ABSTRACT
Most Western school children today are introduced to the Middle East through lessons on ancient Egypt. That is in part a result of a long-standing Western fascination with ancient Middle Eastern history. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European archeological excavation teams headed to the Middle East in order to find the remains of ancient empires of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Persia. Biblical archeologists excavated sites mentioned in the scriptures, in order to prove the historical truth of faith narratives. About the same time this research into antiquity began, Western governments established colonial rule over the region. The military and the scholarly exploration of the region often went hand in hand. When the French emperor Napoleon I led an expedition to Egypt in 1798, he took with him an “army of scholars” to document ancient and modern Egypta multiyear endeavor that resulted in the academic field of Egyptology in Paris, as well as a multivolume set of publications under the title Descriptions of Egypt (1809-1829). The first American scholarly expeditions to go and claim parts of ancient history were organized in the late nineteenth century. Phoebe Apperson Hearst, mother of the newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, sponsored a University of California, Berkeley, excavation in Egypt, and the University of Pennsylvania mounted an expedition to Iraq in search of the famed city-state of Babylon.
