{"id":166015,"date":"2010-01-11T03:57:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-11T08:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6760875.post-2473444129258457298"},"modified":"2010-01-11T05:37:50","modified_gmt":"2010-01-11T10:37:50","slug":"exhibition-pioneers-to-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/166015","title":{"rendered":"Exhibition: Pioneers to the Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chicago Tribune<\/a> (William Mullen)<\/p>\n

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James Henry Breasted, founder of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, was short, bespectacled and cerebral — hardly fitting the picture of Indiana Jones, the fictional archaeologist many think was based partly on him.<\/p>\n

Yet some of the cinematic “Indy” swashbuckle could have been inspired by a perilous, 11-month journey Breasted took through the Middle East in 1919 and 1920, just after founding the institute.<\/p>\n

On Jan. 12, the institute celebrates its 90th anniversary with a temporary exhibit — “Pioneers to the Past” — that retraces the adventure, including tense haggling with shady antiquities dealers, encounters with armed Arab horsemen and even a little fisticuffs.<\/p>\n

It is described in Breasted’s own words in vivid accounts he sent home to his family, photos taken by him and four companions, and hundreds of ancient artifacts he brought back. . . .<\/p>\n

He had written several well-regarded histories of the ancient world, including a 1916 best-seller, but he had never been able to raise enough money to fulfill his dream of creating a great research institute at Chicago.<\/p>\n

In May 1919, he was elated when John D. Rockefeller Jr., son of the world’s richest man, pledged $50,000 in seed money to start the institute and finance a Middle East trip.<\/p>\n

By November, Breasted was in Egypt, intent on buying ancient artifacts from the world’s earliest civilizations for the new institute and touring ancient sites in Mesopotamia where he planned future Chicago-led archaeological digs.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chicago Tribune (William Mullen) James Henry Breasted, founder of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, was short, bespectacled and cerebral — hardly fitting the picture of Indiana Jones, the fictional archaeologist many think was based partly on him. Yet some of the cinematic “Indy” swashbuckle could have been inspired by a perilous, 11-month […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-166015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166015\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}