about 9th-century Abbasid decoration, and where possible identify any additional information in Herzfeld's copious documentation. Concurrent with this, objects are being catalogued on the Museum's database and photographed by the Museum's photographer, and gradually every item is being uploaded to the website, so that our goal of full access to one and all is starting to be achieved. The glass objects are already photographed and uploaded, so please go to http://collections.vam.ac.uk/ and type in 'Samarra glass' and you will see them. Ignore everything else for now, as although there are some images and information there already, these records will be updated as the project proceeds. Each plaster fragment will be photographed front and back, as the mechanics of how it was affixed to the wall/ceiling/floor are just as important to the overall picture as the actual decoration, and in the long run will probably assist in identifying which location in the palace complex it came from, and which group of paintings/stucco/wood decoration it belonged to.

The collection is a typeset of the excavators' finds but it is not comprehensive - for instance, it lacks metal pieces. However, it is easy to establish from Herzfeld's records (now housed in the Freer Sackler Gallery's archive) what metalwork was found in Samarra, which compensates for this lack. You can see from the bronze- and copper-headed nails, illustrated below, that they are not large pieces, but are decorative utilitarian objects used to secure the fixtures and fittings suitable for a caliphal palace. Each piece has been given a findspot number: for example, I-N 697 (second row, second from right) is recorded as being found in Square 26v in the Dar al-Khalifah, and described as being a "massive copper head of an iron nail, door hardware? Traces of gilding, pattern: twisted rosette" (translation taken from the Lubkins' incredibly useful document - see our entry on their visit here). The grid reference to 'Square 26v' refers us to the findspot on Herzfeld's gridded map, on the FSG Samarra resources site. 

Click here to see this image on the FSG website

FSA_A.6_04.22.071

Once familiar with these online resources, it is easy to navigate through the many illustrations and documents, and in recording the objects this facility has been useful for providing additional information. Around half the objects are still marked with their Herzfeld red inventory number (prefixed by I-N in the various publications). Herzfeld was a highly accomplished watercolourist (as we have seen in a previous post) and in addition to his sketches he reconstructed some of the wall painting fragments into complete murals. However, he did use a little artistic licence, so it is essential to double check every detail.

V&A A.29-1922 - measures h.14cm x w.16cm.
 You can see this fragment at the 
centre of Herzfeld's pl. LII in DIE MALEREIEN.
The fragment immediately to the right of this one is
now on display in the British Museum.

.

V&A A.54-1922, which you can see depicted in the bottom right hand corner of DIE MALEREIEN, pl. L


The resources on the Freer Sackler website help to problem-solve too. For example, among the ceramics there is a series of similar lid fragments, all now in different collections, some of which might fit together. Nothing published in Sarre's Die Keramik von Samarra resembles these, but in Herzfeld's own photographs, there is a group image - two with the same design and two of the same shape but seemingly with a different design. A fragment of one of these is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and can be seen on their website. (Interestingly, this lid fragment in the V&A is one of very few lustre pieces in the V&A Samarra typeset.)

V&A C.632-1922

Click here to see the image on the Freer Sackler website

Matching the objects with the archival material is slow but rewarding work, and hopefully the reader will understand why this blog has been a little dormant. Next month our findings to date will be presented at the First International Conference on Islamic Archaeology in the East, to be held at the University of Cairo from 8th-12th December. News from Cairo to follow soon thereafter!

Rosalind Wade Haddon

A Study in Close Looking: Reflections on Herzfeld's Architectural Drawings at the Met

Hello Herzfeld Scholars,

My name is Charmaine Branch and I am a rising senior studying art history at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. I’ve spent the past few months working as an intern here at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On the first day Matt Saba, a Research Fellow and my supervisor, introduced me to the works of Ernst Herzfeld housed in the Islamic Art Department. Although I had no previous knowledge of Herzfeld’s expeditions in Samarra and other cities across Iran, Turkey, and Syria, I welcomed the challenge of exploring a whole new area of art history.  Matt acted as my guide as I familiarized myself with architectural drawings, watercolors of wall decorations, photographs, and their subject matter.

