Layard
Shawn Malley,
Through an analysis of several Foreign Office memoranda
dealing with the “recovery” of Assyrian artifacts, “Layard Enterprise” argues
that archaeology served important diplomatic and, indeed, propagandistic
functions in the Eastern Ottoman Empire in the years leading up to the Crimean
War. Dovetailing excavation into imperial
issues of national “honour,” securing commercial
markets, deploying troops, and even spying, these documents represent an
underground genealogy for Austen Henry Layard—the key British agent in the FO’s
secret plot to transport archaeological “trophies” to London—that implicitly
challenges the romantic narrative of discovery and the paternalistic ideology
of Western stewardship so firmly embedded in narrative histories of British
Assyriology. The sub-theme of
self-promotion underpins this genealogy: particularly Layard’s own successful
manipulation of Western archaeological desire to secure an official position in
the aristocratic domain of the Foreign Office.
I develop these claims for archaeological imperialism by comparing the
Victorian experience with a contemporary instance of archaeological propaganda
in