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

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