The Dutch and the Ancient Near East

By Lucas Petit, National Museum of Antiquities

Cheese, windmills, and the sweet smell of marijuana in the city of Amsterdam have become famous icons of the Netherlands, a small country in Europe. But this is a very limited description of one of the most densely populated countries of the world, and one that has long been a leader in ancient Near Eastern studies.

The Netherlands have a rich and long history. The domination of world trade in the seventeenth century led to economic wealth in the ‘Low Lands’ and caused an early interest in the Near East. This attitude of looking at and learning from neighbors initiated rapid development of the Dutch academic community. Although they developed slightly later than Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, the first Dutch universities, like Leiden, became important centers for the study of cultures and languages of the Middle East.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century the academic scene slowly moved away from a fully biblical focus. As a starting point I should mention the Dutch traveler Cornelis de Bruijn whose work at Persepolis is still of value today. He not only brought back detailed drawings and descriptions, but also original fragments with cuneiform writing. Instead of imprecise sketches, the Dutch had the originals! But it did not help them much. Others, like British scholar Henry Rawlinson, deciphered the cuneiform characters by using De Bruijn’s fragments, and became well-known.

In 1818 the University of Leiden appointed the first professor of archaeology in the world: Caspar Reuvens. This was a period when European countries were searching for national identities and Reuvens convinced the Dutch king that the founding of a National Museum of Antiquities would stimulate the process. As the first director, he planned to collect all objects associated with the Greco-Roman cultures, including ancient Egypt and the Near East. However, during the following seventy years only a few replicas of Near Eastern originals were acquired. At the same time other museums filled their basements with large numbers of excavated objects. But the Dutch were struggling with a financial crisis.

Private Dutch travelers continued to explore the Middle East. One of them, the nobleman Tinco Martinus Lycklama à Nijeholt, collected in the 1860s numerous antiquities for his private museum. Long before Dutch archaeologists set foot on the ground in the Middle East, Nijeholt excavated iconic sites such as Babylon and Tyre! His museum was completed in 1870, but only one year later he was forced to move to Cannes where the collection is still on display today.

After this private initiative, interest in the ancient Near East diminished again in the Netherlands. In Jerusalem, however, a Dutch member of the White Fathers missionary community, Nico van der Vliet, collected thousands and thousands of archaeological objects for his Bible museum. It was one of the most important museums in the Middle East at that time, not least of all because he presented the objects chronologically, with context information and material description.

The study of the ancient Near East was revitalized in the Netherlands in 1913 with the appointment of Franz Böhl at the University of Groningen. He became professor of Hebrew language and Israelite antiquities and was, although young in age, already well-known in the world. In 1927 he left Groningen and moved to the University of Leiden, where he became a specialist in Assyrian culture and cuneiform languages.

Böhl built up a study collection of cuneiform tablets, since he believed that material culture of the ancient Near East should be easily accessible for students as well as for the public. ‘Without the acceptance of the public the study of the ancient Near East has no future’ was his motto. His enthusiasm certainly inspired the National Museum of Antiquities, whose collection grew gradually in the 1920s and 1930s. Böhl was also one of the first Dutch archaeologists who worked in the Middle East, namely at Tell Balata in Palestine.

Another archaeologist who triggered Dutch curiosity in the ancient Near East, although often omitted in overviews, was Henri Frankfort. Frankfort studied Dutch language and Literature at the University of Amsterdam, but due to his Jewish background he soon became fascinated by the ancient Near East. In 1922 he joined the famous British archaeologist Petrie on a project in Egypt and a few years later the Oriental Institute of Chicago asked him to set up a new project in Iraq.

In the Diyala Excavation project, Frankfort brought together several specialists, among them architects, archaeozoologists, pottery experts, and philologists. Such a highly interdisciplinary project would still look very professional today! The results of these excavations helped establish a long chronology for Mesopotamian pottery that is virtually unchanged today. In 1933 Frankfort accepted a professorship at the University of Amsterdam where he promoted the idea that the ecological background of a region must be understood before archaeological material can be interpreted. Even in the 1970s this idea was still not fully accepted in the academic world. But in 1939 he left Amsterdam, and was soon forgotten in the Netherlands.

Besides those two Near Eastern specialists, the Dutch archaeologist Albert van Giffen should also be mentioned since he founded the Biological-Archaeological Institute at the University of Groningen in 1920. The institute still focuses on past human societies and their environments. Many scholars who were educated there, such as Willem van Zeist and Sytze Bottema, have influenced and stimulated the ecological and environmental study of the ancient Near East.

In the 1950s Henk Franken entered the scene. He was a teacher of Palestinian archaeology at the University of Leiden and got his training at Kenyon’s excavations in Jericho and Jerusalem. Franken was convinced that the Bible should never dictate the archaeological record.

Furthermore, he looked at pottery as objects of production and a valuable source for understanding ancient societies. His ideas were put into practice in excavations at Tell Deir ‘Alla in Jordan and taught at the University of Leiden. Franken’s Institute of Ceramic Study became well-known around the world as a leader in pottery research.

During the 1970s these influential scholars and a wide range of specialized studies at Dutch universities attracted more and more students. But this success also initiated unproductive, competitive behavior between universities. In particular Leiden and Amsterdam were facing off against one another; the first following Franken’s way of approaching pottery and excavation, and the second, with the former diplomat Maurits van Loon as the head of the department, paying more attention to Frankfort’s ideas. Dutch projects in those years were centered around the newly created Assad Lake in Syria. Van Loon excavated Tell Selenkahiye, while Leiden was working at Tell Ta’as, Tell Hadidi and Jebel Aruda. Part of the finds were brought to the Netherlands were they were split between the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam.

After 1980 Dutch archaeologists spread over the Middle East. Projects were initiated at Tell Bouqras (Maurits van Loon and partners), Tell Hammam at-Turkman (Maurits van Loon, Diederik Meijer), Tell ar-Raqa’i (Hans Curvers), Tell Sabi-Abyad (Peter Akkermans), Tell Deir ‘Alla (Gerrit van der Kooij and partners), Tell Abu Sarbut (Margreet Steiner and partners), Umm Qais (Karel Vriezen and partners) and Ilipinar (Jacob Roodenberg), just to name but a few. Most of those were long-term excavations, which gave Dutch students in the following decades excellent opportunities for fieldwork training. The number of influential Dutch archaeologists has multiplied during the past thirty years and several of them are now occupying important positions at local and international institutes.

The original ideas of Dutch scholars, like Böhl, Frankfort, and Franken, have influenced many scholars and opened up large areas of study. They introduced interdisciplinary research in Near Eastern archaeology, promoted a more careful use of biblical sources in archaeological reconstructions, and fought for a general acceptance of Near Eastern archaeology in the Netherlands. The successful exhibition about the Nabataean city of Petra in the National Museum of Antiquities recently shows that the ancient Near East is still ‘hot’. All those archaeologists did a good job in giving the ancient Near East a place in Dutch society and we, the new generation, should work hard to keep it that way. Why? Because there is nothing more beautiful than the ancient Near East.

Lucas Petit is curator of the Near Eastern Department of the National Museum of Antiquities in the Netherlands and co-director of the Tell Damiyah excavations in Jordan.

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