Section 07
Excavators
Who dug it, and when.
07Three entries on the people who dug, and where what they found ended up.
Entries in this section
3 entries- 07.1Schaeffer at Ras Shamra
Claude Schaeffer began work in 1929 after a farmer's plough hit a tomb roof, and ran the excavation for decades.
- 07.2The Mission de Phénicie
Ernest Renan's 1860s survey, an early and very mixed piece of archaeological practice.
- 07.3Where the objects went
The Louvre, the National Museum of Beirut and the National Museum of Damascus: why provenance and division of finds matter to what can be studied now.
Who dug it
Claude Schaeffer
Ras Shamra, from 1929
Arrived at thirty, trained in European prehistory, and directed the excavation of Ugarit for four decades. His team cut through roughly ten metres of occupation and uncovered the palace archive.
Charles Virolleaud
Publication and epigraphy
Director of the antiquities service in the French Mandate territory. He published the tablets as they came out of the ground, which is what made the decipherment possible for everybody else.
Hans Bauer
Frequency analysis, 1930
A German orientalist at Halle who applied statistical frequency analysis to Virolleaud's published copies and proposed values for the majority of the signs.
Édouard Dhorme
Independent solution, 1930
A French Dominican and one of the foremost Semitists of his generation. He reached overlapping results independently, corrected several of Bauer's values and identified ones he had missed.
Pierre Montet
Byblos, from 1921
Began systematic excavation at Byblos and opened the royal shaft tombs, among them the tomb containing the Ahiram sarcophagus and its Phoenician inscription.
Maurice Dunand
Byblos, from 1926
Took over from Montet and dug at Byblos for roughly five decades, producing the stratigraphic record later arguments are argued against. He published the Proto-Byblian texts.
Ernest Renan
Mission de Phénicie, 1860–61
Led the French state survey of the Lebanese and Syrian littoral. A sharp philologist and a rough excavator: his plates record sites that industrial expansion later erased.
Flinders Petrie
Serabit el-Khadim, 1905
Excavated the turquoise-mining district in the southern Sinai and brought its scratched inscriptions to scholarly attention.
Alan Gardiner
Acrophonic reading, 1916
Working from the published drawings, proposed that the Sinai signs be read acrophonically — each sign standing for the first consonant of the word naming its picture.
George Bass
Uluburun, 1984–94
Ran eleven seasons on the Uluburun wreck for the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, recovering the cargo in three-dimensional record.
Cemal Pulak
Uluburun campaigns
Directed and published work on the Uluburun cargo with the Institute of Nautical Archaeology; the finds are held at the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology.
Where the objects are held
Five institutions carry most of the material record