Bøger i Cambridge Library Collection - Archaeology serien

Charles Roach Smith (1806-90), born on the Isle of Wight and educated in Hampshire, was apprenticed to a lawyer at fifteen, but a year later transferred to a chemist, where he prospered, moving to London and becoming wealthy from a firm of wholesale druggists and his own chemist's shop in Lothbury, in the City of London. Sewerage and other works in the City meant that Roman and medieval artefacts were regularly coming to light, and Smith's collection eventually numbered more than 5,000 pieces. He eventually sold it to the British Museum, at far less than its market value, so that it could remain intact. This book, published in 1859, describes the excavations, and uses the finds he and others acquired to illustrate 'the institutions, the habits, the customs, and the arts of our forefathers'. It remains an invaluable record of finds arising from the Victorian redevelopment of London.

Combining a very active career as a prosperous paper manufacturer with the pursuit of various antiquarian interests, Sir John Evans (1823-1908) began the study of geology in the context of a court case over water rights for his paper mills, but extended his interests to the artefacts found in gravel beds in Britain, and in the Somme valley in France. This work was published in 1872, and was translated into French soon afterwards. Heavily illustrated, it describes stone implements from the Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods, including weapons, tools and ornaments, from cave and river-bed deposits as well as settlement sites. Evans also continued to research fossils, and was highly respected as a numismatist. He was a fellow of the Royal Society, the Geological Society, and the Society of Antiquaries. His son Arthur Evans (1851-1941) discovered the Minoan civilisation of Crete.

In 1863, the English architect John Turtle Wood (1821-90) resigned from a railway development project in western Turkey to begin his search at Ephesus for the Temple of Artemis, lost from view since the middle ages. In the first part of this well-illustrated 1877 publication, Wood describes the city and the initial excavations carried out with support from the British Museum. This survey of various structures concludes with Wood's work at the great theatre, where he found the Greek inscription that helped direct him to the correct location of the temple in 1869. Part II focuses on the exhausting four years that Wood spent excavating the temple, which was buried under many layers of sand. The appendix presents Greek and Latin inscriptions, with facing-page translations, from various Ephesian sites. Also reissued in this series, Edward Falkener's Ephesus (1862) includes a review of references to the temple in ancient writings.

The traveller and archaeologist Sir Charles Fellows (1799-1860) made several trips through Asia Minor. This work is an account of the first of these, recording his careful observations of the lands he travelled through. On this trip, he found ancient cities which were unknown to Europeans at that time, including Xanthos, the capital of ancient Lycia, dating from the fifth century BCE. Fellows' narrative brings the journey to life with vivid descriptions of the people and places he encountered, and detailed sketches of notable antiquities and inscriptions. First published in 1839, this work generated significant interest, fuelling the British Museum's eagerness to acquire antiquities from the region. Fellows was later knighted for his role in these acquisitions, though controversy surrounds their removal. Two of his later works, An Account of Discoveries in Lycia (1841) and The Xanthian Marbles (1843), are also reissued in this series.

The English architect and archaeologist Edward Falkener (1814-96) spent a fortnight sketching the ancient ruins of Ephesus during his trip through Anatolia in the 1840s. In Part I of this 1862 publication, he tries to reconstruct the architectural features of Ephesian buildings, tracing the history of the city. Falkener's accomplished sketches and layouts display his artistic talent, which won him the grand medal of honour at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1855. Part II focuses on the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Falkener surveys ancient writings relating to the Greek temple, which still awaited rediscovery at that time. Although his speculations about the location of the temple were later proven wrong by John Turtle Wood, who correctly identified the site in 1869 (his 1877 account is also reissued in this series), Falkener's work added to the Victorian interest in ancient architecture.

The son of a Turin lawyer, Bartolomeo Gastaldi (1818-79) initially followed in his father's footsteps but then abandoned the law to pursue his passion for geology and palaeontology. Later one of the founders of the Italian Alpine Club, Gastaldi was especially interested in the geology and glaciology of the Alps in his native Piedmont. The mineral gastaldite is named after him. This work, first published in Italian in 1862, is reissued here in the 1865 English translation prepared by Charles Harcourt Chambers (1826-76) for the Anthropological Society of London. Its importance lies in the meticulous descriptions, by Gastaldi and others, of the human remains and artefacts discovered at Stone Age and Bronze Age settlements on the site of lakes and peat bogs to the south of the Alps. Featuring engraved illustrations throughout, the work also includes Gastaldi's summary of discoveries since his book's first appearance.

