Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire.

• Author: Beckman, Gary
• Position: Book Review

Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire. By WENDY M. K. SHAW. Berkeley and Los Angeles: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2003. Pp. xi + 269, illus. $60.

By the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire had become "the Sick Man of Europe," and the great powers of the day busied themselves with annexing territories on the periphery of the crumbling state and securing privileges for their nationals within its interior. In addition to military pressure and commercial exploitation, one of the means employed by Europeans to penetrate the Sultan's realm was archaeology. Beginning in Ionia with Greco-Roman sites and continuing with the ancient Mesopotamian cities of Assur and Babylon, British, French, and especially German archaeologists harvested antiquities for the museums of their capitals, where the artifacts were displayed as products of cultures ancestral to "Western Civilization." Thus there was staked a symbolic European claim to the greater portion of Ottoman lands, a claim that was to be realized--albeit abortively--in the Treaty of Sevres following the First World War.

Of course, the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire was not a simple process: the European states maneuvered among themselves, with one or another on occasion forming an alliance with the Sultan to forestall the advantage of a rival. In addition, progressive Ottoman officials sought to rehabilitate their polity along European lines before it was too late. In Possessors and Possessed, Wendy Shaw tells the story of a minor aspect of these reforms--the creation of the museums of Istanbul. This also entails the discussion of Anatolian and Mesopotamian archaeology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the Ottoman perspective (pp. 70ff., 94ff.).

Beginning with a small, chaotic collection of antiquated weapons housed in Basilica of Hagia Irene, by 1908 the imperial collections had grown substantially and had been fully accommodated in the so-called Sarcophagus Museum and Tiled Pavilion, which are...