As part of my internship, I also gave tours in the Met galleries to the general public. The experience encouraged me not only to focus on the historical importance of an object, but to also appreciate the extensive information available through visual analysis. Herzfeld began his drawings with the act of close looking. For me, the task of digitizing a sketch was brought to life by his skill and meticulous documentation of detail. I often invited other interns in our department to join me in admiring a floor plan or study of a column before I moved on to the next.

Shaykh 'Abd al-Samad Shrine at Natanz (Iran): Analysis of Muqarnas Vault. (MMA, eeh1575)

I spent a long while studying Herzfeld’s analysis of the muqarnas vault over the tomb chamber in the shrine of Shaykh ‘Abd al-Samad at Natanz (shown above). In order to understand the complex construction of the vault’s underlying scheme, Herzfeld employed a series of grids still visible in the upper right hand corner. As your eye moves clockwise around the octagon, the dotted squares, triangles and circles give way to fully-inked lines showing the shapes of some of cells, including flower-like compilations of triangles.  The drawing continues to transform as Herzfeld highlights different geometric elements. In the lower left-hand corner, Herzfeld added parallel lines along some of the preexisting lines, emphasizing texture and depth. As a final step, he applied a thicker black strip between those lines and a new series of shapes were revealed. Herzfeld represented a complicated structure, and his drawing allows you to read his process as your eye travels around the octagon.

Working with the Herzfeld papers during the course of the summer, I came to understand what a significant role this project plays within the international study of Herzfeld’s lifework. I find the possibility of reconstructing parts of a madrasa or mosque based on Herzfeld’s drawings incredibly compelling. The global exchange of information is intrinsic to the study of art not only for scholars but also for everyone who is interested in the visual history of our world. All of Herzfeld’s works are in dialog with one another, although they span his career and are now dispersed geographically as part of several collections.  I am very lucky to have joined the conversation. 

Charmaine Branch (Vassar College)

Update from the Met

Dear Samarra-Finds Readers,

I write to you with a Herzfeld-related update from New York. As summer comes to a close, we are excited to report that the Department of Islamic Art is moving closer toward making our Herzfeld Papers more accessible to researchers. Having been rehoused and reorganized several years ago, the Islamic Department’s share of the Herzfeld Papers is on its way to being fully cataloged. By the end of the process, each item will have a unique ID number, content description, publication information and, eventually, references to related archival materials.

We have recently finished cataloging the drawings, watercolors and prints in our collection. This group of material includes the preparatory sketches and watercolors for illustrative plates in Der Wandschmuck der Bauten von Samarra und seine Ornamentik, and Die Malereien von Samarra, the volumes where the wall ornament and wall paintings from Samarra were published. Aside from being works of art themselves, these items may be of interest to Samarra scholars as evidence of Herzfeld’s research techniques. Certain questions came to my mind as I looked through the sketches: Did Herzfeld draw from life or from photos, for example? And how much of what we see in the final publication is to be considered an interpretation?

Friezes of Animals in Vine Scrolls, reconstructed from fragments found in Samarra's Main Caliphal Palace (Dar al-Khilafa)

Another subset of the drawings was chosen for a focused digitization project over the summer. This group consists of approximately 175 drawings depicting architectural plans, elevations and details from buildings in Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. A large number of these represent primary research for Herzfeld’s “Damascus: Studies in Architecture”series, a group of articles published at the end of his life that contain some of his most distilled ideas about the evolution of Islamic architecture. The series is an important supplement to the  Freer and Sackler Archives holdings, which have already been digitized in an exemplary fashion.

Nur al-Din Hospital (Bimaristan Nuri) in Damascus: sections of muqarnas dome over entrance hall

Thanks to our fabulous summer intern, Charmaine Branch, we were able to scan all but the largest of these drawings and we hope to upload them to the web. Once online, this series will serve as a “pilot” for a larger project to fully digitize the papers housed in our department, and to connect our portion of the archive to portions held in other institutions.