The decipherment of the ancient cuneiform scripts was one of the major breakthroughs in nineteenth-century archaeology and linguistics. Among the scholars working on Old Persian was Christian Lassen (1800-76), professor of Sanskrit at Bonn. Lassen's book on cuneiform inscriptions from Persepolis appeared in 1836, a month before his friend Eugene Burnouf independently published very similar conclusions. Lassen's account gives vivid insights into the detective work involved, as he painstakingly compares individual words and grammatical forms with their Avestan and Sanskrit equivalents, and proposes sounds for the symbols. The book uses a specially designed cuneiform font, and credits the printer, Georgi of Bonn. This Cambridge Library Collection volume also includes a short monograph on Old Persian phonology published in Berlin in 1847 by the Assyriologist Julius Oppert (1825-1905). Oppert revisits Lassen's conclusions in the light of Henry Creswicke Rawlinson's important 1846 memoir on the trilingual Behistun inscription.

The Assyriologist George Smith (1840-76) was trained originally as an engraver, but was enthralled by the discoveries of Layard and Rawlinson. He taught himself cuneiform script, and joined the British Museum as a 'repairer' of broken cuneiform tablets. Promotion followed, and after one of Smith's most significant discoveries among the material sent to the Museum - a Babylonian story of a great flood - he was sent to the Middle East, where he found more inscriptions which contained other parts of the epic tale of Gilgamesh. In 1875, he published a history of Assyria for the 'Ancient History from the Monuments' series. Using biblical accounts as well as the Akkadian documents in clay and stone then being excavated in the area, Smith traces the history of the Assyrian empire from its origins until the fall of Nineveh in 612 BCE. Several other books by Smith are also reissued in this series.

First published in 1882, this clearly written account, accessible to non-specialists, is one of the principal works of the pioneering Celtic scholar Sir John Rhys (1840-1915). The son of a Welsh farmer and lead miner, Rhys went on to become the first professor of Celtic at the University of Oxford, principal of Jesus College, and a fellow of the British Academy. Knighted in 1907, Rhys had by then made significant contributions to the study of Celtic languages, travelling widely and examining many inscriptions at first hand. Here he covers Celtic etymology, ethnology and history in Britain from the time of Julius Caesar to the eleventh-century Scottish kingdoms. His Lectures on Welsh Philology (1877) and Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx (1901) are also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection. For the study of Celtic language, culture and mythology, the importance of Rhys's research is still acknowledged today.

Clement Huart (1854-1926) graduated in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Modern Greek and served as a French diplomat in Istanbul (or, as he called it, Constantinople) for twenty years before becoming Professor of Persian at the Ecole des Langues Orientales in Paris. He edited and translated many oriental texts and published widely on Middle-Eastern cultures. This 1897 publication describes a visit to Konya, where Huart hoped to find out more about the capital of the Seljuk Empire than was recorded in Byzantine or Persian sources. Travelling on horseback from Istanbul, Huart noted his impressions of archaeological sites and historic buildings, and recorded details of many inscriptions from the Seljuk period on mosques, mausoleums, caravanserais and fortresses. He also met the whirling dervishes. His fascinating account of his experiences is interwoven with references to medieval battles and Islamic legends, together with advice for future travellers to this rapidly modernising region.

The archaeologist D. G. Hogarth (1862-1927) was, when he died, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and president of the Royal Geographical Society. During his career he excavated in Cyprus, Egypt, Greece and Asia Minor. His books about his travels and excavations were well received and A Wandering Scholar in the Levant of 1896 (also reissued in this series) was described by T. E. Lawrence as 'one of the best travel books ever written'. This work, first published in 1909, contains six lectures on the origins of Ionia. Hogarth presents and evaluates the theories of the origins of Ionian culture that were popular at the time, and in the course of his discussion he delivers the results of some of his own excavations, including those at Ephesus in 1904. The work remains of interest to scholars and students of the region and of the history of archaeology.

The distinguished archaeologist David G. Hogarth (1862-1927) excavated in Cyprus, Egypt, Greece and Asia Minor over the course of his career. He wrote books about his excavations and travels to bring archaeology to a popular audience. His A Wandering Scholar in the Levant (1896; also reissued in this series) was described by T. E. Lawrence as 'one of the best travel books ever written'. Hogarth later became president of the Royal Geographical Society, and Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, from 1908 to 1927. This work, first published in 1889, describes his travels around Cyprus in the summer following his excavations at Old Paphos. He visited areas that had not been examined by archaeologists before, and the book contains many illustrations of buildings and objects he found during his journey, providing details of sites and landscapes still of interest to those studying the history of the island or of archaeology.

