Russian Scholars in the ‘Near East’: Archaeological Expeditions and Imperial Cultural Politics, 1856-1914

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In the course of the 19th century, the expansion of the Tsarist Empire towards the Black Sea and Central Asia stressed the political role of the scientific discipline of archaeology in the framework of Oriental Studies (vostokovedenie). This led to the establishment of specialised institutes at Universities and within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well as scientific societies and international expert conferences. Researchers from the Russian Empire thus received multiple possibilities to discuss their theses that they obtained from research conducted during scientific expeditions. Of particular interest was the region designated by Russian orientalists as the “Near East” comprising of Arabic, Ottoman, Iranian, Kurdish, and Afghan studies. In this field, a region became the focus of scholarly attention that had been long exposed to competing interpretative hegemonies by imperial interests in territorial conflicts between the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and Persia. Against this background, this project seeks to analyse the role of scientific expeditions of Russian archaeologists to the Balkans, to Palestine and to Persia (resp. Iran) for the Russian foreign cultural politics and the international circulation of knowledge.In the period between the end of the Crimean War (1856) and the beginning of World War I (1914), archaeological excavations not only served the purpose of scientific research on material remains, rather, archaeology functioned as an instrument of imperial cultural politics towards the near abroad. First, the scientific expeditions took an interest in the study of transnational cultural areas of assumed shared heritage. These areas at times stood in direct conflict with the existing lines of borders and thus fuelled the formation of new political alliances. In the second constellation, the competition with Western European states was the central motivation for Russian archaeological excavations as evident in the appropriation of the Christian heritage of the region. And third, archaeology provided the Russian Empire with the possibility to extend its sphere of influence by appropriating the past of culturally distinct spaces. These three constellations will be analysed in three chapters of a monograph by means of the case studies of the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople, the Russian Mission in Palestine and the expeditions into Iran organised by the Eastern departments of Russian archaeological societies. The research will result in the publication of a monograph and an edited volume.