Zeus statue in Istanbul Archaeology Museum, 2006
(photo by Nevit Dilmen via Wikimedia Commons)
It would have been a day much like any other in Gaza towards
the end of the summer in 1879: hot, rainless, cloudless. Local workers were
quarrying stone in one of the sand hills south of the city, as they often did. They
would find antiquities periodically, usually without attention, selling them
or throwing them away. But none of that would have prepared them for the over-life-sized
marble statue, preserved to a height of 10 feet, they found lying in the sand
on this day. The sculpture depicted a seated figure with its left arm and legs
sawn off, the right arm broken at the elbow – Zeus, though no one would have
known this yet. News of the find spread quickly. An English-language newspaper
in Constantinople, the Commercial
Advertiser (remember, Gaza was then part of the Ottoman Empire), carried a
notice, picked up soon after by the New
York Herald. “Discovery of a Colossal God of the Philistines at Gaza,” the
headline proclaimed; and the article boasted the report of what it claimed was
an Arab eyewitness. Via the Herald,
the report was soon carried in papers throughout the English-speaking world (and
beyond) – from the Aberystwith Observer
to the Ouachita Telegraph to the Wallaroo Times and Mining Journal. The
Pasha of Jerusalem, whose administrative territory for the Ottomans included
Gaza, heard too – he sent soldiers to guard the statue, which legally belonged
to Sultan in Constantinople.
This much is certain. Additional
details of the later (mis)adventures of the statue are harder to confirm, but
two complementary accounts plausibly fill in some gaps.1 The Rev. Henry R. Coleman saw the statue in July 1880 while it sat in a Muslim
cemetery in Gaza itself. Only in April had the authorities begun to move the
sculpture, and in three months it traveled only five miles. As it was, it took
300 fellahin (peasants) and a special wagon constructed on the spot to
transport the statue this far. By November the statue had made it to the Jaffa
pier, where Chevarrier the French vice-consul saw it. And there it sat, more
than a year after its discovery, as the Austrian commander who was to take the
statue by ship to Constantinople refused, out of fear of sinking from its
weight (estimated at over 6 tons).
Discrepancies
and confusion
“This information . . . certainly requires
correction, so that false information about the statue does not come into
circulation.” So worried biblical scholar Hermann Guthe in Leipzig. Guthe was
concerned about the Arab eyewitness’s incorrect description of the gesture of
the left arm – which, as it was entirely missing, had no gesture – but he could
have been writing about any number of false rumors. The same Arab eyewitness
reportedly claimed that the statue was 15 feet high, when in fact the preserved
portion is 10 feet. Without a good image of the statue, its identity was the
subject of wild guesses: Baal, the god Dagon, an Assyrian monument
commemorating their conquest of Palestine. “Others are at liberty to claim it
to be a heroic statue of Samson . . . while others may regard it as the
petrified body of Goliath of Gath if they choose.”2
Sketches of the statue by Murad (in Guthe 1879),
Conder (1882), and Mendel (Catalogue des
sculptures, tome 2, 1914)
Then there was the matter of the stone quarriers’
reaction. In 1882, pioneering surveyor Claude Conder wrote about it in a report
from Constantinople, where he was visiting the Imperial Museum and saw the
statue.3
Conder claimed that the workers who discovered the statue immediately began to
attack it. (He believed they had damaged the face, but that the missing limbs
of the statue had been broken off when discovered.) The statue was saved only
through the efforts of Rev. W. Shapira, who convinced the Pasha of Jerusalem to
have soldiers guard the site. In Conder’s story the motivation of the Arab
workers to mutilate the statue is left unclear, but a reader in 1882 probably
would have filled it in: the Muslims of Gaza were legendary for their
“fanaticism”. The Rev. W. Shapira of Conder’s tale is Alexander William
Schapira, a Russian Jew who was baptized at 21 in Kishinev, spent time as a
clergyman in England, and served as a missionary in Gaza (and, at other times
in his life, in Sierra Leone and Australia). Schapira was praised in missionary
circles for his work with local schools and the medical dispensary (through
which he evangelized in Gaza) and for reportedly ending the slave trade there.
Accounts of visiting missionaries and other believers routinely refer to the
“fanatical” Muslims of Gaza, their low morals – including their drinking – and
Schapira’s supposed positive effect on them.4
Schapira himself spread stories of the Gazans’ “abuses and insults,” stones,
and beatings reported to him upon his arrival in Beirut, before even reaching
Palestine, in a letter published in 1879.5
In fact, Conder had described the “native peasantry” of Palestine as a whole as
“brutally ignorant, fanatical, and, above all, inveterate liars.”6
So it is not surprising that the widely-shared Commercial Advertiser report states clearly what Conder seems to
imply: the Pasha placed a guard to “prevent any injury by the fanatics of
Gaza”.