The archaeologist D. G. Hogarth (1862-1927) was, when he died, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and president of the Royal Geographical Society, whose gold medal he was also awarded. This 1910 book is his account of various episodes in his career from 1897, when he covered the Cretan revolt against Turkey for The Times, to his 1907 excavations in Asyut, Egypt. A mixture of travel writing and archaeological reporting - the volume also contains an academic report on the excavation of Carchemish - this book, a follow-up to his A Wandering Scholar in the Levant (also reissued in this series), and intended for a popular audience, remains a highly readable account of the practicalities behind Hogarth's intellectual career. It also provides background to Hogarth's political involvement with the Near East, as acting director of the Arab Bureau in Cairo during the First World War and an attendee at the Versailles peace conference.

Among the leading Egyptologists of his day, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) excavated over fifty sites and trained a generation of archaeologists. This single-volume reissue brings together two of his well-illustrated excavation reports. The first, originally published in 1896, covers the work undertaken in 1893-4 at Koptos (modern-day Qift), a key settlement in Upper Egypt on the Nile's east bank. This includes a chapter on classical inscriptions by David George Hogarth (1862-1927). The second report, first published in 1909, discusses recent archaeological work around Qurna in the Theban necropolis, including the discovery of an intact royal burial dating from the seventeenth dynasty. The epigraphic material is addressed in a chapter by James Herbert Walker (d.1914). Petrie wrote prolifically throughout his long career, and a great many of his other publications - for both specialists and non-specialists - are also reissued in this series.

Between 1900 and 1901, the Hungarian-born archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943) made the first of several significant trips through Central Asia. In 1903, he published this account of his journey from Calcutta to London via the deserts of Chinese Turkestan. The text is richly illustrated with photographs of locations on the route followed by Stein's party, as well as of the people they encountered and many of the artefacts they excavated in the vicinity of the ancient oasis town of Khotan. Stein intended his book to be accessible to non-specialists, and his descriptions of the many important archaeological discoveries, such as Sanskrit texts of Buddhist scriptures, are interspersed with compelling human details and anecdotes about traversing the challenging terrain of eastern Central Asia. The work of an indefatigable explorer, this book sheds light on the spread of Graeco-Buddhist culture along the Silk Route.

This overview of the famous and pioneering excavations of Heinrich Schliemann was first published in German in 1889, and in this extended English translation in 1891. The author, Carl Schuchhardt (1859-1943), had wide experience of excavations in both Asia Minor and Europe, and the translator, Eugenie Sellers (1860-1943), was the first female student of the British School at Athens. The book begins with a life of Schliemann, who had died in 1890, and goes on to describe his extraordinary discoveries at Troy and Mycenae, and his work at Tiryns, Ithaca and Orchomenos. It also contains two reports of later work at the mound of Hissarlik, the site of Troy, by Schliemann himself and his assistant Wilhelm Dorpfeld, which had not been included in the German edition. The book is illustrated with many line drawings, and includes the famous photograph of Sophia Schliemann wearing 'the gold of Troy'.

The Assyriologist George Smith (1840-76) was trained originally as an engraver, but was enthralled by the discoveries of Layard and Rawlinson. He taught himself cuneiform script, and joined the British Museum as a 'repairer' or matcher of broken cuneiform tablets. Promotion followed, and after one of Smith's most significant discoveries among the material sent to the Museum - a Babylonian story of a great flood - he was sent to the Middle East, where he found more inscriptions which contained other parts of the epic tale of Gilgamesh. In this 1875 work, a bestseller in its day, Smith describes his expedition, the difficulties encountered, and the discoveries, including hundreds of inscriptions which increased knowledge of the Babylonian and Assyrian civilisations but also had a profound effect on traditional biblical studies. Smith died in Aleppo in 1876, having revolutionised understanding of the ancient Near East.

Although best known as an archaeologist, William Greenwell (1820-1918) was also ordained as a priest and served as librarian of Durham Cathedral. A keen angler into his later years, he is known too for his creation of 'Greenwell's glory', a famous British trout fly. As an archaeologist, Greenwell excavated nearly 300 burial mounds, carrying out intensive fieldwork from 1862. First published in 1877, this work is a detailed account of some 230 Bronze Age barrows across England, largely in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Organised by parish, this work records these excavations, giving dimensions and descriptions of their form and finds. Accompanying the survey are contributions by the respected Oxford physician and physiologist George Rolleston (1829-81) describing the skulls found in the barrows. Featuring many illustrations of the finds, including the skulls, the book also contains an appendix discussing prehistoric flora and fauna.