Matt Saba (Metropolitan Museum / University of Chicago)

Samarra at the British Museum

Today Rosalind and I visited Venetia Porter at the British Museum, and spent the morning looking at their Samarra material from Herzfeld's excavations. Part of our BISI-funded pilot project is to develop and seek funding for the next, more international phase of Samarrafinds, and a crucial part of the next stage will be to catalogue the BM's material. Today's visit was an initial assessment of the scope of that collection.

Venetia Porter and Rosalind Wade Haddon in front of the Samarra display in the British Museum's John Addis Gallery

The small gallery display doesn't begin to tell you how big this collection is compared to the V&A's rather modest selection! The V&A is an art and design museum and was always concerned to acquire objects that would inspire art students, so only took a few representative examples of the types of artistic production found at Samarra; but the British Museum is a 'universal museum', which has engaged in its own archaeological excavations, and has much more material in bulk. The same goes for Samarra. They have much much more of everything, and this morning's visit made us realise quite what a big job the next phase is going to be!

Rosalind and Venetia rummaging among fragments of wood and glass in the British Museum store

Rosalind was excited to see the glass, which has been giving her such headaches recently, and especially to realise that the lion's share of the 170 blue glass 'torpedo flasks' mentioned by Lamm are likely to be among the BM's finds. We were excited to find some of the examples he mentioned of bottle stoppers - made of cotton wool, wrapped around with papryus and cotton string! These would be candidates for future analysis, since the cotton may well have absorbed some essence of the original contents of these bottles.

The tops of two blue glass bottles, stoppered with cotton wool, papyrus and cotton ties

I am rather jealous of the several fragments in the BM's collection of incised blue glass dishes - why didn't the South Kensington curators in 1922 want a few of these?? They come from very elegant dishes, perhaps made in Nishapur in Iran, of which several amazingly complete examples have been recovered from the Famensi temple near Xi'an in China - from a reliquary chamber sealed in the 870s, thus also providing a clear terminus ante quem for the production of this type of glass, if the finds from Samarra weren't enough to establish a 9th-century date.

Three fragments of incised blue glass dishes - these are on display but there are more fragments in store

 
I was also amazed to see actual shells amongs the finds! Of course we are familiar with the pieces of mother-of-pearl used for a variety of inlay designs, but the BM collection holds several complete shells! Does anyone know what kind of shells these are? There is no sign of them having been used for make-up trays or paint palettes, unless analysis reveals invisible traces which have been lost to the naked eye - but perhaps they were waiting to be turned into inlay? Could the original context of the find have been a 9th-century inlay workshop??

Shells found at Samarra

These were just a few of the many exciting things we saw in the British Museum today, which hint at the many treasures we hope to uncover as the project moves into its next phase. But the size of the collection and the task ahead feels a little overwhelming! Next is to start making a list of priorities and possible candidates for scientific analysis. Oh, and to start thinking about where we might look for further funding. Any ideas, please be sure to let us know!

Mariam Rosser-Owen

Research on glass and marble

Progress seems to be slow at the moment as I write up all the cataloguing details and start reading and researching around the different materials. For example, there are only 20 glass pieces other than mosaic tesserae, but they are so diverse and I was a little outside my comfort zone, so it has taken me longer than anticipated. Fortunately I have had the expertise of Jens Kröger at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin to call upon - he has been extremely helpful and pointed me in the right direction. Carl Johan Lamm (1902-1981) was tasked with studying the collection and published his observations and categories in 1928 in DAS GLAS VON SAMARRA, vol 4 in the Samarra series, but unfortunately he did not include every piece, thus he was of no help to me with the 'problem pieces' - perhaps they were equally problematic to him, bearing in mind he was just starting on his Islamic glass studies! 

This is the entire collection (except for the arrow-shaped plaque top right which was acquired in 1967 from Mohammed Yeganeh, an Iranian dealer resident in Frankfurt, and said to have come from the site of Gunbad-i Kabus. If anyone has ideas about this piece we would love to hear them!)

