Edhem Eldem,

(Visiting Professor in History, on Archaeology and Heritage in the Ottoman Lands)

How Local Can You Really Go?

Archaeology In The Ottoman Lands In The Long Nineteenth Century

Friday, February 13, 2026, 4:30 PM – 6:30 PM

951 Schermerhorn Extension

Register Here

Please note that all non-Columbia University affiliates must register for a QR campus access code.

This seminar will also be available on Zoom

Abstract

One of the major challenges faced by historians dealing with the question of archaeology and heritage in the Ottoman lands is to find alternatives to the dominant Western narrative in the hope of bringing forth its local dimension. This can be – and has been – done to some extent by resorting to Ottoman sources, particularly state archives, given that early efforts in that direction were monitored, and sometimes sponsored, by the government and its provincial agents. However, especially after the 1880s, as the Imperial Museum in Constantinople claimed central and exclusive control over this matter throughout the Empire, a new kind of periphery emerged, consisting of local actors engaging in archaeology in a variety of ways, as poachers, traffickers, collectors, amateur epigraphists, or self-styled archaeologists. As such, addressing the issue of the ‘local’ dimension of archaeology in the Ottoman Empire requires navigating through these two layers of hierarchy, to try to uncover the ill-documented margins, an exercise that will be conducted based on a few illustrative cases.

Bio

Edhem ELDEM, PhD Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille I, 1989, is a historian of the Ottoman Empire, and the Sakıp Sabancı visiting professor at the History Department, Columbia University. He has taught at the Department of History of Boğaziçi University, at Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia. The École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, the École Pratique des Hautes Études, the École Normale Supérieure and has held the International Chair of Turkish and Ottoman History at the Collège de France. He has been a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Among his fields of interest are the Levant trade in the eighteenth century, Ottoman funerary epigraphy, the development of an urban bourgeoisie in Istanbul, the history of the Imperial Ottoman Bank, the history of archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, the history of photography in the Ottoman Empire, late-nineteenth-century Ottoman first-person narratives and biographies, Westernization and the Tanzimat, and Orientalism.

His publications include French Trade in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (1999); A History of the Ottoman Bank (1999); The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul (1999, with D. Goffman and B. Masters); Pride and Privilege. A History of Ottoman Orders, Medals and Decorations (2004); Death in Istanbul. Death and its Rituals in Ottoman-Islamic Culture (2005); Consuming the Orient (2007); Un Ottoman en Orient. Osman Hamdi Bey en Irak (1869-1871) (2010); Le voyage à Nemrud Dağı d’Osman Hamdi Bey et Osgan Efendi (2010); Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753-1914 (2011, with Z. Bahrani and Z. Çelik); Camera Ottomana. Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, 1870-1914 (2015, with Z. Çelik); L’Empire ottoman et la Turquie face à l’Occident (2018); L’Alhambra. À la croisée des histoires (2021); L’Empire ottoman (2022); The Alhambra at the Crossroads of History (2024).