Alessandro Palma Di Cesnola (1839-1914) travelled to Cyprus in 1873 to take up an honorary post secured by his brother Luigi, who was the American consul there and also an amateur archaeologist. Obtaining funding from the British financier Edwin Lawrence, Alessandro carried out his own excavations, chiefly around Salamis. Replete with more than 700 illustrations, this 1882 publication records the most notable artefacts from the Lawrence-Cesnola collection, including gold jewellery, ivory objects, engraved gems, coins, and terracotta statuettes. The book sheds considerable light on the ancient Egyptian, Phoenician, Greek and Roman influences that shaped Cypriot art over the centuries. Di Cesnola's activities generated controversy, however, as he had flouted regulations in removing these artefacts. After the British Museum declined to acquire the whole collection, the bulk of it was sold at auction. His brother's finds were recorded in Cyprus: Its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and Temples (1877), which is also reissued in this series.

Born in Italy, Luigi Palma di Cesnola (1832-1904) settled in the United States and fought for the North in the American Civil War, becoming a cavalry colonel. Appointed by Abraham Lincoln, he then served as consul to Cyprus from 1865 to 1877. As an amateur archaeologist, he directed excavations throughout the island. In this 1877 publication, including maps and illustrations, Cesnola gives a useful sketch of Cypriot history and contemporary customs in addition to providing an important record of his archaeological practices and discoveries. He covers a number of ancient settlements where significant finds were made, notably Paphos, Amathus and Kourion. Many of the uncovered artefacts were controversially removed from Cyprus and sold to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art; Cesnola served as its first director. His brother Alessandro's Salaminia (1882), recording his own excavations and discoveries in Cyprus, is also reissued in this series.

The Hungarian-born archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943) is probably best remembered today for his explorations in Chinese Turkestan, and especially his discovery of the Buddhist treasure of Dunhuang, described in his earlier works, Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan and Ruins of Desert Cathay (also reissued in this series). Stein was equally interested in the territory north-west of the North-West Frontier, and in this highly illustrated 1929 work he describes an expedition to survey the route of Alexander the Great's invasion of India in 326 BCE. Having long been intrigued by 'that comparatively small area to the west of the Indus which Alexander's march of conquest towards India for a brief span of time illuminates as it were with the light of a meteor', and by archaeological remains showing a blend of Hellenistic and Buddhist art, Stein offers a fascinating account of an ancient clash of civilisations.

The son of an Italian historian, Paul-Emile Botta (1802-70) served France as a diplomat and archaeologist. While posted as consul to Mosul in Ottoman Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), he excavated several sites, becoming in 1843 the first archaeologist to uncover an Assyrian palace at Khorsabad, where Sargon II had ruled in the eighth century BCE. As nobody could yet read the cuneiform inscriptions, Botta thought he had discovered Nineveh, and an enthused French government financed the recording and collecting of numerous artefacts. Many of the marvellous sculptures were put on display in the Louvre. Botta devoted himself to studying the inscriptions, and this 1848 publication, a contribution towards the later deciphering of the Akkadian language, presents a tentative catalogue of cuneiform characters that appear to be used interchangeably. Of related interest, Henry Rawlinson's Commentary on the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Babylonia and Assyria (1850) is also reissued in this series.

This book contains two works by William Kennett Loftus (1821-58) in which he describes his archaeological surveying and excavations in Mesopotamia between 1849 and 1855. An enthusiastic antiquarian and geologist, Loftus was appointed to the staff of the Turco-Persian Frontier Commission. On his travels, he located many ruins later identified as biblical cities, including Warkah (Uruk) and Tell el-Muqayyar (Ur). In 1854 Loftus was enabled by the newly formed Assyrian Excavation Fund to return to Warkah, and he excavated over a three-month period, discovering artefacts and cuneiform tablets which he sent to the British Museum. His Travels and Researches, describing his work in Mesopotamia up to 1852, was published in 1857, and his short account of his later work at Warkah in 1859, after his early death. These texts remain a record of the first discoveries in a region significant for its biblical history, but previously hardly visited by Europeans.