A very different version, however, is provided by the
French journalist Joseph Reinach.7
In Reinach’s tale we read that, on finding the statue, the workmen immediately
contacted a Greek merchant in Gaza and sold it to him for 20 pounds. After he had
paid them the money, the Pasha of Jerusalem heard of the discovery and placed a
guard (there is no mention of Schapira in this story). However, the workmen
refused to repay the merchant, ultimately returning his money only under threat
of incarceration. Nowhere does Reinach describe or even hint at intentional
damage to the statue. The Pasha, meanwhile, is portrayed as focused on selling
the statue: he had already received an offer from the Prussian consul in
Jerusalem, and Reinach urges the French not to lose out.
Each of these stories trades on a stereotype of
Arabs: either as violent and fanatical or as greedy. Both are probably
exaggerated, but in reality Reinach’s is probably closer to correct – it is
supported by a first-hand account edited by Guthe. This is ironic, since that
first-hand account – the most detailed and probably the most reliable report on
the discovery of the statue – comes (indirectly) via a Baron von Münchhausen.
In response to Guthe’s request for more information, Münchhausen had sent an
Armenian, George Murad, nephew and secretary of the German vice-consul, to
Gaza. Besides inspecting the statue first-hand, Murad interviewed someone who
identified himself as Michael Basale, the man in Gaza to whom the workmen sold
the statue.
In that account, though, there is no mention of
incarceration or the refusal to repay. Guthe does mention that the Germans,
English, Americans, and French were all interested in the statue, and that
there was an offer of 200 Turkish pounds for the statue from an unknown source.
But the Pasha had already been instructed by Constantinople by December 1879
that the statue should be sent there. After all, Ottoman antiquities laws – the
latest enacted in 1874 – stated that such finds were property of the state. Apparently
not everyone knew of such things, however: in April 1881 – by which point the
statue was apparently already in Constantinople – rumors about offers for the
statue were still being discussed. At that time, the Baltimore papers reported
that John Baldwin Hay, former U.S. consul-general to Beirut, had met with Mayor
Latrobe to advise him that a “statue of Baal” from Gaza could be obtained for
one of Baltimore’s parks for a low price. Hay claimed to have already been
offered the statue for $50. The mayor indicated that the city would not be
interested in the statue due to the high cost of delivering it. Instead he
suggested the Smithsonian might be, since the government could transport it
cheaply on a “returning war vessel.”8
There is so much confusion about the find that even
the identification of the site is unclear. In 1882 Conder identified it
matter-of-factly as Tell el-Ajjul, now known to be an important Bronze Age
site, about 7 kilometers (4 miles) southwest of Gaza. Scholarship on the statue
has nearly universally claimed its provenance as Ajjul, almost always citing
Conder – probably because Conder’s article was widely circulated when reprinted
in the Survey of Western Palestine Memoirs the following year.9
But we should remember that there are four independent accounts from 1879: the Commercial Advertiser report; a brief
letter in the 1880 Palestine Exploration
Fund Quarterly Statement from Dr. Thomas J. Chaplin (director of the
British Hospital for the Jews in Jerusalem, in service of the London Society
for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews); Guthe’s edited article; and
Joseph Reinach’s piece. Reinach is the only one to name the site where the
statue was found, and he names it as “Tell-el-Ajoul”. But it is not clear
whether Conder’s source is independent of Reinach; Conder was writing over two
years after the statue was found, and was not in Palestine at the time of the
discovery. And Ajjul does not fit the locational information given in
independent accounts: they generally agree that the site was an hour and a half
from Gaza and near the seacoast, and Guthe’s report adds it was just south of
Wadi Gaza (Nahal Besor). Ajjul is closer to Gaza, on the north of the wadi
(that is, a seasonal river or stream), and over a mile from the coast. In fact,
there seems to have been widespread confusion about the exact location of
Ajjul, at least until the Palestine Exploration Fund published the Survey of
Western Palestine Memoirs and map in the early 1880s.10
 |
| Survey of Western Palestine map, 1880 (click to enlarge) |
 |
| Musil's map (Karte von Arabia Petraea), 1907 |
Meanwhile, in 1886 German-American engineer Gottlieb
Schumacher made an excursion on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund to the
Gaza region, where he was told by several people that the statue had in fact
been found at a different site, a mile to the west of Ajjul and on the south
side of Wadi Gaza, which they called Tell en Keiz (the same as the Survey of
Western Palestine’s Tell Nujeid).11
Twenty years later, Alois Musil visited the site, which he called Tell en-Nḳêd (Tell en-Nuqeid), noting that it
had been used as a quarry and that a statue had been found there.12 This site fits the locational information
(distance from Gaza, south of Wadi Gaza, close to the seashore). Schumacher
also noted trenches on the top of the site, which would fit quarrying activity,
while Ajjul showed no such signs. Finally, by the time the British Survey of
Palestine surveyed the area during the 1920s, the site was known as Tell eṣ-Ṣanam
– ṣanam being Arabic for “idol”.13
In other words, at some point after the Zeus statue was discovered, the local
residents started calling the site “the mound of the idol”.14
 |
| Survey of Palestine map, 1931 (click to enlarge) |
Pivotal
moments and scholarly myths
The traditional narrative in the archaeology of
Israel/Palestine is that neither the imperial Ottoman authorities nor local
residents were much interested in antiquities.15
Pride of place is given to the British Mandate for organizing the Department of
Antiquities, enacting antiquities laws, and for establishing a national museum.
