A “delightful” group of members of the Penn and Philadelphia community crowded into the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Sunday for “Turkish Delight!,” a three-hour celebration of the opening of the new exhibition, “Archaeologists and Travelers in Ottoman Lands.”
“Turkish Delight!” festivities included 19th-century Turkish and modern folk-rock fusion music, preparation of traditional Turkish salads and demonstrations of water marbling on paper. Children painted tiles and made evil-eye bracelets.
Special guest Nihan Bekar, Turkish Consulate General in New York, kicked off the event with a welcoming speech. She was joined by Richard Hodges, the Williams director of the Penn Museum and exhibition co-curators and professors Renata Holod and Robert Ousterhout in cutting the ribbon on the exhibit.
The exhibition explores the intersecting paths of three prominent figures — Turkish painter and archaeologist Osman Hamdi Bey, photographer John Henry Haynes and Penn professor of Archaeology Hermann Hilprecht — united by Penn’s and America’s first archaeological expedition to the ancient Near East in Nippur in modern-day Iraq.
The display features two 19th-century oil paintings, about 50 archeological photographs and more than 40 artifacts from ancient Nippur.
Apart from ancient history, the exhibition revealed the logistical and legal difficulties archaeologists faced 100 years ago when embarking on a new project. “Starting an archaeological expedition is very complex,” explained Holod. “You have to be an excellent diplomat,” she added.
Holod also said that she hoped the exhibition will educate people about Haynes who Ousterhout called “the father of American archeological photography.”
Haynes, a notable photographic artist featured in National Geographic, was rarely credited for his work. One of his Nippur photographs was used by Penn archaeology professor Hilprecht as a frontispiece for a book, in which he highly exaggerated his contribution to the Nippur expeditions. Following accusations of academic violation, Hilprecht was forced to resign in 1910.
Incidentally, the same photograph had been copied in oil by Hamdi Bey and is now featured in the exhibit together with another painting of his.
“Archaeologists and Travelers in Ottoman Lands” will be running through Feb. 6, 2011.
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