Who Are You? Preliminary Results of the Academic Genealogies of Near Eastern Scholars (AGNES) Project
november 2022 | Vol. 10.11
By Rachel Hallote, Diane Harris Cline, and Eric H. Cline
Where do archaeologists and other scholars of the ancient Near East come from? Who were the intellectual fathers and mothers and who are their children and grandchildren, some of whom lead the field today?
The Academic Genealogies of Near Eastern Scholars (AGNES) project comes out of years of conversations about the history and development of the discipline of archaeology of the southern Levant. Our field has lost many senior scholars in recent years, including some who knew a tremendous amount of history about previous generations. We decided to act before we lose any more.
We wanted to examine several questions about our discipline, specifically, whether certain preconceived notions are accurate. For instance, we wanted to know whether W. F. Albright was really the main “father” of the discipline, as is often asserted. We also wanted to know whether certain well-known “big digs” were as influential as they are sometimes thought to be.
Figure 1: Graph showing the countries in which survey respondents have done fieldwork most often.
The AGNES project is two-fold. One part involves an oral history based on information gathered from a survey of current scholars, and the other involves research into scholars of previous generations.
As a first step, we compiled a survey and distributed it to as many scholars of the ancient Near East as possible, with the help of the ASOR mailing list, Jack Sasson’s “Agade” listserv, and social media. The survey contained questions about personal academic genealogy and the excavations in which they had participated. Before conducting this survey, we went to our school’s institutional review boards, which both agreed that our project constitutes oral history, not ‘human subject research.’
Figure 2: Excavations and Excavators Survey respondents in relation to excavations on which they have worked. Excavations are shown in dark blue and excavators in light blue.
Over 250 scholars have responded to the survey. From the survey data, we compiled Excel spreadsheets with relevant categories and from those we created edgelists with one-to-one correspondences as pairs of people (i.e., Cline: Muhly as advisee and advisor) and people with excavations (i.e., Hallote: Miqne as participant and dig). Creating such edgelists is a necessary step for rendering the visual depictions of relationships, which are called sociograms in Social Network Analysis.
Concerning excavation work, a full 41% of survey respondents (101 people) said that they’d most often excavated in Israel (Figure 1). However, this was then followed by “none of the above” — that is people who either haven’t excavated at all or have excavated in places not given as specific choices on the survey — and then by Turkey, Cyprus, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria in that order.
Figure 3: Excavations and Excavators shown in relation to each other as a sine curve. Excavations are shown in dark blue and excavators in light blue.
Figure 2 is a sociogram that compiles all the data relating to participants in excavations, and visually connects participants to all the excavations in which they have participated while Figure 3 demonstrates the same connections but in a sine curve.
The predominance of Israel likely reflects a skew—people whom we reached most successfully were colleagues who work in our field or in those related to ours. It also likely reflects the fact that digging in Israel is particularly accessible, due to the field school model. This also makes them ideal for non-archaeological professionals in ancient Near Eastern studies (linguists, etc.) who want to experience an excavation. However, the tremendous number of other countries, and sites, at which the survey respondents have excavated shows the large reach that ASOR has in terms of geographical and chronological territory currently being investigated.
Figure 4: Survey respondents who worked at particular excavations.
As to which “big digs” are actually “big digs”: We chose excavations to include in our list based on the sheer size and scale of the projects. We included digs that ran for multiple seasons and that had anywhere from 50 to 80 or more people coming through as volunteers every season of their existence. But the survey data regarding specific excavations reflects another skew; obviously there are generations of professionals who worked at Hesbon and Lahav, not just two and three respectively (Figure 4). We attribute this to the fact that while we distributed our survey widely, not everyone filled it out!
But even with the skew, the survey results demonstrate that many professionals in the discipline worked at excavation sites that we did not list. In fact, it seems that these “big digs” didn’t or don’t produce professional archaeologists as much as we thought they did. We might want to interpret this as a reflection of the fact that most undergraduate volunteers don’t go on to become professional archaeologists.
Figure 5: Number of survey respondents who knew who their advisor’s advisor was
Turning now to the question of academic genealogies, one thing that jumped out at us right away is that a large number of respondents — fully 60 of the 253 respondents (or nearly a quarter) — didn’t know the name of their advisor’s advisor (Figure 5).
This was surprising, but probably shouldn’t be; it demonstrates that by and large scholars are interested in their actual research material, not in the history of their discipline.