But this is a scholarly myth. We find that the people of Palestine were often
very interested in the past of their land and its material remains.16
The Ottoman administration, meanwhile, enacted a series of antiquities laws
starting in 1869.17 They
founded the Imperial Museum in Constantinople, and later set up a museum in
Palestine as well.18
Conder’s visit to the Imperial Museum coincides with the beginning of the
tenure of Osman Hamdi Bey, its first Turkish director. He paints a picture of
chaos to which Hamdi succeeded: no museum catalogue; lack of provenance or
other basic information in many cases; statue fragments organized by body part.
We as readers might be tempted to see this as an Orientalist characterization,
but Conder’s presentation clearly favors the Turkish Hamdi at the expense of
his German predecessor. Hamdi is shown as concerned with compliance with
antiquities law and ensuring that finds in provinces like Palestine were
brought to the museum in Constantinople. “I had great satisfaction,” Conder
says, “in explaining to him that the Society by which I was sent out [the
Palestine Exploration Fund] had never transgressed in this respect since the
regulations were first promulgated in 1874” – though he says nothing about
following the earlier law of 1869. In fact, privately the Palestine Exploration
Fund expressed a very different reality. As its secretary Walter Besant wrote
to the British consul in Jerusalem around 1874, “we have broken the law for six
years at least, and we shall go on breaking it, until we are stopped, with
every coin we bring away from the place.”19
Perhaps the narrative of Ottoman indifference to antiquities was a way for
Western scholars and institutions to justify their ignoring Ottoman
regulations.
Examples of the "seated Zeus" statue type,
allowing a reconstruction of the complete Gaza Zeus
(Salomon Reinach, Répertoire de la statuaire grecque et romaine, Tome 2 vol. 1, 1897)
While at the museum, Conder looked for material from
the Levant that he knew. He sketched the Gaza Zeus “from the original on the
porch of the museum.” But otherwise Conder only recognized the Luwian
hieroglyphic inscriptions known as the “Hamath stones.” His impression is
confirmed by the summary catalogue of the Imperial Museum’s collection
published that same year by Salomon Reinach (Joseph’s brother), soon to become
a prominent classical archaeologist.20
The few other Levantine objects – at least of those objects for which provenance
was known – are all from Syria and Lebanon: a statue from Baalbek, a bust from
Palmyra, two lead sarcophagus fragments from Homs, a Phoenician sarcophagus
from brought from “Syria.” Most artifacts are from Anatolia (Turkey), northern
Africa, or Cyprus. Conder refers to the absence of the boundary stones of
Gezer, seized in 1874 by the governor of Jerusalem, but unknown to Hamdi Bey.
Hamdi was interested in the famous
Siloam Inscription, found about the same time as the Gaza statue, but it would
not reach the Imperial Museum for several more years. It seems that the Gaza
Zeus may have been the first object from Palestine to become part of the
Imperial Museum collection. Conder’s article provides a brief but fascinating
glance at the Imperial Museum at exactly this time – a pivotal moment both for
Palestinian antiquities entering the museum and for its stewardship under Hamdi
Bey.
