Osman Hamdi Bey. Photo courtesy of the Archive of Istanbul Archaeological Museums

By Anand Holla

The last of the six-part lecture series on Archaeology and Heritage Conservation saw Professor Dr Edhem Eldem, Boaziçi University, talk on Osman Hamdi Bey: An Ottoman Archaeologist, to a keen audience at MIA Auditorium, recently.
With this lecture, the series organised by Qatar Museums and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Turkey in partnership with UCL Qatar (UCL-Q) as part of Qatar Turkey 2015 Year of Culture came to a close. The series introduced to Doha “the work of key Turkish experts in the fields of Archaeology and Heritage Conservation.” The informal lectures and talks, organised over two months, were aimed at students, faculty staff and general audiences.
Osman Hamdi Bey (1842-1910) has played a crucial role in Turkish arts, science and culture in the 19th century, transforming the Imperial Museum, later Istanbul Archaeology Museums, into one of the world’s leading archaeological collections.
Osman Hamdi is seen as the founder of Ottoman archaeology. “Although this is not entirely accurate and does injustice to some of his predecessors, it is true that as director of the Imperial Museum, he gave Ottoman archaeology the scientific foundations it had lacked until then,” says a note on the subject, shared by Dr Ferhan Sakal, Consultant – Head of Archaeology Operations, Qatar Museums.
“What makes his role and contribution particularly interesting is that he was never trained as an archaeologist, and never really became one. And yet, standing somewhere between the polymath and the autodidact, he combined his artistic talent, his familiarity with western culture, and his organisational acumen to turn a modest and almost random collection into one of the leading museums of the world, while at the same time placing the Ottoman Empire among the major actors on the international archaeological scene,” the note further adds.
His pioneering work in archaeology included drafting legislation protecting antiquities and historical sites, and he was also a celebrated painter. In his lecture, Eldem explored the life and work of this “extraordinary archaeologist, administrator and intellectual,” and discussed his legacy in Turkish and world archaeology today.
Followed by a quick reminder of the “prehistory” of Ottoman archaeology until Osman Hamdi’s appointment at the head of antiquities, the presentation took the audience through the nature and circumstances of his action, pointing out the systematic way in which he planned his intervention in a domain dominated by the West.  It also showed its inconsistencies, resulting from the adoption of a Eurocentric perspective in determining the norms and priorities of his cultural and scientific action. Eldem is a professor at the Department of History of Boaziçi University, Istanbul, and has taught as visiting professor at Berkeley, Harvard, at the EHESS, EPHE, and ENS in Paris, and has been a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He has worked on the Levant trade, Ottoman funerary epigraphy, the socio-economic development of Istanbul, the Ottoman Bank, archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, and late Ottoman first-person narratives and biographies, most notably Osman Hamdi Bey’s. He has curated a number of exhibitions on historical subjects and themes, and has written several books as well.