himself as a dilettante in Troy, Mycenae, and Tiryns expanded the field of vision extraordinarily.
fig. 27
Schliemann was no specialist, and his work long went unrecognized. The consequences of his achievements were the English and American excavations on Crete. The art of the Cyclades (island art) with its small sculptures (idols) has been evaluated only recently. The French dug near Susa and revealed the stele of Naram-Suen, among other things. At this point the chief interest turned to the excavations in Mesopotamia. English-American and German expeditions brought to light the ancient cities of Ur, Warka, Larsa, Nippur, and others. Warka was the location of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (before 612 BC), and Ur the city of the patriarch Abraham. These discoveries were initially concerned with locating a discovery site. Historical research provides clues as do the geographical and geological circumstances, site names, and myths. Treading the path from the known to the unknown this way resembles the method of solving a geometry problem, in which we advance from the known to the unknown. We attempt to zero in on the unknown as it were. The following are two examples of success in excavating: The story of the Pithecanthropus discovery almost verges on the miraculous, because this find was not made accidentally but was the crowning event of a systematic and persistent search by an individual who went from Europe to Dutch India influenced by the theory of evolution, with the conscious intent of finding the presumed “missing link” . . . (From Wilhelm Gieseler, Abstammungskunde des Menschen [Human evolution])1 Wilhelm Gieseler, Abstammungskunde des Menschen , vol. 1 of Abstammungs- und Rassenkunde des Menschen (Anthropologie). Schriften des Deutschen Naturkundevereins 56 (Oehringen Rau, 1936), 80. The anthropologist and physician Gieseler (190 0 –1976) founded the Anthropological Institute at the University of Tübingen in 1934, where he was active until 1945 and later beginning in 1955. The title of Gieseler’s book indicates that it deals with human genealogy (Abstammungskunde), whereas the series in which it was published deals with genealogy and Rassenkunde , a now obsolete branch of ethnology that dealt primarily with the evolution of races. The National Socialists instituted an extreme form of racial-biological thinking, where it became a central point of their ideology and politics in defense of cultivating the so-called purity of the Aryan race. Gieseler joined the Nazi party in 1933 and in 1937 became a member of the SS; after World War II he was classified as a “fellow-runner” and rehabilitated. He himself apparently stated that the emphasis of his research lay “in the area of science itself and not in racial policy.” See Uwe Hossfeld, “Wilhelm Gieseler,” in Geschichte der biologischen Anthropologie in Deutschland: von den Anfängen bis in die Nachkriegszeit (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 20 05), 349 –53. Baumeister’s interest in Gieseler’s text was no doubt part of his growing interest in excavations in the Swabian Alb, anthropology, and prehistoric art beginning in the 1930s.
1
160 The Unknown