In 1820, the English traveller Sir Frederick Henniker (1793-1825) set out for Egypt, which he would explore for nearly three years. He sailed up the Nile, calling it 'the least romantic, but most useful of rivers', stopping off at many places along the way. His adventures were varied: he was the first known person to climb to the apex of the Pyramid of Khafre at Giza, and he acquired a second-century coffin that is now in the British Museum. He claimed to have met Egypt's khedive, Muhammad Ali Pasha, with whom he discussed English horses and military campaigns. Heading next to Mount Sinai and Jerusalem, he was brutally attacked by bandits on the road to Jericho, leaving him injured and naked. He recovered and continued his journey through the Middle East and back to England, where he published this lively and often amusing account of his adventures in 1823.

Well versed in oriental languages and antiquities, Claudius James Rich (1786/7-1821), the East India Company's resident at Baghdad, visited and described many historic locations in present-day Iraq and Iran. Following his early death from cholera in Shiraz, Rich's widow prepared his writings for publication. His two-volume Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan, and on the Site of Ancient Nineveh (1836) is also reissued in this series. The present work, which appeared in 1839, contains Rich's 1811 journal of his first visit to the site of the ancient city of Babylon, followed by the archaeological memoir he published in 1815. 'Remarks on the Topography of Ancient Babylon', an 1815 paper by the geographer James Rennell (1742-1830), who queried Rich's conclusions, is included, and Rich's 1818 memoir of his second visit then responds to Rennell. A narrative of Rich's Persian travels in 1821, featuring 'hitherto unpublished cuneiform inscriptions copied at Persepolis', completes the work.

Sir Arthur John Evans (1851-1941) famously excavated the ruins of Knossos on Crete and uncovered the remains of its Bronze Age Minoan civilisation (as described in his multi-volume work The Palace of Minos at Knossos, also reissued in this series). But he had already visited the island prior to this: in 1894, during his first trip, he found examples of an ancient pictographic writing system that pre-dated the Phoenician alphabet later adapted by the Greeks. First published in 1895, this work, illustrated with examples throughout, documents and describes these discoveries, and demonstrates that the earliest finds date from a period before even the most ancient known Semitic scripts. Evans also records evidence of later scripts which were subsequently categorised as Linear A and Linear B (only the latter has been deciphered since his death). The final section of the book describes in detail the pottery and other finds from the Hagios Onuphrios deposit.

An anthropologist and archaeologist working for much of his life in the British Museum, Thomas Athol Joyce (1878-1942) succeeded in making American archaeology more accessible to non-specialists. Through careful analysis and presentation of the available evidence from South and Central America, he secured his reputation as an authority in this field, especially with regard to Mayan civilisation. Drawing on his wide reading of the published literature, he produced three pioneering and highly illustrated textbooks. The present work appeared in 1912 and confined itself to South America, beginning its coverage with Colombia in the north. Given the better preservation of the material culture, there is a particular focus on Peru and the Incas. The topics discussed range from burials, mummies and shrunken heads to nose ornaments, musical instruments, tattoos and weaving. Joyce's Mexican Archaeology (1914) and Central American and West Indian Archaeology (1916) are also reissued in this series.

An anthropologist and archaeologist working for much of his life at the British Museum, Thomas Athol Joyce (1878-1942) succeeded in making American archaeology more accessible to non-specialists. Through careful analysis and presentation of the available evidence from South and Central America, he secured his reputation as an authority in this field, especially with regard to Mayan civilisation. Drawing on his wide reading of the published literature, he produced three pioneering and highly illustrated textbooks. The present work appeared in 1916 and focuses on Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and the West Indies. The laws, religion, customs and daily life of the various indigenous peoples are discussed and compared, with thorough illustration and examination of a range of artefacts. Joyce intended his summary of the evidence to serve as 'a signpost for future investigators'. His South American Archaeology (1912) and Mexican Archaeology (1914) are also reissued in this series.

An anthropologist and archaeologist working for much of his life at the British Museum, Thomas Athol Joyce (1878-1942) succeeded in making American archaeology more accessible to non-specialists. Through careful analysis and presentation of the available evidence from South and Central America, he secured his reputation as an authority in this field, especially with regard to Mayan civilisation. Drawing on his wide reading of the published literature, he produced three pioneering and highly illustrated textbooks. The present work appeared in 1914 and focuses on Mexican and Mayan culture. The topics discussed include social structure and daily life, warfare, trade and architecture, as well as religious observance and mythology. Particular attention is paid to the calendar, with appendices providing the names of days and months along with a provisional dating scheme. Joyce's South American Archaeology (1912) and Central American and West Indian Archaeology (1916) are also reissued in this series.