Or was it? Ottoman historian Edhem Eldem has pointed
out how, even among scholars aware of and specializing in Ottoman interest in
antiquities, there has been an exaggerated focus on Osman Hamdi Bey. This cult
of personality has had a distorting effect: scholars fail to acknowledge the
gradually increasing Ottoman interest in antiquities over the course of the
nineteenth century. They routinely miss the 1869 antiquities law, claiming the
1874 regulation to be the first. These trends in scholarship can be traced in
this very report from Conder about the Imperial Museum. Here, as in so many
other ways, Claude Conder was a true pioneer in the field.
1 Rob Morris, “The Stone Idol of Gaza,” Chicago Tribune, August 26, 1880, p.7; “Sciences, Littérature, Beaux-Arts,”
Journal officiel de la République Française 12 no. 328 (November 30, 1880): 11731.
2 From a column shared in several papers; the
earliest example I can find is in The
Commonwealth (Topeka, KS), November 8, 1879, p. 2. The petrified body of
Goliath is a reference to the Cardiff Giant and various copycat hoaxes. See
Mark Rose, “When Giants Roamed the Earth,” Archaeology 58
no. 6 (November/December 2005).
3 Claude Conder, “Notes from Constantinople,” Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly
Statement 1882: 147-149.
4 Samuel Müller, “A Visit to Sharon and Philistia. Part
IV.—Gaza and Beit Jebrin” (trans. A.G. Weld), Missionary Life vol. 12 (1881): 440; Louisa H.H. Tristram, “The Land of the Philistines, with a Sunday at
Gaza,” The Church-Worker, vol. 1
(1882): 4-5; William Berryman Ridges, My
Ramble Through Bible Lands (1886), p. 11.
5 “Gaza: New Work in an Old City,” The Church Missionary Intelligencer and Record n.s. vol. 4 (1879):
155-156.
6 Claude Conder, “The Present Condition of Palestine,” Jewish Chronicle, November 1, 1878, pp.
10-11. Reprinted in Palestine Exploration
Fund Quarterly Statement 1879: 9. (But Conder graciously adds that “they
have qualities which would, if developed, render them a useful population.”)
7 Letter of December 17, 1879 from Gaza, in Revue politique et littéraire, 2nd
series, 9 no. 28 (January 10 1880): 667-668. Reprinted in Revue archéologique n.s. 21 no. 39 (1880): 57-58; English summary
in “Antiquarian News,” The Antiquary
vol. 1 (January-June 1880): 89-90.
8 “Statue of Baal for Baltimore,” Baltimore Sun, April 5,1881, p. 1; “The Statue of Baal for Sale,” Washington Post, April 7, 1881 (from the
Baltimore American).
9 Among many others, George Adam Smith, The Historical Geography of the Holy Land
(1894), p. 188; Charles Clermont-Ganneau, “Sur quelques localités de
Palestine mentionnées dans la vie de Pierre l’Ibère,” in Etudes d’archéologie orientale,
vol. 2, by C. Clermont-Ganneau (1897), p. 13; Martin A. Meyer, History of the City of Gaza (1907), p. 152; Arthur Bernard Cook, Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion, vol. 3 pt. 1. (1940), p. 557 (following
Reinach); Nelson Glueck, Deities and
Dolphins (1965), p. 498; Carol A.M. Glucker, The City of Gaza in the Roman and Byzantine Periods (1987), p. 67;
Asher Ovadiah and Sonia Mucznik, “The Zeus from Gaza Re-examined”, Archivo Español de
Arqueología 70 (1997): 5.
10 Victor Guérin (Description géographique,
historique et archéologique de la Palestine. Judée vol. 2, 1869, p. 213) notes that some
maps showed Ajjul south of Wadi Gaza, singling out C.W.M. Van de Velde’s Map of
the Holy Land, 1:315,000, Gotha: Justus Perthes (1865). See also Van de Velde, Memoir to Accompany the Map of the Holy Land
(1858), p. 53, where he notes “Tell el-’Ajûr [sic], 1 ½ hours S.W. of Gaza, at
the entrance and S. of Wady Ghŭzzeh,” among the sites mentioned to him by the
Bedouin (in other words, which he did not personally visit). Note the time, position south of the wadi, and position
along the coast all match Tell Nuqeid. Charles Warren (“The Plain of
Philistia,” Palestine Exploration Fund
Quarterly Statement 1871: 86) describes “Tel Ajur” [sic] as on the coast,
at the mouth of Wadi Gaza; immediately above this, he also noted that he found
van de Velde’s map “hopelessly in error” for the Gaza region, but “found little
chance of correcting it.” Other than Guérin, the only source I
have found that appears to place Ajjul correctly before the publication of the
Survey of Western Palestine Memoirs is Baedeker, ed., Palaestina und Syrien: Handbuch für Reisende (1875), p. 329
(Eng translation 1876 p. 315): “Tell
el-‘Adjûl [‘Ajûl in English
transliteration] 1 hr 5 min from Gaza.” As late as 1887, the Franciscan priest Liévin de
Hamme (Edouard Colleman) placed it two minutes south of Wadi Gaza and about 1 ½
hours from Gaza in his detailed and valuable travel guide: Liévin de Hamme, Guide-indicateur des sanctuaires et lieux
historiques de la Terre-Sante (3rd rev. ed.; 1887), pp. 205-206.
