Backlog – Keep on smiling
Another Day at the Outdoor Office in Palmyra
Harald Ingholt, a widely famed and globe-trotting Danish archaeologist, who met his American-wife-to-be on a boat trip from Japan to China on his world tour, and who came to hold a chair of archaeology at Yale University, worked at the oasis-site of Palmyra in the Syrian Desert in the 1920s and 1930s. He boldly published his monograph on the site’s funerary sculpture
in 1928 in his native tongue, and it remains today as a standard work in scholarship — it was widely read by non-Danes even before the age of Google Translate! This is testimony both to Ingholt’s scholarship and to the fact that Danish is less difficult than it sounds! His work detailed the portrait habit of the city — a habit that persisted for almost three hundred years, coming to an abrupt end only when the Roman emperor Aurelian sacked the city with his troops after Queen Zenobia had rebelled against Roman rule and cut the Romans off from the precious trade routes to the East.
Rubina Raja
Centre for Urban Network Evolutions, Aarhus University
However, in this photo, Ingholt does not seem concerned with the heavy weight of Palmyra’s history — a site that has, in the intervening years, once again suffered great damage due to the conflict ongoing in Syria since 2011. In this shot (taken by an unknown photographer), which I came across in a file given to me by Ingholt’s daughter, Mary Ebba Underdown, when I visited her in her home outside New Haven to find out more about her father’s career, Ingholt appears as photo grapher-in-action with pieces of Palmyrene sculpture — his passion for decades. He seems to be enjoying another day at the outdoor office, dressed in immaculate attire, complete with strappy sandals. But another figure has sneaked in as well — to the top left of the image, a large lizard loiters, perhaps sunbathing or waiting for a fly to come by. Ingholt was clearly not afraid to lounge around with the lizards of Palmyra. Such an image reminds us that archaeologists are in for a bit of everything when on excavation, and that strappy sandals are perhaps not ideal wear in the Syrian Desert if you want to avoid animals in your pants. For camera-crazed enthusiasts, it can be noted that the camera used appears to be a No. 3. Autographic Kodak special model A (with thanks to Scott McAvoy for this particular nerdy detail!).