Excavations, tablet collections and publications

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The first phase in the history of French Assyriology came to an end with the outbreak of the First World War. In the two decades leading up to this event, fieldwork previously carried out by the French and English was marked by the arrival of new nations. On the one hand, there were the Americans, with their excavations at Nippur from 1889 to 1900. Above all, Kaiser Wilhelm II's Eastern policy led to the Germans opening two major sites: Babylon from 1898 and Assur from 1903. Oriental archaeology, which until then had been little more than a hunt for objects, underwent a notable inflexion: from then on, excavators established strategies, seeking to highlight the mud architecture characteristic of Mesopotamia, and demonstrating a concern for rigorously documenting the context in which objects were unearthed. During these years, the French and English were no longer very active. There was a campaign by Scheil at Sippar in 1894, the successful revival of Tello by Commandant Cros from 1903 to 1909, and finally the opening of an excavation at Kiš by Genouillac in 1912. But the most important French excavation of these years was not in Ottoman territory, but in Iran: de Morgan's excavations of Susa from 1897 to 1912 wereextremely fruitful, even if the French engineer's methods were not as good as those of the German architects.

These years also saw the building of considerable collections. The "Musée Assyrien", opened at the Louvre in 1847 to house Botta's discoveries in Khorsabad, had been incorporated into a "Département des Antiques" that soon proved unmanageable. With the arrival at the Louvre in 1881 of Sarzec's discoveries at Tello, a "Department of Oriental Antiquities" was created, headed by Léon Heuzey. The same year, an archaeological museum was created in Constantinople. Its director, Hamdi Bey, had a law on antiquities passed in 1884, which made all remains discovered on Ottoman territory the property of the Empire, and objects unearthed during excavations were to be added to the capital's museum collections; the sultan's practice, however, was to personally give the excavator a share of the finds. From 1892 onwards, Fr. Scheil was asked to put the Constantinople tablet collection in order, until he was called in by de Morgan in 1897 to be his epigraphist in Susa. The baton was then passed to Thureau-Dangin and Genouillac, who set about publishing the monumental Inventaire des tablettes de Tello.

Excavations at Tello, Kiš and Susa yielded tablets that are now preserved in the Louvre, but most of the collection built up before the First World War came from acquisitions. At the time, there was no legislation prohibiting the trafficking of antiquities; museum curators or private individuals bought tablets without always realizing that, in so doing, they were indirectly participating in irregular excavations, by creating a market where illegal dealers could sell their finds. This led to the creation of a number of public collections, such as that of the EPHE, as well as private collections, such as that of P. Scheil and some of his students.

In France, the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres and the Société asiatique played a key role in disseminating the results of research carried out in the field and in museum collections. However, their periodicals gradually proved insufficient to absorb all the scientific output: new journals were therefore created. In 1879, Egyptologist G. Maspero founded Recueil de travaux relatifs à la philologie et à l'archéologie égyptiennes et assyriennes. J. Oppert and E. Ledrain inaugurated the Revue d'assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale in 1884, and Scheil and Thureau-Dangin became its editors in 1910, giving a decisive boost to the world's oldest Assyrian journal. Other initiatives did not survive as long. But journals were not enough: monographic series were created, sometimeslinked to archaeological sites, sometimes to tablet collections. In 1910, Thureau-Dangin inaugurated the Textes cunéiformes du Louvre (TCL) series.