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

Meeting the Lubkins

This week I had the privilege of meeting Marianne and Jim Lubkin as they were passing through London on their way from an Atlantic cruise to some weeks' holiday in Europe. Marianne and Jim are dedicated docents at the Freer Sackler Gallery in Washington DC, which holds the archival papers of Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948) - a collection documenting his archaeological activities in Samarra as well as Persepolis, Pasargadae, Paikuli and Aleppo, and which includes correspondence, field notebooks, drawings, sketchbooks, squeezes of architectural inscriptions and details, and photographs. 

This amazing resource - which the FSG has been digitising over the last few years - includes Herzfeld's Finds Journal from his excavations at Samarra, which is an invaluable primary source for us as we research the dispersed small finds. Each object has a 'red number' written on it which indicates a find spot, and which spot this is can be checked by looking in the Finds Journal. The problem has been that the Finds Journal, though digitised, can only be accessed online in fairly low resolution images, and beyond that we are faced with the problem of Herzfeld's idiosyncratic handwriting and, even more of a hurdle for some of us, the fact that it is all written in German.

However, the Lubkins have solved that problem! Marianne alone has spent more than 550 hours translating the contents of the Finds Journal into English, and Jim has typed it all up, painstakingly reconstructing each page of the original Journal so that the English version matches it page for page, aiding the researcher even more. During their visit they presented me with this treasure on a CD - you can see a screenshot of the first page on the computer in the background. This is going to make our lives so much easier! Thank you so much Marianne and Jim!

Mariam Rosser-Owen

Berlin Visit

Making great strides with measuring, photographing, drawing and recording all 285 artefacts in the V&A collection and gradually getting to grips with the multitudinal aspects of the Samarra finds in the various web facilities already available through the Freer Sackler archives. Contact with colleagues in the Museum for Islamic Art in Berlin alerted me to the fact that they are embarking on a similar project of digitising their considerably larger collection and will be doing it in 3D. Hasty email discussions with the Curator responsible, Dr Julia Gonnella (coincidentally co-director of the Aleppo Citadel excavations where I have worked for a couple of seasons prior to the current troubles), prompted me to use up some airmiles a couple of weeks ago and jump on a plane to Berlin to meet their researcher, Simone Struth, and spend a couple of days with her familiarising myself with their work and the collection.

This has proved invaluable and has helped me appreciate and understand the decorative motifs – where the V&A has small fragments of carved stucco Berlin has full-sized panels. Trying to work out what is the top and what is the bottom becomes a nightmare. Admittedly many of these are casts taken in situ and manufactured in the dig house at Samarra, because they were deemed to be too fragile to move en bloc, but some are complete pieces. A young researcher from the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft (University of Applied Science), Berlin, Mariam Sonntag, is currently studying all these pieces by non-destructive means for her MA thesis. This amounts to some 90 pieces. Today these panels to the naked eye all appear to be colourless, but Herzfeld reports seeing various pigments when they were first excavated and her research will establish whether this is so or not. She is also establishing the chemical differences between the original panels and the 20th century casts made by Herzfeld and his team. Her results will be presented in her thesis in August 2013.

This was a wonderful chance to work with Simone Struth, who very kindly guided me through their whole collection and patiently answered my endless questions. An added bonus to this was a chance to see the temporary exhibition in the galleries of SAMARRA – CENTRE OF THE WORLD. Seeing the eye-catching blue banner draped over the front of the Pergamon Museum made one immensely proud of having a hand in bringing this important slice of history to the forefront. After two days of handling, photographing and discussing their collection I began to realise the wisdom of Herzfeld dividing it up into sample collections for various institutions. Now that we have reached the digital age it will be much easier to reassemble the original collection virtually and I feel privileged to have a part in the process.

Outside the museum which is undergoing extensive renovation to both the fabric and interior display areas.

Mariam Sonntag (left) and Simone Struth (right) discussing the carved stucco panels in storage

 

Simone Struth showing us one of the wooden coffered ceiling panels from the Dar al-Khalifa in their state-of-the-art storage facilities for wood and paper. She shows the amazing scale of this miraculously surviving piece!
 

Rosalind Haddon

The project begins!

 

To know how many pieces we need to catalogue and what they all are, the first place to look is the V&A's Central Inventory - the books held in the V&A Archive that list every object acquired in a certain year. Here Rosalind Haddon is checking the volume for 1922, when the Herzfeld Samarra finds were accessioned by the Museum. The total count is 285 objects!

 

Mariam Rosser-Owen