11 Gottlieb Schumacher, “Researches in Southern Palestine,” Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly
Statement 1886: 177; Map of Western Palestine, 1:63,360, Sheet XIX (London,
1880); Claude R. Conder and Horatio H. Kitchener, The Survey of Western Palestine: Memoirs of the Topography, Orography,
Hydrography, and Archaeology, vol. III. Sheets XVII-XXVI, Judaea (1883), p.
254.
12 Alois Musil, Arabia Petraea. II. Edom. Topographischer Reisebericht, pt. 2 (1908), p. 53; also Musil’s map: Kaiserliche Akademie der
Wissenschaften, Karte von Arabia Petraea, 1:300,000, 1907. To explain part of
the variety of pronunciations of the site’s name, Conder (Tent Work in Palestine; A Record of Discovery and Adventure, vol.
2, 1879, pp. 213-214) reported that, among the Bedouin, qof was pronounced as
“jof”. See also Rafael Talmon “19th Century Palestinian
Arabic: The Testimony of Western Travellers,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 29 (2004): 216.
13 Survey of Palestine, 1:20,000, Series Topocadastral, Sheet
9-9 Wādi Ghazza (Jaffa,
1931). See also Schedule of Historical Monuments and Sites, Palestine Gazette Extraordinary 1375,
Supplement no. 2 (November 24, 1944), p. 1311.
14 As far as I know, the meaning of the site’s name and its
connection to the discovery of the statue have been highlighted only by
Felix-Marie Abel, “Les confins de la Palestine et de l’Egypte
sous les Ptolémées,” Revue Biblique
49 (1940): 69. Other than Abel, scholars
who have identified Tell en-Nuqeid/Tell eṣ-Ṣanam as the findspot of the statue
include (Musil); Louis-Hugues Vincent, “La Palestine dans les papyrus ptolémaiques de Gerza,” Revue
Biblique 29 (1920): 175; W.M.F. Petrie, Ancient
Gaza vol. 1 (1931), p. 2; Antoine Duprez, Jésus et les dieux guérisseurs: à propos de Jean, vols. 8-12 (1970),
p. 78.
15 As an example, Neil Asher Silberman, Digging for God and Country (1982),
154-155. Many sources present Ottoman authorities only as an occasional
nuisance to the brave explorers and excavators, or ignore them entirely.
16 See, for example, Louis Fishman, “The
1911 Haram al-Sharif Incident: Palestinian Notables versus the Ottoman
Administration,” Journal of Palestine
Studies 34 no. 3 (Spring 2005): 6-22.
17 The texts of the 1869 and 1874 antiquities laws were
published by Grégoire Aristarchi (Bey), Législation ottomane, pt. 3. Droit administratif
(1874), pp. 161-167. For a useful summary of
Ottoman antiquities laws of 1869, 1874, 1884, and 1906 (last in effect in
Turkey until 1973): Sibel Özel, “Under the Turkish Blanket Legislation: The
Recovery of Cultural Property Removed from Turkey,” International
Journal of Legal Information 38 no. 2 (Summer 2010): Article 10, pp.
178-179.
18 See, for example, Wendy Shaw, Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization
of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (2003); Edhem Eldem, “From
Blissful Indifference to Anguished Concern: Ottoman Perceptions of Antiquities,
1799-1869,” in Scramble for the Past:
A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753-1914 (ed. Z. Bahrani,
Z. Çelik, and E. Eldem; 2011), pp. 281-329; Beatrice St. Laurent
with Himmet Taşkömür, “The
Imperial Museum of Antiquities in Jerusalem, 1890-1930: An Alternate
Narrative,” Jerusalem Quarterly
55 (2013): 6-45.
19 Letter from Walter Besant to Noel Temple
Moore, copying Charles Clermont-Ganneau, c. 1874 (Institut de France, Fonds
Clermont-Ganneau); quoted in Naomi Shepherd, The Zealous Intruders (1987), p. 219.
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