                                   

Most of these vessels are so delicate that one wonders how they survived the journey from Samarra via Baghdad and Basra to London, in the chaotic aftermath of World War I, let alone over a thousand years of being buried amongst the rubble of crumbling palaces!

C.753-1922: a miniature bottle found near the Throne Room in the Dar al-Khalifah

Another aspect that I am investigating at the moment is the source for the marble/alabaster used at the site. Marcus Milwright published an excellent article on "Fixtures and Fittings" in 2001, with lots of useful references to the sources, but common sense tells me that for speedy palace building on such a massive scale not all the marble, for instance, could have come from Latakiyya, as indicated by the Arab geographer Ya'qubi (d. 897-8). Looking at the marble and alabaster pieces in the V&A's collection I noted that Herzfeld classified some pieces as being 'Mosul marble', so I have been looking at where earlier Mesopotamian civilisations sourced their materials. Austen Henry Layard (1817-1894) writing in 1849 in NINEVEH AND ITS REMAINS states:

"Of the material used by the Assyrians in the construction of their palaces, it has already been shown that a limestone or alabaster was the most common, and served to case, or panel, the chambers. It abounds in the country, and being very soft is easily quarried and sculptured. It is still extensively employed in the country, chiefly cut, as in the time of the Assyrians, into slabs, and forming in that state a casing to walls of sun-dried or baked bricks. The modern slabs, however, are much smaller than those found in the ruins, rarely exceeding four or five feet in length, by two or three in breadth, and being only a few inches thick. Thus shaped, they are exported to Baghdad, where they are used for the pavement of halls, and for fountains, and reservoirs, in the interior of houses. When first taken from the quarry, this alabaster is of a greyish white; but on exposure it soon changes, growing darker, and ultimately becoming a deep grey, the colour of the slabs now in the British Museum. It is extremely fragile, easily decomposes, and wears away, if subjected to the action of water, or even to damp. Several slabs from Nimroud have retained the outline of the matting in which they were packed, water having penetrated into the cases. The back of the bas-relief of the eagle-headed figure in the Museum is an instance; on examination it will be seen that it is not the result of pressure, but the outline of the matting has been produced by the percolation of water, through the fissures between the rushes. The material being so very perishable, it will be a matter of surprise that the sculptures should be so well preserved, even in their minutest details. This can only be attributed to their having been suddenly buried, before exposure, and to the great accumulation of earth over them, by which they were preserved completely from damp in a country naturally dry.

On exposure to fire, this alabaster becomes of a milky whiteness, as in the ruins of Khorsabad, Kouyunjuik, and the south-west corner of Nimroud. The outline of the sculptures becomes, at the same time, sharper and more defined. They have consequently a more pleasing appearance, than in the grey slabs of the unburnt edifices; but they crack into numberless pieces, which fall off in flakes, so that it is impossible to move, and even frequently to preserve them. The sculptures from Khorsabad in the British Museum show this appearance, and are easily distinguished by it from those of Nimroud."

However, according to Julian Reade writing more recently no quarry has yet been discovered and I would be grateful if anyone working in this field has further information on this topic.

A.65-1922: a fragmentary frieze of blue-veined marble thought to have come from either the Dar al-Khalifah or al-Haruni, both palaces - the latter is 2km to the west of the former on the Tigris' floodplain - Herzfeld's ornament 22.

Rosalind Wade Haddon

A call for consistency

Two thoughts - firstly acceptable terminology for those red Herzfeld numbers. For those of you who have not handled any Samarra finds from the 1911-1913 excavations these are the red digits written on objects by Herzfeld and indicate their findspot, effectively a locus number, thus in many instances there are several objects with the same number. Many of these objects have a thumbnail sketch in Herzfeld's Finds Journal and a reference to Sketchbooks for more detailed drawings (these are all housed in the Freer Sackler collection). The 'red numbers' have a prefix, sometimes written 'I-N', at other times 'IN'. 