Nevertheless, our survey yielded 539 names of individual scholars, with a total of 441 links showing advisor/advisee relationships for those who received a PhD. These are graphically depicted in Figure 6. Everyone who reported such an advisee:advisor relationship for the PhD in the survey is included in this sociogram, although those with fewer than four people in their “family tree” are collected at the bottom of the image; note also that this does not include the data regarding MAs, which we may either add in or do separately in the future. As can be seen, we were able to connect multiple generations; the longest such pathway covers nine generations and more than a century.
Figure 6: Full results of academic family trees, showing those with four or more scholars. Those with fewer than four people in their trees are collected at the bottom of the image
Of greatest interest is that our results demonstrate that there is a huge diversity in terms of pathways into the discipline. In fact, our data show that the standard narratives about the field do not reflect reality—for instance, contrary to popular belief, William F. Albright, while extremely important, is not the true father of the discipline. Instead, as can be seen in Figure 7, it is the German Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch of Leipzig University who is truly the Ur-Doktorvater of almost all American and Israeli archaeologists as well as multiple Assyriologists and biblical scholars. And please note that we can trace this lineage back even farther (Figure 8), to the mid-18th century Semitic linguist Johann Michaelis, who may have influenced Carsten Niebuhr’s very early eastern explorations.
Figure 7: Freidrich Delitzsch and his academic descendants
As Figure 8 shows, Albright turns out to be only one of many “cousin lineages” that we have uncovered, for he was the academic grandson of Delitzsch, just as were Benjamin Mazar, George Reisner, George Barton, Max Margolis, Albert Clay, Cyrus Adler, and James Montgomery. Moreover, Delitzsch’s genealogical academic family, which we are about to examine more closely, is in turn only one of three main “families” that we have identified. All three academic families can be seen in Figure 9, depicted in dark blue, green, and brown.
So, who was Friedrich Delitzsch? First and foremost, he was an Assyriologist who had studied at the University of Jena with the early Assyriologist Eberhard Schrader, who was responsible for identifying biblical King Pul with Tiglath-Pileser III. Delitzsch then spent his own career at Leipzig, where he trained many (many!) students.
Figure 8: Eight academic generations, noting especially Freidrich Delitzsch and W. F. Albright
He is perhaps best known for the so-called “Babel-Bible controversy”, which resulted from the publication of a lecture series that he originally gave in 1902-3. In his lectures, he argued that the Hebrew Bible was the work of an inferior and derivative culture, while the original sources, the writings and culture of Mesopotamia, were far superior. He went further, separating Jesus’ life and beliefs from the Jews of Roman Palestine, claiming that the population of the Galilee was mainly Babylonian in origin in the 1st century and that, as such, Jesus’ ancestry could be associated with Aryan and Indo-Germanic groupings, not with Jews. The antisemitic implications of Delitzsch’s work and worldview are well known and have been fully discussed by others.
Figure 9: The three main academic “families”. Delitzsch is depicted in dark blue, Gelb is depicted in Green and Porada is depicted in brown
While his students tended to follow him in all things Assyriological, and also fully accepted biblical higher criticism, many did not agree with his diminution of the Bible and the culture of ancient Israel. And the next generation of students, Delitzsch’s grand-students, included some who were quite conservative, such as Albright. It’s worth describing several academic genealogies that began with Delitzsch’s students:
First, and extremely important in the genealogy, as it turns out, is Julius Lewy (Figure 11). Lewy studied with Delitzsch, then taught at the University of Giessen until 1933, when the Nazis dismissed all Jews from university positions. Eventually, Lewy took up a position at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.
Figure 11: Julius Lewy’s academic genealogy
Although Lewy was an Assyriologist, he was also immersed in biblically-oriented issues. One of his students at Giessen was Benjamin Maisler, later Mazar. Maisler, a Russian Jew, wrote his dissertation on the history of ancient Syria and Palestine, submitting it in 1928, after which he left for Palestine, where he had an extremely distinguished career at Hebrew University. Mazar trained a multitude of archaeologists including Yohanan Aharoni, Yigal Yadin, Moshe Dothan, Trude Dothan, Hayim Tadmor, Miriam Tadmor and Avraham Malamat. In other words, many of the influential scholars in Israeli archaeology today are descended from Delitzsch via Lewy, including Israel Finkelstein and his students. The Lewy branch as the progenitor of the Israeli lines is one of our most interesting discoveries.
