With the rapidly increasing economic importance of the bourgeoisie beginning ca 1870, Europe and America witnessed the creation of private associations, funds, and societies to finance archaeological expeditions in the ‘Lands of the Bible’, complementing state-run institutions such as universities, museums, and academies of sciences and the humanities.

From the very first, research into the history of the ancient Near East served to reflect ‘Western’ self-perception and provided the foundation for the projection of Weltanschauung. Against the background of increasing professionalization of archaeological disciplines, learned societies also enabled laypersons, amateurs, and dilettantes to participate in scholarly debate and to promulgate certain conceptual frames of what was perceived as the ‘Ancient Orient’.

Behind the movement lay different motivations but also respective ‘national’ cultures in academia. In fact, while economic and strategic interests during this ‘Age of Empire’ played a pivotal role, the historian should not be blind to other factors. Given the central importance of the ancient Near East as the ‘cradle’ of no less than three world religions, as well as the earliest states, even empires, in world history, it became a matter of prestige for European and other ‘Western’ nations to fill their museums with objects from that distant past era – objects which were related to the origins of their ‘own’ culture, as they perceived it.

Furthermore, the exotic appeal of ‘the Orient’ must not be forgotten, for it served as means of self-affirmation in contrast to the Oriental ‘other’, legitimizing the colonial exploitation and semantics of a ‘white man’s burden’ or a civilizing ‘mission’, but also defining a cultural responsibility. After the many political upheavals resulting from World War I, new forms of associations evolved to compensate for the loss of state-funding but also to remedy the loss of previously firmly established world views.

A systematic and transnational study of these associations remains a desideratum.  This volume, with contributions by historians and archaeologists, along with representatives of other disciplines from different countries, provides the basis for a truly interdisciplinary discourse, focusing on Oriental Societies as a means of societal self-assertion.

Editor’s Foreword

Christoph Jahr: Europe and the Orient: Bourgeois Scholarship and Imperial Sense of Mission in the Long 19th Century

Part I: Early Encounters

Marco Bonechi: The Rise and Fall of the Società Asiatica Italiana

Felicity Cobbing: The Motivations of the Palestine Exploration Fund: Hidden and not-so Hidden Agendas at Work in a Learned Society in the Late 19th Century

Stefania Ermidoro: The “Assyrian Society” and the Early Exploration of Ancient Mesopotamia

Part II: Imperial Self-Reflections

Sebastiaan R. L. Berntsen: The Sichem Committee: A Case Study of Dutch Private Sponsorship of Near Eastern Archaeology

Silvia Alaura: Oriental Societies and Hittite Studies in Victorian England: Tracing the History of an Entangled Relationship

Reiko Maejima: Babylon Society, a Private Japanese Association in the Early Years of the 20th Century

Part III: Egyptian Stakeholders

Marleen De Meyer, Jean-Michel Bruffaerts and Jan Vandersmissen: The Fondation Égyptologique Reine Élisabeth in Belgium and the Creation of National and Transnational Egyptological Research Infrastructures in the 1920s–1940s

Stephanie L. Boonstra: Fundraising for Amarna: Evidence from the EES Archive

Thomas L. Gertzen: Jews excavating in Egypt? An Archaeological Endeavour of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens

Part IV: Absences and Adaptions

Katalin A. Kóthay: Hungarian Archaeological Presence and Absence in Egypt and the Orient at the End of the Long 19th Century and during the Interwar Period

Hana Navratilova: Bohemian Absences: The Academy of Sciences in Prague and the Network of European Institutions Involved in Archaeological Research in Egypt in the 1900s

Willemijn Waal: From Wish to Reality. The Foundation and Early Years of the Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO)

Carolien H. van Zoest: Overview of Societies and Initiatives in the Netherlands in the 20th Century

Olaf Matthes: Financing Babylon. The German Oriental Society and its Funding System

Illustration Credits

Index