III. The Society of Biblical Archæology

Extract

The Society of Biblical Archæology was born at a meeting held on November 18, 1870, at the rooms of Mr. Joseph Bonomi, Curator of the Soane Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Its ruling spirit was from the first Dr. Samuel Birch, the then Keeper of the Assyrian and Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, at whose instance the meeting was convened. It was attended by some eighteen gentlemen, of whom Sir Henry Rawlinson, Mr. Fox Talbot, Mr. J. W. Bosanquet, and Canon Cook were perhaps those best known to fame, and in the result decided to form itself into a Society “for the investigation of the Archæology, Chronology, Geography, and History of Ancient and Modern Assyria, Arabia, Egypt, Palestine, and other Biblical Lands, the promotion of the study of the Antiquities of those countries, and the preservation of a continuous record of discoveries now or hereafter to be in progress”. With this view an association with Mr. William Cooper as Secretary was instituted, which by March 21 in the following year had received a sufficient number of adherents to hold monthly meetings, at which papers were read, to be afterwards printed and circulated either at the author's expense or at that of one or two of the richer members. In his Inaugural Address to the first of these gatherings, Dr. Birch, who had been unanimously elected President, gave a summary, still well worth reading, on the then state of Oriental Archæology and the discovery of its principal monuments, and struck the note which has been sustained throughout the Society's history by the announcement that “Archæology and not Theology” was its aim, and that “it must be attractive to all who are interested in the primitive and early history of mankind”. Early in 1872 it had progressed sufficiently to take rooms at 9 Conduit Street, Regent Street, to formulate a set of Rules, afterwards embodied in the Memorandum and Articles of Association, and to publish the first volume of Transactions, together with a list of 166 members, which included Mr. Tyssen Amherst (afterwards Lord Amherst of Hackney), Mr. Arthur Cates (of H.M. Office of Works), Canon T. K. Cheyne, Dr. Currey (Master of the Charterhouse), Mr. Gladstone, Count Gleichen, Mr. (afterwards Sir) Henry Howorth, Canon Lightfoot, Professor Mahaffy, Mr. Walter Morrison, Canon George Rawlinson, Professor Sayce, and Captain (afterwards Sir Charles) Wilson, R.E.—names which show how widely the net had been thrown. Of the papers published, many were of high merit, and included a study of the Early History of Babylonia by the late George Smith, another on the Origin of Semitic Civilization by Professor Sayce, and several on the then newly-found Cypriote Inscriptions, by their discoverer, Mr. R. Hamilton Lang (H.M. Consul at Cyprus), George Smith, and Dr. Birch.