Figure 12: Richard Gottheil’s academic genealogy
Another important student of Delitzsch’s was Richard Gottheil (Figure 12). The son of a prominent New York Rabbi, Gottheil went to Germany specifically to study with Delitzsch. When he returned, he became a professor of Syriac at Columbia University. Gottheil’s first PhD student was Max Margolis, who held a position at Dropsie College starting in 1909. One of Margolis’s students was Eliezer Sukenik (PhD 1926), father of Yigael Yadin. Sukenik’s career was spent in Israel, where he established the Archaeology Department at Hebrew University, and trained many doctoral students including, for instance, Nahman Avigad. We thus have yet another group of Israeli archaeologists who are descended from Delitzsch, but via Gottheil, Margolis, and then Sukenik.
Next we come to Delitzsch’s most infamous student, Hermann Hilprecht (1859-1925) (Figure 13), who spent most of his career at the University of Pennsylvania (1886 forward). Although they clashed in later years, Hilprecht’s scholarship was probably the closest to Delitzsch’s in terms of diminishing the importance of the Hebrew Bible, and putting Mesopotamian archaeology far above biblical archaeology.
Figure 13: Hermann Hilprecht’s academic genealogy
Hilprecht is credited with beginning the first American archaeological excavation in the Middle East, the Penn-sponsored Nippur Excavations. But he is equally well-known for what’s been called the Peters-Hilprecht controversy, a drawn-out scandal involving accusations of fakery and theft that indirectly led to his resignation.
One of Hilprecht’s students at Penn was James Montgomery, whose own career was also at Penn and who was one of the founding members of ASOR. Montgomery had multiple influential students, including Cyrus Gordon, who in turn had many students of his own.
Next we come to Paul Haupt (Figure 14), who was Albright’s direct Doktorvater. Haupt studied with Delitzsch at Leipzig (PhD 1878), and also co-edited a German Assyriological linguistics series with him. Haupt taught in Germany until 1883, when he accepted a position in the United States at the newly founded Johns Hopkins University.
Figure 14: Paul Haupt’s academic genealogy
Haupt’s views on biblical history and historiography were clearly influenced by Delitzsch. He was a skeptic about the historicity and value of the Bible and forced his students to approach it in the same way. In fact, his insistence on intellectual conformity stopped Albright from publishing some of his own more conservative ideas until after Haupt’s death.
The last of the Delitzsch students we’ll mention here is the Assyriologist David Gordon Lyon, professor at Harvard and founder of its Semitic Museum (Figure 15). There are two reasons to mention Lyon. The first is that George Reisner was one of his students, meaning that the field of Egyptian archaeology, usually solely credited to scholars from France and Britain, is also part of our Delitzsch-influenced narrative. The second is that he organized the first American archaeological expedition in Ottoman Palestine—the Samaria excavations. Even though Palestine was not his first choice, his expedition began the tradition of American-led digs there.
Figure 15: David Gordon Lyon’s academic genealogy
There is also a separate strand of American archaeologists and Assyriologists who did not originate with Delitzsch, or even in Germany. The name most familiar within this branch is Ignace Gelb of the University of Chicago (Figures 9 and 16), who taught quite a number of influential scholars. Gelb himself was educated in Rome, in a line that we’ve traced back three generations in Italian universities. Similarly, there is also a third large academic family (see again Figure 9) whose members can trace themselves back to Edith Porada of Columbia University, who studied in Vienna.
There are, of course, also numerous other academic families besides those whom we have mentioned here, including ones based in England, continental Europe, and elsewhere. We will continue our analyses and hopefully this short article will be followed by a longer and more detailed one sometime soon.
![Photo courtesy of the University of Chicago Photographic Archive [apf1-06334].](https://anetoday.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Cline_et_al_Fig16.jpg)
Figure 16: Photo courtesy of the University of Chicago Photographic Archive [apf1-06334].
In the meantime, please feel free to contact us via this form if you possess additional information such as the names of other advisors and advisees whom you could pass along to us. We hope that this project will be of interest and of use to the field in general and can be expanded in future years.
Rachel Hallote is Professor of History at Purchase College.
Diane Harris Cline is Associate Professor of History at George Washington University.
Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology at George Washington University.
How to cite this article
Hallotte, R., Cline, D. H. and E. H. Cline. 2022. “Who Are You? Preliminary Results of the Academic Genealogies of Near Eastern Scholars (AGNES) Project.” The Ancient Near East Today 10.11. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/hallote-cline-academic-genealogies/.
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