So, the question is should we continue with Herzfeld's system and retain the prefix (with or without the hyphen), or call them 'Herzfeld numbers'? The main thing is to have continuity and an easily recognisable nomenclature throughout the now-divided collection. If every institution has a different system this will lead to confusion with the digitisation, and with the process of matching up the dispersed finds, so it is something we need to agree on now. Of course each institution has its own accession numbers too, and it would be great to have every object easily cross-referenced with the Samarra publications as well - although I should add that Die Malereien does not appear to refer to them! If we all agree on one system now it will save a lot of time and confusion in the future. Thoughts?

A sketch in the Finds Journal with IN 32, now in V&A collection A.63-1922. Unfortunately its red digits have been rubbed off, so cannot give an example but those on the stucco engaged column below should suffice.

A.72-1922 with large red numerals

On a lighter note - and just to show you how immersed I am becoming in Samarran influences - look at the design on London's City Hall! On a visit to the Tower of London a few days ago I was struck by this stepped merlon image and went on line immediately to see if the architect's (Norman Foster) website would throw any light on its influences. Sadly not, but I did learn that it has an internal helicoidal staircase - visible on this image - internalising the iconic minaret spiral-staircases?! So I have emailed Foster's partnership to see if they could throw more light on the influences, and as yet have not received a reply.... If anyone has any ideas please submit them. You can download a pdf of the project with many more photographs from their website.

City Hall, London, by night

  

Rosalind Wade Haddon

Introducing the Ernst Herzfeld Papers in the Metropolitan Museum, Department of Islamic Art

One of the lesser-known fragments of Ernst Herzfeld's enormous scholarly output is housed in the Metropolitan Museum. Since the Department of Islamic Art mounted a small exhibition titled Herzfeld in Samarra in 2002-3, we have been scanning and cataloguing our Herzfeld materials, with a view towards making them available online to scholars.

How the Met obtained the material is an interesting footnote in Herzfeld's life. In 1937, when he moved to Princeton from Tehran, he brought along his lifelong accumulation of professional files. On arrival he contacted his old friend Dr. Maurice Dimand, the curator of Near Eastern Art at the Met. Dimand agreed to store some of Herzfeld's personal collection of Middle Eastern art at the Met, where it would be safe, and Herzfeld gave the Met a frieze from Nizamabad that is still on display.

The Met's stucco frieze from Nizamabad, donated by Professor Herzfeld in 1937 (37.141).
Photo (c) The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1943, Herzfeld decided to retire from the Institute of Advanced studies and faced the twofold need to clean out his office and finance his retirement. He offered to sell the Met for $17,000 his professional library and associated research material, which Dimand inspected and described for the Museum's Purchasing Committee. The Committee authorised the purchase of about 4,000 books, comprising "one of the best and most complete libraries of Near Eastern archaeology," along with "other valuable material for our Near Eastern Study Room consisting of about two thousand photographs collected during many years of travel, about five hundred lantern slides, and a card index of ancient oriental archaeology which would be of great value to students and research fellows." In addition the Museum would receive approximately one thousand original drawings and watercolours of excavated material, including paper squeezes from the Sasanian reliefs at Taq-i Bustan, chiefly of textile patterns.

In late June 1944, with Herzfeld due to vacate his office and leave the country permanently a few days later, the Met sent commercial movers to pack the Herzfeld archive and bring it to the Museum. No Museum staff member was present for the packing, or had seen the archive since Dimand's visit nine months earlier. No inventory was prepared during the packing or unpacking. Thus it is not possible to determine how closely the boxes that arrived corresponded to Herzfeld's offer or Dimand's abbreviated inventory which the Museum trustees had used to authorise the purchase. But there were discrepancies. 
 

Herzfeld's bookplate in a copy of Yaqut's Mu'jam al-Buldan.

