The Ernst Herzfeld Papers at the National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution: Identifying the Palmyrene Squeezes

The National Museum of Asian Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, houses a collection of about 30,000 documents originally belonging to the German architect and archaeologist Ernst Emil Herzfeld (1879–1948). They comprise photographs and negatives on glass plates, sketches, excavation journals, maps, and letters illustrating Herzfeld’s archaeological fieldwork in the Near East. Among them is a group of twenty-seven glass negatives documenting the work on Palmyrene epigraphy by one of his colleagues, the German semitist Moritz Sobernheim. Herzfeld and Sobernheim traveled extensively in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, collecting Islamic inscriptions. Their journeys and epigraphic survey are documented in photographs that are part of the Ernst Herzfeld Papers, and some of the images show their personal friendship and family relations. The photographs of the Palmyrene squeezes illustrate the use of three-dimensional replicas of inscriptions for study purposes and publication during that early phase of research. They are an invaluable record of Sobernheim’s pioneering epigraphic work and illustrate the productive working partnership between the two scholars. A careful analysis of the photographs, which present a reversed impression of the epigraphs on the paper squeezes, has allowed the identification of twenty-six Palmyrene inscriptions that are listed here according to the numbers on the negatives, with reference to text type and findspot, and are cross-referenced to the editio princeps and other major publications. The present identification provides a significant element to complete their inventory in the Ernst Herzfeld Papers.