Many books arrived, and the Watson Library still has some with bookplates reading, "Ex Libris Ernst Herzfeld." The card index is here. The lantern slides, however, never arrived and the thousands of photos Dr. Dimand described were not all received. But the Museum did receive the hundreds of maps, watercolours, squeezes and sketches, made in the field by Herzfeld. These are one of the most interesting and useful parts of the collection, as many have not been published, especially those in Herzfeld's sketchbooks and journals.



One of Herzfeld's sketchbooks from the Samarra expedition (MMA Ernst Herzfeld Papers).

What happened to the other materials Dimand inventoried in 1943 for the Met? The find index of the Herzfeld Papers in the Archives of the Freer and Sackler seems to establish that they survived.  Two years after the sale to the Met, Herzfeld arranged from Cairo to give his remaining scholarly materials to the Freer, where his close friend Richard Ettinghausen was a curator.  It is probable that neither Herzfeld nor anyone else at the time realised that part of the Met purchase had been left behind in 1944, but however it happened, in 1946 those materials were part of what Herzfeld sent to the Freer.



View of Amman, taken by Herzfeld (MMA Ernst Herzfeld Papers, eeh-884).

The Herzfeld material at the Met, other than published books, is divided between the Departments of Ancient Near Eastern and Islamic art.  Ancient Near Eastern Art’s  1974 catalogue describes its Herzfeld material as including drawings, sketchbooks, squeezes, notebooks, an 1897 diary kept by Herzfeld, photo albums, more than 300 maps, some by Herzfeld, but many published by the military of various countries before 1920, individual photos, notes, newspaper clippings, and letters. 

Over the past eight years, the Islamic Department holdings have all been re-housed in archival boxes and folders, and numbered.

Over a thousand pages have been scanned, and the work is continuing.The material includes the following:

• Two albums of photos, mostly taken from Iran, Iraq and Central Asia
• Hundreds of loose photos and negatives, many taken by Herzfeld but others purchased from commercial photographers, some with identifying notes, many without, of people, places and excavations in the Middle East and Europe
• Twenty-four notebooks and sketchbooks. Of the notebooks, many are transcriptions and translations by Herzfeld of published works and carvings on monuments, especially in Aleppo and Hama, in Hebrew, Arabic and Western languages. The sketchbooks include a number of Herzfeld's pencil and coloured sketches of finds from Samarra, along with topographical sketches, maps and ground plans of excavation sites. There are also books of sketches and inscriptions from Cairo and western Europe
• Twelve notebooks of transcribed Arabic sources on the history of Samarra (e.g. Tabari)
• Numerous architectural drawings and maps, many from Damascus, Baghdad, Mosul, and Hama, many but not all published as part of Herzfeld's "Damascus: Studies in Architecture" series
• Numerous loose tracing paper ink and coloured drawings of stucco friezes and wall paintings from Samarra. Most of these are published, with and without alterations, in Die Ausgrabung von Samarra series.

Our plan is to make both images and a finding aid available online.

Rebecca Lindsey (Department of Islamic Art, Metropolitan Museum)

Update

Almost finished measuring and photographing the V&A's 285 objects - this has involved moving between the Ceramics Study Room and the off-site storage in Blythe House. Now the hard work begins, tracing 'lost numbers' through the registers and citing any published pieces in the Herzfeld/Sarre/Lamm volumes. Fortunately various researchers have generously made their documentation available, which is an enormous help - these are principally: Fatma Dahmani, Christoph Konrad, Matt Saba, Nadine Schibille, and both Alastair Northedge's and Jens Kroger's encyclopaedic knowledge of the site is always invaluable. Many thanks to them all!

Of course all this research has been greatly facilitated by the Freer Sackler's digitised website of Herzfeld's papers and the Lubkins' translation of the Finds Journal. I am adding the V&A accession number for each piece identified to their document, which should give us an additional means of cross referencing objects. Eventually if every institution adds their own accession numbers to this document we should be able to present researchers with a comprehensive list of Samarra finds and their current location. By a process of elimination we will then be able to calculate what proportion of Herzfeld's finds were indeed lost in the period of their peregrination between 1917 and 1921.

Rosalind Wade Haddon